Geek Mafia: Mile Zero

by Dakan

  "Sounds good, Bee," said Chloe. "Smart thinking."

  "See, my paranoia isn't just a cute personality trait," Bee said. "It's also pretty handy."

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  "No one ever said it wasn't," Paul told her. "Let us know what you find out."

  "Always," said Bee before she disappeared back upstairs.

  "So, we assume he heard all that?" asked Sandee.

  "Maybe," said Chloe. "Maybe not. If he's already got his man back safe on his boat, then he might not be listening in. And the bug has to be set to bursts of info. If it was constantly transmitting, Bee's defenses in the house here would've found it. If we're lucky, our privacy is still private." Sandee's face said he didn't believe they were that lucky, but he held his tongue.

  "Chloe," said Paul. "This boat. You said it was at the bight marina, right?"

  "Yep."

  "Then it's not the same boat they came in on. At the other marina down by artist's alley."

  "Well, we didn't see that boat for sure," said Chloe. "He and Lily could've just been dropped off there by this boat."

  "Or they could have two boats. Or three. We know that Winston's crew is water-based, at least back on the West coast. They live in the things. At this point I don't think that he'd give up what he's used to. There could be a half dozen boats and three dozen members of his Crew in the waters around Key West and we'd have no idea. Between the boats out by the outer islands and the marinas and wherever else, this place provides all the cover a Crew like Win's could ask for."

  "Which is probably why he suggested Isaiah hold his meeting here in the first place" said Chloe. "He had us here as a front line, but he could have plenty of backup ready if he needed it."

  "So, what?" asked Sandee. "You're saying he's got some kind of army out there?"

  "They could've been coming to the island for weeks now, getting in place," Paul said. "We know Isaiah had to come in early too in order to set up all his stuff. He's probably got his own army here as well, ready to throw down if necessary. And we didn't see any of it. For all our cameras and tracking tags and contacts, we had no idea."

  "We didn't know what we were looking for," Chloe pointed out. "Now we do. We still have the home turf advantage. We found the killer, didn't we?"

  "We did," agreed Paul. "But now that we not only found him but found his boss, what are we going to do about it?"

  "We're not going to tell Isaiah, that's for sure," said Chloe.

  "I agree with you there," said Paul.

  "Why not?" asked Sandee. "Won't we need his help to take down Winston? I mean, if he's really got an army..."

  "Who said we're taking down Winston?" asked Chloe, throwing Sandee a sharp look.

  "Didn't Paul just say he's the one who killed Raquel? I thought we were looking to bring the killer down. You Chapter 29

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  know, the guy who just pulped your boyfriend's face and stabbed a woman in the back with a screwdriver."

  Paul could tell that Chloe was about to blow up at Sandee, so he put a hand on her thigh to calm her down and spoke to Sandee in quiet, even terms. "I know that's how it looks, Sandee," Paul said. "But right now we just don't know enough about what's going on. First of all, we don't one hundred percent know that Winston told that guy to kill Raquel and Jeanie, although I think he probably did. Even taking that as a given, we don't know why he gave that order. Maybe Raquel was up to no good. Maybe she was an undercover cop. Maybe the whole thing was an accident. And remember, according to Raff, Jeanie's partner' did shoot Winston.

  There might be bad blood going back a long time with those two. We just don't know."

  Sandee nodded, but clearly didn't like it. Paul couldn't blame him. He'd signed up with the Crew to run 24-hour parties and scam tourists out of their money and clothes. In their little recruitment speeches they'd never mentioned hunting down murderers or getting caught between to "armies" of gangsters fighting over old vendettas.

  "There's a chilling thought," said Paul, realizing something unpleasant.

  "What?" asked Chloe and Sandee at the same time.

  "Talking with Jeanie, however briefly, I got the impression that she knew about Winston. Or someone that she referred to as the old man,' who pretty much has to be Win. And now that we know Winston has been lying to us about more than a few important facts and has placed a bug here in the house, well, as much as it pains me to say it, I think we have to look again at some of the things Raff told Bee."

  Chloe chewed on her lower lip and just nodded for Paul to continue. "I think it strains all credulity to believe that Winston and Raff were both working with the killer. Whatever his reasons, Win was behind the attacks on Raquel and Jeanie. I mean, Raff 's not going to set up his own Crewmember for... Ok, scratch that. Raff might set up a Crewmember for a fall, but it's not really likely in this situation."

  Chloe jumped in at this point, "Which means that Raff really is just here as backup to Eddie and probably didn't know we'd be here. Then he didn't kill Raquel just so he could take over her place in Isaiah's organization. And while we were concentrating on him, the real killers were free to do whatever they wanted behind our backs."

  "Like dispose of the body," Paul pointed out. "And shift blame to other suspects. And undermine the whole foundation of Isaiah's plan by sowing dissension and doubt amongst the founders."

  "I thought Winston was in favor of Isaiah's plan?" asked Chloe. "Why come to the meeting at all if he was against it?"

  "Well, his support has been super cautious," Paul explained. "Like he thinks it's a great idea but is worried because so much could go wrong. Which makes sense. If he just comes out against it, Isaiah would cut him out of the loop, simple as that. Isaiah wants Win's contacts - he probably has to have them to make this thing as big as he wants it to be. And Winston knows that, so he's stringing us all along so that he can destroy the plan from the inside out. Convince Isaiah that it's impossible and doomed to failure."

  "Why would he be so against it?" asked Sandee. "So against it that he'd kill people?"

  "Winston doesn't like change," said Chloe, who knew Winston far better than any of them. "I know that sounds crazy. He's a revolutionary right? But he's old school in his ways. He thinks we should all be living in squats and on boats and on collectives somewhere in the boonies, pulling shit over on The Man. He's very much an ideologue, and I can just imagine how much he hates this idea of buying into the corporate culture as Chapter 29

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  a model for revolutionary action. I was surprised that he was willing to even talk about giving over his list of contacts to Isaiah, so I can't say I'm really shocked at the idea that he might've been playing us all from the beginning."

  "What I can't figure out," said Paul. "is why he felt he needed to kill Raquel."

  "That doesn't make any sense to me either," Chloe said, shaking her head. "Winston doesn't like violence and, as far as I know, he's never killed anyone before."

  "As far as you know," said Sandee with scorn in his voice. "His friend certainly didn't seem to have much of a problem with it. He sure as..."

  "Like I said," Paul interrupted, "We just don't know enough about what's going on. We need more information before we do anything else."

  "So what do we do now then?" Sandee asked.

  "We pretend we don't know anything," said Paul. Chloe nodded her agreement. "They have no way of knowing we saw the killer and Winston together. Well, unless they heard it over the bug. But even then, they don't know we know they know, if you follow me."

  "I think so," Sandee said.

  "So we play dumb," Chloe said. "Paul goes to the meeting tomorrow morning with Isaiah and Winston and Eddie, and reports what he can. The killer attacked Jeanie last night, and no one knows why. You gotta assume she'll tell Raff who will tell Eddie, so there's no sense in hiding it."

  "Then we just see how everyone reacts," said Paul. "Maybe Winston will use it as an excuse to shut down the meetings and maybe
Isaiah will agree and everyone will just go home. Then we don't have to worry about it."

  Chloe stood up from her seat, "And while Paul's doing that, the rest of us try and track down any other members of Winston's crew. I want to have a few words with Lily. Maybe she can shed some light on this."

  "Sounds fun," said Sandee, who clearly though it was nothing of the sort.

  Chloe held out a hand to Paul, offering him a lift up. "I'm going to take a shower and get some sleep," she said. "Care to join me?"

  Although the shower sounded pretty pleasant, it was the sleep part that really caught Paul's imagination.

  "Absolutely." He looked at his watch. 4 a.m.. He could get six hours of sleep, which seemed an impossible luxury. "We'll save the world tomorrow."

  "Not the world," said Chloe. "Just our own asses."

  "Same difference," said Paul. "Just as long as I get to sleep first."

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  Chapter 30

  AS it turned out, Paul didn't get to sleep anywhere near right away. Nor did Chloe. No sooner had they stepped out of the shower than Bee barged into their room, aflutter with worries about their compromised security. Paul had wanted to lie down and let her paranoia stew until daylight, but the breaches she started describing to them were so grim that he couldn't ignore it.

  They had no way of knowing what Winston did and didn't know about their little set-up in Key West, but at the very least he knew about the cameras hidden all over town. In planning their hunt for Jeanie and the killer, they'd even shown him a map of where every camera and RFID reader in town was located. Bee had discovered that just in the last few hours over a dozen of her cameras had gone down. And while it was pretty common for at least one or two of the devices to go black almost every day, twelve at once was unheard of.

  Even more telling, three of them were in the general location of Winston's boat at the bight marina, while two more were near the AME church where today's meeting with Isaiah was to be held.

  But wait, it got worse. Most of the cameras worked on a wireless network, transmitting their signals to routers that Bee had hidden around town, routers that bounced the signal back to the house or used the city's own wireless network. And while the signal network was behind a security wall and encoded, it was all off-the-shelf software. If Winston had a competent hacker on his Crew, he could probably break it. Especially if he'd managed to pull some data off one of their laptops. None of them could remember for sure if they'd left Winston alone with any of their computers, but everyone agreed it was more than probable that they had.

  Thus, Winston could very well be accessing their own camera network for his own purposes.

  Finally they'd given him their private cell phone numbers, although that was easy enough to fix. They switched out for new disposable phones and tossed the ones Winston knew about, giving them some small measure of security. Bee's analysis of the bug Winston had planted showed that it did operate in signal bursts, but that it sent them fairly frequently - every ten minutes or so, which was the maximum amount of audio it could store. Bee had done a little digging around outside and found a signal receiver for the bug plugged into an outlet on the outside of their neighbor's house that would transmit the bug's recording anywhere on the island. There was a chance Winston or his Crew had heard everything they said.

  They'd all agreed that the only real option was to move forward as planned and play dumb, at least during the next meeting. They needed time to figure out just what Winston's game was and whether or not he meant them harm. So Paul would go to the meeting, while the rest tried their best to dig into Winston's activities over the past few days and sort out just what the hell was going on.

  All of which was why Paul had only about two and a half hours of sleep before he had to set out to meet with his potential co-conspirators at the church. After his experience with Isaiah and the gang up atop the La Concha, he knew better than to try and sneak in any hidden recording devices. Armed with just his cell phone (and, he liked to think, his wits), Paul walked the twelve blocks to the church. He traveled through the prosperous tourist and residential blocks where he spent most of his time and then right past the restaurant and bar-clogged region around Duval Street and onto Whitehead Street, where one couldn't help but be reminded that Key West really was a southern town.

  He'd talked to several old-time conchs who'd grown up on the island and lived here all their lives (rarer and rarer as snowbirds bought up all the real estate for vacation homes and drove the housing prices sky high).

  They told him how up until all too recently it had been unheard of for a black person to cross Whitehead Street and come into the "white" parts of town unless they had a very good reason. Likewise, it was equally unusual for any white to travel in the opposite direction. In more recent years, the part of the black community known as Bahama Village had been refurbished and claimed as part of the larger tourist attraction, but much of the historically black neighborhood remained as historically poor as it had always been. Paul and his Crew had few contacts here and no cameras because, quite frankly, they were intimidated by the drug dealers. And Chapter 30

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  although there was nothing much in the way of organized gang activity (it was still a pretty small part of the island), there was too little gain for too much risk.

  Isaiah obviously had fewer worries about setting up shop in the area, and he obviously had some good contacts if he could get the usually busy and popular AME church to let them meet there. Although to be honest, the church was just at the edge of what locals considered the "dangerous" part of town and Paul wondered if maybe Isaiah wasn't trying to have it both ways - meet in a black community, but not so far in that he'd be likely to encounter any real trouble.

  Paul had expected to gather in a parish hall or church office of some sort, but as he approached, he recognized the man who'd been guarding the door at the La Concha two nights ago. He was sitting on the steps of the church, reading a newspaper. He gave Paul a casual nod of greeting and then motioned for him to go on inside.

  Up five steps and through the front door which stood wide open. Paul could count on two fingers the number of hours he'd spent in church since graduating from high school, including weddings. This particular church was pretty much everything he expected from a house of worship - wooden pews coated with decades of furniture polish, a high vaulted wooden ceiling shrouded in shadows and high, thin windows. At the far end, standing in front of rather than behind the pulpit, was Isaiah, his wife Amelia at his side. She had a phone nub in her ear and was paying studious attention to the PDA in her hand. Isaiah was talking on a phone of his own, but he hung up as he saw Paul advancing down the aisle toward him.

  As he walked forward, Paul took a moment to look around the sanctuary, searching for signs of hidden cameras or other electronics Isaiah might have hidden there, but of course he didn't see anything. Once again, he decided to just assume they were there. He reached the front and held out his hand to Isaiah, who shook it.

  Amelia, talking quietly to whoever was on the other end of her cell phone, flashed him a smile and a little wave before strolling a few paces away, out of Paul's earshot.

  "Good morning, Paul," said Isaiah.

  "Pretty fancy digs you got here." Paul said. "Is this a religion or a corporation you're planning to start here?"

  "Most religions are corporations of one sort or another," Isaiah replied. "Or at least they take advantage of some of the same powers and advantages that governments have granted big business. Incorporating some religious institutions is part of the overall strategy - we've got to take advantage of any opportunity the powers that be give us."

  "Sure, why not?" said Paul. "Are you a religious man yourself ?"

  "No, not at all. But don't tell my grandparents or my mother. I thought this place would add a certain solemnity to the occasion, maybe inspire our future partners to behave themselves and think seriously about the opportunity we all have here.
"

  "Plus if we need to have a funeral..." Paul said, but let the joke trail off.

  "There is a certain funereal aspect too, but no one had been killed when I arranged for this place."

  "The best laid plans..." said Paul, again letting his sentence trail off, although this time it was because he couldn't remember the whole quote. Something about mice and men. More important, Isaiah had just dropped an interesting little fact into the conversation: He'd arranged to use the church days ago, at least before Raquel's murder. And probably weeks or even months ago. Once again he felt he was playing catch-up with everyone else.

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  Isaiah's phone buzzed in his hand, and he excused himself to take the call. Looking around, Paul decided to take a seat in one of the pews and wait for the others. Eddie and his sidekick Marco arrived about five minutes later, and Eddie ignored Paul as he went over to Isaiah and pulled him aside for a private word. Marco just sort of stood there, looking around. He gave Paul a friendly nod, but that was the limit of their communication.

  Winston arrived last, coming up the aisle with a spring in his step and a smile on his face as he whistled something that sounded to Paul's ears like a hymn or maybe an old spiritual. "Good morning, all," he said.

  "Sorry I'm late. Overslept a bit." Paul wondered where he'd slept - certainly not back in the house he and Chloe had provided, which had remained empty all night according to their cameras.

  Isaiah broke away from Eddie, (who didn't seem like he was finished saying whatever it was he wanted to say) and resumed his place at the front of the church below the pulpit. Eddie followed him over and took a seat in the pew across the aisle from Paul, motioning for Marco to join him. Winston sat down next to Paul, giving him a fatherly pat on the shoulder as he did so.