by D S Kane
They ate lunch in their bathing suits on the 4th floor of the tower. Ann sampled the food and said, “Wow. This stuff is mag.” She dug out handfuls of the homemade kettle potato chips and placed them on a large plate, along with cold-smoked salmon, mahi-mahi, ono and yellowtail sashimi, macadamia cookies with white chocolate chips, exotic fruit slices, and Kona coffee. “Yummy sushi.”
“When it’s not on top of rice, raw fish is called sashimi, Ann.”
And after that, Cassie took Ann surfing at the beach. The bodyguards sat on the shore, waiting and helpless. Cassie looked over at them and realized it was better to have them here, protecting Ann. Cassie still didn’t believe she needed them, but her daughter might.
Maru returned from a meeting with one of his lieutenants, entering his office as his computer beeped indicating the arrival of an email.
He clicked the mouse and the screen changed:
Esteemed Omasu-san,
Cassandra Sashakovich has arrived at the hotel and I am on my way out. Her meeting with me has not been scheduled, per you orders. She and a young girl are in the two suites on the tenth floor, along with five civilians I assume are her consultants for the Security Audit.
All the other guests have vacated the premises.
Should you need to reach me, call my cell.
Sincerely,
Sanji Morikono
Maru chuckled. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, and coughed. He flexed his palms, thinking, as he reviewed the bet he’d crafted for GrayNet. It took him a few hours until he got it absolutely correct, in words that had obvious meaning to anyone reading them in English, the foreign language he used for the message post:
BET—No one can send the severed head of Cassandra Sashakovich to the address at the bottom of this bet, for payment equal to the bet amount at market odds, plus a bounty of $3 million USD. Proof of her death will be her severed head, packed in dry ice, sealed in a wooden box. To earn the bounty, mail MP4 proof of Sashakovich‘s death, along with hitter’s contact information to address below via overnight delivery. Others may bet on the outcome, but will only receive computed odds as they would at any sporting event. Her current whereabouts are at the Wailea Spa and Hotel in Maui, Hawaii, and her location can easily be tracked at www.gawkerstalker.com.
The physical address for reply upon success was a postal box in Tajikistan.
He smiled as the GrayNet web page of “Active Bets” updated the “Contracts for Death” sub-page.
He walked to the lunch room and poured himself a cup of coffee. Wearing a Cheshire-cat smile, he sat and waited. Within two hours, the bet was number one in popularity, as indicated by the number of views and also its position on the list. The odds were now 2:1 in favor of her death, there was almost $5 million betting that she could be assassinated.
Maru laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.
Louis Stepponi viewed GrayNet’s web page on his screen. He smiled. “Bingo! Jackpot.” He hit the print button, then turned the notebook computer off, reached into his closet and grabbed a Hawaiian shirt. In seconds, he’d locked the apartment door and was off to the train station in downtown Detroit, where he had several lockers rented. As the taxi arrived, he paid the driver and walked in. In less than ten minutes he’d removed two items from different lockers. One was a small suitcase filled with clothes for a warm climate. The other was a box with a blank FedEx label. He took another taxi, this time to the nearest FedEx, five blocks away. He shipped the box, containing his Tango-51 and night scope, both wrapped in lead foil, to the Wailea Spa. He’d had the taxi wait outside.
Back into the taxi, he called out, “Take me to the airport.” While the driver pulled onto the highway, he reached into the suitcase and removed a credit card that had almost ten thousand dollars on its available line. That ought to be enough to get him to Hawaii first class, and before the throng of wannabes he was sure would follow.
It took less than two hours from the time he’d seen the “Contract for Death” for a woman named Cassandra Sashakovich to the time he boarded and took his seat on the aircraft going to Hawaii.
Harry Aimes finished his dinner and helped Nancy with the dishes. Not a word was said by either of them. He knew she was afraid to ask what was bothering him. He was aware of the reasons for her skittishness. The pain in his throat was so bad it hurt to speak. Besides, he knew she was just plain tired of hearing his tirades.
He walked into the den and sat at the computer. He pulled up each betting site in turn, desperate to find a “Contract for Death” easy enough for him to execute. One by one, he read the web pages of each site. The GrayNet site had what he’d been seeking for over a month. Some ditsy woman had annoyed the world so totally it had decided she no longer deserved to live. Not a CEO. Not a politician. He snapped his fingers and, in a voice that sounded more like a cough, said, “Yes!”
What to do now? He’d need to travel to Hawaii. If he was successful, he might make enough money to pay for the trip two hundred times over. He knew where Nancy kept the emergency money. He printed the website page. Then up to the attic. The money was still there, in a cigar box. He plucked the ten bills, each a hundred dollars, and stuffed them into his pocket.
There might be others on their way. He had to be there first. He called the airline and spoke to a clerk. They had a flight out tomorrow afternoon. He booked himself on it. Then he packed a small duffel bag. He’d get a good night’s sleep before he traveled.
The clerk at the Wailea Spa and Hotel shook his head. “No sir. We have no more rooms available.”
The middle-aged man in a blue check flannel shirt pulled its collar away from his neck. “Well, how about tomorrow?”
The clerk’s face showed his exasperation. “Nothing. No rooms available for the next month. We’re totally booked.”
The disappointed man shook his head. “Where’s the nearest hotel with an open room?”
The clerk’s arms went akimbo. “Nothing within ten miles.” When the flannel-shirted man turned and walked away, and others replaced him at the front of the line, the clerk turned to a woman working the front desk. “Yikes. The whole hotel has only two suites in the Tower that are filled. With all the empty rooms, we’re ordered to say it’s full. Where are all these people going to stay? Camp on the beach? What a dump of bullshit.”
The woman smiled back. She mouthed the word in a whisper. “Yakuza.”
That evening, Cassie treated them all to dinner at Roy’s in Kihea. The restaurant had branches all over the Far East and Hawaii, and in New York City and northern California. Ann picked up one of the Szechuan spare ribs and tore off some of its meat with her teeth. The spicy and sweet flavors made her close her eyes with delight.
Cassie said, “Scrumptious food. Tomorrow we’ll go to Gerard’s in Lahaina for some serious French haute cuisine. They make wonderful foie gras. I can’t wait to see your face when you taste that, Ann.”
Ann smiled, thinking, food and drink, another bonding experience for us.
“Come in, Lee. Have a seat. Mark McDougal, one of our other director-level managers, recommended you be promoted to agency-level management from your current job assignment as a staff director in the Information Security Division. Although the title is only assistant director, you’ll have a higher GS rating and a higher salary as well. Interested?”
Lee’s face lit up with a grin. But then he thought about his deal with Cassie that she’d only marry him if he resigned his position. Lee gulped and ran his hand through his lush blond hair. “Sir, I’m not sure.”
Gilbert Greenfield frowned. “Let’s talk. Want coffee?”
Lee nodded and Greenfield turned away from him, pouring two cups to the brim. Took him a few seconds longer than it should have, but Lee didn’t notice through his case of nerves. He took a sip. French roast. “Sir, I’m about to get married and that change in my life will take me away from here, perhaps permanently. I have two weeks of time off coming and I’ll take a bit of that time preparing for t
he wedding and the rest on honeymoon. Maybe we should postpone this until after I return. Um, that is, if I return.”
Lee guessed that Greenfield had never had someone decline a promotion offer. Greenfield’s expression seemed to be filled with a confused complex of undecipherable emotions. “Okay, Lee. We’ll do it your way. But, as long as you’re here, let’s talk about the new position, to give you more data points for your decision.
Lee took another long sip of coffee. “Sure.” He thought of ways to convince Cassie to let him stay with the agency and not move far away.
Chapter Eighteen
October 23, 1:52 p.m.
Wailea Spa and Hotel, Maui, Hawaii
Cassie sat straight up in the beach cabana and pushed the phone into her ear as if she hadn’t heard correctly what Lee had said. “What do you mean, you didn’t resign?”
“Uh, Cassie, sweetie, I tried but Greenfield asked me to think it over a bit and then make my decision. He just promoted me again. Give this at least a few weeks and—”
“You bastard! I agreed to marry you only if you’d resign. So I guess you don’t want to marry me?”
“No. I do want to marry you. But—”
“No ‘buts.’ It’s ‘either-or.’ What’s it to be?”
“Okay, okay. Sheesh, stop yelling at me.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll do it. Just give me until the end of the week, to make it look as if I’ve thought it through. Maybe he’ll stop trying to convince me to stay if I take a few days before rendering my decision.”
Cassie’s face went from red to a more normal shade. “Right then. I’ll give you until Friday. Before I fly home, I plan to visit a few cities for a firsthand inspection tour to select where we’ll live. I’ll leave a week from next Monday to visit and take you to the short list of two or three so you can have final choice. Then we’ll have Wing sell the house and send us the proceeds. Okay, Lee? Okay?”
His voice steadied with the one word: “Sure.”
As he terminated the call she wondered why he loved her.
When he arrived in his office after a meeting at the FBI’s building in Langley, Greenfield dropped his coat on the couch and picked up his phone. “Margaret, get Bob Gault up here.” He sat back in the leather desk chair.
Within minutes Margaret knocked on the wall near the office entrance. “Sir, Bob is waiting. Shall I show him in?”
Greenfield smiled. “Yes. And that’ll be all.” She disappeared and a pear-shaped man with a badly knotted tie shoved his face through the doorway.
“Come in, Bob. Have a seat,” said Greenfield.
Gault was a middle-aged analyst gone to seed, a direct report to Mark McDougal, one of Greenfield’s subordinates. He sat uneasily watching the face of his boss’s boss. “What can I do for you, Director?”
“I have a tiny project for you. I need you to do this without telling anyone about it. Clear?”
“Not even McDougal?”
“No one.”
Gault nodded.
“Good. Remember the new micro bug we had the R&D section develop?”
Gault nodded again. He tugged at his right ear while staring at the man across the desk. “Uh huh. Isn’t the beta version called ‘Bug-Lok’?” Gault remembered that DARPA had subcontracted the actual lab work and alpha testing to the Ness Ziona labs in Herzliyya run by the Mossad.
“I’ve secured a test subject for the upgraded version and I’m assigning you to set up the software and monitor the hardware. Record all signals—GPS, voice and visual taps—on the subject. Here’s what I want.” He handed Gault a single sheet of paper. “Read it and leave it.”
Gault read the short document. The subject wasn’t named. He scratched his head as if he wondered what this was all about. Greenfield must feel he needed to make sure Gault didn’t exceed his charter.
Greenfield scratched his forehead above his left eye. “This technology is urgent. That’s why you’re reporting to me and not McDougal. Inform me with emailed transcripts of every word the subject says and include what the bug picks up from those he contacts, and list the GPS coordinates of the subject every time they change. In other words, everything. Use this email address, not my email at the agency. Are you clear on this?”
Gault nodded.
“Okay then, Bob. Good luck. I’ll expect those reports daily at noon.”
Gault rose and left. As instructed, he left the piece of paper he’d read on Greenfield’s desk.
When he was gone, Greenfield reviewed the Bug-Lok specs. It was designed to lodge in the medulla oblongata at the back of the neck and seek the neural bundles carrying sensory traffic to and from the brain. Greenfield knew that even a mere senior analyst like Gault had a security clearance level with access to that knowledge.
But there was one additional hidden feature Gault’s security clearance would keep him from knowing about: Bug-Lok contained a very powerful and nearly undetectable poison, a cocktail made from a small amount of botulism, carfentanil, and another highly secret compound based on ricin, developed for the agency by Mossad’s research arm. Only several molecules were enough to kill the subject with no trace left behind. Best of all, the trigger could be operated remotely from thousands of miles away, releasing the poison from the device into the subject via a telecommunications signal.
Greenfield picked up the phone and set up the land-line Encryption-Lok to call the ex-President. He didn’t need a FISA warrant to bug Ainsley. The man had already served time in Gitmo as a terrorist suspect. Now they would know where he was in real-time. And, when he and Sashakovich were together, they would also know that. He smiled.
Lee felt like his stomach would explode. He hurried into the men’s room and tossed his lunch and a bit of the coffee from his meeting with Greenfield. He stood with his face over the toilet, dry-heaving. Must have been bad sushi.
His belly still felt like it had been ripped into when he cleaned the vomit splash back from his spit-polished shoes and staggered back to his office.
Gault hit the snack machines on his way back to his cubicle. Two lattes, a few bags of chips, several chocolate bars. And, as an afterthought, a package of trail mix to assuage his health fears. His pockets stuffed and his hands full, he navigated the crowded path between cubicles praying he wouldn’t bump into anyone and lose one or more of his special treasures.
Everyone he neared gave him a wide berth. He set the lattes on his desk, then emptied his pockets. He set up his computer to follow the “subject” who was beta testing Bug-Lok. It didn’t surprise him that the subject was in the building, on the same floor with him. He examined the GPS receiver’s screen more closely. The subject was moving, now twenty-six feet southwest of him. From the men’s room into Ainsley’s office.
Gault thought about the past conflicts that Ainsley and Sashakovich had with McDougal. Was McDougal’s animosity toward Lee was the real reason for Gault reporting directly to Greenfield?
The computer recorded everything, including sounds and GPS locations. Gault’s curiosity was piqued.
Maybe this was just a blind test, but maybe Lee knew about it and was a compliant test subject. Given Gault’s long history as a senior analyst with the agency, he doubted this. He considered other possibilities, none of them friendly.
He guessed there was a large probability that Lee didn’t know he was being used to test Bug-Lok. Gault would have to consider this carefully. There was a rumor running through the agency that Sashakovich had turned McDougal, ran him as her pet dog. He wondered if he should tell Lee that he was bugged.
As he listened through headphones and watched, Gault wondered what the hell was going on. “Come on, Lee. Say something.”
Cassie smiled as she watched Ann. The texture and look of the foie gras at Gerard’s obviously repulsed the teen but Cassie watched as her daughter steeled herself to try it anyway.
“Take a toast point and place a tiny piece of foie on it, then spoon a bit of the cherry sauce on it. Good, now place it in your mouth and chew
it slowly, to get the flavor to spread around your mouth.”
Ann’s expression slowly changed, disgust to bliss. Cassie almost fell out of her seat as she laughed.
But after a second, Ann reached for her napkin, gagged and spit it out. Then she ran from the table. Cassie could see her close the distance to the rest room, gagging repeatedly into the napkin.
Ann sat on a carton in her makeshift room in the tunnels. The man standing above gave her a stack of bills and she patted the carton nest to hers. When she examined his face, she found it was Charles Breckenridge, the senior from her high school class. He held a plate of foie gras. She took the fatty meat and rubbed it into her crotch. Then he leaned over and kissed her where the foie dripped from her.
She bolted up from the bed. Whispered to herself, “Sheesh.” She realized that this was what Lee often exclaimed when he was confused or frustrated; usually about something Cassie had said or done. She was hyperventilating and, as she slowly calmed, she shook her head, attributing her nightmare to the rich taste of the foie gras.
She wished she had Gizmo to hug and cuddle. She thought of her bedroom. Suddenly, she was afraid of losing all the good in her life. She vowed to try harder and be more careful of her ways, then focused on this lesson. She felt her growing attachment to Cassie. It was as undeniable as the coming day.
For hours, she lay still in bed, unable to sleep any more that night.
Ann spent the next day in total delight. She and Cassie sat in a cabana around the pool, and Cassie showed her simple tricks to improve her reading speed.
“Try using your finger, running it down the side of the page as you finish each line.”
Ann did and it worked. Cassie beamed at her, then looked at her watch. “That was almost twice as fast as your reading was when we started this morning. Let’s take a break and I’ll give you another swimming lesson.”
