by Tim Tigner
66
For the Birds
Location: Unknown
KATYA WAS ASLEEP when the Charger finally came to a stop. Sound asleep. After thousands of fitful miles—hungry, thirsty, cramped and callous miles—her body finally overrode the feelings of discomfort and fear and dropped her deep into slumber’s forest.
The car’s decreasing speed and opening doors didn’t rouse her, but the blast of light from the popping trunk broke through the fog. Before Katya could think, she used her hands to shield her eyes, exposing the fact that she’d broken her bonds.
Nobody spoke.
Katya’s ears immediately alerted her to an alien environment. A strange sound emanated from all around. It resembled a 17-year cicada hatching, but was more earthly. A soft soprano peeping rather than an eerie insect hum.
Oz appeared beside the bumper with a gun in his hand. “Get out.”
Katya wriggled from the trunk and into a surreal setting. “Where are we?”
A gleam entered her captor’s eyes. “Rule One: No questions.”
Katya didn’t actually require his reply. Her location wasn’t that difficult to define, even when seeing it for the first time. She was in a huge tubular hangar fashioned from corrugated steel. It measured well over a football field in length and was about twenty yards wide. In addition to barn-sized doors, the semicircular ends each housed multiple wall fans. Instruments undoubtedly designed and regulated to keep the temperature under control.
A makeshift wire fence cordoned off the twenty-yard end section where Katya, Oz, Sabrina and two other people now stood. The strangers both wore protective coveralls, clear goggles and white filter masks. One also wore a shower cap. They were toying with a tool she couldn’t identify but which, to her great relief, was definitely not a chainsaw.
The remaining eighty percent of the hangar housed birds. Fluffy yellow birds. She was looking at a literal sea of chicks. Tens of thousands of peeping baby chickens.
Under normal circumstances, Katya would have been delighted and fascinated. She’d have scooped a few up and buried her face in the soft yellow fluff. But her thoughts didn’t go there. Given the context, stories of Sicilians feeding their rivals to wild pigs jumped unbidden into her mind. There was no better way to utterly and completely dispose of a body. Was she about to become chicken feed? Shot in the head and left to be picked clean?
No.
Surely they wouldn’t have gone to all the fuss of bringing her here just for that? Unless…. Could Achilles have somehow offended them so profoundly that this was to be their revenge? Some vendetta? Was there an Arabic proverb about feeding your enemies to the chickens?
Sabrina broke Katya’s nightmarish trance. “Come with me.”
This time, her former friend wasn’t holding a gun.
The car that had presumably transported Katya from an underground bunker in Nevada to a chicken farm in Mexico was parked in a corner of the hangar. Sabrina led her toward the opposite side, giving her a chance to study the reappropriated part of her surroundings.
The first thing she noticed was the floor, which was covered in something that resembled tiny wood chips, but wasn’t. Given that it extended into the chicken-covered section, she assumed it was the functional equivalent of kitty litter.
“It’s ground corncob,” Sabrina said, answering her unasked question. “Cheap, clean, organic and effective. When the chickens are grown, the farmer will have about three times the volume he started with, transformed from agricultural waste into fertilizer.”
Despite her curious nature, Katya really wasn’t in the mood to learn about farming. She was, however, quite keen to uncover what she could about her captors and their activities. Clearly they were living in this big barn, if that’s what you called it. There were four folding cots over in the corner, topped with pillows and sleeping bags. Next to them, four short-legged folding beach chairs were situated in a circle around a teapot, which rested on a portable camping stove. Four midsized suitcases rested against the back wall—two upscale, two clearly economy.
Katya was the fifth wheel.
The middle of the freed-up end of the barn was occupied by dozens of big folding tables. A whole field of them. The kind you’d use at an outdoor wedding banquet, if they weren’t so old and worn and irregularly covered with what looked like sprayed black rubber. Beneath each table were crates of something Katya couldn’t see.
The two people wearing protective clothing were busy at a central table. One was male, the other female. Both had complexions matching her captors’. Their size and shape resembled Sabrina’s and Oz’s as well
The table they stood beside held five-gallon buckets and bits of hardware Katya couldn’t identify but which she figured were power sprayers, given the context. Both remained focused on their work as she walked past.
Beyond them was a forklift, a stack of pallets, and one of those huge rolls of plastic wrap you sometimes saw in airports for wrapping luggage destined for airports where pilfering was common. The roll was big enough to wrap a person, Katya realized. What a horrible way to go. Suffocating with your arms strapped to your sides and your eyes wide open.
Fortunately, that vision didn’t last. Sabrina appeared to be headed for a structure in the corner, if that was the right word. It looked as if boxes had been stacked like bricks to form an L-shaped wall about eight feet high, then covered with blue tarps. Where the makeshift structure met the barn’s curving wall, there was a quarter-round opening one would have to duck to get through.
Sabrina gestured her inside, then followed.
Katya began to cry the moment she laid eyes on what lay beyond. The tears just started flowing. It wasn’t because she was the weepy type. Quite the opposite. She’d kept it together in the trunk. Through the cramps, hunger and thirst. Through the days and nights of darkness and depressing uncertainty. While each minute took her a mile farther from Achilles, she maintained emotional control. Mental control. Spiritual control. Up until that minute, hope and faith remained foremost in her heart, like twin battlements on a castle.
After all that, this was too much. Too unjust. Too unfair. Standing there before that corncob and crap-covered floor, staring at a rusty chain, hefty padlock and empty bucket, Katya felt the bricks of her psychological foundation begin to slip.
67
The Remains
Florida
THE INTERIOR of the castle was as remarkable as its exterior. At its heart, a central courtyard rose from the ground-level garage to the soaring skylight three floors above, adding space and light. Wrapping the courtyard’s perimeter, a circular staircase lifted eyes skyward like the rockets that blasted-off nearby. One couldn’t help but think that King Arthur would have been proud to own this place.
Despite its size, the castle didn’t take me long to clear. No doors were closed, and navigation was made easy by moonlight streaming through glass. The rock-solid structure also worked to my advantage, allowing me to walk without making a sound.
That was the good news.
The bad news was what I found inside. Or rather, didn’t.
The house did not seem to have been hastily abandoned. Nothing of value had been left inside. The remaining kitchen equipment looked old and cheap. The forsaken sticks of furniture were far from special—more like the sentimental stuff you’d bring from your old house than what you’d buy for your new. The residual clothes clearly weren’t worth packing.
Everything I found, all the physical evidence, supported Vic’s point of view. The departure had been planned.
Discouraged, I suddenly found myself scared and weary.
If Vic was right and I was wrong, if Oz and Sabrina had been in on the kidnapping all along, then Katya was probably dead. I couldn’t accept that, but couldn’t efficiently fight it either. Not in my current state.
I set the alarm on my phone for 2:30 a.m. and lay down for a restorative nap. It was a tactical move, one that I hoped would set my mind and body right.
&nbs
p; I chose the room closest to the skylight stairway, in case an emergency escape became required. I passed out quickly, but didn’t make it to the alarm. At 2:20, I bolted upright in my borrowed bed feeling better in more ways than one. I had the answer.
Or at least an encouraging idea.
Suppose Vic and I had begun with a bad assumption. Suppose Oz and Sabrina and their PPS employees hadn’t just left the dregs of their existence behind. Suppose they had actually left everything behind.
Vic and I both subconsciously assumed that the tenants would match the residence. We assumed that when people bought a house they did so with long-term intentions. We also assumed that houses match their owners’ lifestyles. Both assumptions were strongly backed by statistics, and supplementarily backed by Oz’s and Sabrina’s business cards. Those of a CEO and a CFO.
But they could be wrong.
The house might have been bought as camouflage. If so, it had certainly proved effective. Take that one piece of data out of the equation, that Potemkin facade, and the remaining evidence sketches a very different story.
I began counting out facts on my fingers. Thumb—two Middle Easterners. Index—trying to blend into the upper strata of the U.S. population. Middle—want the authorities to believe they’ve left the country. Ring—but actually stay despite the danger. Pinkie—after coming into a lot of money. Thumb two—committing multiple murders. Index two—and kidnapping a woman.
I ran back through the facts a few times, continuing to throw fingers like a kid who couldn’t quite count. Despite the repetition, a new picture failed to form. I’d erased the old one, but kept drawing a blank. Oddly enough, I kept getting hung up on the money. The same money that was driving the FBI’s conclusion.
If it wasn’t about the money, then it had to be about something else. Something more important to Sabrina and Oz than ninety-two million dollars. That had to be terrorism, right? But terrorists depend on secrecy. So why would Sabrina and Oz draw attention to themselves by usurping the kidnappers’ plot? Why not just go home along with everyone else?
If it wasn’t about the money.
I didn’t know. But as I sat there in the dark in the house where Oz, Sabrina and their colleagues had lived, I sensed that the answer to that question was the key to finding Katya.
I saved that as the go-to puzzle I’d work whenever circumstances permitted. For the moment I had physical evidence to gather.
I grabbed a couple of sturdy wire hangars from a closet, then exited the castle the way I’d come in—via the roof in the dead of night.
Emerging into the fresh ocean air beneath the blanket of stars, I wondered where Katya was at that moment and what she was seeing. The likely options chilled my heart.
I glanced over the rooftop toward the business district a few miles northwest, setting my sights. It was time for the day’s second illegal investigation. Time to visit Personal Propulsion Systems.
68
Not the Gulag
Location: Unknown
KATYA DID NOT SLIP INTO DESPAIR. She did not slide into insanity. She held on—with tooth and nail. Wit and wile. Hope and faith.
The ground wasn’t really all that bad. Much softer than the trunk.
The chain was tough. More psychologically than physically. Knowing that human history’s darkest days had been punctuated by placing people in chains, it was difficult not to see the device as more than a restraint. Hard not to hear the taunts of a million ghosts. Depressing to picture how her life might end.
But she battled the blues and fought back the fear.
Time and again, she told herself that this was nothing, not when compared to the gulag or the galley of a slave ship. And in contrast to history’s forsaken souls, she had Achilles.
But not at the moment. Then and there, she had to go it alone.
Her wits and wiles had thus far failed to connect serenity and tranquility with the events she’d witnessed since leaving the trunk. But she had learned a thing or two about farming chickens.
The gap at the end of her cell was literally a window into that world. A completely automated world. Gone were the days of Old MacDonald. The birds were watered and fed through dispenser troughs that ran the length of the hangar. Those troughs were hung on thin cables that allowed them to be raised as the chicks matured. Also attached to the dangling troughs were perches and colorful plastic appendages. The former allowing the birds to rest their feet, the latter, Katya finally figured, serving as toys.
That was their world. Their entire lifespan. Food, water, perches and plastic toys. That and companionship.
She could do with a bit of that right now. Someone to whisper and stroke her hair. Oddly enough, in addition to Achilles, she missed Sabrina. The previous version—before she turned traitor.
Katya spent much of her time attempting to figure out what Sabrina and company were up to. The chain gave Katya seven feet of freedom. Not quite enough—no matter how she stretched and strained—to see around the edge of her makeshift partition into the portion of the room that hosted human activity. She could only imagine what was going on there.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The chain didn’t restrict her nose and ears. She could hear and she could smell.
A bit.
Precious little could be heard over the peeping chicks and churning fans. Only the occasional word or phrase—which she was now convinced were Arabic—and the comings and goings of the car.
It was her nose that clued Katya in on the interesting activity. Even with the fans blowing twenty-four hours a day, fortunately in her direction rather than the chicks’, she detected the smell of paint. That and cigarette smoke.
The paint fumes weren’t like a passing whiff of perfume either. Rather than a spritz or two, the activity seemed to be constant as a water sprinkler—interrupted by meal and sleep breaks.
She wanted to know what they were painting, and why. Surely that activity was somehow linked to her fate. No, not her fate. Her future had yet to be written. Their plan for her.
One of the things Katya did to fight the boredom was count chickens. Obviously that was impossible, but she busied her mind by counting the chicks within a projected grid square and then multiplying it out. Her calculation yielded a staggering fifty thousand birds.
Katya also counted 300 boxes in her wall. That too was an estimate, given that they were hidden beneath tarps, but she could see enough corner bumps to guess. Her hungry mathematical mind continued to play, calculating that 300 was enough to fill twelve pallets if stacked three-by-two-by-four.
Was that a lot? Depended on what the boxes were filled with. If gold, diamonds or uranium, it was a fantastic supply. If chicken feed, it wouldn’t satisfy her neighbors for a day.
Maybe that was why they were using the tarps?
Probably not.
Katya was trying to figure out how to create an undetectable ground-level gap she could peer through when a woman ducked into her cell. A strange woman carrying some equipment.
69
Spoiled
Florida
I DROVE PAST the Personal Propulsion Systems office and parked at an apartment complex a half-mile closer to the beach. No sense tempting fate by leaving a car where a patrolling cop might investigate it, given the suspicious hour.
While there, I took the opportunity to do a license plate swap. Fortunately Florida, like Arizona, only required rear plates. In order to avoid adding grief to an innocent’s life, I picked a car with the bumper sticker: Lost your cat? Try looking under my tires.
The PPS building was a generic standalone box, undoubtedly leased, with white walls and a door plaque for signage. Personal Propulsion Systems. No hours, no phone number, no welcome mat. A typical manufacturing startup.
The glass front door exposed a modest lobby and a reception counter. Its lock was a typical cylindrical deadbolt. Easy pickings, so to speak. But I went around back instead. Less exposure. Again, why tempt fate?
The backside stank of spoi
led food and was lit by an overhead light on the fritz. Its flickers revealed a leaky dumpster and two entry points. The first potential entrance was a gray metal fire door equipped with a standard lever lock, the second a delivery bay with a rolling garage door. Both made me smile.
Most homeowners are unaware of the security flaw built into their garages. That’s because it’s disguised as a safety feature.
The emergency door release is a plastic handle attached to a string that’s tethered to a toothed latch. It’s often red but sometimes black. When you pull the string, it levers the tooth free from the drive chain, thereby freeing the door to manual movement. This allows the garage to be opened in the case of equipment failure or an electrical outage. It also gives burglars an easy way in.
I chose to exploit that weakness because garage doors are rarely alarmed.
I began by shoving one of my borrowed wire hangers between the garage door and the weatherstripping seal at the top. Then I twisted the hanger ninety degrees, turning it into a wedge. Satisfied that I’d created a usable gap, I unwound and straightened the second hanger, leaving the hook at the end. I fed the hook through the gap and guided it to the emergency release lever with the aid of my phone’s flashlight.
It hooked.
I pulled.
The door released.
The whole procedure took me about two minutes. A burglar who knows his craft and comes with his tools prepared can pull it off as fast as you or I could use a key. Knowing that, I’d locked the release on my home garage with a cable tie. Of course, that garage would soon be forfeited to Trey’s bank if I didn’t recover the stolen funds.
