by Jeff Siebold
At the best vantage point George stepped into a restaurant, asked the hostess for a menu, and turned toward the large front window, facing north, as he appeared to study the food offerings. After a few minutes, he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich to go and insisted on paying for it in advance. It was $4.75 and he gave the girl a five-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.
There was no doubt in George’s mind that he would find the blond man, and more importantly, the backpack again. This exchange had a finite area, and the blond fellow had used a key to access the apartments. That meant he lived there or he knew someone who did. It meant that he’d be back, and would possibly walk back to the coffee shop once he found out what he had in the bag. Considering the linkages associated with the campus, the location of the retail establishments and classrooms, the layout of the campus, the public transportation access points and the seriously restricted parking availability, George calculated that there was about a 70% chance that he would see the blond man again, from this spot, and within the next sixty minutes.
* * *
Tracy hated being on hold. She always felt that it undermined her momentum. While waiting for her supervisor to answer, she walked down the street, first right, then left, backtracking and hoping for a glimpse of anyone with the blue and gray backpack. The accident victim hadn’t had it with him, so she assumed that the blond guy, Zeke, had taken it.
There were people on the sidewalk, but mostly in small groups of two or three, and none that looked like Zeke. The backpack containing the money and the counterfeit printer plates was gone.
Dealing with the local Police Department had slowed Tracy down. Fortunately, she was inside the coffee shop at the time of the accident and was able to pacify the police with her ID and badge and a promise to call the precinct with a statement and come in for an interview, if necessary.
“Fitch,” she heard from her phone.
“Boss, this is Tracy. We’ve got a problem. Cruz never showed. I think he sent someone, a messenger. The delivery was half done, and then the backpack disappeared. It looks like it was taken by a local on his way out of the shop, and the messenger was killed in a hit and run...”
“Wait, what?” said Fitch. “What about the pick-up guy?”
“Haven’t seen him yet, unless it was the guy who took the bag. But I don’t think it was. It’s a circus here.” Tracy had turned the corner and walked most of a block. Now she was moving back toward the coffee shop entrance, avoiding the recently applied police tape and the uniformed officer guarding the scene.
“Where are your spotters?” Fitch asked.
“In place in the building across the street,” Tracy confirmed. “This was supposed to be a quick and easy one.”
“What spooked Cruz?” asked Fitch. “He knew he was covered.”
“Not sure. Maybe he worked himself up to it. I’m circling the block, and I’ll check in with our guys.” She hung up and dialed the number of one of the Secret Service agents across the street.
Chapter 4
Zeke’s apartment was in a mid-rise, urban style building with a brick and stone facade and black wrought iron trim on the balconies. The complex was maybe four blocks away from the campus in the trendy Luckie Marietta District. It was one of the newest apartments in the area, built a couple of years ago on the site of a former freight warehouse.
One benefit of living on the third floor, thought Zeke, is that it’s a short climb up the stairs. He took them two at a time, then crossed the third floor mezzanine in four normal strides. He noticed that the ‘tell’, a small piece of clear plastic wedged between the door and the frame, was undisturbed. Zeke was in his apartment a moment later.
As soon as the apartment door was closed, Zeke bolted the lock. It felt like it might help keep the ugliness of the past few minutes separated from him, separated from his reality. Then he set the backpack on his kitchen counter and zipped it open.
* * *
Whatever was inside the backpack was wrapped very tightly in some sort of green plastic wrap. It was the kind of thick wrap that manufacturers use to keep their products together and tight during shipping. The first package was translucent, and about the size and shape of a large book or a thin laptop. Zeke lifted it out and examined both sides for an access point. There was none. It looked as if the wrap had been heat sealed to create an integral seam.
That’s odd, he thought.
Zeke opened the drawer to his left and took out a pair of kitchen scissors. As he worked he smelled an inky smell. He’d picked up a tune in the coffee shop—a piano piece. Without realizing it he found himself snipping the wrap in time to the music still in his head.
The package began to come apart, and Zeke used both hands to contain the contents. That proved to be inadequate, though, as banded bundles of what looked like U.S. currency tumbled free, some bouncing on the counter, some into the sink, and much of it falling onto the floor. Zeke saw $100 bills everywhere.
He leaned forward and pushed the bundles he held between his chest and his hands onto the counter, and then reached down and began picking up the stacks from the floor. Each stack was marked with handwritten initials and a “$5,000” printed on the band wrapping the bills. Zeke flipped through two bundles and counted fifty one-hundreds per bundle.
Zeke stacked the bundles on the counter and counted them. There were forty-two perfect bundles of United States $100 dollar bills. He noticed that they’d been arranged in a shape that resembled a laptop computer, a rectangular shape, and three stacks wide. The green plastic wrap littered the floor in two pieces, and the backpack had fallen into the sink with a small thud.
Zeke looked in the bottom of the backpack. There were two cloth bags in the bottom, with drawstrings at the top. He pulled one open. It contained a metal printing plate that looked long and rounded on one side, with the reverse image of what looked like U.S. currency.
“Well, take a look at this,” Zeke said to no one in particular, thinking about the connection between the guy with the Black Dress Shoes, the money, the printing plates and the accident. And then he heard a knock at his door.
Chapter 5
Instinctively, Zeke turned and opened the freezer door behind him, and started tossing the bundles of currency inside. Then he picked up the two pieces of green wrap and threw them on top of the money. And finally, he put the cloth bags back into the backpack, folded it once and shoved it on top of the pile. He shut the freezer door. There was also a small cardboard spacer, a block used to square off the bundles of cash, which he dropped in the trashcan as he turned toward the apartment door. Zeke’s instinct was that he was probably followed from the campus.
Then came the second knock, a bit louder and more insistent. It wasn’t official, as no one was yelling through the door at him, but the sound was coincidental and seemed a bit odd. Zeke walked quietly toward the door. Typically, Zeke avoided peepholes. A darkening lens is a sure give away of the position of the viewer’s body and head, and a simple gunshot through the door, at the moment the lens darkens, has a good chance of hitting flesh.
Zeke had installed a small camera in the outside hallway to the left of his front door. It was mounted ceiling height and connected by Wi-Fi with a small monitor, a pad really, that was kept in an open cupboard in the hallway. He glanced at the pad and saw a small, dark haired woman smiling up at him. It’s Kimmy, he thought.
Kimmy was a neighbor, a single woman who had introduced herself to Zeke the day he’d moved into the complex. She lived across the hall from Zeke. Based on the positioning of their apartments, her porch must have had a view north, down the street toward the Tech campus.
Although Zeke had lived in the Enclave for three days, it seemed as if he had run into Kimmy at least once each day. She was usually at the mailboxes when he stopped by, and she caught him in the hall often. She frequently knocked to ask for his assistance with any one of a myriad of small things, none of which she seemed able to handle by herself. Sh
e was a bit odd in that she seemed to embrace the spiritual world, and often went on about energy fields and the battle between good and evil. A bit nutty for Zeke’s taste, but she could be entertaining.
Zeke opened the door a crack, as Kimmy lifted her arm to knock again. “Hey, Kimmy,” Zeke said. “I’m sort of in the middle of something…” he started.
“Do you have a girl in there?” Kimmy asked with a smile. Kimmy was a body in motion, always moving, bouncing, turning; she was energy finding reasons to stay moving. Combined with the smile, the constant motion seemed to give her an attractive and young presence.
The comment made Zeke pause. He looked at Kimmy for a moment, and said, “No. But...”
“Good, I need to talk with you, Zeke.” She walked past him into the apartment. As she passed him, Zeke smelled a hint of lilac. It was her usual fragrance and smelled fruity and ethereal. Kimmy rounded the kitchen island, boosted herself up on a stool and put her elbows on the granite counter. She was just over five feet three inches tall, with a round face and dark, curly hair. She had almond shaped eyes, the shape enhanced by subtly applied eyeliner, and her normal expression included a wide smile. It seemed that she was always moving, always smiling, and she had an optimistic yet practical disposition. Kimmy was dressed in a turquoise blouse, silver jewelry and a long Indian skirt. Although Zeke guessed that she was in her late 30’s, from a distance she looked as if she were 25 or even younger.
Zeke followed her into the kitchen and glanced at the fridge for a moment, confirming that the door was still closed. He turned back to his visitor. “Sure, Kimmy, how can I help?”
“I saw you coming back from campus,” she said. “Did you have a late meeting or something?”
“No, I stopped for a cup of coffee after my last class. I was...”
“How about a glass of wine?” Kimmy jumped down from the stool, opened the wine fridge and grabbed a bottle from the bottom shelf. She took a clean glass out of the cupboard, twisted out the cork and began to pour herself some Merlot.
“Would you like one?” she asked.
There are a lot of good arguments for red wine, thought Zeke, automatically. The resveratrol protects against dementia and enhances cardiovascular strength. It’s also responsible for longevity. The quercetin kills cancer cells, and the tannins contain procyanidins that protect against heart disease. But, not just now, he thought.
“No, just water for me,” Zeke said, taking a cup and filling it from the tap.
“I need some ice,” she said, and stepped to the fridge. Zeke stopped breathing for a moment, but Kimmy pushed her glass against the ice dispenser in the fridge door, and three cubes slid out into her glass.
“Did you see the accident?” Kimmy asked. She corked the bottle, put it back in the fridge, circled the bar and hopped back up on the stool with her wine glass in hand. “The hit and run?”
“Is it on TV already?” asked Zeke. “I was there and saw it from a distance, but it only happened a few minutes ago...”
“A friend texted and told me about it. I guess word is spreading across the campus.”
“It was awful,” Zeke said. “The guy was just crossing the street. A horrible accident.”
“Oh, no,” Kimmy shook her head. “That wasn’t an accident. When something like that happens, evil is always nearby and involved.”
She said it with absolute certainty with no smile on her lips. Then she smiled broadly again, winked and sipped her wine.
“You think?” asked Zeke, not certain whether she was serious or joking.
“Sure,” she said. “Did you ever notice how the universe likes balance? It actually seeks equilibrium. If it were random, things would just occur in equal number, good and bad, right? But the world is fundamentally good.”
“Maybe I’ll have that glass of wine, now,” Zeke said, smiling at Kimmy.
“No really, think about it. The real ‘bad’ things that we see are isolated incidents that disturb the equilibrium. There’s a greater evil that’s at work, but it’s limited by the good.”
“Well, what can I do for you, Kimmy?” said Zeke, changing the direction of the conversation. Kimmy had once told Zeke about a family of gypsies that lived in the desert near her parents’ house in Israel where she’d grown up. Apparently, they would play tricks on the local people and then return to their camp and laugh hysterically. Kimmy said that sometimes at night she felt like she was the only one who could hear their laughter.
Kimmy’s father had been a banker in a rural town near the West Bank, a widower who raised his only daughter after his wife died in a market bombing some years before. Kimmy had fine, fragile looking features, and had told Zeke that her looks favored her mother. There was a picture of her parents on one wall in her apartment, and Zeke had acknowledged the resemblance.
“I should wait to ask you for your help until all this is over. It’s really not that important, Zeke. I just need some help moving some furniture.” She smiled again, looked at him with her big, brown eyes, and slid off the barstool. She set her empty glass in the drain and walked to the door, turned the knob and let herself out.
“Ciao,” she said, and winked at him.
Zeke waited a moment after Kimmy left, and then he moved to the door and snicked the deadbolt. He returned to the kitchen, reached into the freezer and pulled out the chilled bundles of money, the plastic wrap and the backpack.
Zeke set the backpack on the counter and took the two smaller bags with the drawstrings out of it. Opening the top of each carefully, slowly, he saw they both contained the same thing, a curved counterfeit printing plate. The plates were solid and substantial, each individually wrapped in a thick cloth and held in place with industrial strength rubber bands. Zeke didn’t notice any ink stains or smudged area on the cloth, but he had smelled ink, so he assumed that these plates had been used but cleaned.
He unwrapped each plate carefully. There were four reverse images of the front of $100 bills, and four reverse images of the back of $100 bills. They had heft, maybe fifteen pounds each. A newer Simultan printing press with a few of these plates could produce 10,000 sheets of new money an hour.
He arranged it all on the countertop and noted the time.
It was 5:37 on the microwave clock.
Chapter 6
As he long-pressed the off button to reboot his phone, Zeke thought about the evil that Kimmy had mentioned. It could be true. He remembered the feeling as he had passed the small man on the street. Like a sudden thermocline, a tangible temperature shift.
The small man could have been involved, thought Zeke. He’d looked past Zeke first, and had given a small nod toward someone behind Zeke, possibly someone on the sidewalk, or even in a car. The gesture had looked to be affirmative, a command.
He looked at the pile of money in front of him. U.S. Currency, Zeke thought. But these bills were the older, pre-2013 $100 bills. Before the holograms and special threads had been added. This currency was one version behind current.
Zeke checked the serial numbers on the $100 bills. They were all the same four numbers, all counterfeit. So, this was a package of sophisticated counterfeiting equipment and product. What seemed most unusual was that Black Dress Shoes had walked away from it all.
There was nothing else in the pouch, so Zeke emptied the cash and the printing plates into his brown leather backpack, plugged his tablet in a wall outlet, threw his backpack over his shoulder on one strap, and walked out. By now Tracy would have figured out about the backpack. She’d be looking for him.
Using a different stairwell, Zeke exited a side door and turned the first corner north toward the Tech campus. Almost immediately he blended in with the student and pedestrian traffic.
* * *
Minutes later, the small man, George, spotted the blond man walking north from the apartment complex. He was carrying a leather backpack, which he had slung over his shoulder. He was about 150 yards away and walking away from George. Perfect, George thought, and he immed
iately left the restaurant without his to-go order. He walked quickly.
George was steadily gaining on the blond man, and was about twenty yards back when he slowed and paced himself. From behind, George saw a slim, fit man with an easy, balanced walk that spoke of competence and conditioning. A few people have that natural, genetic muscle motion that translates into excellent balance and quick reactions. This fellow seemed to be one of them. And he appeared to be heading toward the library building, walking comfortably.
George watched the blond man approach the main entrance of the library at the same time as two college-aged girls, and he held the door open for them. He used the opportunity to check behind and around him, carefully. Across the open area of the campus there were people walking in almost every direction, some hurrying along, some talking as they walked together, several looking down at their phones as they walked more slowly. Apparently, nothing stood out, and the blond man followed the girls into the lobby.
* * *
Zeke was in the campus library, having used his student ID to gain legitimate access. The leather backpack hanging on the back of his chair blended in well and seemed to reinforce his student status.
Although he was actually on assignment here, posing as a student gave him freedom of movement and flexibility. He took out his encrypted cell phone.
