by Jeff Siebold
“But...” said Zeke.
“But, I was very frightened. I wasn’t convinced that the agents could protect me.”
“You’d spent the week with the Secret Service, right?” asked Zeke.
“Yes, right after the time I was contacted by Jefe’s men, I went to the police and explained my situation. I told them that I had escaped from Mexico and had been involved in counterfeiting. They said that there was maybe a crime, but it was in a different country, and they took me to meet with the Secret Service agents. They seemed to think that I wanted to leave, but in truth, I wanted to stay with them, surrounded by their agents, for as long as possible.”
“Why?” asked Zeke.
“Because, one does not cross Jefe and expect there to be no consequences. I escaped with my life and their money and the printer plates, which means that I’m in serious trouble.”
“And you called us,” said Zeke.
“Yes, after I heard from George, the Accountant, last week I contacted your Agency. I felt that I needed protection from Jefe’s men,” said Cruz. “I don’t have confidence that the Secret Service agents are enough. In Mexico, it is not unusual to hire private protection. The police are barely adequate, and many are very corrupt.”
“So, working backwards, before you heard from Jefe’s man, the Accountant...” Zeke asked.
“I had a visit from two other men about a week or so ago. They were not violent men, but they made it known that they were from Jefe, and were here in Atlanta to resolve the situation.”
“To retrieve the plates?” asked Zeke.
“Well, yes, and the money, of course. And me, honestly.”
“You?” asked Zeke.
“Well, yes.”
“Why would they want to take you back, Alberto?” asked Zeke.
“Oh. Well, actually, I am the artist,” said Cruz.
“The counterfeiting artist?” asked Zeke. “The forger?”
“Si,” said Cruz. “I just haven’t told anyone about that part.”
Chapter 12
The small man, George, examined the backpack again. He carefully opened each outside pocket, expanded it to its full size with the fingers of his left hand, and shined the flashlight into the opening. Looking for uneven stitching, a torn seam, possibly a small opening. Then he unzipped the zipper around the circumference of the pack and repeated the search inside the compartments.
He’d found a small pad and a couple of pens in one pocket, and he’d noticed some chewing gum in another pocket. But there was no sign of the plates or the money. He used both hands to pull at the seams inside the pack, straining them away from each other, in search of a hidden compartment or pocket.
The stitching was made up of big, wide stitches of nylon, apparently run over twice with a sewing machine to assure a solid seam. The backpack had an almost nautical feel to it, with the nylon and canvas exterior, the large stitching and the nylon rope drawstrings. There was a label inside, a brand that George had never seen before. It contained a simple logo, which seemed to illustrate water with a sailboat floating on top of it, and which said only, “Aft Creations”.
George could tell immediately by the feel of the bag- its heft- that neither the plates nor the money were hidden in it. But more than once he had found an important piece to the puzzle he was working on by paying attention to a seemingly innocuous item. And it gave him a sense of his new prey, the man he’d taken it from.
For example, George knew from what he’d seen in the backpack that the blond man was organized and efficient, that he wanted to be anonymous, and that he was rather minimalist. Combined with his observations of the blond man earlier, George was developing a mental picture of a competent man, in good shape and able to respond or react quickly to unexpected stimuli. He was a man to be cautious around.
Having searched the entire bag, every pocket and compartment twice, George took the X-acto knife from the desk and began gently cutting the seams away from the bag. A few minutes later, there were individual pieces of the bag lying in an organized fashion across the desk. Each piece was reexamined, and then set aside in a pile of discards. There was nothing else here, he decided.
George was nothing if not meticulous. He spent much of his time thinking and reliving situations from various perspectives and with a variety of emphases, culling out details and possibilities, and constructing scenarios to accommodate most any unexpected situation.
“If it’s not in here,” he thought aloud, “then where might it be?”
George was sitting at the desk in his hotel room next to the Olympic Park. From his upper floor room he had a view of the Interstate. Lost in thought, he watched the traffic slowly crawling by. It was rush hour, and evening was near.
* * *
Tracy Johnson was watching the traffic, too. Thinking black thoughts, she snapped her pencil in frustration. Sitting at her Steelcase desk in her Homeland Security office on Spring Street, less than a mile and a half south of the Georgia Tech campus, she was anxious to find Cruz and the plates, and to wrap this case up. She’d thought that they were close, and then it went sideways in a major way with the hit and run.
Tracy reached out unconsciously and touched the butt of her Glock, which she was wearing in a reversed holster on her left hip. She then touched the pocket that held her badge and ID; at some subliminal level, she found this reassuring.
Fitch was stepping into the case, taking some control away from her, and thinking in terms of possible damage control. He had started showing up at team meetings and insisted on being kept current on the situation, several times a day.
So, Tracy thought, where’s the invisible planet? She subscribed to the astronomers’ theory that the gravitational forces of planets that couldn’t be seen acted on the orbit and behavior of visible planets. So one could essentially triangulate the existence of the invisible body by observing its effect on its neighboring planets and their moons. Applied to law enforcement, this theory could translate to determining the cause of an action- such as Cruz never coming to the coffee shop- by looking at what might be happening to motivate him in that direction. What are the important gravitational influences on Mr. Cruz, she thought. This type of postulation often led to a series of “What if...?” questions.
Like, What if Cruz saw something that motivated him to run? To run and to take the money and the plates, that is. Maybe the plates were never in that backpack, and that’s why it had to disappear. What would have caused that reaction?
Tracy doodled with the sharp end of the broken pencil and a legal pad that was sitting on her desk. She wrote, “Fear”. That would be the most effective motivator, she thought. Fear of what, though, or of whom?
Or, what if Cruz never intended to return the plates to Jefe or his men? Had he been using the Secret Service all this time, setting them up for his escape with the plates? Cruz had insisted that, for credibility, the plates must be in the backpack when he met with Jefe’s men. And he’d insisted that they be the originals. When Cruz refused to make the exchange without them, Tracy’s boss Fitch had finally complied.
Tracy knew that Cruz had run from the Mexican cartel, and had taken the money and the printer plates with him. She knew, from Cruz, that they had killed a member of his family in retribution. His nephew in San Luis Rio Colorado, Pablo, a fifteen-year-old boy. They killed him because he was related to Cruz. When Cruz arrived at Secret Service headquarters, he was obviously upset.
When Cruz had been found in the Phoenix airport, his presence was reported back to Jefe. They had dogged him in Atlanta after that, letting him know that they had found him, toying with him, making him wait. But they stayed with him, kept him in sight until he was good and scared. They used the safety of his family in Mexico as a threat, and then they demanded the counterfeiting plates in return for his family’s safety.
When he’d first told the story to Tracy and her partner, he was resigned. Cruz said that he knew that it was just a matter of time. But he had information abou
t the Mexicans, about their operations and the counterfeiting.
“How long did you work for the cartel?” Tracy had asked.
“Most of my life, I guess,” said Alberto Cruz. “Since I was a young man, my Uncle saw my talent and he mentioned it to Jefe. I went from the fishing boat to the warehouse in San Luis Rio Colorado. That warehouse was my home for many years.”
* * *
So, Cruz was already scared about the drop, and if fear was the motivator, then how did it become so amped up that it made him skip the meeting? She wrote, “Skipped” on the pad. Then she wrote, “Counterfeit printer plates”.
The counterfeit plates and the money were specific requests by Jefe’s men. Someone had contacted Cruz on his cellphone, someone who spoke in Cruz’s native dialect and with some of his hometown colloquialisms. The voice had spelled it out to him last Saturday afternoon. Get the money and the printer plates together, and have them ready to deliver. “Dispone de una semana,” “you have one week,” the voice had said, and hung up.
Tracy wrote “Greed” on the paper next, a new column heading. If Cruz had found a partner, the plates could have been snatched after the man in khaki’s had left the coffee shop. Maybe the blond guy, Zeke, or someone outside, just stepping in for a moment and back out with the backpack. It would take about three seconds.
If Cruz masterminded this whole scene, he may have disappeared himself again, but this time with the counterfeit plates. Perhaps he intended to bargain them away in return for his life.
There were no further reports, though, from Secret Service Headquarters in DC. Nor had she heard anything from the Yuma Border Patrol Sector. The intelligence that they had gathered so far tended to support Cruz’s testimony about the Mexican cartel and its leadership. In fact, from what was shared with Tracy and Ron, this Jefe was a very bad man.
Cruz was in a bind when he first approached the Atlanta police. He was being watched, and the Mexicans following him knew about his car and his house. It’s possible, she thought, that he used the time in the Homeland Security Building to insulate himself and plan a final escape.
Tracy’s phone rang. She checked the caller ID and saw that it was Ron. She answered, “Yea, Ron, what’s up?”
Tracy’s partner, Ron Marcus, had spent the week organizing and coordinating this effort. The logistics of the drop were his responsibility, while Tracy was sticking with Cruz, interviewing him, preparing him. She had been working in tandem with two other agents, focused on Cruz for the best part of the week.
Marcus was a tall, fit man who moved a lot like a dancer, mostly on the balls of his feet. It looked odd until you got used to it. His thin frame accentuated his large head, nose and ears. She’d found him to be deceptively quick and prone to action. He eschewed the desk part of the job, looking for reasons to get back out to the field whenever he could.
A soft-spoken voice said, “Trace, I’m following up on a lead, trying to figure out how the plates and the money disappeared. We’ve been canvasing the buildings around the coffee shop. I kind of feel like Cruz had this whole thing set up, ready to pull a Houdini on us. Seems like he’s in the wind. But I found a kid who was sitting at a table, outside the coffee shop when this went down. I don’t think you saw him out there. He was sort of off to one side, and he had his books out on one of their umbrella tables. Studying for a test. I think he may have seen more than he knows.”
About time we caught a break, thought Tracy. But she knew that the likelihood of any one lead panning out was sparse.
“Do you want me to meet you to interview him now?” she asked. The presence of two agents in an interview sometimes had the effect of illustrating the serious nature of the questions, and creating a somber tone. Two authoritative figures represent a commitment to the proceedings.
“No, I’ve made the initial contact,” Ron said. “But we should interview him again tomorrow morning, in the office. I told him to stop by at 8:00 AM to chat with us again.”
“OK, good. You think the kid saw something?” Tracy asked hopefully.
“He claims that most of the time he was in his books, but he had a good vantage point to see everything that happened. Said that he saw a guy who looked Hispanic leave the coffee shop and walk down the street in front of him. Said he looked up, but the guy didn’t make eye contact. Then the guy crossed the street and got in the middle of the accident. This kid, Mike Williams is his name, by the way, he also said that after the guy passed by and was hit by the car, he noticed an older lady, walking back and forth on the street in front of the shop, walking quickly and talking on her phone.”
That would be me, thought Tracy. “Clothing?”
“He said black leggings and a yellow shirt, so, yeah, it sounds like you, ‘older lady’.” Ron made a noise that sounded like a chuckle.
Chapter 13
“How’re you doing, my friend?” asked Clive.
“It was a bit of a surprise, the hit and run,” Zeke commented. “Unexpected, and right on top of Cruz sending in a substitute.” They were sitting at a tall table in a restaurant near the Tech campus.
Clive sipped his beer. It was a black and tan. The server brought Zeke a glass of a local IPA and set it in front of him. Zeke tasted the draught and nodded to the server.
“Indeed,” said Clive. “It sounds like that hit and run was a bit of nasty business.”
“Nasty enough, right?” Zeke sipped. “Time for a change of fortune.”
“Change of fortune” was a term that Zeke and Clive used at their former jobs, where they had met seven years ago. They met while working at ‘MIC’. Zeke had been highly recruited for counterintelligence in the group, and Clive, an MI-6 Operative, was on loan to the program.
Zeke’s job had been as an operative at the Military Intelligence Civilian Excepted Career Program in Fort Meade, Maryland. The name of the program has always seemed vague, and perhaps that was intentional. The MICECP is charged with developing a highly qualified, technically skilled, foreign language capable workforce for intelligence and counterintelligence missions worldwide.
The Army wanted intelligence and counterintelligence operatives that they could move around to various hotspots worldwide, and who could provide intelligence to various Army commands. The reason they opted for civilian operatives was, in Zeke’s opinion, that there weren’t enough soldiers that have the skill set necessary to complete that mission statement. And the Army is a government bureaucracy, which means that ranks, pay grades, personnel records, logistical support, supplies and all of that would be controlled by other branches of the Army.
Zeke’s belief was that, by using a civilian program, the Intelligence and Security Command guys would have much more direct control. The program was started in 2008, the year he was recruited.
Another benefit of using civilian talent like Zeke was that there are fewer restrictions. The FBI, for example, is authorized to work only within the United States, and the CIA is authorized to work only outside of the United States. Operatives in the MICECP program can do either, and in the war on terrorism, the geographic boundaries are indistinct.
The website for the program says, “Army commands worldwide can avail themselves of this unique talent pool to meet their mission-essential requirements.” In the beginning, the operatives were mostly current-day mercenaries with combat experience, language skills and intelligence training. A number of the guys that he had worked with were recently discharged soldiers who had seen action in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan. They went through training and were deployed around the globe to various hotspots.
Paired together, Clive and Zeke worked counterintelligence, personal protection details, and counterterrorism. They handled the ransom exchange in a high profile international kidnapping, handled bomb threats against U.S. companies abroad and performed a myriad of other similar activities.
When the program began in 2008, Zeke had been hired as one of the first Intelligence Operations Specialists, a civilian contractor to the Army. He
worked there until 2014. Zeke was prone to action. His experience and training was aimed at anticipating situations and taking evasive or preemptive action without hesitation. But he also knew how to modify his personality to reflect the person he was interviewing, developing an empathetic and relatable persona that was usually attractive to the others involved. He knew how to become likable.
“Change of fortune” meant that the momentum was due to shift in their favor, and in practice it often did. It wasn’t a tangible event, but when it was happening, there was a sense of change in the air, even an excitement. Like a momentum shift in an American football game.
“We arranged for your backup, a watcher,” said Clive. It wasn’t unusual for The Agency to hire undercover operatives to stand by in case an operation went sideways. Typically, a watcher remained on the sidelines, but monitored the situation, communicating with The Agency directly, and remaining available in case plans changed. It was a practice that had paid off more than once in the past.
“Had a bit of a revelation, today,” said Zeke.
“What’s that?” asked Clive.
“It turns out that Cruz is actually the artist. The forger,” said Zeke.
“That’s unexpected, I suppose,” said Clive.
“Indeed,” said Zeke. “I’m not sure he meant to admit it. But, I was interviewing him, and it came out. He said that he just hadn’t told anyone yet.”
“He seems to be a man with many talents, and an extraordinary penchant for luck,” said Clive.
“I agree,” said Zeke. Both men thought in silence for a second.
“My neighbor said something odd today,” Zeke continued.
“Like what?”
“Well, I’ve told you about Kimmy. She’s a bit different, like some of the people in that cult we encountered down in Brazil,” he continued. “She definitely has her own understanding of the way everything works.”
