Initially, he thought about taking a few months and make a fitness comeback. Maybe he’d join a karate studio or a street-fighting gym in case he ran into guys like Agent Klipser during the next phase of his operation. Then, he realized that while he might learn a few kick-ass moves, he’d never accomplish his mission with physical confrontations with people. He was fifty-three years old. He wasn’t going to win any fist fights against men half his age, certainly not against highly trained FBI agents or covert operators.
If he was going to achieve his goal, he’d do so with brain power and detailed planning. If he needed to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Klipser, he’d have to hire someone to do that for him, and that person was going to be very expensive.
The Feds had military-grade weapons, armored SUVs, encrypted comm gear, sophisticated computers and surveillance equipment, and maybe even access to military satellites and domestic drones. To match wits with the US government on that level, Carl would need that kind of gear also, as well as people to operate the equipment. Money could buy probably anything he needed, except maybe satellites and drones.
He knew his own limitations. He was an excellent executive planner and high-level thinker, but when it came down to the nuts and bolts of actually running an operation, he preferred to have someone else in that role. He needed to hire a detail-oriented person to run his ops.
He also needed to learn several things very quickly, things that cops and the Feds were trained to do from the very beginning of their careers. He needed to learn how to avoid directly answering questions and how to parse out necessary information on a need-to-know basis. He needed to learn how to lie convincingly and instantly, without thinking, without hesitation, and without tell-tale eye movements.
He had to learn police procedures and FBI operations protocols so he could anticipate their tactical responses and stay one or two steps ahead of them. He also needed a refresher course on shooting handguns and maybe even some automatic weapons, though he demoted that task as a lower priority. He wouldn’t win a shootout with cops or the Feds, either. It was best to leave all the macho-man bullshit to professionals who were good at that stuff. Without a doubt, he needed to hire mercenaries.
He also had to learn how to change his appearance, how to disappear and fade into crowds, how to steal transportation, how to get fake IDs and passports, and how and where to acquire weapons, technology, and high-tech explosives. He had to actually find the mercenaries before he could hire them. Most important, he had to be able to do all this discretely. One slip-up, one word to the wrong person who might turn out to be a federal informant or an undercover cop, and he’d be under FBI investigation again and likely not even know it.
Money came first, for without money none of the rest of his to-do list was possible, and that was why he was following the young man in the white tank top.
On a Friday night in the little-big city of Albuquerque, Carl was officially homeless. Even better, he was officially dead, and that was essential for the next part of his plan. He now walked around town with a wad of bills in his pocket and the rest of what remained of his withdrawal in a money belt strapped around his waist. He hadn’t bothered to close his real estate business. He no longer cared about any of that. His creditors would find out fairly soon anyway, as soon as their electronic bills bounced off his now-empty checking account. That chapter of his life was over, whether or not he brought formal closure to it.
Over the last couple of weeks, he’d spent considerable time trying to figure out why the Feds had arrested him in the first place. If the kidnapper was so damned elusive, how was it that someone just happened to see him—Carl—and call in the cavalry? That kind of accidental coincidence only happened in the movies. The only conclusion Carl could come up with was that the Feds had come across his face on some facial recognition computer program and thought he was the other guy.
As a result of that conclusion, he had changed his appearance. A quick stop at Wal-Mart yielded some dark wrap-around glasses, which he had removed when the sun went down. Next door at Sally’s Beauty Supplies, he found some face cream that went on dry. He bought two shades of cream—one that went on very light so he’d look white, and one that had a dark tint that would make him look several shades darker than his normal skin color.
At a wig supply store across town on south Broadway, he purchased two wigs. One was dreadlocks for his brown-man disguise, and the other was a short, simple brown hairstyle for his white-man disguise. The latter was a woman’s wig, but the plain style would look just as generic on a guy.
It was in his Caribbean disguise, with dreadlocks and darkened skin, that he followed his target across west Central Avenue. He found a break in the east-bound bumper to bumper traffic and stopped on the median next to a sign that was prevalent at almost every intersection from downtown all the way out to Coors Boulevard, prohibiting cruising.
Carl knew for a fact the signs did little to discourage the decades-old weekend practice. Cruising was what the young folks in the South Valley did on the weekend. They drove slowly up and down Central Avenue, cruising—looking for whoever they could see, and whoever could see them.
Carl found his break in traffic, then jogged across to the sidewalk. Then he crossed the same parking lot his target had crossed moments ago. He darted behind the grocery store where he saw a group of young men talking. He guessed they were about to conduct some not-quite-legal business. The parking lot was well lit, but the delivery docks behind the store where the young men stood were only sparsely lit by weak lamps. There were too few lamps, and those that functioned offered only small pools of light.
The group of five men stood huddled together in the dark space between two dim pools of light. They all turned toward him as he approached. The tough guy in the wife-beater T-shirt split off from the group and took two steps forward. If the man’s resistance to the near-freezing cold was any indication, he was a hell of a lot tougher than Carl, who wore a T-shirt under a pullover sweater under his jacket.
“You lost, Homes?” Tough Guy said.
Carl looked past the man at the other four for a long moment, until it was clear he was intentionally ignoring the challenger. Three of the other men glanced at each other, then they collectively looked at the fourth. It was clear to Carl that this fourth man was the alpha dog of the group, so that’s who he centered his attention on.
The slender young man stood about five-eight and weighed maybe a buck-fifty. In the dim light, Carl could see the fellow wore dark pants, maybe Dickies or Chinos, dark shoes, and a heavy, red plaid shirt over a dark undershirt. Black hair peeked out from under a skull cap, and the young man had dark eyes.
The slender man nodded at him and stepped forward. “You come up here to do some business, brah? How much money you got?”
Carl smiled. “Two thousand,” he lied.
The man raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I tell you what. Why don’t you let me hold that for you? I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you. This neighborhood is kinda hard on tourists, you know?”
Carl shook his head calmly. “I’m no tourist.”
“If you don’t give me your money, Esteban might kick your ass.”
The leader stuck out his hand and waggled his fingers for the money. The big man, Esteban, stood just over the six-foot mark and probably weighed over two-fifty. He was thick in the chest and gut.
“That’s not how we play the game, my friend. I’m not going to give you my money because he might kick my ass. If he’s going to take my money, he actually has to do some ass-kicking first.” Carl shrugged. “Of course, then you’ll be missing out on ten times that much.”
Chapter 26
1849 MST Friday
Albuquerque, NM
Alpha Dog’s eyebrows raised a notch, and he shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “You have my attention.”
“I know three businessmen who each have about two hundred grand available in cash. We have your boys baby-sit the family, while you and I g
o to the bank tomorrow with these men for a cash withdrawal.”
“And how were you able to quantify each man’s liquidity?”
Carl was taken aback by the young man’s word choice, and he felt a shiver of fear flash up his spine. He’d figured these guys for simple gang-bangers, but now he sensed there was something more devious to this particular young fellow. He suddenly felt he might be out of his element against a man who was obviously educated in the arena of illegal finance.
Skeptically, he said, “They’re investors, and I used to be their real estate agent. Whenever they made offers on income property, I made them submit a statement of cash on hand to show their purchasing power.”
The young man nodded. “So you propose that we just waltz into three banks tomorrow and walk out with two hundred grand each time?” Carl narrowed his eyes and nodded, but the man shook his head. “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”
Answer like a cop would.
“What makes you think so?”
“My friend, that is most definitely not how that game is played unless you want to be a house guest of the FBI.”
The young man gave the big guy a head nod and said something to him in rapid-fire Spanish. Carl watched as the big guy moved over to the edge of the building where he could keep an eye out for police.
The young man said, “Let’s step into my office over here.” He took Carl by the arm and guided him across the alley, out of earshot of the others. They stayed in the shadows between the pools of light.
Carl said, “It sounds like you may be familiar with this particular game.”
The young man nodded. “I have...um, family members in the trade.” He paused and looked Carl up and down. “You look like a Jamaican island boy, but you don’t sound like one.”
“It’s a disguise.”
“No shit, Homey. So, how exactly did you happen to be in this neighborhood?”
“I stopped at the MMA gym over on Isleta.”
“I know the place. And you told them you needed some money, and they just gave you my name?”
He said it innocently enough, but Carl knew it was a test. “There were some guys standing around outside. I told them I needed someone who could help me collect some money from some folks.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” the young man said with a nod. “You a cop?”
Carl shook his head. “The guy that told me where to find you struck me as the kind of man who could smell a cop from a mile away. But he gave me a code phrase. He said to say your mama wears combat boots.”
“Remind me to kick his ass later. But, in fact, my mother was in the army back in the day, so she did wear combat boots, literally.”
Standing close to him, Carl figured the man was maybe half his age. His dark eyes held a mischievousness, but he looked keenly intelligent. There was something else Carl saw in the man’s eyes, and he liked it. He saw a little bit of recklessness and excitement, like he was familiar with the adventure of illegal finance and open to embracing the activity.
“Well,” the man said. “Point number one: taking hostages and extorting money are federal offenses and the FBI takes those activities very seriously. Point number two: banks have cameras and security procedures to prevent what you’re suggesting. So, if a couple of...shall we say, men of color such as ourselves try to walk out of those banks with a briefcase full of greenbacks, we’ll get our pictures taken, and we’ll be marked as highly suspicious.”
The young man took a deep breath and shrugged. “At best, we’ll succeed once. Worst case, the first bank will be instantly suspicious. After all, nobody carries money out of banks like that anymore. They’ll likely delay our departure while they check the federal database to see if we’re legit, whereupon we’ll be busted before we leave.”
He shrugged. “My uncle worked in the creative finance sector in Mexico for several years.”
“Are you suggesting we hire him?”
The young man sighed. “Unfortunately, he’s no longer available. He was retired preemptively and with prejudice.”
Knocked off. Killed. Assassinated. Same thing that will happen to me if I’m caught. Same thing that happened to Mark.
“What do you recommend?”
“I recommend setting up several off-shore accounts in countries that don’t have extradition agreements or shared information protocols with the US. You provide me with the address of each investor’s family and his schedule. Then we send two guys that look honest and hardworking to visit the first family, and we send a scary-looking guy to visit the related investor.
“Our man gives each of your businessmen a smartphone with a picture of our other guys hanging with his wife and kids. Then he gives each businessman an account number, and he goes online to make the wire transfer. Rinse and repeat two more times. You and I are never connected with the crime or seen in public.
“Of course, I can’t use these guys.” He nodded over his shoulder at his crew of four. “They live here in the Burque, and two of them have police records longer than my dick.” The young man held out his hands in mock surrender. “That’s pretty damn long too, by the way.”
“If you say so.”
“I can use some guys I know who just came up from Mexico looking for work. Job gets done, the guys go back home. This thing goes south, they can’t be traced back to us. Once each transfer is made, I get an electronic notification. Then, I transfer the money out of the initial account and distribute it among our untraceable international accounts. I’ll need a laptop, of course, with a prepaid wireless USB dongle and a prepaid disposable phone, all of which will also be untraceable. There’ll also be fees to grease the wheels, as they say. Probably around the twenty percent mark, if that’s okay.”
“Where the hell did you learn all this stuff?”
“Like I said, it’s a family trade.” The man smiled and shrugged. “We kinda pass the knowledge along as a family tradition.”
As a project manager, Carl had evaluated a lot of defense contract proposals to determine if his company was getting its money’s worth. He’d learned over the years to quickly determine which parts of a proposal made sense, which parts seemed padded, and which parts were negotiable. He looked at his new business partner and nodded.
“I agree to everything except two points. For the time being I control the passwords to all the accounts. We’ll meet in person to do the actual transfer of funds. And you can have ten percent of this first phase. If we pull this off without a hitch, we’ll discuss twenty percent for phase two.”
The young man nodded. “Very well. We’ll see how the first phase goes. And by the way, my name is...Garcia.”
Garcia was the most generic Hispanic name Carl could think of so he matched him.
“I’m Smith.”
They shook hands, but Carl could see skepticism on the young man’s face. He either doubted the mission, or Carl, though he couldn’t tell which. The guy was in it for the quick buck. There was no trust or loyalty beyond the potential payday, and Carl was comfortable with that. He didn’t want the kid getting comfortable or careless. In fact, he planned to use the kid for his first phase, then move on and maybe find another assistant for the next phase. He wanted to stay mobile, keep his team small and disposable.
“Mr. Smith, when would you like Phase One to occur?”
“First thing Monday morning.” He pulled a wad of cash from his right pocket. “Here’s two thousand so you can get your disposable equipment.” He handed the man the cash. “And your guy didn’t even have to kick my ass.”
Garcia smiled. “I’ve always believed that negotiation is a more powerful tool than force.”
Carl reached into his left jacket pocket and pulled out two of his four prepaid smartphones—“burners” as the Internet called them. He’d known he’d need them to make untraceable phone calls. He gave a black one and a silver one to Garcia.
“Use the silver phone only to call me, and for no other calls. Use the black one for the rest of your business. My num
ber is preprogrammed into the silver phone as speed dial number one. When we’re done with the first phase, destroy them both and the laptop, and we’ll get another set. And by destroy, I mean smash and burn them beyond the point that anything can be salvaged, especially the chips and the hard drive.”
They agreed to meet at nine o’clock on Monday morning at his favorite downtown coffee shop. The young man turned to rejoin his guys.
“Mr. Garcia,” Carl called softly. “There’s just one more minor detail.”
Garcia stopped and turned. “And that is?”
“There are people who are going to be very interested in this operation as we progress, and these people make the FBI look like pussies. You get careless and fuck this up, there’ll be nowhere on Earth they won’t find you.” He paused. “And trust me when I say, you won’t like it when they do.”
Chapter 27
2352 MST Friday
Albuquerque, NM
Carl Johnson sat on the ratty couch in the dark living room of the low-budget hotel not even a mile from his meeting with the young Mr. Garcia. It was close to midnight, but still sleep would not come. It had nothing to do with the constant squabbling coming from the room next to his. The woman over there had lit into her man at eight o’clock about not having a job, for smoking too much, for getting high, and for cheating. She hadn’t let up since.
He ignored her fussing and contemplated what he’d planned and accomplished in the past thirty hours, and what he was about to do in the next seventy-two hours. He’d broken several laws by setting his house on fire, though the Internet said the investigators would call it a fireplace accident until they discovered the body. Then they’d call it suicide when they discovered all the booze and pills.
All bets were off if they discovered the body was not Carl Johnson. Then McGrath and his minions would get involved.
Monday, he’d start breaking federal laws by extorting money from his former investors and electronically transferring that money out of the country. But when people started dying from his version of justice, there would be no turning back and no surrendering. There was no doubt in his mind. There was no wavering in his commitment. They killed his son, so they had to pay with their lives.
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