Carl thought about Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous quote that most folks are familiar with:
“That which does not destroy me only makes me stronger.”
He found it interesting how he had used it over the years. All the life challenges he’d faced that he thought required the use of such a statement now seemed so trivial compared to what he’d experienced in the last thirty days.
Then he considered that most people were not familiar with another lesser-known Nietzsche quote:
“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks back at you.”
Alone in the darkness of his motel room, Carl was standing at the metaphorical precipice, gazing into the abyss. He was one step shy of literally jumping in there. It was a place where normal people never wanted or needed to go.
He wasn’t afraid of what he saw in the abyss. In fact, he wanted to go there. He needed to.
The FBI woman was in there. Agent Klipser was in there. A shadow figure called Director McGrath was in there too. They were all staring back at him from just beyond the threshold, as if they were right on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole. The difference between himself and them was that they lived and breathed in the abyss. They were comfortable in there, lying, bullying, and killing innocent people.
Carl had been willing to get past everything McGrath and his people had done to him when he’d had Mark to return home to. Without Mark, though, he could never be whole or normal again. Justice and personal closure lay in the abyss.
Carl took a deep breath and looked to his left, toward the unseen wall in the darkness. The woman over there was throwing things now. Apparently, she was missing her husband, and her projectiles were thumping into the shared wall.
The inescapable fact that hurt Carl the most was that he himself shared the blame for Mark’s death. It was his own defiance of Agent Klipser and his attempt to get the man to kill him. If he hadn’t rebelled or become obstinate and confrontational, he’d still be in custody, and Mark would still be alive.
Carl began pacing again in the darkness. It was all because some rich politician’s daughter got kidnapped. She was probably dead by now. After all, she’d been missing for well over a month. Who the hell was she, and why did Mark have to pay for her life with his own?
Carl stopped pacing and shook his head. Logic told him the two events were unrelated. His son had not died for that girl, nor was she responsible for his death. A bad man named Reyes had killed his son, and another bad man, a senior government agent, had engineered the trap that led Reyes to commit the murder.
One man operated outside the law, and the other operated above the law.
Carl returned to pacing in front of the bed. He had just returned from flying Mark’s body home to his mother just before the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a hell of a thing to put any mother through.
When he returned, his closest friends had all called him and left voice messages and text messages, begging him to call, begging him not to spend the holidays alone. He knew they meant well, but he ignored them all. They would never understand that the last thing in the world he wanted was to be around people, families, and kids.
For the last thirty days, he had been completely alone. It was a hard transition, suddenly losing an adult child who was his only true life companion.
He wondered if he really could find the government agent named McGrath. Then he wondered how he could even remain undiscovered, at least until the moment when he had his hands wrapped around the man’s throat.
He’d taken the first step, though. The world now thought he was dead.
It had been easy to stage his disappearance, but he knew the ruse wouldn’t last long. He just needed a couple of days to implement his plan. McGrath and his crew would certainly know he was still alive as soon as he hit his first target. Then they’d be out gunning for him.
Carl felt good about his plan. He’d done everything correctly so far. At least, he had no indication he’d made any mistakes yet.
Earlier the same day, before he met with young Garcia, Carl had emptied all his checking accounts and made a round-trip four-month reservation to Maui, scheduled to depart the next day. Then, he bought a half dozen bottles of whiskey from the nearest package store and a twenty-four-count bottle of over the counter sleeping meds from a convenience store. He wanted to create the impression of a depressed man trying to run away from his sorrow, a man trying to drink away his pain, a man who maybe hadn’t slept in several days.
At home he had spread all the bottles and the pills around the couch and stacked several armfuls of firewood on the right side of the fireplace. He then added a pile of kindling and newspaper carelessly close to the wood, and spilled the box of long matches on the floor in front of the fireplace. Several landed amidst the wood, kindling, and paper. It was something an intoxicated man might do. Then he had used one match to light the logs in the fireplace. He left the glass doors and the safety screen open.
When the fire was burning fiercely, he had written his suicide note, roughly scribbled and misspelled, partly printed and partly written in cursive, and taped it to the outside of the front door.
I can’t life without Mark
He had splashed whiskey on the note, more evidence that it had been written by a suicidal man who was already drunk.
Before leaving the house, he turned the plastic bottle of lighter fluid on its side, and with the snap cap open, he stepped on the container. The action splashed a path of flammable liquid that instantly spread flames outside the fireplace.
Hopefully, a cursory investigation by the fire inspector would conclude he’d gotten drunk and drugged, and let the fire get out of control. That would be easy to believe with all the alcohol and sleeping pills scattered around the room. He died in the conflagration. Slam dunk, case closed.
It helped that the FBI had completely trashed his house during his captivity. Every exterior door had been forced open during their raid, and every French door had the glass shattered. Every cabinet, drawer, and closet had had its contents emptied. The fuckers even left the fridge and freezer open, and the whole house stank of rotten food. He didn’t bother cleaning up. It fit his scenario of depression.
Finding a body had been the hardest part. It had cost him almost a quarter of his ten grand to bribe a student at the medical investigator’s facility at the UNM School of Medicine to provide him with a corpse that wouldn’t be missed for a week or more. How the young man covered up the missing body was not Carl’s concern. The young man needed cash for whatever reason and was willing to do the deed. The risk of discovery and the burden of punishment was on the student.
Carl was pretty fit, but trying to manhandle a hundred-fifty-pound stiff body out of the back of his second car, a Jeep Cherokee, from the garage up to the second level was a serious challenge. Midway through the process, he’d broken into a sweat, but he finally dropped the nude corpse in front of the fireplace. Instead of trying to dress the body in his clothes, he simply wrapped one of his bathrobes around it. He left his car keys and driver’s license on the kitchen granite counter so the investigator could easily find those in the rubble.
Then, after the fire was burning well outside the fireplace, he walked away from everything he knew—friends, family, neighbors, car, house, business—everything. Even his beloved topless Jeep Wrangler that was probably still parked at the Hyatt, if it hadn’t been confiscated by the FBI.
From his experience claiming Mark’s body for burial, Carl knew the medical investigator might do an autopsy on the dead body. At that point, he or she would likely discover the body had already been dead before it was burned. Then the doctor would likely discover the body was not the same ethnicity as Carl. Maybe then, he or she would do a toxicology test, and that test would show the body had no sleeping pill drugs or alcohol in it unless, of course, that corpse had also died by a similar suicide.
On the other hand, Carl figured the odds were equally good in a case like his. With no
suspicion about the cause of the fire, the MI would just refrigerate the body and call Carl’s next of kin. Since Carl’s son was dead, his estranged father in California—whom he hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years—would get the call.
The normal report of findings after a death might only take two weeks, but if a toxicology test was done, the test report could take up to six months to complete. Initiating that course of action would arouse McGrath’s suspicion, and his people would learn about the deception much sooner than Carl intended.
Either way, Carl figured he’d be presumed dead for at least enough time to launch his mission plan. He’d at least get the first couple of phases of his operation under way. He’d be able to hit his first target, the FBI woman cop. She knew McGrath and Klipser personally, and she no doubt knew how to find them. But first he had to figure out how to make her talk.
It occurred to Carl that if and when he found Reyes, no one was going to throw him a party and thank him for ridding the world of a kidnapper, or hit man, or whatever the hell that man was. He’d have to answer for that murder as well. He wasn’t fooling himself into thinking he was some kind of noble vigilante with a great cause like in a movie. When he declared war on the US government, and when people started dying, they’d come after him. He would hit the FBI’s most-wanted list for sure.
The only way to survive was to stay ahead of them. Keep moving. Always moving. He found it peculiar that he felt no fear. Someone had to make the shadow government agents pay. For Mark. For countless other victims McGrath and his ilk considered acceptable collateral damage.
Someone had to make them pay.
“If not me, then who?”
He smiled in the darkness as a new thought occurred to him. When he stepped into the abyss in two days, he was voluntarily going to become the terrorist and kidnapper they accused him of being. By subjecting him to extensive torture, McGrath and Klipser had unwittingly given Carl the inner strength and the lack of fear to cross over into the world in which they operated. By killing his son, they had also provided him with motivation. They couldn’t hurt him or scare him anymore.
He turned to retrace his path in front of the bed for the hundredth time. Then he froze in mid-step as an absolutely crazy thought occurred to him.
“Who is the girl?” he said aloud. “Where is the girl? What if I can find her first?”
Chapter 28
1426 MST Monday
Albuquerque, NM
By early Monday afternoon, Carl had accumulated a little over two and a half million dollars. Two-point-six million to be exact. Minus ten percent for the young Mr. Garcia.
“Not bad for four hours work,” Garcia said. The young man was clearly well schooled in the art of financial coercion.
Each of the two-member team of his three-man army had been given a cheap disposable smartphone with a camera, and Garcia had synced those phones to an online email account. One of the guys filmed the visit to the family of the target investor, while the other guy did the actual forceful entry. He carried a tire iron behind his back just in case they encountered a door chain or a storm door, but they had not needed it.
This was America, after all. The investors’ family members did exactly what Carl would have done at his own house a month ago, before he knew what people were truly capable of. He would have simply opened the door when someone knocked, especially in his relatively exclusive part of town. He probably wouldn’t have even checked the peep hole.
As Garcia predicted, in Albuquerque if you see a couple of honest-looking Hispanic men with shy smiles who looked like hard working, skilled tradesmen, you opened up to see what kind of services they could provide and how much they might charge you, if you needed done whatever they were offering. You certainly wouldn’t expect them to shove a tire iron in your face, force their way into your house, and take you hostage, but that was exactly what happened to the investors who were home or to their families if the investors were not home.
Three of the targeted investors were work-from-home types, and the other two had regular day jobs. The latter took a little longer to coordinate because Mr. Garcia had to make sure the investor was actually available to discuss financial business at the moment his family was visited. Otherwise, they’d find themselves in an unacceptable extended hostage situation.
There was plenty of shouting, harsh language, and pushing and shoving as Garcia’s two men initiated each brief home takeover. One of the wives had started screaming hysterically, but a quick punch to the belly dropped her to the floor and quieted her. That was the only physical violence necessary that day.
Each home invasion was recorded on video and uploaded as an attachment to a draft email, which was never actually sent to anyone. According to Garcia, a draft email that was not transmitted could not be intercepted since there were no electronic trails from a sender, or to a recipient, for the all-seeing electronic eyes of the US government to trace. Yet, the video could still be viewed online.
The third man, also with a smartphone, simply visited the investor at work, showed him the video, and explained quietly what would happen if he didn’t transfer a certain amount of money into Carl’s account immediately.
No other convincing was necessary. The targets were not spies or hoodlums or corporate celebrities with hostage contingency plans. They were ordinary businessmen caught unawares. They simply did what they were told to protect their families. They had no recourse, but they still received a threat. Tell anyone about the event, and men would return to visit their family again in a week or a month or a year, except the next visit would involve no requests for money and would be much more violent.
After the wire transfers had been completed, Mr. Garcia deleted the videos and the draft email account. He had shown each member of the three-man army how to destroy the cell phones, removing and crushing the SIM cards, breaking apart the phones, and distributing the batteries and other parts in various trash bins behind grocery stores around the city. As motivation for the men to leave the country quickly, a double fee would be paid to them upon their return to Mexico, but only within ten hours. If they dallied, they forfeited their entire fee.
Carl didn’t know how Garcia got the men up from Mexico or back there, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was that there was no direct link to him. Eventually, the FBI and McGrath’s agency would get involved when it became clear what Carl’s true objective was. In fact, he was counting on that fact, but he planned to stay ahead of them until it was too late to stop him.
The mission was everything.
Still in his disguise of dreadlocks and dark skin, Carl sat in one of his favorite downtown coffee shops with Garcia. From their table at the second-floor balcony rail, they could see everyone who entered the chic establishment. They sipped coffee.
None of the investors had tried to be a hero. The three investors targeted in Phase One simply got on their phones or computers and made the transaction happen, transferring two hundred grand each. Before noon, Carl had the first six hundred thousand dollars in his new business account. Phase One was complete.
Before the digital ink was dry, Garcia had transferred the money out of that account and into sixteen different accounts by what he called a blind transfer. Carl assumed that meant you could see that it left, but you couldn’t see where it went.
Phase Two of the operation was equally easy. Two construction companies, both run by associates Carl had done business with, were large enough to be able to transfer a million dollars each without difficulty, but not so large the decision maker had to approach others in the company to get it done.
One owner ran a one-man operation in which he subcontracted all his work to skilled tradesmen. The cash in his account was actually advance payments from construction contracts for work he had yet to perform. In his previous life, Carl had even considered the man a friend, and he knew his former friend would probably go bankrupt from the event. Unfortunately for him, Carl no longer cared about his wellbeing.
&nbs
p; Do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission. Find McGrath and make him pay.
The other company was run by a two-man partnership, and both men had easily agreed it was better to give up the money than for one of them to lose a family member.
Garcia said, “Phases One and Two all in the same morning. You don’t mess around, do you, Mr. Smith?”
Carl said, “Fortunately, this time there was no need for a demonstration of my commitment.” He glanced at Garcia. “But there will come a time when a demonstration will be needed. For the next phase, we will need men willing to do that.”
“Only men?”
Carl looked at Garcia and shrugged.
“I only ask because some of the, uh, talent I have access to might be female. Mercenaries come in all pedigrees, and we rarely put requirements on physical characteristics of the package.”
Carl nodded. “People,” he said. “We will need people willing and able to apply the necessary degree of persuasion to achieve my objectives.” He let the meaning of his words hang between them.
Garcia nodded his understanding and said, “I assume that includes...” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Killing?”
“You okay with that?”
Garcia nodded. “And I assume you are going to need my services for the next phase.”
“Correct,” Carl said. “But as my pops use to say, ‘When the shit hits the fan, it’s time to get out of the fan business.’ You’re going to need an emergency exit strategy for the next phase.” He told the young man what he wanted him to do. “You have a family?”
He nodded. “Wife and new baby.”
Carl said, “You’re fixin’ to be in the fan business, Mr. Garcia, so if I ever call you and say anything about getting out of the fan business, drop everything and grab your family and use the exit strategy. You may have a day or an hour or as little as five minutes to get out, you never know. Forget about me, forget about everything.” He paused.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 14
