The windows of the rental house were covered with blackout curtains and a similar curtain hung in the archway that separated the living room from the hallway that led to the two bedrooms. When he opened the bedroom door, no light from the rest of the one thousand square foot house invaded the tiny room that served as prison cell for the FBI agent and his wife.
Their heads were covered with black cloth so they had no idea who was visiting them. Carl turned on the light and just stood there for a few seconds. He knew first-hand the fear that was eating at their insides. The light was a low-wattage bulb on the ceiling. Special Agent Heinmann and his wife were zip-cuffed with their hands behind their backs and their ankles were duct taped.
Carl knelt next to them and pulled away the piece of blackout curtain wrapped loosely around each prisoner’s head. They sat awkwardly in the center of the room where they had been deposited. Gray duct tape covered their mouths. The Internet said Reyes was fluent in English, so Carl gave them his best proper pronunciation.
“Special Agent Heinmann, my name is Alfonso Reyes. No doubt you know who I am, so you must also know what I’m capable of, yes?”
The man nodded.
Carl poked his glasses further up onto the bridge of his nose. He did that because he wanted the FBI man to notice he was wearing them. He hadn’t worn glasses for nearly ten years after having laser surgery, but having glasses on his face was a familiar feeling, and it wasn’t hard to fall back into the habit of pushing them up.
He figured field agents were trained to notice that kind of detail, especially when they were being held captive. The tiny details would be helpful later when the FBI mobilized to begin the manhunt for the man who kidnapped an agent. The only question in Carl’s mind was whether or not Heinmann would notice the lenses of his glasses were non-prescription.
When you look at a person’s face through their prescription glasses, often their cheeks don’t line up with the rest of their face above or below the lenses, depending on how strong their prescription is. The prisoners’ room wasn’t well lit, so Carl was betting that particular detail might slip through the cracks.
“Good. Your two children are in the room across the hall. Twin girls. How lovely.”
Garcia had reported that the family had been extraordinarily easy to capture. Two mercenaries Carl had yet to meet had simply picked the lock on the side door that allowed them entry into the garage. That door was not visible from the street, so they simply walked into the house through the garage. Like most folks, the Heinmanns no doubt figured if the roll-down garage door was closed, then their house was secure. It probably was secure from ninety-nine percent of the population.
The mercs waited in the living room and ambushed the family when they returned from their Sunday afternoon activity. Then they were piled into a cargo van that backed up in front of the garage door of their North Valley home, and thirty minutes later they were roughly pushed into the temporary house.
Mrs. Heinmann’s eyes teared up when Carl mentioned her daughters, and she tried to protest, but the tape on her mouth made her vocalizations sound like a whimper. Carl spoke directly to her husband.
“Of course, your girls are safe for now. In fact, I’m going to ask you one simple question, then I’m going into the front room to check if you’ve told me the truth or not. If you have, then you and your family will be returned home unharmed. If you have not told me the truth, I’m coming back down the hall, except I’m going into the other room.” Carl paused and allowed both of them to feel the fear. “Do you understand me clearly?”
The man nodded. He was maybe fifty or so. He had a full head of gray hair and was a little soft in the body, but that was expected of a man perhaps ten years past active field duty. Carl saw understanding and acceptance in the man’s eyes. He had no power, nothing to barter or negotiate with. He had no choice but to comply.
Carl removed the tape from the man’s mouth, and Heinmann flexed his jaw a bit.
“You’re going to kill us anyway, aren’t you?”
Carl smiled and said, “The answer to that question has no real relevance. All that matters is what I’m going to do to your girls if you do not comply with my instructions.”
Heinmann nodded, but Carl decided to put him at ease a bit. He wanted the man’s full cooperation.
“Surely, however, you know my…what is the term you use? M-O, my modus operandi. I’m in the pharmaceuticals business, not the killing business, although I do occasionally diversify into the kidnapping arena if it advances my business agenda. I never kill unless it is an absolutely necessary demonstration of retribution. If I kill you, my own government might bow to pressure from your government and place uncomfortable restrictions on my business enterprises. We can’t have that, now can we?”
Carl shrugged. “However, that does not mean I won’t do unspeakable things to your family and make you watch.” Carl nodded. “Not me personally, of course, for I find such barbarism distasteful. But there are men in the other room,” Carl said, glancing over his shoulder, “that are very attracted to your young girls and your plump wife. I fear I would not be able to control them.”
The FBI agent opened his mouth to speak, but Carl held up his hand. He knew first-hand the cop’s power trick. He who asks the questions has the power.
“You will answer my question now. You will say nothing other than that. Do you understand this?”
Heinmann nodded.
Right on cue, Garcia knocked on the door and opened it a few inches. “Señor Reyes?”
“Si?” Carl answered. That was pretty much the extent of his Spanish vocabulary.
Garcia spoke rapidly in Spanish. Carl knew what he said only because he planned Garcia’s interruption before he entered the room. The young man was telling Carl the computer system was set up, and they were ready for the next step.
Head fake.
He figured a career field agent would be somewhat fluent in the dominant cultural language used by a large percentage of the local population, as was the case of Spanish in New Mexico. Heinmann would likely understand a good portion of what Garcia was saying.
“Very well.” He turned his attention back to Heinmann. “We need access to the FBI database and that of the Department of Homeland Security. What is your password?”
He took out a pen and pad from his shirt pocket and wrote down the fourteen-character complex password as Heinmann dictated it. Then he stood.
“Thank you for your cooperation. I’ll be right back.”
He went into the living room and handed the notepad to Erickson, the computer whiz, who sat at the fold-up camp table that served as his desk. His open laptop rested on the table. It had a seventeen-inch screen, and several overlapping windows were open on the monitor. A tiny USB modem stuck out the right side of the laptop and connected Erickson to the local cell phone network.
The man fidgeted like a teen gamer getting ready for a tough competition, except he was in his mid-thirties. He had a thin, hawk-like face with a prominent nose that bisected his face unevenly, maybe as a result of a broken nose way back. He was dressed in denim pants and a cheap knit pull-over sweater, and his hair and mustache were unkempt masses of brown hair. He smelled like sweat, but Carl assumed that was normal for the kind of guy Garcia referred to as a “tweaker.”
Hygiene aside, the man had performed admirably so far. Yesterday, he’d found Special Agent Heinmann, Carl’s first target, in two minutes flat. When Erickson was given the notepad with the password on it, he poised his fingers over his keyboard for a few seconds like a pianist ready to launch into a performance. Then the man went to work. He entered the password at the login prompt on the FBI website and when he hit ENTER, a search page popped up with a query box along with a warning in large, red capital letters that all the information in the system was for official government use only.
“Pull up the personnel roster for Albuquerque, New Mexico. Women only. This particular agent has tied-back, shoulder-length, blonde hair, an
d brown eyes. She’s about five-eight and weighs maybe a buck-forty or -fifty. I want her home address, cell phone number, next of kin, parents, kids, brothers, sisters, significant other. I want everything you can find on her.”
Erickson pulled up a roster with almost three hundred names on it. “They don’t have a search parameter by gender.”
“Can you sort into a grid of pictures only?”
“Dude, this is the FBI, not a dating site.”
“Shit!”
Carl felt the itch of a memory, a faint tug at the edge of his consciousness. He closed his eyes and tried to tease the memory into focus. He drifted back a month in time when the FBI woman had cold-cocked him upside the head with her elbow and then slammed his head into the table. The memory came to him slowly. Just before he was sedated, Agent Klipser was speaking to the FBI woman, and she lied to him about speaking to Carl. Then Klipser called her by name.
The memory flashed into focus in his mind. Klipser had said her name like it was a curse word, and Carl remembered his visual image of the man with the smoky voice speaking like he might have been poking her in the chest with each word.
Special. Agent. Cummings.
Carl said, “Her name is Cummings. Special Agent Cummings.”
Erickson typed in her name and up popped her personnel file, including her address, unlisted cell, and all her family information. Carl wrote it all down on his notepad. He handed the page to Garcia and smiled. Cummings was a single mother—no surprise there, being that she was a kick-ass field agent—and she lived in a multi-generational home with her mother and daughter.
To Garcia, he said, “Have your men do whatever is necessary to secure the daughter after Cummings goes to work tomorrow. Subdue her mom any way necessary, but don’t kill her unless it’s absolutely necessary. I need this agent free to do my bidding for now. If the FBI discovers a dead body in her house, they may assume it’s related to the Heinmann kidnapping, and they’ll take her off the case. Please make sure your mercenaries understand what is expected of them.
“Tomorrow’s Monday, a school day, so the daughter,” Carl glanced at the note pad, “Lisette, will either take the bus to school or the grandmother will drive her. Intercept Lisette before they leave, and take her to our operations house.”
Garcia said, “Roger that. Capture and avoid killing, if at all possible.”
“There will come a time very soon where that restriction will be removed. Right now, though, we’re not on the FBI’s radar. If we start leaving dead bodies around town before I’m ready, then the FBI won’t react the way I want them to.” He paused with a distant look in his eyes. “I want to keep them guessing and not yet fully mobilized. The first time I hit them I want to catch them off guard, give them a real bloody nose that they’ll have to step back and really think about.”
Garcia nodded.
To Erickson, Carl said, “Now look for the names Klipser and McGrath. They won’t be in the FBI database. They’ll be in the Department of Homeland Security, or CIA, or NSA, or somewhere else in highly classified files.”
“That’s gonna take some time. Can I get a fix first?”
Garcia said, “You can have your fix after you find those names.” To Carl, he said, “What shall I do with the FBI agent and his family?”
“Remove their blindfolds and put the kids in the same room with the parents so they can hug and all that. Then take them back home, but not before the workday starts tomorrow morning.” Carl grinned. “He still has an important role to play for us. Once they’re at home, leave them all bound. I figure it’ll take him less than five minutes to get loose, report in, and change his password.”
To Erickson he said, “After he reports the hack, how long will it take them to trace it back to this location?”
“I’ve disguised my Internet connection through half a dozen servers, but they should be able to back-trace us in an hour, two tops. But once they know we were in there with his login, it won’t take them any time at all to figure out what information we accessed.”
Garcia had a thoughtful look on his face as he worked the numbers in his head.
“So, if we take him back at eight o’clock, they’ll locate the house by nine at the earliest, perhaps ten, and have us under surveillance shortly thereafter. They’ll have a tactical team ready to raid us by eleven or twelve.”
“Perfect.” Carl nodded. “Leave the blindfolds off the family on the way home. I want Heinmann to be able to visually verify this location when the back-trace locates this house. I don’t want the FBI wasting time with their raid. But make sure your mercenaries are covered up. I don’t want Heinmann to ID them.
“And I have no doubt Special Agent Cummings will be running point on the raid. She knows our Homeland boys, so she’ll call them as soon as word gets out that Heinmann was held by a man she thinks is Alfonso Reyes.”
Carl wondered how McGrath would react when his FBI lapdog told him that Reyes was searching the FBI database for their names. Would he be surprised his target actually knew of them, or would he even care? He hated not knowing who these men were—McGrath and Klipser—but when he asked Cummings about her Homeland friends, he’d also quiz her on the man who pulled the trigger on Mark.
He paused as feelings of satisfaction and confidence swept through him. Everything was going according to plan so far.
“And that means,” he continued, “Agent Klipser will be on a plane to Albuquerque by noon tomorrow. Mr. Erickson, can you set up a program on this machine to make it look like you’re still in here doing Internet work?”
“Sure. I can control it remotely if you like.”
Carl shook his head. “No, when the FBI agents get here I don’t want any external connection, wireless or otherwise, that might lead them to our other operations house. Leave the computer here and keep it operational so they’ll think we’re in here working. They’ve got computer analysis folks whose only job is to sit around all day and all night, and try to trace our computer. They’ll analyze every piece of data and every signal emanating from this house, and they’ll be very thorough. The only trail I want them to follow is to the second house.”
Garcia said, “Which is a dead end, another head fake, right?”
Carl nodded. “I want the FBI preoccupied with the dead end until Klipser gets here. If they bite at the second house, that’ll keep them off our backs for a few hours.”
Erickson nodded. “So we don’t actually plan to be here when the FBI arrives, right?” He shrugged at the obvious. “I’m just sayin’....”
Carl shook his head. “Absolutely not, but I want to leave a clue for them, a reward for their efficient investigative work.”
Chapter 31
1145 MST Monday
Albuquerque, NM
The FBI’s SWAT people—Erickson called them Crisis Response personnel—arrived at the house for their raid at fourteen minutes before noon on Monday. Carl felt a measure of safety, or even isolation from the event, because his operations house was twelve miles away in the far Northeast Heights of Albuquerque. Garcia stood beside him, and they watched the raid unfold on a fifty-five-inch, high-definition monitor in the living room.
One of the four mercenaries Garcia had hired through his father’s Mexican connections lay on the roof of the second house they had rented. It was a two-story home a half mile from the first house, which was now the target of the FBI raid. Carl remembered seeing the camera Garcia had bought through which he now watched the event. It had a long telephoto lens attached to a video camera. It was several inches wide at the front and very narrow at the back end where the camera was attached. In fact, the lens itself was so cumbersome that it sat in a cradle atop a tripod and the camera hung off the narrow end like a forgotten appendage.
A thin wire connected the camera output via a micro-USB connector to the merc’s smartphone so that Carl and Garcia could watch the unfolding scene. Carl felt a shiver tingle up and down his spine as he watched the precision with which the two a
ssault teams converged on the property. His sense of safety diminished a bit, and he found himself looking around the living room. Garcia was tense also, but the remaining three mercs were focused only on the monitor. Erickson was hard at work at his new laptop.
Carl knew he was playing a dangerous game with combat-trained professionals, and he could tell the FBI troops were trained every bit as well as military special ops soldiers. For all he knew, these troops may have been recruited from the military ranks because of their assault expertise. Regardless, the FBI cops he was watching on the monitor enabled his mission.
Find McGrath and make him pay.
The target house sat almost forty feet off the road in the middle of a one-acre plot of land. It was deep in the South Valley, three miles south of Rio Bravo and a tad east of Coors Boulevard. It was one of several homesteads on a dirt road edged by acres of irrigated farmland.
The front and back yards of the homestead were merely dirt, except for a few tufts of wild grass, and were devoid of even minimal xeriscaping, the gravel landscapes typical of many New Mexico homes, although most local folks pronounced it “zero-scape.” Most of New Mexico was high desert country and under perpetual water conservation, so grass yards that were popular in past decades were gradually being replaced by xeriscape yards.
The target house was a cheap structure with years of deferred maintenance, and it looked like it could have been an old mobile home that had been resurfaced decades ago with vinyl siding. Its roof was sloped at a very shallow angle and was covered with rolled asphalt sheeting instead of shingles.
The two assault teams lined up in front of the house next door. A sniper’s head and the barrel of his rifle and the binoculars and head of his spotter could be seen just over the ridgeline of the pitched roof of the neighboring house to the west.
Each of the two assault teams had four men. One man from each team carried an elongated pole that Erickson said was for forcing their way through locked or barricaded doors. Those guys were the breachers. Those two men, one in the front and one in the rear, would facilitate entry for the assaulters, the guys with the shotguns and automatic rifles. Once they forced the doors open, the breachers would drop their poles and follow the group through for containment and mop-up, since they only carried handguns for weapons.
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