True Patriots

by Russell Fralich

  The XO hesitated. “M2. And Bofors available.”

  The RO added, “Radio contact lost with Maritime Command.” He threw his hands up in frustration. “The antenna is probably damaged.”

  Wiseman pointed to Sullivan. “Get out there and fix it. We need to confirm our orders —”

  “No, we don’t,” said Claire. She turned to Wiseman and pointed aft. “Take charge of the fire crews back there. We can manoeuvre. We know they have military- grade weaponry. They have to be stopped. Now.”

  “We don’t have permission to —”

  She replaced the microphone, and she could feel the atmosphere change. Was it more tension? Or maybe respect? She had decided to use the big gun. And everyone on the bridge knew it.

  Wiseman grabbed a fire extinguisher, pushed through the aft door, and disappeared.

  Claire swung to face forward, looking out to the black coast on her left. “Gun crew, aim and target.”

  “Aim and target, ma’am.” They could see the brake lights of the fleeing truck flick between the black of the trees. The road must be near the water’s edge. But it must be in poor shape. The truck seemed hampered and couldn’t drive at full speed. It was barely moving faster than the crippled Kingston, a thousand-tonne warship now at flank speed, knifing through the water at about forty kilometres an hour.

  “Warning shot. Aim fifty metres in front of them.” She gripped her binoculars. The XO reappeared.

  “Sounding at four metres twenty, ma’am.” Barry, the navigation officer, sounded stressed. “Running out of room fast.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am,” the XO said, “fifty metres in front. Aim and target.”

  “Fire.”

  The cannon flashed, and she felt the compression wave smack her entire body. A moment later, a portion of the forest lit up in an orange blast, sending sparks and trees flying. She could see the truck in the reflected light for a fraction of a second.

  “It’s not stopping, ma’am,” said the lookout. The van didn’t slow down. It didn’t accept the warning.

  “Gun crew. Aim and target. Target the truck.”

  “Ma’am?” said the XO.

  “We can’t let him escape. He has military-grade weaponry in that truck. We have orders to stop it.”

  “Aim and target, ma’am.”

  “Sounding at four metres. Breached minimum clearance.” Panic washed through the navigation officer’s voice.

  This was the biggest decision of her career. Maybe of her life. If she was wrong, her career was over. Maybe even if she was right, too. The crew held their breath. The cannon could annihilate an entire city block. She might run aground on a sand bar at any moment.

  Time to decide.

  Unleash.

  Or not.

  He fired on my crew.

  She had to clean up the mess left by that asshole Lansdowne.

  No way they were going to get away. The smugglers. Lansdowne.

  No way.

  She sucked in a breath. “Fire.”

  The crew didn’t hesitate this time. The Bofors roared with orange flame. Four seconds later, a hundred-metre tract of forest vapourized in a blaze of white light, followed seconds later by a rumbling, growling roar. It was a direct hit on a vehicle. Whatever weaponry and ammunition it contained detonated with the blast. The explosion was spectacular, throwing shadows everywhere for a few seconds before dying as quickly as it appeared, leaving a twisted collection of glowing red metal and shattered tree stumps burning beside the shoreline.

  The crew stared in awe.

  Now she had two suspects dead, a hell of a mess near a national park, and one prisoner who better have some of the answers.

  She turned the Kingston around just before they ran out of navigating room. With the onboard launcher now a pile of twisted metal from the RPG blast, she couldn’t send the RHIB to pick up Kershaw after she had transferred the prisoner to the RCMP.

  The RO got the message over the radio. Kershaw would get a ride back with the RCMP. “Police reinforcements have arrived,” Kershaw said. “They confirm they have the prisoner, ma’am. They’ve begun interrogation. So far they said he’s only a low-ranking member of a white supremacist group. In Alberta. The maps were right.”

  “Roger.” That got Claire’s attention. Why would white supremacists in Alberta want military weapons? Who were they going to war against? If they were battling another white power group, would they really need RPGs and Stingers? Their enemy must be substantially more powerful. Did they want the weapons to even the odds? Why smuggle them along the Atlantic coast? Why not just bring them over the border from Montana? Someone went to a great deal of effort to conceal their activity.

  Too many unanswered questions.

  And the XO is toast.

  FORTY-SIX

  DANIEL SIPPED HIS COFFEE and watched the faint morning sun creaking over the sleepy, snowy town. Breaking his contemplation, there was a knock on the door. MacKinnon, right on time.

  “How are you two getting along?”

  Touesnard grunted from the stupor of another restless night on the sofa.

  “Glad to hear it.” MacKinnon turned to Daniel. “Does the name Sharon mean anything to you?”

  Daniel shook his head. “No. Why?”

  MacKinnon held up a plastic bag holding an iPod. “This was Forrestal’s. It was the password. Must mean something important to him.”

  “Wife’s name?”

  “Nope. That was Gabrielle.”

  “Daughter’s name?”

  “No children.”

  “New girlfriend?”

  “Nobody we could find.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  MacKinnon threw him a look of surprise. “It would be an odd name for a man.”

  Daniel rubbed his nose. “There’s something important that we’re missing about Mr. Forrestal.”

  “I agree,” said Touesnard.

  “What did you find on his iPod?” said Daniel.

  “Music of someone in his late fifties. Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Buffett …”

  “Jimmy Buffett?” Touesnard tilted his head.

  “‘Margaritaville.’ It was a big hit in the seventies, re-member?”

  Touesnard shrugged.

  “It looks like a pretty generic hit list to me,” Daniel said.

  “Except it’s not.” MacKinnon’s face tensed.

  “He could have downloaded it from dozens of music sites.”

  “No, this list is unique. It’s Denise Michael’s Sunday Night Rock Royalty Top 100. Says so right here.” He showed Daniel and Touesnard the image on the iPod display.

  “So?”

  “This show is from Cay Rock 96.5 FM. Cayman Islands. We’ve already confirmed with the radio station. This was their list from two weeks ago.”

  Daniel and Touesnard looked at each other in surprise.

  MacKinnon continued. “I think he spent a lot of time down there. He wanted something to remember it by.”

  “So. Forrestal had a connection with the place where someone set up an account with my name on it. It could be a coincidence,” said Daniel without any conviction.

  MacKinnon cradled the iPod. “You don’t believe that, and I don’t believe in coincidences either.”

  Daniel’s cellphone buzzed. He answered right away and put his phone face up on the table.

  “Hi, Xiao Ping. I’m putting you on speaker. The police are here.”

  “Back in the thick of it, Daniel?”

  MacKinnon looked surprised. “Is that your friend from China, again?”

  “Detectives, this is Xiao Ping Lu. She’s the one I called before. She’s in Beijing. Xiao Ping, I’m working with Detectives MacKinnon and Touesnard on this end. Trying to get to the bottom of things. It’s been a busy few days —”

  Xiao Ping interrupted. “What happened?”

  “Just like old times. Almost run off the road, among other things.”

  “How is your driving holding up?”

>   “A bit rusty.”

  The two detectives looked puzzled.

  Daniel explained. “I took a high-performance driving course. All senior managers in our Beijing office had to take it.”

  Touesnard said, “Didn’t you have taxis or a driver?”

  “Sure. But we were all potentially high-worth targets. Kidnapping was common, and bodyguards couldn’t protect us all the time. The company had insurance policies on us, and the insurance company insisted that we knew how to defend ourselves in case something bad happened. Remember, it was the Wild West out there.”

  Xiao Ping said, “He was a crazy driver.”

  “The training was good. But it was a few years ago.” Daniel took a deep breath. “Glad you’re enjoying yourself, Xiao Ping. What did you find out about our mysterious businessman?”

  “He’s an interesting person, Daniel. Competent.”

  “That’s the good news. I’m after the bad news.”

  “As I said, he’s interesting. Regular transactions.”

  “Shell company?”

  “No surprise there. On paper, it looks like a real company, but it exists only as a post office box number to hide the real owner and his money from prying eyes like ours.”

  “Where is it located?”

  “Cayman Islands. They have strict secrecy laws to prevent disclosure of the owner of any shell company.”

  Daniel and MacKinnon nodded at each other. Daniel said, “Did your contact cough up the details?”

  “Of course. Looks like the company hid a series of bridge loans.”

  “So he had big bills to pay and came up short on cash to pay them?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did he have to pay?”

  “Loans. And lots of them. They cascaded, one loan to pay the prior loan.”

  “Diversified sources of revenue? Clients?”

  “Not really. He seems to have only one income source.”

  “What about investments? What does he have in his portfolio? Oil? Natural resources? Banks? High-tech?”

  “It started with real estate. Then nothing. It’s more like a big savings account. One with a regular infusion of cash. The most recent deposit came in last July: 2.7 million dollars.”

  Daniel tried to recall which acquisition happened last summer. “I remember that he bought Transcon Securitech, a Virginia-based online data management and security company. It was another big success, with more happy investors and more fawning headlines.” He checked Google Finance on his laptop to verify the price. “He paid three million and change. With fees, it could easily have netted him a couple of million. So 2.7 million is possible.” No surprises there, he concluded.

  But the lack of a diversified portfolio got his spidey senses tingling.

  “So no investments at all? Where did the money go then?”

  “There were regular withdrawals. Usually to another shell account, also linked to him.”

  “And they went where?”

  “I’ve got the pattern breakdown. There were many places, and each time the list of destinations grew. He got around. Canada, of course, then Eastern Europe, Central Asia, then back to Canada and the States.”

  A growing list of clients. That made sense. He was paying back dividends to his customers. But he wasn’t investing any money.

  “Can you check to see if any destinations have been there since the beginning? Can you trace back a few years?”

  “Only seven years back.” Daniel heard keys clicking in the background, then Xiao Ping said, “Yes, there’s one account that’s been there since the start. The SWIFT code is based in the Cayman Islands, but the company is headquartered in Panama City. And it’s not under his name. It’s owned by another shell company, LJF Global Investments.”

  “And who is that?”

  “That’s another reason we were such a great team, Daniel. You know, people still talk about our bust in Hong Kong. Just a second …”

  Daniel felt a twinge of regret. It was so much more than just a bust. At least three people lost their lives because of his decisions that week. And for one man in particular, Daniel was the one who pulled the trigger.

  “Got it,” Xiao Ping continued. “The only one listed on the proxy form as owner and founder is someone named Lloyd Fanshawe.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  CLAIRE WAS ONCE AGAIN standing at attention in Captain Hall’s spartan office on base. He fumed. “I support you, as always, Marcoux, but now I have to explain myself again to the commodore. He’s getting flak from the chief of the defence staff and probably the minister of defence. And he has to explain to the New Brunswick premier why part of a national park was destroyed this morning by the navy. You do have a knack of getting the attention of the top brass.”

  Her ship had limped back into port two hours earlier. The engineer said he needed at least two months, maybe six, to repair the damage. The crew was denied shore leave to prevent them from recounting their amazing tale to their families for at least a day. She was ordered to report to Hall immediately. Soot, smoke, and sweat streaked her day uniform, and her hair was tied loosely in some random Frank Gehry pattern. She hadn’t bothered to change. In spite of her exhaustion, she had sprinted up the stairs to his office.

  “That was not my intention, sir, but we have some answers now. And it doesn’t look good.”

  He sat in his chair behind a desk covered with stacks of paper. “I agree that it doesn’t look good.” He looked at the floor, as if trying to assemble his next thought. “For your career. You take too many liberties with the rules. You attract too much attention. Maybe I’ve given you too much leeway.” He picked up a printout and seemed distracted for a second as he read it. “And you want another XO? What’s wrong with Wiseman?”

  “He’s too cautious.”

  He leaned forward, his hands on his desk. “That’s why he’s an XO, not a captain. He’s your second-in-command. Deal with it.”

  Startled, she sat back. “I don’t know if I can trust him when we’re under pressure —”

  Hall cut her off. “It’s your job to make him trustworthy. You’re the captain. Act like it.” He dropped back into his chair. “You’ll figure it out. Your main problem is what to do about the commodore and the CDS. They’re not pleased with what you did to a significant patch of New Brunswick coastline.”

  “It was a special hunting mission, while the rest of the fleet was on exercise. You said so yourself.”

  “There are some aspects of your mission that you are not privy to. To protect you. I also said that it was supposed to be a low-profile hunting mission. The key words were ‘low profile.’”

  Claire thought before she responded. “It worked. The smugglers were clearly surprised.”

  He spun away from her for a moment, his back to her. “No, it didn’t work. I wasn’t talking about the smugglers. There were others who I didn’t want to be aware.” He swivelled his chair back and looked directly at her. “And now they know.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORRESTAL AND LLOYD. The names echoed in Daniel’s mind. To avoid the Chinese government censors, Xiao Ping used an encrypted VPN to send files of the banking details to Daniel’s email address. He owed her another big favour. They had evidence of a financial link between Forrestal and Lloyd. It explained a lot. But just because Lloyd made money with Forrestal didn’t mean he was part of something nasty. He and Lloyd didn’t like each other, and Daniel suspected it was because he made Lloyd nervous, jealous, and unsure about his position in the department. But was jealousy enough to kill Forrestal and now to try to kill me?

  Daniel pulled the PDF up on his computer screen for everyone to see. “So now we know how Forrestal made money,” he said. He was still stunned by the connection they’d unearthed.

  “You seem to have an interesting past, professor,” MacKinnon said. “Care to explain what she said to the rest of us?”

  “His first investment was in real estate in Ontario. He built it up in a few years into quite a
portfolio of properties.”

  Touesnard said, “So he was a real estate developer then?”

  Daniel kept scrolling and reading the document. “Sort of. More of a property speculator. He bought for prestige.”

  “Where did the money come from? He didn’t come from a wealthy family,” Touesnard said.

  “Looks like he convinced some wealthy investors to go into the real estate business with him.” Daniel kept reading. “Interesting. He’s highly leveraged.”

  “Which means?”

  “That he borrowed a lot of money. For every dollar he had, he borrowed another ten.”

  “How could he ever pay that back?”

  “There’s always another investor coming in with new money.”

  “To bail him out?”

  “To pay the earlier investors.” Daniel began to slowly nod.

  “He was a good negotiator, everyone said so,” added MacKinnon.

  “And he saved those companies.”

  “True. He knew how to turn around a company. But he was always only a step away from total collapse.”

  “So was he very good, lucky, or a crook?” Touesnard sneered.

  “Maybe a bit of all three. He was brilliant.”

  “So what interests you about his finances, professor?” MacKinnon said.

  “He just brought in money from new investors to pay the old investors.”

  “Sounds scammy,” said Touesnard.

  “It is. It’s called a Ponzi scheme. Everyone’s happy unless you’re one of the last investors who buys in before the scam is outed. And Lloyd was in on it from the beginning.”

  Daniel saw something new in the documents, something more important than the Ponzi scheme. “Do you see the dates of the first transactions, Detective?”

  Touesnard swung the laptop to face him. His eyes zigzagged across the screen. “The late eighties. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine.” He looked at Daniel. “So?”

  “Earlier than twelve years ago. Now we know what he did before he founded the Fireweed Corporation. He used to run a real estate development company.”

  “Look at when the transactions stop and start up again. There’s a big gap there.” He pointed to the spreadsheet. “Two years between ’89 and ’91. All of the other ones are only spaced a few weeks or months apart. But not these two.”