by DL Barbur
She picked up the phone.
“Hart Wildlife Photography, where we bring the wild to life.”
That particular slogan hadn’t been on her business cards. I would have bet a truckload of vintage Fender Stratocasters it was her duress code.
She listened for a few seconds, then hung up the phone and locked it.
“My boss is at the front gate. Do you think you could let him in?”
She smirked at me, then went back to staring at the wall.
Even though it was just one guy, we didn’t take any chances. We geared up with vests and rifles. Casey opened the outer gate, shut it behind the silver Lexus, and it stopped immediately in front of another gate. Effectively it was penned in until we decided to let it go.
“Driver! Step out of the vehicle!” I yelled from behind a concrete barricade. My rifle was almost, but not quite pointed at the guy.
A silver-haired man stepped out. He wore big round glasses and looked to be not quite sixty. He was wearing a nice suit, even in the heat. His hands were empty.
“Hello Sebastian!” he said. “Is all this really necessary?”
Beside me, Bolle sighed and let his rifle hang on its sling.
“Put the guns away,” he said. “I know him.”
He stepped out from behind cover.
“Hello, Hubbard.”
Chapter 9
I didn’t like Hubbard. He exuded a sort of upper class, Ivy league, prep school vibe that made my skin crawl. Part of it was because people like him had always looked down on me, even after I’d managed to learn which fork to use when, and had lost the Tennessee accent. The other reason was people like him always seemed to be wearing a mask. There wasn’t a genuine facial expression or word to be found with guys like Hubbard, and I didn’t trust that.
Bolle ushered me, Diana and Hubbard into his office. Somehow, I’d fallen into the role of Bolle’s second-in-command without it ever being made formal, so I was to be privy to these hush-hush meetings.
Bolle poured tea. I resisted the urge to drink it with my pinky sticking out, just to be ironic.
Hubbard turned to Diana. “It’s ok to declare.”
She wrinkled up her nose at that and accepted a teacup from Bolle.
“Diana and I both work for CIA,” Hubbard said as he accepted a sugar cube from Bolle and dropped it in his tea.
“So Marshall was one of yours,” I said. I took a sip of the tea. It tasted like boiled socks.
Hubbard smiled like I was a child that had said something mildly amusing. It made me want to punch him.
“Marshall was an independent contractor. He was very useful to us but it appears his operation was compromised at some point. We’re still not sure of his involvement.”
“By compromised you mean his men were shipping American women overseas?”
“It’s regrettable mistakes were made,” Hubbard said, and took a sip of tea.
That just made me want to punch him more.
“Why are you here, Hubbard?” Bolle asked.
Hubbard stirred his tea.
“Marshall has become a major problem. The human trafficking was bad enough. I don’t think anyone can argue that the attacks at the reservoir and the zoo were linked to Rickson Todd, Marshall’s key associate. It’s unfortunate he’s no longer around to give an accounting for himself.”
He gave me a nod at that. If he wanted me to apologize for killing Todd, he was going to be disappointed.
“Anyway. Now Henderson seems to be having delusions of grandeur and fantasizing that he’ll be able to run for political office.”
I wanted to ask Hubbard what bothered them the most: the human trafficking, the terror attacks, or the fact that Marshall was making a spectacle of himself in public.
“Where is he?” I asked.
I got that amused smile again. A month ago I probably would have hit him, but I’d had time to catch up on my sleep.
“We don’t know. He somehow managed to make a Gulfstream business jet disappear. We’ve had every technical and human intelligence source available to us looking for that plane and it appears to just be gone.”
He turned to Bolle.
“You and I have been at odds in the past, Sebastian, but I think now is a time we should work together.”
Bolle seemed to consider that for a while.
“What do you have to offer?” he said finally.
“Information sharing,” Hubbard said. “We work together to find Marshall. When he’s found, I fade into the woodwork, and you take the credit.”
“Ok,” Bolle said, tapping his finger on the desk in that habit that annoyed me so much. “Give me some information.”
Hubbard had some microexpressions of his own. The flicker of annoyance was brief, but it was real. Hubbard was like a man at a card table that was trying to bluff everyone into believing he had aces when he really didn’t.
“Right now, I don’t think we know anything you don’t,” Hubbard said.
“That’s not much to go on,” Bolle said.
“It’s also not true,” I said.
Both Hubbard and Bolle looked at me like I’d spoken out of turn while the adults were talking. I gritted my teeth and told myself when this was over, I wouldn’t deal with people like this anymore.
I nodded at Diana. “How did you know John?”
Her mouth compressed into a hard, flat line and she looked at her boss. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod.
“We were in the same unit in the Army,” she said. Unconsciously, her hand traced the network of scars on her cheek. “When we got out, we went our separate ways. He went to work for private contractors, I went to work for Langley.”
That story had the ring of truth. Unlike, Delta and SEAL Team Six, the Intelligence Support Activity was rumored to have a high number of female operators. After just a few years in service, they would be prime targets to be poached by either CIA or a private contractor.
“What did he tell you about Mack and Marshall?” I asked. It was a pretty standard investigators trick, asking a question that assumed part of the answer.
She shook her head, even before I was done asking the question, usually a sign of truthfulness.
“Nothing. I never had a chance to talk to him.”
I leaned back in my chair, satisfied that Diana was telling me the truth about that, at least.
“We were certainly curious what Mr. Macklin might have shared with you during your meeting,” Hubbard said.
Bolle fielded that one. “He wanted to start a conversation about testifying in return for potential immunity for any wrongdoing he might have committed. We agreed to consider his offer, but learned nothing of any substance before he was killed.”
Bolle could tell a bald-faced lie with the best of him. He didn’t even blink.
Hubbard put his cup on the desk and stood.
“Well, in that case, it doesn’t sound like we have much to offer each other at the moment. I do hope you’ll consider my offer of information sharing in the future. I’ll give Miss Hunt a ride and we’ll get out of your way.”
Bolle didn’t object. It was curious to watch the two of them. The world of innuendo, double meanings, barbed comments, and outright lies wasn’t my natural environment. I’d grown up in a culture where differences between men were frequently solved with a knock down drag out fight. There had certainly been a few off the books boxing matches during my time in the Rangers as well. Cops were known to have the occasional shouting matches. In my early days at the Bureau, fisticuffs had been frowned on, but not unheard of.
Bolle walked with them back to the sally port. Dalton and I watched them shake hands on the video monitor in the command center. As they drove out the gate, Casey stuck her head in the doorway. She was wearing a pair of coveralls, and there was a smudge of grease on her cheek.
“Did you get them placed?” I asked.
“Yep. Both transmitters are installed.”
She walked over to a laptop and called up a website.
“Both GPS trackers are broadcasting.”
While we’d been drinking tea and sharing lies, Casey and Henry had descended on Hubbard’s car like a NASCAR pit crew. The first GPS tracker they’d installed would be moderately difficult to find. It was affixed by zip ties to the undercarriage of the car and broadcast continuously. Experienced spook that he was, Hubbard would probably find it.
The second was more ingenious. Affixed inside the engine compartment with a fast setting epoxy, it would only broadcast while the car was moving. The theory was if Hubbard or his counter-surveillance team used a spectrum analyzer or signal scanner to check for trackers on the car, they would only do it while the car was parked.
“Good work,” Bolle said as he walked in the door. He looked over Casey’s shoulder at the screen.
“What can you tell us about our new friend?” I asked as I debated getting a cup of coffee. There was a risk it would keep me awake, but I had to do something about the aftertaste of that awful tea.
“He’s probably a sociopath,” Bolle said. “I ran into him in Iraq. I was never able to determine exactly what he was up to, but he was hip deep in running the Cascade Aviation contract.”
Up until now, the phone Mack had given me had been sitting on a desk inside a plastic baggie. We wanted to be able to see the display in case a call came in, but didn’t want to let anyone eavesdrop on us in the command center. We experimented in our own phones and determined a regular old sandwich baggie attenuated the audio enough that we could talk freely.
“Hey, look,” Casey said and pointed. The phone screen lit up with an incoming message.
Casey put her fingers to her lips and pulled the phone out of the bag. She handed it to me.
I want to talk to Dent Miller. Respond via text.
I looked at Bolle. He shrugged.
“Might as well.”
This is Miller, I typed laboriously. The damn keys were never big enough for my fingers.
What year was your Chevy truck made? The reply was almost instant.
It’s a Ford, and it’s a 1972.
“I’m starting to trace,” Casey said from behind her laptop.
There was an almost thirty-second pause before the next message came.
Mascot of the high school you went to?
I felt like I was opening an online banking account.
Lion, I typed. What he was doing made sense. An impostor could figure these answers out, but would likely need at least a few minutes to research them.
Don’t have much time. I want out. I want immunity. In return I give you everything you need to nail Marshall.
Bolle was reading over my shoulder.
“Tell him he needs to give us something,” he said.
Need something from you, I typed.
“He’s in Eastern Oregon,” Casey said. “I’m narrowing it down.”
We all sat there and stared at the phone as if willing another message to come through. Finally, it buzzed again.
Can’t talk any longer. You are already tracing phone. Here’s a picture for you. More later. May contact you via other means. Identifier will be CRYPTER.
I opened the picture attached to the message. From the curved ceiling and round windows, I realized it was the interior of a small business jet. Strapped to the deck against the aft bulkhead was a cube-shaped object wrapped in plastic shrink wrap.
I squinted, trying to make it out on the small screen.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Money,” Bolle said. “Lots and lots of money.”
Chapter 10
“We’re guessing it’s pretty close to a hundred million dollars,” Casey said.
Now that the picture was projected up on the wall in our conference room, it was easy to see it was bundles of shrink-wrapped money.
“That’s assuming it’s hundred dollar bills,” Casey said.
“Oh, I’m sure they are,” Bolle said. “Tell me about the plane.”
“The interior is consistent with a Gulfstream G100, the same model as the Cascade Aviation jet that departed the Portland airport without authorization right after the reservoir attack. By comparing known measurements of the interior of the plane, we were able to estimate the size of the cubes of money. There are three of them, each about 130 cubic feet and weighing in the neighborhood of 660 pounds.”
She paused and blinked. I think we were all trying to wrap our head around that much money. I’d seen some pretty good hauls come out of dope busts, but they had all been orders of magnitude smaller than this.
“Where is it?” Bolle asked.
“Eastern Oregon,” Casey said. “Near a town called Lehigh Valley.”
“Where the hell is that?” I asked. Sometimes it was easy to forget there was quite a bit of territory on the east side of the Cascade Mountains. It was like a different world over there.
“Mueller County. It’s damn near Idaho.”
Casey called up a satellite map.
“Specifically we triangulated the signal to a place called Freedom Ranch. It actually has an airstrip and a hangar.”
The satellite photo showed plenty of arid, rugged country, with a few scattered buildings and a long ribbon of tarmac that was the airstrip.
“The strip is long enough for that Gulfstream to land, but probably not long enough for it to take off again,” Jack said. “Hell of a thing to do with a sixty million dollar aircraft. We’ve been looking all over the Pacific Rim for that damn plane. Turns out they flew out to sea, did a u-turn and headed back inland. They probably stayed low and weren’t even in the air much more than an hour.”
“Seems like somebody would have seen a low flying aircraft like that,” I wondered aloud.
Jack shook his head. “Not necessarily. There’s plenty of places in Oregon where you could stay at about a thousand feet and be off radar as long as your transponder was turned off. My guess is they had a route planned ahead of time that gave them a low probability of observation. Once they made it out over the mountains, their chances of being seen would go way down.”
I took Jack’s word for it. Sneaking into foreign countries in an aircraft was his forte. It turned out your average third world dictatorship had better radar coverage of its airspace than big swaths of the United States.
“Freedom Ranch is owned by a guy named Owen Webb. He’s a big deal in anti-government circles. He always wants to graze his cattle on BLM land but not pay the fees.”
Casey clicked her remote again. Now we were looking at a picture of two guys standing under a “Don’t Tread On Me!” flag and mugging for the camera.
“The guy on the right is Webb. We all know the guy on the left.”
I recognized Henderson Marshall right away. Webb and he looked like two peas in a pod, both were men in their sixties wearing western attire that was way too clean for them to have done any actual work. Marshall was taller. Webb was stockier.
“I wonder if he’s still there,” Alex said.
“The photo of the money was time-stamped two days ago,” Casey said.
“Looks like we need to go to Eastern Oregon,” Bolle said.
“Road trip!” Casey said.
“I call shotgun,” I said.
Chapter 11
We left at dawn the next morning. Casey, Alex and I rode in a Charger. We were supposed to be an advance party while the rest of the crew frantically packed up the gear we would need to take our show on the road. Alex drove most of the way, while Casey curled up in the back like a cat and took a nap. I sat in the passenger seat with nothing to do but pore over investigative files on my laptop.
In the last few weeks, we’d raided every Cascade Aviation facility we could find, traveling all over the state to hangars, maintenance facilities, and offices. We’d also searched Marshall’s private residences, a palatial mansion outside of Salem, a beach house at the coast, and a cabin up in the mountains outside of Welches. We were drowning in information. Most of it was mundane. Even a super secre
t private military contractor like Cascade Aviation kept invoices and billing records for companies that stocked the vending machines in the employee break room and delivered toilet paper.
We’d even seized the records from Marshall’s Political Action Committee. We’d expected a big legal fight over that one, but in the end, his lawyers threw up their hands and walked away. It was tough to bill hours when your client disappeared and all his assets were seized by the government.
We’d been working through it slowly, pulling hours in front of the computer, looking for clues and connections, which often led to more records we seized. If this had been a full-scale FBI investigation, there would have been dozens, maybe a hundred agents and analysts digging through the records. On Bolle’s team, loyalty mattered more than ability, so it was just our band of misfits and rogues doing the digging.
Webb had been on the list of leads to check out. He was a major donor to Marshall’s PAC, and cell phone records showed the two talked a couple of times a month. Maybe in another week or two, we would have gotten to him and one of us would have had a blinding flash of insight about the rich rancher that happened to own his own air strip.
The trip to Mueller County took just over seven hours, and it was like journeying to a different world. First, we cruised down the scenic Columbia River Gorge, sandwiched between big rigs and commuters. The farther east we moved, the browner and more desolate the country became. At the town of Boardman, the river bent to the north, and the interstate bent to the south. The scenery always reminded me of something out of an old John Wayne or Clint Eastwood western. We left the world of strip malls and chain restaurants behind, trading it for honest to god general stores that sold everything from baby food to shotgun shells, and little mom and pop restaurants that were heavy on beef, potatoes and beer.
We actually swung into Idaho for a little while on the interstate, before bending back into Oregon on Highway 95. We finally stopped at Lehigh Valley, about 30 miles shy of Freedom Ranch. Alex pulled into the parking lot of the KW Cafe. I saw a pair of familiar looking pickup trucks in the parking lot. One of them was hitched up to a big fifth wheel camper.
