The Vulture

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Stop!” The action figure shook his head and waved in the tow truck which at that moment had arrived.

  “Get this airhead and her car out of here. And, ma’am, just stay the hell off our turf in the future.”

  ***

  Earl’s Garage had the car on the rollback and was pulling onto the road when Ike and Ruth arrived.

  “Sis,” Sam yelled. “You won’t believe what happened to me. Four flat tires. Oh, and I didn’t get the burgers. Sorry.”

  “Get in. Ike, get us the hell out of here,” Ruth hissed.

  “You should wave goodbye and smile at GI Joe,” Sam said. “Lord knows we don’t want to upset him. Will you look at all that artillery?”

  “I guess they weren’t exactly expecting company.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “What did you tell them?” Ike kept his eyes alternately on the road and the rearview mirror.

  “Nothing. I was Doris the Ditz. I had the lead in Born Yesterday in college and I just played Billie Dawn with a lot of Valley Girl thrown in. I think the goon with the wannabe shades bought it. Sorry, but I’m afraid he has a pretty low opinion of you two now.”

  “Low? How low?” Ruth asked.

  “June, like, you’re a slut. That low. And Marvin, you’re so totally a jerk. Sorry, but I was improvising.”

  “Works for me,” Ike said. “I would never say it to you myself, June, but your sister has you pegged.”

  “She didn’t miss much about you either, hotshot.”

  “Did you two have a nice nap?” Sam asked and, in spite of her efforts not to, blushed.

  “You were always Mom’s favorite. She spoiled you rotten, Trixie, and just look at you now.” Ruth said.

  “Moving on. Sam, what did you learn about that place?” Ike knew Sam and he knew she would take in as much as she could. She’d been a cop before she became a NSA snoop.

  “Well, the goons were all armed with military grade weapons, not US, though. AR 15s or AK 10s, I think. One or two had a side arm, maybe Glocks, judging by the butts, as well as the rifles. As near as I could tell, all the safeties were off on the long guns. You can guess where that might go if one of those drugstore warriors got excited. Apparently the gate was not supposed to be open, so somebody screwed up there big-time. The camo on most, but not all, looked new and store-bought, you know, like they did their shopping at Cabela’s or the Bass Pro Shop. Not US military-issue, at any rate. The guy who was hassling me had an insignia on his jacket. It looked like a star with a number in it.”

  “What number?”

  “I’m not sure. He kept moving around and I was too busy trying to remember who I was supposed to be.”

  “The ranch is called New Star. Could it have not been a number, but a word? Could it have said, New?” Ruth asked.

  “Oh, well maybe. Like I said, he moved and it wasn’t very big.”

  “It was the number fifty-one.” Ike said.

  “How can you possibly know that?” Ruth stared at Ike.

  “Because I’ve seen it before but I can’t think where. I think that’s why the name, ‘New Star,’ on the crossbeam jogged my memory yesterday. A new star on the flag would be number fifty-one, you see? Star fifty-one has to mean something more than the ranch name. When we get back to the cabin, Sam, link us up to a satellite and go digging for anything about a star with the number fifty-one inside it, or similar notations. Now, earlier you said ‘two things.’ What else?”

  “Oh, yeah, someone has hacked the Sheriff’s Office back home. No surprise there. So Frank has to be careful what he posts and what he doesn’t. I wasn’t able to locate the source before I was called out here, but the best guess is it is the same people who went after you two.”

  “They are good, I’ll give them that. There ought to be some way we can use that information to our advantage.”

  “What about dinner?” Ruth said. “Trixie, here, never made it to Bert’s.”

  “I said I was sorry, Sis.”

  “Shut up, you two. We’ll go back to Bert’s and do takeout. Then we go back to the cabin, search for a satellite link, and then tackle the five one-star.”

  “Take my advice, Trixie, don’t order the Swede potatoes.”

  “But I like sweet potatoes.”

  “Not these, you won’t.”

  ***

  Jackson Shreve had a very bad moment when he retrieved his keys and saw that he’d inadvertently opened the main gate. He spent the next twenty minutes going over in his mind the different ways it could have happened that didn’t involve him or his keys. The best he could do involved supposing a mysterious power surge had overloaded the circuit and caused the gate to swing open. He was refining that scenario in his mind when he was ordered from the room and back to the barracks until further notice. His attempts to describe how startled he’d been when the lights dimmed and then got very bright fell on deaf ears. He was on the next plane to Wyoming where the Fifty-first Star had an auxiliary camp for retraining. So much for “delivering big-time for the boss.”

  When Shreve had cleared the room, the four men who’d made the intercept at the gate sat and dialed up the Section Commander. The screen brightened and the image of a man who could have been the twin of the one who accosted Sam appeared.

  “What the hell happened out there?” he said.

  “Screw up big-time by a Probationer. Won’t happen again. No harm, no foul. We sent him back to base camp.”

  “Who?”

  “Shreve. You know, the nerdy guy with the Fu Manchu.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “She stays.”

  “Pangborn…?”

  “You know how it goes. So, one or two questions raised at the gate, however.”

  “Questions? What kind of questions? Do I want to hear them?”

  “Maybe. You remember that man and his wife who pulled in here two days ago. Their name is Gottlieb, Marvin and June Gottlieb. She was seen taking a picture of the gate. We didn’t think too much of that. Tourists and people new to the area take a lot of dopey pictures.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the woman who trespassed was the wife’s sister, she says. The phone intercept we listened to the day before indicated the person coming out here was pretty bright. It seemed the Gottliebs were looking at something with a problem in an outbuilding. The caller, Chuck somebody, seemed to think she could solve a problem that needed some kind of special, I don’t know, skills or something.”

  “Why is that odd?”

  “The woman might be that person.”

  “So, she came out to fix whatever they wanted fixed, right?”

  “Yeah right. Here’s the thing. If she’s the one, I’m thinking she is the biggest airhead this side of Washington. I mean if she has any skill set, I didn’t see it. She sounded like a complete moron.”

  “And she’s the sister, or whatever, of the woman who took a picture of the gate?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, maybe she isn’t the person who was talked about in the call and maybe she is. I think I need to kick this up to the top. In the meantime, put a team on them…all of them. Find out everything you can. Where they come from, who they know—everything. If they don’t come up squeaky clean, get back to me. We will be working the same databases back here. Good work.”

  “Thanks. Say hi to Jack for me.”

  The screen blinked off.

  “You heard the man. Tomorrow, find a way to get in and toss their house. Get some pictures for a facial recognition scan, fingerprints, financials, the works. Oh, and put a tail on them twenty-four seven. I want to know what they’re up to.”

  ***

  Ike surveyed the cabin and the room Sam had set up as her work space. “Sam, you need to make all this equipment look as inconspicuous as possible. Anyone coming in here would k
now we are snooping.”

  “Well, we are.”

  “I know that, but I don’t want anyone else to know that. This place should look like the digs of some real estate speculators, not the eastern Idaho annex of NSA. Can you program the computers so that whoever opens them will see real estate websites—here and in Raleigh, North Carolina? You’ll need to block any access to their browsing history, too. Oh, and when we leave, scatter the laptops around to other spaces so it looks like we’re just land brokers looking for bargains.”

  “What about the big screen we use?”

  “Set it up to run as a TV when we’re not around. Any heavy equipment, shove behind the washer/dryer.”

  “And we’re doing this because…?” Ruth asked.

  “Because Sam had a run-in with some not-your-usual cowboys at a ranch with a name that is producing bad memory vibes for me. Those guys qualified as sufficiently out of the ordinary to warrant extreme caution in the future.”

  “That’s it? Sam plays dumb with some macho idiots and you want to shut down the camp?”

  “Not just because of that. I am certain the goon in the shades will want to have a look at our cabin and unless it slipped your mind, someone tried to kill the two of us and isn’t done. Also, please remember that we are in the bad guys’ backyard and I want to avoid having them ask embarrassing question when I am tied to a chair and they practice unlicensed orthodontistry and facial massage on me.”

  “So we use a fake credit card on purpose and we stage the house on the assumption it will be searched. Don’t you think you’re being just a little paranoid, Ike?”

  “Yes, I am. Being intentionally paranoid is the reason I survived as long as I did in the field. It’s like this, no matter how smart you think you are and how cleverly you plan. Staying alive usually means that you are prepared for the opposite—that you are stupid and careless. That way, you’ll be ready for the unexpected, the bizarre, the screw-up. I failed at this once and it cost the life of someone close to me. I won’t let that happen again.

  Ruth began to respond, recognized the cloud that crossed his eyes and the determined set to his jaw, and changed the subject.

  “Okay, Sheriff, we stage the house for showing, but first, can we eat the burgers that got us in this mess in the first place?”

  They sat, opened the bag of enormous burgers with the packets of fries Ike bought from Bert’s. Ike passed mustard, pickles, ketchup, and bottles of beer. They ate in silence. Ruth started and shivered.

  “The hair on the back of my neck just stood up,” Ruth said. “What do you suppose that means?”

  Sam swallowed a mouthful of bison and washed it down with beer. “My Aunt Camille would say it means trouble is coming.”

  “Yeah? So what else is new?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The next morning the three made a show of leaving the cabin and driving away. Anyone observing their behavior from, say, the nearby shrubbery, would have seen the two women, the sisters, bickering, and the older man, resplendent in a large pattern green-and-white houndstooth sport coat barking at them, “Shut up and get the hell in the car.” It should have been convincing. They drove away, and after a pause, two men emerged from the shrubbery and approached the house. A third man stepped into the driveway farther along and spoke into a shoulder-mounted radio. The men stopped at the front door, acknowledged the call, picked the lock, and were inside in less than thirty seconds. Motion-detectors planted in several places responded and recorded their visit with the cameras placed in every room. They stayed for thirty minutes and left, leaving, they believed, no trace of having been there.

  At the same time, another duo stopped by Bert’s and made copies of the surveillance footage taken the previous day. The tapes were taken to the New Star Ranch where a team of men ran them through facial recognition programs. The process took several hours and resourced every database available to them but no identities were made or confirmed. To more sophisticated reviewers, that should have been a red flag. By this time, in the country’s terrorist-obsessed culture, nearly everyone had been photographed and cataloged. Between NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA, and the remaining alphabet soup of acronymous security services there were precious few people over the age of twelve who were not resident in one registry or another. But these three were nowhere to be found. Had the scan been done a day later, it would have identified Beatrice Silver, June Gottlieb (nee Silver), and Marvin Gottlieb, all from Raleigh, North Carolina, but Charlie Garland had been busy with debriefing the agents ensconced in Ruth’s cottage in Maine. He did hear that the scan had been done and hoped that the persons looking at the Gottliebs would not notice their absence in the files. He certainly would have.

  ***

  The director of the FBI was a career agent. Unlike his recent predecessors, he had actually served in the field as a special agent. Over the twenty-five years he’d been an agent, he’d worked his way up through the ranks and the president, at the time torn between two conflicting loyalties each vying to have their choice appointed to the directorship, had solved his dilemma by appointing a career man instead, thus satisfying no one, but not offending anyone either. The New York Times called it a “bold, nonpartisan move for which the President should be commended.”

  The director studied the pink memo on his desk with disgust. He did not like political interference in the operation of the Bureau and especially not the sort that emanated from the Congress. He thought that Congress and its members, past and present, had enough skeletons in their collective closet to suggest they give the Bureau a wide berth, not stir up questions by seeking political favors. But politicians are not known for their introspection, and so the requests for special consideration landed on his desk nearly daily. Anyone who knew him also knew he was not stupid and realized that bending in the wind would sometimes prevent breaking. Occasionally allowances had to be made.

  The matter of Karl Hedrick’s continued employment in the Bureau hit his desk that morning. He did not understand why a senator would presume to question the effectiveness of an agent he’d never met and about whom he knew nothing. It bothered him. Obviously, Hedrick had stepped on someone’s toes and they did not like it. On the other hand, he thought a few of the boys on the Hill could use a looking into and toyed with the idea of opening the file on the person making the request. He was pretty sure the Bureau had one. He shook his head, sighed, smoothed his patterned silk tie, a birthday gift from his wife—he hated it—and passed the request on to a senior deputy with more ambition than scruples. The deputy, in turn, scanned Karl’s file and noted the adverse entries already in it. He ignored the exonerating documents accompanying those entries and pulled Karl out of Picketsville and back to his desk in the Hoover building.

  ***

  Karl’s removal from the case, while serving as a blow to the work underway at the site, did provide another bit of information for Charlie to work with. Who had enough pull at the top to initiate a request like that and, more importantly, whose pocket was he in?

  “We are triangulating,” he announced to Alice. She smiled an acknowledgement but had no idea what he was thinking. She didn’t ask. She knew from experience that to do so would interrupt the process he referred to as “problem solving.”

  ***

  When they were well away from the cabin, Ike turned to Sam in the backseat. “We’re set with surveillance?”

  “Done and done. I have motion-activated cameras all over the place. When we get back, we can download the footage and see who visited us and what they were doing.”

  Ruth twisted in her seat. “Won’t they see them? I mean, if they are breaking and entering, isn’t it a fair assumption they will be looking for cameras?”

  “That depends on whether they think we might not be who we say we are. Then they might. But I don’t think they will. Not this time, anyway.”

  “There will be anoth
er time?”

  Ike grinned. “Oh, yeah. If they are professionals, there will be. People with suspicious minds like theirs will always repeat a search on the assumption that we are as suspicious of them as they are of us and assume we staged the house for a search, but are not smart enough to anticipate a follow-up. They might guess that we will hide things and then, having been searched, get careless and leave stuff lying about. So, to be sure, they will come back in a day or two.”

  Sam leaned forward and handed Ruth a picture of a clothes hook. “What do you think?”

  “Very minimalist. Are you and Karl doing your closets in black and white?”

  “No. This is a picture of one of the cameras, Ruth. It looks like a coat hook but it isn’t. My only concern is that the people in there will wonder at the number and placement of clothes hooks in the house.”

  “This is all very Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Poe? How?”

  “C. Auguste Dupin in ‘The Purloined Letter.’”

  “Ruth is being professorial,” Ike said. “It’s a story about a missing letter and it is hidden in plain sight, in a letterpress with other letters. Your hooks work because they look like they belong where they are”