The Vulture

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Who? Maybe…I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  “He’s listed as a major player. Like I said, you should read this.”

  “I’ll read it later. What else have you got?”

  “That’s what NSA has on them. Since we all were folded into Homeland Security, the boundary between domestic and foreign has sort of evaporated. Nobody is happy with that so we are careful to change our metaphorical hat when we cross it. Anyway, as I said, the Fifty-first Star has been looked at from time to time. It is classified as ‘Militant Survivalist.’ I think some of the analysts wanted to up the ante but the word from the top was to leave them alone.”

  “Word from the top? What does that mean?” Ruth asked.

  “Whoever runs it has some friends on the Hill at the very least. There were whisperings about some of their activities, that’s all. Anyway, nothing beyond that. The Bureau might have more. We could get Karl to snoop around. Now, look at this.”

  Sam pulled up Google Earth on her laptop and zoomed in on Idaho and then their portion of it. New Star Ranch stood out from the others because of the number of its outbuildings. The total seemed unusually large, but more importantly, they seemed different from the buildings on nearby properties, a few of which also had a large number of buildings.

  “What are we looking at?” Ruth said and made a face after her fist sip of a skinny latte. “This is terrible coffee. Do you think they do a better job with chai tea?”

  “If you insist on drinking trendy coffee, you get what you deserve. Plain coffee in a cup is good enough. It looks to me like an unusual number of buildings and all alike,” Ike said, and tried to enlarge the image. “Maybe they can put it in one of those electronic gizmos and you can vape the chai thing.”

  “This from the man who thinks K-cups qualify as gourmet fare. Besides, I am sure that vape is not a word and neither is vapeing. God, what has happened to us? Okay, so what’s so important about the buildings?”

  “Look at the other ranches. Some of them have almost as many buildings, but they’re all different sizes and shapes. New Star’s buildings are all the same and lined up like a camp or something. I bet if you looked at a military installation, maybe not a new one, but one from the forties and fifties, it would look just like that. Barracks, that’s what those buildings are or I’ll eat my hat.”

  “Could it have been an old Army installation that the owner bought in a surplus sale?” Sam said.

  “We can find out, but I doubt it. They look new. I wish they had caught people in the picture. I wonder if Charlie could arrange a drone.”

  “You want the CIA, which is in enough hot water over their use of drones overseas, to institute domestic surveillance? You’re not serious?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted the CIA to send a drone. They won’t do it. I said, ‘I wonder if Charlie could arrange a drone.’ There’s a qualitative difference.”

  “A what? Charlie Garland has a private fleet of drones?”

  “No, of course not, but other people do. Jeff Bezos has lots of them. And corporations, police, even private citizens do, too.”

  “Jeff Bezos?”

  “Amazon.com. He says he wants to deliver packages with them. Drones are everywhere. The last catalog I received from someone wanting me to shop for Christmas in July had one with surveillance capability equivalent to the early Predators. They wanted thirteen hundred bucks for it.”

  “Maybe we should get one of those and leave the CIA out of it.”

  “It won’t do. It’s big and clunky and obviously a spy-in-the-sky. Those fake New Star warriors might be politically obtuse, but they’re quick enough to spot it in a minute and paranoid enough to shoot it down in the next. Anyway, most drone manufacturers are falling all over themselves right, left, and center, to land a fat contract with a police department, a government agency, or some big commercial enterprise like Amazon. So, I will ask Charlie to suggest, only suggest mind you, that he would like a demonstration of someone’s product, one with eye-in-the-sky technology and able to work relatively unseen. He’s CIA, but he doesn’t have to say he’s not a procurement officer, just hint, flash his creds, and see what happens. Some hungry entrepreneur with a drone equipped with good TV surveillance system will happily offer to demonstrate it.”

  “Over Idaho?”

  “Where better? If they were to do it over the East Coast, too many people would know, questions would be raised, competitors would wonder, but out here? Wide open spaces with nothing but buffalo.”

  “You are a very bad man, Ike Schwartz.”

  Sam’s face lit up. “Do you think he’ll go for it?”

  “We can ask. I’ll make the call. Can you get me a secure line on that thing or must we wait until the dopes have finished searching our place and go home?”

  “We need to wait.”

  “Then, let’s look at real estate in town. Charlie said we should look for a location to set up a satellite office in Idaho. Gottlieb Realtors, only we won’t call it that.”

  “We are? Really?” Ike nodded. “Why?”

  “I’m pretty sure we will need more boots on the ground soon. The office will be our cover.”

  “Okay, but why not Gottlieb Realtors?” Ruth asked.

  “Too obvious. If you were in the realty business and were expanding into someone else’s territory, you’d pick a generic name, something that sounded local.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Okay, let’s say you are looking for property in this part of Idaho. Are you going to go to Gottlieb, Gottlieb, and Silver, Real Estate Brokers, or Western Sky Realty?”

  “Oh. You don’t think a company with that name already exists?”

  “I’d be surprised if one didn’t. We’ll think up another or we’ll use it. People will assume we’re a branch office. Anyway, are you done drinking your brown water?”

  “Done. Let’s go find an office. I take it you are okay with the locals knowing that Western Sky or whatever is really the Marvin and June Gottlieb and Trixie Silver deal?”

  “I am. By the way, Sam, what’s a chai tea?”

  “It’s a fancy meal where they serve little cakes and things at four o’clock in Chicago.”

  “Shut up, you two.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Charlie Garland spent the day on the phone with contacts in various agencies. He had to call in a few favors and needed the director to call his counterpart in the Federal Bureau of Investigation to get what he wanted, but he finally had a name. Oswald Connors, junior senator from Idaho, had made the request to have Karl Hedrick removed from the Picketsville bombing case. Idaho. Of course, another Idaho association. Now all Charlie needed to discover was who made the call to Senator Connors and he’d have his man. He hoped.

  The director of the FBI, in turn had to wonder why the director of the CIA was interested in a local, and only remotely possible, terrorist strike in Virginia. That agency did not stick its nose in for no reason. They wanted to know who sent the request. That meant they must know something about him. He scratched his ear and then ordered his people to pull any files they had on the junior senator from Idaho.

  Karl Hedrick’s friend in records thought Karl had been given a raw deal when he was assigned a desk. He called Karl and told him so. Karl thanked him and, as an afterthought, asked if he would send a copy of what the director had asked for. That’s when he discovered the rumor about Senator Connors.

  The senator, it was alleged, liked boys. Not as in he supported the Boy Scouts of America, or Big Brother, but as in the sixth-century BC Greek-sense. No reports of pederasty had been confirmed, nor had there been any accusations made—only rumors and gossip. Whether there was substance to them had not been determined. The file noted: evidence or not, the rumors should be taken seriously. The senator served on an oversight committee that had both the CIA and the FBI under its
purview and, therefore, had access to sensitive classified material. Analysts at the Bureau felt because of that, he could be an easy target for possible blackmail and subsequently a threat to National Security. What all this had to do with his request to pull Karl from the case, he did not know, but he passed the information along to Charlie anyway.

  ***

  For his part, Charlie did not like coincidences. He knew that they happened naturally and often. Much of Russian fiction was predicated on them. What were the chances that Lara would be domiciled in the same town in the middle of central Russia where Zhivago rode in to borrow a book? Or was it to buy a loaf of bread? Charlie couldn’t remember. This business with the attempt on Ike’s and Ruth’s lives seemed riddled with too many coincidences. The mysterious repeater tower was in Idaho. The junior senator with a penchant for interfering with investigations (and possibly young boys) also hailed from Idaho. And that ranch, mustn’t forget the ranch with the familiar-sounding name. The Idaho connection seemed too much a coincidence to dismiss.

  So, two questions: if the FBI had files on the allegations about Connors’ behavior, who else knew? It would be fair to guess someone else did. Was it another Idaho link that would close the loop and encircle our master bad guy? That would certainly explain a lot. Charlie called a contact he knew and trusted at the New York Times and fed him just enough to set him on the hunt. Then, he had Alice run up a list of all of the senator’s contributors, both the ones declared on the disclosure forms and the darker ones buried in PACs. Somewhere in the list of righteous political movers and shakers lurked a very nasty piece of goods and Charlie wanted him. As soon as he had that information, he would set the dial under the pot to boil and that should make someone jump.

  ***

  At first glance, the tape from the dash cam that recorded the shooting outside Buena Vista didn’t show much. The deputy approaches the car and as he leans in, he is shot point blank, and the car speeds off. The assailant’s license plates were missing. That, Frieze’s supervisor assumed, was the reason the deputy had pulled the car over in the first place. There were some other small irregularities regarding operating procedure used on approaching a suspicious vehicle. If the result had been anything other than lethal, Frieze might have had a “sit down” with the sheriff’s administrative assistant. But Frieze was dead and calling his sloppy technique into question at this point would be beating a dead horse. The PR person who made that statement had blushed and muttered something about there being no pun intended.

  Before Frank could task Charlie Garland to secure the dash cam footage, the Rockbridge Sheriff’s Office, as a courtesy, sent a copy to Picketsville. A few eyebrows were raised at the time. What did the Picketsville Sheriff’s Office needed with it, anyway? It wasn’t in their jurisdiction and did not involve any of their people. They shrugged and reminded themselves that even hick cops got the courtesy nod once in a while. The chief was funny that way.

  As he had done with the previous surveillance tape taken at the site of the bomb-planting, Frank called in as many deputies as were available to scan this new footage.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?’ Frank asked them.

  Charlie Picket scratched his grizzled head and asked, “What do you mean?”

  “All of you went through the academy. Sometime or another you called in a 10-38 and made a stop like this one. What’s not right?”

  “One correction, Frank,” Billy said. “The word I get from the County is he never called it in. He just made the stop, which is why they didn’t know about the shooting for, like, two hours after it happened.”

  “Okay, I’m guessing that’s real important, by the way. So, with that in mind, what else is wrong with this picture?”

  “Umm, I’m not sure but shouldn’t he have readied for a confrontation? Like, he doesn’t unsnap the strap holding his piece on its holster,” the new kid said.

  “Exactly. That’s drilled into us all the time. If you pull someone over, your never know what you are about to run into. You always have you gun free and safety off, right?”

  The men murmured their assent.

  “Next?”

  “Crap, he’s got his hands in his pockets when he steps up to the driver’s side door.”

  “Anyone like to guess what that means?”

  “It means he knew the guy he pulled over,” three said at once.

  “So we have a murder, yes, but not a random shooting. This was premeditated. Whoever was in that car knew our deputy and lured him to his death. So, who has a motive to shoot our fellow officer?”

  “Oh shit,” said Billy. “He’s the cop at the 7-Eleven when Ike went in and the bomb was planted, so that means he, for sure, had to be implicated. He wasn’t just there by chance. He must have followed Ike there. So, it looks like someone in charge decided he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut and had him erased. Whoever these guys are, they sure play rough. Jesus, Frank, that raises another question.”

  “Which is?”

  “What if they know we’ve seen the tape? What if this guy was rubbed because someone found out we pulled the surveillance tape from the store and they were afraid we’d make the connection and get to him? If that, is it possible they, whoever they are, might be after us, too?”

  “How do you figure?”

  “We know what it means. Like, if somebody has eyes or ears on us, doesn’t it follow they know that and could come down here to make sure the rest of us don’t pass on what we know? Maybe punch one of us out to intimidate the rest into not saying anything?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a stretch but I guess it could be. So, everybody, if what Billy thinks is the connection, there’s a cop killer out there and one or two of us could have a target on our backs. All of you stay sharp. We don’t need any more of us going down.”

  “Frank, you think that’s possible?” One of older deputies had a worried look. When the first of his six children arrived, he’d transferred in from the Baltimore Police Department because he believed Picketsville was not a high-crime duty station. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  “You’re good, Bob. First of all, you haven’t seen the tape and, second, for all practical purposes, aren’t tight with the investigation. No worries.”

  Bob didn’t seem convinced. He had less than five years to his twenty and pension and he wanted to be on the right side of the sod when he got there.

  ***

  “You want a what?” Charlie had received some bizarre requests from Ike in his time but his insistence he needed a drone fly-over in the middle of nowhere took the cake. “Where? Idaho. Yes, of course, Idaho. That’s where you are and you want this because? Suspicious buildings? Ike, I love you like a brother, but if you think I am going to be responsible for the internecine warfare that will erupt when the other branches find out the Agency is doing domestic surveillance on the hotbed of conservative America, you are nuts.”

  “Not the Agency, Charlie. A private contractor eager to demonstrate his wares to an unidentified government agency alleged to be in the market for a hi-res TV surveillance drone.”

  “I see. And we need this why?”

  “There is a ranch out here with too many men in full military attire who’re resident and some of whom are, even as we speak, searching our cabin. I may have footage for you to run some facial recognition scans in a few hours. At any rate, all of this activity is too much to dismiss as suspicious human nature. The place is called New Star, like fifty-one star, for God’s sake. Worse, since we arrived here we have been scrutinized, followed, photographed, and now our belongings are being searched. It is way over the top, Charlie. I want a peek into that ranch and the military arrangements of their buildings. So, can you fix it?”

  “Why can’t you ever ask me for something easy, like a small nuclear device or the original Enigma Machine? Why don’t you just buy one from Radio Shack or somethin
g?”

  “They are too obvious, have limited capability and wouldn’t last five minutes in the sky. I want one of those sneaky ones you told me about.”

  “Sneaky? Like the thing that looks like an eagle? It’s just a rumor, Ike. Maybe you’d like an armored personnel carrier, too? They are real and available to every police department and sheriff’s office in the land. Why don’t you ever ask for something easy?”

  “If the armored car looks like a buffalo, I’ll take it.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay, give me some time. By the way, we have a development at this end. Karl has been told to stand down. I have been pursuing who made the request and why. You might find it interesting to know it was Senator Connors.”

  “The senator from Idaho. I’m not crazy about that being a coincidence, Charlie. Stay on that and get me some satellite pictures of the New Star Ranch. Sam will send you the GPS coordinates. Oh, and who is Martin Pangborn?”

  Ike tapped off and turned to the two women. “Well that’s interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?”

  “Sam, your husband is in the doghouse again. He’s off the case. Before you ask, I don’t know why, but it’s hard not to believe it has something to do with the three of us.”

  “Someone up there doesn’t like him. I’ll call and find out why. Do we get our drone?”

  “Maybe. Charlie is not happy, but he’s working on it.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The deputies operating out of the Rockbridge Sheriff’s Office spent their off-duty time in two places. The more abstemious ones were to be found at a diner on old Route 60. Those more likely to require liquid support before or after work would be found at Benny’s Sport Bar and Grille, AKA the Cop Stop, a few clicks east. Billy and Essie assumed that Frieze would probably frequent the latter and that is where they headed.