Power and Empire

by Marc Cameron

  “Well, this sucks,” he said under his breath as soon as he stepped across the threshold. He’d fully expected to see a handful of triad or cartel types, but was startled to find one of the largest Hispanic men he’d ever seen sitting beside a magnetometer, presumably to check IDs. Pushing seven feet tall, the big guy had to weigh in at a good 350 pounds. Much of his bulk was fat, but Jack had learned from experience that heavy guys built up a considerable amount of muscle just hauling their own weight around. This one eclipsed the small stool he was sitting on, completely blocking the entry. A tattoo of what looked like a female version of Death stuck up from the collar of his T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved or showered in a long time, and Ryan was surprised they hadn’t gotten wind of him outside. He half expected “Fee fi fo fum” to be the first words out of the guy’s mouth.

  Instead, the big man grunted and asked, “¿Armas?” giving Ryan, and then Chavez, the evil-eye once-over. Guns?

  Ryan hunched his shoulders, slouching some to look less threatening than his six-foot-one frame would normally indicate. There was a time to be intimidating, and this was not it. Bouncers paid a hell of a lot more attention to tough guys than they did to nervous pushovers with bleached tips. Both men were indeed strapped, each carrying a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield nine-millimeter. The small, single-stack pistols were virtually invisible under the men’s shirts, but even so, guns could be explained away. Dopers carried guns. Hell, half the people in Texas did. The wire neck-loop mics and the rest of the comms package, however, would likely earn them each a hole in the head.

  Jack assumed the dozen Asian and Hispanic men in the place were armed, but management evidently wanted to double-check any new faces. Chavez started to say something in Spanish, but Jack noticed just in time that the cord at the base of the magnetometer was unplugged from the wall. He gave his partner a quick elbow in the ribs.

  “No armas,” Ryan said, eyes on the dancers as if he was enthralled—trying his best for a lecherous-college-boy look. “We’re all about the girls, not the guns.” He peeled a couple twenty-dollar bills off a roll from his pocket and gave the big guy an embarrassed grin. “To tell you the truth, this is my first time in a titty bar. Do we pay the cover charge to you or what?”

  The twenties looked like Monopoly money in the big guy’s massive hands as he snatched them away. He lifted his chin and grunted toward a trio of skinny Asian girls swaying on the stage. “They’ll dance better if you give them a little cash, but hands off the merchandise unless you work out an extra arrangement with me or Manolo—the bald guy in the white shirt at the end of the stage.”

  “Got it.” Ryan gave a compliant nod and gulped for effect, his eyes wide and seemingly transfixed on the poor gyrating women. A dozen low tables ran in front of the stage, some occupied by small groups of Hispanic or Asian men. Triad or cartel according to their significant ink, each stuck with his own ethnicity. Two rosy-cheeked white guys in City of Dallas municipal worker coveralls occupied the nearest table. Ryan counted sixteen patrons in all, counting Manolo and the Asian man with the ridiculous fauxhawk sitting at the table beside him.

  That one had to be Eddie Feng.

  • • •

  The North Texas Crimes Against Children Task Force was housed in a nondescript hangar leased by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the northeast side of Dallas Love Field Airport. The three agents that made up the ICAC—or the Internet portion of the Crimes Against Children Task Force—worked at a bank of computers in a windowless area with their backs to the far wall. These two women and one burly man—all parents themselves—spent much of their workday posing as children, engaged in online conversation with some of the sickest minds on the planet. It was a target-rich environment—with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimating 75,000 would-be traders in child pornography online at any given time.

  The ICAC workstations were purposely situated with their backs to the walls, giving them some semblance of security and allowing them to look up and view a glimpse of the seminormal life of their brothers- and sisters-in-arms in the bullpen just a few yards away.

  The CAC Task Force Commander, FBI Special Agent Kelsey Callahan, didn’t believe in separate offices. If her team was going to wade through the river of shit that the perverts they hunted caused, they should do it together as a unified group. She did, however, put her desk at the head of the open bullpen so she’d have direct access to the whiteboard behind her.

  No straitlaced Betty Bureau Blue Suit, Special Agent Callahan wore a Neiman Marcus silk blouse in subtle pink and stonewashed jeans over hips that she wished were a smidge smaller, but that were still small enough so as to make the .40-caliber Glock 23 in the holster on her belt look huge. Her instructors at Quantico had called her curly copper ponytail a “murder handle.” She considered chopping it off for the academy, but she’d had long hair since high school—and besides, she needed to cling to every last vestige of femininity in this overly masculine profession. Callahan resolved early on to unleash nine kinds of hell on anyone who got close enough to even touch her hair—and went on to prove that resolve to an exuberant defensive tactics instructor who thought he’d teach her the error of her thinking and grabbed her from behind. She’d dislocated her own shoulder but ruptured the instructor’s testicle. Her injuries saw her recycled into the next class of NATs—New Agent Trainees—but the badass reputation that followed her into her career was worth repeating three weeks of training. The reputation of being what Texas Department of Public Safety sergeant Derrick Bourke called “a half a bubble off plumb” only added to her success leading the North Texas CAC Task Force.

  Sergeant Bourke’s desk was to the immediate right of Callahan’s, facing the bullpen, but the forty-year-old trooper and father of three now stood beside her, looking over her shoulder at the files on the screen of the standalone laptop at her desk.

  It was Sergeant Bourke who had brought her the USB drive, retrieved the night before by a trooper posted to Mansfield. Department of Public Safety computer gurus had run all manner of diagnostics to check the drive for viruses. FBI techs had double- and triple-checked it for remote access Trojans, ransomware, and other viruses. Even after the device had been pronounced free from malware, FBI higher-ups still directed it only be inserted into a computer with the modem disabled and not attached to any network.

  Bourke leaned in, his hand on Callahan’s desk. “Looks like some kind of spreadsheet,” he said. “Accounting records maybe . . . and encrypted notes.”

  The FBI agent scrolled upward, nodding. “Not encrypted,” she said. “Coded. We can open them. We just can’t tell what they mean. I see the word ‘coronet’ a lot. Mean anything to you?”

  “Nope.”

  Callahan mused as she scrolled, as much to herself as to Bourke. “I’m not finding anything to give us a location of this Eddie Feng bastard. After what Blanca Limón told me about him, I really, really want to find this guy.” She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the sergeant. “I’ll let the organized-crime squads figure out the rest of the trash on this thumb drive. What I do need is to have a little chat with the guy who pays for sex with a little girl as young as Blanca. According to her, there’s another girl, a friend of hers named”—Callahan looked at the printed FBI 302 beside her laptop—“Magdalena Rojas. The guy your trooper killed dropped Magdalena at some creepy mansion in the country. She is at this very moment being made to do God knows what. If we find this Eddie Feng and squeeze him a little, maybe, just maybe, we can find her.” Callahan took a breath, as if she was coming up for air. Bourke, who was used to her passion, stood by and listened.

  Callahan glanced back down at the 302. “Your trooper made the traffic stop south of Mansfield. Blanca says a pimp named Parrot took her and Magdalena to work a party with a bunch of other girls south of Dallas last night. Eddie Feng was there. He gives us the address of that party and we’ll have a search line between there and t
he Mansfield traffic stop.”

  “That’s still a lot of open ground,” Bourke said.

  Callahan scrolled through the columns of numbers, looking for anything that might give her an address. “It’s all we’ve got right now. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Feng will know where the mansion is, the sick bastard.”

  Two desks away, FBI Special Agent John Olson pitched his cell phone onto a stack of paperwork and slumped in his chair, rubbing his eyes.

  Callahan looked up at him. “I sincerely hope you’re about to tell me Fort Worth PD has Parrot Villanueva in custody.”

  Olson shook his head. “I wish. His apartment’s empty and he’s in the wind. We have an APB out for him, but unless he gets jammed up over a broken taillight or something . . .”

  Callahan stood and used the flat of her hand to pound on her Vietnam War–era metal desk. The noise echoed off the high ceiling of the spacious hangar. She did this at least twice a week, and everyone on her team knew what it meant. A new turd had floated to the surface of their little world, and he was now their priority. Six police officers from four different municipalities and two sheriff’s departments, three Texas Department of Public Safety investigators, three special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and three from the FBI Dallas Field Office all peered around their computers, ready to receive marching orders. Some were relatively new, others had been on the task force for a couple years. But all the CAC Task Force members had so much experience rescuing kids that they’d accumulated a deep and abiding hatred for the men and women they hunted. It was controlled hatred, hatred that Callahan made sure they kept within the bounds of the law, but it was hatred nonetheless. Callahan banging on her desk was like the horn to a foxhound. Every member of the team sat poised, twitching to channel their hatred into the hunt.

  “Okay, listen up! There’s a thirteen-year-old girl out there named Magdalena Rojas who needs our help. Right now, our best chance at finding her is a worthless little creeper named Eddie Feng.” She threw the last name like an expletive. “Not sure if it’s Edward or Eddie. He speaks English, but judging from the scant information we have, he may be Chinese.”

  Joe Rice, a detective working off a federal grant from the Waxahachie Police Department, raised his pen. He was in his fifties, with thinning blond hair and a drooping mustache he’d probably not shaved since his first days in the police academy thirty years before. A new grandfather and a deacon in the Waxahachie First Baptist Church, he was the reason Callahan didn’t curse as much as she would have liked to.

  “Do we got a photo of Eddie Feng?”

  “We will as soon as you get me one, Joe,” Callahan said.

  She’d conducted the interview with Blanca Limón, so she had a general physical description. “Our only witness is another thirteen-year-old girl named Blanca who was being forced to turn tricks with Magdalena. Blanca describes Feng as being in his mid-thirties, around five-feet-eight, slender build, with glasses. She says he downs energy drinks like they’re going out of style . . . and he’s sporting a fauxhawk.”

  “Of course he is,” Olson said, still rubbing his eyes.

  “I’ve got him on Facebook,” an African American detective named Jermaine Armstrong said. The Dallas PD detective was a dedicated gym rat and wore the sleeves of his gunmetal T-shirt rolled up over biceps the size of cantaloupes. He also possessed the uncanny ability to sell anything to anyone—especially online. He turned his laptop around to show Eddie Feng’s profile pic, complete with a can of Red Bull and the fauxhawk. Once Callahan had seen it, Armstrong turned the computer back and began to peck at the keys again. Callahan hit an icon on her desktop and pulled up an image of the detective’s screen on the whiteboard behind her.

  Armstrong peered over the top of his computer. “Our little friend Sugar just sent him a friend request. According to Messenger, he’s online right now. He should be getting back to her shortly if he likes what he sees.”

  “Sugar” was the name of a computer-generated image of a twelve-year-old girl who could have been a Hispanic or Filipina. The avatar allowed law enforcement to pose and talk to men under her identity without using the image of an actual human child. Sugar was dressed innocently enough in a pair of pink shorts and simple white T-shirt. Sadly, that innocence was the hook for a great many men.

  Eddie Feng accepted Sugar’s friend request almost instantly, which was not surprising, since he’d chosen to pay for the services of little Blanca Limón. Detective Armstrong, burly man that he was, was a genius at writing under the guise of a preteen girl.

  Bored, he typed. What RU up 2?

  Feng’s words marched across the screen. Do I know you?

  Megan sez U R kool.

  I guess Megan knows, Feng said. Where’s she at now?

  Armstrong typed, Texas stupid. He finished it with a squinty emoticon with its tongue sticking out.

  Feng came back almost instantly. RU in Texas 2?

  Armstrong/Sugar sent a blue thumbs-up.

  Cool, Feng said.

  Armstrong cast the net. Wanta trade pics? C if you like what U C? I’m bored shitless.

  You shouldn’t curse, Feng said.

  Sorry, Daddy, Detective Armstrong typed, setting the hook.

  Feng was silent for two solid minutes. No words, no flashing dots to show he was typing.

  Finally, I guess appeared in the dialogue box.

  I’ll text them 2 U, Armstrong/Sugar said.

  just attach pics to message.

  Nape, Armstrong replied, purposely misspelling a few words, FB alredy warned me bout that. My mom could find out.

  That’s ok, Feng typed.

  Callahan held her breath while the dots pulsed in the dialogue box. He was still making up his mind.

  Then his cell number appeared.

  Sitting at the desk beside Armstrong, Joe Rice entered the cellular number in his computer. He put an index finger to his head and pulled an imaginary trigger at Eddie Feng’s stupidity.

  Feng’s dialogue box pulsed again. Then: What’s your contact info?

  Armstrong typed the number to one of the office burner smartphones—so called not because it was a prepaid, but because the disgusting photos that came across the devices rendered them unsuitable for anything but burning in a very hot fire once they’d been utilized as evidence for the prosecution. As soon as he entered the number, Armstrong typed POS—parent over shoulder—and logged out.

  Joe Rice looked up from his computer and raised both fists high in the air. “He shoots, he scores, the crowd goes wild.”

  “Talk to me, Joe,” Callahan said.

  “Eddie Feng’s phone is pinging a tower off Harry Hines Boulevard near the LBJ Expressway. Google Maps shows two strip clubs in that quadrant. One of them is closed until six, but a place called Chicas Peligrosas opens at noon. It’s not far from here.”

  Callahan stood again and grabbed her jacket, glaring across the squad room. “Why aren’t y’all already in your cars?”

  Less than ten minutes after Special Agent Kelsey Callahan slapped the flat of her hand on the top of her desk, fourteen members of the North Texas Crimes Against Children Task Force followed her out the hangar door en route to Chicas Peligrosas. Considering the story Blanca Limón told her about Eddie Feng and his friends, Callahan thought she might just arrest everyone in the place. Even if they weren’t involved with Feng, odds are they’d be sitting around watching a bunch of kids take their clothes off. It would do them good to cool their heels in Dallas County lockup until a judge cut them loose. They might beat the rap, but they wouldn’t be able to beat the ride.

  11

  Less than six miles from the Dallas Area CAC Task Force hangar, Jack Ryan, Jr., slouched at his wobbly table and tried to figure out how he could unsee the sad scene unfolding amid the pulsing lights and throbbing music on the raised stage less than ten feet away. He ordered a
second bottle of Corona from a sullen Hispanic waitress. Unlike the girls on the stage, who wore nothing but tiny G-strings and sweaty layers of body glitter, the waitress got to wear a tube top. Unfortunately, it was so small it wouldn’t have covered a roll of breath mints, let alone her full figure. Not that any strip club was an upstanding establishment, but there were strip clubs and there were strip clubs. These girls looked awfully young and it made Jack feel dirty to be within a hundred feet of them. He did his best impersonation of a happy-go-lucky frat boy, but a sticky film of unknown residue on the table’s surface made him wish he’d worn long sleeves. The slightly sour smell of the place melded with the pulsing bass note from the speakers behind the stage like some kind of enhanced interrogation measure, making it difficult to think.

  Ryan faced the dancers but scanned the rest of the club with his peripheral vision—a respite from focusing on the poor girls on stage doing their level best to look sexy. He knew Chavez was doing the same, taking the left half of the club—including a couple tables of triad types and Fee Fi Fo Fum, who remained by the front door. Jack looked predominantly at the area to his right. The strobe lights of the stage left the area extra-dark, but he could just make out the curtained booths in the shadows along the back wall—where the special “dance” arrangements were taken care of. At the far end of the stage, Eddie Feng sat next to an equally sleazy-looking Tres Equis guy and tapped away on his iPad in between slugs of Red Bull.

  Feng was the polar opposite of the giant at the front door. His skin was pasty and pale, appearing to glow pulsing strobes. As with many of the people Ryan had followed over the years, there was nothing formidable about the man at all. In fact, calling him wormy was a disservice to actual worms.

  In addition to working on the iPad, Feng scribbled notes in a spiral notebook on the table in front of him. Ryan didn’t know exactly what this guy was up to, but he knew he wanted to get a look at that spiral notebook as well as the iPad.