Back-Tracker

by Bob Blink

  “My wife and friends are not the source of the problem,” Jake objected. “They have been aware of my ability for some time. Besides Zack was a potential victim of whoever was doing this, as was Karin. Nate came and helped me out. Without his help I might not know what we have learned. The problem is elsewhere.”

  “I just want to be sure we understand everyone who knows,” Carlson replied consolingly.

  Jake frowned, but nodded. “There were also a handful of local citizens who might have picked up on something odd going on. I tried to be careful, but I couldn’t be positive that none of them might have learned or overheard something they shouldn’t have. I have no idea who they are,” Jake said.

  “We can check out all the others,” Carlson said, “but I’m not sure what to do about the members of the community. We have no idea who they might be.”

  “I’ll try and recall the circumstances, and maybe we can put some names to them, but given what we are learning, I’m becoming convinced I’m going to have to go back and nip this in the bud. If we can find any leads that would be great, but if not, I might have to relive it again being especially alert to where the leak might be.”

  “Don’t do anything yet,” Carlson cautioned. “Let me see what I can learn.”

  “Don’t worry. I intend to see this through with Laney here. I want to see who those two heavies who killed Ray might be and who they work for.”

  “Good. We’ll talk in the morning. I’ll initiate the call.”

  Jake nodded, and then terminated the transmission. After shutting down the equipment that yielded the secure link, he stood, stretched, and headed into the other room. They’d go out for dinner, and he’d explain to Karin what he’d learned.

  Chapter 18

  Special Agent Jim Laney arrived at the front door of Jake’s home just after nine thirty that evening. Jake met him with a smile, and an informal greeting.

  “Hi, Jim,” he said as the tired agent stepped into the lobby.

  Laney picked up on the use of his first name. Despite he and Jake being friends of a sort, Jake always called him by his last name. The use of his first name was an alert. He looked at Jake, the question clear in his eyes.

  Jake nodded and pointed toward the study door at the far end of the small hallway off the large great room. Jim left his suitcase in place and headed toward the door that Jake had indicated. Jake found it interesting that Laney was dressed almost exactly as he’d been when he visited from Washington four months from now when this had all started. The clothes he wore, the small rolling suitcase, were exactly the same.

  “Bugged?” Laney asked once they were inside the study and Jake had discretely closed the door.

  “Most of the lower level,” Jake acknowledged. “The upstairs and this room are exceptions, and your people left that thing which is supposed to block anything they might have missed.”

  “So that’s how they might have learned much of what they know,” Laney surmised out loud. “Do you speak much of your ability around the house?”

  “At times,” Jake admitted. “There was never a reason to be particularly careful. I’m certain we’ve talked about it in the kitchen and during meals. Those conversations would have been recorded. There was probably even more discussion in the bedroom, but they wouldn’t have been able to monitor those conversations unless they had other means of listening in.”

  “Such techniques exist,” Laney warned.

  “I understand, and during the summer months the windows might have been open. If we are correct as to when they discovered my existence, it would have been after summer, so perhaps they never had the opportunity.”

  “How is your wife reacting to this?”

  “As you might expect. The idea someone is listening makes her very uncomfortable.”

  “You can ask Carlson to have the monitoring devices removed,” Laney reminded him.

  “Not until this immediate situation is resolved. A change like that might alert them and modify events. I want this to go exactly as it did last time around. Almost certainly I’ll have to jump back, and the removal can happen at an earlier time so none of what they learned will happen. Simply finding those responsible isn’t going to clean this up to my satisfaction.”

  “Did you talk with Carlson since this morning?” Laney asked.

  Jake filled the FBI agent in on the information that Susan Carlson had forwarded earlier in the evening.

  “Very curious,” Laney remarked when Jake had finished. “But nothing you have been involved with touches on Mob activity as far as we know.”

  “There’s a link,” Jake said, “we just haven’t realized it as yet.”

  “Susan is going to call in the morning?” Laney asked.

  “Later in the morning. She had something scheduled she wants to complete before we talk.”

  “Well, I’d like to shower and get some rest. It’s after midnight my time, and you’ve given me a lot to ponder.”

  “I’ll show you the guest room. It’s on the downstairs level, and is one of the areas they can monitor, so keep that in mind. Before that, let’s move your car into the garage for the night. Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but why make it easy for someone to plant a listening device or tracker on it while it sits out all night?”

  They went out for breakfast the next morning. Laney and Karin exchanged brief greetings. They had met a couple of months earlier after the Washington affair, but this morning the awareness by all parties that anything they said could be overheard made the exchanges awkward. Karin headed off to work taking Janna with her, and the two men took the agent’s rental car across town.

  “I’d like to see Ray’s house and both newspapers,” Laney said as they drove.

  Jake had to remind himself that this Laney had yet to visit the place in Oakland, despite Jake’s memories of the two of them breaking in before.

  “We can run by after talking to Carlson,” Jake agreed. “It’s too far to drive to and get back for her call.”

  “It might be useful to drop in on Ray and talk with him like you’ve done before,” Laney mused. “We might be able to learn if he has any contact with organized crime that would lead up to the events that will get him killed.”

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I talked with him, and while my interpretation of what he told me was colored at the time by the fact I thought he was planning on taking a powder, I don’t think he had any indication that he was at risk. I don’t want to risk alerting him, or risk changing what is going to happen. Depending on what we learn, that might be something to approach with a future back-track when we know more. The conversation could be more productive at that time.”

  Somewhat reluctantly, Laney agreed. “I want to watch the incident as it goes down,” Laney said. “Just as you and Nate watched the evening progress, we can already be in place. We can make reservations in advance and have a table where it will be possible to see everything.”

  “We can do that,” Jake agreed. “Then we can come back the following morning and arrest the two men who killed Ray. Catching them with the body will provide the maximum leverage.”

  “This is more than a little embarrassing,” Susan Carlson said a couple of hours later when their video conference was established. “I was never told a number of important things.”

  “Who told you about this?” Laney asked.

  “Ted Kramer from the Organized Crime Division. He was the representative that was part of the task force which looked into the attempt on Senator Kerns more than a year ago. I had an interesting meeting with the Director this morning, when Kramer was reluctant to talk with me and persuaded the Director to order Kramer to open up. Otherwise I wouldn’t have learned much of this.”

  “They know who targeted the Senator?” Jake asked, guessing what Carlson might have learned.

  “There’s more to it than that. The investigation yielded very little as I told you a long time ago. Senator Kerns had a tracker that had been placed on
him somehow, which the drones could have used to target him. That’s one of the reasons we were certain that Kerns was the target. With the tracker, the drones would easily be able to target the particular suite that had been assigned to the Senator. Since a number of senators were in the hotel that night, without it there could have been confusion which room was really his.”

  “How was the device planted on him?” Laney asked.

  “That we apparently don’t know, but it is believed it was planted before he reached the hotel and activated remotely later sometime shortly before the attack.”

  “You haven’t said who was behind the attempt,” Jake pointed out.

  Carlson nodded. “You might recall that the Senator was having an earlier breakfast with one of his supporters, a businessman named Mark LoBue who often contributed heavily to Kern’s re-election campaign.”

  “I knew that someone else had been in the room, but he wasn’t important. Most of the news reports glossed over him in favor of the Senator. Are you saying he was somehow involved. That doesn’t make sense because he was killed with the Senator before I shot the drones.”

  “Mark LoBue was the real target, not the Senator,” Carlson informed them. “While everyone assumed that LoBue was there to discuss money he was going to donate in exchange for the usual support from the Senator for issues that mattered to the businessman, in fact they were meeting for a different reason. Mark LoBue had somehow learned of ongoing criminal activities certain members of San Francisco’s organized crime lords were pursuing, and had contacted his friend Kerns. The breakfast meeting was a brainstorming session in preparation for a special meeting with an unannounced gathering of a Grand Jury.”

  “Unfortunately, the meeting was not as secret as the two of them had hoped. Somehow those who Mark LoBue was informing on had learned of the plan, and while they hadn’t been able to locate the very cautious LoBue, they knew where the Senator was going to be, and planned their actions accordingly. If they could hit Kerns during the breakfast meeting, they could probably get LoBue as well. They didn’t have much of a window because Kerns and LoBue were scheduled to meet with the Grand Jury immediately after the news conference with the other senators who had brought Kerns to the hotel in the first place. Once LoBue talked, it would be too late. Billions of dollars were at risk, as well as a whole new area the group was planning on expanding into. Once their plans were revealed, any hope of expanding would be lost.”

  “That’s why there was no follow-up attempt on the Senator,” Laney said.

  “That’s right,” Carlson said. “For weeks the security around Kerns was intense, but nothing ever materialized.”

  “What about LoBue?” Jake asked.

  “He was killed in an accident seven months later.”

  “So they got him,” Jake said.

  “Yes, but by then it was a revenge killing. The damage was already done. He’d talked, their plans were disrupted, and several of their key people landed in jail. One, a forward thinking planner was killed in a raid. The group still hasn’t recovered from the loss.”

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t know about this?” Laney asked.

  “Special Agent Ted Kramer is responsible for that. He could see no gain for the real reason behind the attempt to become known. He felt it would be in the Agency’s interest if those behind the attempt didn’t know we knew as much as we did. It also took some public pressure off his organization if it was believed that terrorists were somehow behind the attempt. Even after LoBue was killed, the true nature of the attack was buried. I believe he hoped those behind the attack would get careless at some point if they didn’t believe we were looking in their direction. Apparently, that hasn’t happened.”

  “These are the people who have learned about me, and want me to retroactively reinstate their attack on, not Kerns, but this LoBue person,” Jake said.

  “That’s my guess,” Carlson said. “We don’t know exactly who, but someone in organized crime is directing the effort.”

  “They aren’t usually so round about,” Laney said. “Why didn’t they simply put it on the line to Jake? “Go back and let this guy get killed or else your family pays the price.”

  “That was probably their first thought,” Carlson said. “I’d guess that Jake is right that as they learned about him they felt this other approach had a better chance of working. In the past, Jake has been presented situations where his actions to help have resulted in deaths of others. He has always gone back and made sure that didn’t happen. If they could make it appear he’d inadvertently caused an innocent person’s life, they could hope he’d try and unravel the matter.”

  “And this time they knew I had a hard restriction that would limit my options,” Jake added.

  “Between that, the death of an innocent, and the threats against your family, they could hope you’d decide to let matters adjust back to the way they’d been before you got involved. If it didn’t work, they could always revert to the more direct approach as you’ve suggested.”

  “And Henry Ray?” Jake asked.

  “Simple window dressing. He was used to make it look reasonable to you, a brother trying to save his sister. Also to direct any investigating you did away from the people really pulling the strings.”

  “But we don’t know who exactly?”

  “We know the organization, but not the specific people involved. Certainly the local head, and those they report to back East would have to know. That means awareness of you and what you can do has spread to a number of people in the organization. Who discovered you, and how many are involved in planning this we can’t say.”

  “This is worse than I thought,” Jake said. “Unless I can find the original leak and plug it, those inside this organization will be able to use threats against my family in the future anytime they want someone selectively removed in the past. We’d have to disappear completely to be safe.”

  “There are a few people we can ask,” Jim Laney suggested.

  “I doubt they will know as much as we hope,” Jake said, recalling the care taken to keep those involved in the kidnapping and attempted murder of Zack from knowing who had hired them. “It all comes back to going back and finding out how they learned about me.”

  Jake looked at the camera that broadcast his image back to Carlson’s office in Washington.

  “Any luck with that list of names we put together?”

  “Not yet. I’ll make it a priority to follow up. We will talk again in the morning. Have you made plans?”

  “I’ll show Laney around today, and then we’ll be ready to watch Ray’s killing go down. We’ll need support from the local FBI office to bring in those we want to question.”

  “I’ll alert them at the appropriate time. We don’t want them wondering why we know in advance and aren’t taking action,” Carlson said.

  Chapter 19

  After finishing the call to Carlson, they had decided to go and look over the key locations that Laney wished to see. They had stopped for coffee at Starbucks, and were now headed toward the Bay Bridge, having made a pass by the newspaper office in south San Francisco. They were using the rental car, but Jake was driving so that Laney would be free to look around as much as he wished. He had brought a digital SLR and was taking pictures with a telephoto lens, although Jake couldn’t see what use the pictures would serve.

  They discussed the various individuals who had pretended to be Henry Ray at various times as well as the other suspects that had been part of the investigation thus far.

  “You are certain this last one is really Ray?” Laney asked as Jake followed the freeway as it made a gentle turn toward the Bay Bridge a short distance ahead.

  “Not completely. It looks to be him, and everything I’ve uncovered suggests that is the case, but until you have him fingerprinted and checked against the records, I’ll still have a small doubt.”

  Laney considered this as he felt the transition onto the bridge structure and had his view partial
ly cut off by the steel walls that lined the edge of the bridge.

  “We’ve worked together more than I remember, haven’t we?” Laney asked after a moment of contemplation.

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked.

  “I sense something. You seem to know me better than you should given how much we’ve interacted. You can anticipate me too often and seem to be aware of some of my likes and dislikes when I know damn well we’ve never discussed them.”

  Jake smiled. “A few things have been looped around and gotten lost, I guess.”

  “For example,” Laney pressed.

  “Well, this situation for example. We are going to Ray’s house because you’ve never seen it before. But from my perspective, you and I broke into his place together a while back when we were first looking into matters.”

  “Broke in?” Laney asked. “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”

  “As I recall, you weren’t very happy about it, but it didn’t matter in the end because now it never happened and won’t.”

  Laney shook his head. “A man could be your partner and never know just what you had shared. When was the first time?”

  “The first time we actually were on the same side was in Atlanta when those nut cases tried to trigger a bomb.”

  “Atlanta? You weren’t in Atlanta at all.”

  “Not the way it ended up,” Jake agreed. “The first time around I was in the thick of it with you, Carlson, and a whole bunch of other agents.”

  “I always suspected Carlson had some inside information. I should have guessed it was you.”