Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  A few years ago Terrance and Julia had taken the tour to the observation deck on top of the Empire State Building. Julia’s idea of course—it was too silly and touristy for his taste—but he had to admit that the view was breathtaking. This was even better, like a topographic map of the city that scrolled beneath them as they flew north. Skyscrapers flew by in clumps, first at Lower Manhattan, and then Midtown. Finally, the green swath of Central Park drifted below and to their left.

  As they traveled, Malcolm pointed out a real estate development that he had a hand in, favorite restaurants and galleries, a friend’s yacht in the East River, an office building where he was a part owner. The guy may have been a hedge fund manager and rich as a Saudi prince, but he wasn’t sitting still.

  “So how are things with you?” Malcolm asked. “You know, I always pegged you as a Wall Street guy myself. I remember cribbing off your test that time in stats and wishing I knew my numbers as well as you did. Was surprised when you took a government job.”

  “The CIA is a good stepping stone for other positions. Think tanks, private boards, all of that.”

  “Sure, but you’ve got to get out early enough to make it worth your while. Start earning a living.”

  Truth was, Terrance’s career had stalled. Some of it was Julia’s fault; if she hadn’t been so damn preoccupied with medical school and then her residency—building her own career, in short—he could have put in the hours, made the contacts necessary to get ahead.

  At this point he was a nobody. Until he became a somebody, all those think tanks and private boards would have no use for him.

  In the meantime, he needed money. His backers had disappeared the instant Sarah Redd pulled the plug on the project. Maybe they hadn’t given up on Namibia, but they’d given up on Terrance Nolan.

  It had been a perfect plan. Sarah would send CIA assets to Namibia, find out the strength of the Chinese camp. Then, when the coup went down, American air power would neutralize the Blackwing contractors while the rebels took control of the Namibian government. All that oil would still be in the ground and someone would have to get it up. The new government would offer no-bid contracts to Sarah and Terrance’s friends, who would, in turn, show proper appreciation to their benefactors.

  Sarah had the authority to pull it off, Terrance the knowhow to make friends in appropriately low places. The implants were perfect subjects, since they didn’t even need to know what they were looking for. They could scope out the military base, and Sarah could get the full specs on everything necessary to make the coup successful with a minimal commitment of U.S. troops and aircraft. But now the coup was off. Terrance had almost panicked before a beautiful realization occurred to him. He’d bet on the wrong horse, but that didn’t matter because the race hadn’t started yet. Still time to change his wager.

  “I know how to earn a living,” Terrance said. “It’s not that hard when you have access to the kind of information that comes across my desk every day.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Hathwell said. “Ah, here we are.”

  Here turned out to be a restaurant in a high rise on the Upper East Side, near the river. Exclusive didn’t do justice to the place. Seating was in a smoked glass cube that seemed suspended in midair with views of most of Manhattan and across to Brooklyn. They entered through a narrow glass hallway with views of tiny cars and dots of people along the avenues far below.

  Access was only by air. The helipad had eight landing spots, but the restaurant itself only had four tables, each of which commanded a dedicated wall of the glass cube. Terrance realized with surprise that it must be common for a single party to arrive in more than one helicopter.

  There was no menu, or any other indication of what was on offer, but a small team of servers arrived at once with crab legs, baked bries, paté, wines. He was so taken with the views and the heady memory of the helicopter ride itself that it took him a moment to notice the women who brought the food and drink.

  They were absolutely gorgeous. Each wore a single-piece shift made of some diaphanous material. Sheer enough to see that they wore no underwear of any kind. The impression was far more erotic than if they’d come out in the nude.

  This, Terrance thought as he cut a slice of baked brie, was what he wanted from life.

  He looked away from the most beautiful of the servers to see Malcolm watching him. “I’m on a short lunch, but there are spa treatments downstairs if you’d like to linger after the meal. I’ll send the chopper back to get you when you’re ready.”

  “Spa treatment? Sounds like something for the women.”

  “Not this spa,” Malcolm said. A smile played at his lips. “It’s a gentleman’s massage. This place doesn’t cater to women, as a general rule.”

  “Ah.” His eyes strayed back to the beautiful women who serviced their table.

  They spent some time enjoying the food and chatting about their old days on the rowing team, about a former classmate who had been indicted for fraud, and various college hijinks.

  “Now let’s get down to it,” Malcolm said. “What have you got for me?”

  “I’m going to give you some information. It’s worth a lot of money. All I want in return is ten million dollars.”

  Malcolm raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all?”

  “If you play your cards right, you’ll make many multiples of that amount.”

  “But through insider trading, is that right? Illegal actions on my part?”

  “Only an idiot would be caught insider trading,” Terrance said. “Never happen to a smart guy like you.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Terrance. You’ve either got something or you don’t. Now what is it?”

  Terrance took a piece of paper and slid it across the table. “These are the stocks that are about to shoot through the roof. The official announcement is just a few days from now, so you’ll have to work fast.”

  Malcolm studied the list. “ChinaOne Petroleum? Blackwing Enterprises, Dillon Tool and Die, Uchdorf Limited. Blasko and Struthers.” He looked up. “The industries are hot at the moment, but I wouldn’t invest in some of these companies. ChinaOne is sixty percent owned by the Chinese government and overcapitalized. The Chinese keep all the plum fields for PetroChina.”

  “Not this time they didn’t.”

  “DT&T’s profits are a mess. Their stock is in the toilet.”

  “Not for long,” Terrance said.

  Malcolm looked up. “You sound awfully certain.”

  “I am. And so is the US government. They tried everything short of a coup to keep this deal from going down. It can no longer be stopped.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Malcolm said. “You give me everything you’ve got, let me check it out. Not just a list of companies, but specifics.”

  “I can do that.”

  “And instead of ten mill, I’ll offer one percent of my take. How does that sound?”

  “One percent?” Terrance said, dubious. “That doesn’t sound like much. I’m providing all the information, putting my career on the line.”

  “Off the top of my head I’d say there’s a hundred billion dollars in market cap in these companies. There’s certainly room to slide in and make some money. Even a modest run-up could net five, ten billion if you knew it was coming. And that’s going in cautiously. What’s one percent of ten billion?”

  Terrance licked his lips, suddenly dry. With that kind of money he could blow this all off. Even flee the country if it got out what he’d done. Live a lifestyle like Malcolm’s, flying back and forth in private jets and helicopters, surrounded by gorgeous, half-naked women.

  He nodded. “It’s a deal.”

  ________

  Terrance didn’t do anything about Julia until he was back in his hotel room. But first he flopped onto the bed and looked around the room with mounting disgust.

  Oh, there was nothing wrong with the hotel, per se. It was a small, clean place a few blocks from Penn Station. But it was middle cl
ass, generic, where working guys like himself spent a night or two.

  He found himself hating the Thomas Kinkade prints on the wall, the too-small windows, and the polyester bedspread meant for easy cleaning. The bathroom had those little pre-wrapped soaps and there was a note asking him to reuse his towels, together with some bullshit justification about helping the environment. Whatever.

  The moment of living large had vanished the instant Malcolm had left him to return to work. Terrance had taken a cab back to his hotel. He’d spend the night in Manhattan and catch the first train of the morning back to Washington.

  He lost himself in thoughts about how he’d spend his future wealth. Maybe a yacht, or a chateau in the south of France. None of these fantasies involved Julia. It was only when this thought came consciously to his mind that he remembered her request.

  Terrance phoned Hubert Chang. He got the man’s voice mail, but Chang returned his call a minute later.

  “Hey, what’s up, Terr?” He sounded only mildly irritated by the interruption, which was good.

  “I’ve got a question for you. Would it be possible to install software on someone’s computer that would tell you where they were located physically?”

  “You mean like GPS coordinates? No, not via software. But there’s plenty of data you can extract from someone’s computer if you feed it a Trojan Horse.”

  “Like what?” Terrance asked.

  “You can get someone’s IP address whenever they log in. In most cases that would narrow it to a geographic location. It’s like when you go to a web site and it seems to know where you’re at already. Quite easy to record that information and send it out.”

  “But only if they’re online.”

  “Well sure, but all the computer has to do is log in once to check email and you’ve got all sorts of information. Assuming you can trick someone into installing something on their computer. This some foreign government server or what?”

  “No, it’s just someone’s personal computer. I’m supposed to send someone some software to install and I was wondering if you could stick something else in that would tell me where he’s located. It’s a laptop.”

  “A laptop?” Chang sounded disappointed. “I thought you had a challenge for me. Just who is dumb enough to let you send executables? Never mind, I don’t care. I can do better than a domain name. Every time your guy carries his laptop into a new place his computer will search for wireless networks. I’ll trap that information and send it back to your email account.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Any programmer could do it in an hour or two, but I’m not any programmer. Might take me ten minutes. I’m in the middle of something right now, but how does this evening sound?”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Fine,” Chang said. “I’ll email it to you when I’m done. Just name it something innocuous and execute it from your install script.”

  “Uhm…my what?”

  “Your install script, you know what kicks off the installation and…” He trailed off with an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know why I bother. Fine, tell me what you need to install and I’ll do it for you.”

  Terrance explained how Julia had called and what she’d asked him to send. Chang listened in silence until he was done.

  “Your wife is still alive? Thought they had Markov hunting for her. He should have taken care of her by now.”

  “Well, he hasn’t.”

  “Hmm, maybe Markov’s not as good as he thinks he is. Probably my fault for thinking that. When you’re the best at what you do, you start to assume everyone else is, too.”

  “I just hope he appreciates what I’m about to do for him,” Terrance said.

  “Let me get this straight. Your wife thinks you’re going to help her out but instead you’re going to pass her location along to Markov. That’s just nasty. It’s like your revenge that she ran off with that South African dude.” He gave a laugh that ended with a piggish snort. “Yeah, I’ll help you. Want me to ping Markov when I’ve got it?”

  “Sure, why not? And thanks,” Terrance added, just to be safe. Nothing irritated a guy like Chang more than someone who didn’t show proper gratitude.

  “You know what’s even better?” Chang asked. “Julia thinks she needs the software to access Ian Westhelle’s implant, but it won’t do her any good. I locked her out of the system when I had access to his implant in the asylum. So all she’s going to do is give up her location and she won’t get anything in return. Funny, huh?”

  “Yeah, really funny.”

  Terrance was irrationally angry with Chang after he hung up the phone. At first he thought it was the crappy hotel room again, after that fabulous lunch in the glass cube, followed up by the full-body massage from three of the beautiful women in the silky, see-through clothes.

  No, he was irritated by the innuendo about Julia and Ian. Never mind that his wife had turned so frigid you could chill a bottle of wine between her legs. Everyone probably thought she was sleeping with the guy. Frankly, Terrance didn’t care, but it made him look bad.

  Well screw them all. As soon as Malcolm Hathwell worked his financial magic, he could tell them all to go to hell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  There was nothing yet from Terrance when Julia first got her new computer up and running and logged into her email account. Well, it had only been a few hours since the call. She’d check again that evening.

  They hired a Land Rover and drove north, along the N7, through the Cape Winelands. They passed mile after mile of vineyards with rugged mountains offering a dramatic backdrop.

  Driving rules were the same as Namibia, with the cars driving on the left side of the road. The hard thing to get used to wasn’t driving on the wrong side, but sitting on the wrong side. If Ian took a curve too fast, she found herself clutching for a nonexistent steering wheel or stabbing at a brake that wasn’t there.

  North of the Winelands the land dried out, the population grew more sparse. Every time they stopped, whether to get fuel or grab a bite to eat, Ian came back with his accent stronger. Ian’s family had lived in an English-speaking enclave of Cape Town, but he seemed fully bilingual. As his accent strengthened, he kept dropping untranslated bits of Afrikaans into his speech.

  Back in Julia’s school days, when Apartheid was the cause de jour, she’d come away with the superficial understanding of South Africa as a white minority with a poorer black majority, but the reality was more complex. There were plenty of people who seemed of mixed race—Ian called them colored—and others who looked Indian or Southeast Asian.

  Ian had an especially chummy conversation with a white man who pumped their gas at one petrol station and he returned to the car with a light step and a broad smile across his face.

  “You catch that?” he asked.

  “I heard lots of words. Some of them sounded like English.”

  “Aweh, that was my old china.”

  “What? Now you’re just making stuff up.”

  He grinned. “‘An old friend. We played on different sides in a cricket league when I was a boy. You’d never know it by looking at him, but one of his grandfathers was black. He told a couple of us kids, but swore us to secrecy.”

  “That wasn’t allowed?”

  “No way. Whites only league.” Ian took a short detour through Garies, a loose collection of farms in the Northern Cape. He drove through a couple of farms until he found a sun-withered old man working on an irrigation ditch through corn fields.

  “Wait here,” Ian said.

  Ian spoke with the farmer, and after a short conversation where Ian pointed to Julia, the old man put his arm around Ian and led him into the house. Ten minutes later they reemerged, and Ian walked back to the land rover, a pistol tucked in the waist of his pants.

  “Where did you get that thing?” Julia asked.

  “This isn’t California. No waiting period.” Ian smiled. “At 400 rand—that’s about 50 bucks—it was a steal. I’m sure i
t wasn’t his best. Told him a bunch of blacks were hassling you on the road, I needed some protection.”

  She glanced back at the farmer, confused. “But he’s black, too. Didn’t that offend him?”

  “He’s colored.” A shrug. “It’s complex.”

  They spent the night in the little town of Springbok on the Northern Cape. Ian wanted to keep going, but it was the last major town before Namibia and Julia needed to find somewhere with broadband wireless so she could download and install the software from her husband. And she was exhausted.

  The hotel was in a charming little building across from a stone church. The available room had only a single bed, but Ian quickly offered to sleep on the floor.

  Best still, the hotel had wireless, and she was pleased to discover a series of emails from Terrance in her box with large attachments.

  Hey, sorry I cut you off earlier. I’m glad you’re okay, I really am, and I hope everything works out. As soon as you know what’s going on, tell me and we’ll figure out what to do, k?

  Anyway, here are the files. Unzip them all in a folder, and then double click the “autoinstall” file. You’ll be all set.”

  Love, Terrance

  The email was sent from an anonymous account, one she didn’t recognize. So much for his speech about security. She followed his instructions. It took forever to download the series of files and even longer to install. What she wanted was a shower, followed by a good meal, and then to sleep and sleep.

  Ian came out of the shower a few minutes later. He wore a pair of jeans and a white tank top that showed off his shoulders and arms. He was freshly shaved for the first time she could remember since training several weeks ago. Julia’s eyes slid lower to the back of his jeans as he combed his hair in front of the dresser mirror, then back up to the mirror where she could see his blue, penetrating eyes. He glanced in the mirror back to the bed, where she sat in front of the computer. Their eyes met briefly and she looked quickly back to her computer.