Known Dead ch-2

by Donald Harstad

  ‘‘I’m worried about that mission business,’’ I said. ‘‘Whatever it is, it doesn’t sound like harvesting marijuana.’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ said Hester.

  We both looked at George, half expecting a ‘‘pish tosh’’ official FBI disclaimer.

  ‘‘Yeah, it scares me half to death,’’ he said. Earnestly.

  ‘‘Oh, swell,’’ said Hester. ‘‘You were supposed to say that there was nothing to fear, or something like that.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, I know,’’ said George, sitting back down and picking up the stack of Melissa’s papers. ‘‘However… A ‘blocking force,’ of course, is a military term for force that blocks.’’ He looked up, pleased.

  ‘‘Boy,’’ I said, ‘‘am I glad you’re here.’’

  ‘‘No, no, no,’’ he said. ‘‘Let me finish. That dude you and Hester saw making his getaway from the farm, I think I’ve found him in here. Or his tracks anyway.’’ He pushed a single-page document toward us.

  It was a letter, obviously mimeographed, with the recipient’s name newer and darker than the rest. ‘‘Armed Forces of the Reoccupation Government’’ was in a curved letterhead, with a little guy in a tricornered hat, with a musket and a flag. Very similar to the National Guard symbol, except the man was standing in front of a capitol-shaped building with a cracked dome. There was one of those little wavy banners below that, which said ‘‘White Freedom.’’ The body seemed to be a notification of a meeting of some sort, and exhorted everyone from the ‘‘unit’’ to be there. The date was about three months ago, April 14th, and the location was a town in Minnesota I never heard of. The signature was Edward Killgore, Col., AFRG. But it was actually signed with a scrawl that looked kind of like a G with a couple of circles after it.

  ‘‘So?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘The signature,’’ said George. ‘‘Look at the signature.’’

  I squinted, then put on my reading glasses. ‘‘God?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘No, no, no!’’ he said, exasperated. ‘‘Not God, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that’s Gabe. That’s an e that he trails off, and it looks like

  …’’

  ‘‘Gabe.’’

  ‘‘Gabe.’’

  We all needed coffee after that. Sally came back to copy the papers, and we got her some coffee too.

  It turned out that what Melissa had provided us with was a fairly complete paper trail for a theoretical hoard of gold, kept in Belize and manipulated from San Jose, Costa Rica. The manipulating organization was known as the P.M. Corporation, with offices in San Jose; Portland, OR; Corpus Christi, TX; and St. Paul, MN. Well, box numbers. They listed suites only in San Jose and Portland. P.M., it seemed, stood for Precious Metals. So…

  What they did was this: You bought a share in the P.M. gold, for $500. This got you an ounce. They kept the gold marked with your name, and it would be instantly available to you when and if the government of the United States collapsed and there was a ‘‘World Upheaval followed by a World Crash.’’ This, by the way, seemed to be pretty inevitable, if you listened to P.M. If, on the off chance, the United States hadn’t collapsed by 2015, you would receive $5,000 per invested share. Right. Wanna buy a bridge?

  Interestingly enough, although P.M. stoutly claimed that there was no money of value except gold (the rest were all ‘‘false creations of credit’’), they would accept your personal check.

  And it was in this bunch that Herman had invested his and his son’s net worth. So had many, many others, if you could believe that part of the P.M. spiel. This wasn’t the first group that did this that I’d had information about, but P.M. was the first one I’d seen with glossy, slick brochures.

  ‘‘People can’t really be this dumb, can they?’’

  ‘‘Carl,’’ said George, ‘‘they get a lot dumber than that.’’

  I’d worked fraud cases before, but it had been my experience that the average Iowa farmer would read a spiel like that one and spit on the shiny shoes that tried to sell it to him. Politely, of course. Maybe even apologetically. But he’d spit accurately, nonetheless. Herman must have been a little short of saliva one day. Not to mention brains. Yet he was known to be a little short on assets as well. He’d been convinced enough to borrow and beg to get the funds to buy into the P.M. hoard. The ‘‘pot of gold,’’ as I began to think of it.

  ‘‘God,’’ said Hester. ‘‘He borrowed money to buy into that?’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Well,’’ said George, ‘‘that’s not half of it. We’ve dealt with P.M. and its right-wing connections before this. There actually is some gold, you know.’’

  No, I hadn’t known. As it turned out, P.M. was just one of several names used by a small group of Nazi types in South America who were supporting the neo-Nazis in the United States. The money that they gathered in was shipped back into the United States and ended up in the coffers of some militant groups, who used it mostly to buy equipment and for publicity and recruitment propaganda. Well, a lot of it went into the pockets of certain individuals too.

  ‘‘You know,’’ said George, ‘‘that’s one of the stranger aspects of all this business. Most of the individuals who prosper here have followers. Most of them exhort those followers not to pay their federal taxes, and many don’t. But most of those making the big profits do report to the IRS, and pay their taxes up front. They just claim that they don’t. Neat, isn’t it?’’

  ‘‘That it is.’’ I got up to go get more coffee. ‘‘Anybody else want more?’’

  ‘‘Me,’’ said Sally.

  ‘‘Okay.’’

  ‘‘Can I ask a question?’’ said Sally.

  All three of us officers had worked with Sally enough to know that she could be trusted completely and that she frequently contributed quite a bit to investigations.

  ‘‘Sure,’’ I said.

  ‘‘What do you think Herman’s wife thinks about all this? I mean, don’t you think she’d be furious about the money?’’

  ‘‘I don’t think Nola probably gave him too much crap about it,’’ I said, sort of absently. I hadn’t really thought about it.

  ‘‘I sure would,’’ she said earnestly.

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ I said, ‘‘but think about this situation. They’ve been married, what, about thirty years by now? Experienced the same ups and downs. Know the same people. They were probably quite a bit alike when they got married, for that matter.’’

  ‘‘So,’’ said Sally, ‘‘you think she agrees with him?’’

  ‘‘I think so,’’ I answered. ‘‘Either that or she could be behind it and he’s just following her. It sure wouldn’t be the first time.’’

  ‘‘But that big an investment?’’ Sally seemed truly perplexed.

  ‘‘Actually,’’ said George of the Bureau, ‘‘it’s not so much an investment as… as a commitment, I guess you’d say.’’

  ‘‘Commitment?’’ said Sally. ‘‘Like, in a promise?’’

  ‘‘Sort of,’’ said Hester. ‘‘I think George’s right. It would be like a couple investing heavily in their church or their mutual religion. That happens a lot, for a lot less of a promise of a good return on the investment.’’

  ‘‘Oh.’’

  ‘‘On the other hand,’’ said George.

  ‘‘No!’’ came from me and Hester at about the same time. George is an attorney by education, and an agent only by trade. He can argue endlessly on either side of a question.

  ‘‘Sorry I asked.’’ Sally grinned. ‘‘But I still say I’d be bent about that… even if’’-and the grin broadened- ‘‘it was my fault in the first place. I mean, if he’s dumb enough to do what I told him to do?’’ She smiled coyly. ‘‘What’s a girl to do?’’

  The point? How well did we know Nola Stritch? Obviously not well enough to know if she was like Sally, so not well enough at all.

  ‘‘I’ll do her,’’ sighed Hester. ‘‘Thanks, Sally.’’

  ‘‘No
problem. Just too bad the smartest cop got stuck with it.’’ With that, she stuck out her tongue at George and me and went back to copying papers.

  In the meantime, George told us about the computers.

  The combined DCI/FBI evidence team, working the Stritch residence, had apparently seized three computers, along with numerous disks. Neat. They were coming into the office with them before going to the lab.

  ‘‘We think,’’ said George, ‘‘that Herman and company probably did a lot of their correspondence on the machines, along with, maybe, a database of addresses…’’

  ‘‘Great,’’ said Hester. ‘‘We get to go over it?’’

  ‘‘That could be a problem,’’ said George. ‘‘The lab folks want their experts to do it, in case there’s any crypto stuff, and messages might be destroyed if we pry…’’

  ‘‘I don’t think,’’ I said, ‘‘that Herman’s able to cope with anything complex…’’

  ‘‘But do we want to take the chance?’’

  Normally, I wouldn’t want to take a chance on destroying evidence. But George told us that it would be about three weeks before the information would be back from the lab.

  ‘‘Your lab, the FBI lab, right?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Sure.’’

  ‘‘And they won’t give us shit,’’ I said. ‘‘If there’s anything concerning the P.M. organization, for instance… it’ll be classified because it’s part of an ongoing investigation, and we’ll never hear about it. Right?’’

  George didn’t say anything.

  ‘‘And no matter what’s there, it just might as well be destroyed as far as our little investigation is concerned. Right?’’ I asked again.

  George had kind of a pained look on his face. ‘‘Probably.’’

  ‘‘And even if your people,’’ I said, turning to Hester, ‘‘had rights to the stuff, they’d just hand it over to Eff Bee One.’’ I used the derogatory term for the FBI. Well, one of them.

  ‘‘Sure,’’ said Hester. ‘‘No administrator can take the hard decision. Even if it kills the investigation. He’s still ‘done the right thing.’ ’’ She shrugged. ‘‘That’s a lot better than trying to explain why you permanently screwed up the evidence.’’

  It was quiet in our little room.

  ‘‘Well,’’ said Sally, ‘‘that’s terrible.’’

  It was quiet again, for what seemed like a minute.

  ‘‘Are we agreed,’’ I asked, ‘‘that there’s likely to be stuff on those machines we need to see?’’

  ‘‘Oh, sure,’’ said George. ‘‘No doubt.’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ said Hester. ‘‘Probably quite a bit. For all the good it’ll do us.’’

  ‘‘Well,’’ I said, ‘‘do we agree that Herman is probably not a computer genius?’’

  We did.

  ‘‘And even if his wife is ten times brighter, he’s still going to have to be able to run it without screwing it up too bad if he makes a mistake?’’

  We agreed about that too.

  ‘‘So just how heavily encrypted can this be? Just a simple password, probably?’’

  Probably would be. We agreed on that too. In fact, we also agreed that it wouldn’t be too complex, and would be something that Herman couldn’t possibly mess up.

  ‘‘Like,’’ said Sally, ‘‘his name?’’

  I’d almost forgotten she was there. But she was probably right.

  It was silent for a few seconds more.

  ‘‘Is it time to eat supper yet?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘That all you think of?’’ asked George.

  Eighteen

  The plan was this: When the two agents from the lab crew got in, they’d have several priorities. First of all, they’d be thinking both about supper and about their motel room. Fine. George, as the resident agent, would offer to take them to a good restaurant. Actually, the only restaurant. But, given the press being all over the place, they surely couldn’t leave their evidence in their car. Nor, given the sensitivity, could they very well leave it at their motel. Especially after George would explain that we thought we’d seen some known extremists in the area. Where would they store the evidence until they could get it to the lab? Why, at the Sheriff’s Department, that’s where. Where else?

  George was really funny, saying things like ‘‘I can’t believe you’re actually going to go through with this,’’ and ‘‘I can’t believe I’m going to be a party to this,’’ and things like that. His own curiosity, however, was the deciding factor. He was totally suave with the lab guys.

  I didn’t do too bad myself, writing out a receipt for each separate component of the computers they’d brought in: a tower, a desktop, and a laptop. Two monitors, one printer, and one external modem. And one external 5?-inch disk drive.

  ‘‘Must have been running old software,’’ I said, writing the serial number of the drive on my sheet.

  The youngest of the lab agents glanced at me when I said that. Suspicious of people, he wasn’t too happy leaving the equipment with someone who knew what it was. Like I’d do anything…

  Anticipating that they’d be polite and ask Hester and me to go with them, we decided we had already eaten. We were also busy. But ‘‘thanks anyway.’’

  After the computers were in our padlocked evidence room, the absent Lamar and I being the only two officers with a key to the heavy padlock, and while the agents were eating and then sleeping, what would the local homicide unit be doing? Slick, no? I doff my hat…

  About an hour later, Hester and I were sitting in the tiny evidence room, with almost no ventilation, locked in by Sally, who had been entrusted with my key to the padlock, and whom I would contact via walkie-talkie to let us out. Having finished taking three Polaroid shots of the computers just the way the FBI agents had placed them in the room, and then struggling with the extension cords we’d had to scrounge up to even get power to the computers, not to mention having to sit on the floor with the machines, as there were no tables in the room, only shelves, I was having second thoughts about the whole business.

  We had finally completely assembled and wired up two of the machines, leaving the laptop aside. It appeared to have a dead battery, and we sort of thought that it would likely just have copies of the stuff in the desktop anyway. The lab crew had seized the printer, thank God. And now we were into the machines at last.

  ‘‘Well,’’ I said, turning on the tower, ‘‘let’s see what he’s been running…’’

  A mouse click on ‘‘Start… Documents’’ showed us the last fifteen documents that had been opened. Most of them started with ‘‘ltr’’ and had a date. All we had to do was click on one of them, and the word processor of choice automatically loaded from the hard drive. Click on ‘‘save as’’ and we had a complete list of documents. We printed them all.

  Next, on to ‘‘the Net.’’ Click on ‘‘Properties… Navigation. .. View History’’ and we got the ‘‘www’’ addresses of every site the machine had accessed in the last twenty days. Almost six hundred of them. Print ’em, Dano.

  Next, I went to the e-mail section. That was where we hit the dread ‘‘Crypto’’ device. It said ‘‘Enter Password for Access.’’ There were two boxes. I typed in ‘‘Herman’’ on the top, and ‘‘Nola’’ on the bottom. That’s all there was to it. Got every message they’d sent or received since, apparently, April 11, 1995. I started the printer, a neat little ink-jet. Quiet too. I began with the ‘‘Messages Sent’’ list. I had to print them out individually, so it took a while. Had to reload the paper twice.

  ‘‘Well, damn,’’ said Hester.

  I chuckled. ‘‘Easy as pie…’’

  ‘‘Now for the hard part,’’ she said. ‘‘Will the lab team be able to figure out we were in?’’

  ‘‘Oh,’’ I said, ‘‘probably.’’ I got busy bringing up the ‘‘Messages Received’’ section. ‘‘ ’Cause if we erase the record of our entry, we erase all of ’em. To do that, we have to go one la
yer further down than the ‘clear entry’ boxes, and that gets easy to grunge up.’’

  ‘‘Grunge up? Is this, like, a computer term?’’

  ‘‘Well, kind of. What I mean is, if we do that, and it hasn’t been done on anything else, it looks like somebody did something really different on the box… and this setup is so simple, it would look funny if somebody cleaned it up.’’

  ‘‘Oh.’’

  ‘‘So,’’ I said, inordinately pleased with myself, ‘‘shall we try the next one?’’

  Since it was so easy, and neither of us really had to do anything, we started reading the received messages. They started with the most recent, and progressed in reverse order to the first received. It was about the third one down. It looked like this:

  FROM: BRAVO6@XII. COMONCOMON. COM

  TO: STRITCHHERMN@WIDETALK. COM

  SUBJECT: YOUR GUEST

  DATE: WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 1996 2:31 PM

  DON’T LET HIM IN. HE’S GOT A BOMB. BE SAFE. KILL HIM.

  We looked at each other. I spoke first. ‘‘Son of a bitch.’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ said Hester, with a long breath. ‘‘Son of a bitch.’’

  ‘‘We should get a long sheet…’’ I said.

  ‘‘We don’t need one,’’ said Hester. ‘‘Wednesday. Two-thirty. Two thirty-one. Adjusting for the time…’’

  ‘‘God…’’

  ‘‘Right when they shot Philip Rumsford.’’

  ‘‘Remember,’’ I said, ‘‘remember when Nola spoke to somebody inside and then they shot him?’’

  ‘‘Oh, yeah…’’

  ‘‘Somebody who got that message…’’

  ‘‘We gotta see more of these,’’ breathed Hester.

  We did. Just as easy. Just as productive. All that remained to do was to wait for the printer to finish with the first one. That’s when we heard voices in the outer office. Cops. Now how in the hell could we come out to get more paper, or to do anything else, with cops sitting right outside the door. Granted, not only were they our cops but we outranked anybody who could possibly be there. But, in the first place, it would look like Hester and I were fooling around in the evidence room. I was absolutely certain that there was no way we could come out of that room without looking guilty. And a little excited, for that matter. In the second place, as soon as that rumor got going, sure as hell somebody who knew the lab agents would pick up on it, and then the shit would really hit the fan. Stuck. I reached up and turned off the light.