by Stuart Woods
“Rita.”
“Rita what?”
“Garcia.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, checking her off. “The bus will be here in a few minutes. Just wait in the parking lot.”
Rita walked back to the parking lot, where other women were gathering, most of them being dropped off by relatives. Time to go to work, she thought. She approached an ample woman who had gotten out of a pickup truck. “Buenos días,” she said, and continued in Spanish. “I’m Rita. This is my first day. What sort of work is it?”
“It’s cleaning work,” the woman said. “I’m Carla.”
“Yeah, Carla, I know about the cleaning. I mean, is it a good place to work?”
“It doesn’t get any better around here,” the woman said. “The pay is twice what you’d get working some lady’s house, but you have to work hard. They fire you if they catch you grabbing a smoke or loafing.”
“That’s okay, I guess. I don’t mind working hard if the money is good. What sort of places you been working in there?”
“I’ve worked everywhere at one time or another. I’ve cleaned houses, I’ve cleaned shops, I’ve cleaned the country club.”
“Where will they start me out?” Rita asked.
“You never can tell. You’re just a number to these people. They don’t care about your name, or anything. It’s just ‘Hey you, clean that house.’ They’ll drop you off with a partner, and the two of you will do the place. You get half an hour for lunch. You bring lunch?”
“No,” Rita replied. “Nobody told me.”
“Tell you what, you stick with me today. I’ve got enough food for the two of us. I’ll show you the ropes.”
“Thanks,” Rita said. She turned to see a white school bus drive out of the gate and stop in the parking lot. The workers started to get on.
“You just sit next to me,” Carla said, “and they’ll put us together. That’s how they do it.”
Rita gave her name to a man with a clipboard, who checked off her name, compared her face to a Polaroid photograph that had been taken when she applied for the job and gave her a polyester jump suit and a security pass, which had her name and photograph on it. She sat down next to Carla.
“You should change now,” Carla said, “and leave your clothes on the bus. It will pick us up later.”
Rita went to the back of the bus, took a seat, changed clothes, aware of the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and returned to her seat next to Carla in the middle of the bus.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll get office space to clean,” Carla said. “That’s why I sit in the middle of the bus. The people up front get the houses, where you have to do laundry and clean up after parties and all that. The people in the back get the shops.”
“Thanks,” Rita said. “I’m lucky I met you.”
“You sure are,” Carla replied, patting her on the knee.
The bus stopped half a dozen times to let off people. Finally, it drew to another stop, and a security guard got on. “You two,” he said, pointing to Carla and Rita. “Come with me.”
The two women got off the bus, and it drove away, leaving them with the guard at the side of the road. Rita could not see any buildings.
“Hands on top of your head,” the man said.
Rita followed Carla’s example and allowed herself to be searched. The guard got a good grope of her breasts and leered at her. She tried to appear demure.
“Get in the car,” he said, pointing to a Range Rover.
Rita opened her mouth to ask where they were going, but Carla grabbed her arm and shook her head. She kept quiet, as the Range Rover drove down a thickly wooded lane for a quarter of a mile and pulled into a parking lot. Rita’s heart leapt. Ahead of her she saw a huge satellite dish, and to her left was a two-story building with very narrow windows. It looked like a cross between an office building and a jail, she thought.
“Everybody out,” the guard said. He led the two women through the front door of the building and into a small reception room. A hard-looking man in civilian clothes checked their names on a list and looked carefully at their ID cards, comparing their faces to their photographs. That done, they were buzzed through an opaque glass door and into a hallway. “You cleaned here before, didn’t you?” the guard said to Carla.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“You know the drill, then. You tell the new babe here what to do. I want you done in two hours.”
“Yes, sir,” Carla said. She turned to Rita. “Come with me.” She led the way down the hall to a utility closet and handed Rita a roll of plastic trash bags. “There’s offices up and down this hallway,” she said. “You start at this end, and I’ll start at the other. Empty all the trash cans and shredders into the bags and bring them back here to the closet. I’ll show you where to put them then.”
“Shredders?”
“Shredding machines, for papers, you know?”
“Okay,” Rita said. She went to the nearest door, which was open, and rapped on the jamb. “Cleaning lady,” she said.
A man was working at a desk; he waved her in.
Rita found the wastebasket, emptied it, then went to a shredder, which sat on top of a plastic bin. She removed the top, set it on the floor and empted the bin into her bag. “Thank you,” she said, smiling.
The man didn’t even look up, just waved.
She repeated the process up and down the hallways. The offices were all identical—a steel desk, a filing cabinet, a chair, a wastebasket and a shredder. Each had a phone on the desk; some had copying machines. There was nothing on the walls of any of the offices, no pictures, no diplomas, no calendars, nothing. She went back to the utility closet and Carla showed her to an outside door with large plastic garbage cans outside. They dumped the trash bags, then each got a vacuum cleaner, and they vacuumed the offices and the hallway.
“Now, upstairs,” Carla said. She led the way up the staircase through a door and into a large room that appeared to cover the whole of the second floor, with a row of offices along one side.
Rita’s mouth fell open, and she closed it quickly, heading for the nearest wastebasket. The room was full of desks, each with a computer terminal. At the rear, reaching across the width of the room, was a row of large computers. She reflected that the computer room at the Miami field office of the FBI was a third the size of this. As she emptied each wastebasket she glanced at the computer screen on the desk. There was no time to read anything, but she saw, on various screens, spreadsheets, documents being written, columns of figures, and, on one desk, a full-color Mercator projection map of the world with red dots placed on at least two dozen spots around the globe. What appeared to be satellites were superimposed on the map. She noted the absence on every screen of anything resembling a market tape running. No commodities were being traded here.
Rita and Carla took out the trash bags, then returned with the vacuum cleaners. As Rita pushed hers around the floor, she began looking at the men at the desks. Each of them wore a telephone headset and a pistol in a holster. When they had finished vacuuming, Carla gave her a dust cloth, and they went from desk to desk, office to office, wiping down every surface. Each room was nearly identical to the ones downstairs—same furniture, same lack of anything personal on the desks or the walls. The windows were no more than six inches wide and tinted green. Carla estimated that the glass in each was at least two inches thick.
As they left the second floor, Rita noticed a bulletin board with work schedules posted on it, but she could get only the briefest of glances at it.
They returned to the ground floor. Rita turned a corner and came up against a steel door. Next to it was a keypad and a glass surface with the outline of a hand drawn on it. A sign on the door read, ACCESS TO THE LOWER LEVELS IS BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. ARMED RESPONSE.
Rita and Carla were picked up on time and taken to the country club, where they cleaned the men’s locker room, but Rita saw nothing out of the ordinary there, except for four or fiv
e men carrying weapons. They had their lunch outside, and Rita gently pumped Carla for information about what she had seen while cleaning there. At three o’clock, the bus returned the workers to the parking lot, searching each of them as they got off.
Rita drove away in her terrible old car, checking her mirrors and driving an erratic pattern to be sure she wasn’t followed. Finally she allowed herself a deep breath and a smile. She had gotten away with it.
CHAPTER
50
H olly sat at Jackson’s dining table and listened to Rita’s report. Ham had joined the group, and was intent on what she had to say. Harry Crisp was thrilled at his agent’s prompt success, and kept saying how lucky she had been.
“Doesn’t sound like luck to me, Harry,” Holly said.
“Thank you, Holly,” Rita said, smiling at her.
“I don’t mean to belittle what you’ve done, Rita,” Harry said. “But I do think you were awfully lucky to get into the com center your first day out.”
“Harry,” Holly said, “Rita manipulated her way into that building—there wasn’t a lot of luck involved. Can’t you give the woman credit?”
“I’ll do better than that,” Harry said. “Rita, I’m giving you a pay grade promotion, just as soon as we get back to the office.”
“Thank you, Harry,” Rita said sweetly.
“We interrupted you; go on.”
“The upstairs looked like the back room of a big bank, or a brokerage house. Everybody had a computer terminal and a phone headset, and they were all talking at once, like at a stockbroker’s. There was almost no paper upstairs. Everything is done on the computers, I guess, and they’ve got major capacity, more than we’ve got in Miami. These guys work like machines, and they only work six hours a day.”
“How do you know that?” Harry asked.
“I saw the work schedule on a bulletin board. There are shifts from six A.M. to noon, noon to six, and six to midnight. That’s all I had time to see.”
“Were there any women in evidence?”
“Just Carla and me. Everybody else was a guy.”
“What else did you see?”
“When we came downstairs I came to the end of a hallway and found a big steel door with a security keypad and a palm-print analyzer and a sign saying they’d shoot any unauthorized entrant.”
“That squares with what the construction guy had to say about the basement he built,” Harry said.
“The place is like a fortress,” Rita said. “Thick walls, armored glass in small windows, air conditioners on the roof, not out back, where they might be accessible to tampering. Did I mention that all the computer operators were armed?”
“Weird,” Holly said. “Armed computer operators.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Harry said, “unless they’re trained to make some sort of last stand.”
“Like Waco?” Holly asked.
“Don’t say that word,” Harry said with a shudder. “I was there.”
Holly shook her head. “You can’t pay people to do a Waco, they’ve got to be motivated by some cause.”
“Maybe,” Rita said, “they’re trained to hold the building until everything in it can be destroyed.”
“Now, that makes sense,” Harry said. “The only other building you were inside was the country club?”
“Yes, but only the men’s locker room,” Rita said.
“Anything unusual there?”
“It was a locker room, Harry. There were a lot of dirty towels. I found out about the other buildings from Carla, though. She’s worked there for three years, and she’s cleaned every building on the place at one time or another.”
“And what did she have to say?”
“All the other buildings are normal, except the com center and the security office. They’ve apparently got a real arsenal at the security office, too—lots of weapons. Oh, and all the houses have big walk-in safes, concealed, usually in a library. At least, it sounds like all of them—Carla has seen three.”
“Did you get any chance to see what we think might be gun emplacements?”
Rita shook her head. “I only saw what I could see from the bus, which was houses, the country club, and the village shops.”
“All right,” Harry said, “what have we got here in the nature of a crime?”
“We’ve got the tampering with state criminal records and probably perjury on seventy-one license applications,” Holly said.
“That’s state stuff. What have we got that could justify my going into that place with a SWAT team?”
Everybody thought for a minute.
“What about communications?” Holly asked.
“What do you mean, communications?”
“There must be licenses required for some of that stuff they’ve got out there.”
“Good point,” Harry said. “Bill, you check with the Federal Communications Commission and see if there’s anything we can hang a criminal charge on.”
“Right,” Bill replied.
“What else? Anybody?”
Ham spoke up. “If they’ve got anything in the way of heavy weapons in those camouflaged spots, wouldn’t that be a federal crime?”
“Yes, it would, if it’s heavy enough,” Harry said.
Holly spoke up. “Harry, I think these people are too slick to overtly violate some federal statute. What they’re doing is covert, and unless the NSA can do some code breaking, the only way you’re going to find out what they’re doing is to go in there. So, what I think you should be looking for is not grounds for a SWAT bust, but probable cause for a federal search warrant.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Harry said, “and I haven’t heard anything from the NSA today.”
Bill spoke up. “I’ve got something I’d like you to hear from the bug in Barney Noble’s car,” he said. “There was a lot of ordinary chitchat that is of no interest, but then this happened.” He set a tape machine on the table and turned it on. There was the sound of the car running, then slowing, then the squeak of brakes and the sound of a car door opening and closing. “Rear door,” Bill said. “Somebody got into the backseat, and you can barely hear him talk.”
“What’s happening?” Barney Noble’s voice said.
There was a mumbled reply.
“She doing anything unusual?”
“Nah,” the voice said. “Routine stuff.”
There was the sound of paper crackling, and Noble spoke again. “Here’s this week’s money. Call me if anything comes up.”
“Okay,” the voice said, then the rear door opened and closed again.
“He must be talking about you, Holly,” Harry said. “It’s got to be one of your people. Did you recognize the voice?”
“No. Play it again, Bill.”
Holly listened carefully to the tape. “Hurd? You recognize anybody?”
Wallace shook his head. “It’s too faint. It could be anybody. Is there any way to enhance it, Bill?”
“Yeah, but I’ll have to send it to Miami,” Bill replied.
“Do that,” Harry said. “And next time, bug the backseat, too.”
“Yeah,” Bill said.
“Rita, how thoroughly were you searched?” Harry asked.
“Thoroughly enough to get groped, but not all that thoroughly. I had already changed out of my clothes into a jumpsuit, and that didn’t have any pockets.”
“Did you keep the jumpsuit?”
“Yeah, they told me to.”
“Bill, take a look at the garment and see if you can hide some bugs in it for Rita to take in.”
“Okay.”
Rita shook her head. “That’s not the best way, Harry.”
“What have you got in mind?”
“Well, nobody looked up my ass with a flashlight, or up anywhere else.”
“I think I see your point,” Harry said.
“Bill,” Rita said, “do you think you can find a canister of some sort, say four inches long by an inch in diameter?”
/>
“Probably.”
“Would that hold some bugs?”
“Four, maybe half a dozen.”
“No sharp corners, okay?”
“Sure, Rita.”
Rita looked around the table. “I’ll shoot anybody who smirks,” she said.
CHAPTER
51
H am Barker got into bed and turned on the TV, but he couldn’t concentrate on any program, and when he switched it off, he couldn’t sleep, either. He had listened to what was said at the meeting with Harry Crisp, and he was intrigued. He was also a little annoyed at how everybody seemed to be tiptoeing around the Palmetto Gardens problem, instead of doing something about it. “Fucking feds,” he said aloud to himself. If this had been an army problem, it would already have been solved. He lay there thinking for a few minutes, then he got out of bed, got into a bathing suit and a T-shirt, and slipped into some Top-Siders, no socks.
He walked around the cabin, picking up things, looking at them and putting them down again. Then he got a large, zippered plastic bag and started collecting what he needed. He found a waterproof flashlight and taped over most of the lens, leaving an open area about half an inch in diameter, and added that to his bag. He dug a black nylon warmup suit out of his closet, rolled it into a small, tight wad and put it into the plastic bag, along with a pair of black sneakers. Then he went to his tackle box and lifted out the plastic tray that covered the bottom. Under that were two things that he had stolen from the army: one was his standard-issue special forces knife, which was still razor sharp; the other was a small black .22-caliber pistol with a silencer attached that had been issued to him for a mission in Vietnam by a CIA field agent. When, after the job had successfully been completed, the CIA man had asked for the weapon back, Ham had told him to go fuck himself. He had never thought that he would actually need it, but he liked it so much that he’d have been willing to fight the agent for it, which hadn’t been necessary. The man had laughed and told him to keep it. He put the knife and the pistol into the plastic bag, along with a spare clip.
Ham took the gear down to his dock and tossed it into the whaler. Then he got an electric trolling motor from the back porch, clamped it to the stern of the whaler and attached it to the boat’s battery with alligator clips. He fastened his rubber diving belt around his waist, minus the weights, got into the whaler, started the engine and headed out into the Indian River, accelerating to around fifteen knots. There was a moon, occasionally covered by clouds, but it was bright enough to light his way down the waterway.
