“Humberto, it's very sad to me that you saw what you did.” The officer stood, and his head was silhouetted by the bright Florida sun.
Something is wrong, Humberto realized, but at the same moment he knew that it was too late. The officer leaned closer once again, and before Humberto died, he saw the name on the officer's uniform, the badge shimmering in the bright light.
R. Morales
Humberto returned to that place in his childhood, to the cottage without doors or windows, the sounds of laughter and happiness around his table, and the smell of good food heavy in the air. In the final moment of his life, he smiled, remembering his favorite day.
Part Two: Now
Spukhafte fernwirkung
-Albert Einstein
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
-Lewis Carroll
Chapter Eleven
The early morning sun broke through the drab winter clouds, and the light sparkled on the ice and frost that blanketed the world. The ever constant wind gusted through the trees and blew whirling flurries of snow across the empty road.
“Turn here?” The taxi driver asked with a thick Middle Eastern accent as he pointed to a sign that read:
DuPage County Forest Preserve District
Beyond the sign was the main entrance to the Northern portion of the forest preserve. A large metal gate was lowered over the road, drifts of snow from the night's previous storm piled up against it.
“No, not this one,” Paul Freemont said, “but slow down 'cause it's coming up soon.”
He studied the maps he'd printed from the internet the night before. Paul traced his finger along the road that they were currently driving on, and tapped a small access road that jutted through the forest. He noted the distance on the map between the main entrance and the access road and tried to estimate the actual distance.
“Couple miles or so, and you'll see a little road. I don't think there will be any signs for the road, but maybe.”
The driver nodded and they drove in silence, bumping along the cracked and pot-holed road. With each bump, needles of pain shot up Paul's leg, despite the painkillers he'd taken that morning. The only other time in his life that he'd felt this way was when he'd broken his arm as a kid. Paul had been playing with his younger brothers on a large woodpile that sat at the edge of a soy bean field at the base of the Rockies. The woodpile had started out as a pile of dead trees and stumps that had been cleared from the land to make space for the field, but neighboring farmers had taken to dumping their own scraps of wood and dead trees to the pile as well. People talked about a massive bonfire at the end of the season, but the seasons kept passing, and the woodpile kept growing.
Paul was around 10 years old at the time, and he and his brothers had claimed the pile as their own. They ran and jumped across logs and broken pieces of wooden gates and barn doors. They played tag, built forts, and explored the seemingly never ending holes and passageways throughout the wood.
On the day Paul broke his arm, he and his brothers had been acting out battle scenes from an Indiana Jones flick. They had been running and jumping when Paul took a wrong step and fell through a hole between logs. His arm was caught between some broken branches as he fell, and the bones snapped just below the elbow. There was an explosion of white hot pain, and he remembered screaming as the world faded away.
His next memory was lying on the family kitchen table, his mom and brothers leaning over him as he cried. Somehow, his younger brothers had dragged him back to the house and to their mother. She had no medical training, but one look at his forearm, bent into a ninety degree angle below the elbow, and she knew the bone needed to be set in place. The nearest hospital was thirty minutes away.
“This is going to hurt,” she whispered into his ear and then planted a tender kiss on his forehead. Paul could feel her hands tightening on his wrist and elbow, not understanding. He felt the jerk as she pulled the bone straight, and if he hadn't passed out immediately, he would have tasted the pain, like rusted nails.
Even after the doctors pinned the bone, and after the cast had been removed, his arm still ached for months. It felt like tiny needles jostling around the area where his muscles and the healing bone connected. The sharp and constant throb in his bones reminded him of the sound a train track makes when banged with a sledge hammer.
But being shot was worse, he thought, and probably because he hadn't passed out. He remembered every detail, from his own blood splattering the walls and floor of the parking garage, to the fear, and screams of the doctor who’d been in the elevator with him. The details were vivid in his mind, and the remembered pain was exquisite.
While lying in the hospital during those few moments each day when his thoughts were lucid and not hampered by medication, he promised himself that he would run away from this story as fast as he could. Already, he'd lost his wife and kids because of this obsession, and now someone had tried to kill him.
But the story consumed him. He had been to Ground Zero in Miami, and he had seen the destruction and the cover-up by the media and his own government. Something had happened that day. An attack that everyone refused to call an attack. A bomb without a bomb, and he was sure that it was connected to the night he was shot.
He was supposed to have met a woman that night, and she was going to shed some light on the details of the attack in Miami. She never showed up, but the driver of the bus on which they were supposed to meet was later found shot in the head.
The cop named Morales had ties to the Miami bombing, and he was somehow related to the whole cover-up. It was when Paul had gone to the hospital to figure out the connection, that he'd been pulled deeper into the conspiracy. An assassin came to the hospital at about the same time Paul was there, to kill Officer Morales. Paul had helped the cop escape, but the cop turned out to be one of the bad guys and had turned on Paul, trying to kill him. Before he escaped, Paul snatched Morales' briefcase, which contained coordinates to an area of forest preserve in DuPage County that happened to be very close to a bus route. The same bus on which Paul was to meet the woman.
His leg throbbed and he was tempted to tell the cab driver to just turn around. The more he thought about this mess, the more he did not want to get involved. Being home suddenly sounded very good to him. He'd drink a bottle of Wild Turkey and go into work the next morning, try and figure out a new story. It was safer that way. Too many people had died in connection to the cover-up in Miami, and he didn’t want to be one of them.
But despite what he knew to be the safest course of action, Paul couldn't turn away. Something was here, some piece of the puzzle that would make it all clear.
“Here we are man,” the driver said as he slowed the taxi. Paul looked up, shaken from his thoughts, and saw a small road leading off into the forest. Drifts of snow were pushed up to the edge of the road and tree branches hung low. If the driver hadn't been looking for the road, he would have never seen it.
Paul glanced again at the maps he'd printed and then nodded.
“Yeah, this is it. Turn here.”
“I'll have to charge extra if we get stuck in that snow, and I have to be towed. It's cold man, and I don't want to get stuck.”
“You got it.”
The driver turned down the road, and they bounced along through the trees. The sun flickered through the bare branches and the ice gleamed. The road curved away from the highway, and within seconds thick forest lined the road. The trees and snow drifts, it seemed as though the forest continued on forever, as if they were in a desolate wilderness, and not just a few miles from a large and bustling city.
Were you here? Why were you here? Paul wondered about the woman who had called him. He remembered her fear, seemingly unfounded at the time but now so real. He touched his leg, feeling the bandages that covered the bullet wound.
They drove along the w
inding road for several minutes in silence, and the forest seemed to thicken as they went deeper into the preserve. They drove over a bridge that crossed a wide river that was mostly frozen over, but Paul could see dark water churning beneath the ice. He shivered at the thought of how cold that water would be.
“This what you're looking for?” the driver asked. Paul looked up as they drove into a clearing with an old two-story cabin sitting in the center. The snow was deep, with drifts piled high around the walls of the cabin, so high that it was spilling onto the sagging porch.
“Yes, stop here.”
The driver stopped and Paul got out of the car. The cold wind blasted and burned his nose and cheeks. Freshly fallen snow covered the clearing, but the new layer of snow was not deep enough to cover a flurry of footprints and tire tracks in the clearing. The new snow hadn't yet covered the trail of footprints that led up the steps to the front porch of the cabin.
Someone had been here, and recently.
Paul felt a surge of excitement. He was getting close to something, he could feel it in his bones. He looked around the clearing for any other clues. Several sets of footprints headed off into the woods. A spot of bare, splintered wood caught his eye and he trudged to the tree which was missing its bark. The area was not more than five inches around, but he could tell the bark had been removed not long before. The splinters and indention in the tree trunk suggested that the bark was removed rather forcefully.
A gunshot.
Call the cops? Paul wondered, but only briefly. He didn't know what he was looking at here. It could be anything or nothing, and he wanted to be sure that it was something.
Paul gulped and turned back to the cabin. He walked by the cab and nodded to the driver, who lowered his window a quarter inch.
“I'll be back,” he said. The driver nodded and turned on the radio. Paul could hear faint music from the taxi as he walked through the snow toward the cabin.
Chapter Twelve
Heather woke up before any light was on the horizon, completely alert. She was not one of those people who woke slowly, stretching tired muscles and coaxing her eyes to open. No, she would be asleep one second, and then awake the next. It was a habit she’d picked up as a little girl, when she would have terrifying nightmares, and would be unable to tell the difference between her dreams and waking reality. She would wake up, instantly alert to her surroundings and ready to dive for cover if any monsters were lurking in her room. As she’d gotten older, the nightmares had faded, but the habits remained.
And now, she listened to the sounds of her apartment, trying to sense if anything was out of the ordinary. Her apartment was completely dark, except for the light from her computer screen, which glowed in the living room. She heard the faint whirr of the fan in her computer as it worked, the soft clicking of the water heater in the closet by the bathroom, and the drips from the kitchen sink. Otherwise, the apartment was silent and dark. She was alone in the early morning hours, and that was just how she liked it.
Heather swung her legs off her bed, and sat looking out her bedroom window for several minutes. Droplets of rain splattered her window, and puddles of water pooled on the street below the yellow light of the streetlamps.
The air in the apartment was cold, and she shivered. Heather was dressed in only a tee shirt and underwear, and the air chilled her exposed skin. She looked around the floor for her bathrobe, but remembered that she’d put it in the washing machine a few days earlier. It was just sitting in there with her other dirty clothes, damp and growing mildew. For several days now, she would think about the forgotten load of laundry, restart the washing machine, and then promptly forget about it until the next time she needed some clothes. But this time, she grabbed a marker from her nightstand and wrote LAUNDRY in big block letters across her arm. Heather didn’t care that it looked messy and unprofessional because she mostly worked from home and rarely left her apartment.
Speaking of work, she thought, gotta get started. Heather took a deep breath, and ambled into the kitchen, where she found a clean mug from the dishwasher, filled it with water, and placed it into the microwave. She set the timer for 60 seconds and pressed start. The microwave lit up and hummed as it warmed the water.
Next, Heather checked her computer, sliding into the faux leather chair and wincing at how cold it felt on her bare skin. Sure enough, in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, there was an alert letting her know that the automated computer program, what she called a ‘bot,’ had finished its work.
Heather clicked on the icon and opened the program. At the top of the window was an animated drawing of a robot that scurried from one end of the screen to the other. Below the little robot were lines of categorized information, some of it translated into a readable form, and other parts just raw date. She scanned through the report that had been compiled during the night while she was sleeping. Normally, her job consisted of running security checks and analysis on software and various company networks, but occasionally her boss would send over lists of potential employees, usually for executive or management positions, for her to check out.
Heather’s boss would give her the individual's email address, home address, and any other information he was able to glean from his or her resume and social networking sites. Heather would take that information and would begin working her magic.
First, she would find all bank accounts that were linked to the individual's personal information. With the bank accounts, she was able to track down most of the individual’s credit card information and other financial records. She would then use the home address to identify and locate the ISP address for the individual’s personal computer. With the personal computer identified, the rest was easy peasy. Heather would hack into the individual's personal email accounts, calendars, and contact lists. From there she would compile information about the individual's personal life and day-to-day activity. She pulled tax records, financial records that were kept on his hard drive, but not online, and anything else that she might find useful from the computer.
Once she had all the information she needed, she would plug it into an automated computer program that she had written and dubbed ‘the bot.’ The bot would then work through millions of data points to compile every bit of information about the individual that was available in the digital universe. It used an algorithm to identify patterns in order to search for bank accounts that were hidden, credit cards that were opened under different names, or any other activity that she was not able to identify manually. The process took several hours, so she would usually run the bots while she slept. This particular project had taken just under three hours, and the data was now ready for her analysis.
The microwave dinged, and Heather pulled out the steaming mug of hot water. She ripped open a teabag and lowered it into the cup. She watched the water filter through herbs and dried leaves, and saturate the bag. The smell of rooibos and vanilla wafted up in the steam, and she inhaled deeply. It was her favorite part about making tea, that initial burst of aroma that lifted out from the cup as the water mixed with the contents of the bag.
Heather returned to her computer, and began to prepare her report. At first, this particular individual seemed like a good candidate: undergraduate from Georgetown, MBA from Princeton. For the first three years of his career, he worked at a startup software company, which he later sold and made millions. With the profits from the sale, he started a hedge fund with several other investors, and for the last 13 years, he'd been running the fund to great success.
The problems in this particular individual’s profile, seemed to begin about six months before, when he'd begun receiving angry emails from his partners. Apparently, this guy was showing up late for work, if at all, leaving tasks incomplete for months at a time, and was responsible for large amounts of cash flow that was suddenly disappearing.
Interesting, she thought as she sipped her tea. The full flavor of the tea had permeated the water, and she savored the vanilla overtones with earthy
notes of dried herbs. It reminded her of a trip she’d taken to Africa while in college, where she’d tasted rooibos for the first time while visiting a village in the bush. Of course, the tea bags found in the states didn’t do the unique flavor justice, but did bring to mind fond memories.
Heather scanned through the information about bank accounts and credit cards. Everything seemed in order, except for one credit card, and one bank account, both of which were set up with a different name, different home address, and different Social Security number. On the surface, this information looked out of place, as if the bot had pulled the data by accident. But after carefully reviewing the data, Heather saw that the credit card and bank account information had been opened up on this guy's personal computer. She double checked the ISP address, scanned the digital cookies saved on the websites, and confirmed that if not this guy, then someone else had used his computer to set up this credit card and bank account.
Heather didn't care what these people were up to, but it was something her boss might be interested in, so she included it in her report. She knew that the issue wasn't so much the credit card and bank account under a different name, although that was curious in itself, but the amount of money flowing out from the bank accounts to the credit card. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were being spent on the credit card, and then paid for with money from the bank account. The incredible flow of money could mean any number of things, she knew. Heather didn’t like to speculate, but the point was that most normal people, did not spend this much money, in such a short amount of time.
Heather finished her report and then pasted it into an email. She wrote a short note to her boss, drawing his attention to the red flags that she’d identified.
When the email was sent, Heather stood and crossed to the large window that overlooked the courtyard apartment building. Her apartment was three stories high, and the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon. Rays of sunlight filtered through rain clouds, and glistened on the wet grass and street below.
The Snow Swept Trilogy Page 28
