by Skye, S. D.
“Who is who!” Santino yelled, turning his head left and right. In the rearview mirror, their backs faced him. Two men. “Who are they?” Santino pulled into the parking space directly in front of Mr. O’Leary’s house.
“No, no,” she whispered. “Keep going!”
“Why are you whispering? He can’t hear you,” Santino said. “He can’t see you either. Tint’s too dark.”
Katherine pushed her back against the heated leather and buried her face in her hands. “I can’t even believe this shit. Sunday can’t get here soon enough.”
“Katherine, who were they?”
She turned to him and deadpanned, “Trust me when I say, you don’t want to know. Circle the block a couple of times to give them a chance to get out of the area.”
“I take it they’re not friends of yours.”
“What gave it away?” She swallowed hard. “Either the world is getting incredibly small or I’m incredibly screwed.”
Chapter 41
Thursday—Irving Street
Kyle led Hopper up Irving, the last street on their list. Two hours of teeth-pulling interviews had yielded nothing. He was frustrated that they had yet to interview a single Fed-friendly person in the entire neighborhood. Most were older African-Americans who had a deep-rooted distrust of law enforcement of any kind, a problem he was well aware of before he arrived. Snitching on a stranger with no ties to the area engendered as poor a level of cooperation as any fear of ratting on a local kid.
Frustration subsumed him, but he refused to give up. The faint, steady sound of a clock ticking down haunted him. It’d been a week to the day since she disappeared. The longer she remained free, the less likely their chance of finding her before she departed for Moscow. He couldn’t let her get away. She had to pay for Cartwright. And if Karma hadn’t yet stepped up to do the job, Kyle was determined to do it for her.
They carefully shifted their gazes between the lists in their hands and the address numbers, searching for the location of their next failure.
“The next house is just up here on the left,” Kyle said as he opened the gate and walked up the steps. “Mrs. Merla Rae Simmons. Strong southern name. Hope she throws some sweet tea in our faces before she slams the door on us. I could use a swallow.”
“I’m too busy swallowing my pride,” Hopper said. “Here goes nothing.”
He rang the doorbell and waited; he heard the sound of faint footsteps approaching the door then a pause. The curtains rustled when a small finger pulled open a slit in the sheer-covered side window. Kyle saw the tip of a brown nose. The fabric released and a voice screeched, “Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any!”
Kyle chuckled and reached in his breast pocket. “Ma’am. Mrs. Simmons. I’m Special Agent Kyle Oliver with the FBI and this is my co-case agent Hopper Mack.” He pulled out his credentials and pressed them against the window. “Promise not to take up much of your time, just like to ask you a few questions.”
She cracked open the door and sunlight glistened on her long silver hair. Her narrowed skeptical sneer carved him up from beneath the bifocal line in her brown-framed glasses. “FBI. Hmph. You’da been better off tryin’ ta sell me somethin’,” she said, pursing her lips together. “You never see the po-lice ‘round here ‘cept to haul off one of these hard-headed chirrens.”
She extended the opening, grabbed the thick leather case from his hand, and ran her finger across the golden badge before handing it back. “All the money I’m payin’ Uncle Sam and that’s the best the FBI can do?” She shook her head. “What brings you to the ‘hood?”
“We appreciate your cooperation, ma’am.”
“I ain’t told you nothing yet, but go on and say what you gotta say. I’m listenin’.”
“We got your name from a friend at the Washington Post,” Kyle began. “As we understand it, you advertised a room for several weeks and then withdrew the ad.”
“Is rentin’ illegal now?”
“No, no, Ma’am. We were just wondering if you pulled the ad because somebody answered it.”
She shook her head. “Oh…no. Uh-uh. Kids run up my light bill, sneakin’ in and out the house in the middle o’ night, don’t pay on time, gettin’ my pressure up. I could find life on Mars before any one o’ dem on rent day. Decided it wasn’t worth the headaches. Can’t have nobody playin’ with my money and I’m gettin’ too old for jail.”
Hopper smiled, shot Kyle a side-eye glance, and cleared his throat. “So, you never had anybody respond to the ad?”
“I got a few calls, but nobody showed up here.”
Kyle pulled Lana’s picture from his jacket pocket. “Have you seen this woman around here in the past week?”
She took a careful look at the photo, tightened her lips, and handed it back to him. “That’s the one on TV, right?”
Kyle nodded.
“No, definitely ain’t seen her,” she said. “Only times you see white people in this neighborhood is to take somebody to the hospital or to jail…or every once in a while ‘cause they’re lost.”
“Anyone else on this street rent rooms to college kids?”
“Hmm. Let me think about that for a second,” she said, tapping her index finger against her upper lip. “You know. I think the Mamie Douglass rents her basement. She’s three doors down. Oh, and the O’Learys too. They rent to just about anybody.”
“O’Learys?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinkin’ but they ain’t white. They Irish,” she said. “I reckon they lived here about as long as anybody. That’s all I can think of. If you want to talk to somebody who really knows, you should talk to Max McCall. He’s been ‘round here ‘bout forty years. Ten longer than me.”
“Max McCall, you say?” Hopper said, jotting the name in a notebook.
“Yeah. Come to think of it, last time I heard his daughter was working with y’all. Surprised you don’t know her. She was all over the news last week. Beat that lady’s ass at the airport.”
Kyle’s eyes bulged as he turned to Hopper. “Wait! Max McCall is J.J. McCall’s father… and he lives here?”
“Ain’t that what I just told you?” She stepped out on the porch and pointed to a duplex midway down the block. “You see that one there? The red brick one? He lives there. Owns a little corner store a few blocks up 7th Street too. He don’t miss a beat.”
Kyle and Hopper shot knowing glances at one another.
“Well. I think we’ve got everything we need for now, Mrs. Simmons. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak with us,” Hopper said, handing her a business card. “If you think of anything else or see anyone suspicious who might fit Lana Michaels’ description, please give us a call. In the meantime, we’re gonna talk to Mr. McCall.” Kyle led Hopper out of the gate.
“He’s probably at the store. Make a left at the far corner and walk three blocks up,” she said after glancing from side to side to check for nosy neighbors.
Kyle and Hopper walked in silence a few steps until out of earshot of Mrs. Simmons. Then Kyle stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and dug his hands into his pocket. “Let me ask you something, Junior. Do you believe in coincidences?”
“Not like this one, I don’t,” Hopper said. “Our assessment was wrong the whole time. Michaels was never planning to attack J.J. No, she’d plan to hit an easier target all along. But why do you suppose she hasn’t hit him yet?”
Kyle thought about it for a second and then it struck him. “Of course. That’s it. She can’t leave,” Kyle said. “The fact that he’s still alive means she can’t get out.”
“That’s gotta be it,” Hopper said. “That’s the only reason she’d risk staying this long. She had no choice.”
“Most importantly, she’s not going to kill McCall or do anything that’ll draw heat from the cops until she’s ready to leave the country, which means we’ve still got time.”
Kyle threw his head up to the sky and starting pacing quickly towa
rd the corner when a car with dark tinted windows passed by. The deep, throaty rumble from the sparkly black Mustang's engine, reminded him of his own V8 with off-road H-pipes and Flowmasters. The shadow of a head ducked midway down a passenger window. Strange. But he didn’t give it much thought. Chalked it up to sensory overload as his eyes followed it for half a block. Couldn’t be Lana. She wouldn’t drive a car that would turn the head of every straight male within a 100-mile radius. Wrong way to lay low.
“So what’s next?”
“We’ll talk to Mr. McCall and then call J.J. and the Gs,” Kyle said. “We’ve had Money T watching the wrong target all along.”
Chapter 42
Thursday Evening—FBI Headquarters
“Which room is Sunnie in?” J.J. asked, striding down the 8th corridor looking for briefing location. “There’s 2,000 conference rooms in this building and she leaves a note that says, ‘I’m in the conference room.’ What the hell?”
“It’s gotta be one closest to the office,” Tony said with Six trailing a step behind him. “Wait. You just passed it.”
J.J. stopped in her tracks, took two steps back, and twisted the doorknob. When she entered the room, her eyes fixed on the wall-to-wall whiteboard filled with diagrams approaching Rorschach test proportions. Sunnie was scribbling notes alongside the diagram while Walter watched in wonder.
“Geez, Sunnie, what the hell is that?” J.J. parked herself in the seat at the front of the room closest to the whiteboard. The chicken scratch was so small in some areas she could hardly decode the words.
Six laughed and took a seat at the head of the table. “Exploring your inner Jackson Pollock? That’s incredib…bly confusing.”
“What the hell?” Tony added.
“Okay, Wendy Whiners. I’ll explain everything once somebody shuts the door. I don’t think there’s a clearance level high enough to cover all the crap I’ve got on this board.”
After everyone settled down, Sunnie circled three stick figure people and two pitiful representations of buildings.
“Okay, so to help you understand what’s going on here,” Sunnie said, circling her hand over the board and landing her finger on the first stick person. “I need to start with Lana Michaels.”
“Ugh, Lana,” J.J. groaned.
“We got diddly off of her work or home hard drives except some expressions of insanity in a few journals, not much from her house either. Interviews of Jack Sabinski and Chris yielded a little bit of nothing. And the only other person who knew her that intimately is…well…” she eyed J.J. and stammered, “Uh, er…not here anymore. So we got more nothing. I mean zilch.”
“So, what’s all this on the board then?” Tony asked.
“It dawned on me that if she’s the nucleus of a spy network, there’s one thing that she needs more than anything else.”
“Money,” Six said.
“Exactly. So what you see up here is what we found when we followed the money,” Sunnie said. “We found a book by Pushkin called The Daughter of the Commandant in her house. The cover fell off when ERT dusted for prints. On the inside of the cover along the spine, she wrote a series of numbers.”
“Let me guess,” J.J. said. “Bank account?”
“Bingo! Linked to a limited liability company,” Sunnie said. “I ordered a Treasury FINCEN analysis on the account and just got the report this afternoon.”
“I don’t understand. Lana owned a company?” Tony asked.
“No, Lana didn’t own it, but she was a signatory on the account, using a slight variation of her name—L. Alexandra Michaelson—and a fake social security number. She could write checks and withdraw cash without ever directly linking a single transaction to her personal account. Tens of thousands of dollars transacted through this account every couple of months. Each deposit less than $10,000 to stay off Treasury’s radar.”
“So, where did the money come from?”
“Troika Technologies,” Walter replied. “I’m still drilling down but from what I’ve found so far, they buy and sell computer technologies and network installation equipment. Apparently, they supplied cabling to a contractor who performed the White House and State Department renovation jobs. All U.S. companies. All legal. All above board,” Walter said.
“The owner is Ivan Mashkov, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Belarus,” Sunnie added. “The money comes from his Bank of New York account.”
“Mashkov?” J.J. asked. “Wait, he wouldn’t by any chance be related to…”
“The one and only,” Sunnie said. “He’s the brother of Golikov’s henchman numero uno. Been loosely linked to Russian organized crime in New York, but nothing solid. FBI New York had a case opened for the last 8 years and this is all they have.” Sunnie held up a thin file folder. “Might be ten sheets of paper in here. Can’t get enough on them to request a wire.”
“Until now,” J.J. said. “But I still don’t understand. What’s the connection to the Sit Room?”
“Glad you asked,” Walter said. “Our new friend Ivan didn’t send the money directly to Lana’s account. It made a pit stop at another company—anybody ever heard of MCM Construction?”
Everybody gasped and snapped upright in their seats.
J.J. slammed her elbows against the table and scraped her nails across her scalp before her phone vibrated. She sent the call to voicemail and returned her attention to the conversation. “Oh my God. My head’s about to explode.”
Tony slapped his hand against the table. “I’ll be damned. It fits. They did the renovations in the State Department and the Sit Room.”
“We think MCM was being used to help launder the money used to pay the agents in Lana’s network. And you’ll never guess who owns MCM.”
“Oh, I’ve got this one,” Six said. “Maddix Cooper?”
Sunnie shook her head. “No, his brother in law, Gary Mosin. Married to his only sister.”
“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Tony said. “What’d you find on the brother-in-law?
“Based on what we have right now, he’s clean. A model, naturalized American citizen. But we’re still digging,” Sunnie answered.
“This Cooper guy’s a regular John Walker,” J.J. said, speaking of the convicted former Navy officer who recruited a network of spies among his family and friends. A simultaneous release of anger and frustration overcame her. “He’s recruiting his peops into his duplicitous little circle.”
“I’ve also linked calls from Troika Tech to the company in Russia I told you about,” Walter chimed in, referring to the company linked to Lana’s secret bank account. “We think Troika is the American-based financial hub. Money is transferred from Russian intel into an account for the Moscow-based company, then cut-outs move the money from Moscow to the U.S. For all intents and purposes, Troika operates as a NOC.”
“If we can cut off the money, it’s only a matter of time before we catch the moles. The Russians will have to risk exposing new members of the network or lose valuable sources of intelligence.”
“Just in time for us to cut them off at the neck,” Six said.
“Our mission is clear, gentlemen…and lady…very smart, awesome lady,” J.J. said, smiling at Sunnie. Her phone rang again, increasing her annoyance. “First thing tomorrow, we find and interview Maddix Cooper. He’s the lead domino. We take him down and the rest will fall right behind him. Did you ever find anything on his whereabouts, Sunnie?”
“Sure did. Based on what I got from my contacts in Customs, he never left the country. Not on his passport.”
J.J. leaped forward in her seat. “You mean he’s been here the whole time?” She turned to Six. “I think your girl is dirty.”
“No, kidding. She’s got to be covering for him,” Six said. “The question is why?”
“Hmm. We’ll find out soon enough. Call her tomorrow, Six. Pour on the charm. Tell her you’ve been thinking about her and you want to do breakfast. When she arrives, we’ll all be waiting. She’ll cough up Maddix Coop
er’s location or she’ll go to jail for obstruction. Her choice.”
J.J.’s phone rang again. She finally looked at the screen and realized she needed to answer. Pronto. “Listen guys, I’ve really got to take this now. It’s Kyle Oliver from WFO. He’s been blowing up my cell, must have something on Lana’s investigation.” She stepped into the hall and answered.
“McCall. What’s going on, Kyle?”
“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. What do you want first?”
“Uhh…give me the good first. God knows I need it right now.”
“Well, the good news is we think Lana has abandoned her mission to kill you.”
“Hmph. The feeling certainly isn’t mutual. What’s the bad part?”
“We believe she may be after a softer target…your, uh, your father.”
J.J.’s heart thumped so hard she lost her breath. She bent forward trying to regain her composure.
“J.J.? J.J.? You okay?”
The sound of Kyle’s voice barely seeped through the pounding in her ears. Her father and brother were all she had left in the world since her mother died. The mere thought of losing either paralyzed her left her dizzy with fear and anguish. She didn’t have time for the anxiety attack she so richly deserved. Her first objective was to ensure her father didn’t die at the hands of that witch.
“I want protection on him,” she said, forcing calm into her voice. “Like yesterday.”
“Money T’s on the way there now.”
“What’s he going to do? Follow Lana to death?” J.J. said her voice in a nervous high pitch. “Unfortunately, we don’t’ have time to hunt her down and burn her at the stake, and I’d prefer someone with a gun.”
“J.J., I understand your concerns, but we don’t have the resources to put an agent on him right now,” Kyle said. “Every free body’s on the streets.”
“The Bureau has already failed my mother. Now you want my father, too?”
“I can’t even respond to that.”
“You know what? I’ll get my brother to stay with him,” said J.J. “Forget Nixon and his orders. And as soon as I wrap up this case, I’m going to devote every second of my life to making her suffer for deigning to think she could get away with threatening my family.”
