The Mac Ambrose Series: 1-3 (Boxed Set)

by HN Wake

  They hauled him out with an unusual amount of force and no little amount of discomfort. They shackled his wrists at the bottom of the stairs, on the landing, as his mother screamed her head off and his father shouted at the top of his lungs.

  The lead FBI guy stepped up to his father and delivered the verdict. “Your son has hacked into the Bank of Dallas and could have transferred all the state’s pension funds. He’s got some explaining to do.”

  His father’s stared at Isaac. “Why?”

  Isaac shrugged. Because he could?

  His mother started crying softly.

  Isaac had been sitting in that cold chair in the high-rise FBI office for five hours. He knew what they were doing—they were sweating him. It would have been better if he hadn’t been wearing Fruit of the Loom pajama pants and a Pac Man T-shirt. The indignity was eating him up. He was pretty confident he had used all the right routing and hidden hacker holes that they wouldn’t be able to stick the bank job on him.

  Anyway, he had been part of the collective, which they had no idea about. Hackers were so much smarter than the Feds.

  Then the door had opened and a slick nice suit had walked in with nothing: no file, no smirk, no coffee. Just a nice looking tough guy in a nice looking suit. He pulled out a chair across from Isaac and sat down. As easy as that.

  Isaac sat up straight, his thin lanky body poking out from the T-shirt. At least they had taken the cuffs off, so now he folded his hands together in prayer mode on the table. He said nothing. He knew anything he said would be used against him.

  The suit watched him, then gave him a small grin.

  That unnerved Isaac, but he remained mute.

  The suit said, “We’re pretty impressed.”

  Isaac’s eyebrows shot up. That was what all hackers wanted to hear.

  The suit said, “We’ve got an offer.”

  “Who are you?” Isaac was calm, confident, unusually so for a teenager.

  “I can’t tell you that. Yet. You need to accept the offer, then I can tell you.”

  “I’m only seventeen.”

  “We can work around that.”

  “What’s the offer?”

  “You come work with us.”

  “I’ve got a full ride at MIT coming up next fall,” Isaac said.

  “We know.”

  “Is your offer better than that?”

  “We’d like to think so.”

  “How’s it better?”

  “You’d get to mess with pretty much whomever you want to, from behind very, very, protected walls.”

  “And the money I’d be missing out on?”

  “Let’s just say this, Isaac, we have you on our list now. You’ll never make too much money on the black market because we’re watching you. Our offer is a better way to live than hiding in the dark.”

  Isaac thought about his father’s disappointment and his mother’s crying. He considered the threat of being perpetually watched by the CIA and imagined spending his life looking over his shoulder. In that instant, it was easy to agree to be on the right side of the law.

  Down in the IT department, Isaac pulled out his cellphone with a small grin and dialed her number.

  She answered quickly, “Joyce Tattle.”

  “It’s Isaac. Just to let you know, I just started the search on your Malaysian shelf company.”

  “Super! Thanks for that.” Her voice dropped into a whisper. “When you say that, what exactly does your search look like?”

  She’s a curious one, Isaac thought. Yeah, definitely a movie was the way to go.

  He said, “I define the search criteria and then I use software and it goes out scrubbing for information.”

  Her voice dropped lower. “Do you hack stuff?”

  “The Agency wouldn’t use that term.”

  “So you do!”

  “We search,” he smiled to himself. “So, I was thinking, you want to carpool tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” he suggested tentatively.

  “Sure!”

  He smiled wider. He’d have to check out which movies were playing.

  28

  Miri, Sarawak Province, Malaysia

  Later that night, the bar was empty. A soul song played over a tinny speaker. Hector was sitting at the long bar laughing with the bartender. When he saw Mac, his smile disappeared.

  As she sat down, the bartender stepped into the back room.

  Her voice was low. “You didn’t want to tell me about Dominick’s death because you’re afraid of Alghaba.”

  Hector wiped the condensation from the glass of orange juice. His mouth worked in tense nervous movements.

  “I’m not here to get you in trouble,” she said. “Nobody knows what we’re talking about. We could be talking about the dive.”

  He stared at his drink.

  “Hector, I’m trying to figure out what happened to my friend.”

  “I don’t know you.” It was a whispered statement.

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “All you need to know is that I’m no friend of Alghaba.”

  He glanced at her.

  “I’m a foreigner. I’ll be gone soon. I understand why you’re afraid. But I promise you, I’m not a friend of Alghaba.”

  “They are killing us. Killing Borneo.”

  She nodded. “So I saw.”

  “You went up?”

  “We just got back.”

  “Who did you go with?” he asked.

  “Azly.”

  “Azly’s a good guy.”

  “Yes, he is. He was badly hurt today.”

  Hector glanced at her, fear written across his face. “Is he okay?”

  “He’ll be okay,” she nodded. “Hector, I’m not a friend of Alghaba. I need you to tell me what you know. I need to find my missing friend.”

  Hector finally moved. He picked up his orange juice, the ice having long ago melted in the heat. He took a deep sip and finished the drink. He stood from his stool and turned toward the door. As he passed, he leaned in and said under his breath, “They killed Dominick French’s murderer. Two days ago. He’s in the morgue.”

  Mac let Johnson into her hotel room. Spread across the bed were printouts of black and white maps. There were at least ten maps. She indicated the closest one. “I’ve marked in red the boundaries of Alghaba’s forestry concessions.”

  He looked up at her, his expression shocked. “How did you put these together so quickly?”

  She deflected his inquiry easily. “It’s part of the bank’s paperwork. Alghaba submitted the official permits as part of due diligence. I just plotted them out.”

  “So you’re breaking client confidentiality by showing me these.”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “We’ve come a long way, you and I.”

  “Don’t push it, Johnson. We’re not getting married.” She shuffled the maps, uncovered printed satellite images and pointed to a red line. “Here is where we were today.”

  “Hold on a Hong Kong second. How did you get satellite images from today?”

  “The bank uses all kinds of contractors for all kinds of things.” She watched him, waiting to see if he accepted the lie. The satellite images were from 89.

  Johnson gave her a confused look.

  She lifted up the top images to show more underneath, “These are images going back ten months. You can clearly see in these images where the deforestation is happening.” She stood and cracked out her back.

  His look was incredulous.

  She nodded to the papers on the bed. “Johnson, bank’s have a lot of money to throw around. Let’s not dwell on that. We’ve got a lot more important things to do.”

  He continued to stare at her.

  “Look at these, please.” She pointed to the bed. “What I’m telling you is that we have the legal boundaries for Alghaba, we have the coordinates for today, and we can compare these to the satellite images going back ten months. We can plot Alghaba’s
illegal logging--historically.”

  He shook his head.

  She pointed to the bed again. “Johnson, this is not about you and me. This is about Alghaba. Just look at this.”

  Johnson reluctantly turned to the bed. He shuffled through the papers, comparing the red lines on the maps to the satellite images of deforestation. “Compared to three months ago. They’ve moved up this mountain at a pace of…my guess…is ten miles a month.”

  “Close. From my calculations, Alghaba is moving fifteen miles a month and are well over fifty miles past their official demarcation line. Their encroachment is significant.” She pushed her nails through her hairline.

  Using his finger as a guide across the image, he measured out to a point on the map and looked up. “So within two weeks, they will have completely subsumed the Penan village.”

  She rubbed her fists across her eyes.

  He measured out a different path and looked up again. “They will rip down the orangutan sanctuary in two months.”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me the bank is going to kill the deal.” he pleaded.

  “The bank is going to kill the deal.” It was a vow to him and to herself.

  She called Meredith Coldwell in Hong Kong. “Meredith, I’ve got proof. I’ve got proof Alghaba is — “

  “Give me your number.”

  “What?”

  “Where are you?”

  Mac glanced around the Marriott room at Johnson sitting in a corner, listening. “I’m in Miri at a hotel.”

  “I’m taking this off the office phone. Give me your number and I’ll call you back from my cell.”

  Two minutes later, Meredith called. “It’s me.”

  “What was that all about?” Mac asked.

  “The bank records our calls.”

  Mac shook her head to herself. Nothing surprised her anymore. “I’ve just come back from one of Alghaba’s sites in the rainforest. It’s pretty bad. They are clearly logging illegally. I’ve got GPS coordinates and photos of them ripping down primary rainforest miles beyond their permitted concessions.”

  “You have proof?”

  “Yes. I’ve compared satellite images of their concessions to what they are actually foresting.” She paused, stared at Johnson. “And, Meredith, I think I may have stumbled on to something else that the bank needs to know. I believe Alghaba may be involved in a death and a disappearance of two environmental activists.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Back up. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “There were two activists that recently visited the same site, and had done the exact reconnaissance I just did. Shortly after their trip, one was murdered. The other hasn’t been seen since.”

  Johnson watched her.

  Meredith replied, “We need your stuff air tight. The deal team will push back hard. We can’t have any doubt.”

  “I don’t have any doubt.”

  Johnson made a tight, small nod.

  Meredith said, “Okay, then come on home.”

  29

  Langley, VA

  Neville O’Dore was chewing a toothpick as he held her cover note in front of his chin. The toothpick jimmied up and down between his two, wet lips. Sitting opposite him on the other side of his desk in his bright office, Joyce wondered at what point the toothpick splintered? Did toothpick chewers know when the toothpick was about to splinter?

  The toothpick stopped all movement. O’Dore’s jaw was clenched as he set the paper down and looked over at her. “So let me get this straight. I told you to finish investigating this intel and just write a cover note. Instead, you dug in more.”

  “I was able to turn up some interesting accounting on the company.”

  “And how did you do that?”

  She swallowed. She couldn’t tell him about her meeting at the Hilton with Hassan Talib. She was pretty sure he’d yell. She lied. “I found it online.”

  “Huh--”

  “And what it tells us is that this shelf company is actually up and running. It’s had two transactions in the last year.”

  “I read that in your cover note. Thanks.” His sarcasm was thick.

  “So, I think I need to dig a little deeper.” She sat up taller and began her oral argument. “First, the Agency is blind on Malaysia, relatively speaking. I scanned what we had in the ‘known’ files and really, Neville, it’s just not that much. I would say ‘blind’ might be an understatement—“

  “So nothing other than these two transactions?”

  “Second, Malaysia may not be a high value target for us right now but it may be one day. There are many disaffected and politically disenfranchised folks in Malaysia. UMNO stifles any kind of dissent, as you know—“

  “Tattle, I read your cover note--”

  “Further, it shares a border with Thailand where we have a whole shitload of activity. We are following the Thai-Malaysia border with precision reporting. I don’t know who’s out there, but they sure do report back a lot.”

  “So nothing else from this particular agent?”

  Exasperated, she admitted, “Nothing else.”

  “This is just not compelling, Joyce.”

  “A significant majority of Malaysians are Muslims?”

  “No. You’re not going to be able to tie this to counter terrorism.”

  She blew out her cheeks. “I’m trying to tie it into to anything that will give me a green light to dig deeper.”

  “There is nothing here”—he tapped her papers—“that warrants that. Do you want me to assess this as unusual activity?”

  “Absolutely. I think we should go back and try to get more information from the agent in KL on this particular company, Malay Petro Reliance.”

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not gonna do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t see how buying a shelf company and receiving payment is classified as unusual activity.”

  She was flabbergasted. They’d chased smaller leads in the past. She huffed, “But it’s Malaysia.”

  “There’s nothing inherently interesting about Malaysia at the moment.”

  “There’s something interesting about all countries, all the time!”

  “Not in Malaysia there’s not. Not right now. You’re done. This cover note is fine. You’ve cleared the intel. Get on with your other assignments.” His mouth closed in finality.

  Joyce sulked back to her cubicle.

  “I seriously don’t even know what I’m feeling right now,” she said to Anatoli. But if she were to admit it, her internal scale had her at probably a forty-five percent. The bureaucracy was weighing heavy on her.

  Anatoli said through the wall, “Move on.”

  “But there is something here, goddammit.”

  Anatoli was clacking away at his keyboard. She stared at her cell phone for a long time. It was exactly 8:20 p.m. in KL. She picked up her cellphone and dialed Hassan Talib.

  He picked up his cellphone in two rings, “Talib.”

  She lowered her voice, “Yes, Mr. Talib. This is Joyce Tattle from DC.”

  Anatoli’s chair creaked.

  In KL, Hassan Talib was shocked into silence.

  Joyce whispered quickly, “Don’t worry, I’m calling from a clean phone.” Better to give him some meat to chew on before he balked. “I’m not sure who is there, but if anyone asks, just say I’m one of the participants you met in DC. I’m a municipal worker in Maryland.”

  Anatoli’s face appeared over the cubicle wall. His eyes were as large as saucers.

  It took Hassan Talib a moment to digest her words, but he sank into the deception easily. “Yes. Yes, hello, Ms. Tattle. How are you?”

  Joyce grinned, spoke into the phone, “Yes, well, thanks, all fine. I just needed one more thing from your friend who is so good on finances.”

  Anatoli’s mouth gaped open.

  Hassan Talib picked up her cue
s. “Yes, yes, okay, more financial information. On that same company?”

  She grinned wider to Anatoli, “Yes, please. That would be so helpful. Well, what I need is their banking information in the last month. The most recent information.”

  Anatoli started shaking his head emphatically and miming her to hang up the phone.

  Hassan paused, then said, “Yes, I think I can get that.”

  “Well, perfect. We’ll cover your expenses,” she lied.

  “Yes, yes, okay, then. I’ll send those as soon as I can. To the fax again?”

  Bingo. “Yes, perfect. Thank you, Mr. Talib.” She hung up.

  Anatoli laid his chest down across the top of their cubicle in a dramatic loss of strength. He blinked rapidly. “Are you insane?”

  She gave him a fake innocent look, “What?”

  “We’re fucking Directorate of Intelligence not Directorate of Operations. What you just did is officially Covert Action.”

  “It had to be done.”

  “You need approval for that! Are you insane?”

  She snorted.

  “Lady, if anyone finds out about that call you’re in some serious shit.”

  “Who’s gonna find out?”

  “This is the CIA, Joyce.”

  “Exactly.”

  30

  Miri, Sarawak Province, Malaysia

  The banging on her hotel door came at midnight. She was awake immediately. Through the peephole, she saw a disheveled Johnson—hair spiked wildly and eyes dilated.

  She pulled open the door.

  He was wearing a t-shirt and sweat pants, barefoot. “They took Azly,” he said loudly, too quickly.

  She pulled him in, closed the door. “Stand here, breathe, tell me everything you know.”

  Johnson was panting. “His father says two policeman came. He said they were ‘rough’ with him. Dragged him by his neck.”

  “Did he explain rough any more than that?”

  “Uh, no. Just said they roughed him. Dragged him by the neck.” His chest was heaving.

  “Did they say anything to Azly’s father?”

  “No. Nothing. No explanation.”