Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 40 Dog Tags

  “Between dust and dreams there is life.”

  It was a phrase barked at all the recruits day and night.

  The saying was coined by the man who trained Legacy at Special Forces. He was a big man with loose vocal chords that could dig deep into baritone to find just the pitch that made his words resonate filling the chest of every man in the proximity of his voice.

  Legacy loved the phrase, partly because he had no idea what it meant. He remembered that it was used to motivate, the idea being that before a man returned to the earth he had to work to make his imprint or his life would be no different than a dream. But Legacy thought the words more closely stated in fact that life could be bent toward either the pursuit of death, dust, or alignment with the ideal, dreams. In Legacy’s reading, every step away from the ideal was one closer to death. It was the kind of saying that kept a man’s engine running.

  Legacy made it clear from the day he showed up at age seventeen that he would not just get through his elite training, he would dominate it in every phase. There was a Special Forces test – the first week of training everyone ran one mile a day. The second week the run went up to two miles twice a day. By week five, the men were expected to complete a full training regimen during the day, while running five miles five times a day. This was a marathon of will. It continued until half of the men who started the training dropped out. This occurred on the second day of the fifth week.

  Legacy didn’t stop; it wasn’t good enough to be in the top fifty percent. He continued running, five times a day, five miles. Others in his unit started joining him, once or twice a day. This lasted until the third day of the seventh week, when Legacy did back-to-back seven-mile jogs, returning at three AM to find his training officer, Perkins, waiting for him at the barracks door.

  Legacy would never forget the words he imparted on that dewy hot night. He said, “I went through this ten years ago, and I didn’t want to quit either. I ran the course until my lungs were ready to explode. I quit on the second day of the seventh week.” He paused to let Legacy appreciate the math, “so get your ass to nine hours of sleep and miss morning call. Oh and if I see you on the trail again, I’ll shoot you.”

  Legacy scraped down the carpet to the study. His limits had been tested so often, two nights in a row without sleep was like a holiday. When he saw Wagner slumped over her computer, deliberating over each image and recording the Kanji characters in her notebook – glasses perched on the slim bridge of her nose, eyes marbled with red streaks like a good cut of meat. He gave up a little ground to encourage his fellow agent.

  “We’ll call a meeting in the morning, we shouldn’t get to have all the fun. You need some sleep.” He observed.

  Wagner stretched and let a drowsy look of contentment slip over her face. She pulled both arms out of the sleeves of her jacket leaving it over the chair and her standing in white dress shirt.

  Legacy continued, “We’ll need a qualified linguist to go over all of the findings.”

  “So?” Wagner purred in a husky tired voice.

  Legacy watched her step out of her heels and sink an inch on his horizon line. She was still shoulder height and strangely provocative holding a shoe in one hand and pulling a clip from her hair with the other. Legacy stared at the attractive pose standing in front of him with one emotion flooding his thoughts: fear.

  “So where’s the guest room?” Wagner asked passing by him on the way to the bathroom. “I won’t make it back to my hotel in time for an hour before morning.”

  “Miss morning call.” Legacy said.

  “Like hell I will.” She gave him a sidelong look over her shoulder, as her hair cascaded around her face, a disheveled accent to the precision of all other aspects of her appearance. It was worthy of a series of photos. Legacy could see that she was in a vulnerable position and decided to handle the matter better than he usually would.

  “Sleep in your car. That’s my advice.” Wagner squeezed her face together, composing the mental diatribe against Legacy constructed in three compelling movements. Legacy amended his statement, “Or you could sleep on the couch in the living room.” He busied himself flipping through the transcript and when he looked up ten minutes or perhaps three hours later, Wagner was gone. He could hear her steady breathing in the other room. It pushed him into a world of strange satisfaction.

  The next three days were like waves crashing on a dirty shore. Movement forward only to suddenly pull back, dragging hidden sediment, making the waters more cloudy than ever. The period of stagnation was a cakewalk compared to the complete ruin that would follow.

  The first wave came the next morning when a section of staff linguists were called in to decipher the message that Laura sent via her eyelids.

  Wagner and Legacy entered the familiar conference room and were greeted by a posse of people who looked almost like the same person. The same glasses adorned the same thin, finicky faces. Not an ounce of fat in the room, the surgeon general would be pleased. The room was a fish tank of the same species and all stared at the videoconference image of Wilkes as they made their presentation, even though a live audience sat at one side of the room.

  The only oddity in the group was their leader. Jay, or Agent Lightning, the sloppy, choppy delivery of a young leader of the brain trust spoke in lower-class southern dialect of which all of his formally dressed and composed colleagues must have found at very least nominally annoying. Legacy knew of him, there was a connection between prodigies. He’d moved up the chain of command to his position simply because he soaked up words and culture in one swift linguistic stroke that none of the others could keep up with. There was no nuance that hid from him, even when studying the driest of textbooks. Within a week of starting a new language, he was reading the literature, and writing academic critiques.

  The one language he vowed never to learn was French. “French was like a frilly lady wearing too much par-fum.” That’s what he said, and Teutonic studies majors in the room would turn beet red whenever the subject came up.

  He knew how to put together almost any sentence in a way that would piss off someone. It was a gift, and probably why he still spoke in his country accent, having mastered hundreds of speech variations perfectly.

  Legacy liked him immediately.

  “I got good news,” He waited a little longer than was comfortable before finishing with “And more good news. But lets get the confusing part out of the way first. The message the girl so artfully scratched on the outside of her eyeballs is nonsense. It means nothing taken word by word or put into clusters, groups or structure loops. It is not a code either, and I’ll tell you that sent most of my team to the head-scratcher from which they never came back.”

  Wilkes showed impatience “What are you trying to say?”

  “The joy of being me director of the linguists division,” He said in a lazy drawl, “Is that I never try to say anything, I am as exact with language to the width of an atom. That’s why it even took me a while to catch on to what the lady was really saying.”

  A gesture from Jay and the group sprung into action, holding up carefully prepared flip cards with the Chinese symbol, the translated meaning and the phonetic pronunciation.

  Legacy scanned down the definitions and instantly understood what Jay was talking about. It was gibberish, fish, trail, dog, ear, water immersion, sell – even when the timeline was taken away it was almost impossible to find a cohesive message out of the scramble. There was a strange moment when he looked over at Wagner whose lips moved as she read and reread the words – she looked back while still chewing an assembly that she’d been working on. She said “Tail of dog immersed in water – that could be – what the hell could that be, Legacy?”

  Legacy shrugged, he knew the answer was coming. “It means nothing, no? Right? Now read the phonetics but banish all accent.”

  “Fis – to – ga- loo – pro – fo- U – ta.” Jay waited for one of the a
udience to pick up the trail. “There’s more, about her surroundings.”

  Wagner was eager to continue the message “Da – see – Jen – ee – gsu. The first girl is in Provo Utah. It’s Darci Jennings, the girl we’ve been looking for – the girl that marketed pornography to her high school classmates.”

  Legacy was on a different track, silent but just as meaningful. He remembered a satellite part purchase from Tyke’s list that was sent to Provo and the date was a day after drop-off of the last girl. They were narrowing the operational area of the Vinyl Men, and if they could find Darci, they could stick a pin in the map.

  Jay was still speaking. Legacy caught up with him mid sentence “- the times she gives for sunrise and sunset don’t make sense.”

  Legacy asked, “What if she were in the mountains, sheltered under a peak?”

  Jay pointed to Legacy with a pen with enthusiasm like he’d just won something at auction “That sir is why I have to take more interest in the world at large, yes an uneven surround could take minutes off one and altitude could add to another, I’ll get someone qualified to work out that point.” He was about to turn back to the screen when curiosity shifted him back to face Legacy. “You’re the crazy one, aren’t you?”

  An audible gasp from his colleagues, knowing the arsenal of syntax that Agent Lightning did, meant that choosing a word like crazy was the harshest kind of cut possible. It meant that searching through all possible expressions; crazy with all its judgments was the best.

  “I prefer the term nut-case.”

  Jay convulsed with laughter. He put a finger to the side of his nose and saluted Legacy while hardly missing a beat, jumping back into the presentation.

  The meeting concluded with Director Wilkes issuing orders to a team to scour the Provo area for Darci Jennings. It was difficult for him because he was still entwined with Sofia. He had assigned manpower to investigate her as the possible first abductee. The wear on his face and the tear on his hairline however indicated to Legacy that he would take this new lead seriously and pursue it vigorously no matter how much pride he had to choke down admitting he was wrong.

  Legacy felt like he needed to express his support for his boss so he raised his voice before the meeting broke. He shared with everyone gathered at the table his own views on their work. “I understand that there is much more freedom in being wrong. A person can be wrong in so many individual ways that it allowed them to consider their mistakes as part of their personality. I understand that some of you will, at some time, disagree with me.” If he had looked up he would have seen Wilkes looking on, his mouth had fallen open in disbelief, but it didn’t stop there.

  Legacy went on to explain that he didn’t consider it a character flaw to disagree with him; it was simply misplaced human ego. He ended by chiding Wilkes in front of everyone in attendance “Let’s not make that same mistake again and in the future, believing me the first time will save time.”

  Legacy finished with a varnished, affable smile. He thought that Wilkes took it well.

  When he looked over at Wagner, her face was a mixture of disbelief and horror, but he knew that inside she agreed with him and was just too polite to say anything.

  Wagner mouthed the words, “Shut up.” But he had one last thing to say.

  “Forget the mistakes of the past and concentrate on making the mistakes of the future. That’s what all of you are best at.” The end of his speech was met with complete silence.

  The only one in the room who could breathe was Agent Lightning, who seemed downright delighted by the whole display. He applauded then began laughing until some of the others joined. He’d probably pull a muscle sprinting to his notebook to write an academic analysis of the elocutionary force of their interchange in his online journal. He could well entitle the blog “The Silent FU2”. The meeting broke up and the participants scattered.

  A wave of federal activity crashed into Provo Utah that afternoon, in the form of a troop of thirty liberty-grade agents with two national advisors. The wave receded three days later having found no trace of the girl Darci, nor a single caffeinated drink to keep them company in their round the clock search.

  The messages on Laura’s eyelids did produce one significant break – a fissure between Wilkes and Legacy. In classic Legacy fashion, he showed no signs of recognizing the cold wind that blew through the conference room every time they locked eyes, the one only everyone else seemed to notice.

  Things were rough all over. Even with the area around the Vinyl Men shrinking, there was over 200 thousand square miles of territory within the band of mountainous area a day’s drive from Provo.

  For every new development that inched them closer, there was a tick of the clock that punched them back. The office that Legacy and Wagner shared seemed to shrink and the panic of finding solutions before the selection of the next girl hummed in the walls. If Legacy was right, there were only four days until the girl would be selected and six before she’d be initiated before an audience that was fusing the singularity of this perversion with the popularity of a fad.

  The money tally on Laura had grown into the tens of millions, and although the ransom target wasn’t released until two days before the girl’s release, it was hard to believe that Laura’s wouldn’t eclipse a hundred million dollars. This was just the money earned in Internet distribution. Legacy shuddered to think at the economic engine that direct to home sales would unleash. The buyers were everywhere. They should all be charged, and he wasn’t thinking about their credit cards.

  Wagner’s discovery of a fertility treatment clinic that had a records fire in Grand Junction put one more dot on the map. But without Darci their only chance to seize control of this operation lay in wait, in the next abduction. They had to be there when the group laid hands upon her, and then ride that new stream of information back into the night.

  Since the discovery of the message on her eyelids, Wilkes had ordered that the video should be viewed frame by frame and mapped out item for item that appeared. The results were collected on a large-scale map on the wall of the conference room. Every product that appeared on screen should be followed back to any possible purchase point. A deck of Bicycle cards in a gambling hall set would be traced back to the manufacturer, eventually found to be sold in twelve thousand outlets in all fifty states. This data would be compared to the costumes and the chips and the felt on the table. If any item were slightly unique they would know, and use special marking on the map to show that a specific purchase must have been made from a specific shop.

  The board quickly became a dense stand of pine that spread from coast to coast. Pins standing at attention, almost on top of each other because the props, costumes and sets were more than just a gambling scene, it was a cheerleader tryout in leather, and a high school reunion with sex toys, and a French country house bound in silk ribbons and, of course, the penitentiary visiting room.

  The agency had ten thousand active investigations, yet it functioned around this case. Every agent knew that putting these men behind bars meant more than a promotion, it was also the validation of the agency that they served. This abduction brought international scrutiny in the form of daily front-page headlines; no story had ever lasted this long under the constant watchful eye of the world.

  Up to thirty-two acts aired daily along an Internet media pipeline that had almost the same audience as a cable network. Laura, the face of a nation’s struggle against crime was, at almost any moment of the day sliding out of her clothes, standing amid her captors, treating them to the kind of intimate contact that she would have prosecuted if she were in any other position.

  Wagner was watching the end of one of the sessions on day two when a hand reached in and turned off her screen.

  Legacy stood over her, lacking a response she said, “They pierced her tongue.”

  “Don’t get caught up in what’s happening now. It’s all about what comes next. Work on that.”

  Wagner instead,
told Legacy of the new directive to examine every frame of the video. He sneered.

  Legacy couldn’t believe that every time he gave his superiors information, they misconstrued it wasting time and effort. He’d told them to look for a biker group and a first victim and they’d jumped at the first biker and victim they could find. It didn’t matter that the rest of Legacy’s report told them that the bikers would not be moving around the victim, or that the victim would exhibit a fear of her captors. They’d wasted thirty-six hours on Sofia.

  Now they were looking frame by frame because he’d found a message on specific moments in the video. They weren’t building a theory on Blue and how Laura’s elaborate message delivery, which almost had eluded their collective efforts said something about how much she respected the intellect of her captor. They instead were cataloging a museum of terrors and graphing the results like lost sheep, two more days wasted.

  He looked at Wagner for a moment, saw in her face how much she wanted to be one of them - and he reached down below her desk and pulled the plug on her computer monitor.

  “I’m going to have lunch.” He disappeared out of the room. She thought of following him, but decided to utilize the time with him out of the room.

  Legacy had been working on the same flip chart since just after dinner the night before. He said that he’d show her when the time was right. Wagner decided in his absence that the time was right.

  It was not at all what she’d expected.

  An organized flow chart of all of the women who would certainly be on television during the three and a half hour window during which Blue would pick his next victim. Every name given a color that must have corresponded to their profession, their ages written beside and a passport photo stapled beside. Notes like “Blue might like her position of power,” or “Not a step up,” feathered the margins on a perfect diagonal from the chart text.

  It looked like a sketch Leonardo Da Vinci would have presented; it was so symmetrical in its freehand form, verging on artistic. The fact that he was capable of such organization surprised her.

  Every picture had two breakdown columns, Legacy’s comments and Blue’s comments. The style of commentary in Legacy’s box was familiar, factual and unemotional. Blue’s comments were erratic and sometimes vulgar. Although she knew that they came from the same pen, she could hardly believe that the division could be explained within one man.

  It was here that she saw the disturbing nature of Legacy’s gift. He could crawl so far into the mind, usually a criminal, that the vulgarity became a second part of his own nature. Every time he undertook to write notes as Blue his mind went to a place that could not be explained. And in those moments it’s exactly who Legacy was. He was a killer, liar, rapist and cheat, sitting cross-legged in his study, daughter sleeping down the hall at night.

  Wagner’s eyes scanned the pages, and she imagined so many faces. Was there any way to be sure that Blue would even be looking when this or that one flashed across the screen? Reading the margins, her heart began to race and sweat beaded up on her upper lip.

  Wagner burst into the women’s restroom, fidgeting with the buttons on her blouse. One by one they popped open showing a hint of a peach satin bra. Her heart thundered, “Is this a panic attack?” She thought, “How can I trust him?” Was she going crazy? Was she beginning to believe? And did the answer yes to one of the questions presuppose an answer of yes to the other?

  She assessed the damage in the mirror. Her face looked perfect, it could have been worse, but then again, the weakness of a reflection is that it only showed the outside.