It was a big show, Novak thought, with lots of lights and noise and weaponry, certain to ruffle the feathers of any citizen distrustful of a growing police state. Yet they’d succeeded in maintaining the element of surprise, and the raid unfolded methodically in the basic three-stage process: surprise, stabilize, seize.
The SWAT team kicked things off with sharpshooters taking tactical positions at the compass points to cover the assault force that fanned out around the building. After one officer shut off the main gas line to the building, others breached the locked doors leading to the administrative offices and the side exit doors and loading dock, then tossed concussive stun grenades through the openings before swarming inside in a coordinated wave. Their goal wasn’t purely shock and awe; they performed the critical functions of rounding up everyone inside as quickly and cleanly as possible before computers and evidence could be tampered with, as well as quashing any armed response.
In less than two and a half minutes, SWAT’s lockdown and stabilization was complete, with no resistance or threats reported. Once they’d given the all-clear, the FBI, Postal Inspection, CBP, and CERT streamed into the front-end administrative offices.
The CERT techs sprinted to the computer workstations and copied the entirety of Echelon’s proprietary computer files and billing and accounting software before the screensavers had a chance to nap into password log-in mode. In less than a minute, one of the techs had gained access to the main server’s root directory, which wasn’t even sporting, given that everything was running on an antiquated Windows XP platform that had gone at least seven years without a software update or security patch and that its oblivious administrator had kept his passwords on a handwritten sticky note in the top desk drawer. From there, Echelon’s digital innards were laid bare: ledgers, emails both personal and business, browsing history, faxes, archives, and anything else in its system that had ever been converted to zeros and ones, including the deleted files, whose ghosts still haunted the hard drives.
The FBI agents handled the physical invoices and paperwork, boxing it all and carting it out to an unmarked FBI panel van. Strapped filing cabinets went in behind them, followed by the seized computers (the CERT techs took digital pictures of the password lists taped to each of the monitors and kept a detailed list of the corresponding hard drives) and peripheral equipment, such as fax machines, backup servers, disks, thumb drives, and even the 3.25 floppy disks from a bygone era.
While SWAT watched over the office and warehouse staff, who’d been corralled into the break room, Knight and Novak made their way into the back-end storage facility, accompanied by the lead postal inspector, Craig Hargrave—a forty-something with the build of a linebacker and the scarred, angular face of a veteran prizefighter. The previous afternoon, his team had scrambled to collect the tracking and shipping records, thereby securing a no-holds-barred emergency search and seizure warrant in record time.
The warehouse was like most others Novak had seen: an immense open rectangle lit by an overhead grid of fluorescent light boxes, aisles of sturdy shelving crammed with boxes, forklifts parked here and there. The damp air smelled like motor oil and plastic wrap and rat carcasses. There were no computer servers in sight. So much for a twofer, he thought.
“Company’s privately owned by two brothers, Camillo and Anthony Sorvino, who hail from a prominent Italian family, if you know what I mean,” Hargrave explained. “Welcome to Jersey.”
Being a Jersey boy himself, Novak took no offense, because the stereotype had some truth to it. Certain areas of the state, particularly shipping hubs like Jersey City and Newark, had a rich history of organized crime.
“They run a mail-order business,” Hargrave said. “Specialty foods imported from Italy that are then shipped out to customers who want a taste of Tuscany.” He pointed up at the boxes on the shelves, indicating the Italian labels. “Lord only knows what they ship out along with the olive oil. But get ready for the runaround.”
“Why’s that?” Novak asked.
Hargrave grinned. “You’ll see.”
He took them to the southwest corner of the warehouse, where the postal inspectors and CBP agents stood around a cube-shaped cardboard box, three feet per edge, labeled in Chinese. The shelves behind them were stacked to the ceiling with identical boxes.
“Go ahead and have a look for yourselves,” Hargrave told Novak and Knight.
The inspectors moved aside to let the G-men examine the spoils. Sure enough, the box was stuffed full of what they’d come looking for. But the pins had shipped here prepacked in their insulated manila envelopes, needing only local shipping labels to make it out into U.S. circulation. The sticker on the box flap indicated the sender was some company in China named Chongxin Shenme.
“They’re going to claim they didn’t know what was in the envelopes,” Novak said to Knight.
“Yup,” Knight said.
# 34.02
“How’re we supposed to know what’s in those envelopes?” Camillo Sorvino said, handcuffs shackled to his wrists, calm as could be, as if a raid were a weekly event. “I mean, come on, fellas. We don’t go openin’ the merchandise.”
In Echelon’s conference room, Knight, Novak, and Hargrave had been grilling the Sorvino brothers for a solid twenty minutes, knee-deep in the runaround, just as Hargrave had predicted.
Camillo Sorvino was a handsome guy who reminded Novak of that underwear model who became an actor some years back. Dark hair, and lots of it. Olive complexion. Athletic build. Brother Anthony, also manacled about the wrists, shared the family’s good genes but was gray at the temples and thick in the midsection. Neither of them seemed tech-savvy. No Neo to be found at Echelon. These Soprano wannabes were middlemen. Low-level peddlers. It didn’t speak well for the Mafia’s place in the modern economy.
Knight was getting tired of the nonsense. “You realize, gentlemen, that no matter how you dice it, you’re laundering money for Bounty4Justice. Those Chinese novelty pins out there in your warehouse are funding bounties for assassins. Plain and simple.”
“Again, I say, how’re we supposed to know that?” Camillo leaned back in his chair with his left leg crossed over his right, calmly rocking to and fro.
“So you figure that the demand for lapel pins suddenly spiked?” Novak said. “Pins with the scales of justice on them? You think that’s just coincidence, or maybe every lawyer on the planet happened to join the same club this week?”
Camillo and Anthony both gave him a “you don’t talk to me like that, smart guy” look.
“Like I said,” Camillo replied, “we don’t—go openin’—the merchandise. They’re pins. Pins. Could have a smiley face on ’em, a peace sign, a rainbow for the gays, or whatnot. How we supposed to know? And our neighborly postal service here has been more than happy to ship this crap for its cut of the money.” He thumbed toward Hargrave. “It’s not like they go openin’ the envelopes, do they? So tell me, agents, you gonna charge our mailman with funding assassins, too? What’s fair is fair.”
Everyone exchanged glances, as if the dealer had just turned the river card in a high-stakes round of Texas Hold ’Em.
It was a weird thing Bounty4Justice was doing, thought Novak. It was testing every facet of criminal activity and the minutiae of all the legalities that tried to govern it. In this case, it was quite literally pushing the envelope. Was this its intent? To put the entire justice system under stress?
“Look, agents,” Anthony said. “I can save you lots of trouble and tell you straight up that we haven’t taken a single order from this Bounty4Justice. God’s honest truth.”
“Tell us who’s paying you to mail out these pins, and how,” Knight insisted. “Then maybe some of the other goodies that I’m sure we’ll find in your files and on your computers might be overlooked.”
Novak fully expected a “Go fuck yourself” from Camillo or a “Talk to my lawyer” from Anthony. Instead, the brothers Sorvino looked at each other and performed some weird nonverbal mind m
eld. They both nodded in consensus.
Camillo shrugged. “Sure. Consider it done.”
The Dallas Morning News @dallasnews • 49m
Assassinations 2.0: murder for hire’s latest upgrade is @Bounty4Justice.
d-news.co/De231tj
ProPublica @ProPublica • 7m
@Bounty4Justice adds former @RedCross officer for enriching family and friends with disaster-relief funds.
propublica.ca/12We45q2
# 35.01
@ Dallas
11:14:41 CDT
The three detention towers of the Lew Sterrett Justice Center stood like a modern Bastille along the bank of the Trinity River, with the skyscrapers marking the city center safely in the distance on the other side of the I-35 corridor. Michaels parked the rental car in the visitors’ garage and trekked over to the North Tower Detention Facility, a conjoined pair of harsh octagonal high-rises that housed nearly thirty-three hundred maximum-security inmates. One of its most recent inductees was the cult hero Manuel Tejada—dubbed “Handy Manny” by the press—who’d been detained without bail, pending a judge’s hearing of the opening movements of his capital murder case.
Outside the main entrance, she spotted a tall, almost storklike woman smoking a cigarette—middle-aged, with square shoulders, an angular face, and a short haircut teleported from the 1980s. She wore a blindingly white form-fitting dress suit—the skirt’s hemline barely halfway down her slender thighs—with a pink silk blouse unbuttoned precariously low and pink pumps.
“Rosemary?” She blew a plume of smoke skyward, then smiled.
“Yes. Hi, Angela,” Michaels said, stepping up and shaking her outstretched hand. “Great to meet you.”
“Welcome to Dallas, darlin’. And, please, call me Angie.” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray fitted to the top of a cylindrical garbage can. “You made good time. Flight went well, I take it?”
“Smooth sailing.”
Inside, they turned over their sidearms for safekeeping, funneled through the metal detectors, and proceeded past the bail-bond windows, inmate property-retrieval desk, and vending machines to check in with the guard manning the front desk. The place was empty; the posted weekday visiting hours were from 7:00 to 9:00 in the evening. A hulk of an officer from the sheriff’s department—his name tag read “Barry J. Eubanks”—escorted them through the succession of barred doors in the buffer zone, then down a long, sterile corridor that bypassed the prison floor cellblocks and to a secure, windowless meeting room.
“Y’all go on in and get cozy, and I’ll go fetch ’im,” Officer Eubanks said.
They sat side by side in folding chairs on the guests’ side of the room’s only table, which was bolted to the floor. Simmons retrieved the prisoner’s case file from a bulky white leather purse bedazzled with rhinestones.
“Let me tell you, if ever there’s been an open-and-shut case,” she quietly confided to Michaels, “this is the one.” She opened the folder, flipped through some pages, and tapped her brightly painted fingernails on a glossy photo of Congressman Krosby’s blackened corpse, melted to the stretch limo’s burned-out interior. “Nobody at the office has grand illusions about the expected outcome of the judge’s ruling. Manny Tejada is the proverbial dead man walking.”
There was a double-tap knock at the door. Eubanks opened the door and held it open. Handy Manny shuffled into the room wearing leg irons, handcuffs, and a standard-issue orange prison jumper. Eubanks helped him to his chair and shackled his handcuffs to an eyebolt in the center of the table.
“Hi, Manny,” Simmons said. “This here’s my colleague from New York, Special Agent Rosemary Michaels.”
Manny had dark circles under his eyes and was in need of a shower and shave. He glanced briefly at Michaels, then shifted back to Simmons.
“We’ve got some important questions for you, and we’d really appreciate your cooperation.”
“Shouldn’t my lawyer be here for this?”
“You don’t have to answer any question you’re not comfortable with,” Simmons said. “But, sweetie, you’ve already pleaded guilty. Full confession. Nothing you say is gonna change that.”
Tejada looked down at his handcuffs.
“I’m deeply saddened about what happened to your son, Manny,” Michaels said earnestly. “It takes a lot to push a father to do what you did, and it takes an even bigger man to stand up and deal with the consequences. So I’m not here to judge you. I’m just looking for some basic information.” She paused. “You used your phone to upload the video. And when you registered your claim with Bounty4Justice, you were asked for a mailing address for the bounty payment.”
Novak had told her to act as if the FBI was sure Tejada had opted for physical delivery of his prize money; it was only a hunch, since any claim submitted to Bounty4Justice was completely untraceable. Briefs from Cyber Command indicated that this had to do with ultrarobust proxy servers that performed a digital version of sleight of hand. Tejada could just as easily have opted to be paid in NcryptoCash, which would mean Michaels had flown to Dallas for no reason at all. But the way Manny looked at Simmons for guidance suggested to Michaels that Novak was on to something.
“Go ahead, you can say it,” Simmons told him softly.
“Do you think I’d be sitting here in a cage if this was about money? Don’t you think I would have tried to make a run for it?”
“But you did submit an address to Bounty4Justice?” Michaels said.
He looked to Simmons. “Can’t you figure that out from my phone or my data plan?”
“You smashed your phone before the police arrived, sweetie,” Simmons reminded him.
“I think I want my lawyer,” Tejada replied.
“I’m assuming you want the money to go to your wife,” Michaels said. “To take care of her, right? In your shoes, I’d be looking out for my family, too.”
Manny ran one manacled hand over his face, confused.
“We don’t want to bring your wife into this,” Michaels said. “But we have a real dilemma on our hands here. We need to confirm if that bounty is actually being paid, and how.”
Manny looked at his handcuffs. Then at Michaels. Then at his handcuffs. “Shouldn’t you two be able to figure it out? Can’t you track what that website is doing?”
“Look, Manny,” Michaels said, dodging the technical stuff, “the money was paid to you in exchange for murdering someone. There’s nothing we can do to get around that fact. And Texas has some very clear rules about what the penalties are.”
“Yeah, well. He had it coming.”
“Maybe he did,” Michaels said. “But whether or not Congressman Krosby deserved to die, or whether the court of public opinion backs you, or whether I have my own opinions about what I might have done if I’d been in your shoes…those issues are secondary. My concern, as should be yours, is that this website can easily be used to bring harm to the wrong people. To innocent people.”
“Hasn’t happened yet. The way I see it,” the chauffeur said defensively, “it’s just encouraging people like me to do the job for people like you. You guys should be thanking me. This website is a good thing. Keeps people honest.”
“It’s not a good thing, Manny,” Simmons said calmly. “And let me tell you why, sweetie. Just this week my office arrested two students at a university not far from here who were about to launch a website inspired by Bounty4Justice. They were going to raise bitcoins as a reward for someone to assassinate the president and vice president. Sound familiar? Now, I think we’d all agree that our young people certainly aren’t getting a fair shake at the American dream. Hell, thanks to this screwed-up economy, I can’t get my own daughters to fly from the nest. They’re driving me bat-shit crazy. But do you really think this website is the answer? For these zealous students and anarchists like them? For my daughters? For you and me? Is it really the solution we should all be looking for?”
Manny remained silent for a long moment, and Simmons let it play o
ut.
“Can my wife keep the money?” he finally said. “You know. If I tell you things. If I help you.” He looked beseechingly at each agent in turn, as if searching for the weakest link.
“Manny, honestly, it’s not for us to decide,” Simmons said.
“The way I see it, since I’m the killer and I chose not to receive the money myself, then my wife should be considered the recipient of a prize. Like a lottery or a fifty-fifty.”
Regardless of how Tejada had framed this in his mind, thought Michaels, he was facing a “murder for remuneration” charge—in Texas, a shoo-in for the death penalty. Whether that money was real or fantasy, the mere fact that he’d admitted to uploading the video to Bounty4Justice in hopes of cashing in on the prize had sealed his fate. And with all the premeditation he’d put into torching Krosby, an insanity plea would be a nonstarter, anyway. But she didn’t want to kick him while he was down. She leaned her elbows on the table. “Do you really think your wife can deposit that kind of money in a bank without raising suspicions?”
“If it’s cash, she doesn’t need to give it to any bank.”
“Assuming it comes as cash,” she said. “And that means you’d be forcing us to put her under constant surveillance. Don’t make us do that. Don’t do that to her. Especially if we’re not even certain if the money will show up.”
Manny tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling, or maybe God. “Man, this isn’t fair.”
“You settled your score, Manny,” Michaels said. “If it’s not about the money, then help us prevent Bounty4Justice, or something like it, from hurting someone who doesn’t deserve it. Please, give us the mailing address.”
Manny stared as his handcuffs. Looked at Simmons. Looked at Michaels. Looked at his handcuffs. “Okay.”
Bounty Page 17
