“Now, isn’t that interesting,” Tammy said, rubbing the material between her fingertips.
“You’ve seen this before?”
“You bet I have. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that Bounty4Justice would—” She paused to think it through. “Actually, it makes perfect sense.”
“You’re killing me right now. Tell me.”
“Sorry. Yeah, we come across this sort of packaging every now and then. Even more so lately. In fact, the DEA has made a few confiscations over the past few months, right here on Long Island. Except the packages I’ve seen came in on a boat. Looked just like your pictures.”
“What, you mean drug money?”
“Exactly.”
# 49.02
“These cartels stockpile cash,” Tammy explained. “They maintain a big inventory, and they’ve learned that when you keep huge stashes of money, the elements tend to take a toll. A big toll. They call it a ‘critter commission.’ I’m talking about rodents, insects, humidity, you name it. Basically, it’s tough to store cash in a hostile environment. Even harder to transport it from place to place in bulk without damaging it. And these characters move it by sea, by land, by air, through jungles…everywhere. Hell, we’ve even intercepted homemade submarines stuffed with cash and drugs.”
“So these wrappers are meant to protect the bills?”
“Right. There’s even this residue here, on the inside…” Tammy turned the swatch over from the shiny side to the dull side and rubbed her pinkie on the powdery film. “It doubles as a drying agent and a repellent for the critters and bugs. Let’s face it: nobody wants to be paid with rotten bills. Kind of defeats the purpose.”
Clever, thought Michaels. When all was said and done, every good business boiled down to quality control—drug dealers, auto makers, and clothing stores alike.
“Let’s have a look at that shipping label again,” Tammy said.
Michaels scrolled to the picture and enlarged it for her.
“Massena, New York,” she said. “Makes sense.”
“Why’s that?”
“Massena’s just across the St. Lawrence River from Ontario. That’s a popular crossing point. ATF and DEA are constantly nabbing smugglers in that area. Everyone forgets that our northern border is three times longer than the southern border, and they beat the drum for a fence down there. We’ve got over five thousand miles of exposure up north, lots of it rugged country and rivers and lakes. There’s a damn good reason they call it ‘the longest undefended border.’ No way in hell we can police it. Even if we try to, the smugglers tunnel underground, kinda like those Palestinians do over in Gaza when they sneak into Israel with bombs.”
“So Massena is close enough for a smuggler to bring a package into the U.S. and put it through the mail?”
Reynolds nodded unequivocally. “The border patrol is looking for guns and cigarettes and methamphetamines and marijuana. Oh, and heroin, too. Trust me, your box of books there”—she tipped her head at Michaels’s phone—“wouldn’t even blip on their radar. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone just drove it across the bridge, mixed in with some other boxes. No tunnels required.”
“But I thought all the drug dealers were pushing product through the Mexican border?”
“You’re thinking of cocaine. These cartels up north don’t go after that market. They’ve learned not to mess around with the Mexican drug lords. Plus, it has more to do with who is distributing this stuff to begin with. Up north, most immigrants coming into Canada are primarily from Asia. With them come all the connections to the criminal elements back in their homeland. That’s why trafficking in drugs like opiates is the niche up there.”
“But this makes no sense,” Michaels said, staring at the swatch. “Why would Bounty4Justice work with drug smugglers?”
“Come on, Rosemary. You know that smugglers run two businesses: distributing drugs or weapons or slaves or what have you…and laundering money. Lots and lots of money changing hands. Cash money. To me, this all makes perfect sense,” she said, holding up the swatch. “Think about it: how else is Bounty4Justice going to monetize millions of digital dollars without inciting suspicion or raising red flags at some banks? Let me tell you, nowadays there’s a gigantic online market for laundering. Think of it like this: one guy has the problem of turning something of value into cash, maybe a cargo load of stolen cars or electronics or a few kilos of cocaine, while the other guy has the problem of turning huge amounts of cash into something of value, like cars or electronics or houses or boats. So they swap, or one takes a cut to service the needs of the other. Or a third guy steps in as a facilitator. The black market has gotten very fucking sophisticated, let me tell you, and it functions pretty much like the legitimate one, just without the storefronts and paper trails. In fact, I’d say that makes it even more sophisticated, because you need to be clever to survive—it’s literally a cutthroat business.”
Michaels sipped her coffee and tried to frame it all in her head. This was a granddaddy twist in the investigation.
“So listen to your girlfriend Tammy. Because the bottom line is this: from all that you’ve just shown me, I’d say that Bounty4Justice is using these smuggling syndicates as its ATM.”
BBC London Newsroom @BBCLondonNews • 4m
South Kensington: Lord Andrew Smith dead after cyberassassin purportedly hacks heart implant.
bbc.in/1Wetx432RTp
# 50.01
@ South Kensington, London
14:35:16 GMT
In the elevator car, Burls and three MI5 agents dressed as paramedics surrounded the stretcher bearing the body bag. Zipped inside was a life-sized CPR training dummy. The media had to confirm Lord Andrew Smith’s death or the video kill claim Jeremy had submitted to Bounty4Justice wouldn’t be taken seriously. Somewhere in the world, on some computer—maybe in a library or a coffee shop or the basement of some foreign intelligence agency or in the guts of a sentient machine—that Trojan video file was now sitting in an in-box waiting to be opened. Waiting to poison the well. Burls felt like an engineer at mission control awaiting transmission from a lunar probe on the dark side of the moon.
“Once we get outside, we move quickly,” Burls told them. “Everyone remain calm and stay focused.”
Emerging into the lobby, the crew carefully pushed the stretcher toward the front entryway, its rubber wheels squeaking along the marble floor tiles, while the building manager and his desk staff looked on somberly, trying to process the idea that the Windsor Arms’s most prestigious tenant was checking out for good.
Outside, parked in place of the limousine, was an ambulance with its blue roof lights flashing. A fourth MI5 agent, uniformed as its driver, circled around back of the vehicle to open the rear doors.
The doorman and one of the bobbies held open the front doors, and the raucous sounds of the mob—now swollen by the news of the baron’s death—assaulted the lobby.
They made their way outside and across the sidewalk, just as Burls’s cellphone sang the arrival of a new text blast from Bounty4Justice. A couple of his agents’ phones sounded as well, and even from across the street he could hear a cacophony of ringtones rising within the mob, as if a legion of digital demons had swooped in from the netherworld. Burls felt a chill.
“Ignore that,” he snapped to his team. “Get on with it quickly. And leave straightaway.”
A murmur swept through the crowd, the shriek of their spokeswoman rising above it through her bullhorn: “LIES! THE BARON LIVES! THEY LIED TO US!”
The crowd roared and surged forward. Burls turned and saw fear in the eyes of his agents. “Get moving! Go!”
The doorman backed away from the entrance and smartly set off in a sprint down the sidewalk.
“NO MORE LIES! NO MORE LIES!”
Burls darted back inside and screamed to the manager and the staff: “Get out of here, and make it bloody fast!” As they all disappeared through the door behind the front desk, he sprinted back to his
men outside the entryway.
The enraged mob was now engaged in a full-on shoving match with the riot police. But the shields formed a line, not a circle, and the protestors began spilling out from the sides and stampeding across the street, headed straight for the paramedics doggedly positioning the stretcher to load it into the ambulance. As the outliers and the agents engaged in a struggle for the “body,” one of the protestors yanked the bag’s zipper down. Then the situation escalated to a whole new level; the roar was deafening as protestors muscled aside Burls’s men, freed the dummy baron from the body bag, and raised it high for all to see—an effigy of betrayal.
Burls and his unit retreated to the lobby, the mob not far behind them, heading directly for the front doors of the Windsor Arms like peasants storming the castle. All that was missing were the pitchforks and flaming torches. The three bobbies, fumbling for their batons and pepper spray, were shoved aside, and bodies crashed into the doors, shattering the glass into thousands of tiny pebbles, which went skittering across the marble floor to Burls’s feet as he stabbed the elevator’s control button again and again.
DING!
The elevator doors opened, and Burls followed his men inside. As the lift jostled and began its ascent, he could hear shouting and crashing in the lobby below. He looked at the meddlesome text message displayed on his mobile to see precisely what had nettled the mob.
URGENT: REGIONAL ACTION ALERT
TARGET: ANDREW SMITH, autocrat, UK
STATUS: Unconfirmed
BOUNTY: £1,627,444 «REINSTATED @2x»
We have received credible intelligence that contrary to news reports, Baron Andrew Smith remains alive and well under the guard of British intelligence. Such ploys to shield targets from proper justice will not be tolerated. As per section 23 of our user agreement, the bounty for this target has been reactivated and doubled.
http://www.bounty4justice.com/ALERTS/ANDREW.SMITH
All Burls could think: How could it know?
# 50.02
The elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, and Burls hit the red STOP button to freeze the car. He could hear the oscillating wails of klaxons off in the distance. “We’ve got a situation,” he told the guards manning the doors to the penthouse. “Take the baron into the kitchen. We need to evacuate the building immediately.” They disappeared inside, but before he followed them, he pushed through the fire door to the side of the elevator and peered over the railing, down the throat of the switchback steps. Four levels below, and all the way down to the bottom of the shaft, dozens of hands grabbed at the spindly steel railings and were quickly moving upward. “Bloody hell.” Mercifully, the fire door locked from the inside. He secured it, scrambled into the penthouse, and turned the dead bolts and locks on the front entry’s heavy walnut double doors.
In the kitchen, the MI5 guards stood in a circle around the baron, weapons drawn. Jeremy was still seated at the counter, staring gravely at his laptop and the two words displayed on the screen in a bold oversized font:
NICE TRY
# 50.03
“I need everyone out to the freight elevator. Move!” Burls barked.
Jeremy snapped his laptop shut and scrambled after the others. As Burls turned to follow them, he caught a glimpse through the French doors of men emerging from the fire escape, out at the edge of the rooftop terrace. “Faster!” he yelled to the group.
The guards grabbed the baron by the elbows, funneled down the hall and out the penthouse’s rear door, then raced through the service corridor to the freight elevator. An earsplitting bang emanated from a nearby metal fire door and its hardware popped out, nuts and bolts skittering across the floor tiles.
Burls jabbed his finger at the control panel. Finally, he heard the machinery deep in the shaft engage.
A second huge impact sounded at the fire door; then the door was pulled open, metal twisting and grinding, and a fellow of Bunyanesque proportions stood there, grinning, cradling a sledgehammer. When he saw the baron, his eyes lit up. “There he is!”
A horde of burly men in flannel and denim spilled out from the stairwell, brandishing every implement they’d found along their ascent—fire axes and fire extinguishers, broom handles and metal pipes—and blitzed forward like marauding, nitro-fueled latter-day Vikings.
The elevator door opened, and the agents manhandled the baron into the car. One of the bodyguards fired a warning shot over the heads of the attackers, which slowed their advance just enough so that he could slip inside before the door rattled shut.
As the elevator began its descent, Burls briefed the group: “The garage is secure. It has a roll-down bay door leading outside and coded locks going in and out. And we’ve got the armored van parked down there.” The armored vehicle was how they’d been clandestinely moving the baron from place to place. “We stay there while the police bring matters under control, keep the van running near the door. If the situation escalates, we open the gate and make a go of it. Do we all agree?”
Everyone nodded except the baron, who came back with “Frankly, I think—”
“Do shut up, Your Lordship,” Burls snapped.
Silence prevailed until the elevator clunked to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. At the same moment, the baron groaned and tottered into Burls, clutching his chest just above the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Burls caught him before he could drop to the floor, grabbing him by the lapels to keep him upright.
The agents sprang forward and hooked the baron under his armpits.
“Your Lordship—!” Burls yelled.
This time, the man’s agonized expression was all too real. His eyes rolled back, his complexion gray and beaded with sweat.
By the time the elevator door clunked open, MI5 was propping up a dead man.
TIME.com @TIME • 26m
Social media helps @Bounty4Justice score viral “hits.”
ti.me/1Lmt140mlez
# 51.01
@ Manhattan
11:02:06 EDT
It had been only two hours since Knight had raced off to an impromptu meeting with SACs Cooper and Karasowski-Fowler to discuss Team CLICKKILL’s latest predicament and present its proposal to fight fire with fire. Shortly thereafter, they brought Hartley into the deliberations, and she put a call out to the Office of Public Affairs. Not long after, the official statement hit the newswires:
Bounty4Justice has wantonly targeted FBI agents in order to help Russia deflect blame for its cybervulnerability and internal disarray…and has implemented a slanderous campaign of misdirection that has no basis in fact….Let the unauthorized video of the exchange in question speak for itself.
After the reference to Knight’s intricate diplomatic negotiations with Voronov, the statement went on to further establish the agents and the legat to Russia as the solid citizens they were, tacitly reminding the public of whose side they were on and what they were collectively fighting. By 10:00 A.M., the talking heads of morning media had latched onto the story, trumpeting support for the actions of the FBI, with many pundits declaring a “New Cold War” in cyberspace and several social media sites electric with support. Before 11:00 A.M., Novak’s BlackBerry pinged the arrival of his status change:
AS OF 11:00 AM EDT, YOUR CURRENT BOUNTY IS $151,008
CURRENT STATUS: Not Guilty
«BOUNTY SUSPENDED»
FOR THE LATEST UPDATES, VISIT:
http://www.bounty4justice.com/ROMAN.NOVAK
Knight and Walter received similar updates within minutes of each other.
When Walter logged on, checked his profile, and saw that his new status had deactivated his family’s personal information, he visibly relaxed. “That’s better.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Knight said. “But it buys us some time. Now let’s get back to chopping wood.”
# 51.02
Novak told Knight he needed a moment to make a call, long overdue, and ducked out into the hallway.
His f
ather picked up before the second ring. “Hey, sport.”
“Sorry for taking so long to check in, Dad. I’m sure you’ve seen the news and know what’s going on.”
His father said, “Sure, I’ve been following it. Hard to miss. And before you ask, yes, Tommy stopped by this morning, just like you asked him to.”
Thomas McGovern had been Novak’s best friend since kindergarten and was now chief of the Summit Police Department. Novak had phoned him earlier that morning. If ever there was a time to cash in a favor, this was it.
“He told me that if we see any funny business,” Raymond Novak said, “anything at all, to call him directly. And he’s got two officers in a patrol car sitting in front of the house.”
“Good. Glad to hear it.”
“It’s really not necessary, Roman. I appreciate it and all, but—”
“Look, Dad, I don’t want to worry you, but this website grabs at everything it can to put pressure on its targets. It’s not something to be taken lightly.”
“That’s what they’re saying on the news. I get it. It pulls no punches and it hits below the belt. I know you’re doing everything you can to put a stop to it. But don’t be too hard on yourself, Roman. I know how involved you can get. Just try your best, son. Anything above that is beyond your control. Listen to me now: your mom and I will be just fine. If anything comes up that the police out front can’t handle, we’ll call Tommy.”
“All right, Dad. And look, get a pen and paper. I know you pay cash for almost everything and you’ve already got credit monitoring, but there’re a few things I need you to do.” Novak reminded him to call his banks about restricting all online activity on his accounts, changing access codes and PINs, and issuing new credit cards with lower credit limits. For good measure, he also recommended a new email address and home phone number. “And be sure to file your tax returns as early as possible next year to avoid any scams. No clicking on suspicious emails, no giving out personal information over the phone. It’s full lockdown. Got it? Same goes for Mom.”
Bounty Page 24
