Power (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 8)

by Thomas Hollyday

  “Thanks for helping. “ Loggerman said, pushing his hand quietly at a mosquito.

  “She’d bring me coffee when I was outside doing guarding. Back before the group started up wearing them green stars.”

  “What happened then?”

  “All of them began hating everything. She wasn’t allowed to be nice to anyone no more. I knew she wasn’t like the rest of them, nossir. Ask me, the kids they brought in were nasty types.”

  He was quiet for a while. “It ain’t his doing, anyway. Cole don’t even know what’s going on nowadays. It’s Ferrars. He’s the bad one.”

  “Do you think we can get Stephanie out?”

  Gramps looked at Loggerman in the dark. His face was close to Loggerman. “Like them folks ask you about your oil wells, mister. Do you think there’s oil down there? What do you tell ’em?”

  “Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t.”

  “Wellsir, you got your answer about getting your daughter out. Let’s get going.”

  They moved through reeds and brambles to climb up the small clay bank and into the cornfield. The large fence was in front of them. Gramps led him along it for about one hundred yards. They turned to follow it as it ran to the left. It became covered with thick vines of honeysuckle and poison ivy. The corn field turned into thick woodland of pine and heavy brambles. He tried to avoid tearing his skin but no cleared path existed.

  About another hundred yards went by. They came to a large pile of broken and mostly rotten pine branches. They halted and Gramps pointed to one of the larger limbs. They crawled under it. The ground was scraped bare and formed a path tunneling under other pine sections. The going was hard. Once he put his hand into a mass of coiling snakes.

  “Ain’t none of them poison,” said Gramps, noting his discomfort.

  They passed under the bottom of the fence, the wire strands cutting into Loggerman’s skin.

  Finally, Gramps stopped and pulled back more pine boughs. Vertical boards appeared, nailed across with wooden braces, forming a three foot square panel.

  “This way,” said Gramps, as he lifted the panel to the side.

  Loggerman pushed forward and found himself behind a row of shelving along one wall of a room.

  Gramps said, “You get your work done and come back here in ten minutes. I’ll meet you outside.”

  Loggerman climbed across the shelf among a collection of red boxes. He opened one and found copies of resumes of college students. They were enclosed in folders and, as he skimmed, he read letters asking for intern work with the Tinker Institute. A look down the row of shelves showed hundreds of similar cartons.

  These interns become the volunteers Tinker and his managers use, he thought.

  He grasped the box angrily and thought of the ones who were parading beside his ship. In these boxes were their resumes. Like applying for college or a job. Gramps had mentioned how they were different than Stephanie.

  Or, were they the same but just hardened into hateful people from their original idealism?

  He dropped to the concrete floor four feet below. Light spread across the concrete coming from a small fixture in the ceiling. The room was large with many files and shelves along the wall. Two doors stood closed at the far end.

  He stepped back beside a file as the door to his left opened with a slight creak.

  Whithers the accountant reached the bottom step of a stairway. He came out, closing the door behind him, and walked to a blue metal file of four drawers near the door. He used a key to open it and then pulled out a sliding drawer. He took a file out of the drawer, closed it and relocked the file. Then he went to the right door, opened it, and called inside.

  ”Has anyone come back from the break? I need a message sent.”

  The little man stepped inside, saying, “Nobody here yet. Goddamn I’ll have to wait upstairs.” He closed the door hard behind him.

  Loggerman waited for a few minutes for Whithers to climb back up the stairway. Then he opened the right door. He was standing in a large white well-lit room filled with large mainframe computers, work desks with smaller computers, all arranged in four rows of seven workstations each. The hum of the machines and the smell of the electronics convinced him this was where the Tinker operations were performed. In the middle of each row one or two metal tables were piled high with printouts and storage devices.

  He scanned the room as quickly as he could. From his own experience with Joe Henry’s computers, he studied the desks to determine the most important sites. He guessed the desks of the supervisors would have the most papers piled on them to be distributed to workers.

  One of the desks at the middle of the main row had several consoles. The operator here, he surmised, administered many activities. A pile of cardboard file folders sat on one side. The chair was pulled out and he assumed the worker had left for a short break.

  The door at the end of the room opened suddenly and two women entered.

  One said, “We have to update these new projects. Whithers is very upset they are not finished.”

  “Bitchy, you just want good marks to go to Cole.”

  “So what if I know what’s up around here, Softy?

  Softy handed Bitchy some papers. “You take the place actions and I’ll do the crowds.”

  Loggerman crawled behind a row of files near the door he had entered. Bitchy sat at the chair in front of the three consoles. Softy pulled up a chair from behind her and turned on a computer.

  “The trip to Baltimore is on,” Bitchy said as she typed.

  Softy added, “Spire says everyone is going out on assignments after Cole’s speech.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me,” Bitchy murmured.

  “How do you always get chosen by him at night?”

  “I think you got something going on with Spire.”

  “I’m not the kind of girl she likes. You know.”

  Loggerman opened his cell and recorded their conversation.

  Bitchy continued, “Tell me about your target in Dayton.”

  “I met him the first time three months ago on my first trip out there. Our team leader out there knew him and invited him to a party at the hotel the night I got there. You know the routine. The leader arranged I would meet him.

  “I wore the shortest skirt I ever owned even when I was a teen and those high heeled sandals. I was damn near naked.”

  “You have the body for a short skirt,” said Bitchy.

  “Well, I guess Billy thought so, too. He came over to the leader and I was introduced. I remember he didn’t say anything - just looked at my eyes. I knew right then this assignment was going to be pure pleasure. Of course I didn’t let him know.

  “Then we sat down in a small room near the ballroom and had a drink and talked. He told me about his wife and two kids. Oh, yes, and he told me about his fishing boat. He is a champion fisherman. He has all kinds of lures and he told me he is inventing a new type of lure to catch bass in the lakes.”

  “You don’t get attached, do you?”

  “I left after the pictures of us were finished. You know the routine. Another volunteer, one of the boys, followed up on him after the riots started near his company.”

  “Do you feel sorry for his wife?

  “No. She had her chance.”

  “I’ll bet it’s more. He’d still be happy with her if you had not come along and shown him those breasts of yours.”

  “Billy’s got character.”

  “They all got character. They wouldn’t be targets if they didn’t run companies.”

  “Yes, tell me how you do it.” Loggerman detected some sarcasm.

  Bitchy said, pride in her voice, “I was assigned to Seattle as you know.”

  “I heard it took you two weeks to meet the man.”

  “I didn’t have any big party to help me. I had to go out and figure a way to get him into my bed. I couldn’t just go up to him on the street and wiggle my ass.”

  Softy chuckled. “Why not? You
r ass ain’t big enough?”

  “Shut up, whore.” Bitchy continued. “I knew where he worked so I went to the building. There were lots of trees. “

  “Tree lined and all. Not your style.”

  “I pretended I was applying for a job and then worked my way into the lunch room. I had studied his photographs and knew who he was. Just like the dossier said, he sat by himself, eating his lunch, same food every day.”

  She laughed. “It was so simple. I went up to him. I had on a pant suit but I had gone into the ladies room and unbuttoned the jacket buttons so enough cleavage showed. I didn’t want to be too sexy because this was a lunchroom full of suburban mothers and fathers and I was afraid I might get thrown out by the security.”

  She continued. “Anyway, I went over to Jack’s table. He was eating a hamburger and French fries covered with red ketchup. I said, “Glad to know another hamburger fan.”

  “He looked up. He had big eyes like a puppy. He was reading a model railroad magazines and I pointed to a picture. “Nice train.”

  “‘You like trains?’ he asked.

  “I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

  “So I sat down. Now you got to understand. This guy, Jack, he was probably the biggest man I have ever seen much less tried to make love to. He must have weighed all of four hundred pounds and most of it was in his belly. The thing quivered when he moved, even in his chair.”

  “Spire was playing a joke on you when she gave you the fatso assignment.”

  “No” Loggerman could hear the defensiveness in Bitchy’s voice. ”I think she was giving me a challenge because she knew I would not let her down.”

  “So how did you get old tub of lard in the sack?”

  “He had a wife, strangely enough, so I had to figure out a way to get to him outside of his home. The model railroad hobby gave me a method. I just followed him to the hobby shows.”

  “If you couldn’t get him in blackmail, you couldn’t get the job done.”

  “Cole thought all these guys loved the program. He didn’t know what we had to do to get secrets of the companies. Ferrars is the real expert in these things. He had the cameras set up and everything. This target was different in a way.”

  “Why?”

  “Jack fell in love with me.”

  “The one woman here who hates men more than anyone else and she gets a man to fall in love with her?”

  “I could be an actress. I’m telling you. Spire says so, too.”

  “I can’t imagine you at the hobby show.”

  “It was in a Holiday Inn about ten miles from Jack’s home. I had been watching his house and I followed him to the show.”

  “Did you see his wife?”

  “Yes. She was as big as he was. When she came out to wave goodbye to him, she was holding a piece of pie. Jack went to the show with his club. He was in charge of the track-making exhibit. He sat at a small table showing visitors how to make track. Little pieces of rail had to be tacked to wood for the track beds. I looked around when I got there. Lots of women and children were standing at all the model trains.”

  “Not your kind of place.”

  “No. I decided to get this thing settled right away. I rented a room and changed into something I thought he would like. The women were wearing shorts, tees, and sandals so I did, too. I let my hair down and put on my sunglasses. Then I walked up to him.”

  “ ‘What are you doing here?’ he said gasping a little as his eyes ran over my body as I knew they would.

  “ ‘You’re not the only person who likes model trains, you know.’ ”

  “He seemed a little nervous at talking to me. ‘This is the way we do our tracks.’ ”

  “I sat down beside him and worked with him for a while. Some of the other club members came by and I talked to them also about models.”

  “How’d you know so much about the trains?”

  “You want to catch a fly, you got to use a little sugar. I studied the damn train magazines until I was ready to vomit. I wasn’t too worried, though.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a train magazine they were passing around back of the table. Jack wouldn’t let me see it. I got a glimpse of it anyway. There was photo of a girl in shorts holding a train. The girl wasn’t good looking, either.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “Kinda dumb, I guess. I was talking to him and I asked him if he wanted to see some of my train magazine collection.”

  “Sounds real original.”

  “It worked real well. Jack followed me back to my room and came in. He sat on the bed and drank one of the beers I had there. I told him I was going into the bathroom to get the magazines. Then I stripped down bare-assed and came out and sneaked up behind him. I put my hands on his head and covered his eyes. ‘Guess who?’ I said.”

  “ ‘I’m damned,’ and he jumped up. I tell you his eyes were as big as pie plates and they looked up and down my body like I was the first woman he’d ever seen. I guess the old lady of his didn’t give him much. Anyway, he liked what he saw because he didn’t waste any time getting out of them oversize clothes and right into bed beside me.”

  “Man, big, it must have taken you a little time.”

  “He didn’t have anything to do, don’t worry. He just had the look in his eyes.”

  “Was it a long train show?”

  “I bet you he and I were back in his little room maybe ten times over the next twenty four hours. By the time the show was over, I knew he’d do what we wanted. We had all the pictures done.”

  There was quiet for a few minutes.

  “You ever think we might get caught?”

  “Spire says no one would ever try. We’re too much on the side of right to be caught.”

  “These are done. Let’s get the next batch.” Softy began to shut down.

  Bitchy laughed. “No need. No one else here. We can save time. Leave them on. We’ll be right back.”

  The women walked out, holding the finished papers, their high heels clicking on the floor.

  The smell of perfume was overwhelming. He saw Softy had turned off her machine anyway. Its screen was completely dark.

  He sat at Bitchy’s desk. Two of the monitors were half closed showing simply the green Tinker emblem. He knew he did not have time to try to find the password to open them.

  The third monitor was open and showed a field of information indexes. One title was lit. He assumed it was Bitchy’s last entry.

  He went there. The screen opened. The information was arranged in two parts. The top section was called “field.”

  The first entry below this was the word and the code “Texas” then “Action.”

  Under was the entry called “Intel” and beside it was written “I201.”

  The next category was called “Volunteer” and beside it were entered “V561” and “V862.”

  The next category was “Internet” and the space stated “Photo.”

  The last entry was Blink and it was marked “ready.”

  Below this section was a second one. It was called “Volunteer.” The first entry was typed in “V561” and it had been marked “Adequate.” The second entry was typed in “V862” and it had been marked “Killed.”

  Across the bottom were links to storage files for the entry components. When the page was finished by Bitchy she would enter it and it would go to the files.

  Loggerman knew he had little time left before the women returned. He took the storage thumb drive from his pocket and inserted it into the computer. He found the save command and targeted the material. The drive lighted and he was able to get the page. He went ahead with the file links and stored them also. Each one took time and he gave himself two minutes.

  He retrieved his storage and restored the page Bitchy had been using. It was time to go. He moved back to his hiding place at the end of the room. He listened. Hearing nothing he opened the door and left.

  Gramps was talkative as they waited on the shoreline for Ben. He
told the old man about the girls he had listened to.

  “These kids go out to get secrets and cause trouble. Some work with the street crowds, stirring them up. You know it’s not too hard with the mobs, getting them excited. Most of them got nothing else to do. The volunteers give them a little food or money. After they start the yelling at some company, they bleed into the alleys and no one can catch them. The volunteers stir up activists who been doing this activity for years. This kind of rioting pays, though. Money gets donated to the volunteers.

  “Free energy is just a sideshow of all the hatred out there. Ferrars, he knows how to get money, he does. The volunteers go out and get the street people riled up at some company. Some of them actually find out secrets, too. So it’s what your girls were talking about, like spying with their bodies. I worry about Stephanie, I do.”

  Big Ben’s boat arrived.

  Chapter Twelve

  Friday

  When Loggerman arrived at the spy boat in the morning, two men in civilian clothes stopped him. Sarah was on deck servicing the V8 engine. The wooden cover for the power compartment had been raised to the side and she was on her knees cleaning a fuel filter. Barbara rushed up from below with a submachine gun in hand.

  “It’s Loggerman,” she said.

  Sarah nodded and waved as Loggerman clumped down the wooden steps on the overgrown bank. The morning, even with the fresh breeze over the river, was hot. Two mallard ducks, the green feathered male and the brown female were scared up by Loggerman’s footfalls. They circled and landed in the middle of the river.

  Sarah stood up and said, “We’ve been working hard on the material you delivered last night.”

  Loggerman replied, “I was more scared of being lost in all this brush in the dark. Ben got me through.”

  She laughed and agreed. “We keep the paths pretty camouflaged. I’ve fallen, myself, walking around by the cottage at night.”

  He climbed aboard and, following Barbara, descended to the lower workroom. Eddison was bent over a terminal. Loggerman’s drive was plugged in.

  Eddison looked up and smiled. “Good work.”