Identity Crisis td-97

by Warren Murphy

  No one looked happy at the prospect. They just looked at the office phone and swallowed hard.

  "Well, someone has to make the call."

  "We'll flip for it."

  They flipped two out of three, then three out of five, in rotation until a shoving match broke out between the last two agents left in the running.

  Finally they drew straws. Agent Phelps pulled the short straw and went to the black glass desk and sank his rear end into the chair heavily.

  He picked up the phone and began dialing. It took three tries. His trembling fingers kept hitting the wrong keys.

  RICHARD BUCKLEY BRULL had come up the hard way, from a lowly IRS transcriber to the assistant commissioner of the service's New York City regional branch of the CID. It was a long climb. He had started in the Examination Division, slid over to Collection and from there worked his way up to Criminal Investigation. By his own estimate, that was twenty-eight million returns personally eyeballed, 2.4 million audits conducted, and over fifty thousand criminal investigations prosecuted during the varied stages of his career. A lot of paper.

  Through it all Richard Buckley Brull never met a taxpayer he liked. Or trusted. Or who was audit-proof.

  If Richard Buckley Brull had his way, the Internal Revenue Service would be renamed the Internal Revenue Force. Every agent down to the secretaries would be armed. There would be none of this witholding crap. It only made citizens scheme and bend their returns to get as much of it back as possible.

  The way Richard Buckley Brull saw it, the only program to bring the nation into total compliance with the Internal Revenue Code would be to have employers pay all salaries directly to the IRS, which would disburse it to the taxpayers upon receipt of a weekly voucher.

  Why, just the bank interest alone would make the IRS a fortune and lower taxes in the final analysis.

  His superiors, however, did not see the wisdom of his vision.

  "Why not?" he once argued. "It's our money. Why should the filers have it even temporarily?"

  "Because there would be a taxpayer revolt. The government would be overthrown, the nation would fall into bankruptcy, and most importantly we'd all be out of work."

  "Nobody objects to withholding," Brull had said stubbornly. "Hell, the filers are technically paying taxes on a portion of their salaries they never even touch. Yet our polling shows that most citizens' opinion of the force-I mean service-goes up twenty-six percent when they get their refund checks. Not that it ever lasts."

  "Look, Brull. Don't rock the boat. Shuffle your papers. Make your quotas. Exceed them if you feel ambitious. But don't rock the boat that tows the ship of fucking state. Okay?"

  But Richard Buckley Brull was an ambitious bureaucrat. He didn't want to shuffle papers, make or exceed quotas or do any of those safe bureaucratic things. He wanted to shoot to the top, no matter how many filers he had to gouge.

  In an agency where little mercy was shown to transgressors, Dick Brull was ruthless, heartless and a bully. He browbeat his staff into spying on one another. Once he struck the fear of the Almighty into them, he set them on the filers. And got results. When assets were seized, not even the bank accounts of dependent children were spared.

  Given his winning personality, it was probably only a matter of time before the nickname "Big Dick" was hung on him.

  No one ever called Richard Buckley Brull "Big Dick" to his face. No one even called him Big Dick within the confines of the IRS New York offices. No one dared. They knew that Big Dick Brull would tear them entirely new biologically unnecessary orifices.

  For Big Dick Brull did not earn his nickname because he was big or stood tall.

  Big Dick had come to the IRS straight out of the Marine Corps. He had never worked for anyone other than the corps. Not even a paper route blemished his employment record. But when the military began to downsize, there was no longer a need for tough drill instructors like Dick Brull. He took early retirement and went in search of a civilian equivalent to the corps.

  A job-hunting specialist had pointed him in a natural direction-the Internal Revenue Service.

  "You're nuts!" Brull had told the man. "I wouldn't fit in with those paper shufflers."

  "You don't know the IRS. It's run by master sergeants. You'd fit in perfectly. Just give it a shot."

  Amazingly it turned out to be true.

  Brull had come to the IRS for one simple reason, security. But he stayed for an entirely different one: power.

  There was no field on earth in which Big Dick Brull could wield such absolute power. Hell, even the President of the United States had checks and balances on him.

  The only person Big Dick Brull was answerable to was what he called the Almighty. In this case, he didn't mean the Lord. He meant the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who in these strange days was a woman.

  Right now he was fearlessly chewing a new orifice for the local supervisor of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  "You will pull your people out of the Folcroft perimeter. Today. That means I want those flashy boats of yours pulled back beyond the three-mile fucking limit. IRS won't stand for being spied on by DEA."

  "You have no jurisdiction over us."

  "The IRS has total jurisdiction everywhere. What was your Social Security number again?"

  "I didn't give it," the DEA man said flatly.

  "Let me see," Brull said slowly, tapping the keys to his desktop Zilog computer. "I have 034-28-4462. From Massachusetts originally. Isn't that right? You know, compliance up there in Mass has always been a problem. We did a sociological study of the citizens in that area, and do you know what we concluded?"

  "No, I do not."

  "We concluded that New Englanders in general and Massachusetts taxpayers in particular have an independent streak. They think the rules apply to everyone except them. They actually think they're above the rules. Do you think you're above the rules?"

  "I play by the rules, same as you."

  "I see by your last year's return you made 1,567 dollars in charitable deductions. That's well above the statistical norm, did you know that? Discriminant function formula is the term we use around here. Your numbers slip above the DIF line, and the service's computers kick out your return, red-flagged for an audit. I guess the computer hasn't gotten around to you yet."

  "My charitable contributions are my own business."

  Brull pounded his desk. Behind him a wall sign reading Seizure Fever-Catch It! shook.

  "Wrong! Your charitable contributions are exactly IRS business, and if you want the service to stay out of your back returns, you stay out of the service's seizures."

  "We have a legal claim to Folcroft assets."

  "Right behind us."

  "You vultures will pick that place clean and leave nothing for DEA."

  "And you jerks like nothing better than to seize a property and pick it up at government auction three months later. We know your game. We've audited you DEA cowboy types before."

  "I'll take your recommendations under advisement," said the DEA supervisor begrudgingly.

  "I know you will," Big Dick Brull said in a suddenly unctuous voice. "I know you will."

  Big Dick Brull hung up the telephone and just because he was the kind of guy he was, he red-flagged the DEA official's most recent return for a field audit. It would take three to four months for the notification to go out. Let him kick about it then. Not a damn thing he could do about it. And the agents were sure to find something really fishy. That was an ironclad guarantee. The tax code was over ten thousand pages long and so confusing that even the service couldn't make heads or tails of it.

  That made it the perfect bureaucratic bludgeon to pound loose cash out of even the most stubborn taxpayer.

  As Big Dick Brull finished issuing the electronic instructions, his desk phone rang.

  "Who is it?" he asked his secretary via intercom.

  "An Agent Philip Phelps."

  "There's no Agent Phelps authorized to repor
t directly to me."

  "He says he's reporting from a seizure site called Folcroft Sanitarium on behalf of Special Agent Jack Koldstad."

  "What's wrong with Koldstad? Scratch that. Put Phelps on. I'll ask him myself."

  The trembling voice of Agent Phelps came on the line. "I have bad news, Mr. Brull."

  "I hate bad news."

  "Jack Koldstad has been injured in the line of duty."

  "That careless bastard! He knows we have an insurance problem. Did he die?"

  "No, sir."

  "His mistake. One he'll rue, I promise you. What happened?"

  "We found a hidden room in the basement of the place, Mr. Brull. It was the jackpot."

  "What kind of jackpot?"

  "Gold bullion."

  Brull perked up. "How much gold?"

  "We don't know."

  "Didn't you count it?"

  "We were, er, forcibly ejected before we could take inventory."

  "What the hell's the matter with you! No one throws out IRS agents!"

  "A man attacked us. When we woke up, we had ended up on the roof. Koldstad was with us. It seems someone performed a partial frontal lobotomy on him, Mr. Brull. He's a basket case."

  "Christ! You know what this means? Long-term rehab. That screwup will be a burden to the service to the day they dump his worthless ass into the cold ground, and there's fuck-all we can do about it."

  "I know, sir."

  "You secure that gold?"

  "No, sir, we're afraid to go back in."

  "Afraid of what?"

  "Well, there's the guy with the thick wrists and the, um, giant butterfly."

  "What giant butterfly?"

  "The one Mr. Koldstad claimed lobotomized him." Agent Phelps cleared his throat quickly. "Sir, I know how this sounds-"

  "It sounds," Big Dick Brull said in a grinding voice, "as if you had better seal off that basement until I get there and have your resumes in order for your next careers. Because it won't be with the Internal Fucking Revenue Service."

  Big Dick Brull slammed down the telephone. It was time to blow the Folcroft file wide open, and there was only one way to do that. Take charge personally.

  Chapter 18

  It was mission creep at its worst.

  Winston Smith had no problem with the primary mission. He just wondered what took the Pentagon so long to get around to authorizing it.

  Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin was a penny-ante clan leader and arms merchant in the divided Horn of Africa nation of Stomique until the UN relief mission blew into North Nog-as the Stomique regional capital of Nogongog was called-to set up what started as a people-feeding operation and mission-crept its way to a nation-building debacle.

  When the UN tanks rolled ashore, Warlord Anin dug out his one Western suit and welcomed them with open arms. It was good PR. It got his beaming face on CNN and made him instantly the most recognizable Stomique citizen in human history.

  But when the UN command didn't annoint Warlord Anin as the natural unifier of Stomique, he ordered hit-and-run attacks on UN peacekeeping forces. Anin made the mistake of not keeping the chain of deniability intact, and the next thing Anin knew he was wanted by UNOSOM for ambushing a French UN contingent.

  That was when the US. Rangers rolled in. And speedily got their tails shot up.

  Navy SEAL Winston Smith had a ringside seat to it all. SEAL Team Six had been sent in, disguised as Army grunts to reconnoiter the situation. In the rabbit warren of North Nog, there was no finding Warlord Anin.

  Smith personally witnessed the multimillion-dollar Blackhawk helicopter brought down by a two-hundred-dollar Soviet-remaindered RPG while riding shotgun on a Humvee down Mission Support Road Tiger. His team was among the first on the scene. They got their tails shot up, too. But they fought their way through the sea of Stomique civilians and pulled the dead and wounded to safety, except for the one guy they missed.

  When his face hit the covers of Time and Newsweek, the ball game changed. The public gasped. The President choked. And the Pentagon went into severe reverse mission creep.

  Even a year later Winston Smith had a hard time believing how chicken-shit Washington had turned.

  Anin was small potatoes. A grinning thug. One lucky shot, and he was dubbed The Strongman Who Made The US. Back Down.

  The US. had never backed down. Just the wusses in Washington. Word came down from on high. A deal was struck, and the hostage was freed. The wanted posters on Anin came down, too. Within months the relief-mission-turned-nation-building operation fizzled out, and Mahout Feroze Anin, labeled victorious over the rest of civilization, became de facto ruler of Stomique, which promptly reverted to anarchy.

  Winston Smith's blood boiled every day for a month as it all played out.

  After that he suggested the UN motto become You Lose Some And You Don't Win Others.

  His XO told him to shut up. "Six's time will come."

  A year later it did.

  "Winner, you're the man for this job."

  He didn't know the job. But he was twenty and full of confidence so he said, "I'm the man for every job."

  "Maybe. But you're really the man for this job. Word from on high is to take out Anin. "

  "I'm definitely the man for this job. How many men involved?"

  "Just one. You."

  "Hey, Six is a team. You can't send me on a lonewolf mission."

  "Those are the orders. As far as the team goes, you're on leave. And they'd better not hear different."

  Even when they airlifted him aboard the USS Darter, contrary to any mission logic, he was pumped. SEAL Team Six was set up to take out the bad guys. They trained and trained and trained, and never got used except for training missions or to run war-game scenarios.

  This time it was different.

  The Fucking Ugly Gun shouldn't have been part of the bargain, but Smith had no choice. In his cubicle, he ditched his gear and strapped it on. It hung off his shoulder rig like a water main.

  After he'd spent five minutes breathing pure oxygen, they shot him out of the blow tube under pressure. He exhaled all the way up to the surface so his lungs didn't rupture and his bloodstream carbonate from excess nitrogen.

  His Draeger bubbleless underwater breathing apparatus got him to shore undetected.

  After that things got hairy. His plastic foldout map didn't exactly jibe with the terrain. And then there was the manual that came with the gun. It wasn't as thick as the Yellow Pages, but it came damn close. Since the pages were waterproof plastic, it weighed more than the BEM itself.

  After a futile twenty minutes of wandering, Smith growled, "Where the fuck am I?"

  A very near voice said, "Thirty klicks southsoutheast of North Nogongog. "

  Smith dragged his gun out of its nylon holster and hissed, "Who's there?"

  The thing in his hand hissed, "Who's there?"

  "Damn. That was you."

  "Damn. That was you."

  "Shut up."

  "Shut up," said the Fucking Ugly Gun.

  Smith gave the thing a hard whack, and the gun shut up.

  He went back to his map and saw that according to the BEM gun's telemetry readout, he was a solid mile north of the landing zone.

  "No wonder I'm fucking lost."

  This time the gun didn't say anything.

  Smith pressed on. Okay, it was a fuck nuts mission. He could accept that. Just so long as at the end of it Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin ended up in a shallow grave.

  Chapter 19

  It was the best news DEA Agent Wayne Tardo had had in a day.

  A full thirty-five hours had passed since the IRS had booted him and his team off the Folcroft grounds. It was humiliating. IRS even made them carry their wounded off in stretchers.

  "But this is a hospital," Tardo had protested.

  "This is our hospital," Special Agent Jack Koldstad had told him. "And this is IRS property. Until we secure it, it's off-limits to DEA personnel."

  "You can't do this."

/>   "It's done. Unless you want to shoot more IRS agents in the line of duty," he added sarcastically.

  Tardo had consulted with his superior by cellular phone.

  "We can't let this get out to the press," the DEA honcho had told him. "Pull back."

  "But the IRS stands to lose as much face as we do."

  "The IRS is essential to the smooth working of government and the national defense. We're fighting a war on drugs everyone knows is a holding action at best. They have the high ground. Pull back. But keep that building staked out, just in case I can work something on this end."

  "Roger," Wayne Tardo had said, and ordered the most humiliating retreat in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  They took the boats out into the sound and dropped anchor. From there it had been a dull routine of close surveillance and stale fast-food cheeseburgers.

  It was the strangest thing. Cars came and went from Folcroft-mostly they went. Staff being sent home, according to the license plates they read by binoculars. Not much activity otherwise except for the damn buzzards that kept circling like a film loop.

  Then came the word by secure cellular phone.

  "I just got a call from a Richard Brull over at IRS," the DEA commander said.

  "Yeah?"

  "He threatened to audit me if DEA doesn't stand down on the Folcroft matter."

  "The bastard."

  "I can stand up to an audit. How about you?"

  "My returns are clean."

  "Poll your men. Anyone with an audit problem, send them away. The rest of you go in."

  "They claimed the place is clean of turkey drugs," Tardo pointed out.

  "They can claim that all they want. You're seizing Folcroft. Every damn brick of it."

  "What if they resist?"

  "What are they going to do, shoot you dead?"

  "Understood, sir. I'll report back when the operation is over."

  "You do that."

  Wayne Tardo snicked shut the antenna to his secure cellular phone and said to his men, "Word from on high is we seize Folcroft.'

  A cheer went up. Half-eaten cheeseburgers went over the side.

  "Only those of you who are audit-proof can go along."

  Two agents groaned and cursed under their breaths.

  "Get word to the other boats. All who aren't clean, assemble in the relief boat. The rest of you, lock and fucking load."