by Jim Magwood
“But? But?” Escobedo screamed. He looked as if he was actually going to explode. He jumped to his feet waving his arms wildly and started to run around the desk toward Hector.
Then he came to an abrupt stop, ran back around to his own side of the desk, tore open his top drawer, pulled out a large pistol and without any warning, simply shot Hector. The shot knocked Hector off his feet and back against the wall of the office, and he crumpled into a ball on the floor. The shot had torn through Hector’s upper chest and shoulder, but had not killed him. Escobedo fired another round wildly in his direction, but missed. Not even noticing, he then spun toward the window looking out over the immaculate flower garden and fired through the glass at nothing. All the while, he was screaming illegibly, insanely.
The door to the office burst open suddenly and several security men ran into the room. Escobedo turned toward them and fired three more times in their direction. One of the men dropped to the floor as a round passed through him; the others frantically jumped back through the door to get out of the line of wild fire. Before any of them could recover their senses, Escobedo ran through the open door and down the hall, crashed through the main doors and down the entrance stairs, jumped into his jeep and began to speed toward the airport.
One of the security men, seeing the insanity on Escobedo’s face as he left, radioed the airport and warned the people to get away before Escobedo arrived. There would be death to deal with if anyone was in front of the Señor when he arrived.
Back at the house, Escobedo’s wife, Francesca, had heard the gunfire and the screaming and had watched her husband drive madly off. She only hesitated for a moment before rushing in to the children, quickly packing some simple bags of clothing and heading on a run to the parking area in the back of the house. She got the girls into her own jeep and immediately drove out the main road of the estate, heading to the safety of the waterfalls in the forest several miles away where they had gone many times for picnics. She knew she simply could not be there when Escobedo came back to the house.
She had seen the insanity before, but never as bad as this.
When Escobedo arrived at the airport, he found no one there and went on a rampage. He had already emptied the pistol and so drove around the buildings ramming the jeep into walls, stacks of supplies, and even a couple of planes parked on the apron. After almost half an hour of destruction, he turned the jeep and drove frantically back to the house. He slammed on the brakes in front of the house and the jeep bounced up the first three steps of the entrance before coming to a stop. Escobedo jumped out without turning off the engine and ran up the rest of the steps. The jeep was still in gear and tried to continue it’s way up the steps until one of the security guards hiding in the bushes to the side of the house ran over to it and turned it off. He then wisely ran back to his hiding place before Escobedo might see him.
By the time Escobedo got to his desk, he had begun to come down from his burst of insanity and he was able to sit behind the desk and think somewhat sanely. Hector had been able to pull himself out of the room before Escobedo arrived and the security men had taken him to treatment for his wound. Escobedo looked at the bloodstains on the floor, then at the destroyed window, and vaguely wondered what had happened.
He suddenly jumped out of his chair and went to the bar in the corner. Hr poured a large glass of his favorite whiskey and drank it down in one long swallow. He screamed out once for Hector and when he received no response, screamed out for his wife. Again hearing no response, he poured another glass full, then dropped back in his chair, tossed down half of the drink and seemed to drop into a drugged sleep. A moment later, though, his eyes popped open and he remembered with immediate rage what had gone on. His planes were gone! The shipments were lost! Then, he abruptly stopped. He suddenly knew what to do. He knew who could help.
He picked up the phone and dialed a number he had only used a few times. The voice on the other end answered simply,
“Yes.” Escobedo quickly ran down the events and told the person he had to find the planes and shipments immediately.
Money was no object.
The voice said bluntly, “All right. One million American dollars to my account immediately. I will find the planes.”
Escobedo replied without hesitation, “Okay. The money will be there within a few minutes,” and hung up. The man had never failed before.
He turned to his desktop computer and clicked into his banking system. He swallowed half of the rest of the whiskey while waiting for the computer to respond. It wasn’t sitting well in his stomach, though, and he threw the glass across the room. Entering his pass code, he then entered the instructions necessary to transfer the money to the other man’s account.
When he pressed the Enter button, though, he got a red flag warning that said, “The account number you have entered is not an active account. Please check your entry and try again.”
He screamed violently at the computer screen, slammed his hand against the side, and then put in the numbers and instructions again. Once again, he got the same response.
This time, he didn’t scream, and appeared to regain some of his senses. He quickly dialed into another of his bank accounts and repeated the process, with the same results: Account closed! Impossible, his brain told him. Only he could touch those accounts. He then dialed into his Swiss account, his most secure hiding place, and requested a report of the holdings. He simply could not fathom the answer: nothing!
Nothing at all! The account was still there, but it was absolutely empty.
Alberto Escobedo fell heavily back into his chair and lay there shaking, the sweat running down his face as if from a shower. His heart was pounding and his breathing was becoming shallow. His face was white. He found he couldn’t lift his arms; they just hung to his sides. When he tried to call out to his people for help, his voice would not respond. While his mind did fly around from thought to thought, he couldn’t focus on any one thing. It was as if he had lost all physical control of himself and could only lie there and feel himself bounce off the walls of the office like an uncontrolled spirit.
As if he was a doctor listening, he heard his heart racing faster and could hear the blood pumping through his veins. He could feel pressure forming in his head and, while he didn’t know what it was, felt the many small blood vessels begin to burst. His eyes blurred as the pressure built and the room appeared to be spinning slowly. He tried to grab the arms of his chair to keep from falling, but couldn’t move his arms. He jerked suddenly as he thought he heard a massive thunderbolt burst outside, but then recognized that the sound seemed to come from inside his head. The taste in his mouth was vile and a quick thought slipped through: Maybe the whiskey was bad?
He began to feel a pain, like a tearing headache, spreading from his head down through his arms and his spine. Then it appeared that the pressure in his head suddenly jumped to his chest. His heart pounded; his breath stopped; his vision turned red, then gradually blackened. The pressure quickly became pain—intense, screaming pain—and he felt it ripping through him like electric shocks.
Alberto Escobedo— little Alberto— had one last thought as the tearing pain gripped him in an iron glove and his heart felt like it was crushed in a vice. Where are my planes?
CHAPTER 27
Roger Evans sat on his horse quietly for a moment looking at the beautiful lodge. It seemed that it had been a long time since he had last been here, but he remembered it so well.
It had been built into the hill at the back and was self-contained with a pressurized water system and fuel storage also built underground for protection against the freezing winters. The lodge was located about 400 miles north of Ed-monton in Canada, and the nearest roads were more than fifty miles away. The lodge was a long way from any city lights.
Jacob Asch had built the lodge many years before after flying over the area on a mission. He had homesteaded the land and gradually built what was his home away from the rest of the world. There were only a few people in th
e world who knew of this place, and fewer who had ever been here. Roger had stumbled on the place during one of his wilderness travels, and he and Jacob had become good friends. A year or two ago, they had worked together to track down and help stop a group of powerful individuals who were bent on taking over control of the world. Was Jacob’s message now intimating something equally concerning was taking place?
He watched the door open and Jacob come out onto the porch. “Are you just going to sit there?” Jacob called with a smile in his voice.
Roger nudged the horse forward and replied, “Just enjoying the sight and remembering. I simply don’t know how you can ever leave here and go back there. Did you save some cobbler for me?”
“Not only cobbler, my friend, but we happened to find an old piece of elk lying around, and Marie’s been coddling it along for some hours. It will have softened enough to be called food by now, but you will have to pass judgement on it.
At least eat a small piece so she won’t get her feelings hurt, okay? She would be impossible to live with.”
“Oh, Jacob, if that’s what I smell all the way out here, will her feelings be hurt if I eat all of it? Sam’s nose is twitching, also.” He nodded toward the beautiful shep-herd/wolf cross that stayed close to him.
“I do believe there’s enough for all of us to eat our fill.
Yes, Sam. You, too.” Sam’s ears pricked up at the mention of his name.
Roger swung down and quickly crossed the porch to shake Jacob’s hand. “Here. I brought you a little gift,” he said, and handed him an envelope.
“What is this?”
“Just a little reminder of our last episode together.”
Jacob opened the envelope and took out a photo, obviously taken from a satellite, and studied it for a moment.
“There’s nothing I can identify here, Roger. I can’t get my bearings.”
“Well, do you see that little line near the top slanting down slightly across the picture?”
“Yes, but…” His eyes tightened a bit and he looked closer. Then, “That can’t be… A fenceline? This isn’t the Institute, is it? Yes, there’s the road, and the open area where the buildings… But…nothing? Is there nothing left? It’s the first time I’ve seen a picture since the destruction took place. I haven’t had time to go back and look at what happened.”
“Yep. That’s all that’s left. A bare field. The electromag-netic pulse basically fried everything electrical in the area, then the bomb pretty much vaporized everything, I guess. The nuclear dirt has already been measured and it will only be maybe another year before the area will be safe again, but there’s nothing physical left of the buildings or equipment.
Cour d’Accord, over on the coast, wasn’t hurt economically as much as people thought it would be with the Institute being destroyed. They already had a good infrastructure of businesses, mainly built around tourism, so they’ve been able to recover from the loss of Institute income. And, with the Group gone, the place has pretty much turned into just another nice, rich vacation place and most of the people have kept a pretty good income. The explosion was contained inside the basic fenceline, and someone apparently went in after and marked the place real well with radiation warnings and so on, so the people have just kept away.”
“I can see there’s nothing left. It looks a little like a moonscape. Dead.”
“I was wondering. Did you ever hear if that Macine guy—John, wasn’t it—if he ever showed up?”
“As far as I know, he never did. The authorities eventually got all the others, some forty or so, but I don’t know that Macine was seen again.”
“Well, enough of this. Just thought you’d like to see the end. Now, where’s that moose soup, or whatever, and cobbler?
I have ridden for about three days, and you just keep me out here starving?”
“Elk, Roger. Not moose. And I don’t believe it is soup.
And, I personally picked the blackberries for the cobbler, so I will expect appropriate smacking of lips and gesticulations of approval.” He laughed, then said, “Go put up the horse and mule by the stream and hurry back. We have a lot to talk about.” Then, seeing the look of playful dismay on Roger’s face, he added, “and food to eat, of course.”
After a few minutes, as they sat and ate, Roger thought, Ah, the quiet. The wind blowing lightly through the trees and the small stream behind the lodge gurgling and splashing gently. This really is a place to get away from life and think about things bigger than me. Roger’s home was in Vancouver, along with his computer business, but he had a cabin of his own, about seventy-five miles west of Jacob’s, where he spent all the time he could away from the big city. His business didn’t need him to carry it on, so he loved to get to the cabin and then pack into the wilderness for weeks at a time. It was on one of his trips that he had first met Jacob.
He watched Jacob also sitting quietly and eating, and saw the night gradually close in around the lodge. They were using the simple oil lamps and the fireplace tonight, and he thought the word peaceful had to have been coined by someone seeing this place for the first time. He treasured the place for its beauty and simplicity.
Asch was a nondescript person, a completely average-looking Israeli, and had worked to keep himself that way.
Someone seeing him walking down a street in Tel Aviv would only have seen another aging Israeli. This nondescript image was exactly what had enabled him, with only a minimum of simple disguise, to disappear over the years into backyards and bazaars and city streets around the world, and to come back with information for the support and protection of his beloved Israel. He had done quiet work in many countries, but there was simply no record of him other than as a professor of history.
He had never married because of the life he knew he would be leading as a Mossad agent. When he was recruited into the dark world of spies and intelligence work, he realized he could not put anyone through what his life was going to be.
His only friends on the outside had been from the university and his scholarly world. His ability with multiple languages and his noted ability to easily see through complex situations and inside complex people made him an immediate target for placement into deep cover within the Mossad, and his life simply couldn’t be open to anyone else. He asked nothing of others but to do their all for what was right. That request did not make him many friends.
At the still young age of 68, he was no longer an active Mossad field agent, but continued to be involved in the behind the scenes work of recruiting new agents, training them as they came in and advising the new Mossad leadership. He was still on the list of people to receive Most Secret materials, and his knowledge of people in the industry around the world put him in a position to learn many things almost no one else would ever know. His contacts acquired over the years were invaluable.
He had a caretaker couple, Peter and Marie, who stayed in a small suite of rooms at the lodge and had the place to themselves when he wasn’t there. They were ex-agents of his from Russia who had been exposed and almost killed before he had rescued them out of the country. They had decided they didn’t want to go back into the spy business and loved the opportunity to become Jacob’s permanent live-ins. They didn’t want any pay, just the supplies to live on and the opportunity to be free. Peter had been an excellent mechanic and a helicopter and small plane pilot, and Marie was a wonderful cook, so they fit perfectly into Jacob’s hidden life. He had secretly put aside investments to take care of the two for the rest of their lives, and, in fact, the lodge and property would go to them on his death.
Roger, on the other hand, was a business executive who had built a small computer sales company into a major developer of specialized software programs, especially an encryp-tion package that was used by governments and large businesses. The business and his main home were in Vancouver, and the business had enabled him to build the cabin by Bistcho Lake and to spend the majority of his time there.
Roger loved computers and was good with t
hem. He was part of a private group who got involved in research projects on people or events they saw around the world that worried them in some way. They weren’t spies, just researchers, but they had the ability to work far behind the scenes, and then to let appropriate agencies know when they found things of major concern. They had associates in almost every major country, and had the tools to do deep research, whether anyone knew of their work or not.
He had never worked directly on a project as serious as the one he had done with Jacob earlier, and it had tested his skills with the computers and excited him. He enjoyed the idea of continuing with more of the same. If Jacob’s message really did indicate an interest in the so-called vigilante group, Roger was more than ready.
When the men finished eating dinner and bringing each other up to date on their activities, Roger asked, “Well, my friend, you called this meeting for more than a social time, I believe. You made reference to some “worldwide people” you thought I might have heard about and wondered if I was involved at all. I’m going to assume you were referencing the people everyone is calling vigilantes and the answer would be, No. I’ve not been doing anything about them. So, what do we want to discuss?”
