The NAFTA Blueprint
Page 21
Roth drove to a public storage facility in Houston. He parked a black Lincoln Town Car in a storage unit and placed a tarp over it. He unscrewed the fabricated license plate and returned the original and then he took off his blazer, tie, sunglasses, and surveillance ear piece. It was the second disguise he had used today. The first when he delivered the autopsy report wearing thick-framed reading glasses, a three-day beard, and a wavy-haired wig, the second as a secret service agent in the Lincoln.
The vehicle was a rental, but he needed to do some light body work on it before he returned it because of when he clipped Michael’s mirror in Barton Hills. He walked out of the storage facility wearing a white long-sleeved button shirt and a pair of black trousers, his hair style was minimal because of his balding, receding hair line. His skin was leathered and pallid, what remained of his hair was like blackened velvet, and he had long-arched eyebrows like Helena’s.
He took a public bus to Houston Heights around the block from where Michael lived. From his back window he had a clear view of Michael’s bedroom window. A clear shot through a scope couldn’t have been more perfect. He had taken an apartment close to Michael’s to monitor his moves after he had bugged him in the limousine in Kansas City. That neighborhood had now become his temporary headquarters.
He also placed a tracking device underneath Michael’s vehicle when it was parked in front of the widow’s house, but Michael was too unaware to underestimate the escalation of his paranoia. To access his apartment he installed a fingerprint control system and a fingerprint hand lock to prevent a break in, the inside of his apartment was bare of any furniture with the exception of a computer work station on hardwood floor and two flat screen monitors that showed different angles of the inside of Michael’s apartment.
A few swiveling chairs rested amongst the workstation. A living room wall had a corkboard with newspaper clippings of the Houston Chronicle with Michael Korsakov’s name on the bylines. He activated the tracking device that was placed underneath his car and discovered he was parked along the Fayetteville Lake. He knew Michael wouldn’t be barging in to his apartment within the next hour. He presumed Michael was going frantic by the events that had unraveled today and he would be reviewing them with Helena trying to make sense of it all. He was right.
He played back a recording from the bugging device he installed on a telephone at the Jacobs residence a few days prior. He heard Mary Jacobs’ voice, “Hey, it’s me…can I speak to you for a second?”
The phone call was made a few minutes after she slammed the door on Michael and Helena.
A baritone-voiced man on the opposite end said, “Yeah, sure…what can I do for you?”
“I just had some reporter and a lawyer walk up to my house and ask questions about the autopsy report. I thought this was over, you said it wasn’t going to escalate further than that. Now I have―”
“Calm down…calm down, do you remember their names?”
I don’t remember the gal’s name, I think she was Mexican…I’m not sure, she was definitely ethnic, and the guy’s name was…Korsakoff, some strange Russian name or something like that.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it. Calm down, and definitely don’t talk to anyone else―you got that!”
“I got it, but you better move quickly on this. Oh…and I hope that agent of yours outside my apartment in the Lincoln is taking care of these two snoops.”
“What agent? What Lincoln...uh…never mind. Okay, we’ll take care of that.”
Roth faintly recognized the baritone voice, but he knew who it belonged to. He had been waiting for that type of phone call for about a week now. The plan was developing accordingly.
He grabbed a backpack from a nearby closet and a Houston Astro’s ball cap and then walked out towards Michael’s apartment. He walked up the four flights of stairs in silenced foot pads and rehearsed a speech should anyone question his whereabouts. He was a census taker, he had a counterfeit badge.
The front door of Michael’s apartment was picked with a paperclip and a quick shove while avoiding suspecting neighbors, and then he walked over to Michael’s laptop to place another monitoring device on his keyboard, another one on his thermostat, and an additional one on his bedroom clock. There was no room for failure on this project, all angles had to be covered, and no loopholes could be exposed.
Roth ransacked the apartment searching for some anonymous object. He looked through Michael’s underwear, sock, and t-shirt drawer to no avail. He threw his magazines, books, and notebooks off of the computer desk hoping to find the object hidden between the hoard, and nothing. He did find a pistol, and took it as a souvenir. He searched through Chloe’s remaining clothes drawer without success, and then he ran his hands through pockets of coats hanging in the closet before throwing them onto the floor. He appeared frustrated. Whatever information he was looking for was out of his reach. He grabbed a marker from Michael’s supply cup, he tore a piece of blank paper from a notebook, and he scrawled a few words and placed it on the refrigerator behind a magnet. It was a warning to Michael.
10.