After searching the house they didn’t find anything helpful. As they were going down into the garage Norton stopped. “What is this? Something is scribbled on this note pad.”
Alexei looked over his shoulder. “It looks like a telephone number to me. With a Washington area code. Should I call it and see who answers?”
“No, not yet. I’ll have my computer staff run it down and get a name and address. Then we can pay them a visit. Let’s see what they came up with outside.”
They walked up the hill to where the track entered the woods. The flattened brush and broken branches showed that vehicles had gone through in a hurry. Alexei led Jim down the road to where his men had left the truck. Fluid was still dripping from the cooling system, and the hood was open to show the radiator that self-destructed after taking high velocity rounds.
“Well, I can’t blame your men for not continuing the chase. When they turned on the light bar what did they see?”
“A man laying on the ground with a rifle, who immediately jumped up and started running. Vasily here took a shot at him with a 22 rifle, not to kill him but to wound and stop him. The guy stumbled and fell to the ground, then rolled into the trees.”
“Where do think you hit him, Vasily?”
“I was aiming for his yagoditsy – ass in English, but I don’t know if that’s where I hit him.”
“Do you think he took a dive and rolled away to make you think you hit him, and then ran off into the woods?”
Alexei took over the conversation. “We considered that until we found blood on the ground where he fell. We rushed that to a lab for a DNA analysis to see if it matches any of them. Only Preston and Gutierrez are capable of making those shots on our pickup, and their DNA is on file. We have access to that information so the DNA search should go quickly.”
“Do you have any idea which way they went?”
“Once they hit the county road they could have gone anywhere. So much time has passed now that they could be 400 miles away.”
“I’m heading back to the house to call my boss. He’s not going to be happy. Send your men to all the medical facilities in the area. We might get lucky.”
Chapter 43
Jack slept through the afternoon and night and woke up feeling much better. As he got up pain shot down his leg, but after a few steps to limber up it was just a dull throb. He washed his face, shaved, and brushed his teeth. It felt good to be back in the cabin with all the comforts of home. He heard the others joking around the breakfast table, trying to relieve the tension of the chase. He put on a set of jogging sweats and went in to join them.
Lynn jumped up and hugged him. “You’re moving around pretty well for a guy with a bullet hole in his butt. How does that feel today?
“I couldn’t get a good look at it in the mirror, but I can feel that the swelling has gone down.”
“Then it’s time to pull out the gauze packing and stitch it closed. You want me to do that, Lynn?” Harriet said with a grin.
“No, I think I can handle it. . . . Unless Jack would prefer that you do it.”
Jack spoke up right away “No, one woman in this group who has seen me naked is enough. Let me get some breakfast and painkillers in my stomach, then we’ll do it.”
As he ate, Jack gave some instructions. “We don’t know what kind of search they’re doing, but it won’t take long for them to check back here. I think we need to be out of here in two days or less, and keep an eye out the windows for ground or airborne surveillance. We need to keep the trucks loaded and ready to run in case they show up. And no one goes outside for any reason. They could even be watching from a satellite drone. Lynn, lets go to my room and get this over with.”
#
An hour later, they were all back at their computers continuing the work they started at the farmhouse. Lynn and Tom went over the latest audio compilation looking for the right voice. Tom asked to hear a couple of them a second time, but shook his head. “I’m about out of U.S. and foreign VIPs to listen to, Tom. Should we give up on this for now and hope you hear someone on TV that triggers your memory.” Tom thought it over. “I think you’re right Lynn. I’ll go tell Jack.”
As Harriet called up past election news footage of conservative hard liners, she started to see a pattern. In almost half of the elections, a highly funded smear campaign against the opposition was introduced in each state a couple of weeks before the elections. In some cases, the charges were based on real past transgressions, but in most cases the negative charges hit the headlines but were never verified. After the election, the people who had leaked the information disappeared from public view. In two cases the losing candidates tried to file a lawsuit for defamation of character, but weren’t able to find the people who made the false accusations, or who was behind them. The accusations ranged from homosexual sex in a public restroom, complete with indistinct, fuzzy photos; to being caught in bed with one or more women on a video tape. Again the faces of the supposed candidates were out of focus, but they looked like the candidates.
Rick’s search for the source of the embezzlement money was still grinding along with limited success. He had all the data and now he was guiding Jack’s software through a search for patterns, something that would connect the deposit amounts to each other. He was about to take a break when the signal for a hit beeped. He looked at the results and almost shouted eureka. The five deposit amounts came from five separate financial institutions, but they were all connected to a single investment bank, Winston Financial Holdings. The connections were indirect, threading through holding companies and dummy corporations, but the software was able to ferret it out.
#
They all got together in mid-afternoon to discuss their progress. Jack summarized it for them.
“Here’s where we are. Point number one – Lynn and Tom’s search for Mr. Gravel Voice hit a dead end. I suggest we abandon that search for now until we have something more to go on.” They all agreed.
“Point number two – Rick has found a common source for the five embezzlement blackmail deposits; Winston Financial Holdings. What do we know about that outfit, Rick”
“I’m still working on that.”
Everyone was quiet for a few minutes thinking over the information they had gathered so far. Then Lynn got their attention. “We’re still missing something here. Having something to derail six candidates just isn’t enough to assure the presidency for a selected candidate. There must be more to it. They must be using other means to discredit some candidates, like we’ve seen in the elections of the ultra conservatives in congress.”
Harriet had an idea. “What if the six candidates with the phony embezzlement files were squeaky clean. They had no dirt at all in their pasts that could be used against them. So, to ensure they had something to attack all the candidates with, they planted the evidence to discredit them in case they needed it. So they must have something else on all the other leading candidates, except for the anointed one, to knock off whoever comes close to their man in the late primaries.”
That got Jack excited. “That’s great Harriet! That was the missing piece in our theory. But if Senator Matthew Roberts is their golden boy, why hasn’t he entered the race yet?”
“Well, it could either be that we’re wrong and he’s not the one, or they’re holding him out of the race until the opportune moment.”
Everyone had a big smile and passed around high fives.
“Now the hard part . . . What can we do about it? What organization can we report this to that has the power and ability to stop it? Should we go to the news media, or maybe the Attorney General? What do you think, Jack?”
“If this plan has been going on for several years and is only now coming to completion, whoever is behind it – the Big Man – has it very well planned and organized. They’re bound to have contingency plans for this sort of thing.
And here’s an even more serious thought. If this is about bringing America back to a conservative, lim
ited Government that lets states and individuals make their own choices; that will limit the influx of illegal immigrants and potential terrorists; and that will rebuild a military that can put an end to militant governments with nuclear weapons who want to wipe out the country . . . do we want to stop it?”
That caused some raised eyebrows. They had been together long enough to share their views on how far toward the liberalism, almost socialism, of the current president and his advisors had taken this country. They agreed that this trend had to stop or it would destroy what made this country great – individual excellence taking a chance with an idea, and being rewarded with financial gain that can be put back into development of even better ideas. It was this competitive capitalism that created an economy where the more capable and brilliant are incentivized to create solutions to the major problems of life without the constraints of too much Government control.
Jack reminded them of this and expanded on it. “It will take a major shift away from liberalism to bring back this country where individuals can make their own choices about health care, how to spend their money, and where to send their children to school; where they can openly thank God and Christ for their blessings, and pray in public. A country where the Government doesn’t waste money to convince the uninformed that they are changing the world by recycling, buying carbon offsets, and saving the Rocky Mountain spotted owl. And where the Government doesn’t create a state of fear among it’s citizens about climate change, terrorism, gun ownership, and corporate greed to make them think they are being saved from an apocalyptic future. We need an administration that will eliminate the unnecessary rules and regulations that take away freedom. I read a book last year about how the average American citizen commits 3.2 felonies . . . every day. We need a Government with the fiscal responsibility to stop the runaway spending and the ever-increasing taxes needed to support it.
What if the objectives of Mr. Big Guy are similar to what we’re talking about? If this guy is powerful enough to engineer elections to shape the Government into something that much of the country wants to have, do we want to get in his way?”
Rick gave it some thought, then spoke up. “We are all pretty much in agreement that the country must swing back toward the conservative end of the political spectrum to remain great, to preserve individual freedom, but we don’t know how far to the right the Big Man intends to take us. There are just as many perils from going too far to the right as there are with the far-left Government we have now.”
Harriet agreed. “The problem is that we don’t have enough information about Mr. Big and his plans for the country his boy gets into the White House. We have got to figure out who he is so we can evaluate his political views and his power. Rick, I think you found the key with the source of funding for the embezzlement deposits. Maybe the Big Man in this political conspiracy is also the Big Man at Winston Financial Holdings. Do you know who that is?”
“Not yet, but it should be easy enough to find out. I’ll do that and dig into his life to see what I can find. I’ll get started on that this afternoon.”
Jack added “Harriet, why don’t you see if you can find where the money is coming from to buy elections, blackmail the opposition candidates, and pay for the advertising. It will probably be a PAC - Political Action Group – but get with Rick to see if you can find a connection to Winston Financial.”
Tom reminded Jack that they needed to be out of here tomorrow and find a place to relocate to, before the Bad Guys came to the cabin looking for them.
“Thanks for reminding me, Tom. We’ve been so busy piecing this plot together that I forgot about it. I haven’t come up with a good place to move into. How about some ideas from you guys.”
“It needs to be a remote place like this cabin, that’s hard for them to get in and out of, but has a back way out for us. It needs to have cell phone and 4G internet coverage. We can keep up with the news on our computers, so it won’t need a TV connection.”
“Good thoughts, Tom. What else do we need? A refrigerator and freezer, and a washer and dryer?”
“We might have to stay there for awhile, and we can’t expose ourselves by going shopping for food, so I think we need those, or we could live on canned goods, dry goods, and packaged meals. Do you know anywhere we can get some military MREs, Jack?”
“Government MREs – Meals, Ready to Eat – can be ordered on line, but we don’t want anything that has to be delivered. I think a good approach would be to stop at some country stores along the way and stock up while we’re travelling to the new place. If we buy food for a couple of months, we can figure out what to do after that.”
“I’m gong to get tired of canned soup and instant mashed potatoes, but I can put up with it as long as you promise me a steak dinner when this is all over.”
“That’s a promise, Lynn. Why don’t you all get back to what you’re doing for the afternoon and I’ll put a plan together we can discuss during supper.”
Rick thought for a couple of minutes. “There’s a net site that shows a map of every rental property that meets whatever criteria the user inputs. Let me spend some time on that and see if I can find something that will work for us. I’ll have some possibilities by supper time.
Chapter 44
Jim Norton was just finishing up an e-mail to Charles Winston summarizing the details of the escape from the farm when the phone rang. It was Alexei. “What have you got for me Alexei. It better be something good because I’m about to send a progress report to my boss and I have nothing new to put in it.”
“As the old joke goes, ‘I have some good news and some bad news.’ The good news is that they rushed the DNA testing through the lab, and the blood found in the woods is a match for Jack Preston. So my guy wounded their leader. The question is will that limit his mobility. From the amount of blood we saw we’re going on the assumption that he had to seek medical care somewhere. If one of his people picked him up after he was wounded they could have driven miles away from the area if they stopped the bleeding, so we are expanding the search of all medical facilities out to a radius of 100 miles. I have four teams of people on that, so we should be finished by morning. We’re also canvassing drug stores near the scene to see if anyone remembers selling the kind of medical supplies needed to treat a serious wound, and we’re checking all the antibiotic and pain killer prescriptions filled in the past 48 hours.”
“So is that the good news and the bad news?”
“No, here’s the bad news. When we searched the farm house we found a scratch pad in the kitchen with a phone number scrawled on it. We ran it through our search program and found that it’s an old-fashioned land line, with an address on file. I went there personally with a couple of my men and knocked on the door. A body guard, a Government man from the looks of him, answered and asked why we wanted to speak to the Deputy Director of the National Intelligence Office. We said we must be on the wrong street, apologized, and left. What does the NIO have to do with the fugitives?”
“We are working on that. The DNI was mentioned in the interrogation of one of the fugitives. You should have done a search on the owner of the house before you showed up there, Alexei.”
“We knew you wanted this done as soon as possible, so we bypassed that step. After our visit we picked up a tail and had to drive around town until we lost them.”
“If that was a Government tail, they now have your license number and will connect your company to this! We can’t allow that.”
“I took care of that by putting some fake license plates on the car before we left.”
“I hope they haven’t identified you, like maybe from a camera keeping track of visitors to the DDNI’s home. Let me get this news off to the boss. I’ll get back to you.”
#
After reading Norton’s email Winston was livid. How could five people keep evading them. They had surveillance looking for vehicle and license identification, one of the best ‘no-holds-barred’ security agencies in the cou
ntry along with law enforcement, trying to find some trace of these people who could ruin his entire plan. Maybe he should have Norton put up photos of all of them on the internet with a $100,000 reward for information leading to their capture. But that would make the whole thing public, and secrecy was essential if his plan was going to work. He was caught between a rock and a hard place; a conundrum in his usual vocabulary. Maybe his team would have some ideas in the meeting that was about start.
He entered the conference room with his usual tardiness and called the meeting to order. “I want to start with Mr. Norton explaining why the five people who could shut down this entire operation were able to escape capture yet again.”
Everyone looked at Norton, relieved that it wasn’t them being called on the carpet. He explained the situation and the search strategies they were using. They had over fifty agents looking for clues based on Preston’s injury and he was certain they would be caught soon.
Winston glared at him and said “You realize when this is over, when we have won the presidency, you are through here. I would do it right now but I don’t have the time to find someone else I can trust to replace you.” He turned to the rest of the team. “These fugitives can ruin everything if they aren’t caught soon, and then all of you will be through here, so if you have any ideas how we can catch them, speak up.”
Judge Walker offered a suggestion. “Can we put some cheese in a trap – something to lure them out in the open, maybe an invitation from Hermetrius to meet with them?”
“Judge, you know Hermetrius isn’t a real person. It’s a code name we came up with to divert any unwanted attention away from us. We set it up so if anyone searched the internet for it we would be alerted and could take action to neutralize them. So far, Preston and his group are the only ones who have been searching, and we’re already working on neutralizing them.”