Chapter 18: Chapter seventeen

Present day

 

Alesha got to the diner just before one in the morning. She had been driving for almost an hour. Partly because the diner was on the other side of town from her house and partly because she needed to make sure she wasn’t followed. She liked her yellow mini—it reminded her of her parents, kept their memory close—but it was the easiest thing in the world to tail.

She sat in the parking lot for a few minutes, watching for passing cars, just to be sure. She got out, locked her car, and opened the diner door. A portly man in a trucker hat brushed past her on his way out, and it looked like he had been the last customer in the place.

Perfect, Alesha thought, selecting a table with her back to a wall where she could watch the door. She watched her partner come through that door a few minutes later.

“What’s this about?” Mike asked, sitting himself down opposite Alesha. It was late and he looked like he’d rather be in bed.

“I got a lead,” Alesha said.

Mike raised one eyebrow. “And this lead requires a 1 A.M. meeting in this place?” Mike gestured around them at the empty restaurant.

“I—” She cut off as a waitress came over and asked them if they’d like anything. Alesha ordered a coffee and Mike followed suit.

“It wasn’t something we could discuss at the station,” Alesha whispered once the waitress was gone. “I’m not sure who I can trust on this.”

Both of Mike’s eyebrows went up at that. “I think you better start at the beginning. What was this lead?”

“Okay, okay. I was working the leads, chasing down anyone who thought they had seen our killer. But something kept bugging me, itching in the back of my mind. Something about that lab equipment transaction wasn’t right. So, when I got off-shift, I went over there to talk to them. They were a little cagey, didn’t want to give out their client information without a warrant and all that, but one guy there gave me a list of what that exact amount could buy.”

“And?” Mike asked.

“And there’s two real contenders. One is a bunch of stuff you might want for counterfeiting and cooking meth, the other is for manufacturing some sort of robotics.”

“Counterfeiting and meth? That’s ambitious.”

“It’s not just ambitious, it’s wrong. I talked to one of the guys over in organized crime and he reckons the numbers would be off. Too much of some equipment, not enough of others. I think it’s the robotics thing.”

“So, a bust then? Robotics aren’t illegal and, unless someone was building a terminator, they probably didn’t have anything to do with Bryson’s death.”

“That’s what I thought. But just in case I did a little digging into who uses that kind of equipment specifically. Turns out there are only a few labs in the whole country that do and none of them have bought anything recently.”

They briefly fell silent as the waitress returned with their coffees.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“No thank you,” Alesha said.

She left, barely concealing her frown at the thought that the tip on two coffees would probably be the only one she got for the rest of the night.

“Overseas then?” Mike asked once she was gone.

“No, the lab in question charges extra for overseas delivery, it wouldn’t match the amount paid. It has to be somewhere in the country but for some reason, someone is keeping it a secret.”

“Companies keep things secret all the time. Doesn’t mean they had their money man knocked off.”

Alesha nodded. “I know. But these tech projects can be worth an awful lot of money. People have killed for less. Anyway, I figured it was worth looking at, so I dug around on the labs that aren’t a secret. Turns out one of them had two scientists reported missing in the last week. One of them turned up dead, the other one just vanished. That’s out of a staff of four by the way, and the one that’s missing was the head of the project, a Dr. Elizabeth Clark.”

Mike frowned at that. “That does sound like it’s worth looking into. But that doesn’t tell me why we’re meeting here in the middle of the night.”

“I’m getting to that. Thing is, the guy at the lab said he gave this information to the Feds as well. But we didn’t hear about it in any of the briefings.”

“And you think one of them left it out intentionally?”

Alesha nodded.

“Look,” Mike said. “I’ve been in this job a long time, and there are definitely dirty cops out there. But what’s far more common is incompetence. The Feds are the best there is as an organization, but individually they’re just people. You’ve been awfully thorough on this lead, it’s more likely that whoever checked it out on their end just didn’t look into it that closely.”

“If they had the information that I got though, they would have to make the drugs and counterfeiting connection. They couldn’t be that incompetent. I only dismissed it because I talked to a guy who had busted dozens of meth labs and counterfeiting rings over the years who had a sense of what you’d want in each one and, even so, the possibility will be going in my report. Those briefings cover everything even remotely important, there’s no way a possible connection to organized crime would be left out.”

Mike sipped his coffee, thinking it over. “You’re right. Someone buried the lead.”

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Alesha nodded. “Which means that one of the Feds is dirty.”

“Do you know which one?”

“According to the person I talked to, it was a white guy in his thirties or forties. Wore a suit. Never gave his name, but he said he was from the FBI.”

Mike grunted. “That doesn’t narrow it down much. That describes half the Feds in town and if one of them is dirty, they could easily say they were from a different outfit than they really were.”

“Exactly. If we had access to the schedule of who looked into what, we could find out who was dirty, but I don’t think we can do that without letting them know we’re onto them. I was thinking about going to IA, but I wanted to talk to you first, make sure you came to the same conclusions I did. Make sure I was going to them with more than a hunch.”

Mike shook his head. “It’s not IA. For the FBI you want the Office of Professional Responsibility. I know a guy who knows a guy. I’ll reach out to them quietly, make sure it doesn’t get out that we are onto them. In the meantime, I don’t want you making any moves without telling me first. If someone on this investigation is dirty, then we have to watch our step or we’ll both wind up catching a bullet.”

Alesha nodded. “Okay. But I want to look into Dr. Clark’s disappearance. If someone went to the trouble of covering up this lead, then it must be important.”

“Okay. But we do it quietly. Keep your notes at home. Nothing on file until we have something substantial.”

“Agreed.”

“Alright, then tell me what you’ve got.”

 

 

The man in black sat in a truck that wasn’t his and listened to a conversation between two detectives who thought they were alone. He still wore the trucker’s cap and extra layers he had used as a disguise, and he held a cup of coffee that he could take a sip from if anyone looked at him. So long as no one saw his eyes, he would look for all the world like a trucker finishing his coffee before he got back on the road. The truck’s real owner was knocked out in the back, and wouldn’t wake up for another hour at least. That gave the man all the time he needed to listen to the bug he had planted on the female detective.

Attracting the FBI’s attention had been a big part of why the man had killed Bryson in the first place. He could go some way to tracing the Program’s transactions using Bryson’s books, especially with a little help from Gwen the hacker—who had hidden RATs in most major banking systems and had already pointed him to MegaSat—but there was no substitute for FBI forensic accountants. The resources of the federal government were unparalleled when it came to tracking money and the man figured the best way to figure out what the Program was up to was to let the Feds figure it out first and then copy off their notes.

The fact that it meant a federal investigation into a murder he had committed, and a sketch of his face on television was a downside to his plan, but not much of one. His face wasn’t exactly recognizable and besides, if he couldn’t elude one country’s law enforcement, he had no business going up against Kessington Smythe.

It looked like the plan had paid off as the disappearance of this Elizabeth Clark person sounded like just the Program’s style.

He would look into it.

 

 

Later that night Mike sat alone at his kitchen table drinking whisky and staring at nothing.

He hadn’t eaten at the diner and he wondered whether he should have a bite to eat. Whisky on an empty stomach was likely to leave him feeling wretched in the morning.

As if there’s a way I won’t feel wretched in the morning, he thought. Still, he turned his head towards the refrigerator as he let his mind wander to what he could eat as a late-night snack.

But he didn’t get up. He just sat there. He took a sip of his whisky.

The kitchen clock ticked by. It seemed too loud by far in the quiet house, and Mike thought about getting up and taking out its batteries.

But he didn’t. He just sat there. Whisky in one and eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

If someone had been watching him, they would have seen that while he wasn’t looking at anything, there was something on the table in front of him that he studiously wasn’t looking at.

Mike took another sip of whisky and placed his other hand on the table. He moved it closer to the object his eyes were avoiding.

There, before him on the table, was a phone. An innocuous looking thing to all appearances. But Mike’s gaze avoided it like it was the grim spectre of death and his hand started to twitch as it neared the phone.

How had it come to this? It had started as just a few days down the track. An innocent bet here or there. Now everything had turned to shit.

Finally he picked it up and dialled a number from memory.

“Yes?” a familiar voice answered.

“I have information you’re going to want,” he said in a weary voice. “Sir.”

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