Blowout (29 page)

He'd told a friend out in Kalispell once that when he died he wanted to be buried upside-down, so that the whole world could kiss his ass. He was angry for a life he figured had passed him by, all the way back to high school when he'd been called slimy. And it was only years afterwards when he'd realized they'd teased him because at his house his mother thought that bathing too often would leach the natural oils out of a person's body. Saturday night baths were plenty good enough for decent folk.

And other things had happened; with a girl in Houston, a couple of friends in Frisco, a job that went seriously south in Detroit, a Social Security disability application that had been turned down three times because not one bastard doctor had been willing to certify that he had bad back problems.

Egan had a list of grievances that he'd been adding to year after year, like saving pennies and nickels and dimes until they came up to some serious money and weighed so much they sometimes brought a man to his knees.

Time to cash 'em in, he thought.

 

Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office
Christmas Eve
Minneapolis

FBI DIRECTOR EDWIN
Rogers had initiated an encrypted video call with Deborah Rausch, the Minneapolis SAC. It was nine in the morning in the Midwest and Deb was sure that she looked like hell, her hair a mess, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep and worry. She'd always had the tendency to take things on her shoulders, most of the time unnecessarily so, but this time she was in the genuine hot seat.

“Glad to see that you're on the job, Mrs. Rausch, but sorry this had to come during the holidays,” Rogers told her. He was dressed just like in his official photograph, in a dark three-piece suit, the tie snugged up and straight. The same as his attitude, formal and constant.

“Thank you, sir, but Mr. Egan hasn't taken a day off. I assume that you've seen my overnight.”

“Yes, and I have to brief the president later this morning, so I wanted to know your gut feelings.”

“We're going to catch this guy, if that's what you mean, Mr. Director. He can't keep hiring people and then kill them when the operation has been completed. He's going to run out of associates. These guys may be crazy but a lot of them are pretty smart.”

“You think that someone will turn him in?”

“Almost certainly, or else he'll make a mistake, get himself into something from which he can't slip away.”

“He's a determined man.”

“Indeed he is,” Deb said. And it stung deeply that the bastard had made it right here to Minneapolis, right under her nose, in a stolen truck, with a stolen ID and credit card and had flown to Louisville and disappeared before anyone had reported the murders of the rancher and his wife. It was the kind of mistake that cost SACs their jobs.

“How are Sheriff Osborne and Ms. Borden?”

“They'll be released from the hospital in Dickinson this morning. No permanent harm, but it was close.”

“And work at the Initiative?”

“I'm told that they expect to have it back up and running sometime after the first of the year,” Deb said. “Excuse me, Mr. Director, but you know all of this.”

“Yes, but you may not know that there are some other aspects that you'll have to take into consideration.”

“Sir?”

“We've uncovered some evidence that points to a possible source of Mr. Egan's funds.”

“Yes, sir. We're looking for his bank accounts, most likely in Bozeman, though there are a few other possibilities, and we're checking his relatives and friends, but as you can imagine they've not been very cooperative. He's probably using fake IDs including Social Security numbers, and we're running down a few leads on that score. We know that he spent a few days in Upper Peninsula Michigan, at a mobile home an uncle owned, and the RCMP in Regina said that a couple matching Egan's and Mattson's descriptions—Egan was masquerading as a woman—paid for a room for ten days but left the first night.”

“Yes, that's in your report. But we've uncovered a possible connection with Venezuelan intelligence. I can't give you all the details yet, the CIA is mostly involved, except to warn you that if Venezuelan funds are involved they'll almost certainly be funneled through an American interest. The consensus thinking at this point is a contractor service.”

Deb was caught a little flat-footed, and yet she and her staff had suspected an outside source of money because the Posse never had been very well funded. Most of their money had been used to stockpile emergency rations, clean sources of water in case of a nuclear attack, bunkers and underground shelters, and small arms and ammunition in case the federal government finally made its move against the population. The transformation to a dictator state would be led by the IRS, of course, which was why the Posse's main strategy had always been a refusal to pay income tax: why finance the expected suspension of all civil liberties, including habeas corpus, the right to free speech, religion, and assembly, and most important, the right to bear arms? Which meant they never had the kind of money it had taken to mount the attack on the Initiative.

“Any leads, sir?”

“Nothing solid yet.”

“Why?”

“I don't understand.”

“Assuming we're right in thinking that Venezuelan intel is involved, what do they hope to gain by trying to shut down the Initiative? It's only an experiment, from what I'm told. Nothing of an industrial level is expected anytime soon. Or was it just an attempt to embarrass us?”

“It's more than that,” Rogers said. “But your main concern for the moment is to look for any unusual activities in your district.”

Deb resisted an impulse to laugh out loud. Her father had served in Congress from Nevada, but he'd only lasted two terms. “It's a different world out there,” he'd said. “They play by different rules, different expectations, and at a different pace. And a lot of the times they get themselves into positions where they have to state the obvious as if it were something they'd just discovered. They're not bad people, just different than me.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but aren't we just picking up the pieces now? Their attack on the Initiative failed, and so did kidnapping General Forester's daughter. There's nothing left for them. I suspect that Egan has gone to ground somewhere and will probably stay there for the immediate future.”

“We don't think so,” Rogers said.

“You're expecting another attack?”

“We're pretty sure that SEBIN is politically committed. One of our special envoys was assassinated.”

“Yes, sir, Rupert Mann, and the president recalled our ambassador. The word is Mann got caught in the middle of a drug cartel war.”

“The president sent him to deal with the oil ministry in Caracas. Shortly after the talks broke off, Mr. Mann was kidnapped and taken to a secure spot outside the city where he was beheaded with a chain saw.”

“Good Lord.”

“And it wasn't the Caracas police who investigated, it was SEBIN. It's why the president recalled our ambassador and expelled theirs.”

The media had reported the recall and expulsion of ambassadors as a reaction to Chávez ordering a steep hike in the price of crude—but only for oil shipped to the U.S. But this was completely different. She sat at her desk looking at the director's unblinking image on her monitor. It had begun snowing again last night, and the entire upper Midwest was all but closed down.

“Those could be the opening moves of a war,” Deb said. “And that's plain nuts.”

Rogers nodded. “Right on both counts, Mrs. Rausch. Keep your people on their toes, because this is just the start.”

“At least we know they won't try to hit the Initiative again. The place is too well guarded now.”

“Most of those troops will be pulled out as soon as the storm abates.”

“That's crazy, too.”

“The orders come from the White House. Officially the Initiative has nothing to do with the dispute over oil.”

“But we know better.”

“Exactly,” Rogers said.

 

PART THREE

MID-GAME

New Year's Eve

 

44

D. S. WOOD'S BOEING
737 with the Trent Holdings logo of three interlocking circles touched down at Havana's José Marti Airport a few minutes after two in the morning, direct from Mexico City. It trundled down the deserted taxiway to an empty maintenance hangar, and once inside the engines spooled down and the big doors rumbled closed. Two men in coveralls pushed wheeled boarding stairs to the front hatch and left.

Wood had been advised to come to Cuba alone, without his secretary or advisers, for a meeting that he could not afford to miss. And, considering the source of the request, he'd been unable to demur.

“We'll only take two hours of your time,” Margaret Fischer had promised.

“This have anything to do with my oil derivative funds?” Wood had asked, something clutching at his chest. If word had begun to leak just how shaky Trent's cash position was the piranhas would begin coming to the surface. And of the carnivores Margaret was the worst. It was she who'd come up with the idea for credit default swaps about the same time Blythe Masters over at Morgan Stanley had. And like many of the other top names on Wall Street, when the securities meltdown had swept the entire world, Maggie had come out with scarcely a bruise.

“Try coal,” she'd told him.

The company's airplane was laid out in four palatial sections: the master bedroom all the way aft, a boardroom and communications center just forward, the main lounge forward of that, and the cockpit, galley, and quarters for the pilot, copilot, and one flight attendant at the front.

The hangar was in semidarkness, an SUV parked to one side. But peering out a window Wood couldn't make out if anyone was inside the car.

He got the captain on the interphone. “I'm going to need a couple of hours here. I'd like you and Kelley and Tammy to head over to the VIP lounge. I'll call when I'm ready to go home.”

“Yes, sir,” Bob Kellogg said. “This is the first time here for any of us, so I might have to call for directions.”

“A car and driver are waiting outside to take you over,” Wood said. “And, Bob, don't talk to anybody, okay? We were never here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kellogg and his crew exited the plane, walked across the hangar, and left through a service door. When they were gone, Maggie, dressed in a mannish business suit and fedora, got out of the SUV with a very slightly built man, who had dark shiny hair, a mustache, and dressed in jeans, a white shirt, and a dark blue blazer. They walked across to the airplane.

Wood got to his feet as they appeared in the doorway and came aft. “Good morning,” he said. He had no idea who the man was or what this meeting was all about. But with Margaret this morning's business would be anything but social.

“Good morning, D. S., glad you could come down,” Margaret said. “I brought Señor Guisti along because he has a number of issues to talk over with you.”

Wood shook hands with them and they all sat down facing one another.

“Something to drink?” he asked.

“No,” Margaret said. “I have a busy day ahead, so let's make this short and sweet, shall we?”

“You called me.”

“Two things. We know that you're not so liquid just now. In fact you're right on the edge of going down. If someone made a couple of calls on certain of your holdings, you would be hard-pressed to cover them.”

Wood kept his expression neutral.

“We also know that you were behind the attack on the North Dakota Initiative, and that last week you arranged to have Ashley Borden, whose father is General Bob Forester, the director of the Initiative, kidnapped. In both cases the people you hired to do the work were unsuccessful.”

Wood could see everything he'd worked for all of his life unraveling, unless he did something. Made an end run, say anything he needed to say, make any promises he needed to make in order to leave himself enough time to call Bob Kast and find out where the hell the leak was. And when he did he'd kill the bastard with his own two hands if need be.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Actually I want essentially the same thing as you do, only from a different direction,” Margaret said.

“You're making no sense.”

“Then let me be plainer. I know about your financials because it's my business to know such things. And believe me, I don't need a spy inside Trent. I can add and subtract. Simple arithmetic. And I know about your dealings with Bob Kast from Señor Guisti who bought Venture Plus five years ago.”

“Turns out to be one of our better investments,” Guisti said. His English was accented though very precise, very clear, even cultured. “A foot in the door, and by chance you came along at just the correct time.”

“Who exactly do you represent?” Wood asked Guisti.

“A politically motivated investor, with very deep pockets, who wants the very same thing that you want.”

Wood was out of his depth, but he didn't know what choices he had. A word to the fed or the FBI and he would end up in jail. Unless he cashed out and ran somewhere. The UAE, maybe Syria, or perhaps right here in Cuba. Others had cut and run before the ax had fallen. Even guys like the movie director Roman Polanski, who was wanted in the U.S. for having sex with a minor, was a free man in Europe.

“What is it do you think I want?” he asked.

“The delay in any realistic attempt to create a viable source of clean energy that would be embraced by the public that did not involve oil,” Guisti said. “Simple.”

“Makes the three of us partners,” Margaret said. “You want to use your derivative positions to temporarily drive the price per barrel of oil as low as possible so that alternative energy research is put on a back burner, at which time the price of oil will go through the roof, making you a fortune. But that will take time, and it's not without risk, as you've already seen with the two attacks in North Dakota. From what I've been told, the big experiment with the coal seam is back on track and will probably occur sometime within the next week or so.”