I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (24 page)

“Then the prisoner got on the elevator and walked out? Just like that?”

“Further precautions would have been implemented if indicated,” the administrator argued. ”The physician indicated he would not be ambulatory for months. I’m not a mind-reader!”

Inside the exam room, Nussbaum had his laptop plugged into a high-speed data connection inside the exam room. Bishop leaned down to look at the zip ties around Stocky’s neck then stepped over the body.

“What have you got?” he asked Red Pants.

Stephen and three other off-site techs were already running a fifty-mile radius using public and private feeds. Every arterial and highway, every parking structure, every mall—eyes were on every black Prius out there.

“I have this fully under control,” Stephen answered. “Thank you for asking.”

“A lot of good it’s going to do,” Bishop responded. “Identifying him doesn’t get him caught.”

“I’m piggy-backed on the national grid,” Stephen explained while his fingers worked over the keyboard. “I’d rather use my own facial recognition software, but we’re stuck using their proprietary crap.”

“Show me,” Bishop told the stick-thin Nussbaum.

“I have cameras scanning license plates going twenty-five miles in every direction. The minute he stops for gas or fast food, as soon as he moves inside camera range, we’ll have visual confirmation and GPS coordinates accurate within two meters.” Stephen swapped over to a black screen with white lettering than scrolled through pages like a blur. It was one of those magical things that only techs can do, exactly the type of sorcery that was putting guys like Bishop out of work.

“What about the father’s house?” Bishop asked.

“Already on it. Jeffers made a call. There’s drone surveillance on the house. We’ll have cameras mounted outside the father’s to take over inside an hour. I’ve got live emails and phone activity screening in real time.” He threw up a map showing a radius going out 100 miles. “These are known addresses on every local member of his unit, present and past, going back to 2005. We’re pulling bank accounts, cell phones, and email aliases.”

“I’ll arrange for response units,” Bishop added, thinking out loud.
Set up a command station, get a comm hub.

“Come with me,” Bishop ordered. “I’ll set you up at my office.”

“I don’t need an office. Just a solid data port. I’m good.”

“I’m not asking,” Bishop told Nussbaum.

“Do you grasp how much data ships through a fifty mile radius containing a major metropolitan area?” he challenged Bishop. “There are nearly a quarter-million feeds, video; that’s terabytes every nanosecond. We have to piggyback processing straight off NSA channels. Even with the backdoor key, it still takes bypassing firewalls, data-decryption.”

“How many fugitives have you handcuffed?” Bishop shot back as they moved. “What sort of cool algorithm do you have for capturing a Special Forces-trained sniper? What keys do you push? Is there an app for that?”
Red Pants, your kind can’t bring in Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer.

Stephen’s connection dropped inside the elevator but he reconnected on a 4G band once they were outside the building. The connection had just enough bandwidth to observe the scanning protocols. “How are you going to do it?” Stephen wanted to know. “I could have a hit this second. When it happens, it is going to happen fast.”

“I’ll arrange assets and move them here as fast as possible. You get a location, you need to stay on him like glue until I can get them into place.”

Bishop arranged for secure a six-man ops squad over the phone as they drove together.

“You have to know who to call,” he told Stephen, adding, “They’re locked and loaded with a helicopter at ready.”

He turned to look at the impression that his phone call had made, expecting Red Pants would be blown away, and then was disappointed by what he saw. Stephen looked disinterested.

“Supply exceeds demand by an order of magnitude,” Nussbaum sneered. “There’s more ex-Special Forces wanting work than day labor outside the Home Depot. Tech talent is where the jobs are.” Then he smiled wide.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed enthusiastically.

“What?” Bishop wanted to know.

“Hah! The golden ticket! Yes!” Jeffers had somehow bypassed the security interviews, the background checks. Everything. Nussbaum realized he had the key to the entire grid.

“We’re into NSA’s entire surveillance system,” he explained. “The whole fucking thing. I’ve heard rumors about it, but I’ve never even seen a geo-specific enterprise intelligence system.”

“A what?”

“Think of a million eyeballs, more, all on 24/7 high-alert. Point a cursor on a map and scroll out to any radius and every camera, every street cam, every public transit cam, every bank, every Starbucks, McDonald’s, 7/11, every single private security camera in every house is right there, right on screen. We can filter for height, build, hair color, skin tone, clothing color, make and model of car. Damn! I’ve waited all night outside Best Buy to get the first copy of every version of Halo. That’s good. This is about a million times better. NSA has the coolest shit! This just scratches the surface.”

“This isn’t a game.”

Stephen disagreed. “It’s all a game.”

*****

The gas gauge showed under a quarter tank of gas. Spencer figured twenty-five miles per gallon, maybe an eighteen-gallon tank, and began speculating. Then he found the button on the steering wheel and the information center in the dashboard screen. Range = 137 miles.

What does it matter? Make distance.
Get clear of D.C. before they find the Prius.
Once they had that they’d ID the Subaru. One-hundred-thirty-seven miles.

The nav system took him west on King to South Henry to merge back onto 495. Six-and-a-half miles of the most patrolled highway in America.

He accelerated to sixty-eight mph and tapped the steering wheel to set the car on cruise control. Every sight around him was made much more surreal because he had seen them all before.
America.
On American soil the entire time.
95 south. Forty minutes away from Jack. Heading home.
He had to reach under his knee to take his right foot off the gas pedal. He was using his left foot for the brakes. No choice; either he slammed to every stop or he wasn’t stopping.

Cruise control bought him the chance to think.
Eight bucks.
A little over two gallons of gas. Sixty more miles. He reached into the paper sack on the passenger seat, felt for the imported water, cracked open the bottle top and drank back half in one gulp then belched away the bubbles.
The coins.
It would take him half a day to sort them out and get them into rolls. Where could he cash rolls? Where could he get the rolls in the first place?
Every bank in the country used security cameras.

Coin machine.
There used to be a coin machine in Tuckahoe. Eighty miles.
Better to make distance or ditch the car?
He took a deep breath, exhaled, and smiled. Fucked-up legs and all, there was color all around him, color on cars, billboards, trees, a sky as far as he could see in countless shades of blue. He felt alive, alive for the first time in forever. He let down the window and let the wind blow across his face, leaned his head out and stretched his neck into it, letting it blow through his hair and beard. Traffic slowed suddenly. He saw the gap closing and the rear bumper of a Chrysler minivan getting bigger fast. Before he could manage braking, he instinctively pulled left into the HOV lane and was passing the Chrysler and more traffic without ever slowing down when in the rearview mirror a gray sedan came up behind him.
Five hundred yards.

He thought the hood and roof were black. Grabbing a fistful of blue jeans just above his left knee, he pressed down until he felt the brakes contact then lifted and pumped the leg to reduce speed so that he could cut back into the center lane. He let the Subaru decelerate, then cut to his right and tapped the button reading “Resume.” The Virginia State Police unit pulled parallel alongside. Spencer kept his eyes looking ahead, his hands at ten and two. Sixty-two mph. He breathed again after the patrol car moved ahead and reached into the bag, taking out an apple and biting in with a satisfying crunch. While he chewed, he reached the pale red and yellow fruit out at arm’s length and studied it, turning his wrist to look at it from all sides as the sweet juice moved over his tongue and settled into the back of his mouth.
Best apple ever.

The white ranch house where he grew up was a half hour ahead. Half an hour. Would Jack be there, he wondered, on the blue couch with his shoes on, or would he be out with the van on a job?

He hadn’t seen his dad since boarding the plane before the last deployment. At Walter Reed he told Jack that he’d come home to visit after his MEB. Right after he left Eagle Arms they talked on the phone.
Hi Dad. Hi Johnny. How are you, Dad? Hanging in there. How are you? The same
.

Before Sands Point,
before everything
. He was already back in operations mode, prepared to do what he trained for, what he did best.

You need to get rid of this thing.
But how do you steal a car, he wondered? People did it all the time, but how? Could you stick in a screwdriver and break the ignition lock? He’d seen five or six of the
Fast and Furious
movies, but hot-wiring a car?

Hijacking? A gimp with no weapon. Probably get shot trying. Good luck on that.
Where do people leave cars and keys?
Oil change places. Valets. Car washes.
Repair shops
. Repair shops might not know it’s gone, not as fast at least. But what if it hadn’t been repaired? Steal a car that was going to break down?

He looked at his hands; he was gripping the wheel too tightly, his knuckles were white, bloodless. Pulse rate in the mid-70s. Way off. Adrenalin rollercoaster. Neurochemistry pinging all over the place like a pinball machine.

Radio controls were on the left side of the steering wheel. He could have reached down and put on music. Instead, he closed the window. Tuckahoe, he decided. Then find a way to get another car.
Sorry Jack
.

*****

“I’m aware it’s been three hours,” Bishop conceded. “No, he can’t be on a plane, not without ID. Besides, how would he pay for the ticket?” Jeffers voice was hitting a high range that sounded entirely different from the deep resonant authority he normally displayed.

“I’m aware of that,” Bishop agreed. “One-hundred-fifty miles. No, camera densities fall apart in forty miles.”

“Red Pants”—Stephen Nussbaum—had mapping projected along an entire wall.

“Spencer didn’t escape on my watch. My contract was singularly for interrogation. Incarceration was entirely separate. Don’t put this on me,” Bishop said, defending himself.

“Things might be considerably different right now if you had an APB out,” Bishop repeated. “We didn’t find the Prius because he’s not in the Prius. Your doctor was taken to his house and found it turned inside out when he got there. No, no weapons. A revolver in the hall closet. Still there.

“Some food, clothing, medications. I know he’s not in the Prius because we have the Prius. He switched cars. A green Subaru Imprezza, Virginia license number 4201 Charlie Victor Thomas. We may not need the cameras. The Subaru has a nav system and roadside collision assistance.”

“If it has a nav system, you’re tracking it, aren’t you?” Jeffers demanded.

“Of course,” Bishop snapped back. ”We’re working on that as we speak. Once we’re inside the system, I’ll have a team on the helicopter.” Stephen and his nerds were proving resourceful.

*****

With the giant jug set inside a shopping cart, Spencer held onto the handle and tried pressing up onto his toes. His heels came off the ground. Not much, but it was something. He tried squatting; the knees started giving way and only the cart kept him from falling smack on his ass. He moved tentatively, lifting one foot at a time, and used his grip on the cart to relieve the weight on his legs. But he was moving. His knees were flexing. Two minutes earlier he had scratched himself from his calves to his thighs on both legs.
Months of therapy my ass.

Inside the automatic doors, the coin machine was still there where he remembered it. After grinding like a rusty washing machine for a couple minutes, it totaled $119.43. He selected the cash voucher that printed out at $108.80.
Eleven bucks, for that.

Monday fried chicken special. Breast, wing, thigh and drumsticks plus two sides for $3.99.
Monday. Tuckahoe, VA
. The aroma of fried chicken made him swoon. He was going to eat it in the car but recognized that he was barely able to drive with both hands helping. He ate right there, every morsel right down to the bone, grits with gravy, mac and cheese, sitting at a metal table with four attached seats, bolted into the shining floor. People kept coming and going to and from the Starbucks counter. He looked up at them with chicken in his mouth. Nobody was going to get between him and that meal.

He wheeled from the deli past the checkout registers, reading the directory signs down each isle. He found disposable razors. Store brand. Packs of three. Then he went down the housewares isle. Brooms.
Screw-in handles.
After the checkout, he still had $103 and change
.
Forget gas. Ditch the car.

Just outside the shopping center, in an area of neat three story apartments and 1950s single-story little houses just like the one he grew up in, he cruised along the lowest speed that took cruise control, 20 miles an hour, with the broken broom stick resting in his lap, the threaded end touching alongside the brake pedal.

After two blocks he saw a FedEx van pull to a stop. The driver went into the back then emerged with a small package and trotted toward the nearest apartment building. Stealing a FedEx van?
Nope.

Another block along he spied something more intriguing. In front of him was another small apartment building, this one off by itself, set back from the street, with a small parking lot in front. He pulled in, punched the stick downward to brake, and then let the car move slowly in drive past the pickups and older four-cylinder imports. At the farthest end away from the parked cars he turned the Subaru between faded white lines and put it in to park. Looking down between the apartment and the little ranch house beside it, a young man made a pass with a power mower across the back yard, turned and went behind the house, the sound fading as he moved in the other direction. Inside the single-car garage was somebody’s pride and joy, a beautiful Honda CTX700 standing all black and shiny. Key in the ignition, helmet resting on the seat.

*****

“Of course we’ve pulled the description; we’ve got the license plate, the VIN. Well, it’s not that simple.

The service carrier is American, but they’re a third party,” Stephen explained. Jeffers’ micro-management was even more frustrating than tracking the car; why even hang up the phone when the intervals between Jeffers’ calls were minutes apart?

“The service contract is offered directly by Subaru,” Stephen continued, “which is owned by Fuji Heavy Industries. I already approached their U.S. headquarters in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Unless the request is made by the owner of the vehicle, they won’t do it without either a court order or an ok from Japan. There’s a twenty-hour time difference.

“The registered owner is a commercial airline pilot in the air halfway between Miami and Sao Paulo. I sent him a text to contact us the moment that he lands.

“Then break into their network!”

Nussbaum answered Jeffers testily. “Tried that. It’s a no-go. Hacking their system will take considerably longer than two-and-a-half hours.”

“Will a warrant get it done?” Jeffers offered.

“You have judges within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, move on that, definitely,” Stephen agreed. “If you really can turn a FISA court order right now, that could be a game changer.”

*****

The Honda was a different animal, not at all like his Harley; a cheetah, agile and smooth compared to the Harley’s throaty lion. No clutching; the automatic transmission was a godsend. The tinnitus rang louder inside the helmet, but he could live with that.
All day long.