The Manuscript (11 page)

Exhausted and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, Michael eventually stumbled over to the couch to rest his eyes. He was out cold within two minutes of lying down.

********

An explosive crashing jolted him awake, followed by screaming.

Michael cautiously approached the window and peeked out; it was morning – a woman in a Honda SUV had rear-ended a plumbing van on the street below. Both drivers were standing beside their vehicles yelling at the top of their lungs, berating each other for their lousy driving skills. The woman was East Indian, with a pronounced accent and a vocal range that likely had the neighborhood dogs running for cover. The male sounded Polish or Russian.

Good morning - I heart Brooklyn.

He stumbled into the shower, prioritizing his activities for the day as he stood under the tepid stream of water. Having skipped dinner, he was starving, so first order of business was to get some calories on-loaded. Then he’d move to making calls and following up on his prior day’s contacts. And of course, finish reading the manuscript. Michael figured that today was going to define whether his network was in crisis, or if this was merely a false alarm.

His Blackberry was blinking.
Shit - he hadn’t even heard it ring
. Koshi had called him the previous night. He punched the speed dial number and listened to it ring.

“You alive?” Koshi asked by way of greeting.

“Yup. I just crashed hard and missed your call,” Michael explained. “Sorry.”

“Write this down,” Koshi responded, and gave him an e-mail address, login and password. “Use it to communicate until the fire drill’s over.”

“Got it. Anything going on over there?” Michael asked.

“No black helicopters, if that’s what you mean,” Koshi deadpanned.

“Good to hear,” Michael reflected before going on to explain about his pulling in some favors to check on Abe’s death.

“Keep me in the loop when you hear something,” Koshi reminded him.

Michael promised to let him know as soon as he talked to Ken, and they agreed to stay in contact via e-mail at least twice that day – once at three o’clock, and once more at the end of the evening.

There were two coffee shops on the block, indistinguishable from each other, so he chose the nearest one and slid into a vacant red vinyl-clad booth. He ordered, then called Ken, who promised he’d have more information later in the day – they were still waiting for feedback from the lab. He assured Michael he’d call as soon as he knew anything.

Samantha wasn’t in yet, so he left a voice mail and the voice-over-IP phone number.

Michael slouched restlessly, fidgeting with his cell, unable to sit still. He’d only been awake an hour, and nervous energy already had him bouncing off the walls.

The waitress delivered his food; the coronary special – three eggs, pancakes, sausage, hash browns. Michael resolved to cut himself off after two cups of coffee. The last thing he needed was to add caffeine jitters to his growing impatience. He plowed through the meal like he’d just been released from prison and broke his commitment to stop the coffee. They were small cups, he reasoned, so three were only about the same as one and a half of his usual.

Back in the apartment, he reviewed the prior evening’s notes and then picked up the remainder of the manuscript, determined to finish it. As he made it to the last few pages, he registered an e-mail address inserted seemingly by mistake in one of the endnotes.
That had to be deliberate.
Maybe the author had put a contact point in that would only be noticed if Abe really read the entire thing and digested every word.

It was worth a shot.

Michael sat down at his laptop and logged into his newly created e-mail.

He had one message, from Koshi: [The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.]

That was Koshi for you. Mister sunshine. Michael fired back an e-mail so Koshi knew things were working: [Daddy drinks because you cry.]

He was interrupted by the jarring ring of the voice-over-IP phone.

“Michael, what do you know about the stiff you had me check on?” Ken launched, skipping pleasantries.

“I told you – why…what did you find?” Michael’s stomach lurched even as he asked. He’d known Ken a long time, so he knew what was coming next. Or at least, he thought he did.

“All right. Here’s the scoop. The ME confirmed death was caused by a massive myocardial infarction. But he also found very subtle bruising on the lower back. Judging by the amount of subcutaneous clotting, his preliminary assessment is that your boy sustained a blow there immediately before he croaked,” Ken reported.

“Like someone rabbit-punched him in the kidneys…” Michael thought out loud.

“And it was the shock of being slammed that gave him the heart attack. That’s where the coroner went with it as well. The corpse had several dislocated fingers and a pretty messed up face, but that looks like it happened when he hit the floor. But it was the blow that started it all. So we’re changing this to a 187,” Ken finished.

“Shit.” Michael didn’t have anything to say beyond the expletive.

“I’ll second that. We’re going back and getting CSI to do a once over on his flat, but after the EMTs stomped around there for half an hour getting the body out, I’m not optimistic,” Ken said.

“No, I can see that would make it tough,” Michael said, from a million miles away.

Ken was all business on this call.

“Since we’re now sure this was a murder, or at the very least aggravated assault, why don’t you take a few minutes from your busy schedule and tell me everything you know about it?” Not so much a question as an order.

Michael told him the whole story, omitting only that he was in possession of the manuscript that was deleted from the e-mail. And that every lethal organization in the world was implicated in Abe’s death. He didn’t see how his suspicions after reading the mystery document would alter the course of the investigation into Abe’s murder.

“And you have no idea who sent the communication, or who planted the listening devices?” Ken asked, for the record.

“Not a clue. But Ken, Abe told me the e-mail attachment was the most important book of his career and would implicate a lot of government and powerful interests in widespread criminal activity,” Michael offered. He chose the words very carefully, to give Ken maximum possible info without actually revealing he was now up to his neck in something that seemed to be turning into his worst nightmare come true.

There was no way he could say anything more without divulging he was the man who knew too much – and that guy usually wound up dead. He had to assume that if the rot went as high as the manuscript claimed, every detail in the police report would be known by the black hats within hours of it being filed.

“Powerful interests, you say – well that’s nice and non-specific,” Ken observed.

“I wish I had something more I could tell you,” Michael said. And he really did. The problem was that telling Ken he suspected covert U.S. Government hit squads, or the Mob, or Iran, or terrorists, didn’t really narrow things down in a helpful way.

“Lemme know if anything pops up in your memory that you forgot,” Ken ventured. He smelled the odor of rat but couldn’t be sure Michael was holding out on him, or if it was something else.

“You’re at the top of my speed dial list. Ken, thanks a million for pushing this. I had a bad feeling when I found the wiretaps and Abe turned up dead. Are you going to hit his office too, and jerk the bugs? Maybe those will give you a lead,” Michael suggested but immediately regretted the condescending flavor. Ken was good at what he did, just as Michael was.

There was a significant silence.

“Never occurred to me,” Ken said drily. “Anything else?”

“Sorry Ken. I…I know you’ll cover all the bases. No offense intended.”

“None taken.”

After terminating the call, Michael stared at the handset still gripped in his now sweaty hand as he calculated the variables. His eyes slowly drifted across the room and fell on the manuscript. Fucking thing might as well be made out of plutonium – being exposed to it was just as fatal.

He looked at his watch. Assuming the worst, a crew had been in Abe’s office last night, dusting for prints to see if anyone new had shown up once Abe had expired. That would put Michael and Jim at the scene the following day.

Only it was likely worse than that. They’d probably dusted the night before as well, when they inserted the bugs, just to identify everyone who’d been in Abe’s inner sanctum, and then wiped everything so only new prints would appear on the next night’s scan. That would put Michael there both before and after. The leader of any team looking for information or leads on where the disappearing manuscript had gone would already have run those prints to get names in preparation for a little chat. And Michael would be the first appointment, he was sure of that.

His instinct to lay low once he sensed he was being watched turned out to be prescient – the intuition that had saved his ass in combat was thankfully still fully operational.

That was the only silver lining so far.

Michael’s gaze returned to the sheaf of papers. What had he been doing before Ken called?

The e-mail address. Right.

He logged onto his e-mail and sent Koshi a message asking how best to contact a blind address without it being traceable – assuming the inbound address might be compromised, or a red herring or even a bad guy. Michael knew it wasn’t prudent to divulge his sending address when he contacted the manuscript’s author – if it was the author’s e-mail.

That done, he needed to formulate a strategy.

If he believed in miracles, he could delete the document from his hard drive, burn the manuscript and pretend he’d never seen it.

That was fine, except he ran the considerable risk that he’d soon be on the receiving end of an interrogation that would get ugly quickly. He had to assume they knew Abe had printed the document if they’d been able to get into his computer to erase all the tracks, which meant they wouldn’t start a discussion unless they planned to end it with a bang, so to speak, whatever he told them, most probably.

Putting himself in their position, he wouldn’t stop until he’d located the document and neutralized it, along with anyone who’d seen it. If they were thorough, that would mean everyone Abe had been with since he’d downloaded and printed it. There was just no other way they could be sure.

Then again, maybe he was over-thinking this. Perhaps they’d be more cautious and wait to see if anything else surfaced. That was a strong possibility as well.

Reality was, there was no way of knowing how conservatively they would react. Which meant he had to assume the worst.

He went through his mental checklist.

He’d need to take effective countermeasures and become untraceable. Fine. He removed the battery from his cell phone, knowing that doing so wouldn’t make it invisible to someone like the National Security Agency – but it would make it impossible to trace for anyone
but
the NSA. He’d need to pick up several clean phones to communicate with – this one was history. Ditto for his credit cards. They all had a chip in them which could be read in a multiplicity of ways. Of course, he couldn’t use them anyway, as he had to believe his pursuers could access most databases. So time for the cards to go missing, too.

His American passport also had a chip, but he kept it in a sleeve that disabled any ability to track it. He could always stuff the cards in with it, he supposed. That would probably wind up being the way to go until things were better defined.

He checked his new e-mail account. Koshi had responded with instructions on the best mechanism to create a new e-mail for the specific purpose of contacting a potentially compromised url. It was pretty straightforward as long as Michael hid his IP address when creating it and checking it – something easily done with any of a dozen IP-masking programs. He quickly followed Koshi’s instructions then logged into the new account, choosing his words with precision for the outbound message he sent to the mystery address: [A is dead.]

There was no harm in pinging the address with that to see what came back, and the message didn’t really reveal a lot that wouldn’t be in the newspaper obituary section. And anyway, lots of people beginning or ending with A had died all over the world. He wasn’t worried about the address itself belonging to the surveillance team because Abe had printed the document the night he’d gotten it and apparently the pursuers hadn’t known about it till the next day – no doubt because someone Abe had called to fact-check had sounded an alarm. There was only one way the chronology worked: e-mail received; Abe reads and prints it; takes it home. If somehow the boogie men had learned about it that night, Abe would have been immediately dispatched to go sleep with the fishes and Michael would have never gotten a call in the first place. So it had to be someone Abe telephoned the morning he contacted Michael who had set everything in motion; the e-mail destruction must have happened in a matter of minutes thereafter because it was gone by the time Abe had checked his e-mail that morning.

The internet phone rang again and Michael leapt to grab it. It was Samantha.

“Okay, lover boy, what have you gotten yourself into?” she asked by way of greeting.

“What are you talking about?” Michael parried.

“I ran searches for the terms you gave me and ran into dead ends. But there was one term that had a twelve page article from a French-Canadian investigative reporter, written about six years ago, that came up when I searched on ‘Delphi Squad’ – and Michael, it’s some scary shit,” Samantha warned.

“Scary as in how?” Michael asked.

“Scary as in, allegations of an ex-CIA spook in Central America who claims to have been part of a U.S. death squad that carried out assassinations in the region for over a decade,” Samantha told him.

That was consistent with the manuscript’s claims
.
One of many, but still, a key one
.

“I’m sensing that’s not all…” Michael prodded.