Last Track, The (8 page)

When Dagget righted his breathing, the officer was furious. “What the hell was that for?”

With his fingertips hovering over the print’s center, Mike placed his hand inside the track. His hand remained still. Dagget, the woods, and everything else became irrelevant. He waited through the moment and the images came to him, even with his eyes open and hostility in the air. Ready or not, the pictures flooded his head.

For an instant he was acutely aware of Sean; Mike
was
that fourteen-year-old boy running from a murder scene, instead of a thirty-four-year-old man on vacation.

Animals left behind more than smudges in the soil or broken branches. They left fragments of their emotional state; the tracks temporarily preserved that energy. The intersection of the trail and the tree line marked a substantial shift in the boy’s emotions. Sean was more than frightened crossing the trail. He was confused. The boy had turned around several times and wandered, almost skirted, sideways. His steps were stilted, his gait shorter than normal. Less thrusting off from the toe, more on the heel. All that suggested uncertainty and caution.

Sean thought that the ranch was this way. He only realized the truth at the trail. He had aimed for a landmark in the distance. Intuition had failed him, and he knew he was lost.

Mike rose and turned away from Dagget.

“Quitting already?” Dagget asked.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Wait here for me.”

“What are you looking for now?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Mike, stranding Dagget with nothing more than a voice and the pack. He wanted to find the landmark that Sean had been running toward. If Sean had locked on a visual cue in the midst of panic, it likely was striking. And it had to be dramatic, because a frightened child would notice nothing less. Mike worked backward over the last hundred yards. Nothing appeared impressive enough to captivate a kid from Brooklyn.

Ten minutes passed; it was time to move forward. Lisbeth’s status report loomed. Mike filed the question for later, certain the answer would reveal itself in time.

Returning to the trail, Mike saw that Dagget and the backpack were gone.

11:17:45 AM

Gathering the background report the Partner had requested was fraught with complications. Not that the work was beyond his capabilities. Crotty certainly had the necessary access levels. He knew the computer systems and the right people to ask. No, what he lacked was an explanation. A reason that cloaked the request in such insignificance that questions about why he wanted the information would be unnecessary.

He faced the usual constraints at his day job at the Department of Homeland Security. Even though a National Security Letter opened all the doors and brought instant cooperation from any number of corporations and government agencies, an administrator had to sign off on the request, and that meant a paper trail. Documentation could be deadly; words on a page might boomerang and return later at the worst of moments. Exactly the reason all communication between himself and the Partner was conducted via pay phones, or in person. He refused to give anyone the proof to hang him with later. Crotty knew that when dealing with the bosses, what he said mattered far less than what someone could prove he had said. So he was cautious about what he committed to paper.

Once he had trusted people at DHS. Well, now he knew better. Crotty thanked Rosen—a former Section Chief with his own motives—for that lesson. Rosen taught him how to make the job work for him, rather than work the job for the check.

Under Rosen, Crotty’s autonomy far exceeded his stated title: Senior Case Agent. Practically a license to kill, in fact. Technically only Directors could authorize discretionary lethal force—albeit unofficially—and though Rosen had not yet become a Director, rumors said the job was his. Until then, Rosen was building bridges in anticipation of the promotion. He promised Crotty a fast track to the top alongside him. In exchange, Rosen wanted Crotty to penetrate M2.

For years, the M2 crime syndicate had funneled stolen intellectual property out of the United States and Western Europe to the former Soviet Republics and Asia in exchange for heavy and small arms. The arms were resold and used to bankroll legitimate businesses. Crotty’s direction was simple: figure out who was in M2. Not periphery characters, either. Rosen coveted figureheads; he wanted everything. Convictions, not red tape, he said. Getting results meant getting creative because the organization was so clever.

A convoluted, almost cell-like structure, it eluded any serious investigation for ages. Year after year, M2 and its subsidiaries prospered, circumventing federal and state authorities as if an invisible hand guided the organization past the reaches of prosecution. Before Crotty, no law enforcement agency had breached M2 any deeper than the first tier.

Armed with his mandate, the complicated tangle of relationships and laundering fronts slowly unfurled. After eighteen months of night-and-day maneuvers—many of dubious legality—Crotty amassed enough evidence and sources for a substantial sting. He worked to put the bad guys away. He worked for the promotion. He worked like a loyal dog who believed in its master. His findings implicated one high-level M2 member and scores of mid-level operatives dead to rights. Success was so close.

Then Rosen spiked the operation. Every trace of the M2 case files, photographs, voice recordings, and digital archives were “refiled,” reclassified as “Top Secret.” Rosen barred Crotty legally from reading his own investigation materials. Three days later, a fire in Crotty’s apartment destroyed all of his personal copies of the case files.

When Crotty pressed for an explanation, Rosen claimed that due to budget overruns there was no longer sufficient funding. So Crotty protested. He had good reason to.

There was a fortune in seized assets available for agency use. On one M2 buy, Crotty employed a three million dollar flash roll—real money “flashed” ahead of a buy to show M2 suppliers he was a legitimate buyer and could be trusted to deliver the entire amount when the time came. Rosen had pushed back from the desk and explained the scope of the investigation had changed course. Discussion closed.

Crotty got the point. And just in case Crotty misunderstood, Rosen also mentioned his concern about Crotty’s recent investigative tactics. What a shame it might be if those allegations found substantiation, Rosen had said.

No charges were filed; no case ever was presented for prosecution. Six months later Rosen retired, Maui-bound. Turned out a rich uncle willed Rosen a generous stock portfolio. Yeah, Crotty knew better. And despite his frustration with the outcome, Crotty marveled at how well Rosen had played him. Rosen got valuable information worth a fortune if it was kept in the shadows, with no risk to his safety—right at his front door. He blackmailed M2 and made the investigation go away.

From that moment Crotty opened himself to the possibilities. He knew the investigation pipeline. He knew the protocol. He knew the evidence, which team had it and how much and what they had. He knew what cases lacked merit, and what might stick.

Most importantly, he knew what confidential information about underworld figures was worth. He kept the day job, and freelanced at night. Nearly all customers were welcome. Personal or professional affiliation was seldom a basis for discrimination. Call it bribery or treason, he preferred the term competitive intelligence.

One of the most valuable things Crotty could offer the underworld were names and places. Who was working undercover. When were they most likely alone and least suspecting retribution. Absolute gold to someone unaware he was an investigation target.

Initially the duplicity had tugged at his sense of ethics. Selling out the first name was rough. He had hesitated. He tortured himself endlessly, second-guessing the consequences, missing sleep and meals as he considered what his decision really meant. Then he got a postcard from Rosen in Maui. A blank card, except for the phrase:

Life is good. –R

Crotty had taken one look around his tiny apartment and decided life could be good for him, too. Just not on his salary. And then there was the girlfriend and her needs. He made the call.

Shortly after revealing the identity of an agent to the leader of a gang he was investigating, the compromised agent disappeared. Maybe the outed agent had quit or was convinced to resign. Maybe he had double-crossed the wrong person. Maybe the thug who bought the profile had liquidated the poor bastard. Maybe it was a coincidence. Crotty always wondered, but he never asked.

On occasion, the day job called him away from business. Brief diversions, usually. Lately though, the Suits rode roughshod, and harped about quotas. Undercover work defied traditional metrics; it wasn’t like setting up a speed trap and writing tickets. Building cases, working sources of information—these activities took time. Success at them meant knowing the street. The only time some Suits saw the streets were through a limousine window.

Unfortunately, there were far more new managers than there was logic and experience. Younger, unseasoned, and far less accommodating, green managers seemed bent on some hidden agenda. Many case agents suspected housecleaning, a deliberate process of cycling out older agents for younger models. The net effect: neither the new guard nor the experienced agents trusted each other, and both sides wished the other would fail.

And today Crotty needed information and his sympathetic cohorts were on assignment. Approaching the division head was out of the question, because claiming that the target was a source of information meant opening a file. Right back to that paper trail.

This was the chore he pondered over a cup of decaffeinated tea. He stirred the beverage, steeped precisely for four minutes. Steam floated off the surface of the dark brown liquid. He sipped and thought, neglecting the pending case report next to the keyboard. An agent passed by his desk. The reflection of the passing man displaced the text and blinking cursor on his screen.

Crotty smiled at the sheer elegance of a solution that had presented itself. Reaching into the drawer for a USB flash drive and a pad of paper, he knew exactly what to do.

First he pulled up the contents of the file from the disk drive on the screen. He kept the file on the drive, because once it was on the local machine, a compliance program logged details about the file.

Deleting the logs created another entry far beyond his reach. Traffic to the network printer from any terminal was monitored. Details about every print job—including the author and the raw data—were archived indefinitely. Only at the shell prompt at the machine was the action untraceable. Writing text to the pad, he respected both case and spelling.

The program was simple, only a few lines of code. Now he needed to push the program where it served him best. That meant the Internet. Street agents had Web access for research; however, the Network Operations Center tracked all browsing activity. State-of-the-art equipment recorded and logged phone calls on hard drives in a remote data center. While his cell phone had Web access, the building was a dead zone and no signal could penetrate the walls.

Not a problem for Crotty. One machine—available to all staff—lay outside the firewall and the reach of the NOC. Instead of a commercial trunk line connection, the phone company listed the line as a residential DSL customer, registered under a false name and billed to a private mailbox. The kiosk had no physical connection to the network and existed for one purpose: a mechanism for browsing in complete anonymity. A slow connection; the lack of a USB port, floppy drive, or printer; and no local file storage, ensured data remained on the screen. Since the kiosk was in the center of the office, visible to nearly everyone, illicit uses were impossible. Any deed, evil or otherwise, required time and risked being observed.

The dilemma: find a mechanism to unleash the code. He drafted a message. A brief note, it requested someone’s presence immediately at the usual place, at the usual time, without mentioning details. For the recipient, he chose a Suit.

Saving the code as an attachment inside the e-mail, he submitted the form. An e-mail anonymizer service did the rest, bouncing the message across the globe between participating remailers. Each hop altered another message header until the forged message resembled a legitimate e-mail from the sender.

Merely viewing the message executed the code inside the attachment, which retrieved a program from another server and installed it on the local machine. All this happened automatically, and without the recipient’s knowledge. Although Network Operations warned management about the risk of Internet mail, Suits ignored techs. Janitors rated higher in the eyes of management. If a virus was loose on the network, it meant a Suit had installed forbidden software or opened an electronic message from an untrusted source. Mayhew, the Suit in question, would trust the forged source. Crotty made the note look like it was from his girlfriend. Mayhew would certainly read the message; not many men passed up sex in the middle of the day.

As Crotty was walking back from the lavatory, Mayhew barreled down the narrow hallway toward him, nearly an hour before the Suit’s usual lunch break. Mayhew walked like a man who was already late, rubber heels gliding along the floor. With a harried glance, the Suit dodged to the left. Crotty mirrored the move, leaned to the right, and collided into the senior officer. The impact was severe enough that neither could dismiss the accident with silence or a nod. Both men stopped.

Crotty apologized first. “I’m sorry. My fault entirely. ”

“It’s all right.” Mayhew checked his tie, the half Windsor knot perfectly arranged. Satisfied with the spot check, Mayhew stepped away.

“Sir, the Heinz case initiation report is finished,” Crotty said.

Mayhew turned back like a man summoned to take out the weekly trash by a nagging spouse. “You can leave it on my desk.” The problem dismissed, he began leaving again.

“What’s a good time to review the report?” Crotty asked.