The Manuscript

Chapter 6

If there was a professional team working Abe’s office, Michael figured they’d go in after all the businesses had closed for the day and the employees had gone home for the evening. That would create an opportunity for Michael to stake out the building for signs of obvious activity — but he immediately dismissed it as unnecessarily risky and unlikely to prove or disprove anything. Sure, if they were amateurish, perhaps a cleaning crew would appear late at night, or some other sort of maintenance or emergency repair personnel would enter, and then the lights in Abe’s seventh floor office would go on. However, if they were seasoned professionals it was doubtful he’d see anything at all — and the absence of activity wouldn’t necessarily mean that nobody had breached the office — rather, it would reinforce that they were not a low-end team, which Michael was already pretty certain about, given the hardware Jim had found secreted.

His natural desire to be pro-active, to gain an advantage over the hypothesized hunters of the document, lost out to his better judgment and discipline. Harsh experience had taught him that security threats were often akin to fishing — both required patience, skill, tuned senses, observation and instinct. Impatience and succumbing to a desire to act were weaknesses he couldn’t indulge.

Michael gave up trying to finish reading the document that evening; he was in informational overload mode, and he realized he wasn’t registering the facts any more. A glance at the remaining pile of unread papers confirmed there was maybe ten percent left, at most, which he could hit in the morning. He decided to stay in the apartment rather than go out for dinner and spent his time going over his notes of the manuscript’s highlights so far.

Studying the list of underlined terms and operation names and organizations, he resolved to attempt to parallel Samantha’s efforts and do some online research. Two hours of surfing and searching for data yielded nothing, other than an appreciation for the number of kooky conspiracy theories that were now accessible with a few mouse clicks. There was a scenario for every prejudice, every level of nuttiness, from the erudite and esoteric to the banal. From flat-earth adherents to those convinced that the devil was everywhere, from modern-day Knights of the Templar scheming for Armageddon to the Tri-lateral Commission fostering a shadowy new world order, there was an ass for every seat, as they said in the car business.

The U.S. government was especially popular amongst the tin foil hat crowd as uber-villain, and one would have to believe it was astoundingly competent to pull off everything from staging lunar landings to assassinating its leaders to hiding the bodies of extraterrestrials to scheming to create a new currency in order to somehow take over Canada and Mexico.

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.

“No, it isn’t. I did a search on the reporter, and he died a few days after it was published. And you’re going to love this. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head,” Samantha deadpanned.

“Come again?”

“The police found him in his apartment, where he’d apparently shot himself in the base of the rear of his skull with an untraceable pistol he happened to have lying around. No note, and it only took the cops an hour to determine it was a regrettable example of self-destruction,” she explained.

“Isn’t it pretty unusual to shoot yourself in the back of the head and not leave a note?” Michael asked, already knowing the answer.

“I can tell you how unusual, actually, because that was my next search. Of the roughly seventeen hundred or more folks who decide to end it all with a gun every year in Canada, tracking data back ten years, can you guess how many shot themselves in the back of the head?”

“One?”

“We have a winnah! Our boy was one in almost twenty thousand.” Samantha paused, possibly for effect.

“Tell me there isn’t more,” Michael said.

“The reporter was scheduled to come out with part two of his investigative report a few days after he killed himself. That obviously never got published. He’d apparently decided to destroy his hard disk before going to meet his maker, per the police report — another quirky bit of mischief you don’t see too often. Are you starting to see any problems with this?” Samantha wondered aloud.

“You don’t say.”

“Here, write down this url — it’s to the first article,” Samantha said, and dictated a web address to Michael.

“Wait a second. That’s a wayback machine article, not a current site,” Michael observed after reading the info.

“Correct. Seems the original article no longer exists. I had to use a little trickery to find this — it’s as though every trace of it had been expunged,” Samantha finished.

“Samantha, I don’t want to scare you, but how cautious were you when you were rooting around?” Michael asked.

“I’m way ahead of you. I always mask my IP address out of habit and use a software program that bounces it all over the world every few minutes, so I’m clean. Professional paranoia. But I was going to warn you to do the same before you pull up the site. It’s a little freaky how the guy kills himself and his files go missing almost immediately after publishing his article. Makes you kind of go, hmm,” Samantha said.

“I owe you a great big one, Samantha,” Michael responded.

“Surprise me with something. I like fast, red and Italian.”

Michael hung up and signed onto an IP masking site, then went to the internet archive to read the reporter’s work. He quickly scanned the article, noting that it confirmed some of the claims in the manuscript. What was particularly troubling was the attention to detail in the article and the matter-of-fact way events were described. To Michael’s ear, it had the ring of truth.

The suspicious circumstances surrounding the reporter’s death lent considerable weight to the likelihood the article was factual. He’d been around the block long enough to understand that when a death that was so obviously a murder was resolved as a suicide, something besides a pursuit of the truth had been in play during the investigation. That it had occurred in Canada and yet was still swept under the carpet, underscored the power and reach of whoever had wanted the reporter silenced. That was consistent with the article’s contention of CIA involvement.

Michael now knew for sure that he had a real problem. This was shaping up in an ugly way, and he had to assume it would get uglier. But he still had too little data to make a reliable decision as to how to proceed. Sure, the article made a compelling case for a black ops team run amok, as well as a shadow government action of gargantuan implications. However, it was just a single article — which wasn’t exactly the ideal broad support he needed. He hoped Samantha would be able to dig up some more dirt, but the problem was that if the manuscript was accurate, the chances were there was no news coverage of any of it.

So how to proceed?

Michael re-read the web page and noted the name of the man who claimed he’d been a CIA wet operative for decades in Central America. John Stubens, who, as of the date of the article, resided in Nevada. Doing some quick math in his head, Michael computed the man would have to be in his sixties, assuming he was still alive and the name used for the reporter’s sake was his real one.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It wasn’t as if Michael had a lot of other leads to pursue. He typed in the name of the online service he used to investigate skip tracing and entered his password. The familiar screen came up and he completed the form with the slim information he had. Michael hit enter and waited as the computer elves did whatever they did, scouring thousands of databases for relevant data.

After a few minutes, a screen appeared.

Bingo.

There were eight men with the name John Stubens in Nevada, but only one who had ever served in the military.

John Carlton Stubens, age 64, living in Henderson, Nevada. Single. No kids. Owned his home, had a modest mortgage he’d been paying down for twelve years. One car registered to him: Toyota 4Runner, 2007. Retired. Army pension. Not much else. One credit card, paid current, zero balance, ten thousand dollar limit. A few creditors — the gas and electric company, the phone company, cable TV.

Which was strange. It was almost impossible to go six decades on the planet and not leave larger tracks. The system Michael used would show everything — credit cards, recent medical bills, any internet sites he’d posted a message on, employment history. The works. This basically showed a house, car and associated bills, and that was it. He’d served in the army from 1966, achieving the rank of lieutenant, until 1979, when he had received an honorable discharge. Which was also odd, given that most who stayed in the service for over a decade tended to stay in as lifers. But that fitted with the reporter’s story, which had represented him as a covert operative throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

So Michael now had an address and a phone number. It was a start. On impulse, he lifted the handset of the internet telephone and dialed the Nevada phone number. He listened as it rang, and then heard the distinctive click of an answering machine picking up. A gruff male voice advised callers to leave a message. Michael hung up. He realized his pulse was racing and took a few deep breaths to get himself under control.

There was no imminent threat, now that he had ditched his apartment. For the moment, he had options, but they would quickly be reduced if something happened to put him back on the radar. One thing he was dreading was Ken escalating his murder investigation and asking Michael to come in and leave a formal statement — it was probably just a matter of time before that happened, and he didn’t like his odds once he was at the police station; there was no telling how much reach the surveillance team had or how much information they had access to. He knew that the CIA was barred from doing anything operationally in the U.S. but also was pragmatic enough to understand that in ‘special’ circumstances, the prohibition was likely ignored. It wasn’t like he could ring Abe up and ask him who had been the last person he’d seen, and inquire as to whether he’d shown his ID before slamming him in the back.

All he could realistically do was wait for more information to come in so he could better understand his predicament.

It was the classic wait and see scenario, and while he had the discipline to be patient, his temperament was more geared towards taking action. He sighed and returned to the computer, resigned to a long day of research.