The Vulture Read online

  His was not the usual rags to riches story—certainly not a Horatio Alger narrative. He started out poor. That part was true, but his rise to fame and fortune had a darker thread than the “hard work is its own reward” line one would like to read in Fortune. His mother deserted the family of six when Martin, the youngest, was three. His father celebrated her departure by getting very drunk, beating up two of his older sons and attempting to rape his only daughter. One of the brothers, the one who’d suffered the lightest beating, split the old man’s head open with a Louisville Slugger. The family was remanded to Child Protective Services and sent to a series of foster homes. All but Martin ended up in jail at one time or another. The daughter, his sister, died of a drug overdose on the Southside of Chicago late one December night. The heroin had been a Christmas present from her pimp.

  For the most part, Martin, because of his age, managed to avoid these and similar disasters and, indeed, was unaware of any of them until years later, after he had achieved some measure of success occasioned by the suspicious death of his foster father who had built a modest acquisition business. There was one important exception to an otherwise uneventful life as a foster child. Martin, fearful for his young life, would never reveal to anyone the things which occurred in his bedroom almost nightly, which was why the caseworker assigned to him would report that his life in foster care had been unremarkable and, given the usual foster care statistics, a positive experience. She did remark as an afterthought that he seemed reticent to communicate with her. Those terrible and painful nights defined the relationship Martin had with his male foster parent and ultimately conspired to bring that man to an early, deserved, but quite unexpected death.

  Later, Martin would spend a great deal of money to discover what had happened to his siblings. He bought a modest annuity, anonymously of course, for each of those who remained alive so that they would not starve—unless they chose to—and then proceeded to erase them from his conscience.

  In his search for guidance, for a lighthouse, he would say later, he came to admire one man, a conservative thinker and blogger named Drexel Franks. Franks claimed to be distantly related to Bobby Franks who, everyone knew, was the thrill-killing victim of Leopold and Loeb from the nineteen twenties. Martin had never heard of either Bobby Franks or Leopold and Loeb. He Googled their names and read the story. He’d had several clashes with Jewish business owners in the past and the story turned his nascent dislike of certain men into a simmering anti-Semitism. It was about this time he started his journey from cutthroat entrepreneur to demagogy.

  Drexel Franks also had a highly filtered view of the American Constitution and its provisions. In his view, the current administration was populated with “One Worlders” (it was never clear what he meant by that, but Martin grasped the essence), bleeding heart liberals, and traitors. The Second Amendment became Franks’ pivotal talking point. It was intended, he said, not just because the framers of the document wanted a well-armed militia, but equally, to enable the people to rise up against it when the government departed from the simplicity of the ideal and turned to totalitarianism. That turning point was never defined either, but seemed to have more to do with ideology than action. His mantra was to arm for the coming revolution, the one that would put the country back on the track the Founding Fathers had intended.

  Franks also founded the Fifty-first Star, an organization dedicated to his idiosyncratic world view. The name referred to a concept he developed over a period of time and then promoted on his website; true representation was no longer available to real people. Not in the Congresses and not in the executive branch. (He had no use for the judicial branch one way or the other.) The present system, however well-intentioned the Founding Fathers might have been in its ideation, had since become, he opined, another example of “taxation without representation” and justified separation. Thus, he called for the establishment of a new state, one without geographical borders, but composed of people joined together in a commonality of ideology. It was needed, he said, so that representation of like-minded people could be assured, a sort of sociological gerrymandering. Thus, if he had his way, a fifty-first star was to be added to the current flag. To that end, he declared himself governor of his new (as yet unnamed) state and proceeded to enact laws that reflected his political thinking and to lobby for recognition by the government. Further, claiming state supremacy, he ruled that laws he believed to be at variance with his understanding of the Constitution were null and void and were not to be obeyed by those who shared this skewed notion of democracy.

  A full recognition of his delusional state would require an amendment to the Constitution, naturally, but in the interest of democracy as he understood it, Franks saw no reason why such an amendment could not be passed and had lobbied state legislators across the country for its introduction. He had no takers, but did receive several encouraging letters, usually accompanied by a solicitation for campaign funds.

  Martin Pangborn joined the Fifty-first Star shortly after he determined the reason America was losing its soul. He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with men like himself who were under attack by society for their greed and lack of ethics. People, Martin and his colleagues believed, simply did not understand capitalism. It was to be understood in Darwinian terms and these soft bleaters on the left did not get it. Survival of the fittest did not include any notion of fair distribution or wage reform. Workers worked and the few men, like himself, who knew how, raised themselves by their bootstraps and left to become managers, owners, and so on. The Founding Fathers understood that. Why not these wooly thinking do-gooders?

  Martin joined this fantasy but not completely. He realized that if the movement was to have any traction it would need more than Drexel Franks’ rhetoric. And that the idea of amending the Constitution was ludicrous. A sovereign state—a new one based on ideology—within the current fifty states would never fly. But it had enormous potential as a movement that could draw people to it and exert pressure in the right places at election time. Influence, he knew, could be purchased. He already had several lawmakers in his pocket. He could buy more. He had the money to do that, and if the Fifty-first Star could be effectively mobilized, he believed he would soon own the government—figuratively, of course.

  That change, he believed, would be brought about by the judicious application of money to certain politicians and the concomitant assembling of a group of people, men primarily, who shared this burgeoning ideology and were willing to act on it. With the right people in office, the need for Franks’ dreamy new state would not be necessary. Pangborn assumed control of The Fifty-first Star. Franks, he set up as its titular head and sent on a prolonged sabbatical to write a book. He recruited like-minded people to his vast acreage in Idaho. There he established the militia he believed the Second Amendment envisioned, set up training camps, armed his people, and—constitutionally empowered, he believed—sent them out to right the wrongs he’d identified as contrary to the commonwealth or, occasionally, to right the wrongs of those who’d caused him personal pain. The country’s youth, he knew, were the future, if his plan were to be permanent. To that end he established the New Pioneers, boys between the ages of ten and sixteen, who were to be placed under his personal aegis. He would train them and provide their education. His fascination with the organization soon became evidenced in the number of times Fifty-first Star or some variant appeared in one of his myriad corporate names—Five/one S, five one Star, New Star, etc.

  There were some who had concerns about his drive to power. They were dealt with variously. Money or coercion usually worked. The more difficult undertakings, he contracted out. Ike Schwartz had caused him pain the previous year. Ike Schwartz had confounded one of his moves toward the White House and Ike Schwartz was a Jew. As far as Pangborn was concerned, that was a double whammy. Ike Schwartz was eliminated. Ike, of course, had no idea that he’d ever met, abused, or caused pain for Martin Pangborn. Martin did not care. Cross the Fiv
e-One Star and you pay. People would learn soon enough what it was and what it stood for.

  When he’d confirmed the hit, he paid the man for a job well done. Later he’d heard the idiot had been apprehended at Dulles Airport. Not as professional an assassin as he’d been led to believe. The word on the wire was that the bomber had lawyered up and had not, as yet, told the Feds anything. Martin did not take chances. People like this contract killer, people with no loyalty except to the highest bidder, with loyalty only for the money they were paid, could never be trusted to keep silent. He dared not take the risk that this weak link wouldn’t break, so he sent two of his close associates to Washington, DC to tidy up that loose end.

  ***

  The FBI had been able to detain Felix Chambers, but with no supporting evidence beyond explosive residue on his clothing, they could not hold him and his lawyer had already produced a writ of habeas corpus to the hearing judge. They had to let him go. They were embarrassed a day later when the only lead they had in the Picketsville bombing was killed while under their surveillance. Apparently someone had dispatched him through the motel’s bathroom window while the agents sat in an unmarked car across the street.

  Chapter Seven

  Charlie Garland had finally mastered the art of enhancing the grainy images from the surveillance cameras and was studying the restaurant parking lot one last time when the news of Felix Chambers’ shooting came across his desk. The Bureau lost its only solid lead in the bombing and thus, had egg on its face. To lose a witness or suspect, or even a “person of interest” while under close surveillance was a definite no-no. An agent or two were about to be given a winter assignment in Duluth.

  Charlie scanned the new crime scene images which he’d pirated from the Bureau’s secure website. The accompanying report stated that the alley behind the motel had not been subject to observation for two reasons: There seemed no reason to believe there was any risk to the suspect from the outside, and the windows were too small for him to exit should he wish to escape further scrutiny. The report speculated that only a lucky shot from a distance could have produced the result and therefore no dereliction of duty could be ascribed to the surveillance team.

  Charlie snorted. “It’s a good thing they weren’t working for me or they’d be on their way to the farm for retraining by now.”

  The ever-present Alice, stepped into the office with the latest analysis. “What?”

  “Lucky, my sweet patoot. Look in this picture…right here.” Charlie tapped the image with a finger. “What do you see here?”

  “It looks like a big box.”

  “A box or a crate, correct. And where is it?”

  “Under a window?”

  “Not just any window. Under Chambers’ motel bathroom window, to be precise. So, a box on which a man can stand. Imagine then, he taps on the window. ‘Felix,’ he says, not too loudly, but enough so the folks in the next room can hear. ‘Hey, Felix.’ The guy comes to the bathroom to see what’s going on. ‘Over here. Come closer, I have a message from…whoever.’ The dope steps closer. The report says he stood in the tub, for God’s sake. As soon as his shadow fills the window, the guy with the Sig drops his laser spot on it and, pop. Lucky shot by a sniper, my foot. I bet when they do the post they’ll find a nine millimeter, not a rifle slug, and evidence of a noise suppressor.”

  “There were men tracking Chambers?”

  “I would assume so. Two, probably—someone had to watch the alley. Anyway, we need to know who hired him and why. Wait. Alice, you read that report. What did he have on him when he was arrested? A cell phone?” Alice scanned the report and nodded. “Did they dump it?”

  “They did. Nada. They found calls to restaurants, the cleaners, stuff like that.”

  “Codes?”

  “Nope.”

  “That means that somewhere between Picketsville and Dulles there is a dumpster, a trash barrel, a ditch, something, with a burn phone in it and we need to find it.”

  “Mr. Garland, do you know how impossible that would be?”

  “Nonsense. First, we find out where it was sold. He would have used cash, of course, but maybe not. Look at that report again. Credit cards? Numbers?”

  Alice rattled off a series of numbers associated with a half dozen credit cards found in Chambers’ wallet at the time of his arrest.

  “Great, we put a trace on all purchases made in the last month. Contract killers like to keep track of their expenses. Look for a phone or phones. He might have bought a series. It would be safer if he did. I would, if I were in his line of work.”

  Alice raised her eyebrows marginally and started to say something.

  “Yeah, yeah, fine line, I get it. Okay, then trace the serial numbers, and then track GPS signals. There, we’ll find it.”

  “Unless he trashed it.”

  “Possible, but why would he? A dumpster is trash enough.”

  “Mr. Garland, I don’t think the director would authorize the resources to make that hunt, even if he believed it would work.”

  “You’re right. He wouldn’t. That’s why we’re not going to tell him. Hop to it, Alice, get the gang on it tout de suite. Oh, and you are looking very smart this morning.”

  “Smart?”

  “You know, fetching, well turned-out…”

  “Charlie, nobody talks that way anymore, but thank you. I’ll get the guys on it.”

  ***

  Frank had only a minimal knowledge of the extent of modern forensic software and its capabilities. He’d heard, but didn’t really believe, that calls made one day would be retrievable days or weeks later.

  “Sam, is it possible to capture any local calls made the night of the explosion?”

  “Maybe. It depends if the signal triggered a watch.”

  “A what?”

  “There are a gazillion calls made on any given day. Some are of interest to the law enforcement community, most aren’t. Obviously, you can’t record every call ever made, but certain phones and, ah, circumstances…will set off a keep signal.”

  “Certain phones and certain circumstances? That’s NSA-speak and I don’t think I want to hear any more. Just tell me if there are any suspicious calls made to or from the area around the time the bomb went off, and if so, can they be traced?”

  “Maybe and maybe not. Let me see what’s still in the air. At the very least, we might get a location for the phone if it’s live. And don’t worry. NSA isn’t interested in your love-life, Frank. By certain phones I mean, think a minute, why does anyone need a burn phone? I know there are lots of perfectly good reasons, but at the same time, don’t forget they are also the preferred means of communicating by all kinds of bad guys. They think that because they are not registered to a specific person, they can’t or won’t be traced. So, as a general rule, a call on a disposable phone will trigger a tap, a watch. Phones sending or receiving odd-sounding messages might be recorded. After a period of time the recordings are erased to make room for the new stuff. I can go searching the call bank for local off-registered phones if you want me to.”

  “Do that.”

  “Okay, but first, there is some stuff you should see here. The FBI is not the only group with eyes on this business.”

  “No? Who else?”

  “Well, it appears the CIA has its nose in at least, and then I get the feeling there is someone else. I can’t figure out who the last one is. It’s pretty well cloaked.”

  “Will you be able to ever?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s just a matter of time. Has anybody heard from Ike’s buddy in the Agency?”

  “Garland? No, not that I know of.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as odd? They were pretty close and all. You’d think he’d be all over this.”

  “You did say the CIA was nosing in?”

  “Oh, right. That could be him. Should I ‘ping’ him
just so he knows we know?”

  “Do what?”

  “I can drop a line of text into whatever he’s looking at so he knows we know.”

  “Suppose it isn’t him at the Agency that’s doing the snooping?”

  Sam grinned. “Then someone up there will have a minor heart palpitation and go running to their systems security people. It could be fun.”

  “Do it and let’s see, but don’t get caught. Remember what happened the last time.”

  ***

  The message startled Charlie at first and then he understood. Ike’s people were on the trail as well and this would be Samantha Hedrick unless he had lost his touch. He studied the screen and then entered a reply.

  It’s nice to hear from you, Sam. You do know it’s a Federal offense to hack the CIA. Of course you do. We’ve had this conversation before. Want to help me out here?

  He waited.

  Sure, we’re looking for a phone. Any thoughts?

  Same here. You have a lead?

  “Maybe…you?

  Let you know in a couple of hours

  K.

  Charlie smiled. At least there was some hope. If Samantha Hedrick was on the trail, that meant there was a trail. Now, where was Ike? When should he tell the others that Ike is alive? When should he tell Ike he knows he is alive? Where is he?

  Chapter Eight

  Ruth scooped fried potatoes and eggs from the pan onto Ike’s plate and then hers. Breakfast any time of the day saved more marriages than sex, she thought. She hitched the flannel robe she kept at the A-frame tighter and sat. She had no idea why this breakfast epiphany occurred to her at that particular moment. It certainly did not carry much in the weighty intellectual department and she wondered if it were even true. Another thought popped up to displace it.