Scarcity (Jack Randall #3), page 5
• • •
Tessa shook the hair out of her eyes in time to see the approaching truck. Her driving reflexes were not developed enough to avoid the collision. She dropped the phone and grabbed the wheel in time to overcorrect. The Mustang responded instantly to the steering command, and the car slewed to the right, barely avoiding the head on collision.
But there was no where else to go. The car impacted the parked truck straight on, the nose diving under the high rear end and defeating the airbag sensor. The force lifted the rear wheels off the ground and shoved the truck forward several feet. Tessa’s size and weight worked to send her chest into the steering wheel before she was thrown down and under the dash. Her head struck the shifter, and she mercifully lost consciousness before the car collapsed around her. Ironically the phone survived the crash and her friend could be heard calling out to her from somewhere in the backseat.
“Tessa? Are you there? How long till you get here? . . . Tessa?”
• • •
Carl and Kurt pried the door open with a shovel far enough for Nick to squeeze into the opening. Nick’s brother was a paramedic, and he knew enough from him to hold the girl’s neck straight while he checked her out.
“She’s breathing.”
“Ambulance is on its way,” Carl informed him. He was still shaking from the near miss. He could have easily been between the car and his truck if Kurt hadn’t been driving by.
Tessa coughed and blood trickled from her mouth. Nick wasn’t sure what to do about that, but he remembered that he couldn’t let go of her neck.
“Hope they get here quick. She’s bleeding from her mouth.”
As if they had heard him, the sirens sounded in the distance.
“Couple of minutes, Nick, just hold on.”
Nick looked down at the broken girl in his hands. “You hear that, pretty girl? Just hold on, they’re coming,” he whispered.
• • •
Senator Remington Lamar of Maryland sat on one side of the large conference room table surrounded by aides. A tall man with steel gray hair and dark intelligent eyes, his name suited him. He looked exactly like what he was—an old money politician from New England. His family had been in politics since the Civil War. Currently, his younger brother and uncle both worked for the State Department, while his nephew was soon to graduate from the naval academy. All of them were ensuring the family tradition would live on for the next generation. Due to this legacy, the senator held power and influence few in his profession could match, which was the reason he had the task before him. It kept him a very busy man. But he had always been busy, first in school, and then in the military. He had followed his years of service with a successful chairmanship of the family business that had made his family even wealthier. He had since traded the business world for government work, first as a governor, and now as a senator in his fourth term.
The pile of paper on the table in front of him had been several months in the making and was nearing the point of being ready. As the head of the committee in charge of overseeing, and now revamping, the Department of Homeland Security, he was putting in the long hours. Projects of this size required help, and the senator liked to surround himself with younger versions of himself, like the man sitting across the table from him.
Although several years younger, Special Agent Jack Randall of the FBI had a career path similar to his. After leaving a family business behind him to join the FBI, he had quickly gained some fame chasing down Mafia heads, serial killers, and terrorists, before advancing to his latest position as FBI liaison to Homeland Security. Senator Lamar had asked Jack only once to come on board, and his combination of law enforcement and business experience had proven him to be the perfect man to help him with the giant undertaking.
“Tell me what we have so far, Jack.”
“Well, if we go with the current plan to combine the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, ICE, the TSA, and a big chunk of the DEA, we look to remove several layers of bureaucracy and save billions in the process. We’ll have to retire a lot of brass, but that’ll free up even more funds for more troops on the ground.”
“They’re going to argue that it’ll create more bureaucracy.”
“The old way it would. Whenever they shuffled two decks of cards together, they always kept every one, no matter how many duplicates they had. Nobody wanted to relinquish their kingdom. The plan is to axe all the dead weight during the shuffle and streamline the process, compartmentalizing things for greater efficiency.”
“What about the military side?”
“I’ve been able to find several National Guard and Reserve units that can tie their yearly training in with real-time Homeland Security operations, mostly MP units, Search and Rescue operations, and airborne radars from the Air Force and Navy. The Army Corps of Engineers will be working on the fence for a few years. Border crossing points are being reduced by 20%. The remaining points will be upgraded with more space and equipment. More sniffers, X-ray machines, and dogs. We’ll be relying less on point of origin clearances and doing it more at the border. The timeline for the construction phase is three years. That’s with projected overruns.”
“The drones?”
“Until the question of arming them or not is laid to rest, it’s still on the table. Once that’s been dealt with, I don’t see much of a problem. The cost is minimal for what they do, and it’s proven technology. We see about two dozen being deployed. Most on the Mexican border and the Gulf states, less on the Canadian side.”
“I’ll need the hardware orders to help get it past Congress,” the senator mused. “What about the rest?”
Jack pulled another printout from a stack of paper in front of him.
“Looks like at least four new cutters, eighteen V-22 Ospreys, two hundred and four Hummers with the night vision periscopes, thirty-eight Blackhawks, twenty light observation helicopters, a few radar towers and blimps, the two floating oil platforms we got for a song, and the rest is miscellaneous support equipment.”
The senator was silent as he scanned a copy fetched by an aide. Jack waited patiently. He knew what the next question would be.”
“The budget?”
“Even with the newest additions, if we use the incentive/fine contract I’m proposing, they would have to come in nine months early before we went over budget. I have a spreadsheet that breaks it all down.” Jack looked to one of his aides and the man pulled a large printout from his briefcase and placed it on the table.
The senator eyed the two-inch thick document and quickly chose to ignore it for the moment. The restructuring of Homeland Security was a huge project, and he had pulled some of the best people in government to help him with it. He chose to trust his people, but he would review the document later when he was alone and verify what he was being told.
“What about the sectors? Are we still thinking the same number?”
Jack was quickly handed a map with another being sent across the table to the senator.
“Yes. Sector One. Michigan to Maine and down the east coast to Virginia. Sector Two is Virginia to the Florida border. Sector Three is Florida, around the Gulf to the Texas-Mexico border. Sector Four runs the border from Texas to California. Sector Five is the entire west coast plus Hawaii, and six is the Canadian border back to Michigan, and Alaska. All have separate budgets based on need, with a general fund for assets used by all. There will be liaison officers in every sector to ensure the flow of intelligence and communication, as well as coordination with the military and other government agencies.”
The senator let his chair fall back as he examined the maps. It seemed like such a simple solution, yet he knew the fight he faced. But this was the time to do it. The American people had let the current president know they were tired of the crime, the drugs, the free social services, and the terrorism all associated with an unsecured border. Congress had been dealt a devastating blow in the last election, and as a result, a slew of long-term representatives had been shown the door. The new House and Senate had a lot of young faces who had campaigned on the promise of reform. It was his job, as a veteran of the Senate and head of the committee on Homeland Security, to lead them to the completion of that task.
“Have we forgotten anything, Jack?”
It was Jack’s turn to sit back in his chair. His answer was blunt and made the eyes of the senator’s aides bug out. It was not an answer one heard in the political arena.
“Yes, sir, a ton of things. We just don’t know what they are yet. We’ll have to confront those problems when they come up.”
Senator Lamar smiled at both the answer and his aides’ reaction to it. It was the kind of answer he wished he got more of and the very reason he had asked for Jack’s assistance in the first place. When dealing with a task as large as he had, you needed men with integrity that weren’t afraid to tell him like they saw it. Jack had integrity in spades.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s an understatement.”
They each had a good laugh and the aides all looked at their counterparts with unease before the senator stopped and addressed them all.
“Would you all mind? Mr. Randall and I need the room.”
Jack placed his hand on his briefcase so one of the aides wouldn’t add it to his pile and watched as the table was cleared before they all filed out. The afternoon sun seemed to flood the room now, and Jack relaxed as the senator stood to remove his jacket.
“We need to talk about the political battle for a moment. Don’t worry, you won’t have to fight any of it. Just leave that to me. First thing I want to hear about is this cartel leader you busted this morning. Is it true he was just over in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins?”
Jack smiled. He knew the senator could use the bust for political points, and at the moment had no qualms about helping him. The man was cleared for the information, so Jack was not in violation by filling him in. He pulled the file from his briefcase and slid it across the table to the senator, who opened it long enough to see the face of a man lying in a hospital bed, before snapping it closed to listen to Jack.
“Oscar Hernandez, head of the Cali cartel. We found him in the critical care unit waiting for a heart transplant. He’d had some serious facial surgery and was posing as a businessman from Mexico. Apparently he has some form of an enlarged heart and will die without a new one. He’s been here for a few weeks under another identity.”
“Amazing. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I guess his options were pretty limited.”
“Not too many places to get a new heart. Kidneys maybe, but not a heart. His blood type is rare, also. AB negative. So I guess he calculated his chances and made the trip.”
“How’d he get here?”
“Looks like a chartered air ambulance flew him out of Mexico City. That’s as far as we’ve traced him so far. We’re looking into the company, for several reasons.”
“Oh?”
“The reason we caught him is that another plane from the same company crashed in Florida. The man on board was Angel Sanchez, a major mover of drugs into the States from Mexico, and a higher-up in the cartel. The plane had some cocaine on board, and some other disturbing items.”
“Such as?”
“A cooler with a pair of kidneys inside—human kidneys. The cooler even had the seal of Doctors Without Borders. Calls to them showed no knowledge of the kidneys. The plane was bound for Orlando where two people were waiting to receive them. The doctors were questioned and from the looks of it, they and the hospital all had reason to believe the kidneys came from legitimate sources.”
“So what did they do with them?”
“The surgeons did the transplants. But the recipients are under arrest for now. Once they recover, they have some explaining to do.”
“The surgeons just did the transplants?”
“Hippocratic oath. You treat the patient in front of you. The kidneys would have been wasted if they had waited much longer. This way the patients live, and we get to question them.”
The senator slumped back in his chair for a moment before it dawned on him that Jack hadn’t answered his question.
“So how did that translate into Oscar being our guest?”
“Angel gave him up. We cut him a deal and the Marshals have him in witness protection. He’s feeding us information on the cartel.”
“Just like that?”
“Well, he gets to live, and we give him a new face.”
“Worth it,” the senator agreed with a frown. “Who turned him over?”
“One of our guys . . . kinda. His name’s Lenny Hill. Since this involves Mexico and Columbia and a few other Central American countries, Interpol had dibs on him. Lucky for us, it happened not far from him. I know Lenny, he helped me with some international law questions I had after the terrorist bombing in Africa. Good guy, good record. I heard he talked to Angel for all of fifteen minutes before he agreed to flip. Now he’s picking his brain with some of our DEA guys. If I know Lenny, we’ll have all that Angel has to offer before he’s done with him. I’ll make sure you get copies of the transcripts.”
“And then what?”
“We get Angel his new face and stick him somewhere in west Nebraska.”
The senator thought about it for a moment. It seemed like a deal with the devil. But he was a politician and he knew that you sometimes had to get in bed with some bad people in order to move forward. It didn’t mean that he had to like it, though.
“Can we at least have the surgeon make him butt-ugly?”
Jack smiled at that.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“All right.”
The senator swept the file up and placed it in his briefcase for review later. He had other things to talk about.
“Let’s go down the list of congressman and see where their votes are on our little project.”
They were only fifty names into the list when an aide entered the room holding a cell phone.
“What is it?” the senator asked.
The aide approached with a pale face and handed the senator the phone. He and Jack both saw the look, and it was apparent that something was very wrong.
“What’s the matter, Susan?”
“It’s your wife on the phone, sir. Your daughter . . . she’s been in an accident.”
Parents push for texting and driving ban.
February 2011, CNN
—FIVE—
Anita sat on the floor in the corner of the room as she had become accustomed to doing. She faced the door and its three locks and listened to the noise on the street below, mostly drunk voices, passing traffic and barking dogs. She had tentatively searched the room the day before, holding her ear to the walls and floor, and creeping in her bare feet, praying she would not be heard. Straining to hear over the radio, she heard nothing beyond the talk of her kidnappers in the room next door, and the faint voices coming from the street below.
She had no watch. The only way she had to track the time was the shadow of the window bars from the window slowly crawling across the floor. She sat on the pillow and watched the men’s shadows move around under the door. The empty plate and cup sat on the floor by the door, and she waited for them to bring her more food and drink. She’d had nothing but some fruit and a small tortilla the day before, with one glass of water that she had dared to refill at the sink in the small bathroom. The water was not on all the time, something she had learned already. Her captors controlled everything.
Her gaze moved to the bed. She had examined its filthy sheets and blanket and discovered what could only be spots of blood on both. This had sent her into a fit of crying that she had somehow stifled so as not to anger her captors. She could not bring herself to sleep in the bed, and instead curled up on the floor in the corner of the room. What if they came in while she slept in the bed and took it as an opportunity to rape her? They were constantly drinking, and their voices would get louder the longer they did so. Occasionally an empty bottle would strike the door, sending waves of terror through her, but so far they had left her alone. The only questions they had asked were the names of her relatives, and as she answered them one by one, she heard the beeping of her cell phone as they looked the numbers up and wrote them down. After that they had ripped the remaining lengths of tape from her skin and stripped her down to her panties and shirt. They had laughed as she cowered in the corner with the towel over her head, crying and shivering in the night air.
The towel sat on the floor next to her now, and she kept it within arm’s reach at all times. She had been warned to immediately cover her head when they knocked on the door and to stay that way until they left. Failure to do so could result in her seeing their faces, and that would mean a certain death. The radio was not to be touched and was on at all times, the constant noise serving to cover any noise she may try to make, as well as keep her nerves on edge.
It worked too well. The previous day she had done nothing but sit in the corner and cry, rising every so often to vomit in the toilet. She retched until she could produce no more, her fried nerves and adrenal glands keeping the torture alive until she had finally fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion.
A loud knock caused her to jump, and she quickly threw the smelly towel over her head before the last lock was thrown open. She heard two sets of feet enter. One stopped and the sound of the dish being collected was heard. The other crossed the room until they stopped in front of her. A hand suddenly grasped her arm at the elbow and she gave an involuntary flinch.
“Relax, I’m not here to hurt you.”
The voice was new, younger, and the hand was soft, not rough and callused as the others. A faint scent of aftershave met her nose, and his breath did not smell of alcohol. His hand moved into hers and she allowed herself to be pulled up to her feet.
“I’ve brought you some gifts.”
She allowed herself to be led to the bed, and she sat with apprehension on its edge. Was this to be when they raped her? Her hands trembled.
