The newest addition to Shadow Ranch was the Venezia, a cluster of upscale villas set on an irrigation ditch that snaked its way through the complex. If he squinted and suspended his disbelief, Thumps could imagine a resemblance to Venice.
Not the one in Italy. The one in California.
Palazzo Veneziano was at the far end of the Venezia, just before everything ran off onto the prairies. Stucco exterior in earth colours, with brightly painted shutters and flower boxes under the windows.
The doorbell was in the shape of a small pineapple. Or a tiny meatball.
“Knock, knock.”
Thumps glanced at the ditch-cum-canal. There was artificial grass along the bank, plastic water lilies in plastic pots sunk into the water, and three rusty metal herons at the ready, in case a school of ceramic fish came swimming by.
“Don’t make me huff and puff.”
The door stayed shut. “Go away.”
“Not happening.” Thumps pressed the doorbell again. A tinkling rendition of “Santa Lucia.”
“I could shoot you.”
“Open the door, Cisco.”
More “Santa Lucia.” Followed by the sound of the deadbolt being retracted. Thumps pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. Cruz was standing in the shadows of the hall, a gun at his side.
“Is that the new Glock?”
“Sig Sauer,” said Cruz. “If you stop stepping on your dick, I’ll get you one.”
“Stop lying to me,” said Thumps. “And leave my dick out of this.”
“Cabrón, you’re taking this acting sheriff thing much too seriously.”
“I’ve got a dead guy in the morgue and a whole bunch of questions.”
“Hello, Mr. DreadfulWater.” Nora Gage appeared in the kitchen, a cup in her hand. “You’re quite the persistent fellow.”
Cruz quickly shut the door. “Anyone follow you?”
“And who would be following me?”
“There’s coffee,” said Gage. “Beer in the fridge.”
Palazzo Veneziano was a one-bedroom suite. Italian villa facade with a Holiday Inn interior. Particle-board sofa with matching chairs, tables with glass tops and pot-metal legs, flat-screen television, prints of famous paintings in plastic frames on the walls.
All the ambience of a fast-food drive-through.
Cruz kept his pistol at his side. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Thumps walked past Cruz into the kitchen, stopped in front of Gage. “You and I need to have a conversation.”
Gage looked at Cruz.
“Don’t look at Cisco,” said Thumps. “Look at me.”
“Pendejo. You need to leave this thing alone.”
“Sure,” said Thumps, “just as soon as you tell me what this thing is.”
“I’m not sure I see your concern,” said Gage. “Have I committed a crime?”
“I’ve got a dead body,” said Thumps. “Which means I can hold the two of you without charges for seventy-two hours.”
Cruz tried a hard stare. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Yes, I do.”
Gage took her coffee to the sofa, sat down.
“All right, Mr. DreadfulWater,” she said. “I’ll answer your questions.”
“Truthfully?”
Gage smiled. “You’ll have to be the judge of that.”
Cruz put his pistol back in its holster. “You don’t have to do this.”
Gage put her cup on the end table. “We don’t want Mr. DreadfulWater banging about. There’s no telling what he might run into in the dark.”
“Your call.” Cruz turned, headed for the door. “I’m going to mingle. See what I can see.”
Gage waited until she heard the door shut. Then she waited some more.
“Mind me asking what Mr. Cruz has told you?”
“That’s not how this works.” Thumps waited for a moment. “Let’s start with Stan Greeley.”
Gage didn’t flinch. “Who?”
“The man we found behind the house you were renting.”
“Ah,” said Gage. “Our Mr. Brown.”
“Turns out he was a private investigator,” said Thumps. “But I imagine that Cruz has told you this already.”
Gage waited.
“Greeley is dead,” said Thumps. “Traumatic brain injury.”
“From the fall?”
“Probably,” said Thumps. “Question is, why was he there in the first place? Why would someone hire a gumshoe from Great Falls to watch you?”
“Too bad we can’t ask Mr. Greeley,” said Gage.
Thumps waited.
“I suppose,” said Gage, “that Mr. Cruz told you about Black Ice.”
Thumps kept the surprise to himself. He knew that name. Couldn’t remember where. He went through the alphabet, hoping one of the letters would trigger a memory.
“Are you all right?”
“Peachy.” Thumps helped himself to one of the wingback chairs. “Yes, let’s start there.”
“Are you a student of history, Mr. DreadfulWater?”
“Can’t say that I am.”
“What do you know about chaos?”
“Don’t suppose we’re talking about Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, strife, and discord, daughter of Zeus and Hera?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a tornado. Or a hurricane. Amazing the destruction there is in wind. Can’t do much about it, but sometimes you can see it coming.”
“Gives you time to hunker down.”
“That’s one response,” said Gage. “You can hunker down, ride it out. You can get out of the way. Or, you can get flattened.”
Thumps looked out the sliding glass doors at the prairie sky. There was a hawk off in the distance, circling. Or maybe it was a vulture.
“Our tornado was 9/11. We didn’t see it coming, and we got flattened. Our immediate response was to create the Department of Homeland Security, whose main activity was to absorb existing departments and to create new ones to try to deal with the new world reality.
“I was in customs at the time. We were one of the agencies that got absorbed. I wound up getting seconded.”
“Black Ice.”
Thumps expected that saying the name out loud would do the trick. He even tried to picture it in his mind. The answer was there. He could see it lurking in the shadows, at the edge of his vision.
“We didn’t call ourselves that,” said Gage. “Not in the beginning.”
“Guessing Black Ice wasn’t involved in winter road maintenance.”
“As it turned out, that’s where the name came from. One of our number was involved in a fender bender on the beltway. Area was hit by an ice storm. All day long, the weather people talked about black ice this and black ice that, how it was dangerous, because you couldn’t see it. And our forensic accountant said, ‘Hey, that’s us, dangerous and invisible,’ and the name stuck.”
“A bit melodramatic.”
“Indeed.” Gage smiled. “Especially since all we did was gather information, pass the information on, go back and gather some more. Worker bees bringing pollen back to the hive.”
“Ever wonder what happened to the information?”
“You mean how it was used?”
“Must have been curious.”
“Wasn’t paid to be curious.”
Gage went to the refrigerator, brought out a plate of fruit, set it on the coffee table between them, along with a bottle of sparkling wine.
“Compliments of the management.” Gage set the bottle off to one side. “Who drinks this crap?”
Thumps helped himself to a handful of grapes. Gage picked out a chocolate-coated strawberry.
“There were eight of us in the beginning. Five men, three women. Names aren’t important. Everybody had more than one skill set. International finance, forensic accounting, cryptography, hard sciences, computers, psychology. Most of us spoke one or two other languages. Arabic, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French. One of the guys was a Go master. One of the women was a world-class hacker.”
“Sounds like a bad movie.”
“But then all that changes. In 2005, Tom Ridge steps down, and Michael Chertoff takes over. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, and suddenly, our little room in the basement gets a new team leader and a new mandate.”
“So, you guys analyzed tornadoes.”
“Yes, Mr. DreadfulWater,” said Gage. “And then we began to create them.”
There were individually wrapped wedges of cheese in with the fruit. Thumps picked one up and squeezed it. Nothing on the wrapper to tell him what kind of cheese it was. It could be a soft havarti or a brie. Then again it could be something smelly and runny.
“Sorin Dalca,” said Gage. “Romanian expat. Ph.D. in mathematics and game theory. When he arrived in late 2006, our mission changed. We continued to gather the raw data, but under Sorin, we began to generate our own vortexes.”
“Prospero conjuring up a storm.”
Gage took another strawberry. “You might suppose that most of our attention was focused on terrorist groups and drug cartels, the poster boys for American paranoia. And you’d be right. We certainly had a good time throwing sand into their gearboxes. But along the way, we discovered that an equally potent threat to national security was coming from our own corporations.”
“The military-industrial complex.”
“Such a liar, Mr. DreadfulWater,” said Gage. “You are a student of history.”
Thumps unwrapped the cheese. It wasn’t havarti, and it wasn’t one of those French abominations. It was a rubbery lump of off-white plasticine, which reminded him of C-4.
“There has always been a problem with restricted technology making its way to bad actors. Weapon systems, artificial intelligence, biological agents, nuclear materials. Anything that has a military application. Some of this is straight theft. Spies, criminal organizations, individuals with an agenda.”
Black Ice, Black Ice, Black Ice. Thumps could almost see it, as it ran across his memory.
“But the bulk of the restricted goodies are simply sold on the international black market.” Gage took two grapes off the plate. “Let’s say a large, well-known U.S. of A. corporation designs a new generation of drones with stealth technology, drones that have a greater range, drones that can carry a more lethal payload.”
Gage set one grape in the middle of the table. “And the folks at Grape One are only too happy to sell our government as many drones as they like. But they can make more drones than the folks in Washington need.”
“Hard to imagine.”
Gage set the second grape next to the first.
“Grape One and Grape Two are the same corporation, but they have different customers and different revenue streams. Grape One reports profits, pays taxes. Grape Two hides profits in offshore accounts and pays no taxes.”
“Capitalism in action,” said Thumps.
“It’s illegal, of course. What Grape Two does. We make weapons of mass destruction to protect ourselves and friends. We don’t make them to sell to our enemies, so they can be used against us.”
“National security being more important than profits?”
“Your cynicism aside, the majority of corporations are both honest and ethical. More or less. But there are a select few who see the sale of contraband as a grey area. Or they simply ignore the rules and regulations altogether. What to do, what to do?”
“I’m guessing prosecuting them isn’t an option?”
“God, no,” said Gage. “Lawyers? Depositions? Courtrooms? Forensic accounting? Televised congressional hearings? It would take years. Besides, you don’t want these industries crippled, you want them up and running.”
Thumps felt his patriotism slipping away. “Where else would we get our bombs for peace?”
“Like it or not,” said Gage, “in this country, national defence and corporate profits are an old married couple.”
“And this . . . Sorin . . .”
“There was little to be gained in disturbing a perfectly good military-industrial complex and throwing workers out of jobs, just to punish a handful of greedy shits.”
Gage picked up a strawberry, weighed it for a moment, put it back.
“What do you know about civil forfeiture laws?”
When he was a cop on the Northern California coast, Thumps had been involved in several cases that involved forfeiture. A fishing boat suspected of bringing in illegal aliens. A truck and trailer transporting marijuana. A warehouse filled with stolen electronics.
Gage rearranged herself on the sofa.
“Before 2000, forfeiture was pretty easy. You didn’t have to charge someone with a crime. You didn’t have to get a conviction. You just had to demonstrate, by the preponderance of evidence, that the property in question was legally forfeitable.”
Gage began chuckling to herself, as though she remembered something humorous.
“The good old days. But in 2000, Congress enacted the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, the main feature of which was a series of protections. It didn’t stop civil forfeiture by law enforcement, but it did provide some legal recourse for innocent individuals and companies who had lost property to the process.”
Thumps leaned forward. “So, Black Ice began confiscating corporation property?”
“No,” said Gage. “That would have taken too long, and it would have been visible and raised too many gnarly questions. But we applied the same principles. We went after the money. And the naughty boys made it easy for us. The legitimate money was in one set of accounts, while the money derived from illegal activities was in another set. The first was visible and known. The second was secret and out of sight.”
“So, you hacked into these accounts and what, took the money?”
“You’re probably thinking of the concept of due process,” said Gage, “which doesn’t apply in most forfeiture cases. Besides, who was going to complain? Exactly how would you explain to the authorities that someone had taken the money you made through an illegal activity?”
“What happened to the money?”
“Sorin Dalca.” Gage paused, let the name hang. “Dalca created something he liked to call the Vault. It was a bank for all intents and purposes, a place to hold the money that was confiscated. Until such time as we could get a legal decision on what should be done with it.”
“And you were in no hurry to do that.”
Thumps had to admit that the idea had its appeal. Powerful people were well protected. Going to court, even with a strong case, would have been an uphill battle. In all but the most egregious cases, a deal would be made that involved a fine and a firm lecture on the importance of ethical business practices.
“The government has used forfeiture to cripple terrorist groups and drug cartels for years. Can’t tell you the number of bank accounts we froze, the real estate we confiscated, the cars and boats and planes we seized. Sorin had us apply the same principles and methodology to target corporations.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
Gage gestured to the plate. “Please,” she said. “I’ll never finish it on my own.”
“Stan Greeley rented a car.” Thumps waited for Gage to catch up with the non sequitur. “In the trunk, we found a sniper rifle.”
Gage sat back, put her hands in her lap. “My, but you do have a gift for burying the lede.”
Thumps picked out a large strawberry, bit it in half.
“You’re telling me you think someone wants me dead.” “And just why would someone want you dead?”
Gage yawned, rubbed her eyes. “You know what? I’m old. I’m tired. I need to lie down. Can we continue this later? Does that work for you?”
Thumps stiffened.
“Don’t worry,” said Gage. “I promise not to disappear again. Besides, I suspect that even if I did, you would find me.”
“Doesn’t sound like you’re giving me a choice.”
Gage smiled. “No,” she said, “I’m not.”