Favors and Lies (9 page)

“Well, either it was wiped down, or the man has no fingerprints.”

Detective Wallace leaned back in his chair as the forensic technician waited for a response.
Be careful
. The words rolled around the detective's head. He could feel his blood pressure rising. His chest thumping. He looked down at his desk and reached for the paper Dan had written his contact info on. He slowly unfolded the paper, read it once, and cursed again. “
Motherfucker!
” The words reverberated around the room, ricocheting off the walls, trickling down the staircase.

Written in eloquent penmanship was the simple sentence:
If you wanted my prints, you should have just asked for them. Thanks for the water.

Detective Wallace turned his attention back to the phone. “I want you to run prints in the database for Dan Lord. I will send you the contact information I have.”

“Does he have a criminal past?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“The main database holds all criminal fingerprints and all recorded prints for military and government personnel. If his prints are in there, I will have something by the end of the day. If he is not in that database, we will have to go to plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Getting access to civilian fingerprint databases for civilians without criminal records. Those are restricted access. You generally need a warrant. Case numbers. Approval from the Captain. You could also bypass procedures. Call in some favors. Play the fallen law enforcement officer card. See if anyone wants to help.”

“Get me whatever you can find, any way you can get it.”

“It could take some time.”

“Just get it.”

—

Lindsay Richer finished her evening run, a five-mile jaunt starting at the gate of American University on Nebraska Avenue. She ran down MacArthur Boulevard, past the assortment of embassies and distinguished residences, through Georgetown and back uphill on Wisconsin Avenue. It was a run she had done three times a week without fail until Conner had died. She was now trying to get back into her routine, to move on.

The exercise was therapeutic. As much as the loss she felt for her boyfriend, she was sorting through the shock to her foundation. She missed him to be sure. Every couple she saw on campus reminded her of what she briefly had and what she knew, somewhere beyond the grief, she would have again. The pain was persistent, but it wasn't life-ending.

The shock was different.

It was the shock that jolts youth when they first discover how short life can be. How quickly it can be snuffed out. What Conner's death had taught her was to keep moving, because your last day can come as suddenly at nineteen as it can at sixty-five. Most young people just didn't think that way. It usually took a tragedy.

She did her post-run stretch on the porch of the Alpha Chi Omega house, her sweat drying in the late autumn air. A group of frat boys exited the house next door, waved to her and piled into an older-model Jeep Cherokee. She put her leg on the edge of the staircase, touched her head to her knee, and then bounded up the stairs.

She took off her sweatshirt and threw it on the pile of clothes in the hamper in the corner of her room. She sat on the bed and kicked off her shoes. When she looked up, she was staring at a picture of herself and Conner, wedged into the frame of the mirror over her dresser. She tried to smile but failed. She looked at the St. Christopher medal hanging on the other corner of the mirror, a gift from Conner.

She stood at her dresser and her eyes welled up. She opened her underwear drawer and in the corner was a memory box, a gift from her grandmother when she turned twelve. She put the box on the dresser and opened it slowly. She unfolded a single love letter from Conner, read it from beginning to end, and then folded it again. In the corner of the box was a folded napkin with torn edges. She unfolded the napkin and finally managed to smile, smirking at the numbers scribbled in permanent marker, the writing leaking through the layers of the napkin. She remembered back to when Conner had given the numbers to her. His cell phone number. His dorm number. His mother's house number. A number he listed as emergency.
He wasn't taking any chances
, she thought.

She removed her phone from the Velcro pocket on her running pants and called Conner's cell phone to listen to his voice recorded on the voicemail greeting. The service was still connected and she shed a tear as Conner said “You've reached Conner Lord. I'm unavailable to take your call at the moment, but if you leave a message I will get back to you as soon as I can.”

She had listened to the message a dozen times since the funeral. Each time it hurt less. A step in the healing process.

She had also called the dorm number the first few days, but Conner's roommate erased it after the service. The voice of a dead guy on the answering machine was only cool for so long when you actually knew the person. Lindsay looked at the last number on the napkin and wondered if there was another recorded voicemail message, a last chance to hear the dead speak new words. Different words spoken by someone she cared about and someone she would never speak to again. She dialed the number labeled “emergency.”

She shut her eyes as she waited.

—

Reed Temple passed through the security booth at the three-story gray octagonal building just down the hill from Tyson's Corner Mall. The unremarkable gray stone exterior of the building was in deep contrast to the gleaming flagships of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, the outlines of their respective corporate castles peeking out from behind the trees dotting Tyson's skyline.

Every commercial tenant in the zip code was paying two hundred dollars a square foot while charging Uncle Sam three hundred dollars an hour for contractors and engineers. The contractors and engineers, in turn, built the systems that Uncle Sugar bought with taxpayer money. They charged the government to employ their engineers to build systems they would in turn sell to the government. It was brilliant.

Tel Q Labs was the baby on the defense industry block. While Lockheed and Northrop Grumman cranked out fighter jets and tanks, Tel Q Labs was stocking their offices with PhDs, MDs, Harvard MBAs, and UPenn accountants.

It was no secret that for the past decade the CIA had been dabbling in private sector technology incubation. It had been splashed across the front page of the
Washington Post
and discussed over tea and biscuits on the BBC. NPR was the first media outlet to list the names of companies the CIA was interested in. The only questions that remained truly classified were which companies they already owned and which companies they were looking to purchase.

Tel Q Labs had spent the last five years trying to make it onto the list of companies under consideration, to make themselves attractive enough to be invited to the dance. After five years, a hundred sponsored dinners, and an unsanctioned trip to New Orleans, they succeeded. The success of the first government contract opened the door to a second contract. A second led to a third, and by the time a half-dozen contracts had been signed, Tel Q Labs was firmly on the radar of the intelligence and defense community as an innovative supplier of key defense services vital to national security. Or so the brochure read.

In the large scope of things, Tel Q Labs was little more than a few dozen highly motivated individuals backed by a series of deep pockets and angel investors disguised by LLCs and blind trusts. Tel Q Labs didn't build missiles or subs or have spy satellite launch capabilities. The only drone they offered was palm-size and was still flying test missions in a basement lab on US soil.

Tel Q Labs' specialty was on the personal level. The company used inventive nomenclature like Headcount Reduction Efficiency to give their personal brand of killing capabilities a certain statistical significance which could be embraced without sounding murderous. Smart ammunition, enhanced protection armor, advanced personal accessories. Dual-use items that were attractive to both intelligence and the DOD.

Tel Q Labs' timing was perfect. The defeat of long-standing enemies and the conquest of lesser countries had left the US without a state-sponsored adversary. And without an organized dark force with which to do battle, the US intelligence and defense communities were being forced to look beyond tanks, fighters, subs, and aircraft carriers. Real war, where the real money could be made, was being curtailed. Nothing rang the cash register like boots on the ground, and the lack of a defined enemy was crippling the defense industry business. Asymmetric warfare was different. Demand for drones was booming. Robotics was on the horizon. The use of technology on a smaller scale was finding itself very popular amidst shrinking budgets. Smaller monetary allocation for smaller toys.

Reed Temple took his Tel Q Labs' visitor pass to the third-level basement where his all-access privileges ended. He stood in front of the camera and put his palm against the wall-mounted reader. A light flashed and the reader mapped the unique pattern of the veins beneath the surface of his hand. While the scanner mapped the layout of the veins, another sensor checked for perspiration and a temperature on his palm. A moment later the door slid open.

“Thank you, Fujitsu,” Temple whispered to himself, marveling at the borrowed technology being applied to personalized weapon grips.

Temple Reed walked into the large windowless floor without fanfare. In the corner, a woman in a lab coat sat with her back to the door, looking through a high-powered microscope at the current version of the world's smallest hundred-terabyte solid-state drive.

Along the near wall, amidst multiple rows of newly arrived boxes, a massive mechanical exoskeleton lay in pieces on a large table. The skeletal outline of composite material rested on a large white sheet. Reconstructive surgery on the skeleton was in session and a large black man was moving from piece to piece, bolt to wrench, twisting and tightening, flexing and straightening. On the other side of the table, a white male with a military haircut checked the wiring between the exoskeleton's forearm and bicep.

Reed Temple approached the table and nodded to his two private-sector program leaders, Major and Ridge. “We need to talk. I just had my ass chewed out and I am going to return the favor. You're not going to like what I have to say.”

Ridge, six feet and four inches of chiseled ex-marine, stood straight from his position over the exoskeleton and stretched his back. The scars on his massive black hands and thick neck were souvenirs from a seven-hour stint defending a position on a hilltop in Afghanistan with eight other marines. Temple knew the story well. Seven hours of hell. Blood. Screams. Piss. Shit. They'd endured shelling and ambushes throughout the night, asses dug into the earth so deep the worms were evacuating to make room. Blinding rain had intermittently pounded their position, torrents of water running through crevices in the ground and filling their foxhole. When air support had arrived at dawn, the enemy had been within twenty yards and Ridge had been firing his last magazine, his knife ready for action. Around him, eight team members had lain injured or dead. One of the survivors would never walk again. By the time the last bomb had dropped on the encroaching enemy and the dust had settled, Ridge's transformation was complete. A young man named Robert Williams, with limited combat experience, had gone to the top of the mountain to oversee a supply route. He came down the mountain with two names—Hero and Ridge. The last one had stuck.

Major's outward appearance was straight from the Army catalog for standard issue, military-grade, white male. Short, dirty blond hair. Dark blue eyes. Average height. Average weight. Wiry strong. The characteristics that made him malevolently above average were between his ears.

His first foreign post with the Army had been working with the Colombian government teaching anti-narcotic trafficking tactics in the jungles of South America. The war on drugs. It was a war that couldn't be won. After three years of burning coke labs and watching drug lords do business with impunity, Major had been assigned to DC. Two years later he was shipped to Iraq. Then to Afghanistan. In Colombia, he had witnessed the killings. The innocent and the guilty. The murderers and those trying to feed their families. But his government-issued weapon had missed out on direct action.

All that changed in Afghanistan. Major took to slaughter without conscience, and his grip on reality loosened. He slipped from soldier to self-appointed mercenary. His lifelong photography hobby blossomed into trophy shots with deceased Taliban and less-guilty Afghani locals. The new angle on his old hobby encouraged more ill behavior. He embraced a penchant for talking to his victims at length before he killed them, and an equally dishonorable habit of taking souvenirs from those he murdered. An ear here. A family heirloom there.

As Reed Temple examined the ankle joint on the exoskeleton on the table, Major looked over at Ridge and flicked his head in the direction of the glass-walled office in the corner. Inside the soundproof glass room, Reed Temple shut the door and the three men sat down at the round table. More boxes filled the corner of the room.

“Where are we with the site?”

Ridge sat at perfect attention with board-like posture but didn't speak.

Major had no such reservations. “We had a visitor. A white male, age approximately thirty-five to forty.”

“Did we get an ID?”

“No. We followed the agreed upon protocol. Paid a local informant with a long record two hundred dollars to keep an eye on the location. He was given the order to obtain ID but was unable to do so.”

“Was the informant armed?”

“Yes.”

“Then what went wrong?”

Major nodded towards Ridge for an explanation. Eyes forward, Ridge provided a description as if there were a script in front of him. “The hired help pulled a gun on the visitor, who evidently took offense to having a firearm shoved in his face. The visitor disarmed our man, breaking his elbow in the process.”

“What is the status on our hired help?”

Ridge looked back at Major who picked up the conversation. “Our hired help is currently residing a few hundred yards north of the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge. He is properly weighted. He shouldn't resurface until the spring when the city does its annual
Keep the Anacostia River Clean
initiative.”

Temple nodded quietly in approval. “The visitor was probably the uncle of the boy.”

“Yes. We are assuming the same. Our hired help gave a similar description when he was debriefed. We didn't set eyes on the subject ourselves,” Major said.

“Well, the uncle is turning out to be a little bit more than a lawyer or private detective, isn't he? Disarming a man with a gun at point blank range is not for novices.”

“No, it is not,” Major agreed.

“What else do you have?”

“The homeless subject who lives under the L'Enfant Promenade was paid to find somewhere else to live. As you can imagine, he chose not to follow these orders.”

“Status.”

“Missing.”

“Outlook?”

“None, sir.”

“And the police?”

“We had a complication,” Major said, relishing his time at the mic. “The police filed their report on the dead boy. The site was checked once when the body was reported and then visited again by a detective and the uncle. The medical examiner records show they are waiting for the toxicology report on the deceased boy.”

“And the complication?”

“The site was visited again, late last night, after the run-in with the uncle. It was the same detective. He caught us by surprise.”