Shockwave (25 page)

But there was one truth I’d known long before Luc took me to be his son. A truth known to all orphans, and
only
to us: despite the blather of the café sages, you
can
miss what you never had.

When I decided to go with Luc, that had been more than blind luck. It had been the one true blessing in my life, that I trusted him. Some form of compensation that I deserved, though I would never know how it had been granted.

Until Dolly.

T
he response was so quick that I was still watching my message disappear when it flashed:

I closed my eyes, keeping that message on a screen in my mind as I wrote it down on the pad of flash paper I keep next to the transmitter. Then I began the decoding, writing on that same paper. I had to make sure I got it right before the crack of a wooden match would make all of it disappear.

The informant was Lewis Gomes. Conclusion: he was one of the three men on that hunter-killer squad. He had to be—it was the only way it made sense for him to have access to the kind of info he’d been passing along. Whoever was sending that team out knew they were all killers-for-the-cause. And those killings would make them the last ones ever to be suspected of informing.

And they’d also be the last ones suspected by the government—not with an FBI boss running interference for them.

All FBI men are “special agents,” but “Alan Brigham, SAC” meant “Special Agent in Charge Alan Brigham.” So Brigham had been running the same “007” informant for a long time, and the “3 majors” that he’d been tipped to had propelled him to that higher position.

The repeated “13” and “R” symbols would baffle decoders, because even a random-number generator required a match at some point. When only a single recipient knew the key, it wasn’t a code at all—it was a shared language.

So I knew that numbers always
meant
letters, but that letters themselves took their meaning only from connected numbers, and changed again if before, after, or in the middle of numbers. If letters were not touching numbers in some way, the meaning of the letters themselves depended on whether they were capitalized.

“13” was always “M.”

“B” in the upper case signals that it is the first letter of a word that logically follows the word connected with all its preceding numbers, but only if placed at the
end
of a string.

“R” following only lower-case letters means “ring,” but an “R” following
numbers
means “race.”

I put it together, working slowly and carefully, moving from easiest to decode to most complicated. What I knew was that this “SAC” had received information from Gomes about three operations. No indication whether the operations were planned, in progress, or completed, but one had certainly been “aborted.”

If the group Gomes had infiltrated—no,
belonged
to—was neo-Nazi in some way, the “1388R” could refer only to the “Master Race” scenario that ran like a buried power line through all those groups, no matter if they had three members or three thousand. RAHOWA. Racial Holy War. Ice People exterminating Mud People. Restoring the planet to its natural state, the one that god—in some versions, Christ; in others, Odin—intended.

And the “cpR” was also straightforward enough, especially if fitted into an ongoing operation leaked to a government agency. A child-pornography ring wouldn’t require the participation of the Nazi group to have its existence known to some of the group’s members. And I vaguely recalled that several different “leaders” of such organizations had been convicted of crimes that would fit. Best theory, then: Gomes was the source of information that some
individual
was hooked into a child-pornography ring, and the government took it from there.

“13” was “M.” So a word that began with an “M” followed by a word beginning with a “B.” Morphine base? When I was still the property of La Légion, it was common knowledge that the opium poppy was easiest to grow in hot, dry places. The
paste the growers extracted from the poppies had to be turned into morphine base before it was moved as major weight. Morphine base was like moldable clay … and it didn’t give off an odor. So it first went to Marseilles for the transformation, that route handled by Corsicans.

What I call “common knowledge” was nothing more than information considered to be of such low value that it was passed along like any other cliché. Everyone said the Sicilians must have some kind of working arrangements to move heroin from France to America—they were already established there, and the Unione Corse preferred the safety of its own territory. Compared with the Corsicans, the clannish Sicilians were warmly accepting of strangers.

At first, the product was sold only to blacks in America, but it spread like any other virus. As the market widened, the blacks were able to wrest control of their own neighborhoods. The Italians were better organized, but they didn’t have the endless supply of young men willing to die for a chance to change their fate.

I heard that many died in those wars. I didn’t know this for a fact—barroom gossip is just what it sounds like it is—but I knew this for certain: Those who died would have been soldiers, not bosses. Or soldiers who wanted to
be
bosses and let their plans be known too soon.

Just before I quit, the mercenary job board had begun to list work in countries like Colombia and Peru. Those aren’t dry climates—better for cocaine, really. But heroin was making a strong comeback. Without the old ten-to-one rule—ten tons of opium makes one ton of heroin—a much purer form could be produced. Naturally, that final product would cost the end buyer a lot more, so the profit margins were probably still worth the risk.

That, too, added up. Among certain people, the perception of “class” is what gives any product its value. Cocaine was
once the high-class drug for the trendy “recreational” users, like a party favor. Now it’s for crackheads, about as low-class as there is.

But heroin isn’t for street junkies anymore; it’s for the wealthy. The new, high-purity product can be smoked, using designer-glass pipes. No needles means no risk of infection, and no track marks. A nicer, sweeter high, they claim. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the extreme prices high-purity heroin fetches would only make it even
more
desirable to those who make the claims.

But how would a neo-Nazi have information on major shipments of this product? What criminal organization would trust such a collection of …? Whatever the people who joined such groups were, they would share the one characteristic no professional would tolerate—unreliability.

The only possibility that I could see would be that some down-the-line bulk purchaser had enlisted a White Power group as a distributor to end users. But that was off—I could feel it—just not right, somehow.

I closed my eyes to help my mind see better. Huh! Hadn’t heroin wholesalers once used motorcycle gangs as distributors? Those gangs wouldn’t necessarily be Nazis themselves, but some of their members might say too much if they were in places where they felt safe. Among friends, if not brothers-in-arms.

Pretty much the same for child pornography. Whatever RAHOWA group Gomes belonged to wouldn’t have to be participating in some ongoing enterprise for him to
know
about it.

What an informant knows, an informant tells. And sells.

This “SAC” had gotten promoted thanks to information he got from Gomes, but the “Master Race” operation was noted as “aborted.” I took that to mean that the informant had passed along enough info for the FBI to stop some massive serial-bombing
scheme in its tracks. It surprised me that this hadn’t made all the wire services. And
not
taking credit for saving lives, much less stopping “terrorism” in its tracks—that didn’t fit, either.

But if the FBI had pulled off a
total
takedown, it made sense that they’d want to keep it quiet. “Aborted” might signal that death was the method the government had used. Now,
that
fit nicely. They wouldn’t want publicity for executions, and claiming that a couple of dozen people in different places had all “resisted arrest” simultaneously might be a hard sell.

All guesses on my part, I knew. But I also knew I had no other choice: the cyber-shadow was too valuable to ask for anything I could work out by myself.

And I knew I was expected to do just that.

T
he blog was called
Undercurrents
, a not very subtle reference to the area it covered … and to the fact that there were parts of where we lived that tourists would never hear about.

I didn’t know if it was the work of one person with a lot of sources, or a collective of people digging on their own and posting whatever they found. But I knew it was way more popular than any of the local newspapers. Maybe people didn’t want to spend their money on “news” when all the coverage they got was of local sports and “the arts.”

For myself, I thought it really had nothing to do with not wasting money—there was some online rag you could get for free, but nobody paid much attention to it, either. Since it wasn’t a real newspaper, the only way it could get access to anything—especially crime news—was to have that “good working relationship” with the DA’s Office.

The print papers could at least sell space—anything from
ads for local businesses to extra-fancy obits to houses for sale. And they had to have subscribers—writing “letters to the editor” was a hobby for a lot of folks, and they probably “scrap-booked” all their insights. For all I know, the papers might even turn a profit.

It came down to this: if you wanted anything even pretending to be an “independent investigation,” you were stuck with restaurant reviews. And if those restaurants were also advertisers …

“Look,” Dolly said, pointing at the screen of the tablet she took everywhere with her. When I asked her about that, she’d told me, “It’s not as fast as a cable connection, but if all you want is what’s already online, it’s a lot lighter to lug around than a laptop. And you can type on it just like on a regular keyboard, if you have to.”

I didn’t say anything about how we had a multi-boosted connection right in the house—I figured she must have been carrying the tablet around while she was out, got a call on her phone, and pulled up the page she was showing me before she’d gotten back.

The headline was the opposite of the flabbed-up bias that coated every word of “crime news” in the local papers. The story itself was a fact-dense rundown of all the information they had gathered.

The “sources” weren’t much of a mystery: Dolly’s pals for the X-rays, Mack for the social worker’s quote, and my vague hints to Dolly for any FBI agent talking to their reporters.

I also knew none of it would be much of a convincer. But the X-ray of the dead man’s skull was in the
Undercurrents
story, right on the screen. And neither Jordan’s nor Homer’s age, height, or physical condition would be in dispute.

So … maybe …?

But I should have known better. That sack of bleached dough we have for a district attorney immediately returned fire, using the “legitimate press” for a weapon. His definition of “legitimate” had nothing to do with paper versus cyber—it was his term for any news outlet that quoted him verbatim anytime he spoke but never asked him any questions.