Blown (11 page)

K
aplan set
his internal timer for two hours. That would put him just this side of Paducah, Kentucky. He'd told Tony the planned route and instructed him to stop on this side of Paducah for gas so there would be no need to stop in town. Not as many closed circuit cameras outside the city either. Street level surveillance was a growing trend nationwide, even in the smaller communities, despite the outcry from concerned citizen groups about Big Brother and invasions of privacy.

Kaplan also knew that regardless of the fact Homeland Security had claimed not to use license plate tracking information gathered by private intelligence companies, agencies like the NSA and the CIA still did. With the current sophistication of this tracking data, a license plate could be tracked in real-time across town or across the country. Privacy advocates had been worried about cell phones being traced when the rapidly expanding, more intrusive threat to privacy was license plate tracking with traffic cams.

His fleeting anger toward his amateurish mistake had dissipated. Dwelling on it served him no purpose and would only keep him from focusing on his mission. He closed his eyes and let the drone of the highway carry him into slumber.

He awoke suddenly and knew something wasn't right. The drone of the highway was gone and the Jeep was parked in front of a gas pump. Tony was nowhere in sight.

Kaplan reached into his backpack and pulled out a baseball cap. He tugged it low on his forehead and got out of the Jeep. There was one other car at the pumps. A young woman with long dark hair was pumping gas into a shiny black GMC Terrain.

As he approached the entrance to the all-night Mini-Mart, he scanned the open interior through the plate glass windows that lined the front of the building. No sign of Tony. He tilted his chin down and used the brim of his cap to shield his face from the Mini-Mart's cameras. A man of Indian heritage sat inside a glass booth.

Kaplan walked up to the glass booth avoiding eye contact with the attendant, "Bathroom?"

"Straight back and to the left," the man said.

Kaplan took two steps when Tony came around the corner. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"I'm seventy, I needed to stop. My bladder is not as young as it used to be. We are about forty-five miles from Paducah and we were down to a quarter of a tank, so I filled up."

"Wake me next time," Kaplan walked toward the back of the store. "My turn."

When Kaplan returned to the Jeep, Tony was standing in front with the hood open.

"Mr. Kaplan, we have a problem," he said. "Car won't start."

Kaplan leaned over and reconnected a loose cable. "No, I guess it wouldn't."

"Did you do that?"

Kaplan ignored him. "I'll drive." He held out his open palm.

Tony handed him the keys.

They both got in and Kaplan started the Jeep.

"I was not going to leave you if that's what you were thinking," said Tony.

"Nope, I'm guessing you weren't."

Kaplan drove in silence toward Paducah in the pre-dawn light. It wouldn't be long before the sun would be glaring in his face, always an issue when traveling east in the early morning unless the sky is covered with clouds. He glanced at Tony; the old man's eyelids were already sagging. His head bobbed a couple of times, each time he opened his eyes, then gravity would pull them shut again.

Kaplan broke the tranquility. "Tell me more about this broker thing," he said.

Startled from slumber, Tony jumped in his seat. "What?"

"How did you get started as a broker?"

Tony looked at him while he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "Long story."

"We seem to have plenty of time."

Tony took a couple of deep breaths. "It started many years ago when I was living in Miami."

"How long ago?" Kaplan interrupted. "Give me a framework in time."

"Thirty years, at least." Tony readjusted himself in the seat. "It began rather innocent actually. A car in South Beach hit my roommate while he was crossing the street. In the crosswalk too, mind you. Ended up with a broken arm, lots of bruises, nothing very serious but it put him out of work and he got fired from his job. I told him he should sue the driver for medical expenses and lost wages." Tony paused. "To make a long story short, turned out the driver was the teenage son of a very wealthy and prominent Miami plastic surgeon. The father offered my roommate thirty grand to shut up and go away. Thirty grand was a lot of money back then—"

"It's a lot of money now."

"Right. Anyway, a light bulb went off in my head. It got me to thinking there was potentially a lot of money to be made. I just had to find the right people. Come to find out, there were literally thousands of people who would take a bump from a slow moving car for fifty percent of the take."

"Kind of like an ambulance chaser."

"Except I was not a lawyer…more like an unofficial mediator. I'd go straight to the drivers and try to arrange a settlement to keep it out of the legal system. The odds were good. Most of the time it worked, sometimes it didn't and I'd find a cheap lawyer and have him file a lawsuit. First year I pulled in over a hundred G's—and that was my take."

"That's a lot of con money."

Tony laughed. "Turned out to be a drop in the bucket, as one would say."

In the distance, Kaplan could see the glow of city lights reflecting off the clouds above. "What do you mean?"

"After doing a little research about corporation formation at the Miami-Dade Public Library, I got more creative and devised a plan. A long-term plan. Pure genius, if I do say so myself. A venture sure to net hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Billions over a lifetime. But it took considerable startup capital to fund the kind of corporate network needed to make it work and I couldn't exactly waltz into a bank and ask for a loan."

"So you went to someone with a lot of money."

"Yes. And there was only one man I knew at the time with that kind of dough. In my mind it was going to be a match made in heaven, but as it turned out, even heaven had archangels. He put his son in charge of my venture. Big mistake. And the son was not a patient man. He never understood the business model. He expected immediate grandiose results as opposed to the slower safer model I devised. His impatience caused mistakes in the field and, being the idiot that he was, he only knew of one way to address those mistakes and that was to make an example of anyone who made a mistake. But when too many people started coming up missing or dead, the authorities were pressured to investigate."

"Who was he?" Kaplan asked.

Tony shook his head. "A bigger dumbass I have never met. Anyway, I had the son, with his father's money of course, set up a multi-level corporate structure under one ultimate corporate umbrella. After that, it was just a matter of recruiting."

"Recruiting what?"

"In the beginning, mostly people to participate in the medical scam. It was the keys to success…make or break to the plan. Ground floor, if you will."

"You mean finding people to jump in front of cars?"

"No, no. That was chump change. The money… the king's ransom was in billing. That's when I became a broker. When the corporation needed doctors, I went out and found doctors who needed patients to bill. When the billing company needed insurance information, I found thousands of people willing to sell their health insurance information for a few bucks. Whether it was private health insurance or not, didn't matter. The big bucks came later with Medicare and Medicaid, almost no oversight. In the beginning we staged accidents. Very elementary scams that I soon figured out weren't even necessary. Our corporate structure cross-billed and the insurance money poured in. One-car accidents could reap thousands from medical payments billed to auto insurance, doctors' billing to health insurance, lab bills…labs that the corporation owned, by the way. It was all just a paper shuffle. Our doctors prescribed medications so everything looked legit and soon we ended up with a stockpile of prescription meds. High dollar meds too. Before I knew it, I was brokering meds all over the world at black market prices."

"Sounds like the kind of crap that still goes on today."

"In a way, it does. Except now I think they are all in cahoots with each other…doctors, health insurance companies, and drug companies that is. It's still all about billing."

"And no one ever got caught?"

"Sure they did. There were casualties. Those were factored into my model. Publicly, the corporate level would be appalled, clean house, and in some instances even prosecute. But, the higher the Feds looked in the corporate structure, the cleaner it was. Some facilities were even shut down…guess who owned the replacement? New corporation name but owned by the same conglomerate at the top. What I had to contend with and hated was repeatedly explaining to the son that this was part of the process…not killing off every mistake. But he still—"

"Hold that thought," Kaplan interrupted as they reached the outskirts of Paducah and he saw a cop car parked on the side of the road with his radar speed gun mounted in the windshield. He looked in his rear view mirror and saw the patrol car pull out and fall in behind him. He glanced at the speedometer, he wasn't speeding so what was the cop's interest in tailing him? Could the authorities have already put out a BOLO on the Jeep? "Looks like we got company."

"Were you speeding?"

"Nope. But it won't be a good thing if he runs these plates." Kaplan spotted an all night diner a block ahead on the right. "I'm not going to wait around and give him the chance."

Kaplan flipped on his right turn signal and tapped the brakes. As soon as he did, the rack of blue lights lit up.

"Now what are you going to do?" Tony said. "You can't very well beat up a cop."

Kaplan braked and pulled to the curb. He was struggling to formulate a viable plan but coming up short.

The police car's siren came on and Kaplan heard the
Interceptor
engine kick into high gear as the patrol car made a u-turn and sped off in the opposite direction.

"That was close," Tony said.

"Too close… we need to dump this car now. We can't wait till Nashville."

"Getting paranoid?"

"As much time as has passed and the fact that we're still in the same vehicle? You bet. We've been pushing our luck for a while and now that it's daylight…" Kaplan turned into the parking lot. "…staying in this car any longer is just plain stupid."

He pulled up to the front door of the diner and got out of the car. Next to the entrance he bought a copy of
The Paducah Sun
from a newspaper machine. They walked inside, sat down in a booth, and ordered coffee. He flipped to the classified section and pulled it out, and then he handed the rest of the paper to Tony. "See if there is any news about Little Rock while I find us a car."

Within minutes he found what he was searching for, a cheap older model non-descript sedan that might make it a few hundred miles down the interstate. The clock above the diner's grill read 6:30 a.m. It was early, perhaps too early to make the call, but he did it anyway.

After several minutes of talking, he turned off his phone. "Anything in the paper?"

"No. Maybe we will learn something tomorrow."

"Tomorrow we'll be far gone from here and you'll be safe and sound in WitSec's custody."

Kaplan chugged the rest of his coffee. "Drink up," he said to Tony. "We need to get moving."

Five minutes later he had located the address given to him over the phone, made a quick drive by, and parked the Jeep a couple blocks away. After stuffing the Jeep's tag in his backpack and leaving the keys in the ignition, he and Tony walked toward the address. Other than a stray cat followed by a litter of kittens, he and Tony were alone on the streets of the dilapidated neighborhood.

"Kind of a rough part of town," said Tony.

"Looks that way. Guess I'll owe Jeff a new car."

"You might owe him more than a car."

Kaplan narrowed his eyes and stared at Tony, then looked ahead at the road and wondered if Jeff's home would be okay. "You might be right."

The car turned out to be a 1991 Mercury Sable station wagon and not a sedan as advertised in the paper. It was parked in the weeds on the front yard. Actually the weeds were starting to grow around the car. Two ruts marked its path in and out of the yard.

The Mercury Sable and its Ford counterpart Taurus were two of the most popular model cars in the late eighties and early nineties. Especially the Taurus. 1991 was about the time its popularity began to wane. The car's original color was wine, now it was faded and bleached by the sun. Several oxidation spots blotched the roof, hood, and trunk.

The owner met them at the front door. He was barefoot. His jeans were torn and his undershirt dingy. He smelled like he was on a two-day drinking binge, which could explain the man's foul mood at that hour of the morning. A cigarette dangled from his lips with an extra long ash just waiting for gravity to pull it free. He claimed the oil had recently been changed and the air conditioner didn't work. When he moved his mouth to speak the ash fell to his front porch.

He held out a key to Kaplan, "Here. Drive it around the block."

Kaplan took the key, "That won't be necessary."

Kaplan walked over to the vehicle and reached through the front grill under the hood. A second later the hood popped loose. He raised it and made a cursory check of belts and hoses. He slipped into the driver's seat, inserted the key, and started the engine. A puff of gray smoke billowed from the rusted tailpipe. The cloth seats were ripped and stained and the interior reeked of smoke and booze, which wouldn't matter anyway since, with no air conditioner, he'd have to drive with the windows down.

He put his left foot on the brake and pressed hard. With his right foot he pressed the accelerator revving the engine past a fast idle. He worked the gear selector from drive to reverse and back several times. Remarkably, the transmission never slipped.

A few minutes later he walked back to the front porch where Tony stood waiting.