COLLATERAL CASUALTIES (The Kate Huntington mystery series) (18 page)

            “Uh, let’s reverse that, partner. You handle Janice’s undies. I’ll dust for prints.”

            Rose broke out one of her rare but gorgeous smiles, transforming her relatively plain face into a thing of beauty. Claude’s mouth fell open.

            Despite his concerns about the stolen gun, Skip had to stifle a grin of his own. Rose’s smile usually had that effect on men the first time they saw it.

            There were no prints on the safe but his own. The thief had apparently worn gloves. He used the house phone to report the gun stolen. No point in wasting a throwaway cell.

            Skip handed Claude his keys. “You take the backpacks and get my truck, please. I’ll ride with Rose so it looks like she stopped by to pick me up for work. You follow at a distance. See if we pick up a tail.”

            Rose did a discreet sweep of her car with the debugging device. Skip waited until they were well away from the house with no sign of a tail before he called Mac.

            “Reilly.”

            “Mac, did you leave lights on in the house last night?”

            “Yeah, and the radio and TV.”

            “Would your guys have gone back in to turn them off?”

            “Nope. Wanted the house to look occupied ’til we were well away. Why?”

            “They weren’t on this morning. Hang on. Let me see if this cheapy phone has a speaker function. We’re in Rose’s car.”

            Once Skip had found the correct button, they filled Mac in on the missing gun.

            “They turned the TV and radio off so they could hear if anybody came home while they searched the place,” Mac said. “I agree with Rose. Stolen gun’s gonna end up at some crime scene.”

            “But why aren’t they watching the house?”

            “They may have limited personnel,” Rose said.

            “’Specially now that two of their men are outta the game,” Mac said.

            “What happened to the guy your men knocked out?” Skip asked.

            “We swung south a bit and dumped him outside an emergency room in Virginia. Doubt he’ll remember what happened. My man snuck up behind him and whacked him good. He was still out cold when we dumped him.”

            “Bad news is these guys have probably figured out that the kids are gone,” Rose said.

            “We’ve got ’em tucked away here,” Mac said. “I’ll keep ’em safe.”

            “Thanks, Mac.” Skip swallowed the lump in his throat. “Thanks for everything.”

~~~~~~~

            Rob was staring at the document in front of him, trying to register the words in his mind instead of just reading them with his eyes. Hard to get excited about a civil suit regarding an alleged patent violation when practically everyone near and dear to him was in jeopardy. Not to mention, he hadn’t slept much the night before. He was getting too old to sleep on the floor, even if it was covered with plush carpeting. And he had missed Liz horribly.

            The intercom on his phone buzzed. Fran’s disembodied voice announced, “Two gentlemen to see you, Mr. Franklin.”

            Rob was instantly alerted. Fran never called him Mr. Franklin. He was Boss at the office or Rob at social events. He started to press the intercom button, then thought better of it. He picked up his phone instead and called Fran’s extension.

            “Mr. Franklin’s office,” she answered.

            “Who are they?” Rob asked.

            “Oh, hi, Mr. Ceeiya,” Fran said.

            “Ceeiya? They’re CIA?” Rob suspected Fran’s attempt at subterfuge wasn’t fooling whoever was standing in front of her desk.

            “Yes, that’s right,” Fran said. “Your appointment’s at four.”

            “Do they look Hispanic?”

            “No, no, of course not. Mr. Franklin will understand if you’re a little bit late. He’ll have your paperwork ready.”

            “They have credentials.”

            “Yes, that’s right. Okay, see you then.”

            “Thanks, Fran.”

            Through the intercom, Rob said, “Send the gentlemen in.”

            Rob stood up as his admin ushered in two men. Rob guessed they were around his age, early to mid-fifties, but the taller one seemed to be fighting tooth and nail to defy the aging process. He was lean and fashionably dressed in a well-tailored suit. His dark brown hair screamed
hair dye
. His partner’s off-the-rack suit was a bit rumpled already at ten-forty in the morning. He sported a middle-aged paunch and his salt-and-pepper hair was combed over to hide the beginnings of a bald spot on the top of his head.

            His ice-blue eyes bored into Rob’s as he extended his hand. “Nicholson. He’s Phelps. CIA.”

            Rob shook their hands. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

             Nicholson held out a picture of the Colombian ambassador. “What do you know about this man?”

            Rob hesitated for an instant. He had no idea why but his gut was telling him something was off about these two. “He’s a new client. Came in yesterday.”

            “Yes, we know that,” Phelps said, impatience in his voice. “What did he want?”

            Rob waved his hand toward the two chairs in front of his desk. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he said, as he walked over to his desk chair. “Client confidentiality.”

            “National security trumps client confidentiality,” Nicholson said, settling into one of the visitors’ chairs. Phelps remained standing at parade rest.

            “May I see some credentials, gentlemen?”

            The two men exchanged a quick glance.

            Nicholson pulled a flat leather wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. Rob held out his hand. The agent flipped the wallet open and leaned forward across the desk, flashing it in Rob’s general direction.

            Rob withdrew his hand, resisting the implied expectation that he would lean forward and attempt to read what was in the wallet from a distance. He sat back in his chair instead. “Gentlemen, please put your credentials on my desk so I can examine them.”

            After a slight hesitation, they both complied.

           
There now, that wasn’t so hard.
Rob picked up one and then the other of the small wallets to examine their contents.

            He nudged them back across the desk and the agents retrieved them.

            “My client identified himself as John Smith. He asked me to write up papers to take care of a routine financial matter.” Despite the legitimate-looking credentials, Rob’s instincts were running up red flags.

            “I repeat, Mr. Franklin, national security trumps client confidentiality,” Nicholson said.

            “Not without a court order, it doesn’t,” Rob replied. “Perhaps if you told me why you’re interested in my client, I might be able to be more helpful, without violating lawyer-client privilege.”

            Phelps snorted.

            “Or perhaps not,” Rob said amicably. He stood up. “We seem to have reached an impasse, gentlemen. If you would leave your card, I’ll contact you if I become privy to any information that would not be covered by client confidentiality.”

            The two agents exchanged another look. Nicholson pushed up out of his chair and picked up one of Rob’s cards from a holder on his desk. He wrote a number on the back of it, then handed it to Rob. “You can reach us there.”

            Rob waited five minutes after the two men had left his office before taking out one of the throwaway phones and the list of phone numbers for the others. He started to punch in a number, then thought better of it. Leaving his office, he walked to his partner’s office again.

            Knowing Stockton was in court, he asked Shirley, “Is Bill in?” She responded in the negative.

            “I’ll just leave him a note then.” Rob entered his partner’s office. He nudged the door closed, then took out the cell phone and punched in a number.

            “Hernandez.”

            “Rose, I just had a couple of interesting visitors. Not sure what to make of it.”

            “Hispanic?”

            “Nope,” Rob said. “Claimed to be on the payroll of the taxpayers, but there was something off about them. I didn’t tell them much.”

            “Wonder what that means.” There was silence on the line for a moment. “We’ve been doing some research here. I’m thinking we should meet for lunch, pool our info. Say in an hour. We’ll come to you.”

            “Sounds good. Oh, and bring your little gizmo. Just in case these guys left me a present.”

~~~~~~~

            Rose had swept Rob’s office for listening devices and pronounced it clean by the time Skip and Dolph joined them. She called Mac with a throwaway phone, put it on speaker and set it in the middle of Rob’s desk. On his end, Mac also hit the speaker button so Liz could join the conversation.

            Rob’s heart swelled at the sound of Liz’s voice booming from the small clump of plastic. “Kate’s gonna be royally annoyed that she’s not in on this.”

            “She’s doing her best to get through the day with her clients,” Skip said. “I’m not about to call and upset her. She said she had two people scheduled today who are in a rough place.”

            “We’ll fill her in this evening,” Rose said. “We’re going back to Janice’s tonight. After that we’re going to need another safe house.”

            “’Specially after you all confront the ambassador tomorrow,” Mac’s gruff voice came from the phone. “I’ll make some calls. See what I can come up with.”

            Rob described his visitors, and their resistance to showing him their credentials or leaving a business card.

            “Could’ve been macho posturin’,” Mac said, “or they could be rogue.”

            Dolph opened his laptop. “You got wireless here? Any kind of a decent firewall?”

            Rob shrugged. All he knew about firewalls was that they were supposed to keep viruses from eating his computer files.

            Rose got up and went out to Fran’s desk. A minute later, she returned. “Firewall’s decent. And if they’re hacking into the system, they’d expect Rob to check on them.”

            Dolph began tapping on his keyboard.

            “We’ve confirmed that Ambassador Garcia did not exist before the age of twenty,” Rose said. “Which is when he bought his way onto the Colombian police force with the appropriate bribes. His driver, Raul Pérez, also did not exist, with that name at least, before he started working for Garcia six years ago. Had a bit more luck with him. We think he was Raul Dias, a lieutenant in a right-wing paramilitary group under the
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia,
or AUC. The AUC came into being in the late 90's to supposedly suppress the left-wing insurgency groups, like the one Garcia was in. Their methods were quite extreme. They were accused of killing hundreds of civilians and the Colombian government saw them as a greater threat to peace than the insurgents. The previous
presidente
, Álvaro Uribe, negotiated a demobilization treaty with them, but some of their members just went underground instead.

            “Raul Dias vanished from the scene about two months before Raul Pérez was hired on to Garcia’s security staff by his then security chief, José Álvarez. This was when Garcia was Assistant Minister of Defense for Colombia. Garcia’s wife’s a bit interesting. She was christened Consuela Maria Fernandez Delgado Rodriguez.”

            “Good Lord,” Liz’s voice broke in from the phone on the desk. “How many last names does one person need?”

            Rob chuckled.

            One corner of Rose’s mouth quirked up in a half smile. “Families that claim a relatively pure Spanish lineage just keep adding the prestigious family names to the list. In person she would probably introduce herself as Consuela Rodriguez de Garcia. Her Spanish lineage plus the fact that her family’s quite wealthy spells hard-core law-and-order politics in Colombia.”

            “So she may not know her hubby’s an ex-rebel,” Skip said.

            Rose shook her head. “Kate said Garcia had talked to his wife about Dawson.”

            “So she knows,” Rob said. “Any indication how involved she is in politics herself?”

            “Not at all that I can tell,” Dolph said. “Her daddy was though, before he died. A behind-the-scenes kind of guy. Tended to back politicians who advocated destroying the rebels over negotiating with them. The Garcias have been married eleven years. She’s nineteen years younger than him, currently thirty-three to his fifty-two. According to her Facebook page, which is under the name Maria Delgado, with a very limited circle of friends and the strongest privacy settings Facebook provides, she’s three months pregnant.”

            “I want to thank the judges for my second place ribbon in the world’s best hacker competition,” Liz’s voice boomed from the table. “It’s an honor to have lost to Mr. Randolph who is an inspiration to all of us who aspire to hacking excellence.”

            “I humbly decline the honor of first place,” Dolph said with a chuckle. “Hacking into a Facebook page is hardly difficult.” His fingers were still dancing around on his laptop.

            Rose nodded to Skip. “I went to D.C. to check out the ambassador’s
hacienda
,” he said. “Fort Knox has less security. I lingered across the street, pretending to consult my street map.
Hombre
immediately materialized at my elbow, suggesting I move along.”

            “Not too surprising,” Rose said. “Considering that Colombia’s still a bit unstable, despite claims to the contrary in their travel brochures.”

            Skip shook his head. “You really think
anybody
would mistake me for Hispanic, Rose? They’re not worried about their own countrymen taking out the ambassador. This felt like something else.”

            “It’s understandable that the ambassador would be paranoid,” Liz said.

            “Yeah,” Skip said. “But he’s trying to keep a low profile–everybody’s best friend, please don’t question from whence he came. Blatantly extreme security would be more likely to draw attention, which is the last thing he wants.”