Forty-Eight X (16 page)

Mack Shell never articulated his beliefs in great detail to his friends or peers. Most would frown at his tales and describe his faith as sin. Christianity held such power in America, and particularly in the armed forces, that any belief that did not include redemption through Christ would make him out as some bizarre cultist. But nevertheless, he felt he could be a vehicle that would help reveal or release this ancient knowledge and perhaps return a harmony to earth—an earth scarred with wars, ripe with the seven deadly sins, with nature itself in disarray. The ancients had an innate wisdom and spirituality, a love and respect for each other and for Mother Earth. Perhaps, with a few billion dollars, and the talents of a bunch of scientists busy manipulating the secrets in men’s genes, Lemuria, and everything it stood for, would rise again. Of course, in the meantime, a few people would have to die first. After all, Mack Shell was also a pragmatist.

Ding dong
.

D
r. Kyle Evans held a prestigious chair in genetics at UCLA. The professor was a tall, lanky man in his early fifties. He lived alone in a posh Westwood neighborhood bordering the gates of Bel Air. He had never married, and other than his work, exercise was his life. He was most often seen in his neighborhood and about campus jogging or biking wearing Spandex shorts. Maggie Wagner knew him well. He had visited with her father several times at Stanford during collegial conferences. He was one of those health nuts who popped a dozen herbal supplements daily, drank only specialty vitamin-enriched water, and maintained one of those diet regimens suitable for rabbits and gurus on Indian mountaintops. Because he was such an exercise freak, she expected him to confound everyone by dropping dead unexpectedly—and ironically-one day, like Jim Fixx, the famously fit runner who wrote
The Complete Book of Running
. Maggie had found Professor Evans’s name in her father’s day calendar. Apparently, he had met with her father in the weeks before his death.

Maggie phoned the professor and then e-mailed him to inquire about that meeting and, perhaps, learn more about her father’s Lemuria Project and any suspicions he might have. At first Dr. Evans didn’t answer or return her calls. One day he inadvertently picked up his phone and curtly brushed her off by saying he had an appointment and would call back. He never did.

Ding dong
. Nate Stumpf rang the doorbell again. Maggie stood by his side.

“Maybe he’s not home,” she suggested.

“His car’s in the driveway. He’s home.”

Stumpf rang the doorbell again—and again, and again, and again.

Peeking through a side window, the professor could see a shady-looking, short, balding man ringing his doorbell with Maggie Wagner by his side. He didn’t intend to answer and rubbed the back of his neck with apprehension.

Maggie watched as Stumpf rang the bell every five seconds. How long would he do this? Then he abruptly stopped ringing and walked to his car. He opened the trunk and retrieved a folding chair, a bottle of water, and an iPod and headset, and returned to sit down comfortably in front of Dr. Evans’s front door.

“You can wait in the car if you want,” he told Maggie. “If there’s one virtue I have, it’s patience.”

He began to ring again. An hour passed, and then another, and every five seconds, twelve times a minute, 720 times an hour, he rang the bell. Stumpf sat on his chair with iPod earphones on and listened to a book on tape-motivational lectures on how to influence people and the power of positive thinking. He alternated ringing the bell using one arm, and then, when it tired, the other. In the course of this “investigative” endeavor, Stumpf began to ring Dr. Evans on his phone, as well.

The doorbell rang. The phone rang. The ringing was driving Evans mad. He thought of calling the cops, but then he’d have to answer the door and—well, what would this madman do? Two weeks earlier, he had thought of calling the police but didn’t call then either.

It had been in broad daylight on a Sunday morning. He stepped out of his house to pick up his newspaper when two black men wearing nice slacks with shirts and ties walked up to him. The only black men he ever saw walking in his neighborhood were those who said they were selling magazines for college or were evangelicals proselytizing their religion. The only other blacks he ever saw in his neighborhood didn’t walk. They were the ultrarich folks-mostly sports stars or entertainers-driving by in luxury cars. His only thought as the two men approached him on this beautiful Sunday morning was,
I’m not buying magazines and I have enough religion
.

General Mack Shell had eyeballed these same two young men a few days earlier from the confines of a sedan with dark-tinted windows. He was parked across from a liquor store on gang turf in South Central Los Angeles. He sat next to an FBI agent, Harley Fealkoff. Harley looked ten years younger than his fifty years, with a bushy mustache and well-coiffed hair. He was the photogenic guy the Bureau put out for the television crews when statements had to be made about touchy issues like manhunts for serial killers or sieges against villages of armed cultists. Fealkoff was also in charge of “street teams” for the Bureau. While Shell listened to the agent, he felt comfortable that he was with the kind of guy who was prepared for contingencies. Fealkoff had a .357 Magnum sitting at the ready on the center console of his car.

“I don’t want to have to reach far,” he said, “if the scenery turns nasty.”

They were parked just down the street from the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues, the spot where in April 1992 the Los Angeles riots erupted and where a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was dragged from his vehicle while parked at a stoplight and nearly beaten to death by a black mob.

“I knew Rodney King,” Harley told him. “He was the ultimate asshole. You know his big quote ‘Can’t we all get along?’ Well, with assholes you sometimes just can’t.”

“You see the one on the left?” Fealkoff nodded toward the taller black gangster with pectoral muscles that looked like armor plate. “He just got his law degree.”

“Really?” Shell said with sincere surprise. The guy reminded him of a young, mean-looking heavyweight champ named Mike Tyson. Someone who would just as soon bite your ear off.

“In the sixties,” Harley explained to his VIP passenger, “the Bureau infiltrated the Mafia and Costa Nostra with ‘made men’ they’d compromised. In the nineties, we started doing the same thing with black and Hispanic gangs that were edging into organized crime. We don’t just pay off snitches. Just like we recruit the best and brightest out of law schools for the Bureau, we recruit the best and brightest youngsters in these communities, too. We train them and pay them to infiltrate the largest gangs in America’s inner cities. Sometimes we’ve had to hire a few that have gone off the beaten track once or twice in their lives. We make some compromises. They make compromises. And we get the job done.”

“You have FBI agents selling dope on the streets,” Shell commented with some dismay.

“They’re authorized to commit petty crimes. They have to fit in. Look, off the record, we don’t even care if they kill rival gang members if what they’re putting a stop to is really dirty. But anything big—major narcotics smuggling or bank jobs—they’d let the Bureau know about.”

The men Shell saw looked like typical gangbangers. They wore low-slung jeans, with tight T-shirts outlining their rippled muscles, and were heavily tattooed. Like several others on the street, they were in the business of making side-window drug deals with cars that frequently drove up. But the FBI sedan parked across the street clearly looked like an undercover cop car. So, when cars did drive up, the “boys” just waved them on. They glowered a few minutes at the black sedan and then swaggered off down the street with a cohort of “homeboys” trailing behind.

“These men,” Shell asked, “you think they’re up to the job?”

“Absolutely,” Fealkoff answered without hesitation. “I’ve trusted them with more. A law degree from a gangbanger growing up in the inner city, I think that’s got to be a more noble and difficult task than my son or yours graduating from Harvard.”

Shell nodded.

“You want to talk to them?” Harley asked.

“No. I’m good,” Shell said. “Let’s go.” He was confident these two agents would serve his purposes well.

As Fealkoff drove off, he set his big gun safely under the seat again. Shell meanwhile was looking forward to Sedona.

When the black men walked up to him, Professor Evans was prepared to politely listen to the first words of their “pitch” before telling them he wasn’t interested. But their first words caught him off guard.

“Get on the ground, motherfucker!” One of the men pointed a shiny chrome revolver an inch from Evans’s nose. He could see the bullets in the chamber. Then they shoved him facedown on the lawn.

My God
, Evans thought, this is crazy.
It’s broad daylight in Westwood. Don’t they think someone will see? Someone will notice. Someone will help
.

“I don’t have my wallet,” Evans said, his voice cracking fearfully. “My wallet’s in the house.”

“Shut up,” the second man said.

The first one pressed his mouth to Evans’s ear. He could feel the moisture on his lips and the hot breath. “You’ve been warned,” he said. “If you mention Lemuria, if you even whisper the word, we’ll fuckin’ kill you. And we’ll mess up anybody you know or care about. You got it, motherfucker?”

The muzzle of a gun was pressed into his neck, his face pushed farther into the dirt, and then he heard a loud pop and a painful punch to the back of his neck. Was he shot?

The voice spoke into his ear again. “We’ve put a microchip into your neck. We’ll know everything you say, everywhere you go.” Then he was slapped hard on the back of the head. He felt dazed, maybe he’d pass out, but the pain passed, and when he looked up, he saw a car driving off, disappearing around the corner.

The FBI gangbangers smiled. Their marks believed they’d implanted some microchip into their necks. But it was just an air gun without pellets. Push hard enough and it hurt, bruised a bit. But there was no microchip. It was a trick that did the job. It shut people up.

Evans got up slowly and looked up and down his block. Someone was working on their garden at one end of the street. He could see a group of bike riders zipping past at the other corner. But the street was quiet. No one had noticed his assault. That’s what made Shell’s team seem even more fearsome. They were so brash, unafraid. Evans rubbed the back of his neck and slowly walked inside his house. He thought about calling the police. But he didn’t. They’d be listening. Two days later, Julius Wagner was dead and Kyle Evans was glad he didn’t call.

And now—now, some lunatic was ringing his doorbell—over and over, hour after hour. It was driving him mad. Okay, he thought, he’d open the door, tell the guy to go away, and slam the door again. Maybe—

When Evans opened the door, Stumpf shoved him inside and kept shoving until the professor found himself slumped on his couch. Stumpf was a foot shorter and forty pounds lighter then the professor. He was often puny compared to his adversaries, and he knew that to get the upper hand, he had to be decisive.
Throw the first punch
was always his first plan. Think next.

“What do you want?” the professor asked desperately. But he was subdued. He wasn’t moving from the couch.

Nate Stumpf pulled out his cell phone and pushed
send
.

Maggie had been napping in the car across the street for two hours when her cell phone rang.

“I’m in. He’s here,” Stumpf said.

She jumped out of the car and ran inside.

Maggie got right to the point. “Dr. Evans, you knew my father. You were friends and colleagues. I know he met with you and talked about something called the Lemuria Project.”

That word
, Evans thought, sweat beading on his brow,
that word is going to get me killed
.

“My father didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

She waited for his response. Evans knew it was true. But he wasn’t going to say anything. His neck was still sore from that implanted microchip. He’d been well warned.

“I think it had something to do with a research project he was working on—the Lemuria Project. I want to know what it was.”

Evans sat up on the couch and looked away. Stumpf thought about punching him in the face, just once. Sometimes that worked.

“Please,” Maggie pleaded. “My father was murdered. His name has been ruined. I have to know. Does it have anything to do with one of the big pharm companies?”

No answer. But Stumpf was used to reading people. The professor averted his eyes, looking down and away. He knew something.

Stumpf wished he could just pull out a gun and shove it into the guy’s face. A gun would work. But he didn’t have a gun because he didn’t have a permit to carry one. It was virtually impossible to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in Los Angeles. You either had to have some political clout with a local sheriff or a lot of money. Stumpf had neither. Now, if he lived in Arizona, well, there he’d be packing on both hips. He’d been ringing a doorbell for hours. He was hungry, tired, and he was getting paid by results, not by the hour. Time for answers. He punched the guy in the face.