Scarcity (Jack Randall #3) (6 page)

“Not yet. We’ll tell you when.”

“Okay.”

The doors opened and they followed the man past another desk and through some double doors. A small waiting room was seen with two Hispanic men sleeping in chairs. The lead man just pointed and four men broke away from the group to detain them. They woke with a startle and the looks on their faces gave them away. The group hurried on, and after several twists and turns came to another set of double doors. Here the security guard hesitated.

“Do all of you really need to go in?”

The lead man pushed past him without a word and they all entered the darkened ward. He was met by several staff members who stopped and stared. The names of the patients and their doctors where written on small dry erase boards outside every glassed-in room. He began scanning the names as he walked along, comparing the picture in his head with the faces behind the glass.

J. Hernandez

M. Dayo

This was it. He looked inside to see a rather ordinary man of about fifty sleeping comfortably in the bed. The monitors hanging from the ceiling providing proof that he still lived. He spotted the man’s wife sleeping in a chair off to one side. Pulling a picture from his pocket, he held it up as he slid the glass back. The men followed him in and the wife awoke with a start to see the room full. One of the men motioned for her to remain silent. She did.

The man on the bed seemed to sense their presence and slowly opened his eyes. They were all the proof the lead man needed. It was always the eyes. Surgery could change some things, but the eyes were always the thing that gave them away. The man didn’t blink or speak, he simply looked from man to man as if he had been expecting all of this, and they were late.

The lead man reached out and grasp the man’s chin, turning his head to the side. The scars behind his ears were plainly seen. He smiled.

“Hello, Oscar. I’ve been waiting to meet you for some time.”

Oscar Hernandez said nothing, but the look on his face was one of intense hatred. It was all he was capable of and he ignored the technician who moved forward and began taking his fingerprints. He instead focused on the man who had addressed him by his true name.

Lenny returned the look without a word.

•      •      •

Tessa ran the hairbrush through her hair while also talking on the phone and picking out what shoes to wear. Her Facebook page was open in front of her and she stopped brushing long enough to scroll through the new pictures on her friend’s page.

“He’s so cute! You sure he’s not with that bitch Megan anymore?”

This produced a long explanation of the steamy and very public break up witnessed the night before. All caught by someone’s smart phone and uploaded soon after. The pictures were making their way around the web at lightning speed.

“Has he updated yet?”

“No, his page still says he’s hitched. He may not have gotten on yet today. He works for his dad, you know.”

“He has to work? That sucks. I would just die if my dad made me work. Where’s he at?”

“You don’t know? At the grocery store on Vogle Avenue. He like, stocks shelves or something.”

“Yuck, his dad makes him work
there
?”

“Well duh, his dad owns the place, and about a thousand others just like it.”

“Oh, I get it.”

“So come pick me up and we’ll get some groceries.”

“No way.”

“Why not? You better get there before that slut Jennie does. You know she’ll just flop on her back in front of him if she decides she wants him first.”

“I know . . . she thinks she’s Paris Hilton or something.”

“So come get me and let’s go!”

“It’s the opposite way, why don’t you come get me?”

“My dad took my keys. I scratched my BMW.”

“Again?”

Tessa grabbed the keys to her Mustang and bolted from the room. She still had her iPod nubs in one ear with the phone to the other. The hairbrush stayed in her hand long enough for her to check the results in the hallway mirror before she stuck it in a back pocket and ran down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out to the garage. Her travels did nothing to stop the conversation.

“Okay, that’s like twice in two months you’ve wrecked your car. You’ve only had your license what, five months?”

“It was the damn mailbox. I didn’t see it in the dark, and the garage door thing was not my fault. I didn’t know my brother had closed it!”

“Right.”

“Like you can talk!”

Tessa ran past her father’s Mercedes and her mother’s Volvo before getting to her new Mustang. It was blue with a white leather interior—just like she had asked for. Her mother had insisted they buy her the car despite her father’s reservations. Her mother had actually tried to talk her into a BMW or a Mercedes, but she’d had her heart set on the little convertible ever since she saw one in a music video. Tessa didn’t understand that her mother was trying to keep up appearances through her daughter. So her daughter was now being seen in an American-made car. It was disgraceful.

“It was parked. I didn’t hit anything!”

“That’s what you told your parents, maybe.”

“Shut up!”

She jumped in the car and impatiently waited for the door to open. She used the time to check her makeup in the rearview mirror. The breeze blowing in the open door whipped her long blond hair around her face, and she had to pull the stray strands out of her eyes before putting the car in reverse and backing out. The Maryland suburb was quiet as she pulled around the circular drive and through the gate at the street.

As usual, the car’s CD player came on despite the phone in her ear, and she raised the volume of her voice to be heard over it. Turning it off never crossed her mind. She punched the accelerator to get to the stop sign at the end of the street in record time, as was her usual driving habit. After a rolling stop, she punched it again and sped through the curving streets on the way to her friend’s house.

“So what’re you wearing?” her friend asked.

“My Lucky jeans and those new boots I got last week.”

“That’ll work. If not, he’s blind. He’s always checking out your ass in the hallway.”

“No way!”

“Yes he does! You’re so clueless sometimes.”

Tessa laughed and pulled more hair out of her face. The wind was whipping it around constantly. She fumbled with the phone while she searched for her sunglasses in the center console. She braced the steering wheel with her knee so she could use both hands.

•      •      •

Carl was just pulling his truck up onto the curb to park. It was his fifth year in the landscaping business and he was doing well. So well that he had been working Saturdays just to keep up with the workload this summer. He parked his truck halfway over the curb and lowered his ample frame out with the use of the handle. At least all the extra work was burning off a few pounds, something his wife had commented on yesterday. He stood with the door open while he reached under the seat for his clipboard. Finding it all the way in the back, he was forced to stretch to reach it.

“Let’s go, Carl. I told Dawn I’d be home by two,” he heard his partner Nick call from the grass on the other side of the truck.

“I’m coming, just a second.”

Carl pulled back and looked up the street as he straightened his sweat stained hat. Another truck was approaching from around the curve. It was Kurt Johnson, his competition. They had a friendly rivalry, as there was plenty of work to go around in this upper class neighborhood. They would often get a beer together after a long day and do a little under-the-table price fixing. He waited for him to get closer so he could give him the finger and a smile. It was their traditional greeting.

•      •      •

Tessa looked up just in time to see the truck parked up on the curb with the driver’s door open. She let the car drift to the left to pass without letting up on the gas. Her hair flipped into her eyes once again, but she was too busy with the phone to bother with it.

•      •      •

Johnson flipped Carl the bird as he rounded the curve. He punctuated it with a honk of his horn as Carl returned the gesture. He returned his gaze to the road, but it was already too late.

•      •      •

Tessa shook the hair out of her eyes in time to see the approaching truck. Her driving reflexes were not developed enough to avoid the collision. She dropped the phone and grabbed the wheel in time to overcorrect. The Mustang responded instantly to the steering command, and the car slewed to the right, barely avoiding the head on collision.

But there was no where else to go. The car impacted the parked truck straight on, the nose diving under the high rear end and defeating the airbag sensor. The force lifted the rear wheels off the ground and shoved the truck forward several feet. Tessa’s size and weight worked to send her chest into the steering wheel before she was thrown down and under the dash. Her head struck the shifter, and she mercifully lost consciousness before the car collapsed around her. Ironically the phone survived the crash and her friend could be heard calling out to her from somewhere in the backseat.

“Tessa? Are you there? How long till you get here? . . . Tessa?”

•      •      •

Carl and Kurt pried the door open with a shovel far enough for Nick to squeeze into the opening. Nick’s brother was a paramedic, and he knew enough from him to hold the girl’s neck straight while he checked her out.

“She’s breathing.”

“Ambulance is on its way,” Carl informed him. He was still shaking from the near miss. He could have easily been between the car and his truck if Kurt hadn’t been driving by.

Tessa coughed and blood trickled from her mouth. Nick wasn’t sure what to do about that, but he remembered that he couldn’t let go of her neck.

“Hope they get here quick. She’s bleeding from her mouth.”

As if they had heard him, the sirens sounded in the distance.

“Couple of minutes, Nick, just hold on.”

Nick looked down at the broken girl in his hands. “You hear that, pretty girl? Just hold on, they’re coming,” he whispered.

•      •      •

Senator Remington Lamar of Maryland sat on one side of the large conference room table surrounded by aides. A tall man with steel gray hair and dark intelligent eyes, his name suited him. He looked exactly like what he was—an old money politician from New England. His family had been in politics since the Civil War. Currently, his younger brother and uncle both worked for the State Department, while his nephew was soon to graduate from the naval academy. All of them were ensuring the family tradition would live on for the next generation. Due to this legacy, the senator held power and influence few in his profession could match, which was the reason he had the task before him. It kept him a very busy man. But he had always been busy, first in school, and then in the military. He had followed his years of service with a successful chairmanship of the family business that had made his family even wealthier. He had since traded the business world for government work, first as a governor, and now as a senator in his fourth term.

The pile of paper on the table in front of him had been several months in the making and was nearing the point of being ready. As the head of the committee in charge of overseeing, and now revamping, the Department of Homeland Security, he was putting in the long hours. Projects of this size required help, and the senator liked to surround himself with younger versions of himself, like the man sitting across the table from him.

Although several years younger, Special Agent Jack Randall of the FBI had a career path similar to his. After leaving a family business behind him to join the FBI, he had quickly gained some fame chasing down Mafia heads, serial killers, and terrorists, before advancing to his latest position as FBI liaison to Homeland Security. Senator Lamar had asked Jack only once to come on board, and his combination of law enforcement and business experience had proven him to be the perfect man to help him with the giant undertaking.

“Tell me what we have so far, Jack.”

“Well, if we go with the current plan to combine the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, ICE, the TSA, and a big chunk of the DEA, we look to remove several layers of bureaucracy and save billions in the process. We’ll have to retire a lot of brass, but that’ll free up even more funds for more troops on the ground.”

“They’re going to argue that it’ll create more bureaucracy.”

“The old way it would. Whenever they shuffled two decks of cards together, they always kept every one, no matter how many duplicates they had. Nobody wanted to relinquish their kingdom. The plan is to axe all the dead weight during the shuffle and streamline the process, compartmentalizing things for greater efficiency.”

“What about the military side?”

“I’ve been able to find several National Guard and Reserve units that can tie their yearly training in with real-time Homeland Security operations, mostly MP units, Search and Rescue operations, and airborne radars from the Air Force and Navy. The Army Corps of Engineers will be working on the fence for a few years. Border crossing points are being reduced by 20%. The remaining points will be upgraded with more space and equipment. More sniffers, X-ray machines, and dogs. We’ll be relying less on point of origin clearances and doing it more at the border. The timeline for the construction phase is three years. That’s with projected overruns.”

“The drones?”

“Until the question of arming them or not is laid to rest, it’s still on the table. Once that’s been dealt with, I don’t see much of a problem. The cost is minimal for what they do, and it’s proven technology. We see about two dozen being deployed. Most on the Mexican border and the Gulf states, less on the Canadian side.”

“I’ll need the hardware orders to help get it past Congress,” the senator mused. “What about the rest?”

Jack pulled another printout from a stack of paper in front of him.

“Looks like at least four new cutters, eighteen V-22 Ospreys, two hundred and four Hummers with the night vision periscopes, thirty-eight Blackhawks, twenty light observation helicopters, a few radar towers and blimps, the two floating oil platforms we got for a song, and the rest is miscellaneous support equipment.”