Soul Intent (2 page)

I sighed. I didn’t think Lester was searching for relevancy. He probably was just gold digging.

two

Present Day

KentIsland, Maryland

My parents arrived five minutes after Lester bolted in search of his destiny. They wore shorts, our company polo shirts, and sandals. Dad carried a stack of red folders, and Mom wheeled a large cooler up to the front door.

She poked her head inside. “Yoo-hoo! You guys decent?”

“Of course we are,” I said. I pulled the door open. “Come on in.”

“Are the girls here?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Val said. She reached for the handle on the cooler. “Let me take this to the kitchen.”

Dad followed Mom inside. He dropped the red folders on his desk. He went to the refrigerator and helped himself to a beer. Then he and I headed out back.

“You got any bait?” he asked.

“It’s all ready,” I said. We walked out to the end of the dock, and I chopped two bloodworms in half. We baited, cast out, set the rods into their holders, and parked ourselves on the bench.

“Bluefish are running, I read online this morning,” he said.

I grunted.

He drained his beer. “Something bugging you?”

I nodded. “Lester the reporter just left. He was back digging up dirt on Soul Identity.”

“What’d he want, an anniversary story?”

“I can’t believe it’s been a year already.”

Dad smiled. “His exposé was yellow journalism at its worst.”

Last summer our tiny security company contracted with Soul Identity, and we helped save them from insolvency while we unraveled an insider attack. That took a little more than a week, and it took me a little less than a week to fall for Valentina Nikolskaya, the gorgeous redhead in charge of writing the software Soul Identity used.

At the time I had thought Soul Identity was some kind of wacky, New Age cult. But they’re not. They don’t force any religious accoutrements on top of their identification and depositary. They let people focus on spiritual questions without having to cater to any one group’s thoughts on what the Almighty or the Everlasting is all about. Instead of acting like another religion, they foster personal spiritual thinking.

At least now they do. Some time in the last decade they had stopped paying attention to personal growth, and they left themselves open to a nasty insider attack. It came from someone they thought was a leader: Andre Feret. He started his own religion called WorldWideSouls, and he conned many Soul Identity members into transferring their deposits to his new church. Val and I helped to catch and expose him as a fraud. Now Feret rots at the bottom of a Venetian canal, WorldWideSouls languishes at a fraction of its former size, and Soul Identity flourishes as a place where spiritual thinking is encouraged.

Lester the reporter got involved because some of Feret’s WorldWideSouls goons had shot at my parents, Val, and me. We escaped on my boat, but while we were out of town in India, Iceland, and Italy, Lester’s paper ran wild with speculations on a mob invasion of KentIsland. His exaggerated tales of mayhem brought in more work for our security consulting firm, but it also made my number one client nervous about our notoriety.

“If he writes any more dirt, Archie’s gonna be pissed,” I said. Archibald Morgan was Soul Identity’s octogenarian executive overseer.

My cell phone rang, and I glanced at the caller ID. “Speak of the devil,” I said as I thumbed the answer button. “Archie, we were just talking about you.”

“Scott, I require your immediate services,” Archie said. “Can you come to Sterling right away?”

I threw the call on speakerphone so Dad could hear. “We’re in the middle of our company picnic, and then Val and I were going to celebrate our first year together with a week off somewhere.” Not that I had planned anything yet, but I should have. “What’s the emergency?”

“Our depositary has been robbed!” Archie’s voice shrieked out of the phone.

Soul Identity’s huge investment pool made its depositary quite a target. It explained why they preferred anonymity over notoriety.

“The whole depositary?” I asked, glancing over at Dad.

Heavy breathing over the phone.

“Archie?”

“I may have overstated the problem,” he said.

I looked at Dad, and he shrugged. We waited until Archie continued.

“During the Nuremberg trials in 1946, I helped a Nazi general establish his soul line collection. Today I happened to look inside the account, and the items I helped him deposit are missing.”

“Does the account have a current carrier?” I asked.

“It does not.”

“Has anybody opened the collection since 1946?”

“The depositary has no records of any activity.”

I scratched my head. “A soul line collection was broken into sometime in the last sixty-four years, and you want me to solve it?”

“I want you to find out who broke in and how they did it, and then make sure they cannot do it again,” he said.

I glanced at Dad as I spoke into the phone. “You do realize how cold the trail could be.”

A big sigh over the speaker. “Of course I do. But you must realize how important this is. Please come to Sterling, Scott. I need your help.”

He did pay the bills, and a depositary break-in, no matter how long ago it happened, sounded interesting. “How about we fly up in the morning?” I asked.

“I will await your arrival,” he said, the relief evident in his voice.

I disconnected and turned to Dad. “I never would have guessed that Soul Identity deposited Nazi money,” I said.

“You’d better not tell Lester.”

Val came down the dock. “Have you seen the girls?” she asked.

I cupped my hands around my eyes to reduce the glare bouncing off the water, and I tracked the closest boat heading south from the BayBridge. “That’s them coming now.”

“You let them use your boat?” Dad asked.

“They needed to get their diving credentials re-certified,” I said. “They’ve been taking it out all week.”

“Let’s hope they sail better than they cook,” he said. He got up and lowered the boatlift into the water.

While Dad readied the lift, I told Val about Archie’s call. “He’s acting kind of strange,” I said. “I told him we’d fly up tomorrow.”

She smiled. “I’d love to meet with my team again before our big launch.”

“Then I’ll book us a room at the guest house.”

Rose and Marie waved to us and brought the boat close to the dock. Rose sat in the cockpit, and Marie stood at the bow, a coil of rope in her hands. The twins wore huge sunglasses and tiny bikinis. They each sported an official company baseball hat, their long dark hair pulled back into ponytails through the hats’ fasteners.

“That’s quite the summer uniform,” Dad said. “What if we distributed a company calendar featuring the twins? It would be great advertising for the business.”

Rose and Marie worked part-time with us, mostly on weekend assignments, as this fit into their freshman-year university schedule. Their exotic Gypsy beauty, happy laughter, and earnest acting made them perfect for their assignments.

Rose steered the boat into the slip, and Dad raised the boatlift.

Marie jumped onto the dock. “Sorry we’re late, Scott,” she said. “We had to drive Grandma to the airport this morning.”

“She’s taking a vacation?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Mr. Morgan asked her to come up to Sterling. Some problem with an old account from the forties that they both worked on.”

Madame Flora, the twins’ grandmother, operated a palm reading joint here on KentIsland. She recruited Soul Identity members, earning commissions when they matched existing soul lines. My parents and I met her and the twins last year as we started our Soul Identity work.

Madame Flora’s involvement in Archie’s current predicament didn’t surprise me. The old Gypsy lady’s entanglements with the organization appeared to run deep.

“Your grandmother’s been working with Archie for a long time,” I said.

Rose hopped onto the deck. “She told us she first met Mr. Morgan in Germany, right after World War II,” she said.

“It’s amazing how everybody’s so connected,” Val said to me.

“What did you girls make for the picnic?” Dad asked.

“Pasta salad,” Rose said. “Only Marie forgot to peel the onions before she chopped them up.”

“I was pulling out the little bits of onion paper all morning, bawling my eyes out,” Marie said.

“And I soaked the pasta all night long, but it never did get soft,” Rose said. “Good thing salad’s supposed to be crunchy.”

I looked down at the dock, biting my lip and trying not to laugh. Then Rose poked Marie, and the two burst out in giggles.

“What’s the joke?” I asked.

“We know you guys never trust our cooking,” Marie said. “We didn’t really make a pasta salad. We ordered pizza.”

And our fourth annual company picnic was a success. Rose and Marie whipped us all at badminton, Dad and I held court at the barbeque, and Mom and Val cooked up a storm. We sat out under a large maple and told stories about the adventures we had over the past year. When we all were full, Dad got us arranged into a semicircle and handed each of us a red folder.

“Why so formal?” I asked.

“It’s our annual report,” Mom said. “Your father worked on it most of the night.”

Dad had us flip to the first page. “Look at the graph,” he said. “Our business grew by seventeen hundred percent this year.”

“Your Soul Identity work made up almost half the increase,” Mom said. “But my testing business did even better.”

Last fall Mom and the twins established a girls-only penetration testing service. The three went out on weekends to various banks and government facilities. They used low-tech hacking to break in, and they held seminars on making security improvements. Every now and then they’d invite Val, Dad, and me to join them on their escapades. Mom had made friends with a bunch of commercial insurance underwriters, and those guys fiercely promoted her services.

I flipped the page. “How about our costs, Dad?”

“That’s even better news,” he said. “Our profits are way up. Even after tripling our bonuses, paying taxes, and buying new equipment, our five person company has a little over a million dollars in cash reserves.”

Smiles all around.

Val raised her hand. “Have you thought about donating to charity? It’s a great way to give something back to the community.”

I shrugged. “Honestly, no.” I wasn’t that thrilled with the idea, either. I looked around the circle. “What do you guys think?”

“It sounds like a good idea,” Mom said, and everybody nodded.

“If we do this, it has to be a charity that actually uses the money wisely,” I said. “Not some group that eats it up in administrative costs.”

“You could give us each fifty grand, and let us choose where to donate it,” Dad said.

Everybody nodded again.

“I know Grandma gives money to help the Roma in Croatia,” Marie said. “That’s where she grew up.”

“Those Gypsies don’t waste a dime,” Rose said. “We spent the summer after our junior year over there, helping them build a community center.”

“Rose and I will donate our portions to Grandma’s fund,” Marie said.

Rose nodded.

“I can support that,” Mom said. She nudged Dad with her elbow. “So can you.”

“It appears I can too,” Dad said.

I looked at Val, and she nodded. “Let’s make it unanimous,” I said. I turned to the girls. “Find out from your Grandma where we should send the check.”

“And see if you can get them to write us a press release,” Dad said. “A quarter of a million should buy us some good will.”

three

Present Day

KentIsland, Maryland

The next morning Val and I caught the early flight from Baltimore to Providence. Ninety minutes later I drove the rental car up to the Soul Identity headquarters gates in Sterling, Massachusetts and whipped out my shiny gold membership card.

“It’s my first time using this,” I said to the guard.

After dragging my feet for almost a year, I had finally signed on as a full-fledged Soul Identity member. Bob, our local Soul Identity delivery person, dropped off my membership card and welcome package just last week.

Val reached out and straightened my collar. “But you’re still wearing black.”

“Because it pays so much more.” At headquarters, employees wore green and contractors wore black. My agreement had Soul Identity paying my outrageously high contractor wages around the clock while I was on assignment. “And because I look better in black,” I added.

“Don’t you feel guilty, now that you’re a member?”

Val and I had been having this conversation for the past few months. She felt I was taking advantage of the organization.