Terror Bounty (9 page)

Rick rubbed his eyes until he was able to
fully open them. The room was still dark, it was the middle of the night
according to the alarm clock on the nightstand. Yet the bed was disappointingly
spacious. He turned his head and saw that he was alone.

He searched the room until he found
Olivia pulling on her clothes next to the bathroom.

“You can stay a little longer if you
want,” he said, his voice hoarse. “They told me they make good breakfast food here.”

“No, I’d better not.”

He yawned and stirred as he watched her
slinking into her dress. He had seen worse things.

“We’re alone now,” he pointed out. “No
more bullshit, okay?”

This gave her pause and she turned to
face him. “All right, no more bullshit. Who are you?”

“I told you, Rick Travis, weapons buyer
extraordinaire.”

“When I went through your laptop I found
some notes you have on Willis Greenwood. You know he’s a client of ours.”

Rick sat up swiftly. It made the bed
sheet fall down to his lap, exposing his naked body. He didn’t care.

“You searched my files?”

“Call it safe sex. Hiding the files in
the system directory was a nice touch but you really should rename them. And
consider password protection.”

She winked like a smarty-pants who always
gets the answers right in class. She reached behind her back and expertly
zipped up her dress.

“Jesus…”

“We said no more bullshit,” she said like
this excused everything.

Rick exhaled loudly. Did this change
things between them? If she knew he was after Greenwood, was his life in danger
again? He had half expected to be murdered in his sleep but the wonderful night
he’d spent with her had made him look past this.

It was time to switch tactics.

“I’m writing a book on Greenwood. It’s
gonna relate how I found him and when I do I’m gonna interview him. You know,
there was a show –
60 Minutes
or something – they did this a few years
back. They tracked a terrorist, had an exclusive interview, it was very big
news.”

“Rick, come on…”

“I swear. Hey, remember Sean Penn? He
made contact with this Mexican drug lord and then he wrote an article for
Rolling
Stone
magazine. Again, this made huge headlines. That’s what I’m doing,
this adventure, this project. It’s just a book. It’s all for a goddamn book.”

Olivia considered this for a moment and
then shook her head. “You’d have more notes than that.”

What else could he say to her so she
would believe him? He sat on the edge of the bed, covering himself with the bed
sheet.

“I told you already that I’m new at this,
remember?”

Olivia picked up her tall black boots
from the floor and began putting them on. Rick hadn’t noticed these before and
it made her sexier than ever.

“That doesn’t tell me what you want with
Greenwood,” she said. “The book is bullshit and we agreed to do without bullshit.”

“Look, I need to find him pretty badly.
Let’s leave it at that. Will you help me?”

She looked at him without moving, her
face nothing but a mystery. Then she moved to slip on her jacket.

“No, I won’t help you.”

She turned around and left the room.

Rick rubbed his neck before dropping back
on the bed.

“Shit.”

He was back at square one.

~  ~  ~  ~

The leaves had mostly all fallen away in
Geneva. Bob Sagan hated that time of year, it was beginning to get too chilly
for his taste. It reminded him too much of home.

As he walked through the kitchen to brew
his first cup of coffee of the day, he admired the sun rising over the Jura
Mountains. That was something they didn’t have back in Detroit.

The thought of his hometown gave him
goose bumps. There wasn’t a better representation of how the world had gone to
hell. It was the very embodiment of capitalism. As if a swarm of insects, like
a virus, greed had gone through Detroit until nothing was left but an empty
shell, just ruins.

And who was paying the price now? It wasn’t
the wealthy. They’d taken their money and left the place at the first sign of
trouble. No, it was the blue-collar workers, the single mothers, the
disenfranchised.

Their homes, everything they had worked
for, it was now worth less than nothing. And those who managed to survive got
punished with a crumbling infrastructure that pumped polluted water into their homes.

“Uuuuggghh!”

Sagan grabbed his porcelain mug and threw
it against the wall where it shattered in a thousand pieces.

He had to control himself, Willis kept
telling him to. But it was so hard, couldn’t he understand? He tried, he did
those breathing exercises, but sometimes his anger was so sharp, like razor, it
had to burst out or he would break down completely, he just knew it.

But being with Willis, being part of the Oppressed
World Liberators, it was what kept him going. It gave Sagan a tangible goal.
Together they could beat these pigs at their own game, they could turn the
tables on them.

He looked at the porcelain shards on the
ground and chuckled. He was getting better with his anger, at least he had sent
the cup hurling before filling it with coffee. Unlike the last time.

He filled a new mug with black coffee and
headed to the living room. It was beautiful, spacious for pricey Switzerland,
and it made him sick. Growing up, he would have killed to live in something
like this, before their home was repossessed when the economy tanked. When no
one helped his parents with so much as a job.

Now this apartment represented everything
he hated about Western civilization. It was so ostentatious. Perverted fucking
values! The sheeple had to wake up, they couldn’t be blind forever.

And that was why he agreed to play along
this charade. Living in this apartment was only a means to an end.

He got to his laptop and sat down with it
on the couch. He drank some coffee, browsed to the website he’d been monitoring
for the last few days, and saw a green icon. His contact was online.

Making sure he had a secure connection,
he sent a quick personal message and soon they were both in a video chat room.

“Hi,” he said.

The other man waved. Hell, he didn’t even
know if it was a man. The figure before him was wearing an oversized Mickey
Mouse head, just like at the theme parks. And the voice was distorted until it
was seemingly computer-generated. The only thing Sagan knew about him – or her
– was that they were located in China.

“Hello.”

“Are you ready to make the financial
arrangements?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

Mickey Mouse was a hacker by trade but
the OWL used him for all their financial transactions. There was nobody better at
moving money between countries, not just to avoid the tax man but to stay
absolutely anonymous.

The organization had bank accounts in a
handful of offshore financial centers like the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man,
and Vanuatu – with even more faceless Panamanian corporations to mask
everything. Mickey Mouse made sure that the money was funneled quietly.

“So what I want you to do is transfer 2.5
million–”

Mickey Mouse held up a hand to interrupt
him. “American currency?”

“Yeah. From my primary account into Cold
Lake.”

They had code names for each account. You
could never be too careful as Willis kept telling him.

“Right now?”

“Right now,” Sagan confirmed. “Sometime
in the near future I’ll be contacting you again.

“The bitcoins, yes?”

“Yeah, they’ll need to be converted. You’ll
need to get ready to transfer another 2.5 million to the same account.”

“You got it.”

Sagan waved goodbye, not bothering to
hide the small tattoo of an owl inside his forearm. It was the crest of their
organization and he was prouder of it than of anything in his life.

With the connection terminated, he took
another sip of coffee before reaching for today’s burner phone. He dialed a
number he knew by heart.

“
Si?
”

That’s right
, Sagan understood with a smile. Willis was in Italy at the moment.
He liked the foreign touch, it was amusing.

“It’s me. Am I calling too early?”

“No, it’s fine. I may have a tad overdone
it on the wine last night, that’s all. Is it done?”

“Yes,” Sagan said. “The wheels are in
motion.”

“Marvelous. It’s time to move on to the
next phase. Send the file.”

“You got it! I’m doing this right now.”

The line had gone dead before he had even
begun his reply. That was so much like Willis, always business business
business. That’s why he admired him. That’s why he would follow him to the ends
of the earth.

Sagan returned to his computer and
prepared to carry on his mission.

There was nothing worse than staring at
the alarm clock when you couldn’t sleep. It only reminded you that you were a
complete failure, that you couldn’t even do something as simple as falling
asleep.

That’s exactly what was happening to
Jason Vanstedum. He was lying on his side, his eyes riveted to the blue LED
lights ticking down the minutes until he’d have to get up.

Hell, even if he did manage to fall
asleep for the few hours he had left before he had to get up, it wouldn’t be
enough. He’d be tired like crazy and he couldn’t afford that. He was a senior
FBI man, the Assistant Director for Counterterrorism, and he was in charge of
the biggest case of his career.

And he wouldn’t be able to do his job
properly for something as stupid as lack of sleep.

He’d read a story once that he found
ironically similar. It was something about a rocket fired into space by the Air
Force. It had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, had spent years in
development, if not decades, and it had exploded in midair. The reason? An
overworked contractor bore a hole that was half a hair’s width too big.

He couldn’t let that happen to his
career. More importantly, there was a terrorist on the loose and the Bureau was
counting on Vanstedum to bring him in.

For some reason he thought of Rogan
Bricks. That guy had been a thorn in his side, definitely not a team player,
but if there was one thing he could say about him it was that he knew how to
get results. It was almost a shame he couldn’t bring him in on this.

Almost.

He sighed and flipped onto his back,
anything to avoid looking at the time. He thought about getting out of bed,
maybe watching TV or going over his notes. It was too late for a nightcap.

But sweet Jesus he needed one! Aside from
Greenwood, he thought about his life going to hell in a handbasket. He was
separated from his wife even though few people knew. It was best to keep up
appearances.

A happy marriage was part of the unspoken
rules of advancement in Washington. If you couldn’t even make your marriage
work, how were you supposed to be able to wrangle hundreds of agents?

His wife thankfully understood this and
her moving away was being explained as a family emergency. Vanstedum wondered
how long they’d be able to keep up this pretense.

And then there were his kids. The
youngest was a freshman at Tulane and he was already talking about quitting. He
wanted to backpack through Europe or some crap. Couldn’t kids understand what
was good for them? It gave him heartburn just thinking about the talk he needed
to have with him.

Suddenly, a nightcap didn’t seem such a
crazy idea after all. He craved it, it was medicinal.

He sat up, swung his feet out of the bed.
That’s when his phone rang. He snorted a laugh. Maybe it was fate that he hadn’t
fallen asleep yet. On the other hand, he didn’t believe in fate.

“Yeah, Vanstedum.”

“Assistant Director, I’m so sorry to wake
you up in the middle of the night.”

The woman didn’t identify herself right
away but the number identified her as being from the night desk at the SIOC. He
didn’t bother to let her know that she hadn’t woken him up.

“What is it?”

“Sir, we just had a message from the OWL.
They’re saying there’s gonna be another attack.”

~  ~  ~  ~

The trip north into Washington DC from
Franconia, Virginia was only 15 miles but it usually took Vanstedum at least 40
minutes in rush-hour traffic. In the middle of the night, he reached the J.
Edgar Hoover building in less than 20.

“What do we have?” he barked as he
entered the large monitoring room of the FBI’s Strategic Information and
Operations Center.

The place was busy, everyone halfway
between panic and excitement. The place was filled with big screens,
workstations. It was the nerve center of the FBI during a crisis, able to
interact with any branch of the US government at a moment’s notice.

He headed to a station on the left-hand
side. There were three analysts and two special agents, including Westerbeck
who was running field operations on this. More people would be arriving
shortly.

“This is the video we received half an
hour ago.”

“Play it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The young woman nodded and clicked her
mouse.

The video faded in. There was a series of
images of stately buildings morphing into one another. They were banks. In the
background, there was the soft hum of
America the Beautiful
. But more
important was the voiceover narration.

“America is at war against its citizens.
The future once seemed bright, our forefathers intended for us to live in a
nation of truth and justice. Equality, in spirit at least, was implied. There
were bumps along the way like the Civil War, like the Great Depression, but we
eventually looked past our differences. After World War II the future looked
bright indeed.”

The music changed. Vanstedum recognized
God
Bless America
and he sat down. There were more images of banks with their
marble columns on the screen.

“But you know what happened as we, as a
nation, became too comfortable in our superiority in the Cold War? What
happened is that we basked in our collective glory. We told ourselves that if
we were winning against the Soviets it was because capitalism was the single
best philosophy in existence. It wouldn’t have been too bad if we had kept this
feeling as a proverbial pat on the back. But no, we actually went overboard. We
let our governments give powers to corporations.”

Once more, the music changed, this time
to
This Land is Your Land
.

“The Federal Reserve is controlling our
economy, dictating the terms. Companies are swallowing the competition before
it even gets off the ground, essentially becoming monopolies. And then there
are the banks creating money out of thin air to stuff their pockets, conning
honest workers out of their life savings just to feed their ever-growing greed.
We let them act with impunity. I hereby declare that the Oppressed World
Liberators will not stand for this. These banks can no longer sin with
impunity. They will be punished.”

The music stopped, the image switched to
the silhouette of a person staring into the camera although no features could
be identified.

“We have acted recently, you know what we’re
capable of. If you don’t want another cataclysmic event of that magnitude, you
will agree to our demands. We want every financial institution listed as
Fortune 500 companies to abolish banking fees. They will lower their interest
rates – mortgage, credit cards, and personal loans – to 1% effective noon
tomorrow. Then, they will pass down 75% of their annual profits not to
shareholders but to their clients, equally distributed to each account holder.
This isn’t unreasonable, it’s good common decency. Refuse to act and you will pay
the price.”

The video faded to the OWL logo and then
to black before stopping completely.

Vanstedum leaned back into his chair and
exhaled. “Holy shit. All right, status report.”

“We’re having the video analyzed by the
techs,” a young analyst said.

“How did we get it?”

“E-mailed to the FBI. We’re tracking the
IP addresses but it’s a maze, rerouted through thousands of servers. Whoever
sent this knows what they’re doing. It was also posted on YouTube; we got it
taken down almost immediately.”

“Are they helping us track down who posted
it?” the Assistant Director asked with a glimmer of hope.

“Yeah, but we shouldn’t hold our breath.
There are so many layers of VPNs and spoofed IPs that this is gonna wind up
being untraceable.”

“Figures. What about from the visual
cues? These pictures, they look like stock images, right? Can we track down
where they were downloaded? Maybe we can get a lead this way.”

An agent with his jacket off nodded
without much conviction. “Already on it. We’re also trying to identify the
source of the music used. It’s a long shot but maybe we can find from which website
it came from.”

“Good. And the guy at the end? Can we fiddle
with it, see what’s behind the shadow?”

“We think it might be Greenwood but it
could also be stock footage. There’s nothing in the background to identify
location, the room looks sterile.”

At that moment, an assistant brought a
coffee to Vanstedum. He hadn’t known he needed it until it was in his hand.

“Thanks. So okay, let’s start thinking
laterally. Worst case scenario?”

“Worst case scenario is that he’s not
bluffing.”

“We know he has the capabilities and will
to kill people,” another agent said. “Greenwood’s done it before.”

Vanstedum nodded. “That deadline,
tomorrow at noon. It’s completely unrealistic. He knows that and he knows that
there’s no way any bank can or would comply. He just wants an excuse to blow
something up again. The question is: what?”

An analyst propelled himself with his
feet and sent his chair rolling two yards away. He promptly returned with a
printout.

“I’ve been looking into this. Greenwood,
if that was his voice which we can’t say for sure yet, he was ranting against
banks.”

“And?”

“I’ve identified some possible leads. At
the moment from what I was able to gather, there’s talk of a merger between Cascade
Peak Financial and Willamette Loans, that’s in Oregon. Also, Chase has their
stockholders meeting in New York next week, that could be something. And I
found online this announcement of new financial services at Perkins &
Molina in Dallas. These are all juicy targets.”

Vanstedum sipped his coffee before
putting it down and standing up.

“Greenwood talked about capitalism and
banks. But do we really know for sure his target is the US? If it’s not, then
his next attack could be anywhere in the world.”

Everybody was silent, staring at him.
They understood what that meant.

No one on the planet was safe.