No More To Lose: Strike 3

No More To Lose

Strike 3

A (3rd) Novella

Dr. Gregory Steinberg

Prologue

She reread the letter twice. Quickly the first time, to ensure she had not misunderstood the general gist and tone. Then again, slowly, carefully, deliberately.

Dear Ms. Giles, my name is Herbert Schoenberg. You knew my wife, Margaret Schoenberg. The two of you first met in 2010 at a breast cancer survivors group sponsored by Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. Maggie thought very highly of you, and although I never met you personally, I feel I know you at least partially from what she told me. For example, I know that you are a decorated retired police officer, and that, like Maggie, you like Pinot Noir, skiing, and Bruce Springsteen.

Before I go on, if you are reading this letter, it means, by definition, that I am dead, and that my death was neither an accident nor, as my obituary will likely state, a suicide. I tell you this not to be dramatic, but I need to make sure that I have your full attention.

As you know, in addition to breast cancer, our two families have experienced other tragedies. Your only son Robert was killed by Islamic terrorists in the Bataclan Nightclub massacre in Paris in November 2015 when he was just 22 years old. I understand that his long-standing French boyfriend was also killed in the attack. Our only daughter Ellie, along with her husband George, was mowed down and killed by an Islamic state sympathizer while on their honeymoon in Nice in July 2016. She had just turned 24. Even as I write this, the parallels are striking.

And it doesn’t stop there. Maggie told me that your husband became despondent and ultimately committed suicide in 2017. As I’m sure she told you, I tried to kill myself in 2018 by locking myself in my car in my garage with the car engine running. And I would have succeeded were it not for those Amazon Prime delivery busybodies. But they found me, and after some time on a psychiatric inpatient unit and various cocktails of pills, I was told I was better.

What you may not know is that Maggie’s cancer returned with a vengeance last year. She decided she did not want what she called ‘desperation treatment’. She was dead within three months.

About two months after her funeral, while I was contemplating suicide for a second and presumably final time, I was approached on the street by an individual who identified himself as James Noble. He said he worked for the National Security Agency, and he showed me supporting identification. It quickly became clear that, for some reason, the NSA knew everything there was to know about me and my family. For example, they knew that I had been charged with a DUI in 1969 while in college, even though I had been subsequently told that the charges had been expunged from my record. They knew all about my two tours of duty in Vietnam, including some pretty bad stuff that I thought no one knew but me. They knew that Maggie and I were unable to have kids naturally, and that we became parents late in life only through IVF. They even knew the name of the surrogate we used, and how many cycles it took. Mr. Noble made sure to emphasize that he understood how much Maggie and I must have loved Ellie, and how sad and angry we must have felt when she died.

Without going into the details, Mr. Noble then essentially offered me the means and opportunity to kill a specific high-ranking Islamic State terrorist. And get away with it. The way it was presented to me was that this would be good for the country, good for me, and allow the NSA to not appear directly involved. I remember his specific phrasing: “Why not Herb? You have no more to lose, and this way everybody wins.”

Well, as it turns out, and again without going into details, I never went through with it. I came close, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. I figured out that Maggie and Ellie wouldn’t want me to do it, and it certainly wouldn’t bring either of them back.

I knew that Mr. Noble and his cronies at the NSA would not be happy. I also knew that they might feel threatened while I was still around. So, I wrote this letter, sealed it, and delivered it to a reliable attorney with the following specific instructions – if I did not contact him by phone at least once every 48 hours, and if he did not hear me utter a specific code phrase that I changed each time we spoke, he should assume that I am dead and immediately arrange for the letter to be delivered to you by messenger.

So here we are.

Given the marked similarities between our two situations, it would not surprise me if you were also approached by Mr. Noble at some point in the future. If so, hopefully at least now you know who and what you will be dealing with,

Praemontius, praemunitus – forewarned is forearmed.

This is for Maggie and Ellie.

Good luck Ms. Giles.

Herb Schoenberg

*****

BOOK 1 – John Layton

“Hello, Mr. Layton.”

“Do I know you?”

“No. But I know you. Please don’t be alarmed. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is James Noble, and I work for the United States National Security Agency. This is my official badge, and I am happy to provide you with as much other credential information as you wish, within reason of course.”

They had both just exited a Starbucks on Market Square in central Philadelphia. Layton had exited first, and he examined the second man’s proffered badge closely. It was heavy, and it looked real.

“Agent Noble, I don’t understand why you or anyone else in the NSA would want to talk with me. I am just a regular middle school teacher, and I have never done anything that anyone in your world should find interesting or relevant. So, again, why are you talking to me?”

“A fair question, Mr. Layton. Let’s just say that I believe that we can help each other. Do you mind if we walk and chat together for a while? I have it on good authority that you have no more classes today.”

James Noble turned towards South Broad Street, pointed, and smiled.

*****

“Mr. Layton, please forgive me in advance but I am going to be quite blunt with you. I know that you have suffered greatly as a result of the so-called drug trade. Your oldest son, John Junior, was an addict, and died as a result of an overdose of fentanyl when he was just twenty. Your wife Susan, and your daughter Lara were kidnapped by bandits related to the Juarez drug cartel while they were on vacation in Mexico six years ago. Despite you paying a five hundred thousand dollar ransom, they were never returned. Their bodies were never found, and they were both declared legally dead three years later. I am truly sorry for all of your losses.”

James Noble paused. His face exuded profound condolences.

“The Juarez cartel is currently being run by a man called José Diaz. Mr. Diaz is considered an enemy of the United States. He was almost certainly involved with the kidnappings of your wife and daughter and, as one of the largest drug dealers in Mexico, he was also almost certainly indirectly involved with your son’s death.

“I think we can both agree that the world would be better off without Mr. Diaz. In fact, Mr. Diaz’s demise is an outcome that the NSA would dearly desire. For obvious reasons, we would prefer to appear not directly involved. What we can do however is to arrange for you to be able to eliminate Mr. Diaz yourself Mr. Layton. And get away with it.”

James Noble paused again. His face was impassive, neutral, lethal.

“It turns out that Mr. Diaz has a younger sister who he is quite close to. Unfortunately for her, she has stage IV ovarian cancer. She is getting outpatient chemotherapy at a cancer treatment center in Juarez, but she’s apparently not doing well. Our sources tell us she likely has only a few weeks to live, maybe two to three months on the outside. On occasion, her brother goes to visit her while she gets her chemo in the infusion suite, presumably to comfort her and keep her company. This happens irregularly, but when it does, we know about it, but only about an hour in advance. The sicker she gets, the more likely he is to visit her.

“The idea is to set you up on the roof of a building across the street from where his motorcade drops him off, just outside the entrance of the infusion suite. We will know which specific car he will be travelling in and, with the right weapon, you should be able to take him out with minimal to no collateral damage to civilians.

“We will arrange for a car and driver to be ready and waiting for you in a parking lot just outside the rear of the building. Given the likely confusion on the street after you get rid of Mr. Diaz, you should have no trouble getting away quickly. Since conditions at the vehicle border crossing are unpredictable, the plan will be to drive you to a small airfield just outside of Juarez where a helicopter will be waiting. You should be back on US soil within 30 minutes, soup to nuts.

“The story that will be propagated will be that this was a hit engineered by a specific rival cartel. Given how these guys operate and the so-called clues we plan to leave, people should have no trouble believing our story. The bonus is that this will likely lead to an internecine war where, hopefully, a lot of these bastards will just kill each other off.

“Just think Mr. Layton. This would be good for your country and good for you. You have no more to lose. And this way everyone wins.

“I will give you three days to think about it. I’ll be in touch. Goodbye Mr. Layton.”

They had reached a subway entrance on the corner of South Broad and Lombard streets. James Noble disappeared down the stairs without turning around.

*****

John Layton returned to the fourth floor walk-up studio apartment where Jessie, his ten year old black-and-white cocker spaniel, was waiting impatiently. He needed space and time to think.

“Come on girl. Let’s take you for a long walk.”

*****

John Junior, or JJ as he was known to friends and family, was funny, smart, and, like his dad, a diehard Eagles and Flyers fan. He had just started middle school in suburban Philadelphia when he smoked his first joint. It was less than a month after his eleventh birthday.

It wasn’t a big deal at first, just a few pre-teenage kids getting together and having some laughs a couple of times a week after school in the basement of Joey Cardone’s house. Joey’s dad worked in sales and was on the road a lot, and his mom was a workaholic senior insurance executive, so the house was almost always empty and available.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, there was more – more basement sessions per week, more people, more and different drugs. JJ’s school attendance and grades began to falter. JJ’s parents, John Senior and Susan, confronted him with the evidence which, predictably, only served to push JJ further away.

Serious money was starting to change hands in Joey Cardone’s basement. JJ began stealing from his parents. Just inconspicuous loose change and the odd dollar here or there at first. But the dollar amounts and the items became more significant as time went by. Some of Susan’s jewelry began to disappear.

One Saturday, as he was leaving his apartment building to take young Jessie for her morning walk, John Senior was approached by a heavily tattooed Hispanic man in his early thirties.

“Yo, Bro. You JJ’s dad?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Never mind that. Your boy owes me money. And one way or another I’m getting what’s mine.”

The tattooed guy had positioned himself directly in John Senior’s path. Out of the corner of his eye, John Senior could see Tattoo Man’s clone lounging casually on the opposite side of the street.

“How much does he owe you?”

“Two Benjamins.”

Holding Jessie’s leash in his left hand, John Senior used his right hand to slowly remove his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. He peered inside and thumbed through the contents.

“It looks like I only have about a hundred or so in here.”

Tattoo man looked at Jessie and bent down to pet her.

“Cute dog. OK, I’ll just take whatever you got in that wallet and we’ll call it quits.”

John Senior handed the money over.

“By the way bro, you should do something with that kid of yours. If he don’t slow down, he and you are going to have a lot worse to deal with than just me.”

JJ was now 16 years old. Over the next couple of years John Senior and Susan tried school counselors, drug counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, even a psychic, all to no avail.

They took JJ out of school and sent him to an outrageously expensive inpatient drug rehabilitation facility in Central Pennsylvania. JJ ran away after three weeks. A month later, he called his parents using a cellphone that he had found near the bridge under which he had been living in northern Philadelphia. He was cold, hungry, and strung out. He was also two weeks shy of his twentieth birthday. John Senior and Susan drove across town to pick up their son and bring him home.

Four months later, they received a call from the police stating that they had found JJ in a crack house unconscious with a needle still in his arm. They had rushed him to the nearest emergency room but the doctors there had been unable to revive him.

Drugs or no drugs, JJ had always been the best part of John Senior. Part of him also died in that ER.

*****

John Senior and Susan first met over a ruptured appendix when he was twenty-four years old. He had been leading an introductory algebra class at the Penn Alexander Middle School in west central Philadelphia when he had keeled over with acute abdominal pain. He was rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital, which happened to be the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, conveniently located just a few blocks away down Spruce Street. After some quick diagnostic tests, he was whisked off to the operating room where they confirmed and repaired a ruptured appendix. Susan was a junior nurse on the surgical unit John Senior was sent to for his recovery. Even through the post anesthesia and narcotic analgesic haze, as soon as he saw her for the first time, he knew that they were meant to be together. It took him a while to get the courage to act on his convictions. In fact, it was only while she was going through his discharge instructions, and he realized that it was definitely now or never, that he finally asked if she would consider going out with him.

“That’s very nice of you Mr. Layton, but there is a strict policy here against fraternizing with patients.”

John Senior was crushed. He felt nauseated. Hurriedly, he started gathering his belongings in preparation for a hasty exit.

“Of course, now that you are being discharged, you are technically no longer a patient…”

John Senior looked up at her hopefully, and saw that she was smiling.

They moved in together six months later, and got married on the first anniversary of his ruptured appendix.

In later years, she would often joke about how, thanks to her diligent nursing skills, she had effectively seen all he had to offer well before he had even asked her out on a first date. Predictably, this gentle jesting would eventually devolve into mutually satisfying, and sometimes delightfully inventive, lovemaking. Those jokes never got old.

*****

Lara was born two years after JJ, and was his polar opposite. Whereas JJ was gregarious, warm, and outgoing, at least before the drugs began to strangle his soul, Lara was reserved and quiet to the point of near mutism. As the two siblings aged, and JJ’s increasing drug use and antisocial behavior consumed an ever-expanding percentage of their parents’ attention, Lara became progressively withdrawn. She began cutting herself with some of her father’s discarded razor blades.

Shortly after Lara had turned sixteen, while rummaging through the kitchen trash trying to retrieve an errant earring, Susan came across a blood-stained towel that she recognized as her daughter’s.

One of Susan’s nursing colleagues knew a highly reputable child psychiatrist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In addition to individualized therapy sessions for Lara, he recommended family therapy. It was slow, grinding, and expensive, but it worked.

Two years later, Lara was accepted to Temple University on a generous scholarship. Half way through her freshman year, JJ inserted the final needle into his arm. Lara spiraled back into depression. She began cutting again. It took three months on CHOP’s inpatient psychiatric unit, as well as a cocktail of antidepressants to get her well enough to go back home to her parent’s house.

JJ’s drugs had almost killed them both.

Temple University gave her a second shot. She graduated four years later magna cum laude, having majored in both biology and chemistry. She was accepted to Temple University School of Medicine, but decided to take a gap year before starting medical school.

Susan suggested the two of them go on a girls-only fun trip to Mexico. It was getting close to the end of the academic school year, and John Senior was overwhelmed with work. The two of them would fly to Cancun, join a tour that combined beach activities with visits to various Mayan ruins, and then fly to the city of Chihuahua to visit one of Susan’s old friends from nursing school. After hanging out there for a few days, they would rent a car and drive about two hundred and fifty miles north to the border, and then fly back home from El Paso.

Cancun and Chihuahua were a blast.

They never made it to El Paso.

*****

At just under one hundred thousand square miles, Chihuahua is the largest Mexican state by area, but only the eleventh most populous, giving it an average population density of about 35 people per square mile. The city of Chihuahua is connected to the city of Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side of the border at El Paso by federal Highway 45 which runs through the Chihuahuan desert. Because of concerns regarding crime, the US State Department has a long-standing policy banning US government employees from travel between cities in Mexico after dark, as well as limiting daytime travel stops to just the handful of locations on the route that enjoy a significant police presence.

The two women left the Chihuahuan house of Susan’s friend Emma at 3 pm, following a hearty and emotional farewell lunch. At 5:30 pm, having traveled just over half way to their destination, following Emma’s suggestion, they decided to stop and check out the stores in the roadside town of Villa Ahumada. They got back into their rental vehicle at 7 pm. Their visit did not go unnoticed.

Fifty miles and one hour later, shortly after sunset, they were boxed in by three large pickup trucks who positioned themselves tightly fore, aft, and portside. The lead truck put its hazard lights on and began to slow down and veer gradually onto the shoulder. Inexorably, the convoy came to a stop. Two armed men got out of each pickup and surrounded the car. One of them used his pistol to tap gently on Susan’s window and used his other index finger to motion her to open it.

“Senoritas, welcome to Mexico.”

*****

“Mr. Layton?” The voice was male and clearly Hispanic.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“It’s about your wife and daughter.”

*****

John Senior had been expecting and preparing for this call, but it still made him feel like throwing up. Two days earlier, as their vehicle was being forced off the road in Mexico, his daughter Lara had called him, frantic. He had been teaching a class at the time, and his cellphone was turned off. Lara did manage to leave a message which he had since replayed countless times, including to the FBI.

“Daddy, daddy, please pick up! Mommy and I are on the highway in Mexico between Chihuahua and El Paso. We are being forced off the road by some men in trucks. I am scared Daddy. Please pick up!”

John Senior could then hear his wife’s muffled voice on the recording.

“Lara, put the phone away! Don’t let them see you with it!”

And then the message terminated abruptly.

*****

John Senior’s brain was furiously replaying the advice which the FBI agents had given him. He forced himself to sound calm and neutral.

“What about them?”

“They are fine…for now. They are here with me in Mexico. If you want to see them again alive, you are going to need to personally bring me five hundred thousand dollars in cash no later than ten days from today.”

“How do I know they are still alive now?”

“Check your text messages.”

There was a brief pause, followed by a distressingly inappropriate cheery jingle.

The new text was a photo of Susan and Lara sitting on opposite sides of a small wooden table in an otherwise bare and nondescript room. Despite the dim lighting, he could see that Susan’s face had a bruise over her left cheekbone and that her lip was split. Lara was sitting bolt upright, clearly terrified, but apparently physically intact. Prominently displayed on the table between the two women was the front page of a local Mexican newspaper with a large font date circled in red. It was today’s date.

“I see the date. But it’s now evening, so how do I know they are still alive now?”

“It sounds like you don’t trust me Mr. Layton. Normally that would make me sad and upset. But I understand why you might feel that way under the circumstances. So, this one time, I’m going to be nice.”

John Senior could hear some shuffling sounds.

“Say hello to your husband.”

“Johnny, Lara and I are okay. Just do what he says. I love you. Just do…”

John Senior heard what sounded like a slap, and the man’s voice came on again.

“So, Mr. Layton, we good now?”

“Please don’t hurt them. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“I already told you what I want.”

“I am just a school teacher. How am I going to get half a million dollars?”

“Mr. Layton, I’m disappointed in you. For a smart man you sound pretty stupid. Worse, it sounds like you think I’m stupid. Your house in West Chester where you’ve been living for over twenty years is worth at least $300,000. And your wife’s daddy is a retired orthopedic surgeon who’s loaded. So getting five hundred thousand should be no sweat. In fact, it’s a bargain. And because you insulted my intelligence and pissed me off, you now only got a week. I’ll call you in a couple of days to see how you’re coming along.

“And don’t involve the cops Mr. Layton. That would make me upset. And when I get upset other people get hurt.”

The line went dead.

*****

“Mr. Layton. I believe I was very clear. I told you not to go to the police. And you did.”

How the hell does he know?

“I can hear you thinking Mr. Layton. I’m a businessman. You are one of my investments. Why wouldn’t I keep an eye on my investments? In any event, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The screen on John Senior’s iPhone indicated Facetime was being requested. The screen came to life and revealed the same dingy room as before but this time only Lara was sitting at the table.

Two men came into the field of view. They both wore stocking masks, gargoyling their facial features. One of the men pinned Lara to her chair from behind, immobilizing her body. The other forcibly extended her left arm and hand onto the table, palm down. He then used his right hand to secure her forearm and grabbed her thumb, index finger, and middle finger with his left and bent them away from the remaining two digits. Those digits were pointed directly at the camera.

John Senior could hear two female voices distantly through the phone. One was Lara who seemed to be moaning softly and repeating the words “Please no” over and over. The other was Susan who was off-camera but obviously able to see what was happening. She was screaming, and it was getting progressively louder. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything you want. Take me. Just leave her alone. Please!”

The camera motion indicated that the phone was being placed on some sort of a stand. A third man, presumably the other interlocutor, came into view. Like the other two, he also wore a stocking mask. Unlike the other two, his front was covered with a white butcher’s apron from the neck down. And he was carrying a meat cleaver.

The third man maneuvered himself to the left of the man holding Lara’s left arm and hand, and gently positioned the meat cleaver’s blade so that its edge was resting on the skin of Lara’s outstretched fourth and fifth fingers, just proximal their first interphalangeal joints.

Lara’s moans and Susan’s screams crescendoed.

Without a word, the third man abruptly brought the palm of his right hand down onto the top of the blade, and applied his full body weight. John Senior heard the brutal, sickening crunch of steel severing bone. Simultaneously, Lara let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and the third man’s white butcher apron was sprayed with two pulsating jets of blood. Lara went limp.

“Apply pressure quickly before she bleeds out.”

As the third man returned to the phone, Susan’s distant wails diminished to a resigned whimper.

“I want the money in small bills, nothing bigger than twenties. Put in all in a suitcase and get yourself to the border at El Paso by 1pm five days from now. I’ll call you then with further instructions. Take a train or drive. Don’t fly. You don’t want anyone to lose your bags. Needless to say, come alone.

“And just to be clear you get the message, your daughter will be sending you a small overnight UPS package to remind you of her.”

The phone went dead.

*****

After four days, a dismal, but clear, pattern had emerged. There were two guards assigned at a time, rotating at sixteen hour intervals. Their leader had appeared briefly, albeit memorably, only twice – once for each phone call to John Senior. With each new shift, the two guards would spend the first few hours viciously sexually assaulting both women in front of each other, after which they would alternate crawling off to sleep for several hours in another room. They would then spend the remaining five or six hours sitting around the small table playing cards, smoking, and watching TV while the two women lay shackled to a bed in one of the adjacent doorless bedrooms. The guards always wore their stocking masks when in the same room as the women.

At all times, the women’s arms and hands were tied behind their backs with plastic zip ties. Drinking took place via straws – there were two of them placed in a deep-dish dog bowl in the corner of one of the bedrooms. Eating only happened if the guards remembered to spoon feed the women some of their own leftovers. The only time their hands were freed was when they were allowed to go to the toilet - the guards had no interest in getting involved with matters of feminine hygiene. They were not left alone however. One of the guards would position himself on a chair directly in front of the toilet’s open doorway, and remain there while the woman tended to her biological needs.

Which is when and where it would have to take place. Ideally when the other man was asleep.

After what had happened to Lara, there was no other choice.

*****

“I need to go to the toilet.”

“Mierda.”

She heard the TV being switched off followed by footsteps entering the bedroom. The masked man untied the shackles on Susan’s legs, grabbed her by her blouse, and heaved her roughly to her feet.

Lara lay in a fetal position on the bed, inert, a blood stained rag wrapped tightly around her left hand.

“Numero uno o dos?”

“Both.”

“Cabron.”

After first getting a chair, the man frog marched Susan to the toilet. He removed her zip tie, spun her, and sat her down. He positioned himself opposite her on the chair. Even behind the distorting mask, she could see he was smirking.

He was wearing a gun, casually inserted into the waistband on his right side. From the way it moved as he sat down, it was not wedged in very tightly. Good. She could hear the other guard snoring loudly in the other bedroom. Also good.

Susan closed her eyes and concentrated. She tried to look like she was working on a bowel movement. She knew she would only get one chance.

She planted both her feet firmly at shoulder width, rocked a little forward, and placed her palms on her thighs. She drew a deep breath, tensed her leg muscles to their limit, and sprang off the seat, head aimed straight at the center of the man’s chest. Just like those NFL fullbacks she had watched with her dad. Her head hit the man’s chest before he even realized that she had moved.

As expected, the contact knocked the man and chair backward. The back of his head hit the concrete floor with a satisfying crack leaving him dazed. Susan grabbed his gun and yanked it out of his waistband before he could recover, pointed it at his chest and pulled the trigger while he was still lying on his back. The man’s body jerked off the ground a few inches and then lay still while a crimson ring expanded rapidly from a dark hole in his sternum.

The loudness of the reverberating gunshot in the confined space was such that Susan went painfully deaf and became disoriented for several seconds.

Just long enough for the second man to wake up fully, find his gun, and shoot Susan three times as she stumbled across the floor, hands clutching her ears. She was dead before her body hit the floor.

*****

“What do we do with the other one now?”

“She saw what happened, and she saw your stupid face. You know what needs to be done. I am probably going to need her one more time though. After that, take care of it. Then take both bodies out to the desert and burn them.”

“What about the ransom money?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it under control.”

*****

John Senior arrived in El Paso almost twenty-four hours before the deadline. It had taken two days of solid driving, punctuated by an overnight rest stop in a cheap motel twenty miles east of Dallas, to get there from the driveway of his house in western Philadelphia. He checked into a Ramada Inn off Interstate 10, less than five miles from the border with Mexico.

His father-in-law was on the board of directors of a local bank, and getting approval for the requested sum of money had been much easier than he had anticipated. The hardest part had actually been finding enough twenty dollar bills.

The resulting pile of cash was surprisingly bulky. The FBI provided him with a special suitcase with an electronic tracker cleverly concealed in the handle. They also put a tiny tracker in his cellphone, and another on the underside of his car’s chassis. They discussed putting a fourth one somewhere on his person, but eventually decided against it given that he would very probably be searched.

The FBI’s Mexican Federal Police counterparts were necessarily informed of the situation as they would be in charge of operations south of the border. Their current iteration had been formed in the late 1990’s by merging several pre-existing police forces with a large infusion of personnel from the Mexican Army’s Third Brigade in a theoretically well-intentioned, but as yet largely ineffective, attempt to deal with the cartels.

*****

“Hello, Mr. Layton. I trust you have made it safely to El Paso and that you have my money with you.”

“I do. What happens now?”

“Take down this address. You will need GPS. It is south of the airport and hard to find. But easy to see from. Like I told you, you better be alone.”

John Senior had the man spell out the address and repeated it back to him.

“I am giving you a maximum of ninety minutes. Traffic can be bad, so you better get going.”

*****

Seventy-five minutes later, John Senior pulled up to a small, detached house sitting on an otherwise vacant lot in a desolate part of the city. Other than a car parked opposite, there seemed to be no sign of life

His cell phone rang.

“Mr. Layton, you made good time. Now, please get out of your car, take the money, and walk to the other car parked across the street. Remember, I can see you, but you can’t see me, so don’t do anything stupid.”

Keeping the cell phone to his ear, John Senior did as he was told.

“Open the trunk. You will see an empty suitcase. I want you to transfer the money from your suitcase into that empty one, and then throw yours onto the ground near the car. I will need to see that your case has been fully emptied. Be quick about it. This is not a good neighborhood.”

John Senior complied.

“Good. Now, throw your cell phone on the ground near the empty suitcase and get in the car. You will see another phone on the passenger front seat. We will be using that one from now on.”

Fucking corrupt Mexican police – they told these assholes everything!

The second cell phone began chirping.

“Now we can both relax Mr Layton. Turn on your new car’s GPS and scroll to “Recent Destinations”. Pick the top one. I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes.”

“Wait! I need to know for sure that my family is still okay, particularly after what I saw you do to my daughter. I am not going anywhere until I have proof.”

“Fair enough Mr. Layton. You, come here and talk to your Daddy. But remember what I said.”

“Daddy…” It was definitely Lara’s voice. Petrified, but definitely alive.

“It’s okay sweetie, I am coming for you. It’s going to be okay.”

“Daddy please…”

The man’s voice came back on. “Okay, that’s enough.”

“What about my wife?”

“Don’t push it Mr. Layton. We both know you were a bad boy by going to the police and trying to use trackers on me. You now have twenty-eight minutes.”

*****

The new location was a deserted dirt road in the desert. As John Senior approached the location indicated on the GPS screen, he could see a solitary sedan parked by the side of the road. His new cell phone rang.

“Stop about ten yards away, get out of your car, and stand there with your hands in the air where I can see them.”

As he pulled to a stop, four armed men got out of the parked sedan, all wearing stocking masks.

The lead man mumbled something in Spanish to the other three. They walked briskly to John Senior’s vehicle, opened the trunk, then the suitcase, and began counting the money. One of them held a printer sized portable bill counter, the second fed the uncounted bills into its maw, and the third transferred the counted bills into a large duffel bag. It took less than twenty minutes. One of them tossed the bulging duffel back into the trunk of John Senior’s car.

“Okay Mr. Layton. Our business here is finished.”

“Where are my wife and daughter?

“They are in the trunk of our car. We are now going to swap cars Mr. Layton. And don’t try to follow us.”

The four men got into John Senior’s car and took off in a trail of dust.

John Senior walked slowly toward the parked sedan. Although part of him refused to accept it, he knew the trunk would be empty.

*****

“Mr. Layton. This Agent Noble. Have you had a chance to think about my proposition?”

John Senior had indeed been thinking about it. A lot.

There were a lot of reasons to say no.

It is not going to bring them back. Any of them.

And if you did it, or even tried to, what would Susan say if she could? Or Lara or John Junior? What would they say if they knew that their husband and father was seriously contemplating cold-blooded murder? What would they think of him? Nothing good, that’s for sure.

And I don’t even think you have it in you. You’re not a violent man. Never have been. And you’re certainly not some goddamned James Bond.

Plus to which you are pushing fifty-five fucking years old. I’d bet a lot of money that there aren’t a lot of geriatric hitmen running around trying to murder Mexican drug lords.

And it would mean going back to Mexico. Which wasn’t much fun the last time around.

And then, unsolicited, an image popped into his mind and crystallized, diamond hard and imperishable. It was a small UPS box.

“I’ll do it.”

*****

“Good. You’ve never been in the armed services, so I think I’m pretty safe in saying that you’ve never fired a rocket propelled grenade, correct?”

John Senior kept silent.

“The CIA has a place near Langley that we can use to teach you. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two to get you to be reasonably proficient. A car will be by to pick you up from your house in a couple of hours. Just pack an overnight bag.

“You’ll be using an Israeli made weapon called the B-300. Being fifty-seven inches long and weighing in at eighteen pounds loaded, it’s a little bulky, but it has the advantage of being reloadable. That might be important if you need to fire more than one round. Hopefully, that won’t be necessary, but it’s better to be prepared for all eventualities. When fitted with a telescopic sight, the weapon is pretty accurate up to about four hundred meters. That should be more than enough.”

Noble was right. It took some time to get used to the heft and feel of the weapon, particularly the recoil, but after about ten hours of concentrated practice, John Senior was able to reliably hit a car-sized object at three hundred and fifty yards, as well as load and fire at three rounds per minute.

*****

Two days later, John Senior was comfortably ensconced in a one-bedroom suite on the third floor of the Gamma Ciudad Juarez Hotel located at the corner of the somewhat incongruously named Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln avenues. The US border was less than one mile away.

Two hours after checking in he was visited in his room by a man identifying himself as Ramon Garcia. John Senior had been expecting him. Ramon was carrying a large, hard-shelled black suitcase which he placed on the bed and opened. The case was lined with black molded foam padding etched into which was a gleaming B-300 rocket propelled grenade launcher and three shells. The shells seemed larger than the ones that he had used near Langley. Ramon caught his gaze.

“These are high explosive antitank shells. You probably practiced with just the regular shells.”

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

After locking the case and stashing it under the bed, Ramon escorted John Senior to the location of the main event. It was just over one quarter of a mile away, and it took less than ten minutes to get there even at a leisurely stroll pace.

The Instituto Regional de Tratiamente del Cancer, or IRTC, was situated on Manuel Diaz Highway close to its junction with Benjamin Franklin Avenue. It was a low-slung professional building set about fifteen yards away from the street. The edge of the curb in front of the building was painted bright yellow.

“That’s where Diaz’s car will pull up. There will be at least three vehicles, but we should know which one he is traveling in. You will get that information by text about one hour before he arrives. That should give you plenty of time to get from your hotel to where you need to be, which is on top of that building over there.”

Ramon pointed to a modern looking four-story building on the opposite side of the street about three hundred feet away. It was part of a small complex of buildings, one of which bore a sign indicating it was the Centro Universitario de las Artes.

They crossed the street and moved along the left side of the building until they came to a large, locked steel door upon which, in large, bold red painted letters, was written “Puerta de Incendios. No bloquees.”

Ramon fished in his pocket and handed John Senior a keychain with two keys.

“Open the door.”

After a few seconds of finagling with the keys and lock, the door opened outward to reveal an indoor fire escape stairwell.

The two men walked slowly to the top floor where they were met by a second locked steel door which yielded to the second key. They stepped out onto the roof which was circumscribed by a low wall, and moved to the side facing the IRTC. The bright yellow curb stripe was a clear shot, no more than four hundred feet away. The wall would prevent anyone from seeing him from the street while he waited.

“Before we leave here, you may want to play with the keys to make sure you know which is which. And for Chrissake, don’t lose them.

“The next time that you see me I’ll be sitting in the driving seat of a light blue Ford pickup. I’ll be parked near the exit of the parking lot on the other side of this building. I will give you a maximum of three minutes to get to me after the fireworks start. After that, I’m gone, with or without you. So don’t be late. Just leave the weapon here – we want it to be found.”

*****

Four days later, just after 8 am, his phone’s text chime sounded.

“Three car convoy. Max ETA 1 hour. Unable to get definite info on target car type or color. Suggest go for center car.”

Great.

John Senior was already dressed and shaved. He went to the bathroom one last time, picked up the black case and headed out.

Fifteen minutes later he was on the roof of the University Arts Building. He set the case down, unpacked the B-300, and loaded a shell. He positioned himself behind the wall such that he was well hidden but could conveniently and comfortably pop his head up every thirty seconds or so to check the yellow curb stripe.

All things considered, you seem remarkably calm for a newbie who is about to fire a rocket propelled grenade at a car on a Mexican street in broad daylight.

Then he looked down, and he noticed that his hands were shaking.

A small UPS box reappeared in his head and stayed there for a while.

His hands stopped shaking.

*****

Forty-eight minutes after receiving the text, the convoy came into view. Three cars driving up Manuel Diaz Highway from the south, all identical black Mercedes 500 S sedans.

Shit, no wonder they couldn’t figure out the details of the target car.

The three vehicles pulled up next to the bright yellow curb and came to a stop nose to tail. There was a white delivery medical supply van parked about fifty yards behind the rear vehicle and two private cars parked about the same distance in front of the lead vehicle. Given that it was not yet 9 am vehicle and pedestrian traffic, including into and out of the IRTC, was still light.

John Senior had already decided to abort the mission if it meant putting innocent civilians directly in harm’s way. He checked the street. At that moment, that there was no one around for at least one hundred feet in any direction from the three Mercedes sedans, and no one had yet exited any of the vehicles.

Good.

He peered down the B-300’s telescopic sights and, as suggested, centered himself on the middle car. Through the scope, a street sign just behind the target vehicle came into focus with the word ’DIAZ” in capitals.

Looks like this scumbag Diaz is about to get himself killed on his own road. What are the chances?

As he had been trained to do, he steadied his breathing, and gently squeezed the trigger. He heard and felt the simultaneous whoosh and recoil of the B-300. A fraction of a second later the central vehicle erupted into an immense ball of flame and flying steel. The shock wave rocked John Senior back on his heels.

Jesus! They weren’t kidding about those antitank shells.

Almost immediately, the gas tanks of the other two cars exploded in unison. Several men vomited out of the front and rear vehicles, screaming and on fire. There was no movement out of the middle car.

John Senior dropped the B-300 and started running towards the fire escape. The clock was ticking.

Ninety seconds later he was in the parking lot on the far side of the building. He spotted the blue pickup truck. Ramon saw John Senior approaching and eased the vehicle out of its parking space and pointed it at the exit. The vehicle was already in motion as John Senior jumped into the front passenger seat.

As they headed south down Manuel Diaz Highway, they were passed by several police and emergency vehicles, sirens blaring.

After proceeding south for about twenty miles Ramon turned west and headed into the desert. He turned off into a lonely, winding, dirt track. After about ten miles he stopped and got out of the vehicle. He appeared to be scanning the horizon.

John Senior got out of the truck and joined him.

“Where is the helicopter?”

“It should be here any minute. Wait, I think I see it coming. There.” Ramon pointed in a direction directly behind John Senior.

As John Senior turned around to look, Ramon pulled his Glock 19 out of the quick draw holster on his right hip and shot John Senior once in the back of the head killing him instantly.

Ramon retrieved a three-gallon gasoline can from the back of the truck, doused the body liberally, and lit a match.

After all, the guy had done his job well. The least he could do is make sure his body wasn’t picked over by vultures or coyotes.

*****

BOOK 2 – Paul Goldstein

Goddamned reporters coming up and shoving a mic in your face asking how you feel. How do you think I feel, you fucking moron? How would you feel if you lost your dad, your wife, and your only son to fucking Covid 19, all within just six months?

And all of it, all that pain, all that misery, all that grief, all of it could have been avoided if there hadn’t been a big, fat, fucking, orange, incompetent, arrogant, selfish, lying bastard Covidiot sitting in the Oval Office.

He told us not to worry. After all, it was just a few little Chinamen, so what’s the big deal. Then he told us it would all miraculously go away when the weather got warmer, and that anyways, if you got it, you could take care of it by just scarfing down some hydroxychloroquine, drinking bleach, and shining ultraviolet lights up your ass.

Like he said: don’t listen to the scientists. They’re idiots, and I’m smarter than all of them put together. Masks and social distancing are for wimps and pussies.

And by the way, when I get sick myself, just keep doing what I say and not what I do. As for me, I’m going to get my fat ass into an intensive care unit where I can have access to the best equipment your money can buy, and be taken care of by a small battalion of some of the best doctors on the goddamned planet. They’re going to give me some of that impossible-for-others-to-get Regeneron antibody cocktail, along with some of that remdesivir anti-viral stuff, and whatever other cutting edge treatments there are out there. So, good luck, and don’t you worry about me cause I’m going to be just fine.

Then I can go back to my full time job of watching TV, golfing, and tweeting about how great and rich I am and how everyone else is either mean or stupid.

Yep, what could possibly go wrong?

*****

Reuben Goldstein, Paul’s father, was born in 1930. Reuben’s own father, Saul Goldstein, had been an ardent speculator in the years and months prior to the stock market crash of October, 1929, Like many, Saul lost much more than he actually owned. Reuben was not a planned pregnancy. Saul Goldstein disappeared before Reuben’s first birthday. The family never spoke about him afterward, and it was never clear to Reuben if his father had left or had actually committed suicide.

Reuben and his younger brother Abe were raised by their mother Sophie who worked as a sales assistant in Gimbels in Manhattan. They lived in a small tenement apartment in Brooklyn which they shared with Sophie’s sister Greta, her husband, and their three children. Despite the spartan surroundings, Reuben had only fond memories of those years.

He married Clara Rosen, his childhood sweetheart, in 1953 shortly after he returned from the Korean War. With the Army’s help, he got into New York University and graduated as a certified public accountant four years later.

Clara and Reuben eventually had three children, John born in 1962, Paul born a year later, and George born two years after that. Clara was a fervent Beatles fan, and those were the only three names she would entertain.

Clara died from uterine cancer in 1971 when she was only forty-one years old, six weeks after Paul’s eighth birthday. Just before she died, she had joked with Reuben how she had only become ill after the Beatles broke up.

Reuben never remarried. He devoted the rest of his life to his sons and his work, in that order. Paul never heard his father complain, curse, or raise his voice. A real life super hero to his kids, and a real all around mensch.

However, on occasion, Reuben would walk over to the large picture portrait that hung over the living room mantlepiece, and gently caress the figure’s lips while he murmured something private and inaudible. Paul and his brothers knew to leave their Dad alone at such times.

In February 2015, two years after retiring, Reuben was found wandering the frigid streets of Brooklyn in his pajamas. The doctors diagnosed him as having moderately severe Alzheimer’s.

Paul’s two brothers were now living and working in California. Paul, who now lived with his wife as empty-nesters in a large four-bedroom house in Westchester, offered to take his father in. After three grueling years, during which the disease inexorably progressed and eviscerated the remains of Reuben’s mind, body, and soul, Paul was eventually forced to admit that his wife and he were no longer able to cope. After some diligent research, they settled on the Kensington nursing home, located in White Plains less than ten miles away from their house. Reuben moved into his new surroundings in September 2018.

Paul visited his dad every Wednesday and Saturday.

On February 16, 2020, the staff noted that Reuben appeared short of breath and that his lips were tinged blue. He was the third patient to have developed these symptoms within the prior ten days. An ambulance was called, and he was rushed to the emergency room of White Plains Hospital just one block away. Within two hours he was diagnosed with coronavirus induced Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome 2. While waiting for a bed in the ER, Reuben had a cardiac arrest. He was initially successfully intubated and resuscitated, but he went into shock and developed multiorgan failure. He died in the Intensive Care Unit two days later.

Paul was not allowed to see his father or speak to him before he died.

Reuben’s body was placed in a biohazard bag and sent to the Rosenthal Memorial Chapel Funeral Home. Again, Paul was not allowed to see his father.

The next day Reuben Goldstein’s body was taken to the Linden Hill Jewish Cemetery in Brooklyn and interred next to his wife Clara. No one from the family was permitted to be present at the gravesite.

*****

Paul first met Dana in 1986 at a party in one of the New York University dorms. They had both recently started their respective postgraduate courses – she at the Rory Meyers School of Nursing and he at the Leonard Stern School of Business.

She came from a small town in Ohio and had never previously left the state. She had instantaneously fallen in love with New York, its energy, its grittiness, its sounds, its foods, its smells, its people, all of it. And she couldn’t wait to tell everyone she met all about her love affair with the city.

She was effervescent, mesmerizing, and totally enchanting. And incredibly sexy. Over the past five years, Paul had had seven girlfriends, but none had ever stirred him to the extent his mind and loins were now experiencing.

He asked her back to his room, and after several intensely passionate yet tender hours, he realized that he was hers forever. The feeling was mutual.

They married shortly after starting their first jobs – she as a cardiac care nurse at NYU and he as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. They moved into a newly built condo in Hell’s Kitchen in 1989 and, over the next five years, they partook generously of the intellectual and social attractions that Manhattan could offer to relatively affluent young couples.

*****

Their son Abe was born in 1994. He had childhood eczema, multiple allergies, and brittle asthma, most likely an unwanted genetic hand-me-down from Dana’s lineage given the presence of multiple similarly afflicted individuals back in Ohio. By the time he was a teenager, he was on multiple chronic medications, including high dose inhaled steroids. Unplanned visits to the Emergency Room of Roosevelt Hospital would occur at least once a year, mainly during allergy season, and would invariably prompt a short course of high dose oral steroids.

Abe never let his asthma get the better of him. He participated in sports as much as he was able, and even managed to make it onto his high school’s varsity swim team. After completing his undergraduate degree at NYU, the family alma mater, it came as no surprise to his parents when he told them that he wanted to become a respiratory therapist. He graduated top of his class from the Mandl School College of Allied Health on West 54th Street in 2018. He was immediately offered multiple job opportunities, but settled on a position at the Ronald Reagan University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center. His parents were not happy with the distance but, as Abe reminded them, the weather in LA would be much better for his lungs. Plus, he was very much looking forward to meeting some scantily clad Californian beach beauties.

In May 2020, Abe Goldstein contracted COVID-19. Within two days, he was intubated and placed on a ventilator where he was cared for by some of his respiratory therapy teammates. Paul and Dana were informed of their son’s status by the Director of the Intensive Care Unit, Dr. Tim Mc Hugh. He sounded tired and not particularly encouraging, but he assured them that the ICU team would do whatever they could. He also told them that they would unfortunately not be allowed to visit their son directly, and that it was probably best if they remained in New York.

He called again five days later.

“Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein, your son is on maximum ventilatory support and we are having trouble keeping his oxygen level up. Also, his blood pressure keeps dropping despite multiple pressors, and his kidneys have failed. I know this is difficult, but I need to know what your wishes are.”

“Is he in pain?”

“He is sedated, and we can’t communicate with him directly, but as far as we can tell he appears comfortable.”

“What are his chances?”

“We never know for sure Mr. Goldstein, but based on my fifteen years of experience I am afraid that it seems very unlikely that he will survive. It is just a matter of time.”

Paul pulled his wife closer and hugged her.

“Abe’s Mom and I have been discussing this for the past few days. We both agree that our son would want everything done if there was a decent chance of survival, but that he would not want to just prolong things if there was no hope.”

“I am sorry to press you on this issue Mr. Goldstein, but I need you to be specific. Do you want us to stop supportive measures?”

Paul looked at his wife’s tear-stained face. Slowly, she closed her eyes and held them shut.

“Yes. Can you somehow make it possible for us to be with him?”

“Of course.”

For the next ninety minutes Paul and Dana watched a hand-held video feed of their son in the ICU, surrounded by tubes and beeping monitors. Two figures, unrecognizable and spaceman-like in their head-to-toe protective gear, were at his bedside. The one holding the cell phone was standing and gently stroking Abe’s head with her other hand. The second was sitting and holding Abe’s right hand. Through the rhythmic trilling of the machines, Paul and Dana could hear that they were both sobbing softly.

*****

Paul and Dana were diagnosed with COVID-19 within days of each other in mid July 2020. Other than feeling like he had a medium case of the flu, and that he literally and figuratively could not smell shit, Paul felt did not feel too bad and was back at work within two weeks.

Dana did not fare as well. She developed fever, cough, and shortness of breath. After a few calls between her doctor and her boss, the Director of Nursing at NYU Langone Health, she was admitted to a private room with a stupendous view over the East River. She required supplemental oxygen by face mask but, with the help of good medical and nursing care, she avoided being placed on a ventilator. She did however develop a deep vein thrombosis in her left leg despite being given prophylactic anticoagulation. As a result, when she was finally discharged three weeks later, she was sent home on Xareleto, an oral anticoagulant, with instructions to continue treatment for at least three months.

On the morning of August 23 Paul woke up early as usual and spent thirty minutes on his daily ablutions. When he walked back into the bedroom, he found that Dana was unrousable and that she was breathing loudly and irregularly. Her face seemed asymmetric, and her right arm and leg were limp.

He called 911, and the ambulance took her to the NYU emergency room. An emergency CT scan revealed a large intracranial bleed.

“We’ve given her some medicine to reverse the effect of the Xarelto. That should prevent further bleeding, but there’s quite a lot of blood already there, and it seems to be causing some compression of other brain structures. We’ve called neurosurgery to see if they can remove the hematoma.”

The neurosurgeon attending on call arrived on scene in the ER within thirty minutes. It took him fifteen minutes to examine Dana, review the CT scan, and consult by phone with another neurosurgeon.

“I’m afraid the bleed is too large and too deep inside her head for us to remove the blood safely. We are going to place her on a respirator and give her medicine to try to shrink any associated swelling, and see how she does. I’m sorry.”

“What are the chances that she’ll recover.”

“Like I said, it’s a large bleed. On the other hand, it’s still relatively early so we’ll just have to take it one day at a time.”

Paul could see from the neurosurgeon’s body language and averted gaze that he was not optimistic. At all.

Shortly after Abe had died, Paul and Dana had made a solemn promise to each other. If either of them ever got terminally ill and was unable to speak for themselves, the other would do what the two of them had already done for their son. There had been no debate.

Dana never recovered consciousness. Ten days later, backed up by the Living Will that they had presciently signed, Paul instructed Dana’s care team to remove her from the ventilator and stop all active treatment.

This time, finally, he was allowed to be present at the bedside.

*****

“Mr. Goldstein, I’m Ron Harper from Fox News. I understand that in the past six months you lost three members of your family representing three separate generations to COVID-19. That must be awful. Can you tell our listeners how you are feeling?”

Goddamned reporters coming up and shoving a mic in your face asking how you feel. How do you think I feel, you fucking moron?

And if our country’s response had just been normal and responsible and sane, maybe none of them would have died, or even get sick. Not to mention the tens of thousands of other poor slobs who died for nothing just because of the hubris and stupidity of one sad, pathetic, fat, little man.

Yep, that prick Trump has a lot to answer for.

*****

“Mr. Goldstein?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“My name is James Noble and I work for the National Security Agency of the United States. This is not a prank, so please don’t hang up. I would like to speak with you for a few minutes about a private matter. It’s probably best if we did that face to face. Hopefully now is a good time for you. I am parked right across the street from your house.”

*****

“Mr. Goldstein, I know all about the tremendous losses you have suffered as a result of COVID-19, and I want you first to know that I am truly sorry. I also know that you place a lot of the blame for what happened to you and your family squarely at the feet of Donald Trump. The NSA has been watching your movements online for some time now. You seem to be frequenting a lot of very vocal anti-Trump sites, and you seem to spend most of your time on those that are calling for specific violent acts such as kidnapping or assassination.”

“That is an outrageous invasion of my rights and privacy! This is America. As long as I am not committing any actual crime, what I do in the privacy of my own home is my own business. Now get the hell out of my house.”

“Mr. Goldstein, I’m afraid that your perspective is a little naïve and misguided. Surely you can see why government agencies such as ours would want to monitor potential threats to public figures such as ex-Presidents. That said, I am not here to discuss that issue directly.

“It turns out that you and your online friends are not alone. In fact, there are a lot of extremely powerful people, on both sides of the political spectrum actually, who share your view that the world would be a better place without Trump in it. Democrats can’t forgive him for perpetrating what they see as longstanding damage to multiple government institutions and individual careers. And there are Republicans who believe he represents an ongoing existential threat to the future of their party.

“Needless to say, it would be very embarrassing for any of these folks to appear to be directly involved with any nefarious acts. So, we would like to make you a proposition Mr. Goldstein. We can give you the opportunity and means to eliminate Mr. Trump yourself, and effectively get away with it. That should provide you with some measure of justice and satisfaction. It will also address my clients’ needs. Afterward, we would make it appear that you were captured and killed by the FBI. In fact however, you will be given a new identity and passport, along with a generous stipend, and you will have the opportunity to live out the rest of your life in comfortable anonymity anywhere in the world of your choosing. I am personally partial to the Seychelles.

“The story that will be made public is that, somewhat understandably, as a result of your massive grief, you snapped and took out your frustrations on Trump directly and assassinated him. Your online history will be a large part of the evidence chain presented. This will provide substantial and plausible deniability for the individuals I represent.

“Given your particular situation, I would consider this offer carefully Mr. Goldstein. As I see it, you have nothing to lose.

“I realize that this is a lot to digest. I’ll give you a few days to think it over after which I’ll be in touch. Goodbye Mr. Goldstein.”

*****

I guess it’s good to know that it’s not just me and a couple of other kooks on the internet who thinks this prick Trump has a lot to answer for. Killing him would for sure not bring anyone back, but it would bring some closure, at least for me. And it sounds like they thought this thing through pretty carefully, at least from what I’ve heard so far. On the other hand, there’s something scary and clearly not too kosher about these guys.

*****

“So, have you come to a decision Mr. Goldstein?”

James Noble was sitting in an armchair in Paul’s living room. As before, he had called from a car parked across the street a few minutes earlier.

“I don’t know. To state the obvious, assassinations are not really my area of expertise, and I’m not sure I’m cut out for it. And, although I get the general picture of what you are saying, how would this even possibly happen for real?”

“I’m not going to get into any details Mr. Goldtsein until and unless we are both absolutely sure you are going to go through with this. If you decide no, that’s fine. I’ll walk out of here and you won’t ever see or hear from me again. But, either way, I don’t want to waste any more time, so I need to know now.”

There was picture of Dana on the mantlepiece directly behind James Noble’s left shoulder. Paul felt she was looking at him.

“Give me an hour, and I’ll give you my decision.”

“Fair enough. See you in an hour.”

*****

More than half a million dead Americans. More than were killed in World War I and World War II combined. And you can add in 9/11 for good measure. What a waste. And as Dr. Birx herself admitted, most of those, except for maybe the first hundred thousand or so when we didn’t really know what we were up against, could’ve been prevented if we had just done the right thing.

Instead, our very stable genius president told us not to worry, and that we shouldn’t listen to the scientists because they don’t understand anything about how the world really works. Especially Fauci.

Fauci, Schmauci – what does he know? He’s just a little pencil-necked wop from Brooklyn who thinks he knows everything just because he happens to be the head of Infectious Disease at the National Institute of Health for the past 35 years. Like I keep telling you over and over, I’ve been to the best schools, I know all the words, and I’ve got the best brain. So just listen to me and treat everyone else with the contempt they deserve. Especially that Fauci. Shit, the little putz doesn’t even play golf.

In fairness, the Covidiot actually did a half decent job with vaccine production, but then he spent so much time and effort trying to gather praise for his success that he forgot to take care of the most important part, namely getting the damn shot into people’s arms. A less charitable, but probably more accurate, view is that he deliberately avoided getting involved in the distribution process as it was likely to get messy, and he wanted all the glory and none of the blame. And he essentially told us to avoid a few inconvenient truths – like when he admitted to Bob Woodward on tape that this was actually a really bad and dangerous disease, and that he and his wife got the vaccine in secret, presumably because doing otherwise would imply that he actually did believe in science, and Fauci, after all.

First my Dad Reuben, then my son Abe, and finally my wife Dana.

Someone has to pay.

*****

“Well?”

“Okay, I’m in. What happens now?”

“Good. Welcome to the team Mr. Goldstein. It turns out that Trump is going to give a speech at a mini rally in St. Petersburg, Florida in about three weeks. The venue is Al Lang Stadium. So that’s the where and when. As to the how, I saw that you were in the Army National Guard while in college and graduate school, and that you were one of the best marksmen in your unit. The how is going to involve a sniper rifle. But before we get into those details, here’s a plane ticket to Tampa. I want to show you the layout first. I’ve booked you into the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront hotel which is just across the street from the stadium. I’ll meet you in the lobby there at 10 am day after tomorrow.”

*****

Al Lang Stadium, located at 230 1st Street Southeast in St. Petersburg, is home to the Tampa Bay Rowdies, a professional soccer team playing in the United Soccer League Championship. It was previously a baseball stadium but was reconfigured for soccer when the Rowdies moved there in 2011. The stadium has a seating capacity of about 7500, most of which is located in an L-shaped area wrapped around the northern corner of the field, just behind and to the left of the home team goal posts.

“We’re still not exactly sure where his podium will be located, but presumably it will be somewhere in the field facing those seats. Now, let me show you where the shot will be taken from.”

“Presumably it’s from one of the north facing windows of the Hilton since it’s just across the street and has a pretty good angle of view over the stadium.”

“No. Trump still has Secret Service and private protection. The Hilton is an obvious potential threat location so they will almost certainly have it swarming with their guys. You’re going to be located further away where the threat potential is considered much less, and you’re therefore less likely to be noticed. Let me show you.”

They walked west away from the stadium and along the north side of the Hilton until they came to 2nd Street South and stopped in front of a six-story building in front of which was a sign reading “Camden Pier District Public Parking”. They entered and climbed the stairs to the roof. The building’s footprint was rectangular with the narrow sides facing east and west. They walked to the east side where there were parking spaces for a half dozen vehicles. The perimeter of the roof was surrounded by a concrete wall about four feet high. Al Lang Stadium was directly in front of the east wall.

“We are going to put construction signs and barriers in front of these three parking spots, effectively blocking them. You will be provided with a van that has a flip open window in the back and no windows on the side. You’re going to park the van in one of the three spots so the back window is looking out over the wall facing the stadium. You’ll take your shot from inside the van so that way no one will see you. Your rifle will be fitted with a silencer so there won’t be much noise either. After your shot, we are going to provide some diversionary explosions around the stadium. That should give you space and time to get away. We want you to leave the van with the gun in it, take the fire escape down to the street level, take the alleyway to your left that takes you to 3rd St. South, and walk four blocks north to another parking garage called SP Plus parking. We are going to walk there now so you can see it for yourself. On the ground floor of that garage, parked near the exit, will be a black Ford F-150 with Florida plates. The keys will be sitting on top of the left rear tire. Get out of town as soon as possible. We suggest you drive north to Atlanta and take a plane from there back to New York. They are likely to put roadblocks on the main roads pretty fast, so use secondary roads as much as possible. We’ll leave some suggested routes in the glove compartment. I’ll see you in New York a few days later.sitting on top of the left rear

“No matter where they put his podium, it should not be more than 350 yards from where you will be parked. You’re going to be practicing at distances at least twice that. By the time Trump gives his speech you should be able to take out a fly at 350 yards.

“Which brings us back to the sniper rifle issue. On this card is an address near Langley in Virginia. That’s where you and your rifle are going to get acquainted. I’ll meet you there in two days.”

*****

“Mr. Goldstein, I’d like you to meet Sergeant Major Norm Blackwell. Norm is a Special Operations sniper instructor. He helped train the SEAL team that took out Bin Laden. I’ll leave you two to it then.”

“Pleased to meet you Mr. Goldstein.”

“You can call me Paul.”

“Great. You can call me Sergeant Major. Nah, just kidding. Call me Norm. Now let’s meet your new best friend.”

They were standing at one end of a large field in an otherwise gently wooded section of rolling hills in rural Virginia. It looked like about eight hundred yards, or about half a mile, to the other side. At the far end Paul could just make out a steel gong target suspended between two A frames.

“She’s a beauty, ain’t she?”

They were standing in front of an admittedly impressive and fiercely beautiful rifle. It was balanced at the apex of substantial retractable steel tripod legs that had been extended to shoulder height.

“This is the Barrett Mark 22 Advanced Sniper Rifle. It’s milled from a single block of aluminum, weighs just over fifteen pounds, has an effective firing range of just under a mile, and in 2019 was chosen to be the preferred sniper rifle of the US military Special Operations Command. Because of its multirole adaptive design, or MRAD, it can be fairly quicky and easily configured to handle a variety of calibers. We are going to be using the 300 Norma Magnum setup with a 26 inch barrel. It’s a little smaller bullet than the 308 or 338, but it still packs plenty of punch. Importantly, it has significantly less recoil than the other calibers, so it’ll be easier on your shoulder. As you can see, it’s a bolt action repeater fed by a ten-shot magazine, and the action is pure poetry. Once we’re through though, you shouldn’t need more than one shot to take care of business. She comes in just this one cool sand color they call Coyote Cherokee for some reason, and she retails for just over seventeen grand. When you add this here Leupold Mark 5 HD scope, which the military also just selected, you’re looking at almost twenty thousand dollars worth of gear. So treat her with the respect she deserves. If you do, unlike most women, she will not disappoint.

“This is the actual gun you are going to use in the field. Every part of it has been wiped clean of prints, and we will always be using gloves when we handle her. Any latex allergies? Good. Also, we have her already fitted with the custom suppressor you will be using. It may affect accuracy a little but, since that’s what we’ll be training with, by the time showtime comes around you should be all set. Any questions?

“Okay then. Now let’s see what damage we can do with thing.”

*****

After two weeks of relentless training under the expert tutelage of Sergeant Major Norm Blackwell, it turned out that James Noble had been right. Paul Goldstein could reliably hit a fly at 350 yards. Not that it was particularly relevant however. When they had practiced with a pumpkin at that distance, no matter where he hit its cartoonish painted face, the result had been the same – the entire pumpkin just exploded.

*****

At 2:30 pm on Wednesday April 14, Paul entered the Camden Pier District parking garage in St. Petersburg Florida. He was driving a black Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van with no side windows. He had chosen this time as it was between lunch and the evening rush. He drove to the roof level and carefully approached the cones in front of the three blocked parking spaces. After ensuring that the roof was, as expected, devoid of other humans, he got out of the van, removed the cones blocking just the center spot, and maneuvered the van in tail first.

The Barrett Mark 22 rifle was in its custom case on the floor in the rear next to a large duffle bag containing the tripod, several extra pairs of latex gloves, sandwiches, drinks and snacks, some reading material, and a large plastic lidded urinal. A surprisingly luxurious folding chair was the final object on the floor of the van. Trump was not due onstage until 8 pm, so he might as well get comfortable in the interim.

He put on a pair of latex gloves, assembled the rifle, and set it up securely on the tripod which he planted firmly in the middle of the cargo area. He checked his surroundings once more, and flipped open the van’s large rear window. He was directly facing Al Lang Stadium. He took a good, long look down the Leupold scope, and made some minor adjustments.

It was a pleasant early Spring day in St. Petersburg with mostly clear skies, good visibility, and a light breeze blowing west to east at about 5 to 10 miles per hour.

Good day to go shooting.

He settled down to wait.

*****

Someone has to pay. And today’s the day.

*****

Trump came on stage just before 8:45 pm, fashionably late as usual. The sun had set over an hour earlier, and the stadium lights were in full bloom. Over the course of the afternoon, roadies had erected a large stage about fifty yards away from the pocket of the stadium’s L-shaped seating area. For the past ninety minutes or so, a variety of sniveling sycophants had been warming up the adulatory capacity crowd in anticipation of the main event. From his perch above the Camden Pier District garage three hundred and fifty pristinely clear yards way, Paul Goldstein could hear the indistinct cacophony of the speakers’ voices as they reverberated over the stadium’s sound system, along with the occasional punctuation of perfunctory audience applause. When Trump swaggered onto the dais, the assembled multitude let out a lusty cheer of jubilant adoration.

This is actually going to be fun.

Paul peered down the Leupold scope. Trump was standing at a forty-five degree angle, and Paul could clearly make out the tiny American flag pin that the man was wearing on his left lapel.

It’s true – the guy has freakishly small hands.

He decided to wait for ten minutes while Trump settled himself in. After eight minutes, Paul planted himself securely behind the Barrett Mark 22. Following Norm Blackwell’s instructions, he started to deliberately slow down his breathing and concentrate on his simultaneously slowing heartbeat. The idea was to pull the trigger after an exhalation and between heartbeats. That’s when there would be minimal effect on movement of the gun barrel.

He sighted on a two inch square area between Trump’s left eye and ear.

That orange skin looks just like those pumpkins. And it really does look like he’s wearing a squirrel on his head.

As he focused himself, his mind’s eye involuntarily presented him visions of his father Reuben dying alone and then being placed in a biohazard bag, of his son Abe dying in a distant ICU surrounded by grieving coworkers, of his wife Dana as she took her last breath in front of his own eyes.

Someone has to pay.

He tuned into the rhythmic thumping of his heartbeat, and started slowly exhaling, his index finger resting gently on the trigger.

Another vision inserted itself. He saw his father standing in front of his own wife’s portrait above the living room mantelpiece, softly caressing her lips with his outstretched fingers while he murmured something soft and tender. The image dissolved and was replaced by one of a proud Dana standing next to a joyous Abe just after he had received his respiratory therapist diploma. They were both looking at him, expectantly…

Shit, I can’t do this.

Paul abruptly stepped back and away from the rifle. He stood still for several minutes, eyes closed, head down.

It’s over.

He peeled off his gloves, threw them on the floor next to the tripod, and exited the van. Briskly, he made his way toward the fire escape leading to the street.

I reckon I don’t need their car. I can make my own way home.

*****

The man on the roof of the roof of the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront Hotel put down his night vision binoculars, took out his cellphone, and pressed a speed-dial key.

“Mr. Noble. This is Agent Charles. The subject has just left the van without taking any shot. He appears to be heading for the street.”

“Shit. Sounds like our Jew-boy wimped out at the last minute. That’s unfortunate. I actually thought he would pull it off. Well, back to the drawing board.

“I bet he just goes home and tries to act like nothing happened. Meet me in my office in two days. Then we’re going to visit Mr. Goldstein.”

*****

“Mr. Goldstein, this is Agent Charles.”

As usual, James Noble had called a few minutes earlier from a car parked across the street from Paul’s house.

Agent Charles was an unsmiling, laconic, craggy man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Clint Eastwood in his Dirty Harry days. Silently, almost casually, he moved a few feet to the side and unbuttoned his suit jacket while James Noble continued.

“So, what happened?”

“I couldn’t go through with it, that’s all. You’re going to have to find someone else.”

“Clearly. But what about you?”

“What about me? I didn’t do anything. No harm, no foul.”

“I’m afraid that’s not how it works Mr. Goldstein.”

Paul’s last conscious thought was that, just outside his field of view, Agent Charles seemed to be reaching for something under his left arm.

*****

“This is Noble. I’m in Westchester, New York and I need a cleanup crew asap.”

*****

BOOK 3 - Miranda Giles

Miranda Giles had done a lot of thinking after receiving Herb Schoenberg’s letter.

Two lines of the letter had made a particular impression on her retired police detective mind. The first was: It quickly became clear that, for some reason, the NSA knew everything there was to know about me and my family. And the second was: I remember his specific phrasing: “Why not Herb? You have no more to lose, and this way everybody wins.”

The only way it all made sense was if the NSA were somehow deliberately picking on people who had suffered some sort of major tragedy which rendered them desperate and vulnerable, and were then using mind games to redirect those people into performing targeted assassinations.

And, if like Herb Schoenberg, the poor slobs didn’t cooperate, they were killed, and it would be made to look like understandable suicide.

It was bonkers. But if it were true, there would clearly be others….

*****

It had made the local New York news – “This is Don Harper with Fox News. Paul Goldstein, who was interviewed by me on this same channel last year after having tragically lost his father, his only son, and his wife to COVID 19, all within six months, was found dead at his home in Westchester yesterday, the victim of an apparent suicide.”

Miranda had seen the original TV interview. Apart from being horrified at the reporter’s total lack of empathy at the time, she vividly remembered thinking how absolutely devastating and awful the whole situation must have been for the poor man.

The only way it all made sense was if the NSA were somehow deliberately picking on people who had suffered some sort of major tragedy which rendered them desperate and vulnerable…

Renting a car and taking a drive up to Westchester sounded like a very reasonable idea.

*****

Paul Goldstein had lived in a comfortable three-bedroom house on Patrick Road, a quiet elliptical street located between the heroically named hamlet of Valhalla and the more prosaic one of Hawthorne. More practically, it was near where the Taconic and Sprain Brook parkways met, so getting there by car had been pretty straightforward..

Like the other houses on the loop, Paul had four immediate neighbors – one on each side, and two on the far side of the street. Miranda began ringing doorbells.

There was no one home in the house to the immediate left, and the person who answered the door on the right was clearly in no mood to speak with strangers. However, the first house across the street was more auspicious.

“Hi. My name is Rachel Rose.” She had picked the name at random, but liked its alliteration, and the ‘Rose’ part made it sound friendly. “I was a friend of Paul Goldstein and his wife, and I was hoping I could talk to you about him.”

The man who answered the door was a cheerful, portly, balding man who looked like he craved company and rarely strayed too far from an adult beverage.

“Sure. Paul was a lovely guy. Come on in.”

He invited her into the living room, and promptly offered her a drink.

“It’s a little early for me, but thank you.”

“It’ll just be me then.” He moved to a well-appointed bar in the far corner of the room and poured a generous measure of Glenmorangie ten-year-old single malt whiskey into a large tumbler. “No ice. Only way to drink this stuff. I learned about that when my late wife and I took a trip to Scotland about five years ago. So, tell me, how did you know Paul?”

She had done her homework.

“My husband worked with him at Morgan Stanley. They were quite close. I only met Paul a few times, usually at company functions. My husband died a few years ago, and Paul was very kind and supportive at the time. We kind of lost touch after, but when I heard on the news that Paul had died, something inside me just made me want to come up and talk to someone who knew him.”

“Like I said, Paul was a lovely guy. Even after all the crap that happened with his family all dying from COVID within months of each other, he never stopped treating other people nicely.”

“It’s a shame he committed suicide. But I guess it’s understandable given the circumstances.”

“I don’t know. I mean, sure, he was angry about what happened, but I never saw him despondent. He blamed the government, Trump especially, for mishandling the pandemic, and would often go off on rants about it. But he didn’t feel sorry for himself. To me, he never looked like someone about to commit suicide. In fact, shortly before he died, he told me that he might’ve found a way to get someone to take responsibility for how badly the COVID thing was handled. He seemed energized by this. Like I said, not like someone about to kill himself. So it all came as a big shock.”

“Do you know who found his body?”

“That’s another weird thing. The local news said that Paul had called a suicide hotline just before he killed himself, and that’s why the police were dispatched to his house. They’re the ones who found him. But a few hours earlier, I saw a cleaning van park outside his house and several cleaners went in. They were there for a while. Who kills themselves right after paying to have their house professionally cleaned?”

“Fair point. You seem to notice a lot of details going on outside your house.”

“I live alone, and I watch a lot of TV. My viewing angle gives me a great view of the street.”

“Did you happen to notice anything else?”

“Actually yes, now that you mention it. Even earlier that day, two guys visited Paul. I saw them drive up and park right outside my house. They left just before the cleaners arrived.

“And you know what, I’m pretty sure I saw the same car and one of those same two guys before. It was about a month ago I believe. He came by a couple of times actually, but only stayed a few minutes each time. Weird, huh?”

*****

She needed to get prepared. The first step was to move all her financial assets to an offshore bank which provided excellent retail customer service worldwide, and from which money flows would be difficult to trace.

Her late husband Ron had not been perfect. He had an unfortunate penchant for younger women, and had strayed off the reservation on several occasions, including a six-month stint after just three years of marriage when he shacked up with one of his bimbo secretaries from work. But he was basically a nice man, and a devoted parent who doted on their only son Robert. After Bobby had informed them he was gay when he was just fourteen, Ron had been totally supportive. And when Bobby told them he was moving to Paris to live with Maurice, the love of his life whom he had met as an undergrad at Columbia, Ron had been totally cool, and merely joked how he would now have a cheap place to stay when he made his regular gustatory pilgrimages to the City of Lights. That was why he went to pieces after Bobby and Maurice were killed at the Bataclan. That was why he took the overdose of pills and alcohol. That was why he she had found him lying on the bed with Bobby’s beaming Columbia graduation portrait resting gently on his chest.

Ron had also been a good provider. As a reasonably successful New York real estate lawyer, he had managed to squirrel away just under three million dollars in various stock and money market accounts before his death. He had also been prescient enough to fully pay off the mortgage on their three-bedroom upper east side condo in Manahattan, and that was easily worth another three million. Along with her own police retirement fund, her net worth was just shy of six and a half million dollars.

Last but not least, Ron had also hobnobbed with enough really wealthy clients over the years to know precisely where they liked to stash their money offshore.

After a little online research, she settled on the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation of Singapore. A ten minute phone call with one of their senior managers confirmed conclusively that six and a half million dollars would indeed secure her excellent and discreet customer service.

*****

The next step would take a little more time.

After several hours of perusing maps and various real estate websites, she made a long distance call to a number winking on her laptop screen.

“Mr. Banks? My name is Miranda Giles. I saw your ‘for sale by owner’ ad for a property in Alaska. Is it still available?”

After fifteen minutes of conversation, they made an arrangement to meet the following Tuesday at noon at the Cave restaurant in Delta Junction.

*****

Delta Junction is located at historic milepost 1422 of the Alaska Highway which starts at Dawson Creek in British Columbia. The highway was constructed in World War II to help connect the contiguous 48 United States with Alaska. For many years, it was designated the northernmost town on the Alaska Highway, but that honor is now more appropriately bestowed on the city of Fairbanks located about 100 miles further north.

Delta Junction is surrounded by three spectacular mountain ranges: the White Mountains to the north; the Granite Mountains to the southeast; and the Alaska Range to the southwest. It also sits adjacent to Fort Greeley which houses the United States 49th missile-defense Battalion, an integral part of the homeland defense system designed to protect the US from intercontinental ballistic missiles.

As Miranda Giles drove slowly past the large signpost at mile marker 1422 on her way to the Cave restaurant, she read the signage on its top that indicated that all cities of significance, namely Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and of course Dawson Creek, lay several thousand miles away back down the road in the opposite direction. There was something about it that made her smile.

The Cave restaurant was actually a diner, and George Banks was waiting for her in a four-person booth in the back. Over coffee and a surprisingly delicious tuna salad, he told her the rest of the story about the property she had travelled almost four thousand miles to see.

*****

“The place was owned by my older brother Larry. He worked as an engineer for ConocoPhillips in Anchorage which is where we grew up. Like a lot of Alaskans, Larry was always a big outdoor enthusiast. He never married , never had kids , so when they offered him early retirement at 55, he decided to go all in. He wanted to go completely off the grid. He found this isolated cabin on 75 acres in the middle of nowhere, and decided that that’s where he was going to spend the rest of his natural days. But Larry also liked his creature comforts. Just because he had decided to live on his own in the wilderness didn’t mean that he wanted to be Ted Kaczynski. So he used his engineering skills and a serious chunk of the change that he had saved from his time at ConocoPhillips to totally refurbish the place, including putting a windmill that can probably power a decent sized skyscraper, state of the art heating and insulation, his own well, satellite TV, and a stereo sound system that Mick Jagger would envy.”

“So why is he selling?”

“Larry died. We’re still not sure exactly what happened, just that he died just outside his front door. By the time we found him he had been dead for months, and there wasn’t much of him left. It was either something sudden like a heart attack or stroke, which is what the coroner thought, or he was attacked by a bear which is my theory. Which brings up the uncomfortable fact that this can be a pretty dangerous place sometimes, particularly for a woman on her own. No offense.”

“Thanks. I was a New York City police detective for over 20 years, so I think I can take care of myself. And, in my experience, I’ve found that when people say “no offense”, they often mean the opposite. No offense.”

George Banks smiled broadly.

“That’s pretty good. You’re all right, aren’t you? Anyway, after Larry died, no one in the family wanted the place so we decided to sell it. Unfortunately, the bizarre combination of having a high tech cabin in the middle of the woods and the history of a dead body in the front yard has made it hard to price right and even harder to sell. If you want to see it for yourself, we should probably get going because it takes about ninety minutes to get there from here. Which brings up another thing. There are no roads up there. The only way in and out is by ATV or, for most of the year, snowmobile. As they say, we only have two seasons here – August and winter. Actually, it’s been pretty warm these past couple of months, so we should be fine with the ATV.”

*****

She asked him to stop briefly every mile or so to allow her to take stills and video with her iPhone. It wasn’t sightseeing - she needed to learn how to be able to find her way to this place on her own.

*****

The cabin was nestled in the foothills of the Alaska Range mountains, its back up against a steep bluff. She had seen the windmill from over a mile away. George Banks had not been kidding – the anchoring pylon was over one hundred feet tall, and each of its three high tech blades were at least thirty feet long.

The cabin was rectangular, about forty by twenty-five feet, with the long side facing out. The exterior, as expected, was made of interlocking logs, but it was clear that they had been precisely engineered. The roof was heavy duty shingle, steeply angled to minimize snow accumulation, and looked fairly new. It also boasted two satellite dishes, a larger one eight feet in diameter and a smaller three foot cousin.

“Don’t quite know how he did it but he managed to hook himself up to several hundred free satellite TV channels as well as to free internet. He just loved not having to pay anyone for any utilities.”

There was a long, narrow shed to the left of the cabin made of similar materials.

“I forgot to mention it. The shed is where he stored his ATV and snowmobile along with a spare gas powered generator and various tools and such. It’s all still there. It’s also heated, and he used it as a greenhouse to grow vegetables in racks along on the side walls. And that pipe sticking out of the ground on the other side of the cabin is the well.”

Before stepping in, she did a 360 to admire the view. It was stupendous. The snow draped Alaska range loomed directly behind the cabin’s entrance. When she stood with her back to the front door, she could clearly see the White Mountains straight ahead in the distance, and a half turn to the right revealed the majesty of the Granite Mountains. Larry had picked a nice spot.

She entered the cabin behind George. The cabin had been divided into two rooms, a larger entrance room and a smaller bedroom off to the side. Other than the floor near the kitchen, which was tiled with what looked like marble, there was heavy duty dark red shag carpeting throughout, and baseboard electric heating panels along all four outside walls. The ceiling was adorned with modern LED track lighting. In the corner of the larger room, to the right of the doorway, was a windowed kitchen area which included a Subzero fridge, a top of the line Viking electric range and oven, a paired Samsung washing machine and dryer, and a Bosch dishwasher. The countertops were dark green granite, and there was expensive looking floor to ceiling mahogany cabinetry extending along the side wall. On the side wall adjacent to the kitchen area was a six- feet wide, three-foot deep, floor to ceiling pantry filled with various canned and dry goods. An inlaid rosewood triangular shaped bar unit filled the far corner opposite the kitchen. The shelves above the unit suggested that Larry Banks, like Paul Goldstein’s Westchester neighbor, was a scotch whiskey afficionado. A square mahogany dining table and two chairs occupied the floor space between the kitchen and the bar. The center of the room was dominated by a large, leather, swivel massage recliner which faced a 65 inch Samsung high definition TV and Sonos wireless home theater system in the other far corner, as well as a woodburning fireplace along the back wall. The remaining wall space was taken up by custom made shelves copiously laden with books. A doorway in the middle of the dividing wall led to the bedroom. A queen sized bed was placed against the far wall and faced a large, triple glazed picture window in the front. A second, slightly smaller Samsung TV was on a retractable wall mount along the side wall. In the corner near the front window was an enclosed shower stall, and adjacent to that were a matching sink and a toilet. A large glass-fronted mahogany gun cabinet lay against the dividing wall adjacent to the bed. It contained three hunting rifles, two shotguns, an AR 15, a Glock 19, and several revolvers, along with multiple boxes of assorted ammunition.

“Larry was a detail nut as you might expect from an engineer. All of the user manuals, from the kitchen appliances to the windmill and the snowmobile, are in an alphabetized file folder in one of the cabinets above the kitchen sink. Feel free to check it out. So, what do you think?”

“I see what you mean about the weird high tech luxury cabin in the woods combo. Also, either your brother really liked guns, or he was expecting an invasion.”

“Both.”

“Well, other than the toilet being kind of in the middle of the bedroom, I like it.”

“So what would you give me for it? The land alone is worth at least $200 thousand, and the cabin has to be worth at least that much again given all the money that was put into it. He had to have most of the stuff and contractors flown in by helicopter. And the windmill itself is worth $40 thousand easy.”

“Tell you what, throw in the snowmobile, the ATV, and everything else as is, and I’ll give you five hundred thousand cash delivered by wire transfer to any bank of your choice. I’ll take all the guns too.”

“Deal.”

*****

“Mrs. Giles?”

“Who’s calling.”

“My name is James Noble and I work for the National Security Agency. I was hoping I could talk with you for a few minutes.”

“About what?”

“This is probably best done face to face Mrs. Giles. It shouldn’t take very long. I can either meet you in your apartment, or outside at a location of your choosing. I am actually in the area, and I could be in your apartment in as little as fifteen minutes if that works for you.”

“I’m a retired New York City police officer. As far as I know, I haven’t done anything that would cause the NSA to want to talk to me. So, from where I sit, you’re full of crap and this has to be some sort of scam.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong Mrs. Giles, and I can assure you this is no scam. I can prove to you that I do indeed work for the NSA. I just want to talk to you briefly about a private matter and, as I said, this is best done face to face.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of this, but okay. I’ll meet you at the Central Park entrance on East 96th street in one hour. I’ll give you five minutes. If I don’t like what I see or hear, I’m gone.”

“Fair enough. See you soon.”

Show time.

*****

“Harry, this is Miranda Giles.”

“Hi babe. Nice to hear from you. It’s been a while. What’s cooking?”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to call me babe? I turned sixty-one a few months ago, and I haven’t been anyone’s babe for quite some time.”

“Age is just in your head. It’s not how old you are. It’s how old you feel.”

Harry had a point. Her cancer had been in remission for over ten years, she exercised regularly, and ate and drank sensibly. There were indeed times she still felt like a babe.

“ And you can’t blame a guy for trying, especially with you now being single and all.”

“Great Harry. Very classy.”

“Sorry. Sometimes I just say whatever shit pops into my head. What can I do for you?”

“I’m meeting some guy at the Central Park entrance on East 96th Street in an hour. I want you to be there, and I want you to follow him. I need to know where he lives, what his routines are, everything. He says his name is James Noble but that may be an alias. Be discreet, be careful, and be cautious. This dude is NSA.”

“I take it that asking you what this is about is a waste of time, right?”

“Just get me what I need. I’ll pay you double your usual fee.”

“Don’t insult me Miranda. You know that after what you did, this one is on me.”

*****

In 2007, Harry Stockton and Miranda Giles had both been New York City detectives assigned to the 108th precinct in Long Island City, Queens. Following a tip from a low level drug dealer trying to avoid a long jail sentence, they had paid a visit to a Chinese laundry in Astoria which, according to the snitch, was a front for an illegal immigrant smuggling operation.

The snitch had only been half right. The Chinese laundry was a front all right, but it was actually handling drugs from South and Central America – a lot of drugs. And the place was fortified with men and guns.

So right after Harry and Miranda identified themselves as New York detectives to the diminutive elderly Chinese man behind the counter, all hell broke loose. Two larger and younger Chinese men appeared suddenly from the back of the store, guns drawn and already firing. Harry took a bullet to the right shoulder and went down. Miranda managed to dive under the counter and draw her Glock 19 just as the lead gunman leapt over the counter directly overhead. She fired three times and hit him twice before he hit the floor. The second gunman was still firing wildly from behind the counter and shrieking obscenities in Chinese. She concentrated on where the sound was coming from and fired two rounds directly through the counter in that direction. The gunfire and shrieking immediately ceased. As she turned back to check on Harry, the old Chinese dude appeared in front of her. He was brandishing a sawn-off shotgun, and he didn’t look that elderly or diminutive any more. Before she could react, in what she had to admit was a remarkably lithe and deft move, the old man placed a swift kick to the left side of her head. The force of the blow sent her crashing through the counter, and caused the Glock to spiral wildly out of her right hand. The old man spun around and started to bring his gun barrel to point at Harry’s prostrate body. Miranda, fighting though stars in her eyes and brain, clawed at the revolver sitting in its holster on her right calf. She fired just in time to move the guy’s gun barrel enough so that his shotgun blast blew a one foot hole in the front door instead of in Harry’s chest. The old Chinese guy fell onto his knees, a dark wine stain expanding across his lower back . He was still holding the shotgun. Miranda fired three more rounds. Finally, the guy dropped the gun, flopped forward, and lay still. She fired her last two rounds at the inert body, just to be sure he was really dead.

That’s why she was a highly decorated police officer. And that’s why Harry owed her. Big time.

*****

Harry never fully recovered from his shoulder wound, and he retired from the police force with a full pension shortly thereafter. He went on to become a private investigator. His training as a detective helped a lot, and for the past several years, he had enjoyed the reputation of being one of the best in the business.

Time to pay your dues and put your skills to good use Harry.

*****

“Hello, Mrs. Giles. I’m James Noble. Here is my badge.”

“Well, if it’s a fake, it’s a good one. Let’s take a walk in the park. Like I said, you have five minutes.”

They started walking towards the running track that circumscribes the reservoir.

“I believe we can help each other Mrs. Giles.”

“I really can’t see how or why, but go on. Clock’s ticking.”

James Noble took out a small notebook from his inside jacket pocket and perused it while they strolled .

“You were born and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. Your father was a police officer there and your Mom was a kindergarten teacher. Both your parents died in a car crash on Interstate 80 in 1978 during your final year of high school. You have no siblings. You attended the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York between 1979 and 1983 and graduated cum laude. Immediately thereafter you joined the New York City police force where you remained for twenty-five years, the last twenty as a detective. In 2007 you received the Police Combat Cross, the second highest medal possible, after an incident where you saved your partner’s life and killed three drug dealers single handed. You retired in 2010 after you were diagnosed with breast cancer from which you are currently in remission. In 2015, your only son Robert was killed by ISIL terrorists in the Bataclan nightclub in Paris, along with his boyfriend Maurice Carpentier. Your husband Ron subsequently became depressed, and eventually committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills and alcohol on November 13, 2016, on the one year anniversary of your son’s death. You have never remarried.”

“Thanks for the trip down memory lane Mr. Noble. I must say I find it disturbing on many levels that you know so much about me. However, you still haven’t told me what you want or, quite frankly, why we’re even talking to each other.”

“You’re very direct Mrs. Giles. I guess that’s not surprising given your background. Let me get to the point. Mohammed al-Thani is a Qatari billionaire who makes most of his money from arms dealing and drugs. He is a major contributor to several terrorist organizations, but his favorite by far is ISIL - the same group directly responsible for your son’s death and indirectly for your husband’s. We estimate that over the years, he has given ISIL at least $1 billion in cash, along with significant direct quantities of weapons and ammunition. We in the NSA, along with a number of other people in the US government, would like to see Mr. Al-Thani eliminated. I suspect that, given the circumstances, you might feel quite sympathetic to that point of view.

“It turns out that before Mr. Al-Thani devoted himself to a life of crime and funding terrorists, he was a US trained cardiologist. For the past nine years, he has attended the New York Cardiovascular Symposium, which is usually held in early December at the New York Hilton on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. It was held virtually this last year because of COVID, but it looks like it will be live again by December 2021. If so, he will almost certainly attend in person. The plan is to have you be an attendee at the Symposium so that you can get close enough to him to take him out without unnecessary collateral damage. You would be dressed in a burqa which will serve to both disguise you and conceal your weapon. It will also allow us to claim that Mr. Al-Thani was murdered by a rival Muslim faction. We will have several agents on the scene dressed as New York City police officers. They will immediately take you into custody, and then take you to a safe location from which you will be released . The official story from the New York City Police Department who, needless to say, will be fully cooperating with us, is that the female assailant unfortunately committed suicide while in police custody. We will provide them, and thereby the press, with enough evidence and supporting documentation to make the story entirely credible.

“You will be helping your country get rid of a very dangerous man, and you will also be able to exact some sort of retribution for your losses. And if the story sells, as we believe it will, it will have the added benefit of perhaps having some of these assholes kill each other off in the aftermath.

“So what do you say Mrs. Giles? The way I see it, you have nothing to lose.”

“That is quite a story Mr. Noble, but it took you more than five minutes, so you already lost points.”

“This is not a game Mrs. Giles.”

“Well, there are a lot of moving parts to your plan, and some of them sound pretty wobbly to me. I’m going to need some time to think about it. I’ll let you know in a few weeks.”

“How about two?”

“Don’t try to bully me Mr. Noble. I don’t work for you, at least not yet.”

“Fair enough. I’ll get back in touch in three weeks.”

That means you have about two weeks to get me what I need Harry.

*****

She put her condo on the market through Corcoran. She told them she wanted a quick sale. It took only seven days to find a buyer willing to pay $2.9 million. Not quite the $3 million she was hoping for, but good enough.

She called one of her husband’s old real estate law partners and told him she had finally had enough of New York and was going to go on a prolonged round the world cruise effective immediately. She asked him to please handle all the paper work for the condo sale on her behalf, and then send the net proceeds to her bank in Singapore.

He could not have been more friendly or accommodating.

*****

“So Harry, talk to me.”

“Well, you were right. He is a cagey one. It’s a good thing I know some people that could help out. After he left you in Central Park, he went to La Guardia and hopped a flight to Buffalo. According to my contact there, after he landed, he took a cab and met a man in a local downtown bar. I can’t tell you what they discussed, but, according to my guy, the whole thing took about the same amount of time as he spent with you in the park. Then he immediately took a cab back to the airport, and got on a flight to DC. I was able to get there before he did. He retrieved a car from the short term parking lot and drove home. Home is 1412 Bradley Lane in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It’s only about a forty-five minute drive from there to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade.

“Mr. Noble has a wife and two young teenage kids who both attend a local high school. The wife is a full time homemaker.”

“I don’t need to know about his family. What about his daily routines?”

“Well, weather permitting, he typically goes for a run in the morning. He leaves the house around 6 am and usually comes back about 45 minutes later. He varies his jogging route unpredictably – like I said, he’s cagey. He spends the next 45 minutes or so presumably washing up and having breakfast, and usually leaves for work around 7:30am. His return time is all over the map but is never earlier than 7 pm. Sometimes he doesn’t come home at all for a couple of days. I guess that’s when he goes to meet people in Central Park and Buffalo.”

“Good work Harry. I think I can take it from here. There is one more thing. I need a car – two actually. First, I need a basic anonymous sedan with clean plates and papers that no one is looking for. I need that one as soon as possible. I also need a second vehicle that is in good condition and has 4-wheel drive – either an SUV, or better still, a pickup. Again, nothing flashy, but reliable. That one should have Alaska plates and a registration made out to Miranda Bennett, my maiden name. I can wait a few days for that one, but no more. I understand this won’t come cheap, but it’s what I need.”

“I’m not sure I’m liking the sound of this Miranda. It seems to me like you’re about to do something bad, stupid, or both.”

“When I want you to be my Dad, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, can you do this for me or not?”

“You know I can. That’s why you asked, isn’t it.”

They agreed on pricing and logistics. It would cost twenty thousand for the sedan, thirty-five for the SUV or truck. He would deliver the sedan to her outside her apartment at 10 am the following morning. The truck/SUV would be ready for her to pick up no later than three days after that. She would let him know exactly where and when.

After they hung up, she called her bank in Singapore and gave them the bank wiring instructions she had just received from Harry. She told them to make the wire out for an even hundred thousand. Harry had definitely earned his money.

She then went onto Amazon, and began searching for false beards and mustaches.

*****

Harry met her on the corner of the block the next morning. He pointed to a white Honda Accord parked in front of a hydrant a few feet away and handed her the keys. As he did, he noticed she was wearing surgical gloves.

“She’s clean. The papers are in the glove box. Good luck and happy hunting Miranda.”

*****

She had done a lot of thinking after her meeting with James Noble. These were very bad people, and they were clearly recruiting more and more folks. If they picked you and you didn’t go through with it, they killed you for sure, just like Herb Schoenberg and, almost certainly, Paul Goldstein. And if you were nuts or desperate enough to do their bidding, what then? It was inconceivable that these guys would just let you waltz free given the clear liability you would now represent for them. The only thing that made sense is that they got rid of you either way. These guys were even worse than the bastard terrorists who killed Bobby. At least they had the balls to do their own dirty work.

Like you said, these are very bad people. And they have to be stopped.

For a while she had entertained somehow taping any future exchanges with Noble and then going to the police and/or the press. But then she remembered him saying that the police would be “fully cooperating” with whatever insane plan they had cooked up for her, so that was probably not a good option. This was the NSA after all, and you had to assume they had their tentacles everywhere.

Hoping that they would just go away and leave her alone was both naïve and stupid.

And anyway, as they say, hope is not a strategy.

No, this was going to require a more definitive solution.

*****

It was 6:45am and she was parked on Melville Place, about fifty yards from where it terminated onto Bradley Lane. It was Wednesday, and the quiet residential neighborhood was just beginning to stir.

This was her third consecutive morning of surveillance, and it was going to be now or never.

She had seen James Noble run up Bradley Lane about thirty-five minutes earlier, so he was due back any time within the next ten minutes or so. The only way for him to get home was to either run back down Bradley Lane or come up Melville Place from behind her. Either way, she would see him in plenty of time.

Her greying blonde hair was wrapped in a tight bun on the top of her head, and she covered it completely with a loose fitting black baseball cap. Using the vanity mirror, she adjusted the dark false beard and matching mustache in order to look as authentic as possible, and slipped on a pair of aviator wireframe glasses with clear plastic lenses.

Good job. You look like a young Jerry Garcia.

*****

James Noble looked down at his FitBit and was pleased with what he saw. He had run just over eight miles in forty-five minutes, or pretty close to five and a half minutes a mile.

Not bad for an old fart.

He slowed to a gentle cooldown jog, and started to turn left into Bradley Lane. Just before he turned, he noted the white Accord that he had seen parked on Melville Place in the same spot for the past couple of days. The engine was on, and there was a guy with a black beard, baseball cap, and glasses behind the wheel.

Looks like someone new moved into the neighborhood and is about to go to work. I must remember to ask Susan if she knows who they are.

Over his left shoulder, he heard the car’s transmission shift into gear.

There he goes. Off to the grindstone, just like the rest of us.

*****

Her side mirror had revealed James Noble trotting up Melville Place from behind. She turned the car’s engine on, and waited for him to pass and turn left onto Bradley Lane. From his body language, he seemed to notice her car as he went by, but he didn’t break stride.

Stay cool.

She nosed the car forward toward the intersection. Noble was jogging slowly in the middle of Bradley Lane, ambling gently towards his house.

Here we go.

*****

She mashed the accelerator to the floor. With a squeal of burning rubber, the Accord lunged forward. James Noble heard the noise and instinctively realized the car was headed for him. Without turning around, he leapt sideways onto the curb in a frenetic attempt to get out of the way.

Miranda saw him jump sideways, and jerked the steering wheel violently to the left.

Contact.

James Noble’s body was catapulted into the air, and sailed forward down the street landing in a heap ten feet away. The car kept going. Miranda heard and felt the crunch of wheel on bone twice as the driver side wheels passed over Noble’s prone body.

She jammed on the brakes and looked in the rear view mirror. The car had run over both of Noble’s legs midway between his ankles and knees. A pool of blood was dilating over the sidewalk and onto the street, and she could hear him screaming in pain. But he was still very much alive. In fact, he was sitting upright and appeared to be frantically trying to lift up the bottom edge of his tee shirt. She spotted a wide, black Velcro belt tied snuggly along his lower waist.

The sonofabitch has a jogging holster, and he’s going for his gun.

She thrust the gear lever into reverse, and jammed her right foot on the gas pedal. Tires screeching and smoke belching from the wheel wells, the car leapt backward and jumped the curb.

Through the piercing pain, James Noble had finally managed to get his right hand on the grip of his Walther PPK and was starting to draw it clear.

Not enough time.

Again, she felt the driver side wheels pulverizing tissue and bone.

She jammed on the brakes, and the car came to a skidding stop thirty feet away, two wheels on the curb, two in the street.

Looking over the hood, she could see Noble’s now inert body lying supine on the sidewalk, its crushed legs spilling into the street. The carcass was imprinted with a deep, fresh, blood-stained furrow across its upper torso.

I don’t think you’re going to shrug that one off Mr. Noble. Looks like your days of recruiting desperate civilian would be murderers are over.

People were starting to come out of their homes to examine the mayhem. Some of them were yelling and gesticulating furiously in her direction.

It’s time to get out of Dodge.

She yanked the shifter into drive, did a shrieking U-turn, and headed briskly away down Bradley Lane.

*****

She was pretty sure that at least one of Noble’s neighbors had taken note of her car and, most likely, the license plate, and that the police would be on their way imminently. They would presumably be told that the vehicle was last seen headed west on Bradley, and that there was a guy with a full black beard, glasses, and a cap behind the wheel.

She needed to keep off the main roads. She hung a right onto Brookfield Road, and continued north for eight blocks after which she turned left onto Thornapple Street. She crossed the Connecticut Avenue thoroughfare, and proceeded another five blocks on Thornapple Street to Oakridge Avenue where she made a final right turn before parking the car on a serene section of the street.

She exited the car without looking back. After removing her surgical gloves and stuffing them in her jacket pocket, she calmly walked the remaining four blocks to Elm Street and the one-bedroom AirBNB apartment that Harry had kindly rented for her using his credit card.

James Noble’s body was still lying in the street less than one and a half miles away, and the entire journey so far had taken her less than ten minutes.

As she entered the apartment, she could hear several police sirens wailing in the distance. Inside, she removed her false beard, mustache, cap, and glasses and stuffed them into a large, nondescript shopping bag along with the gloves. She took off her jeans and jacket and traded them for comfortable matching sweats. After undoing her bun, she combed out her shoulder length hair and tied it into a ponytail.

She admired her handiwork in the bathroom mirror. She saw an attractive middle-aged woman looking like she was about to go out for a run. Jerry Garcia was nowhere to be seen.

She added the jeans and jacket to the shopping bag, and made a quick final tour of the apartment to make sure that she had left nothing behind. She had packed her clothes and toiletries into a single suitcase the night before, and locked them inside the truck that Harry had delivered to her the previous evening. The truck’s keys and her wallet were safely ensconced in a fanny pack around her waist.

After a final trip to the bathroom, she exited the apartment, tied off shopping bag in hand. There were two large garbage cans just outside the apartment, one for recycle and one for regular trash. She deposited the shopping bag and its contents into the latter, and began walking to where Harry had parked the truck less than a block away.

Harry had done well. The vehicle was a 2019 beige Dodge Ram Big Horn 2500 with less than twelve thousand miles on the clock. It sported a 6.4 liter V8 engine with 410 horses and 429 foot-pounds of torque. More importantly, it had four-wheel drive and 13.1 inches of ground clearance.

It was not yet 8 am. Miranda settled into the generous driver seat. It was about four thousand miles and seventy hours of driving to the end of the Alaska Highway at Delta Junction, and she was planning to take her time and enjoy the ride.

*****

Epilogue

“So, what do we have so far?”

Carl Sipowicz was looking out of the window of his corner office at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, leaning back in his swivel office chair, feet up on the edge of the desk. Agent James Calhoun was sitting on the other side of the desk, opposite Sipowicz’s right shoulder.

“Well, it certainly was not an accident. Judging from the tire marks, and based on the report of at least one eyewitness, Agent Noble was run over not once, but twice. The driver hit him first from behind with the vehicle traveling forward, running over and crushing his legs. Then the driver stopped, put the vehicle in reverse, and ran over him a second time, this time passing directly over his chest.”

“Looks like our boy James really pissed someone off. What else you got?”

“We found the vehicle parked in a quiet residential street between Connecticut and Wisconsin Avenues. There are no street cameras in that area, but we were able to find a witness who saw a short guy with dark hair, full beard, glasses, and a black baseball cap get out of the vehicle and start walking in the direction of Wisconsin Avenue. We are looking at footage of cameras on the Avenue but nothing has come up yet. We are also canvasing houses along the route the perp seemed to be walking. The description matches that of several eyewitnesses at the scene of the homicide who claim they had a decent look at the driver.”

“What about the car?”

“Preliminary forensics indicate it is definitely the vehicle that ran over Agent Noble. It is registered to someone in New York who died over five years ago. As far as we know, no one is currently looking for or claims ownership of the vehicle. There are multiple prints both inside and outside, and it will take some time to get through them all.”

“Do what you have to do, but five to one says you’ll find nothing useful. Sounds to me like whoever did this picked a clean vehicle to carry it out. Which makes it sound deliberate. And professional. What about Noble himself? Like the rest of us in this line of work, there are any number of people who might want him dead, but did he have any extra skeletons – mistresses, gambling, drugs?”

“Nothing that has come up so far.”

“As his direct supervisor, I know what he was supposed to be working on, but did he have any extracurricular activities I should know about?”

“The techies are in the process of accessing the files on all of his devices. You should have them in a couple of days.”

“You have till tomorrow.”

*****

Sipowicz looked away from his screen, leaned back in his chair, put his feet up, and turned to face the window. It helped him think more clearly.

As they had mutually agreed following the debacle and massacre in the New Jersey mall, James Noble had continued to recruit people who, as he put it, had “nothing to lose”, and attempt to get them to carry out specific assassinations. Based on what he had gleaned from Noble’s files, there had been only three completed missions since then, and success had been spotty at best.

Only one out of three, a guy by the name of John Layton, had actually managed to take out his intended target. And for that, he had been rewarded with a bullet to the back of the head. Sipowicz was pretty sure that he had not discussed that kind of outcome with James Noble.

And the other two – the first, a probable Jew by the name of Herb Schoenberg, and the second a definite Jew by the name of Paul Goldstein – had both chickened out at the last minute. And for that, they had both been killed. Sipowicz was very sure that he had not discussed that scenario with James Noble.

The files had also revealed that Noble was actively recruiting two new candidates – a male Afghan vet with a penchant for war crimes who lived in Buffalo, and a retired female New York City detective who had lost her only son in the Bataclan killings and whose husband had subsequently committed suicide.

*****

“So, what can you tell me about this Afghan vet Rory Webster?”

“He’s a nut killer for sure, but he claims he knows nothing about what happened to Agent Noble. Actually, he seemed quite legitimately upset. I think he was looking forward to doing whatever Agent Noble was asking him to do. Also, he has an airtight alibi for the date of the homicide. He was drinking in a bar all night with friends, and the bartender let them all sleep it off in the backroom. There is no way he got himself from Buffalo to DC that morning.”

“And the female detective, Miranda Giles?”

“That’s a different story. She sold her New York City condo several weeks ago and has not really been seen or heard of since then. The condo sale was handled by a real lawyer who was a personal friend. He said that she told him to wire the proceeds directly to a bank in Singapore. When I called the bank, they would neither confirm nor deny any knowledge of the transaction or of Miranda Giles.”

“You know the drill. Check with Homeland Security for evidence of international travel, and alert Interpol if there is. Send out an APB with all her available details to all fifty states, and check the major credit card companies and US banks for evidence of any transactions in her name. Also, check specifically for flights, hotels, and car rentals in the DC area. I’m not sure of the link between Ms. Giles and this guy with the beard, but my gut tells me there is one.

“Either way, she’ll turn up eventually. They always do.”

*****

Sipowicz was in his thinking pose, staring vacantly out the window onto the sprawling parking lot surrounding the building.

If you looked at it objectively and in total, Noble had actually succeeded on two out of four occasions. At first blush, fifty percent didn’t sound that good, but it really wasn’t that bad. Hell, in baseball, he’d be a superhero. And it was particularly good when you considered that, in retrospect, Noble had been pretty loose and sloppy in his screening technique. Yes, he had picked people who, on paper, all looked like reasonable candidates who had nothing left to lose, but he had not subjected them to any type of rigorous psychological testing that might have weeded out those less likely to really go through with it.

I am pretty damn sure that if you gave all this stuff to the geeks in PsyOps, they could come up some nifty algorithms that would significantly improve the overall screening process. I bet it could take the success rate up to seventy-five percent or better.

Seventy-five percent or better was good numbers. Very good numbers. Winning numbers.

And everyone loves a winner, right?

END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Gregory Steinberg was born in Paris, France in 1956, grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and graduated from the Welsh National School of Medicine in Cardiff, Wales in 1978.

He worked as a Junior House Officer in England and Wales until 1981 when he moved to New York City following the untimely death of his father. Between 1982 and 2000 he was affiliated with St. Luke’s- Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, currently part of the Mt. Sinai Health System, where he was an Internal Medical Resident, Chief Medical Resident, Cardiology Fellow, Attending Physician, and Associate Director of Medicine. He is Board certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease.

Between 2000 and 2011 he was Chief Medical Officer and then Chief Executive Officer of ActiveHealth Management, a population health management and clinical decision support company that was acquired by Aetna in 2005. Between 2011 and 2016, he was Head of Clinical Innovation at Aetna.

He retired in 2016, and lives in rural northeast Pennsylvania with his wife, three adult children, and a dog

OTHER BOOKS BY DR. GREGORY STEINBERG

A Doctor’s Odyssey (2012)

LifeSpeak – A Family Legacy (2018)

No More to Lose (2019)

No More 2 Lose – The Tunnel Rat (2020)