Chapter 101
“AND WE’RE SUPPOSED to believe the secondhand word of one man, some CIA spook we can’t interrogate for ourselves?” cried Sheriff Cammarata after I explained to the mayor, Chief Fescoe, and Special Agent Christine Townsend who was behind the No Prisoners murder and extortion scheme.
“You can believe what you want,” I snapped. “But those prints belong to Johnson. And I believe Cobb and the rest of his team are going to be on the receiving end of ten million dollars in about ten minutes or so, whenever you get the text, Your Honor.”
“Show them the picture,” Mo-bot urged.
Mo-bot stood in the background with several middle-aged women who, by their attire, looked more prepared for a yoga retreat than an extortion payoff.
I nodded, smiled at the ladies from Cal Poly, as Mo-bot had been referring to them, and then typed in a command on a laptop.
On the screen at the end of the conference room, up popped a grainy picture shot on a foggy spring day in the Afghan highlands. A group of battle-hardened men stood in the melting snow.
“That’s them,” I said. “Cobb’s far left, then Clive Johnson, Peter Kelleher, Jesus Hernandez, Denton Nickerson, and Albert Watson, who our source says is something of a genius when it comes to weapons and computers.”
Everyone in the room studied the picture. Cobb and his men looked either stoic or harshly amused. You’d never know they’d committed atrocities and enriched themselves in the months before Carpenter took the photograph.
“This is what time frame?” Mayor Wills asked.
“April 2005, Your Honor,” I said. “They’ll look quite a bit older now.”
“But what do we do with this?” Cammarata demanded. “Can we put it out there when we have no way of corroborating that this is real, that these men are the ones doing the killing?”
“I see what you’re saying, Sheriff,” I said. “But we’re not getting any other files on these men. Other than burial records in their hometowns, they’re gone.”
“How did they survive?” Fescoe asked. “How did they get here?”
“We talked about that,” I said. “Our source’s theory is that they walked out of Afghanistan along the same trails the Taliban used to bring in supplies from Pakistan. Somehow they got to their stash of gold and black tar heroin, made their way to Peshawar or some other lawless place, and bought the necessary documents. Beyond that, we have no clue.”
The mayor’s cell phone buzzed. She stiffened, looked at it, breathed hard, said, “We’ve got ten minutes, an account number, password, and routing code.”
“Okay, ladies,” Mo-bot said. “You’re up.”