CHAPTER SEVENTY
“Jock,” Doc said, “I owe you an apology.”
“For what?” Jock asked.
“I knew from the memos Matt was sending me that you were helping out with the investigation. I checked up on you, but could only find out that you worked for an oil company and had ties to some innocuous federal agency. I knew those are often covers for CIA operations. I was concerned that you might be one of those guys.”
Jock grinned. “Now you have insulted me. Accusing me of being CIA.”
“Yeah. J.D. straightened me out on the way over here.”
“Apology accepted, Doc.”
“I called J.D. late Saturday night,” Doc said. “Told her what I thought was going down, but that I needed her police credentials to check up on the other team members. I had always kept their names and addresses current in case anything like this popped up.” He looked at me. “I told her not to call you.”
“Why, Doc?” I asked. “I thought we were in this together.”
“I was afraid that somebody was tracking us pretty closely. I didn’t want to tip them off if you were somehow being watched. Besides, if they thought you were going about business as usual, they wouldn’t be too worried about what I was doing. And I didn’t want Jock to know.”
“And what were you planning to do?” I asked.
“Disappear. J.D. didn’t want to do anything without your okay. I didn’t tell her I didn’t trust Jock, but I finally convinced her that if she got in touch with you about any of this, it would put your life in danger.”
J.D. said, “Matt, I was afraid that any direct contact with you after I left on Monday morning could lead somebody to us or put you in more danger. That’s why I used the rather cryptic messages on the e-mail.”
“Doc,” I said, “I think your lawyer Anderson sent me an e-mail that led me to the ownership of this house.”
“He did, at my request. If that e-mail had been intercepted, I don’t think anybody would have traced it to me or even thought it had anything to do with me.”
“What makes you think somebody was tracking us?” I asked.
“I got to thinking about the attempts on your life. Both came right after you’d made a connection to the Laotians. The first attempt happened the day after you initially met with Stanley in Macon, and the second the day after you connected the Asians to the Dulcimer and the murders of Katherine Brewster and the lawyer from Jacksonville.
“I didn’t connect Brew’s daughter to the Dulcimer murders,” Doc continued, “until after I heard about Flem’s son. Then it hit me in the face. The connection between somebody trying to kill you and your discoveries about the Asians and the link to Soupy in Laos. Add to that the fact that the murder attempts didn’t seem too professional, and I thought they might be some sort of misdirection.”
“They seemed real enough to me,” I said.
“Think about it,” said Jock. “The first guy used a knife when he could have shot you. The beach was deserted, no one around. It never quite made sense to me that the guy didn’t use a gun. And that idiot Clyde Bates would be the last person a professional would hire to take you out.”
J.D. chimed in. “If we’re dealing with the CIA and they thought you were chasing Laotians, it’d be in their interest to keep up the charade. The only thing tying the Longboat murders to Soupy was the fact that Asians were aboard Dulcimer at the time of the murders, and we thought there might be a connection to Soupy because of his fight with Jim Desmond. We didn’t know about the Thanatos connection.”
I nodded. “Okay. But what about Stanley?”
“We got off on a tangent,” said J.D. “Stanley was dirty, but not because he was involved with the killings. He was just a dope pusher who’d had some connection to two of the victims. There are such things as coincidences, whether you believe in them or not.” She smiled.
“Then why were you on their payroll?” I asked.
“What? Whose payroll?”
I laughed. “Okay. I know you’re not, but somebody went to a lot of trouble to convince us you were playing footsy with Stanley.” I told them the story of the bank accounts and what we’d found out.
J.D. sat back in her chair, a look of consternation on her face. “Does Chief Lester think I’m taking bribes?”
“He doesn’t know about the bank account,” I said.
“You didn’t tell him?”
“No.”
“Matt, he needs to know.”
“Why? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But suppose I had? Bill Lester is a good cop. He wouldn’t let this slide.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.”
“Call him, Matt. Now. Bring him up to date.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call him tonight.”
She frowned. “Why in the world would someone go to all that trouble to implicate me?”
“More misdirection,” said Logan. “It’d be no big deal for the CIA to tap into the computers at the Otto Foundation and their bank. They could have set up the whole thing so that it looked as if Nigella was receiving money into that account for months. Then, suddenly the money started going to the Sarasota bank and J.D. was withdrawing it. They just added J.D.’s Social Security number to the mix to make it seem more authentic.”
I shook my head. “But that would presuppose they knew that we’d get into Stanley’s computers and follow up on the bank’s.”
“No big deal,” said Logan. “They’d pointed you at Stanley and could guess that you and Jock would follow up and stumble across the drugs and the accounts. The CIA, or whoever, must have known that you knew about Stanley being Bracewell.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have picked up on that information,” I said. “It was kept pretty close. Just the memos to J.D. and Doc and to my own file.”
“Maybe they hacked into your computer,” said Logan.
“I think I can explain it,” said Doc. “My office computers had been compromised. Somebody set them up so that everything was being mirrored on an off-site computer.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“A month or so ago we upgraded our entire system. An outside vendor came in and spent a couple of weeks reworking things. I think one of their people fixed our system so that anything that was on it was being seen on another computer somewhere else in the world. All my e-mails would have been intercepted.”
“Including the memos I sent you.”
“Right. I didn’t think about that until Saturday afternoon late. I rousted our IT guy and had him check out the system. He spent all night working on it and found the back door or whatever the hell they call those things. He couldn’t track where the signal was going. I figured it had to be CIA.”
“Can you trust your IT guy?” asked Jock.
“Yes. He’s been with me from the beginning. He’ll keep quiet about what he found.”
“So,” said Logan, “the CIA or whoever was reading your memos, Matt.”
“I don’t believe it’s the CIA,” said Jock. “There may be a rogue element that’s involved, but the agency itself wouldn’t take a chance on getting caught up in something like this.”
“And,” I asked, “who are the Asians we keep bumping into?”
“There’re only five of them that we know about,” said Jock. “The guy whose elbow you broke, the woman he was with, and the guy who hired Bates to kill Matt. The three of them were aboard Dulcimer the night of the murders. The fourth one is the guy who held a shotgun on us at Stanley’s house in Macon, and of course, there’s Nigella Morrissey. Nigella’s Vietnamese and the guy at Stanley’s house spoke Vietnamese. Maybe the other three are Vietnamese, too.”
“Vietnamese working for the CIA?” I asked.
“The four that anybody heard speak English, including Nigella, are probably American born or at least have been here most of their lives,” said Jock. “Maybe they’ve been recruited by some rogues in the agency.”
“Or maybe,” said Logan, “this is personal.”
“What do you mean?” asked J.D.
“Maybe the ghosts of Ban Touk are coming home to roost,” Logan said.
I thought he might be right. Avenging angels riding a dark wind blowing from the village. A wind not unlike the one that fueled the fire and consumed the dead on that fateful night so many years before.