47
William Echevarria worked late, as he often did, glad of the peace and quiet after the rest of the staff had gone home. He was still a little shaken up by the strange visit he had had that morning. The more he thought about it, the less worried he was about that N-400 false statement. That had been twelve years ago. He was a successful entrepreneur, a wealthy man, and he had powerful friends over in the valley. It was unthinkable that they would try to take away his citizenship. Sure, the FCC might make him jump through a few hoops, but he ran a tight ship and had been in strict compliance from the beginning.
“Another thing: I’m not going to have anything to do with those Kyrgyz guys. I don’t like them. That’s your deal.”
“I’ll handle them. Just follow my orders and all will be well.”
Moro was feeling better. All he had to do was follow orders. Lansing would do the rest.
“You gave me the address. Did you look into the location of the house and the background of the family, like I asked?”
Moro nodded. “The account’s in the name of Daniel F. Gould, 3324 Frenchmans Creek Road. I looked at the place on Google Earth. It’s in the hills behind the town. Isolated. Nearest house a quarter mile away. Gould’s some kind of inventor, owns a company called Charlie’s Robots, Inc. Married with a kid.”
“Robots? Now, that’s interesting,” said Lansing.
“Please tell me you aren’t going to kill them.” Moro felt his voice shaking anew at the thought.
“That’s up to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“It depends on how quickly you can identify the device. And how quickly they cooperate. If all goes well, nobody will get hurt. We get the device and get out. Twenty minutes or less.”
Lansing looked so normal, so calm, talking about this. Maybe he was a true psychopath. Moro almost hoped that was the case—psychopaths were effective. He was frightened of someone getting killed, but he was even more frightened of being caught.
“We’ll go in at midnight,” said Lansing. “Let’s get to work and set up this operation.”