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Rational Conduct

By Kevin Tatro (US)

Chapter Nineteen

Crazies are Everywhere

Chapter 19 – Crazies are Everywhere

As David left the high end apartment building, the sunlight hit him in the face.  It was going to be a hot day.  A direct sunbeam had not touched him as it was only a little after 8:00 AM and the tall buildings blocked the direct rays of the sun.  Still, the brilliance of the day seemed to penetrate everywhere.  The doorman had wished the stranger a good day thinking nothing of the total of fifteen minutes spent in a woman’s apartment with only an expensive bottle of champagne.

David was making his way to the subway when something caught his eye.  He was three blocks from the apartment building, when he noticed a black car on the street.  There was another across the street and yet another in the intersecting avenue.  A glace in the other direction noted three more men with gray suits and dark glassed standing in a huddle.  This didn’t look good.

A group of four well dressed business people moving down the sidewalk obscured his view towards the gathering, and he leaned up against the storefront window to get out of their way and get a better look.

At first it felt like a little tug, but then a strong hand had his belt and ripped him off the street and into the printing shop storefront.  The four business people piled into the storefront with him.  He reached for a gun, but it was already gone.  A woman’s hand covered his face and big hands held his arms.  They moved fast, backing him up towards the rear of the store while blindfolding him and binding his arms.  The killer’s feet barely touched the ground as he was moved swiftly through the store.  In seconds the fugitive was bound, blindfolded, and thrown out the backdoor and into a vehicle.  David hoped it was the scary dude.

It wasn’t.  The blindfold was removed and a woman sat across from him in the darkened windows of a stretch limo in an alley behind a storefront on a safe street.

“My apologies for the rude introduction.  You only have moments to think, so please listen.  We’ve got a guy on the inside of a very powerful network that let us tap your first conversation with Artie.  We followed directions to the first car and placed a GPS in it before you got in.  We then beat you to Tiernan’s place.  We didn’t want to interfere when you killed Tiernan, but the two goons there were instructed to take you out.  They would have killed you right then if we hadn’t stopped them.  We found the next car before you did.  Still had a tap on the phone he left in the first car.  We followed you to Staten Island and then to New Jersey.   They caught up with you so fast in Staten Island we barely had time to get anything off the computer before vacating.  They spent a bit of time in there after you left.  Again they were going to kill you in Jersey, and we risked it by calling Artie.  We knew you still had his phone, but we couldn’t connect to it.  We needed him to call you.”

David was totally freaked out but listening.  This must be group three.

“That call seemed to cost us.  I hope you are worth it.”

David stared into the face of this woman.  She looked a bit like Scary Dude.  She wasn’t threatening or pleasant, and her eyes had that hollow look like the barrel of a gun.  Dark and distant but not dangerous or frightening like scary dude.  She was edgy but far from scared.  She looked like she could be a little kid’s mother, yet she had an intensity not found in people who didn’t have their lives at stake.  David looked directly into her face, looking for more information.

“Our warning tagged us.  It must have scared Artie and he stopped using his phone.  He cut most of our network connections as well.  It will take a long time to get that level back.  The creep network also caught onto us and shut down that part of their communications.  When you ditched the second car, we had totally lost you and seem to have screwed up a year of effort.”

“Artie and the creeps were the only one’s who had any idea where you were going from there, only they each had a huge list of potential locations, and no idea which house you would hit.  Vic’s was an interesting choice.  He was one of the few operators left who hadn’t left town with notice of Brian and Sandy’s death.  He was also one of the few guys who was breaking into the creep network and selling information to us.  They had ideas he had gone bad but no proof.  We happened to have people close by when you turned that machine on.”

David listened intently.  He had a thousand questions and wanted to interrupt, but he had been kidnapped by God knows who, a dozen black cars were around the block probably looking for him, and he had just left the office of a psychopath that had probably left word to kill him and his daughter, if she were still alive.   He had to get to Bridgeport fast.  He looked into the eyes of the dark haired woman listening intently.

“We grabbed some good info from Vic’s place.  You took the hard-drive, but the codes that are a key to the stuff he stole was under the picture in the living room.”

David spaced from the conversation for a moment and thought of the really ugly flower painting.  It was actually totally out of place in that apartment.

“ My guess is that the only reason you are alive is that Marcel thinks you have it.  We saw at least three henchmen at Vic’s, but you were long gone. We watched while the Feds swarmed that place.  They are slow, but things were definitely getting hotter.  I don’t think anybody knew where you were. “

She paused, and David thought it might be for effect, or perhaps to catch her breath, but she was looking for a sign that David understood all this and didn’t need further clarification.

“They were waiting for you at Diego’s.  They were the only ones at that site and yet you survived again.  My guess is that you had someone watching over you that took out the two guys on the fire exit.  With that machine on, everyone knew where you were, and now everyone had the list.”

Again she looked in his eyes for conformation or questions.  He looked back at like the hollow barrels of two smoking guns.  He thought for a moment, she must be scared of me.

“Everybody lost you then.  Everybody but your guardian, and I don’t know if anybody knows who that it.  We’ve been covering Marcel’s for the last three months.  Feds watch the place too.  They seem to have showed up just as you got out.  They’ve been hitting everything on the list as well.  Big stink at the FBI.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen em so riled.”

“Now here’s the big thing.  You’ve screwed us completely.  We’ll loose our plant at Arties, the creeps are going to close up shop, and it will take us years to worm into their systems again, and the feds are going to be all over us.”

“Since we are on the same side, we gotta know…..What have you got?”

David sat motionless for what was in reality a second, but seemed like hours.  He had no idea how to respond.  He didn’t think he had anything valuable.  If he had missed the good stuff at Vic’s, he surely missed the good stuff everywhere else he had been.  He had three and a half yellow pages from Sandy, and a hard drive from the Sloth.

These people were professionals and snatched him right from under the Feds.  Not for his own good he thought, but just for what they could get from him.  They indicated they were on the same side, but David was on nobody’s side. They had broken into Artie’s world, which made them the bad guys, but Artie was the reason David was in this mess in the first place, and that made Artie sort of one of the bad guys.  Marcel would kill David once he got what he needed.  Marcel was obviously one of the bad guys.

Only part of this story was clear.  There were obvious bad guys.  The guys who took Ashley, the guys who took shots at him, the sloth named Vic, Tiernan, Diego he assumed, and probably all the different people who had tried to kill him at various times.

There were at least half dozen groups involved.   There was Artie, and maybe somebody sent by Artie.  That somebody was probably Scary Dude.  The bad guys, who may be more than one group of guys.  This group that kidnapped him.  The feds, which could be from as many as a dozen agencies.  And somebody that killed the guys at Diego’s, and Vic’s, if there really were any other people there.  David guessed that may have been Scary Dude, he seemed the type that would be good at serial killing, but it was probably just wishful thinking by a psycho serial killer who thought he was at his last moments of life.
David was quiet a moment then spoke, “I actually need what you have”

The conversation moved fast from there, and David and his new partners were on their way to Connecticut.  Riding a stretch limo in an expensive suit was a great way to travel.  Beat the hell out of the old Toyota.  His new accomplices were well dressed, but not as well dressed as he.  They were well equipped with satellite phones, computer equipment and all kinds of toys Artie would probably love, but they weren’t as well equipped as Artie.  They were obviously motivated and mean, but not as cold as Scary. They were as motivated as David, and than made him wonder.  Who or what are these people.

The plan was simple.  They would e-mail Marcel and his creepy network of thieves.  Just a tiny a tiny bit of the information they had taken from behind the flower picture in the room of Vic’s apartment.  This would go out with a threat of what would be done if Ashley were harmed in any way.  This might keep Ashley alive long enough for David to get there.  There was no way for David to let Artie know where  was, but  David was sure Scary Dude was watching and would follow.  Artie claimed to shut down his monitoring of the net, but David never believed this was true.  Artie must have seen this message go to Marcel.

The information from Vic’s hard drive and the yellow pages from Sandy’s were being loaded into many files.  The burst of this info on the internet would clog systems all over.  Nobody would be able to get through when this information was instantaneously transmitted to every government agency and creep hunter in the world.  Most of it was fairly low level worthless mail lists, but in there were hundreds of names of serial killers, baby snatchers, perverts, and a mix of computer keys that would link everyone to hundreds more in the sicko network.  Between those hunting and those looking to see how vulnerable they were, this should clog the net for everyone.  Everyone except those who were only watching.  Those who had the ultimate system that could watch everyone all the time.

Unknown to David, the Feds had raided Marcel’s minutes after he left.  David’s new friends found their way into the apartment before the Feds, and found no one alive.  The feds took over from there in a synchronized raid of more than a hundred suspected child pornographers, gun runners, drug dealers, and money launderers.
 
The next day, the news would report that in many of the raids bodies of the suspects had been found but no evidence.  No files, no computers and no telephone records.  Many appeared to have escaped the raids, but for weeks afterwards, bodies would be found in the Missouri River, San Francisco Bay, Boston Harbor, the Thames River, Singapore harbor, Malaysia, Egypt, the Netherlands, South Africa, and nearly every other country in the world.  The raids progressed for months, and the investigations continued for years.  And the death toll mounted.

The scumbag Marcel had talked on the phone for a few moments before he finally nodded off into a deep sleep.  He was tired and groggy, but had time to order the disappearance of David and his daughter.  He had matched the half of yellow paper from David to the pad his associates had taken from the apartment of Sandy Batermen on Staten Island.  An analysis of the imprint on the remaining top page of the pad had been completed, and Marcel knew David likely held nothing that he didn’t already know about.  Marcel had no idea there were three additional pages of information. 

The hard drive was the only remaining asset Marcel wanted.  When the drive was handed over to his boys in Bridgeport, that would be the end of this.  He had become so cocky, he didn’t consider the possibility his encryption and anti-surveillance measures had been compromised.  He talked openly with the powers that be, who had already begun working on his removal.  The men in gray suits and black cars outside took a little longer to get orders to move in than the agents thought reasonable, and when they got there, Marcel was gone.  Why they had been ordered to wait that additional four minutes was beyond anybody there for the raid.  The powers that be, much higher up, had made that decision.

It was mid day when a black limousine arrived in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  David’s new friends had been far from pleasant to ride with, not because they were the enemy or that they were his captors, it was because of who they were.  The explanation didn’t take long and David figured it out quickly.  They were not government agents, gangsters, mobsters, or vigilantes.  They were way beyond that.  They were x-Drug enforcement agents, ex-FBI, ex-Private investigators, ex-parents, ex-brothers and ex-sisters of kids who had been killed and missing years ago.  They were all ex-humans who no longer lived a life of normal description.  They now lived like Artie and acted like David had over the past several days.
 
They had no names or social security numbers No homes or families.  No bosses.  Only benefactors.  The benefactors were believed to be wealthy individuals who had lost children to the sadists, the rapists, the killers, the perverts and the serial killers.  His new partners were beyond vigilantes, beyond the law, beyond the normal realm of human understanding.  They were angry, well equipped, and had to be at work.  They were at work every day.  They worked every hour of every day.  They knew good from bad, and like the TV shows, got rid of bad every chance they had. 

The toughest day for these folks was just watching bad and letting bad be bad, while they waited for the most opportune moment to clean out the bad, along with the creeps they worked for.  It was these days where they lost and memory of who they had become.  Where they had nightmares of children screaming in the trunks of cars.  Where they relive scenes of looking at cold bodies on morgue tables.  Where they make up a hundred scenarios of where their sister, or brother, or son might be right now.  They see decomposing bodies, swamps, jail cells with tormented occupants, and worse.  Much worse.

No, the ride with these folks was no fun, but it was good for David.  He still had a small chance of finding Ashley alive.  He had his wife and his two other daughters.  He had a life at home.  If he ever made it out of here, he would return home.  He had been damaged by all of this, but not so damaged he would become one of his current companions.  He would go to work and wish he was home, and he would go home and wish he were at work.  He would try to survive this and get on with a life full of nightmares of what could have happened to his daughter and more of the same nightmares and daydreams about what horrors could happen to him that day or the next or next week.

The daydreams and nightmares would have to get much worse to compare to the past three days.  These nightmares and daydreams and psychotic moments would have to get to the realm of his current companions minds to make him fear them.