Adara spoke passable Spanish as well, but while females were not unheard of as patrons of strip clubs, her blond hair and athletic build were sure to draw unwanted attention from the very people they were there to watch.
As team leader, Clark took his job of oversight seriously — even with a goofball like Eddie Feng. “Everyone stay alert,” he said. “Don’t let the daylight lull you.”
“Roger that, Mr. C,” Ding said to his father-in-law.
“Here we go,” Ryan mumbled as they approached the door.
“You’re too young to be tired of looking at naked girls,” Chavez said.
“Not naked girls per se,” Ryan said. “Just the kind that hang out in places like this.”
“I hear you there, ’mano,” Chavez said.
The odor of an old carpet stewed in cheap booze and stale cigarettes hit Ryan in the face as soon as he opened the door.
“Well, this sucks,” he said under his breath as soon as he stepped across the threshold. He’d fully expected to see a handful of triad or cartel types, but was startled to find one of the largest Hispanic men he’d ever seen sitting beside a magnetometer, presumably to check IDs. Pushing seven feet tall, the big guy had to weigh in at a good 350 pounds. Much of his bulk was fat, but Jack had learned from experience that heavy guys built up a considerable amount of muscle just hauling their own weight around. This one eclipsed the small stool he was sitting on, completely blocking the entry. A tattoo of what looked like a female version of Death stuck up from the collar of his T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved or showered in a long time, and Ryan was surprised they hadn’t gotten wind of him outside. He half expected “Fee fi fo fum” to be the first words out of the guy’s mouth.
Instead, the big man grunted and asked, “¿Armas?” giving Ryan, and then Chavez, the evil-eye once-over. Guns?
Ryan hunched his shoulders, slouching some to look less threatening than his six-foot-one frame would normally indicate. There was a time to be intimidating, and this was not it. Bouncers paid a hell of a lot more attention to tough guys than they did to nervous pushovers with bleached tips. Both men were indeed strapped, each carrying a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield nine-millimeter. The small, single-stack pistols were virtually invisible under the men’s shirts, but even so, guns could be explained away. Dopers carried guns. Hell, half the people in Texas did. The wire neck-loop mics and the rest of the comms package, however, would likely earn them each a hole in the head.
Jack assumed the dozen Asian and Hispanic men in the place were armed, but management evidently wanted to double-check any new faces. Chavez started to say something in Spanish, but Jack noticed just in time that the cord at the base of the magnetometer was unplugged from the wall. He gave his partner a quick elbow in the ribs.
“No armas,” Ryan said, eyes on the dancers as if he was enthralled — trying his best for a lecherous-college-boy look. “We’re all about the girls, not the guns.” He peeled a couple twenty-dollar bills off a roll from his pocket and gave the big guy an embarrassed grin. “To tell you the truth, this is my first time in a titty bar. Do we pay the cover charge to you or what?”
The twenties looked like Monopoly money in the big guy’s massive hands as he snatched them away. He lifted his chin and grunted toward a trio of skinny Asian girls swaying on the stage. “They’ll dance better if you give them a little cash, but hands off the merchandise unless you work out an extra arrangement with me or Manolo — the bald guy in the white shirt at the end of the stage.”
“Got it.” Ryan gave a compliant nod and gulped for effect, his eyes wide and seemingly transfixed on the poor gyrating women. A dozen low tables ran in front of the stage, some occupied by small groups of Hispanic or Asian men. Triad or cartel according to their significant ink, each stuck with his own ethnicity. Two rosy-cheeked white guys in City of Dallas municipal worker coveralls occupied the nearest table. Ryan counted sixteen patrons in all, counting Manolo and the Asian man with the ridiculous fauxhawk sitting at the table beside him.
That one had to be Eddie Feng.
The North Texas Crimes Against Children Task Force was housed in a nondescript hangar leased by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the northeast side of Dallas Love Field Airport. The three agents that made up the ICAC — or the Internet portion of the Crimes Against Children Task Force — worked at a bank of computers in a windowless area with their backs to the far wall. These two women and one burly man — all parents themselves — spent much of their workday posing as children, engaged in online conversation with some of the sickest minds on the planet. It was a target-rich environment — with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimating 75,000 would-be traders in child pornography online at any given time.
The ICAC workstations were purposely situated with their backs to the walls, giving them some semblance of security and allowing them to look up and view a glimpse of the seminormal life of their brothers- and sisters-in-arms in the bullpen just a few yards away.
The CAC Task Force Commander, FBI Special Agent Kelsey Callahan, didn’t believe in separate offices. If her team was going to wade through the river of shit that the perverts they hunted caused, they should do it together as a unified group. She did, however, put her desk at the head of the open bullpen so she’d have direct access to the whiteboard behind her.
No straitlaced Betty Bureau Blue Suit, Special Agent Callahan wore a Neiman Marcus silk blouse in subtle pink and stonewashed jeans over hips that she wished were a smidge smaller, but that were still small enough so as to make the .40-caliber Glock 23 in the holster on her belt look huge. Her instructors at Quantico had called her curly copper ponytail a “murder handle.” She considered chopping it off for the academy, but she’d had long hair since high school — and besides, she needed to cling to every last vestige of femininity in this overly masculine profession. Callahan resolved early on to unleash nine kinds of hell on anyone who got close enough to even touch her hair — and went on to prove that resolve to an exuberant defensive tactics instructor who thought he’d teach her the error of her thinking and grabbed her from behind. She’d dislocated her own shoulder but ruptured the instructor’s testicle. Her injuries saw her recycled into the next class of NATs — New Agent Trainees — but the badass reputation that followed her into her career was worth repeating three weeks of training. The reputation of being what Texas Department of Public Safety sergeant Derrick Bourke called “a half a bubble off plumb” only added to her success leading the North Texas CAC Task Force.
Sergeant Bourke’s desk was to the immediate right of Callahan’s, facing the bullpen, but the forty-year-old trooper and father of three now stood beside her, looking over her shoulder at the files on the screen of the standalone laptop at her desk.
It was Sergeant Bourke who had brought her the USB drive, retrieved the night before by a trooper posted to Mansfield. Department of Public Safety computer gurus had run all manner of diagnostics to check the drive for viruses. FBI techs had double- and triple-checked it for remote access Trojans, ransomware, and other viruses. Even after the device had been pronounced free from malware, FBI higher-ups still directed it only be inserted into a computer with the modem disabled and not attached to any network.
Bourke leaned in, his hand on Callahan’s desk. “Looks like some kind of spreadsheet,” he said. “Accounting records maybe… and encrypted notes.”