His American passport also had a chip, but he kept it in a sleeve that disabled any ability to track it. He could always stuff the cards in with it, he supposed. That would probably wind up being the way to go until things were better defined.
He checked his new e-mail account. Koshi had responded with instructions on the best mechanism to create a new e-mail for the specific purpose of contacting a potentially compromised url. It was pretty straightforward as long as Michael hid his IP address when creating it and checking it — something easily done with any of a dozen IP-masking programs. He quickly followed Koshi’s instructions then logged into the new account, choosing his words with precision for the outbound message he sent to the mystery address: [A is dead.]
There was no harm in pinging the address with that to see what came back, and the message didn’t really reveal a lot that wouldn’t be in the newspaper obituary section. And anyway, lots of people beginning or ending with A had died all over the world. He wasn’t worried about the address itself belonging to the surveillance team because Abe had printed the document the night he’d gotten it and apparently the pursuers hadn’t known about it till the next day — no doubt because someone Abe had called to fact-check had sounded an alarm. There was only one way the chronology worked: e-mail received; Abe reads and prints it; takes it home. If somehow the boogie men had learned about it that night, Abe would have been immediately dispatched to go sleep with the fishes and Michael would have never gotten a call in the first place. So it had to be someone Abe telephoned the morning he contacted Michael who had set everything in motion; the e-mail destruction must have happened in a matter of minutes thereafter because it was gone by the time Abe had checked his e-mail that morning.
The internet phone rang again and Michael leapt to grab it. It was Samantha.
“Okay, lover boy, what have you gotten yourself into?” she asked by way of greeting.
“What are you talking about?” Michael parried.
“I ran searches for the terms you gave me and ran into dead ends. But there was one term that had a twelve page article from a French-Canadian investigative reporter, written about six years ago, that came up when I searched on ‘Delphi Squad’ — and Michael, it’s some scary shit,” Samantha warned.
“Scary as in how?” Michael asked.
“Scary as in, allegations of an ex-CIA spook in Central America who claims to have been part of a U.S. death squad that carried out assassinations in the region for over a decade,” Samantha told him.
That was consistent with the manuscript’s claims. One of many, but still, a key one.
“I’m sensing that’s not all…” Michael prodded.
“No, it isn’t. I did a search on the reporter, and he died a few days after it was published. And you’re going to love this. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head,” Samantha deadpanned.
“Come again?”
“The police found him in his apartment, where he’d apparently shot himself in the base of the rear of his skull with an untraceable pistol he happened to have lying around. No note, and it only took the cops an hour to determine it was a regrettable example of self-destruction,” she explained.
“Isn’t it pretty unusual to shoot yourself in the back of the head and not leave a note?” Michael asked, already knowing the answer.
“I can tell you how unusual, actually, because that was my next search. Of the roughly seventeen hundred or more folks who decide to end it all with a gun every year in Canada, tracking data back ten years, can you guess how many shot themselves in the back of the head?”
“One?”
“We have a winnah! Our boy was one in almost twenty thousand.” Samantha paused, possibly for effect.
“Tell me there isn’t more,” Michael said.
“The reporter was scheduled to come out with part two of his investigative report a few days after he killed himself. That obviously never got published. He’d apparently decided to destroy his hard disk before going to meet his maker, per the police report — another quirky bit of mischief you don’t see too often. Are you starting to see any problems with this?” Samantha wondered aloud.
“You don’t say.”
“Here, write down this url — it’s to the first article,” Samantha said, and dictated a web address to Michael.
“Wait a second. That’s a wayback machine article, not a current site,” Michael observed after reading the info.
“Correct. Seems the original article no longer exists. I had to use a little trickery to find this — it’s as though every trace of it had been expunged,” Samantha finished.
“Samantha, I don’t want to scare you, but how cautious were you when you were rooting around?” Michael asked.
“I’m way ahead of you. I always mask my IP address out of habit and use a software program that bounces it all over the world every few minutes, so I’m clean. Professional paranoia. But I was going to warn you to do the same before you pull up the site. It’s a little freaky how the guy kills himself and his files go missing almost immediately after publishing his article. Makes you kind of go, hmm,” Samantha said.
“I owe you a great big one, Samantha,” Michael responded.
“Surprise me with something. I like fast, red and Italian.”
Michael hung up and signed onto an IP masking site, then went to the internet archive to read the reporter’s work. He quickly scanned the article, noting that it confirmed some of the claims in the manuscript. What was particularly troubling was the attention to detail in the article and the matter-of-fact way events were described. To Michael’s ear, it had the ring of truth.
The suspicious circumstances surrounding the reporter’s death lent considerable weight to the likelihood the article was factual. He’d been around the block long enough to understand that when a death that was so obviously a murder was resolved as a suicide, something besides a pursuit of the truth had been in play during the investigation. That it had occurred in Canada and yet was still swept under the carpet, underscored the power and reach of whoever had wanted the reporter silenced. That was consistent with the article’s contention of CIA involvement.
Michael now knew for sure that he had a real problem. This was shaping up in an ugly way, and he had to assume it would get uglier. But he still had too little data to make a reliable decision as to how to proceed. Sure, the article made a compelling case for a black ops team run amok, as well as a shadow government action of gargantuan implications. However, it was just a single article — which wasn’t exactly the ideal broad support he needed. He hoped Samantha would be able to dig up some more dirt, but the problem was that if the manuscript was accurate, the chances were there was no news coverage of any of it.
So how to proceed?
Michael re-read the web page and noted the name of the man who claimed he’d been a CIA wet operative for decades in Central America. John Stubens, who, as of the date of the article, resided in Nevada. Doing some quick math in his head, Michael computed the man would have to be in his sixties, assuming he was still alive and the name used for the reporter’s sake was his real one.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It wasn’t as if Michael had a lot of other leads to pursue. He typed in the name of the online service he used to investigate skip tracing and entered his password. The familiar screen came up and he completed the form with the slim information he had. Michael hit enter and waited as the computer elves did whatever they did, scouring thousands of databases for relevant data.