The Rescue(55)

She knew Sophie was right. They all knew it. Business as usual for their firm made a difference to hundreds of women and children every year, but the Decker situation represented an opportunity to instigate change that could help thousands. Possibly tens of thousands. If they exposed Aegis’s dirty connection to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the government would be forced to take real action. Nearly every lawmaker in the country had ties to Aegis money, and none of them would be able to escape the fallout without bolstering their stand against the traffickers. It was a chance she was willing to take, and it sounded like she wasn’t alone.

“I hope we burn it all down,” said Harlow, focused on the valley below.

“There’s the Harlow beast I love and adore.”

She turned to her best friend and colleague with a grin. “Did you just call me a beast?”

“In a good way.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Harlow, raising her glass.

The sliding door behind them swished along its track. Joshua Keller, their lead operations center tech, stepped onto the slate patio. He had an enhanced team set up inside the house, taking up most of the spacious master bedroom with multiple workstations, stand-alone monitors, independent computer servers, and assorted technology equipment. The king-size bed had been pushed into one of the corners and served as a landing zone for all of their boxes and junk. They’d chosen the master bedroom for its massive size and privacy from the outside world.

“Miss Mackenzie?”

She stood up. “What’s up, Josh?”

“I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I think Decker may be right,” he said. “I can’t find a verified death certificate for one of World Recovery Group’s plank owners, or for any members of his family.”

Harlow gave him a puzzled look. “Didn’t we look into this?”

“That’s why I’m embarrassed. I previously scoured publicly available sources and even dipped into some classified sources for data on every member of WRG in a position to turn witness or compromise the operation.”

“Right. And you didn’t find anything,” said Harlow. “I went through your summary and even dug a little deeper with you into some of the outliers. Nothing stood out.”

“Come inside. I need to show you what I’ve assembled.”

She and Sophie followed him through the window-enclosed great room to the hallway leading to the master suite. When they reached the bedroom suite, the tenor changed. Six SCIF techs chatted away inside the cavernous space, typing furiously at their keyboards and sporadically yelling across the room. Upon the entrance of Joshua, Harlow, and Sophie, none of them looked up from their work.

All of the bandwidth required to keep them in business streamed back and forth from six satellite dishes placed in discreet locations around the property and connected to the routers serving each station. Joshua wirelessly pulled data from whichever station he piggybacked on to guide their efforts.

Harlow made her way over to the seventy-five-inch flat-screen LED TV, which stood behind the workstations, mounted to a sturdy mobile stand. While Harlow and Sophie approached the oddly positioned screen, Joshua pulled a chair with an attached mouse tray over to the side of the screen. Before sitting down, he grabbed his keyboard.

“I put together a comparative analysis sheet including every key employee at WRG, in addition to any employees or contractors directly involved in the Hemet operations, and ran the old parameters, in addition to a few new. One being verified death certificates. Take a look.”

The screen activated, showing a database of names and data points that spanned the entire width of the TV. Joshua scrolled to the line containing one of the most prominent last names on the list and stopped it in the middle of the screen.

Harlow said, “He served a year and disappeared with his family on a camping trip in Idaho. Foul play suspected. Their campsite was ransacked. Signs of struggle. SUV left abandoned. The worst was assumed. I checked it off the list as soon as the news broke.”

“Right,” said Joshua. “The worst was assumed because it was a familiar scene. A repeat of what happened to nearly every other principal at WRG, just delayed due to his jail sentence. But I think it was staged.”

“Because no bodies were found?” Without a body or compelling evidence, like blood or gore at the suspected crime scene, the coroner’s office in charge of the jurisdiction typically withheld issuing a death certificate until a significant period of time elapsed. Sometimes years.

“The crime scene and the prison sentence. I couldn’t find any prison-release documents in the public domain,” said Joshua.

“In a sensitive case like this, the Bureau of Prisons might seal that kind of information,” she said.

He shook his head. “I may or may not have accessed their sealed database, very briefly. No sign of Brad Pierce in the BOP system outside of his initial detention at MDC, awaiting a trial that never happened.”

“Interesting,” she said.

Harlow ran the most likely scenario given this information. Brad Pierce, one of WRG’s principal members and Decker’s lead tactical operations officer, turned into a federal witness against Decker and WRG in exchange for a sealed deal. She shook her head. No. Pierce had never appeared at Decker’s trial to testify against him. It had to be something else. Whatever he agreed to, the feds had sealed everything and thrown away the key, letting him walk. Pierce vanished and spent the next year or so planning his fake death. The Department of Justice wouldn’t play any role in that, so it would be totally up to him to put the finishing touches on his disappearance.