Chapter 10

This case was important enough politically, if for no other reason, that the police acted on the evidence we gave them and raided the house of the boy’s captors that same night. They found a lot more evidence, including the computer the ransom note had been written on. The backup copy of the text was still stored on the hard drive. The case dragged on for seven months before it finally went to court. There were three convictions, and everybody was happy, except for the kidnappers.

We got a lot of free publicity through TV and newspaper reports of our success in cracking the case after the local cops and the FBI had been stymied. That $200,000 reward sure looked good in our savings account, too.

Suddenly, we had so much business that we could not handle it all. We were forced to hire an office staff and some additional investigators. Dad helped us with the interviews, and Mom took over as office manager. We started taking assignments in other parts of the state, and did well on most of them. We even set up a branch operation to handle divorce cases. Dad joked that we were making money faster than it could be printed.

The Killer Bee Security Agency, LLC was paying us a regular salary, so that we were doing very well. We got health insurance and the other stuff a regular job provided, but the bank account of The Killer Bee Security Agency, LLC was showing a healthy income for the whole company by the end of the year.

Uh-oh, this was when ISIL started to become a problem in North America. We were contacted by Homeland Security to be hired on as special agents of the central organization. In other words, we were not a part of the FBI, the DEA, or any of the other domestic organizations, but reported directly to Homeland Security. Again, Dad came through for us and set up the operation with all of the details spelled out in the contract.

The first thing we did was to take a course in Arabic, spoken with a Lebanese accent. Yes, we knew that Arabic was not the first language of most countries of the Middle East, but everybody associated with ISIL spoke enough Arabic to communicate with everybody else in the organization. We also took a course in Islam so that we would not step on any religious toes. I was circumcised, so that was a non-problem. Beth still had her clit, but that was important only in Egypt, so we didn’t worry about that.

Our first assignment was to ferret out what we could on an ISIL cell in Chicago. This was spring, so the weather was pleasant. At least, we had that going for us. We rented a room in a boarding house in a section of town that included a large number of recent emigrants from the Middle East. Beth started wearing the typical Muslim head scarf, and we went to the nearest mosque as much as we could.

Wow, knowing Arabic was a revelation because the Imam spoke in that language in an effort to reach as many of the people as possible. He sounded so much like an ISIL agent that we immediately reported him. His denunciations of the USA were almost enough to make me punch him into silence. I was able to control myself, but my grimaces and other expressions made an impression on several of the other men in the audience. They were sure that I agreed with the Imam and hated what was going on in Syria, etc.

All we were supposed to do was to identify possible ISIL cell members and to let other people handle the arrests or whatever was appropriate. We were able to identify 11 men or women who were potentially active terrorists, and that was all our job amounted to. We were being kept to a low profile so that we could do the same job in other places. Okay, we managed that, but it sure was difficult.

Later on, we did the same kind of job in Cleveland and in St. Louis. By that time, we were deemed mature and reliable enough to work overseas, specifically in Syria. We were sent to try to find the location of the head of ISIL in Syria, and we failed at that. We would not be trusted until we had actually killed some Americans, and that we would not do. They even wanted Beth to be a suicide bomber because she was now obviously pregnant. That was when we ran!

Okay, we were shipped home. Beth resigned her job so that she could spend full time at home learning all of the things a new mother had to know. Mom was a first class instructor for her, and she had her baby boy with a minimum of trouble or pain. She named him Robert James Argo, and everybody but her called him “BJ.”

For the next year while Beth devoted her time to being a new mother, I worked strictly locally. That way, I was able to be at home as a new father should so that I could do everything possible to spoil our new child. Beth was exasperated with me, Mom laughed at me, and Dad understood exactly how I felt. Oh, well, that year worked out very well.

In fact, I liked that arrangement so much that I decided to return to The Killer Bee Security Agency, LLC on a full time basis. Mostly, I did bodyguard work, and Beth joined me as necessary, but she was mostly a stay-at-home mom and loved the work. In fact, Mom had very little babysitting to do.

The Killer Bee Security Agency, LLC grew by leaps and bounds with Dad’s guidance and our solid reputation for delivering whatever we contracted for. We soon wound up with offices all over the state and were protecting a number of corporations, especially those that did military contract work. None of the plants that we were providing security for were ever attacked, and that served to bring in more business. We even started to get contracts for out-of-state plants and had the prospect of going nationwide. Yes, The Killer Bee Security Agency, LLC had turned into a gold mine.

My problem and Beth’s, too, was that we just could not give up going into the field whenever an interesting case came along. Kidnappings had dropped off, at least partially from our efforts, but there were still enough around our state and the country to keep us as busy as we wanted to be. We were able to solve several cases because of our peculiar mental ability.

The most spectacular case was a plot to steal radio-active materials to construct a “dirty bomb.” That is the kind of bomb in which there is no nuclear explosion. Instead, a conventional bomb explosion scatters radio-active material in the air, and people are poisoned by the resulting exposure to radio-activity. Of course, a few are poisoned by breathing in the toxic radio-active metal, but that is kind of a side issue.

Naturally, we were not called in until the case was a good three-weeks old. By that time, all of the federal agencies were ready to throw up their hands in frustration. We were called in as a last resort because of our previous contracts with Homeland Security. Nobody expected much from us, and our contract had a performance clause. We were paid a sort of minimum price for showing up to work on the problem, but we would get a monster reward if we actually solved the case.

We were shown the “ransom note” almost the moment that we arrived at the home office. Beth picked it up and screamed. She fell into a short faint. Of course, everybody dropped everything to look after her. She woke up before any medical staff arrived, which, I guess, was a good thing. She said to me, “Bob, be damned careful when you pick up that note. I never suspected that a mere message printed on a computer could contain so much hate!”

That statement shook me, and I was careful to pad my hand even more than just with the plastic gloves that I was wearing. Dammit, through five layers of plastic I could still feel the hate and emotional turmoil the person had gone through when he typed the letter. Yes, I could even tell the gender of the author of the note.

I could also tell a hell of a lot more. “This note was typed in Memphis in room 12g of the Stratford Hotel on August 5^th of this year. The author’s name is Suliman Mohamad, and he has just spent five months training in Syria. He was registered as Abdul Sith. I’ll give you his path of entry into the US later. He used his own computer and a rented printer, and the hotel employees know nothing about him.