Chapter 70

After the little ones were in bed we talked about the space problem. There were a few solutions; one was to turn the Horsey House into office space - the down side was to lose all those rooms and have to use the local motels again.

Another was to convert the covered parking garage into office space and make an open air parking lot. It could take months to get the environmental permits for that plus the rest of the property would have to be made into an environmental containment pond - also known as a mosquito incubator. West Nile virus and two or three other mosquito borne diseases had been found in containment ponds in the area this summer.

There was another possibility; Marcy and Lorrie would team up with Jenna and check out tomorrow.

After all the stress of the last few days, the hot tub worked miracles - that and a few wine coolers and buds.

We were up early and it seemed like so was everyone else. The EIT group bombarded my phone with a dozen texts. There were messages in my email to call Louis Boucher before the end of the day.

The MTAC screen had barely warmed up before I was being paged by Ben.

‘‘Three more subpoenas were delivered to the committee yesterday afternoon after the court announcement; one more from the Senate and two from the House. The committees are teed off that Black Bear no longer exists so the new target is you - to get the information they want,’’ Ben said.

‘‘Are the subpoenas addressed to me as chairperson of the over sight committee or me personally, and when are the dates?’’ I asked.

‘‘Addressed to you; the dates are next week,’’ he said.

‘‘I am not going to be at the White House to pick them up before the dates so I view them as undelivered. As you can imagine, I have become extremely busy. I have appointments and meetings in Mexico, France, South Africa and Louisiana, just to name a few. On top of that I’m planning a meeting at the island with no name that offers numbered bank accounts to select people. I want some answers from them or there shall be bodies for someone to clean up when I leave. I have no time for Congress’s BS for the next few weeks,’’ I said.

I called Marty Coeburn, ‘‘What did your agents find out at Louisiana yesterday?’’ I asked.

‘‘Four people that worked for Black were involved and arrested along with several brokers. It may take a while to get all the stolen property back,’’ Marty said.

‘‘Send me the names so they can terminated. Andy and one hundred men in the two CRJ 200s left an hour ago to straighten that place out. Other things are going to be happening all weekend down there. For your information, Pelican Marsh is now named Fort Dean after Ed Dean - my bodyguard who was killed in the Golan attack,’’ I said.

‘‘Good move - doing away with all old things connected to Black Bear; put them in the history books and move on,’’ Marty said.

‘‘BJ, pick up the com line,’’ came over the PA system.

‘‘Black and Bear are here,’’ the receptionist said.

‘‘Send them to Jenny,’’ I replied.

Jenny was going to run them through as a new employee, starting by filling out new employee forms, then fingerprints that Roberts’s group would run though the systems, full-face profile for ID cards and facial recognition, retina scan and finally a DNA sample for the file. Finally they would be brought down to me in the command center.

Robert was next with updates; first was Oklahoma City. General Bashir was continuing his daily communiqué with them asking all kinds of questions and offering suggestions. Bashir also chose a different date than Sabir Mahmoud. Oct 26 was the new date. The date carried some kind of special meaning to Bashir or his bosses.

The next update was on the Mexican Petroleum. Robert had assigned someone at Andy’s request to do research on the pipelines and problems there. Along with that was monitoring communications channels. As we suspected, the cartel was handling the sales of most of the stolen petro and collecting royalties from independents they allowed to tap the lines.

No wonder the cartel was not worried if twenty five percent of the cocaine they shipped was seized by the American authorities. The number was always exaggerated to street level sales. You know a good PR campaign at its best when you see one.

Hell, everyone with a brain knew that everybody that touched the junk quadrupled their money. That was why the drug business was so lucrative. Throw the lawyers into the mix; there was money for everybody.

With the petro tapping, the cartel was making fifty thousand a day - way more than the manufacturing cost of the drugs that were being seized. They were happy to see the news reports of seizures; it was only a little money.

They knew as I did, it was just a feel good ego trip for politicians, the same politicians that the lawyers were donating millions to.