Chapter 17

Well, it looked like I was right and I was wrong. I had been confused by so many uses of the Elvis Strango alias. The printout that Dad showed us had two different organizations out to get us. The first one to go after me was an organization calling itself The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC). They were a bigoted bunch of fools who thought they could bring back the "glory days" of the old Confederate States of America. They had paid $250K to have me killed, probably because I had supported the right of the United Methodist Church to send a Black pastor to Dothan.

Okay, a lot of things made sense, now. Many of the local cops were unreconstructed KKK members, and that would explain why they were in no hurry to save me from other bigots. A large segment of the local Rednecks were also sympathetic to the KKK, and the KGC was related to the KKK, so what they wanted carried a lot of weight with the local lower level members of the KKK. Well, that made a big problem. I could not kill off every member of the KKK without cutting a Hell of a swath through the lower class White population.

On the other hand, the KGC was made up of wealthy Whites who just wanted to run things and to own slaves just to prove that they were better than anybody else. I could kill off the top KGC members without causing a big problem with the population balance. The question was: did I want to do that? Well, that question could wait while I put a stop to the people who were harassing Dad.

The people who wanted his software appeared to be a gang of crooks who wanted an easy way to get money. The would rob banks the easy way by draining their resources over the internet. They would also get government and industrial secrets and sell them to the highest bidder. These were the dangerous people! They appeared to have no conscience and would damage anything or anybody who stood in their way. They were a current deadly menace and needed putting down as soon as possible.

Once I took care of these parasites, I could take the time to close up shop on Conner & Conner Consultants and their peers. The printout from Conner & Conner Consultants gave us an address in Atlanta, so the first thing to do was to check that out. It was Juanita's turn to travel with me, so we got ready for a trip to Atlanta. We made the trip in the usual way and arrived at about 10:00 AM. We knew practically nothing about Atlanta except that it was a place full of curlicue streets. Just because a pair of streets were parallel along here did not mean that they would be parallel three blocks farther on. I had a map of Atlanta in my head, and there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to need it.

I found a place to put down at 1700 Peach Tree Ave., which bore no relationship to the much more famous Peach Tree St. We were looking for 1707 Peach Tree Ave., but damned if that did not turn out to be a parking lot! Susan McHenry had really screwed up on this one. Okay, there was nothing to be gained here, so we headed home. We would just have to wait until the crooks tried to use the software and gave themselves away then.

NO! Wait a minute. She had recorded a telephone number that was to be called when the DVD showed up with the software. I used my prepaid cellphone to call that number, and it was answered immediately. As soon as the phone was picked up at the other end and some man said hello, I said, "May I speak to Helena?" I was told that I had a wrong number and I apologized.

Now, all I needed to know was the address of the telephone with that number. I called Dad and asked him to find that address for me and to call back. A few minutes later, Dad called back with an address of 134 Pickney Ave. A quick memory search told me that it was an address in an industrial area of the city. Aha! I thought that I was getting somewhere at last.

I picked up Juanita and we jumped to 134 Pickney Ave. This was an old building that had seen much better days. It had once been some sort of manufacturing plant, but none of that was currently visible. The ground floor was boarded up, but the second story might have been occupied. It was not obvious, but I thought that I could detect human mental activity in the back of the building. I did not want to probe deeply because the subject could sometimes detect me looking in, and the effect was generally alarming. Therefore, Juanita and I were going to have to make a physical search.

I lifted us to the roof and we quickly found a means of entry. This building only had two stories, so there was not much doubt about where we would find any occupants. "Juanita, draw your gun and be ready to shoot. Don't get trigger-happy, but do be alert. Stay directly behind me and don't wander off. These guys are killers and are not to be trifled with."

We went inside and found that the place was one mass of gloom. There was barely enough light for Juanita to see where she was stepping, though I had no trouble with my enhanced vision. I knew immediately that we needed to get night-vision goggles for the women, but that was out of the question right now.

I changed our color to match the industrial green on the walls, and that should make us virtually invisible at this low light level. We carefully crept toward the rear of the building where I thought there was a human presence. Suddenly, we could hear the sound of a TV set tuned to a situation comedy, judging from the laugh track.

I heightened my sense of smell and readily detected cigar smoke. I was now willing to bet that the man who had answered the phone when I called was smoking a cigar and watching TV. I would bet that he also had a beer handy, but that I could not detect.

At last, we got to the door leading into that room, and it was exactly as my senses had told me. There was even a beer can resting on a card table that held the TV and a telephone. A man was reclining in a chair and smoking a cigar while he watched the TV.

Juanita and I looked in and then dodged back before the man could see us. I gestured for Juanita to follow me, and we climbed back to the roof. "As I see it, Honey, this is just a telephone drop and nothing more. I think that we would be better off if we flitted away without them ever knowing that we had been here. I'll see if I can get anything useful from the man down there, but I don't want to make him think that he has been probed. Please find a comfortable place to sit while I work."

Juanita sat down and holstered her gun. Meanwhile, I gently probed the man's mind for anything useful. Well, it turned out that I was able to go deeper than I had expected at first, but I did not learn anything useful. This guy was just a very low level member of the gang and did not have any idea what was going on. He did not even have a phone number to call if he heard anything. He was called at 5:00 PM just as he was due to go off shift and another man was to take over the job of answering the telephone. It was manned around the clock every day of the week so that it would not be possible to miss the call. He even had a pot to piss in so that he would not have to leave the phone. That was the extent of the man's knowledge, and he was happy as long as he had his TV, his cigars, and his beer.

Shit! These guys were a Hell of a lot smarter than I had given them credit for! There was nothing for us to do except to wait for the disc to be picked up in Birmingham. Quite possibly, there was nothing for us to do until the software was used for the first time.

I resumed my close surveillance of Conner & Conner Consultants and discovered that they were sending an agent to Birmingham twice a week to look for the DVD from Dad. Two days after he mailed it, I figured that the DVD should have arrived in Birmingham, so I went to the Conner & Conner Consultants office to find out who was going to pick up the DVD and to follow him or her. Yes, the disc was picked up when I expected, so I flew back to Montgomery to see what would happen to it.

The disc was delivered to Susan McHenry, personally, and she immediately tried to make a copy. Dad had expected something like that, so he had copy-protected the DVD. He had some tricks of his own that made it impossible to copy the DVD either to standard memory or to another disc, so she was frustrated in all of her efforts. I could not help laughing when she reached the point of throwing things, but she never threw the important disc.

Susan called the telephone number in Atlanta and reported that the DVD had been picked up. Of course, she never said anything about her efforts to copy it. The man at the other end of the line said that the DVD would be picked up by a messenger in two days, and she should keep it securely locked up until then. Susan had already stashed the DVD in a locked safe in her office, so that was not a problem for her.

Just in case, I returned to Montgomery and my surveillance the next day, but nothing of interest happened that day. The next day was a different story. A man from a private messenger service turned up and asked for the disc. I scanned him, and he knew nothing beyond the fact that he was to pick up a small package and to deliver it to an address in Marietta, an Atlanta suburb.

As soon as the messenger left the Conner & Conner Consultants offices in Montgomery, Ann and I flew to Marietta to check out the address in question. As expected, we found an empty building. A few hours later, the messenger showed up and dropped the package through the mail slot in the door and left. He had been paid in advance, so he had no further need to hang around.

Two hours or so later, a man showed up and unlocked the door to the building. He stayed only long enough to pick up the package. Ann and I followed as he carried the package to a palatial home outside Marietta. At last! We had found the people who had ordered the extortion of Dad's program. Ann and I hung around while I probed the mansion.

The package was opened immediately to make sure that it was not a bomb. When its safety was assured, the disc was passed along to another person who put it into a computer to test it. She found that the disc seemed to be what was expected, so she reported such to her boss. He jubilantly reported the fact to his boss, and an impromptu party was held in the executive suite. The champagne flowed like water, and everybody got soused. I scanned all of the executives and we headed home.

Back in Dothan, I found out that Dad had been signaled when the disc had been checked the first time. The address reported to him was the address of the mansion, so we knew that much of the software worked as Dad had intended. Dad was pleased, but I just took for granted that any software written by my father was going to work as ordered.

Dad settled down to monitoring the computer for usage reports on his hacking software while I went back to monitoring Conner & Conner Consultants. I was not going to let them kill any more people if I could prevent it. Furthermore, I was especially annoyed with Susan McHenry, and I was looking forward to her downfall. What I didn't know, yet, was the best way to do that.

The next two weeks were not exactly dull, but there were no more murder contracts issued. The case of Dr. Hilton was still a concern, but he was being ignored for the moment; I had no idea why. There was a kidnapping planned for a high school age daughter of a very wealthy family in Mobile. That I planned to foil, but I had to wait for the final plans of the operation before I could act.

Other than that, I started looking for leads to organizations similar to Conner & Conner Consultants. I knew that Conner & Conner Consultants could not possibly be the only outfit engaged in this kind of misdeeds, so I started searching the minds of the Conner & Conner Consultants employees to see if they could give me any clues. I really had to dig deep to get the information that I was looking for, so it took me four days to complete my search.

There was such an operation in Miami, in New Orleans, and in Memphis. I was going to look into them as soon as I could take care of Conner & Conner Consultants and that gang in Marietta. The discovery of these three organizations alerted me to the fact that there must be one or more of these outfits in every state. Hell, I could spend my life just chasing them down! The question was whether or not I wanted to dedicate myself to that job. After all, I was still a teenager, and I recognized that I had a short attention span whenever any job became routine. That was one of the main reasons that I gave up on politics: there was so much dull routine associated with the job.

Oh, well, I still had Conner & Conner Consultants and the other gang as active opponents, and I was not about to quit on them. There was too much of a personal attachment with them to have that happen.

The two-week "vacation" ended with a murder contract, but this was an even bigger deal than usual. A woman wanted to bump off her husband and step son to collect on a monster life insurance policy. The charge was $500K, and the client did not bat an eye at the price. The catch to this was that the husband was the Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives. There was a minor catch to the deal: this had to look like an accident because of a double-indemnity clause in the insurance policy. The step son was incidental to the insurance, but the woman wanted to make sure that she got the whole policy and did not have to split it with the boy.