The Alberta Connection (10 page)

During the evacuation of Saigon, they were
part of a four-boat patrol sent to escort some Americans from Bien
Hoa. The service record did not indicate why four patrol boats were
sent to Bien Hoa or who they were supposed to escort. The convoy
had been ambushed and three of the four patrol boats had been sunk.
The bodies of seven sailors had never been recovered.

Ryce compared the Lyste brother’s pictures.
There was certainly no doubt that they were brothers, although the
service record photos were of obviously younger men than at the
cabin. Ryce made a mental note to have the service record pictures
aged. Or perhaps he could check with a good forensic tech to see
how old the cabin occupants actually were.

Ryce chuckled. Maybe not having answers was
better than having them. He now had names for two of the men at the
cabin, but he actually knew less than when he didn’t have names. He
badly needed a kiss.

When Ryce did not find Tanya in her office,
he checked in Suite 424, Suite 423, and Suite 422. Tanya was
missing. He did, however, have a back-up plan. He headed to the
men’s room.

As he walked down the corridor, he saw Tanya
emerge from the lady’s room. He smiled. She obviously had the same
idea as he. After a kiss and hug, he disappeared through the men’s
room door.

Ryce’s laptop was playing “Celebration” by
Kool & the Gang when Ryce returned from the men’s room. He
smiled and wondered when Tanya found the time to change the system
alert sounds.

Doug had forwarded an email from the FBI with
an official report on the visit to Wally’s Pies and Wings. A Bank
of America debit card issued to a Diane Renault was used to
purchase the pizza. Doug had immediately checked the account. Diane
had paid for three motel rooms in Lexington, KY, but not the motel
rooms in Richmond, VA. However, Doug was confident that Diane would
be easy to track.

Ryce turned back to the Navy service records,
pulled a legal pad from his desk, and began to doodle on it.

How old were the Lyste brothers when they
enlisted in the US Navy? He had not noticed birthdates during his
initial scan of the Navy service records. After closely scanning
the records, he found the birthdates and the enlistment dates.
Andrew and Gregory were eighteen years old when they enlisted.

Ryce re-examined the photos from the cabin.
Both of the men were twenty when they died. They would be in their
sixties when Ryce photographed them at the cabin. Where had the
Lyste brothers been for over forty years?

Ryce was interrupted by his cell phone. It
was a text from Doug. Diane Renault had paid for fuel in St. Louis,
MO. Thirty minutes later, she had paid for a motel. It appeared
that Diane had stopped for the day. Ryce checked the distance from
Lexington, KY, to St. Louis, MO. It was less than 350 miles.

Ryce reread the text from Doug. The last
purchase in the morning was at 8:47 AM and the first purchase in
the afternoon was at 3:21 PM. If Ryce factored in entering and
exiting the freeway, Diane was driving for only six hours a day.
She appeared to be leaving late and stopping early.

Ryce grinned. What would he do if he had just
stolen four laptops? His first goal would be to get the laptops as
far away as possible from where they were taken. Ryce chuckled. He
usually drove five mph over the posted limit. And, he would likely
drive a minimum of ten hours a day. The laptops would be moving
away from the Pentagon at seven hundred miles per day if he had
them.

Ryce was filling the legal pad with doodles,
but had abandoned doodling questions in favor of hearts with
Tanya’s initials when Doug walked into the office.

Doug walked over to the desk. “I think I have
a something we can use to find out who we are dealing with.”

He pulled a flash drive from his pocket and
handed it to Ryce.

“On this flash drive is a program that will
give you access to a voluntary national security video database.
The video is stored for a minimum of ninety days, but sometimes a
lot longer.

“There is a master index of all camera
locations. Simply enter the address of the area you want to look
at. The program will give you all the cameras that have provided
coverage.”

Tanya had walked into Ryce’s office almost at
the same time as Doug, and had heard about the video database. Ryce
chuckled, and then handed Tanya the flash drive.

“Is there anything John doesn’t have his
fingers in? Don’t answer that question.”

Tanya stood in the middle of the office,
looked at Ryce, and then held the flash drive up.

“OK, what would you like me to do with
this?”

Ryce began to laugh. “Haven’t we been married
long enough for you to read my mind?

“I got a text with the name of the motel
Diane stopped at for the evening. Grab a couple of your agents and
see if where she stopped has video surveillance. I realize it is an
extremely long shot, but we may get lucky. We may see someone
walking around with four laptops under their arms.”

Tanya turned and walked from the office. Ryce
watched every ripple of her movement and grinned. She looked as
good walking out of his office as she did when she walked in.

Tanya was just finishing loading the security
program when Ryce found her and suggested it was lunchtime. As they
entered the cafeteria, they noticed Doug was sitting with three
laptops opened in front of him. He waved them over when they
completed filling their trays.

“I have been doing some background checks on
Diane Renault. The card she used for the motel and pizza was opened
on the Internet four years ago. The opening deposit was for
$50,000.00 from a debit card issued to a Marcel Renault.

Doug frowned. “That’s a lot of money for an
opening deposit. I would like to know where it came from.”

He typed on his laptop for a few moments and
then looked at Ryce.

“Marcel deposited an additional $50,000.00
into Diane’s account seven days ago. I checked Marcel’s account. It
was cleared out and cancelled six days ago. Normally, the history
goes away when you cancel a card, but it takes at least one billing
cycle to completely disappear.

“Both of the accounts had the same street
address in Grand Forks, ND, but different suite numbers. I checked
the address. It is a mailbox farm.

“The account in the name of Marcel Renault
has had over $250,000.00 deposited into it from several accounts I
have not been able to verify. The account numbers are listed as
part of the deposit transaction, but I have no access.”

Doug frowned. “I cannot track any of the
money before it got to Marcel’s account.

“Diane’s account is linked to a Louis
Renault, but I can’t find anything about him, either.”

Doug looked down at his laptop, chuckled, and
then looked back at Ryce.

“I don’t think that Marcel and Louis Renault
are the real names of the account owners, unless they are almost
one hundred and fifty years old. I will send you updates on Diane’s
debit card whenever I get them. I have a couple of my people over
at the Holdings building keeping an eye on the account.”

One of Doug’s laptops began to play the Rocky
theme. Doug glanced at Ryce and then turned his attention to the
laptop. Ryce turned his attention to his lunch.

When Tanya returned from lunch, she checked
on the agents assigned to check the security feeds. No one actually
knew what to look for on the security videos. They had the GPS
location for the motel in Lexington and even the room number. They
also had a GPS location for a motel in St Louis, and Doug had
included a Waffle House in St Louis. They did not know how to
correlate a GPS location with a video source.

Tanya walked to Ryce’s office to report the
issue. Ryce returned to Suite 424, found a laptop that was not
being used, and loaded Google Maps. He pulled up the GPS location
of the Lexington motel. Eventually, he discovered the street
address. After he wrote down the address, he accessed the security
program. Seven cameras covered the motel in Lexington. Ryce smiled
at Tanya and then turned the program over to one of the agents.

As he walked out of the room, he heard Tanya
mumble, “It works better with the instructions. Hell, I even work
better with the instructions.”

Ryce turned to look at Tanya. She and the two
agents scouring the security feeds were huddled around two
widescreen monitors. Ryce knew the team was in capable hands.

Ryce did not know how much pull he had with
the FBI or Homeland Security. John, however, seemed to be
exchanging Christmas cards with all the bosses. Perhaps John could
help Ryce with his next project.

With all the interruptions from his agents,
composing the email to John took the next hour. When he completed
reading the two pages for the fifth time, Ryce pressed the send
button.

Tanya was working on one of the laptops when
Ryce returned to Suite 424. In the hour he had been gone, Tanya and
her two agents had found nothing out of the ordinary. Ryce
suggested they expand the footprint around the motel. It was
located on the end of a strip mall. If he were a thief, would he
park directly in front of where he was sleeping? Probably not.

After a thirty-minute search, two men and a
woman were discovered looking at a laptop positioned on the trunk
deck of a blue Lexus. The GPS placed the Lexus directly in front of
a Waffle House, which was only one half mile from the motel.
Working the video back in time, they observed one of the men open
the trunk and remove a laptop from a diamond-plate case. He opened
the laptop and pressed the power button. They watched the display
spring to life.

Tanya compared the time on the video
recording with the GPS time recorded by the LoJack. It matched.
With a little manipulation of the video, they had a clear view of
the license plate. Ryce took the number back to his office and
plugged it into the program he had gotten from Doug.

As he waited for Doug’s program to finish
loading, Ryce ran through a mental checklist. Diane Renault rented
the Lexus from Hertz in Alexandria, VA. The security video had just
verified Diane was traveling with two other people.

Ryce walked to Suite 423, where his team was
busy with something. He wasn’t sure what. After a few seconds of
eenie, meenie, miney, moe, Ryce selected three agents and gave them
the assignment to find Diane Renault using all available social
media. Perhaps she is someone’s friend on Facebook. Doesn’t
everyone use Facebook or Twitter?

Ryce frowned. Maybe not everyone. The three
at the cabin certainly didn’t use social media. Ryce had not seen
any electrical or telephone lines running to the cabin. Nor were
they using cell phones. The nearest cell tower was more than thirty
miles away, and there were some tall mountains to block the signal.
A good military-grade radio would penetrate the mountains, but Ryce
had not seen an antenna, either.

Ryce was halfway to his office when he
suddenly stopped in his tracks. Someone had driven from the cabin
three or four times a week at 1:00 PM, and returned after 3:00 PM.
The campground used by Ryce’s retrieval team was about thirty to
forty-five minutes away from the cabin and had a payphone. In fact,
the campground had Wi-Fi. Were the occupants of the cabin calling
someone from the payphone on the wall outside the campground
office? They could just be sitting in their vehicle with a laptop
plugged into the cigarette lighter to access the Internet.

Ryce sat in his office until the end of the
day and worked on the details of his plan. First, he wanted to get
an audio device into the vehicle Diane was driving. Second, he
wanted to attach a GPS device on the vehicle. Yes, the vehicle had
the laptop LoJack, but Ryce wanted his own GPS system on the car.
The rental company was not aware that the authorities were looking
for their vehicle, and Ryce wanted to keep it that way. The laptop
LoJack had provided only one report since Diane ordered pizza. If
Diane never ordered pizza on the Internet again, there was no way
to track her actions except for her debit card.

Ryce hoped to establish a pattern for Diane.
What motels did she like to sleep in? Where did she eat breakfast
or dinner? If Ryce could predict where she would stop for the day,
at least within a few miles, the FBI could install the devices on
the car.

As soon as Diane paid for her motel room or
meal, Doug would have an exact location, which he could forward on
to the FBI. Or, at least the location where she had last used the
card. Ryce needed to narrow down where.

Ryce checked the time on his laptop. It was
time for dinner.

Chapter 14

Ryce wondered why
his cell phone was playing Pink Floyd as a wake-up tone. As he
fumbled to turn off the cell phone, he remembered that Tanya had
suggested she could fix the angry chicken alarm sounds. Was the
cure more painful than the illness?

Doug was waiting in Ryce’s office when Ryce
and Tanya arrived. He was closely studying his laptop. He looked up
as Ryce walked in.

“It appears that Diane just switched her
rental car. She is still in St. Louis. One of my techs was checking
her card and saw a large debit charge from Hertz pop up. John made
a call to the FBI. They have an office near the Hertz rental
location. Someone at the Hertz counter was able to delay turning
the vehicle over to Diane until the FBI got their hands on it. She
is now driving a Mercedes.

“John says you don’t have to worry about
getting a GPS into Diane’s new ride. The FBI was able to install a
GPS and an audio device. And, the FBI will email a copy of the
rental agreement to John later today. We still do not have any idea
what Diane is using for a driver’s license.

“The FBI also said that Diane is riding with
three men. One of them is in a wheelchair.”