“That’s right,” Mac added nodding. “I’m guessing Jones talks to Daniels. PTA gets wind of it, realizing they won’t be able to control her.” Mac tossed his beer bottle into the garbage. “PTA has the money. Maybe they have the resources and the people as well.”
Everyone took it all in for a moment, the gravity of what Mac had just laid out for them.
“Anyone else know about this?” Riles asked quietly, leaning back.
“Nope, just everyone in this room and one other person, wholly unaffiliated with the department that we can trust,” Mac answered.
“So, where does that leave us?” Lich asked.
“On the trail of an assassin,” Mac replied.
“Should we be telling the chief?” Rock asked.
“With what we got? No way. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t touch this with a ten-foot poll, nor should he.” Riles shook his head. “No. We have to protect the department. We keep this to ourselves until we find something concrete. If we do, then we can think about going to the chief.”
“And, if we don’t,” Rock added, “Nobody’s the wiser.”
“So, what’s next?” Lich asked.
“We stay covert,” Mac replied calmly. “We don’t tell anyone what we know or think.”
“And?” Sally asked.
“The chief has given us all a few days off,” Mac replied. “And I have some ideas of what I’d like to do with the time.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Viper tucked McRyan and Kennedy into bed at McRyan’s place at 11:15 p.m. The report from Kraft that Lyman Hisle had met with McRyan, followed by the rest of the little detail going downstairs, had him concerned. He became downright worried as he listened with his earpiece to the detective and assistant district attorney discussing PTA prior to moving onto nocturnal activities. Things were not yet over. McRyan and company had to be watched.
The crew dropped Viper back off at his home. He went in the front door, checking the mail on the way in. Mostly bills, one from the gas company, another for the telephone, and one of those annoying credit card offers, all addressed to Webb Alt, Viper’s name.
He went to the kitchen and dropped his keys in a little wicker basket on the counter. Having watched McRyan and friends hit the bar had left him thirsty for a beer, and he needed to relax and wind down. The fridge was his salvation, providing a bottle of Heineken. He fished an opener out of a drawer, popped the top and went to his den. Grabbing the remote, he clicked on the news and threw himself into his easy chair. Kicking off his shoes, he took a sip of his beer and thought about Cross.
It had been such a sweet little deal. It had made Alt, Ted Lindsay, Bouchard, James Stephens, and select others inside and out of PTA a nice little pile. And until very recently, nobody knew. They needed to keep it that way. McRyan was a concern and becoming a bigger one by the minute. He was connecting some of the dots. They had to keep him from connecting them all.
Ted Lindsay was Alt’s and PTA’s boss. Ten years before, PTA was a large manufacturing company that was, among other things, a supplier of small arms, weaponry, ammunition, explosives, and communications equipment to the United States Department of Defense. It was a profitable company, with 8,000 employees and operations in Minnesota, California, and West Virginia. It did extensive work for the Defense Department, but little or no work with the CIA or NSA. Ted Lindsay changed that.
In the ten years that Ted Lindsay had been president and CEO, PTA went from being one of many companies to being
Lindsay did two things that made PTA grow. First, at the time of his arrival, the company had started developing satellite technology for commercial use, in particular for satellite television. Lindsay understood its potential application to intelligence gathering. He was fully aware of the CIA’s movement towards the reliance, if not flat out dependence, on satellites for intelligence gathering. He leveraged his contacts and obtained a large chunk of the CIA’s business for PTA. Not long after, he was able to work his way into the NSA as well. PTA became intertwined in the overall defense of the country. It had led to a three-fold increase in their governmental work.
Second, he took the company’s expertise in software, communications and satellite technology into retail. The company was the first company to offer walkie-talkie ability with cell phones. Some of the first personal digital assistants (PDAs) came from PTA. PTA offered one of the first combination cell phone/walkie-talkie/PDAs. One could buy their products at Best Buy, Circuit City, and Sears. It was a name brand.
After two years and even before the company’s aggressive move into retail markets had taken off, Lindsay had been looking for a big increase in pay. Given what he’d done with the company in his two short years, he felt entitled. He was disappointed with what the company offered. A decent raise and an increase in stock options helped but was nowhere near what he’d expected. He wanted to, expected to move into the big leagues of executive compensation. However, the board of directors had been disturbed by stories about high executive pay at prominent corporations. They did not want criticism in that regard coming their way, especially given how much of the business was based on government contracts. Taxpayers would not be happy to learn that their tax dollars paid a president and CEO ten million dollars, plus stock options and it wasn’t enough. Lindsay would have to take what the board was offering.
Lindsay started to look around. Through intermediaries, he learned of potential openings and interest in his abilities. He arranged for that interest to leak to the media. He expected the board would then sweeten his compensation, not wanting to lose the one person who had raised profits and stock prices to new heights. The board, knowing a media leak and power play when it saw one, played hardball and put together their own list of potential replacements and leaked that to the media. Lindsay seriously considered walking.
Then Cross came along.
Lindsay had worked his way up through the CIA over twenty-five years, with his last ten years spent as the deputy director of Operations (DDO). That made him Alt’s boss. Alt worked as an intelligence officer. Supposedly, after the Church hearings in the 1970s, the CIA was out of the assassination business. That wasn’t entirely the case. Alt, and a number of others now with PTA had worked wet operations for years for the CIA. That was how Alt met Bouchard-some joint activities with the French. Lindsay had ordered assassinations and other operations, with Alt integrally involved in many of them. When Lindsay went to PTA, he wanted to significantly upgrade the security at the company. He brought in Alt for that very purpose and made him a vice president. Another person Lindsay brought to the company was CIA numbers genius, James Stephens, naming him chief financial officer.
After two years, when Lindsay was just about ready to walk away from PTA, Stephens and Alt came to him with Cross.
The increase in governmental contracts in Lindsay’s first couple of years necessitated that the company go into an expansion, acquisition and hiring mode. Their facilities were tapped out for space and efforts were made to create as much room as possible to fulfill the contracts. New facilities would be built, but that took time. In the meantime, the company had to ramp up its operations immediately, and they were short of space.
James Stephens had been tasked with evaluating each facility, its equipment, capacity, viability and needs. Stephens found that at many company facilities there was an abundance of surplus military hardware and equipment, leftovers from previously fulfilled government contracts. It had simply been stored and nobody knew or had ever decided what to do with it. It was largely unrecorded on the company books. Stephens mentioned the
