James Swain - The King Tides

“My name’s Jon Lancaster. I’ll be inside waiting for him.”

“You haven’t paid me.”

“Nor do I plan to.”

He passed through a beaded curtain into the club. The bar was shaped like a horseshoe with the dance floor in its center. A young lady wearing a piece of dental floss gyrated on a brass pole to the beat of deafening electronic dance music. He found an empty chair at the bar and ordered a Bud. It set him back twelve bucks.

A man built like a bodybuilder and wearing a black suit caught his eye. The man was checking out the patrons, intent on finding someone. Lancaster took a swig of beer and hopped out of his chair. He’d spent thirty months training to be a SEAL and never once lifted a weight. Big muscles only slowed you down. The man in the suit pointed a finger at him.

“You Lancaster?”

“My friends call me Jon.”

“My boss wants to see you. Let’s go.”

The man in the suit slapped his hand on Lancaster’s shoulder. A split second later, the man was kneeling on the floor, writhing in agony. Pain being the great equalizer, Lancaster gave him enough juice to drain the blood from his face. When the man in the suit had taken enough torture, he released him. The man rose rubbing his thumb.

“Touch me again, and I’ll break your arm,” Lancaster said.

The dancer had stopped her routine and was watching. So was everyone else in the joint. Watching a fat guy take down a strong guy was not a dynamic they were used to seeing. He took his change off the bar and slipped it under the dancer’s G-string.

“Just a little misunderstanding,” he said.

Sergey’s office was more of a living room, with a leather couch and a glass coffee table. Three walls were taken up by flat screen TVs. A feed from the club played on one; a feed from a VIP room where a patron was getting a friction dance showed on the second; the YouTube video of him popping the kidnappers was on the third.

Sergey was sprawled on the couch. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a hairless chest covered in bright tattoos. He was going bald and wore an elaborate comb-over. He pointed at a chair leaning against a wall. Lancaster grabbed it and sat down.

“You have more hits than the latest Justin Bieber video,” the Russian said. “Do you enjoy being famous?”

“It isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

“Does the video help you get women?”

“It’s a good icebreaker. They usually ask how the little girl that I rescued is doing.”

“Do you know?”

“Kid’s fine. Her parents sent me a Christmas card last year.”

“How touching.”

“Glad you think so. Croix told me about your problem. I have a solution.”

In Lancaster’s experience, Russians were difficult to read. Something resembling a smile crossed Sergey’s face. Without getting up, he fetched two beers from a small fridge, and placed one on the coffee table in front of his guest.

“Tell me,” Sergey said.

“When cops shake down businesses, they choose ones that are breaking the law. The owners don’t go to the police because they’re afraid of being arrested. Your problem is worse because you’re breaking a lot of laws. Your dancers are blowing customers, you’re videotaping the sex and using it for blackmail, and you’re hacking cell phones and draining bank accounts. That’s enough to get you put away for fifteen years.”

The Russian mobster sipped his beer. “Not good.”

“Not good at all. Here’s my solution. These detectives want your dancers to move coke that they plan to steal from the police stockade. I have friends on the force that I’ll tip off. These detectives will get busted, and your problem goes away.”

“Will my name be left out of this?”

“Yes. The detectives won’t know you set them up. Now let me ask you a question. How are these detectives stealing the coke? The stockade is tightly run. It’s hard to steal drugs without it getting noticed and reported.”

“I asked the detectives, and they explained the deal,” Sergey said. “The police have drug-sniffing dogs that they use on busts. One of the handlers uses cocaine to train the dogs on a course. Before the handler returns the cocaine, he switches the drugs for flour. The handler is a veteran officer, so no one suspects.”

“How much is he stealing?”

“A kilo every other week.”

“A kilo has a street value of twenty-five grand. Fifty grand a month is a nice haul. Give me these detectives’ names, and I’ll get it taken care of.”

“I don’t know their names,” the Russian said. “They flashed their badges the first time they visited the club but did not present me with their identification. However, I do have a video that I secretly took of them stored on my computer. Will that help?”

Lancaster knew most of the detectives with the department and said yes. Sergey put his beer down and powered up the thin laptop on the coffee table. In the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, 98 percent of the cops were brave, honorable women and men who risked their lives every day to keep the public safe. The 2 percent that were bad had reputations, but managed to keep their jobs because other cops were loath to turn them in.

Sergey flipped the laptop around. A video played on the small screen. It had been taken inside the same office they were now in. On the video, a Hispanic woman and her partner stood with Sergey in the room’s center. The woman was doing the talking while wagging her finger in Sergey’s face, doing the old shakedown. He stared and realized it was Detectives Vargas and Gibbons. He leaned back and shook his head.

“You know them?” Sergey asked.

“I sure do,” he said. “They’re bad cops, and plenty of their colleagues on the force know it. No one will shed a tear when they go down. But I have to ask you again. I’m familiar with the stockade procedures for handling drugs, and they’re strict. Did you learn exactly how the dog handler is getting the cocaine out of the building?”

“He uses his cowboy boots,” the Russian explained. “He comes to work with plastic bags filled with flour stuffed in each boot. Each bag weighs half a kilo. He gets a kilo of cocaine from the stockade and works the dogs on a course. The course has places where the cocaine can be switched, including a small shed. He picks a moment and hides in the shed and makes the exchange.”

Lancaster nodded. It was everything he needed to make a call and get an investigation started. “This is going to take a few weeks. In the meantime, continue to deal with them like nothing’s changed.”

Sergey closed his laptop. The Russian had gotten what he wanted and looked pleased. Lancaster handed him the Droid with Zack Kenny’s information.

“Your turn,” he said.

Hacking a cell phone was virgin territory for Lancaster. He didn’t have a clue as to how a hacker got his hands on personal information stored inside a phone. Was it skill or luck or a combination of both? To his surprise, it was none of the above.

It was called brute force. Using a sophisticated software program, a hacker could systematically try many passwords or pass phrases until the correct one was found. The method was fast when used to check short passwords, but grew longer when the password consisted of a combination of numbers, letters, and symbols.

To aid his search, Sergey needed personal information about Zack Kenny. This included names of pets, favorite foods, names of schools he’d attended, girlfriends, and any other easily remembered things that might be turned into a password.

Using his Droid, Lancaster got on the internet and pulled up Kenny’s LinkedIn page, which contained the names of Kenny’s previous workplaces. He recited this information to Sergey, then found Kenny’s profile on Facebook, and read off the names of schools Kenny had attended and his favorite musicians and movies.