The Whisper Box Read online

  The sound was very muffled. At first he could not make out any of the muffled voices and was somewhat let down. He was about to tell Laura that she had wasted his time. After all, he almost died tonight to help her and the quality of this tape made it useless. Just as he was about to mention something to her, she held her index finger up, and then pointed at the stereo. She was motioning for Mac to keep his mouth shut. Obviously the good part was about to come up.

  Suddenly the muffled voices cleared up enough for him to make out a few sentences,

  “Forget it. Right now we have to conduct business. You have Neil killed. Talk to Anderson. He's the best we have. He'll take care of it quickly. Tell him there is zero room for screw-ups and this has to be done within the week. When you're done you come back here, then we'll take care of the pleasure part. Bring your friend. That's the last time I'm going to tell you.”

  Mac had to keep telling himself that he was awake and that this was all real. The sound on the tape became muffled again. Obviously the person doing the recording was moving with the recorder. He pictured Laura backing out of her secret spot. Laura told him that it was all that could be heard on that tape.

  Mac thought before he spoke. “This bastard is having sex with some woman and obviously some friend and, all the while, having people killed. Do I understand correctly so far?”

  Laura raised her eyebrows and whispered, “Yup, there's more. Here's the next tape.”

  Mac grabbed it with the same intensity as the first. Thankfully, this tape was rewound. He inserted it in the cassette player and pressed “Play.” More muffled sounds and voices filled his speakers, but then he heard faint moaning with unclear whispering. He sat there in shock. After about two minutes of moaning the voices broke in. “Put your clothes on, quick. You are both beautiful girls, the last thing I need is someone walking in here seeing my girlfriend and her friend in their panties,” said Farnsworth.

  The second mystery woman's voice broke in. She had a Southern drawl, which made it easy to distinguish between girls.

  “When do I get my job, sir?” she asked.

  “You'll get your job in due time baby. Be patient, there is a time and place for everything. Meanwhile, here is your money. Do not deposit this into your account. Now let's talk business. Neil was disposed of yesterday. With that little problem eliminated we should have clear sailing from here. Go to Anderson after you leave here and tell him we need to have a boat in Miami tomorrow morning by five o'clock. When they get to the same dock as last time, they will receive instructions as to where to sail and what to pick up. The guy at the dock will have the money for the purchase and his money as well. This is important. Make sure Anderson knows that he can be disposed of as quickly as Neil and that he better not screw this up.”

  The President's girlfriend broke in, “Understood. Should we call you after, or not?”

  Farnsworth shot back, “You do not call me, I trust you will not screw it up. Get out of here.”

  Again, in shock, Mac stopped the tape and looked at Laura.

  “Who is Neil?” he asked.

  Laura explained that Neil, from what she gathered, was a reporter from the Washington Post. The next morning Neil Becker was found dead in his car on the side of a small highway about two hours outside of Washington. There was no sign of foul play and no reason for his travels to this far off highway. The death was listed as an Unsolved Mystery. Laura explained that she thought he was snooping a little too close and unaware that he was very close to stumbling onto the biggest news story in the history of our country. Farnsworth had to quiet him before he got any further.

  Again, Mac inquired, “So is our President responsible for drugs or something coming into the country also? I mean, what else do you pick up on secret boats with a bunch of money?”

  Laura explained that there are more tapes with references to dollar amounts, specific drugs, and more names. Mac had known it would be a long night, but he did not know it would be this interesting.

  They spent the entire night going through tapes and videos. The videos were more graphic than he anticipated. There were actual phone calls to Anderson regarding the disappearance of Neil and how the media was treating the story. There were orders to pay off police officers to cover Neil Becker's death. Another videotape actually contained footage of the President and the Southern girl having sex.

  Mac knew this story had to break immediately. He was contemplating whom to call. Obviously, he had to have trustworthy and powerful protection. Who could be trusted? If the police had been paid off, who could guarantee their safety? There were no police officers' names mentioned on the tapes so Mac had no idea who to trust at this point. One wrong move could spell death. He wondered if he should call the local television station and help some of his friends out there that could use the break, or was this not the time for favors? Could he get in touch with Grant Winchester at CNN? Grant would love this, it would cap off his career. Mac loved Grant Winchester, as did most other Americans.

  A thought hit Mac almost immediately. How could he call someone? What if his phones were tapped? He decided his phones could not be tapped yet. If the guys in Laura's apartment had no idea who he was, then they would not know to tap his phones. As Laura and Mac were discussing a strategy, the phone rang. Laura and Mac exchanged a troubled glance. It was five thirty in the morning, who would be calling now? Nervously, Mac picked up the phone. It was his wife. He motioned to Laura that everything was OK. Her widened eyes relaxed and she began to breath again. Mac explained to his crying wife that everything was going to be OK. He told her that, at this point, this was all he could tell her. He promised her that they would be anywhere in the world that she wanted to be soon and that her parents could come if they wanted. One of the hardest things he had ever had to do was to hang up that phone.

  Mac told Laura how his wife was taking the whole thing, that she was very frustrated because of the secrecy. She must have been scared for her husband's life. Just as Mac was telling Laura that she would probably call five more times today, the phone rang again.

  Mac shook his head and said, “Here we go again.”

  He picked up the phone. “Yes dear,” he said.

  The caller replied, “Yes dear? Let me tell you something dear, you are in the middle of a huge fuckin' storm.”

  Mac looked helplessly at Laura.

  The voice continued, “I don't know what you think you pulled off last night, but this just become personal. We're coming to your office. You can't run because we'll catch you. You can't go to the police, because we own them. You can't go to the media, because we own them too. If you cooperate, we might let you kiss your kids good-bye before we cut your fuckin' throat out.”

  The line went dead. Mac bolted for the tapes and the envelopes. Laura had watched Mac's expression change from complacent to shock.

  “What's wrong Mac? Who was that? What just happened?” she pleaded.

  Mac thought brutal honesty was best approach at this point, “They're coming to kill us, Laura. Grab as much shit as you can and follow me!”

  They managed to grab everything in less than thirty seconds, and then Mac led her to the back door. They hopped in the banged up Corvette and sped out of the parking lot. Mac was hyperventilating and shaking feverishly.

  Laura just repeated over and over, “Please. Please, no.”

  Mac had his Corvette up to one hundred miles per hour when he realized that he did not want to attract any attention. He got on the entrance ramp to I - 95 and slowed down to about seventy miles per hour. They just drove.

  Every five minutes, one of them would ask the same question. “What are we going to do?”

  After an hour of driving, Laura finally fell asleep.

  There was definitely no one following them. Mac just continued to head south.

  He felt like a bleeding man swimming in shark infested waters. What made it worse was that he could not actually see what was swimming below.

  Just then, the Corvet
te jolted to the right. Laura woke up and screamed. Mac looked in his rear view mirror and saw a red Corvette right behind them and a black Ford pickup far off in the distance. The red Corvette smashed into them again. Mac was shaking with anger now, his pride and joy was a crushed, dented wreck. Oh well, he thought, as he floored the gas pedal. In seconds they were traveling over one hundred and twenty five miles per hour. Laura continued to scream and Mac fully understood why. These people were good at what they did. They got a Corvette to keep up with his Corvette. He could not outrun it.

  As Mac was concentrating on driving faster than his newfound enemy, he was blasted into another level of fear. He heard shots clearly ring out. He could actually see bits of metal flying past his window. The small rear window was shattered with a bullet. Mac heard the window pop. Laura was screaming as loud as ever now. Mac, without thinking, screamed back at her, demanding her to stop. He could hear bullets flying off the edges of where the small rear window had been. He looked in his rear view mirror and saw the hit men pulling up to the driver's side of his car. The passenger was hanging out of the window shooting at them with a sawed-off shotgun. Laura had finally stopped screaming. Mac turned to her to tell her to look out for exit signs. If they came to a small town, he would pull off. He felt certain the hit men would not follow him into a small town and create such a disturbance.

  As he turned to Laura he noticed that his right shoulder was drenched in blood. Immediately, he grabbed at his shoulder, assuming he had been hit. Then he realized he was fine and reluctantly looked up at Laura. The entire left side of her head was almost gone. She probably had not felt a thing. Mac knew he was next. As a child Mac was easily rattled, the doctors told his parents to stop babying him so much. The slightest things had made him nervous and uncomfortable, but he had outgrown it. Now, twenty years later, he felt it again, only magnified beyond anything he could have imagined. He was overwhelmed.

  Once again, the red Corvette hit the right rear of his Corvette. He felt his car vibrating intensely. He could not negotiate the steering wheel so the direction the car was headed was now out of his hands. He felt the car spin once, and then he lost control. Suddenly, the car was airborne and spinning uncontrollably. This was not surprising; he was driving at speeds exceeding one hundred and twenty five miles per hour when the tire was pierced by a bullet. He saw a tree, then the ground and, after his head smashed into the steering wheel, another tree. He was losing consciousness. When the car finally landed, it skidded in circles, upside down, and downhill, still traveling at a high rate of speed. Finally, the car stopped, when it slammed into a concrete pillar. Mac heard a loud popping sound, followed by a crack, as his left shoulder hit the driver's side door. He knew instantly that it was broken.

  Without thinking of Laura he looked around the car. His seat belt kept him strapped in and safe. When he wiped his forehead, he realized his head was bleeding. Because his left shoulder, he assumed, was broken, he unbuckled his seat belt with his right hand. Whoever did this was not going to drive away after he sped off the highway. These men were professionals, it seemed, and they would most likely come down to finish the job. He looked for the tapes in the backseat and grabbed what he could. He still had groceries in the backseat from a quick trip to the store he had taken just before Laura Greene came back into his life. He quickly and randomly picked through the groceries for the video and audiotapes in between. When he felt like he had gathered as many as possible, he crawled out of the car and studied his surroundings.

  He was at the bottom of an embankment. There was a railroad track on a bridge above him. His car had met with one of the huge concrete pillars that elevated the trestle. There was a deep river in front of him, which flowed underneath the bridge. He could hear the men about one hundred and fifty feet above him on top of the hill. They were screaming at each other about finding him. After all, they were coming to kill him.

  According to his calculations, he had about thirty seconds to make a move. He looked at the water, then headed back into the Corvette he was about to abandon. Laura's body was still hanging upside down from her seat belt and her blood was splattered all over the car. First, he dumped the contents out of one of the plastic grocery bags and shoved the tapes in it, tying it closed with the handles, hoping to waterproof it. Realizing he may have to stay underwater for an extended amount of time, he opened the compartment between the front seats and let the contents fall out onto the roof of the upside down car. He grabbed one of the pens he kept in there. He removed the cap, tip, and ink cartridge from the pen, making a temporary snorkel.

  He put the pen between his lips and dove headfirst into the rushing river. The water was freezing this time of morning. He kept his head under water and breathed through his makeshift snorkel as the furiously flowing rapids pushed him down the river. The only person who could relate to what he was feeling had just lost her head, literally. Still, he felt proud at having just pulled off one of the most amazing escapes imaginable.

  It was almost dawn. Because they were as secretive as Mac was about what was going on, he knew the men would not follow him in broad daylight. Mac would love to float into a heavily populated area. It would have made him feel better because hit men would not fire at him around a group of people. Whenever the river widened he would relax his muscles and float down river for a few minutes at a time, enjoying the ride. He would dip under water with his pen firmly between his lips from time to time to escape from the world when the river narrowed. He did not want anyone calling the police reporting a man floating down river.

  After a couple hours in the water Mac noticed a small clearing along the river and realized he had reached a rural area. Not having seen a building for forty-five minutes, he swam to the clearing, crawled about twenty feet across the dirt, and collapsed in the brush. His head, shoulder, back and neck were throbbing. He lay there and stared at the trees above for a few minutes before he thought about the tapes. They were clutched under his unbroken shoulder. When he opened the plastic bag he was surprised that the tapes were still dry. He still had the evidence. Knowing the tapes were safe was enough of a relief to allow him to drift off to sleep. He was completely exhausted. This would be a long nap.

  ************************

  Michael Helsel, the office clerk at Hart and Hart, officially became a missing person at four o'clock that afternoon. His girlfriend, Tonya, had looked for him the previous night. When she received the letter he had supposedly written, Tonya knew that the handwriting definitely did not belong to him. Furthermore, she did not understand what “she'll know what I mean” meant. The entire situation did not make any sense. She called his parents, but they knew nothing about any trips that Michael had planned. Finally, she contacted the police. When they arrived at his apartment, they were dumbfounded. The crime scene investigation unit was dispatched to the apartment soon thereafter. They searched it for fingerprints, but there were none other than Michael and Tonya's. The neighbors were questioned over and over again, but they had no answers and had heard no struggle. There were no clues as to where Michael could have disappeared. His boss, McFarland Hart, was not in his office, nor was he at home or even in court. He could not be found either.

  McFarland awoke later that afternoon. He peeked out from the brush and saw no sign of anyone. Extremely hungry, and in more pain than he had been before he fell asleep, he tried to gather his thoughts. The water had rendered his watch useless, but he assumed it was late afternoon, probably about four thirty. He was convinced that his shoulder was broken because he could not move his left arm. In spite of his physical condition, he had to make a move sooner or later.

  As for what move to make, he could not think of anything immediately. Still, he was determined to see this through. For a moment, he actually considered disguising himself, dumping the tapes in the river and trying to regain some sort of control of his life in another country, possibly Canada. He dismissed that idea in part because it was impractical, but mainly because he was determine
d to finish what he had started. He promised Laura, in a silent prayer, that he would see this through until he won or he died.

  Mac wanted to think about his wife but, he could not. The only way he could see her again was to overcome this. One startling thought kept creeping into his mind. If these hit men could find him, then they could find his wife. He did not think they would take his wife hostage because it would do no good if they did not know where he was to contact him. He blocked the thought out of his mind.

  7

  Aaron stared at his computer. How could he tell LadiesFirst who he was without anybody else knowing? Had they ever used any catch phrases in communicating each other? He started typing, hoping to figure something out.

  JohnnyM80: Hi Ladies, What are you up to?

  LadiesFirst: Nothing, just waiting on a friend.

  JohnnyM80: Is he a Republican?

  LadiesFirst: Of course.

  JohnnyM80: Send Too Under Drawers.

  LadiesFirst: Huh?

  JohnnyM80: Send Too Under Drawers.

  LadiesFirst: What language are you speaking?

  JohnnyM80: Send

  JohnnyM80: Too

  JohnnyM80: Under

  JohnnyM80: Drawers

  LadiesFirst: Oh my God.

  JohnnyM80: Let's talk a little. I really want to talk to you!!

  Ladies First: There is nothing to talk about.

  JohnnyM80: I need to know what you know. I need to meet you in person.

  Aaron waited for a response that was not coming.

  JohnnyM80: Are you still there?

  The message came back: LadiesFirst disconnected from server.

  Aaron immediately disconnected. He did not want to have anything traced, even to the laptop computer. Frustrated, he was sure LadiesFirst knew something, and someone knew that she knew. He could not understand what was going on, but knew it was dangerous. The safety of his family frightened him. Protecting them became his top priority. After fifteen minutes of contemplation he reconnected to the Internet. He typed WWW.GRANTWINCHESTER.COM. There was no such web site address. Next, he typed in WWW.CNN.COM. When the web site came up he scoured the web page for a 'Contact Us' link. It was at the very bottom. He clicked on it and saw a listing of every CNN reporter. All their names were highlighted which meant he could click on the name and send them e-mail. They were in alphabetical order. Right there between Waylons and Worthington was Winchester, Grant. Instantly after he clicked on it, a blank e-mail popped out. He wrote to Grant: