“Where do you live, Cracker?”
“I have a room in the staff quarters.”
“How many of the staff live on the place?”
“All of them.”
“What do you do for entertainment?”
“They fly us to Miami. Everybody works seven days on and four off. Palmetto Gardens owns a refurbished DC-3 for flying staff back and forth.”
“Which airport in Miami do they fly into?”
“Opa Locka.”
“Tell me the names of some of the members of Palmetto Gardens.”
Cracker looked blank. “I don’t think I know any of them.”
“How do they refer to them among the security people?”
“By addresses. I’ve never heard any names used.”
“What do these people look like?”
“Rich. All kinds of nationalities. There’s some Europeans and some Hispanics and some Americans. There’s a couple of Arabs, too, I think. It’s not like I ever have a conversation with any of them.”
“Do they have wives and children?”
“Women, most of them. I’ve only seen a few kids—that’s less common.”
“How many members?”
“There’s two hundred and eight houses; I guess a member a house.”
“How many employees, total, on the place?”
“Something over six hundred, I think. Half of them are domestics.”
“Six hundred employees are living on the place?”
“No, the domestics are local.”
“How do they get in and out of the place?”
“They drive or take the bus to the service gate; there’s a parking lot for them there. Then they walk or are driven in vans to their work.”
“How do they hire the domestics?”
“I don’t know. I guess they run ads. The pay is good, so there’s not much turnover. There’s an employment office in Orchid.”
“What sort of arms do you have at the security station?”
“We all carry nine-millimeter automatics, then there’s a supply of AR fifteens.”
“Anything heavier than that?”
“Not at the station.”
“Elsewhere?”
Mosely suddenly looked uncomfortable.
“Come on, Cracker, or I’ll be talking to your parole officer.”
“There’s some stuff scattered around the place. I don’t know exactly what.”
“You’ve got to do better than that, Cracker.”
“I’ve never been close to it, but there are some…places around the property.”
“Are they camouflaged?”
Cracker looked surprised. “How did you know that?”
“We’re talking about what you know, Cracker.”
“Yeah, they’ve got netting over them.”
“Who mans them?”
“There are certain employees who’re trained for that, a couple of dozen, I think. If there’s an alarm, they go to their positions.”
“What kind of an alarm?”
“There’s a siren on a pole at the security office. If we get three blasts, we’re to go to our preassigned positions.”
“What’s your position?”
“Backup at the front gate, unless I’m already on service-gate duty.”
“What are they afraid of out there, Cracker?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but I know that they don’t want anybody from the outside there, unless they’re invited and escorted.”
“What kind of aircraft land at the airfield?”
“Corporate jets, mostly, and some support airplanes that bring in stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Equipment, parts, special foods, whatever’s needed. The DC-3 and a Cessna Caravan do that work.”
“Is there any special security at the airfield?”
“Yeah, there’s a couple of those camouflaged places.”
Holly couldn’t think of anything else to ask him. “Stay here a minute,” she said. “Guard, Daisy.”
“You’re leaving me with that dog?” Cracker asked, worried.
“She won’t hurt you unless you move.” Holly left the room and went next door. Harry Crisp was gone. She went back to the other room. Cracker had not moved. “Okay, Cracker, I’m going to let you go. If Barney wants to know why you were here so long, tell him I kept you waiting. If you tell him about our conversation, I’ll know, and I’ll have you back in prison before nightfall, you understand?”
“I understand,” he said. “I’m not going to jail for Barney.”
“Good, now get going.” She followed him to the squad room and watched as he walked out.
Hurd Wallace approached. “Who was that guy?”
“Just an interview,” Holly said. “Nothing important.”
CHAPTER
46
Holly went straight to Jackson’s house after work. One of the two FBI vans was parked outside. Harry Crisp was on the phone, as usual, when she walked in, and Jackson was having a beer with Bill and Joe. Harry waved and covered up the phone. “Be with you in a minute.”
Holly fed Daisy and got herself a beer, returning to the living room as Harry finished his call. “What happened to you today?” she asked. “I came in there to see if you had any more questions, but you had gone.”
“Sorry, when I heard that Cracker was driving Barney’s Range Rover I went out there to see if I could bug it, but I didn’t have the right equipment.” Harry waved at the other people. “Let’s all sit down for a minute,” he said.
Everybody gathered at the dining table.
“I just want to tell you all where we are,” Harry said. “First of all, Holly did a brilliant job of interrogating Cracker Mosely this morning. She got a hell of a lot of information that would have taken us a week to get. Thanks, Holly.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Let’s see.” Harry consulted a list. “I talked with a guy from the National Security Agency this morning. They were already aware of the transmissions coming out of Palmetto Dunes.”
“They’ve been listening in?” Holly asked.
“They did for a while, starting a couple of years ago, but they’d assigned it a lower priority for the past year.”
“Why? What was coming out of there?”
“Commodity trades.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They were dispatching sell and buy orders for futures on soybeans, wheat, pork bellies, everything you’d find at a commodities exchange, but they were doing it on a worldwide basis.”
“Well,” Holly said, “that doesn’t make any sense at all to me. I thought those things were handled through brokers.”
“What they’ve got there is a brokerage. There’s something odd about it, though.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re using a Chinese telecommunications satellite to move their information.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand that, either,” Holly said.
“Neither does the NSA. Their earlier scans were handled routinely by lower-level personnel. All they did was to listen in; they didn’t do any analysis. Now they’re going to take another look at the transmissions and see if there is any change in what’s coming out of there. They’ll also do an analysis of the information.”
“I still don’t understand it,” Holly said, “but maybe that’ll help somehow.”
“Sounds like your old man’s idea of the antiaircraft emplacements wasn’t all that far-fetched,” Harry said. “Though, for the life of me, I just can’t believe that anyone on the Florida coast would start shooting at airplanes.”
“Who would do something like that?”
“It doesn’t make any sense as a security precaution. It might make more sense if they intended to use that kind of weaponry to buy some time.”