“Confessions” Serial, Tech Wars 23
Sally sat in the New Mexico State University library in Las Cruces and did a final read through of an email before sending it to a corporation called “Vast and Fast Property Funding.”
She, Andy and Jauncey had arrived in Las Cruces two days previously after a brutally long flight from South Africa. They had spent three weeks in Matjiesfontein planning and preparing the sting that they hoped would draw out the cabal that had attacked them and result in its capture.
She had completed her search for current property finance corporations advertising on the Internet. She had previously managed to track down the kind of criminals that she now wanted to expose but now she was looking on a much bigger scale. She had no idea how many such groups existed and whether they were in alliance with each other or if they operated independently. The intensity of the attacks on herself and Andy indicated to her that she was dealing with some major crime syndicate.
At first she came up with names she had seen before and, as far as she could judge, they were all legitimate, names like Trusted Lender Network, Lexology, Close Brothers and Investopedia. She had excluded those from her search. What she had now found were new corporations in the property finance field that had been created to catch the unwary. She uncovered evidence of serious wrongdoing on three occasions and sent details to the appropriate state departments. Two of the three were subsequently prosecuted and she suspected that at least one of them could be part of the cabal that was trying to silence her now.
In her current search, a new name came up. It was not linked to any of the other corporations and had no known big names behind it. She decided to proceed against the corporation named “Vast and Fast Property Funding.” The blurb on the website hinted at massive resources and many years’ experience in the property business, without giving any specifics. She figured that if it were genuine she would simply withdraw the request for funding that she, Andy and Jauncey had come up with.
Through previous successes in bringing bogus groups to justice, she had become friendly with the State Property Association in New Mexico. She had explained that they were looking for a ranch whose owner was prepared to work with her team to set a trap for the cabal. Gus Henderson, one of the committee members, had come up with a rancher who had already been swindled out of owning a property in Wyoming. He was willing to help and could offer a derelict 10,000-acre cattle ranch he had recently purchased as bait.
• • •
The Vast and Fast Property Funding Corporation was fully funded by the cabal through a series of complicated financial structures and networks which made it impossible for its finance sources to be traced. Johannsen was contacted by Vast and Fast to say that they had been approached by a teenage girl, Angela Perkins, studying film and digital art at New Mexico State University in the city of Las Cruces. Her grandfather who had owned the ranch had recently died. He was estranged from his daughter and son-in-law, the girl’s parents, and had left the 10,000-acre ranch to Angela. But her aunt Judy, who had expected to inherit it, was planning a lawsuit to contest the old man’s will. This created a perfect opportunity to play the granddaughter against the aunt and take the land away from both of them. In Angela’s email to Vast and Fast, Angela mentioned that the original deed of sale from when her grandfather bought the ranch in the 1970s was safely stored away at the ranch and she would shortly be going down to retrieve it.
Based on this data, Johannsen decided that his first action was to retrieve the deed of sale from the ranch. After that there were various options he could take to ensure that neither the girl nor the aunt would see a cent from the property. Not knowing how soon Angela would go to the ranch to collect the deed of sale, he decided to move as fast as possible.
He surmised that the document would most likely be kept in a safe, and with any luck the safe would have been installed in the ’70s or earlier, which meant it would not be as sophisticated as modern safes. He made contact with a safecracker he had used previously. The man, Luke Wolf, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the older safes and claimed that he could get into any of them inside of five minutes. For a hefty fee he agreed to come along to open the safe. Johannsen then located a forger, Uwe Klein, who had worked for the cabal on occasions and included him in the team. He also selected five of the toughest men available to the cabal, hired a large chopper to transport them, and prepared to leave for the ranch.
As they flew in the chopper towards the ranch, Johannsen explained that he did not want to leave any tire tracks for the cops to find, if they investigated the scam. The chopper would land well away from the ranch house. After they had finished, his men would use leafy branches to sweep the area for footprints. On establishing that the place was deserted, they picked the front door lock and entered. A quick search of the place enabled them to find an office on the ground floor. The safe they were looking for was hidden behind a photographic portrait of the original owner.
Luke chuckled as he saw the safe. “It’s an old model, probably before1950. Piece of cake!” He took out his tools and got to work. Johannsen had meanwhile posted his men at strategic points around the building with instructions to alert him if anyone came near the ranch. Luke was as good as his word, opening the safe in just over three minutes. Johannsen, with Oscar looking over his shoulder, reached into the safe and withdrew a pile of papers. A quick search revealed the deed of sale dated 1974.
“Now what?” Oscar asked. Johannsen finished reading the deed of sale before replying. “I wanted to see this before choosing our next step. It’s a standard format, so my original plan should work.” He withdrew some of his own documents from a briefcase and showed them to Oscar. The first was another deed of sale showing that Angela had sold the property for a nominal fee to a corporation based in the Cayman Islands. It had been signed by all parties except Angela. It lacked her signature as it had been drawn up by Johannsen who had hoped he would find her signature somewhere in the office. He got lucky. A letter was in a file on the desk. Angela had sent it to the executor of the estate after her grandfather’s death and signed it with her full signature.
Johannsen turned to the forger and showed him the letter. “Can you copy her signature? It’s an easy payday for you. We don’t have to go to plan B.” Uwe smiled. “No problem.” Oscar frowned. “Why should the girl sell the ranch for $500,000 when I’d estimate it’s worth at least $3 million?” Johannsen nodded. “Good question. If queried, the argument would be that for a teenager $500,000 is a fortune and with the aunt trying to muscle in on the property, she wanted to make a quick sale, get the money and have done with it before the aunt could do anything about it.”
Oscar frowned. “Sounds dubious to me.” Johannsen laughed. “All the deals we do are dubious – but we do them fast before anyone has a chance to really dispute them. Then we disappear.”
Oscar shrugged. “OK, I guess that’s why I came along, so that I could see how one of these deals goes down.”
Uwe had meanwhile been writing on a clean piece of paper. He held it up. He had written Angela’s signature a number of times, with the final two efforts being indistinguishable from Angela’s real writing. Johannsen nodded. “That’ll work. Put her signature on the deed of sale and I’ll make copies of both documents. Just as well I brought my own photocopier. Theirs doesn’t work.”
“What happens now?” Oscar wanted to know.
Johannsen smiled. “We clean up. Make sure that there’s no trace of our having been here. I submit the deed of sale to the Cayman Islands Corporation and the deal is done.”
“Does the girl get the $500,000?”
“Only if we have to. Most times in a case like this, even if they can track us, we can drag out the payment for so long that she’ll eventually settle for a fraction of that, leaving us with a darn good profit.”
Oscar impulsively leaned forward and hugged Johannsen.
“Great. I can see why you’ve been our top operative for so long, even though you failed to catch that couple who’ve been harassing us.”
“I’m hoping they’ll try to stop us again, and this time we’ll be ready for them.”
As Johannsen spoke, a section of the far wall of the office unexpectedly opened up, leaving Oscar, Johannsen and the others gaping in disbelief.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.