Dakota wasn’t going to consider that maybe the problem with keeping up stemmed from celebrating his fortieth birthday in Colombia.
There were men still playing in the NFL who were over forty—the Steelers, the Bills, the Broncos.
Forty was young.
Dakota still had some hills to climb before he was looking over the top at the valley below.
He was good.
Maybe part of the problem was that while Tank was training with Cerberus, Dakota had been working out of Colombia and had been running solo.
When Tank finished up his certification with Cerberus Tactical, he would whip Dakota’s butt into shape. Dakota would ask Reaper for Tank’s training protocol and replicate it as best he could while still holding down his job. After all, training and deploying was Cerberus’s day-to-day, right?
As the elevator dinged the sixth floor, Dakota stepped through the sliding doors and turned down the short end of the hall.
At the end of the corridor, Dakota tapped at the open door and lifted a hand in salute, “Jasper.” Turning, Dakota found another colleague sprawled in a side chair. “Benny, goodto see you, man.” Dakota dropped his wet umbrella by the wastebasket, then extended his hand for a shake.
“I brought the office a present.” Benny slid his hand through the air to showcase three hundred-dollar bills, resting on the surface of Jasper’s scarred desk.
Dakota bent to inspect the bills. “These are seriously good,” he murmured to himself.
Jasper reached into his bottom drawer, pulled out a white box of nitrile gloves, and dropped it onto his desk.
Dakota plucked out a pair so he could pick up the specimen without adding his fingerprints.
When he snapped them on, they covered his fingers and half his palm.
Jasper was five feet five and had proportionately sized hands. That wasn’t to say that Jasper wasn’t a powerhouse. He was the wiry, sinewy type of guy that filled out most of the U.S. special forces—the kind that were like self-winding clocks that never run out of go-juice. And frankly, there were some tight spots—both physical and metaphorical—where a smaller size than Dakota’s basketball player's frame (and shoe size) would have been helpful.
The gloves weren’t going to work.
“Nah, you don’t need those,” Benny laughed. “I have stacks of these samples. You need to feel them, anyway, to see how clever they are.”
Dakota stripped the gloves off and tossed them into the garbage. “Where’d these bills come in from?” He picked up a specimen and held it to a light. He slid his thumbnail over Franklin’s shirt and felt the bump. He focused on the crispness and the hand feel. “Yeah, real artistry here. Are these samples from North Korea?”
“Florida,” Benny said, leaning forward. “The gal was a fine arts student who got tired of living in her van. She’s detail-oriented and a true craftswoman for sure. She spent her summer vacation traveling around the United States, big city to big city, printing those off in a hotel room.”
“Printed. Like off a basic office printer?” Jasper asked. “That’s impossible. How did she get past the internal security that she could print that?”
“Layers. This gal sent them through over and over and over again. Each time, she layered a different file. She said they learned a lot of these techniques in her art classes. She was replicating a piece of art, and it wasn’t that tough to figure out.”
“So she’d like to run off a stack of say border and eyebrows, and then fill the tray with the printed pieces to send through to pick up lips and a number?” Dakota pulled the chair out to form a circle with his colleagues.
“Exactly,” Benny said, then grimaced. “She said it was like doing layered gel printing, whatever the hell that is.”
Dakota bent the bill back and forth. “The paper has a good feel. If I wasn’t looking for it, I’d say it’s just right.”
“She glued two layers of Bible paper together. That’s part of the reason she was in a hotel. Nice hotels too, since she was traveling as a single female, right? So she said she was worried about staying in one place too long because she was sure the Secret Service would be beating the bushes.” He sent Jasper a wink.
“Which you were,” Jasper said.
“Second, she needed to bribe the maids to let her buy their boxes of Bibles, so she could cut the blank pages out, then she’d leave the Bibles in the supply closet.”
“No one figured it out?” Jasper asked.
“Why the Bibles?” Dakota asked.
“She could only buy that paper in large lots, and she didn’t want anyone to be able to track the delivery to her. And she could bribe the maids with counterfeit money, so she wasn’tlosing anything. And, she left the Bibles behind when she was done. No one would get what that was all about.”
