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  The case had made national headlines for some time and several eyebrows were raised when Black Jack put Sam in charge of the investigation. Sam’s one and only direction was a 24-hour surveillance clamp on the cult’s retreat including the trailing of anyone leaving the compound.

  The operation was demanding and expensive with agents spending weeks clamped on their stomachs on hard ground keeping watch on the compound from different vantage points, trailing cult people to the nearest grocery store or flea market. And there were those who began to question Sam’s relentless tactics. At one point, even Black Jack had summoned him to question his tactics. But Sam was convinced the cult people knew where the mother was and would eventually lead them to her.

  After six demanding weeks, his hunches proved true. An agent photographed the mother inside the compound. Enlarged and enhanced, there were those who claimed it not conclusive. Sam, eager to find the boy and afraid they would lose their opportunity, thought they should raid right away but it was not until she was photographed a second time that it was deemed conclusive.

  The agents raided at dawn, finding the hiding place but not the mother who was apprehended with her son riding a small motorbike on a hidden dirt road some five miles away from the compound. It was Sam who guessed the escape route and had assigned two agents to watch the road.

  As it turned out, the compound had a cellar tucked away under one of the bunks with concealed entries from both inside the bunk and a tunnel that led to a dry creek hidden a few hundred yards out in the woods. Mother and child were hidden there for nearly eight months before Sam’s agents spotted her. The little scooter bike was kept at the entrance to the tunnel.

  Mother and cult leader were sent to prison for kidnapping. Few of the members remained at the compound but the cult was dismantled, most members returning to their former lives. Sam had kept in touch with the father and son, monitoring their progress. There were no winners in such sagas for the child needed his mother and missed her terribly. Their first year was arranged around exhausting visits to the penitentiary. Then, slowly, it became more bearable until the child adjusted. Two years later, the father remarried, found a new job and the family relocated to Seattle. Sam considered the outcome partial success. He still felt sorry for the mother.

  The LMC Task Force survived six turbulent years of Capitol Hill funding wars. In the end, law enforcement appropriations committees who could not agree on a source for the money cut off funding. Sam was a member of LMC five of those six years, the last three as section leader for the western United States. Part of a section head’s job was to lobby for money, stand in front of Capitol Hill staffers and plead their case for LMC. Though in the end they were not successful in keeping LMC afloat, Sam had managed to draw attention to his cause and gather quite a few supporters who would eventually help him finance his own Center for Missing Children.

  He learned that it was simpler to approach and sway philanthropic organizations and private people who agendas were obscured from the public eye than official bodies who had the responsibility of fighting for every available public dollar. No cause, be it saving missing children or procuring standoff missiles, was deemed more or less important than any other. What seemed crucially important to one seemed less so to another. The deciding factor on a particular budget request was, in the end, simple politics, or, the strength of lobbyists to sway the committees to adopt their cause. The LMC failed to secure budgets because none of the influential committee members adopted their cause. There were a million causes fighting for money and LMC got lost in the shuffle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It took Sam a year to establish his own crew to continue the fight for missing children, most of them from the former LMC. He pleaded his case and won support from private organizations, trust funds, and wealthy individuals he and his people had managed to persuade. The Center was officially opened on March 19, 1992, Sammy’s eighth birthday. The ceremony was televised on local New York stations featuring a host of celebrities, from state and federal politicians to law enforcement figures to movie stars, all out to get their photo plastered for a worthwhile cause. Among them, shying away from the spotlight were the real money people who backed the Center. People like George Metzger and Annie Green whose own personal tragedies convinced them to dedicate funds from which the Center could draw monthly to pay its bills. George Metzger was a self-made billionaire in the shipping business whose grandson was kidnapped but eventually returned for a five million dollar ransom. The kidnappers were never caught. He took to Sam instantly when Sam was introduced to him at a Washington function. The experience had greatly affected Metzger who now vowed to fight such adversity henceforth. Metzger involved Annie Green who had lost a granddaughter to a lunatic who assaulted a Vermont school, holding hostage a second grade class for two days killing himself and four children in the process. Metzger and Annie Green, whose family owned a chain of do-it-yourself stores across the Eastern United States, put up nearly a million dollars a year to help finance the Center’s activity. They were the two main contributors, with others possessing considerably less financial resources but by no means less enthusiasm. The rest contributed a fair share which amounted to another million dollars a year, keeping Sam’s six-person operation afloat with salaries, rent, capital equipment, travel, and numerous other expenses such as surveillance services, contracted information and even bribes, to name just a few.

  The four other members of the Center, besides Black Jack and Sam, were all investigators, all top of their profession, all working for a cause which had personally affected each of them. There was no peripheral help at the Center. They had no budget for secretaries or any other help. Everyone pitched in, typing their own letters, sending their own faxes, making their own airline and hotel reservations, and taking turns running the office errands. Sam was the appointed accountant and phones were answered by whoever was available. Priorities were determined at a weekly staff meeting and cases were assigned to whomever seemed most suitable or in most cases least busy.

  Natasha Usher was a tall, five foot ten inch, striking blonde, who at the age of eight had fled Russia with her mother, requesting asylum at the Finnish border, having escaped a distance of fifteen hundred miles chased by her raving alcoholic father who was also a member of the KGB. Years of abuse and molestation had finally convinced Natasha’s mother the only solution was to defect to the West; the consequences could not have been worse than what she and her daughter had been suffering. They escaped Moscow to St. Petersburg on a train one night, changing trains and buses until they reached Sortavala and walked the final fifteen kilometers to the Finnish border, narrowly escaping a KGB team sent to fetch them. Upon realizing his girls had jumped ship, the father had dispatched several KGB units in pursuit. The terrified mother and daughter just managed to make the border and plead with the Finns who became sympathetic to the striking Russian woman, whose face had been badly bruised by the father just two days prior. Natasha could still recall her mother treading through the snow those last dreadful miles around Russian checkpoints, carrying her in her arms, sobbing but determined not to falter.

  They eventually migrated to the States, taking residence in the Bronx with distant relatives. Several years later, when Natasha was twelve and well immersed in American society, her father had attempted to kidnap her back to Russia. Two masked men had grabbed her on the street, attempting to stuff her into a waiting car. She would have been forced back to her lunatic father but for a random NYPD patrol who happened on the scene just in time to witness the girl being hustled into the waiting car seconds after stepping off her school bus. The policeman driving the squad car rammed into the front of the car disabling it instantly. The two masked men dropped the girl in the car and disappeared into an alley. The driver had been hurt by the impact and was easily apprehended by the officers. He confessed to the kidnap attempt, shedding light on what would have been Natasha’s fate. The plan was simple. Drive her to JFK and hoist her on to an Aeroflot cargo j
et carrying diplomatic mail to Moscow. It was learned that the Russian flight engineer was involved for a considerable sum of money. Under the cover story that he was doing a favor for a distant cousin, bringing her home to mother Russia for a visit, she was to be drugged for the journey. The father was to be waiting at the Moscow cargo terminal.

  Natasha and her mother relocated to Queens but further attempts to take her were never made. She would forever consider herself in debt of the NYPD. After high school she took Criminology at John Jay University in New York and joined the force as an intelligence specialist; being fluent in Russian was useful with Eastern Bloc crime on the rise. She assisted Black Jack and Sam with several cases involving Russian children then joined LMC as a full member. After LMC was dismantled, Natasha went back to her old intelligence job for a year then quit to join Sam at the Center.

  Jose Luis Ortega, nicknamed El Chino, or The Chinese, was a short, stocky Spaniard who joined Sam’s operation following the Ricardo affair. In three years of operation, the Center, as the organization was commonly referred to, had its share of setbacks, with just a few bright spots keeping everyone hopeful. Their biggest and most notorious success to date, which happened early, was tracking down and releasing a kidnapped boy smuggled from New York on a passenger plane to Madrid, Spain. He was to be driven to Gibraltar and sent to Morocco on a ferry boat in the trunk of a car, then he was to be driven to Marrakech and from there through the Sahara to Algiers. The father, an Algerian national, had divorced a Bronx woman to whom he had been married for four years and had borne him two boys. The mother, a postal worker with contacts in the NYPD, contacted Black Jack a few days before the kidnapping, forewarning of her ex-husband’s intentions. Black Jack ordered the two boys, Tomas and Ricardo, tailed, but while the attempt on nine-year-old Tomas was thwarted at a small playground near the family’s apartment building, eleven-year-old Ricardo was not so lucky. The tail team lost him for a few crucial moments at a video arcade when he stepped into the toilet and did not reappear.

  The abductors had managed to ship the boy on a flight to Barajas Airport near Madrid where he was loaded in the trunk of a car on its way to Gibraltar.

  Jose Luis Ortega, nicknamed El Chino by his Spanish police mates because of his height, a mere five foot five inches tall, and his slightly slanted eyes which gave his face an oriental look, was the police sergeant on duty at Barajas Airport when the call from Madrid headquarters was received. Assuming the kid was, as the mother had warned, on his way to Spain, Black Jack had quickly informed the US Embassy in Madrid who contacted the Spanish authorities who alerted El Chino at Barajas Airport. Ortega quickly ordered full searches of every cargo plane arriving from the US that day but the search produced nothing. Baffled by the situation, his pride slightly wounded, El Chino vowed to find the boy and that he did with a major break and a little help from a friend.

  After a demanding eighteen hours of searching airplanes, he stepped into a small bar where airport personnel and crew members often gathered. The talk of the day was, of course, El Chino’s search and when he stepped in for a café con leche - coffee with milk - an Iberia flight attendant, just in from New York, approached him with a concern about a boy she noticed on her flight that fit the description of the boy he was looking for. Most of the passengers of that Iberia flight had already left the terminal by the time El Chino and his band of policemen and women stormed the Arrivals Terminal. A woman friend at the Avis car lot thought she saw a boy being hauled into one of the cars she had rented that morning, though she could not recall which car it was. Now they had several car descriptions and license plate numbers, which were quickly distributed over the net.

  Black Jack arrived late that morning with British Airways, on a flight through London Heathrow. He was introduced to Ortega and immediately felt a connection with the energetic Spaniard who quickly briefed him on the status. El Chino’s makeshift operations center was the tiny radio room at Airport Police offices where he and Black Jack sat waiting for word on the Avis cars being pursued.

  Of the six Avis cars rented that morning, the one, a Renault minivan, traveling south on interstate N-IV, was spotted approximately three hours following Black Jack’s arrival. Two of the five other cars were stopped and searched at various locations around Madrid, producing no kidnapped American boy. El Chino ordered additional police backup in pursuit of the minivan while he and Black Jack boarded a police helicopter.

  When they arrived on the scene, they found the boy, Ricardo, safe and sound sitting in the back of a squad car, looking tired and confused, but noticeably relieved. The two abductors, a woman, who had traveled with the boy from New York on the Iberia flight, and a man of Arab descent, were cuffed in the back of another squad car, looking quite bruised from the collision with two Spanish police cars and the ensuing foot chase.

  Ricardo was safely returned to his mother in a well-televised event at JFK, which brought the Center great publicity and additional funding. El Chino and Black Jack became best friends. After a year of back and forth discussions and contemplation, El Chino took a year off from his job and moved to New York to join his friend. The Ricardo affair had a profound effect on his life and, being a religious man, he decided to dedicate himself to finding missing children, at least until the Barajas airport police chief asked him to return to his airport duties. Two years later, he was still in New York working with Black Jack.

  Mai-Li was a high school history teacher, specializing in Chinese history. She was a slender-framed, somewhat vulnerable looking, twenty-six year old Chinese-American, with short black hair and delicate oriental features who spoke so softly one had to pay close attention to what she was saying. Her parents had migrated from China as children in the late fifties, both settling in Manhattan’s China Town where they met and married in 1969. Mai-Li was the first of two children. Her younger brother Sing-Yan, two years her junior, had been caught, at the age of twelve, in a crossfire during a shootout between rival gangs in the Bowery, taking a bullet to the spine, paralyzing him from the waist down. So devastated were her parents from their misfortune they had stopped functioning properly, her father taking to drinking and her mother subject to fits of anger and depression. Their life had changed dramatically, the burden of a crippled child weighing heavy on their conduct. Mai-Li found herself almost alone in the daily battle of caring not only for her crippled brother but also for her dysfunctional parents who kept working but could not deal with their son’s condition. So, aside from her own school responsibilities, she had to care for the small apartment they all shared, cramped with everything they owned and too small for Sing-Yan to maneuver his wheelchair. To avoid dealing with their problem her mother and father remained at their workplace for as long as it was possible, returning home sometimes as late as midnight. Mai-Li was left with preparing lunch and dinner for herself and her brother, looking after his needs, assisting him with challenging toileting, showering him, making sure he performed his physiotherapy, and tutoring him. Her parents did provide a sitter for the time Mai-Li was at school, but the brunt of the responsibility fell on her young shoulders.

  Despite his misfortune, Sing-Yan did not drown in misery. After a year of adjusting to his new condition both physically and mentally, he began doing the things a person in his condition would do. He began to draw, play chess, build model airplanes, and take guitar lessons. Their favorite time together was when Mai-Li would wheel him across the busy streets to the hospital for physiotherapy, to his guitar instructor for lessons and later to the music studio where he rehearsed with his band. The two of them would spend hours traversing the streets of lower Manhattan stopping now and then for a bite to eat and a drink, absorbing themselves in the busy city, taking in the sights and sounds, smelling the air, immersing in with the crowds, feeling the potential of endless possibilities, away from their cramped apartment, away from their despondent parents.

  Mai-Li admired her brother for his recovery and his positive attitude, but secretly she wanted his a
ssailants punished. She volunteered her services to the police and became an informant on gang related matters inside her school. No one suspected this fragile looking, soft spoken girl of being a police informant but in fact her information helped dismantle several juvenile gangs taking refuge and operating from within the school walls and other schools in the immediate area. She had hoped such activity would lead her to the people who crippled her brother but this never materialized.

  After high school she was accepted at City University as a history major, intending to focus on Chinese history, a desire she had ever since she could remember sitting on her mother’s lap taking in stories from the old country. At twenty-two she became a teacher at her old high school, remaining close to her brother who still lived at home but was now an accomplished jazz guitarist who performed at various locations around Greenwich Village and local Manhattan jazz clubs.

  At the university, she took a minor in behavioral sciences, still mystified by the type of human nature which brought about her family’s misfortune. She still lent part time services to the police and it was there that she was first introduced to Black Jack’s missing children bureau. She was asked to assist in locating an eighth grade student from her school whose mother had reported missing after a full week of not seeing him. The child, Wayne Gardner, was a known Hardhead who would sometimes disappear under questionable circumstances, but never for more than a night or two. The Missing Children bureau was called in after an additional two weeks went by and the police were still clueless. Mai-Li was introduced to Black Jack at the Bowery Police Precinct and was asked to assist in gathering information. Old contacts in the area put her on a trail of a score settled between rival gangs.

  There were three gangs operating at the time in the Bowery out of the local high school. Their activity ranged from dope selling, to car theft, to shoplifting, to general harassment of the public which included coercing harmless children into performing dangerous deeds. Wayne Gardner, who was a hard head but smart enough not to belong to any of the gangs, managed to keep out of harm’s way until one of the gangs recruited him to run an errand which happened to be an envelope full of stolen cash. Gardner, who thought he was doing a friend a favor, unaware of the contents of the envelope, was due to deliver the cash to a member of a rival gang who had been tipping off Gardner’s gang on money collections at local small stores in the area. The particular gang member had been dissatisfied with the share he was getting from his own gang, so he struck a deal with the rival gang, alerting them on any planned robberies. The rival gang would clean out the shop before the member’s own gang, and send him his share via unrelated personnel.