Free Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure by Tom Abrahams Page B

iPods.
    I reached to unzip my bag and pull out the device. “What’s the code?” The codes were always different, and I never knew what they were until the contact gave them to me.
    “Spindletop,” she said.
    “I don’t follow,” I said. The iPod’s UNLOCK screen showed the options were numbers only. Four digits.
    “The date the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop started producing. As a Texan you should know this.” Her lips curled into a wormy, toothless grin. I didn’t like her.
    I wracked my brain, trying to find the date among the files of useless information I’d stored in there. The date Tupac was shot: 09/09. The date Billy Corrigan announced the breakup of Smashing Pumpkins: 05/23. The fall of the Berlin Wall: 11/09. The date my parents died: 12/24.
    Spindletop: I couldn’t remember it.
    “I can’t remember that,” I begrudgingly admitted. “What is it?”
    “January tenth,” she frowned. “It’s all about Texas you know.”
    I’d missed the $100 question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire ?
    I punched 0110 onto the screen’s keypad and the device unlocked. I passed it to her and she flipped it over, running her thumb along the back of the device.
    She began to slide down to the rock to stand, and she lost her balance. The iPod slipped from her hand, off the rock, and landed at my feet.
    I held out my left hand to help her stand up and bent over to pick up the iPod with my right. It was lying face up on the ground. On the screen, it read:
    CAYMAN BANK OF INTERCONTINENTAL COMMERCE
    There was an account number, a bank transit code, and two sets of long numbers I assume were some other sort of bank codes. I punched the home button on the bottom of the iPod and handed it back to Ms. Brown before she could see what I’d inadvertently noticed.
    She took it from me, brushed off her jeans, and returned to the bike path to walk south along the water. I took that as my clue to head back to the airport.
    While waiting at the gate for my plane, I pulled out my netbook to dig a little more. I thought about what the woman had said about how everything was about Texas. If the code for her iPod was a significant date, maybe the other codes had been too.
    Against what the Governor had instructed, I’d kept a list of the codes in a file on my computer. I opened the document and added 0110 to the list.
    I looked at the previous seven numbers.
    0302. That was the code for London. I opened a web browser, and after agreeing to the rules for the airport’s free Wi-Fi, I entered “Texas History, March 2” into a search engine.
    Nine million results popped up instantly. The first: March 2 , 1836 – The date Texas declared its independence from Mexico .
    I type December 19 Texas into the search box. 1219 was the code in Venezuela. I have to scan through a few of the seven million hits before I find the significance. December 19 , 1836 - The boundary of Texas established .
    I entered five more sets of numbers, each of them relevant to either Texas’ rights as a Republic or significant dates in the history of Texas’ role in energy production.
    It was certainly clever. Did it mean something more? Why was there bank account information on the iPod? I’d heard Cayman accounts were hard to trace and easier to hide than Swiss accounts since a government crackdown in 2009.
    There was something much greater at play here. Contrary to the Governor’s wink of a promise, I was beginning to believe there was nothing legal about whatever it was he was perpetrating.
    Until I was drugged, tortured, stalked, and nearly killed, I never thought it was much more than needlessly covert political favors exchanging hands.
    I never considered my life was at stake.
     
    ***
     
    Sitting across from Townsend, I spill my guts. Over the next half hour, between bites of buttered farfalle, I tell him about the trips, the iPods, my kidnapping, the torture, and Bobby’s murder. He puts his phone on the table between us to record the conversation.