Moral Fortitude

The phone on the desk shrilled, blasting the climate.

All four jumped slightly, but recovered quickly, not without glancing self consciously at each other, however.

The Captain barked into the receiver, clearly angry at the interruption. He slammed down the phone and waved his hand in annoyance, dismissing the call. "Could have waited. Go ahead with the end."

"Please tell me the kid survived," Tony pled.

Fornell stood up and paced from one end of the room to the other. "Tony, yes, the boy survived because not twenty four hours before overdosing, the mother showed up at the local Shawnee police precinct and demanded to speak with a detective. They obliged her, and she confided the whole background, despite obviously narrating the story while under the influence of drugs. As she talked they confirmed the facts, and promised her that they could help her and the boy stay safe."

Surprisingly, Fornell's voice suddenly caught, and Tony jerked his head sharply to assess his father's friend. This Fornell was unchartered territory and Tony could not remember a time that he had seen the older man respond that way, clearly experiencing trouble reining in his emotion.

Fornell pursed his lips, evidently getting himself under control.

"Anyway," he rasped before clearing his throat. "Anyway, she agreed, and even requested substance abuse treatment once she and the boy got settled. She refused to let them drive or accompany her to where she stayed, afraid that the cartel would immediately kill them if they saw a police tail. The last time the department saw her alive, she arranged to return with her son the next afternoon. I don't know why she begged for help that particular day. Maybe she experienced some kind of premonition or spiritual event and sensed her own death. Going to the police provided her with an avenue to save her son."

Forbes interjected, "The medical examiner could not determine whether she self injected the heroin or if the cartel got to her and did it for her."

"The cartel scoured the place trying to locate the kid, but the homeless community, no pun intended, rallied to protect him. They handed him off to the police for protection nearly a year ago." Fornell stuffed his hands into his pockets.

Tony clenched his jaw. That unlucky little boy had lost everything he knew, and still had a price on his innocent head.

Tony's concern weighted each word of the request. "Then what happened to him?"

"Since then he has called five foster homes his residence."

"Five," Tony sputtered. "Five in a year? What kind of stable homes is the Department of Family and Children Services making available?"

"Not DFACS, not the Department's fault about the instability," the Captain contradicted. "The kid's behavior sabotages any chances of living in a foster home for more than a few weeks. According to the agency, the common complaint is incorrigible behavior foster parents can not manage."

"Yeah, and those particular foster homes are actually residences of other families in witness protection. Until we finally implode the cartel, he can not go to mom's family, though they have expressed that they want him badly."

Tony absorbed the analysis, began to speak, then stopped himself. Processing the tragedy encountered in that child's short life just electrified his emotions. Staring down at the file in his lap he gathered control of his feelings before finally looking back up to confirm, "What motive do all of you have in making me privy to this child's story?"

The three men exchanged glances, and the Captain spoke for them. "Tony, can you hold off a little while longer and let us answer that later? Trust me, you will hear it all."

Sliding back, Tony propped his head at the top rim of his chair and slid down, his bottom barely touching the edge of the seat. It created a straight line with his tall frame and he crossed his feet at the ankles.

Forbes pulled out a leather briefcase next to his chair, balanced it on his knees as he opened it, and slowly extracted another file.

Passing it to Fornell, he inclined his head in Tony's direction.

Fornell handed the file to the younger man, and watched as he carefully opened it to check the contents.

This time a photo of two somber children faced him. Favoring each other with high cheekbones and golden olive skin, he guessed they were family. However, the resemblance ended there. Evidently older, the girl's hazel eyes and wavy honey blond hair already marked her as a beauty. The boy's hair was a couple of shades darker with streaks of copper threaded throughout. His eyes, luminous and compelling, sparkled a light topaz brown.

"Good looking, aren't they?" Fornell stabbed a finger towards the photo, smiling.

"Girl's five, and the little boy is three," offered the Captain.

Wiggling himself straight, Tony slid back in his chair and closed the file. "Introduce me," he requested, interlocking his fingers behind his head. A tuft of hair popped up like a rooster's comb. "My process of elimination suggests a tie to the Black Widow Cartel. Did I miss the mark?"

"No, you connected the dots. These kids belonged to a housekeeper working for one of the men higher up in the organization. She might have suspected her employer trafficked in drugs, but no evidence exists that she in any way acknowledged it," Forbes clarified, crossing his arms across his chest.

Cracking the file back open, Tony considered the picture. "Are those his kids?"

"No," Fornell answered, "hers only. Their dad lost his life in a car accident two months before the little boy's birth, skidded off the road during an ice storm. He had no tie to the organization."

Tony winced.

"Apparently we can credit the housekeeper's boss with recruiting the servicemen we mentioned earlier, the Navy and Marine boys. This guy's position functioned as a pseudo human resources officer, for lack of a better term. From what we have gathered he had a charisma about him, which made him the man able to enlist dealers and workers in three or four states. However, he got greedy, and must have thought his rank in the food chain would provide him carte blanche because no one would consider him a suspect. He spent the last several months covertly siphoning business to a secondary drug organization created from drugs appropriated off of his employer."

Forbes stopped talking, and Tony watched as he gathered his thoughts before continuing with the story.

"As happens in situations like that the boss suspected all along. He ordered his henchmen in to get him with commands to kill everyone in the house, with the exception of the traitor, the homeowner."

Fornell added some detail to the bare bones summation. "Two men stormed the residence and mowed down the man's wife and teenaged kids, the housekeeper, the chauffeur, and the gardener as they slept, then dragged him to their boss, who oversaw his death by torture. According to our informants, the boss didn't kill him for three days, but ordered him tortured seventy two straight hours. Can't imagine how a human could last that long."

His audience sorted through the mental image.

"By some miracle, and I mean that literally, the assassins allowed the housekeeper's babies to live. Police investigating the bloodbath found them alive but crying in their mother's room. The only rationale to their survival that the investigators could offer rested on the fact that a huge picture of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus hung on the wall between the crib and bed of the two kids. Arguably they figured the men could not slaughter the little ones with that picture, with them protected by such holy entities."

The Captain presented the conclusion. "So this happened a year and a half ago. Like you saw with our young man at the beginning," he pointed at the file still open in Tony's lap. "The kids do have relatives on mom's side to adopt them eventually, but the kinfolks won't be safe, nor will the kids be safe, until we finish taking down the rest of the Black Widow Cartel."

"As of now, they have passed through three foster placements, roughly one per six months," Fornell continued. "By all accounts the kids exhibit no problems per se, but the two together require a tremendous amount of energy from the caretakers."

Tony stood up and stretched, internalizing the nightmare narration he had just heard. He pursed his lips and tilted his head quizzically. "How- or rather, why did Athens, Georgia, start this whole conversation?"

"All in good time," the Captain smiled back, the smile not reaching his eyes. Despite the fact that three men in the room considered themselves veterans in enforcement, examining lives as they had done the past few minutes tore them to the quick.

"One more, Son," Fornell gestured towards the chair Tony had vacated. "Sit down again, because we should go over this last case."

Motioning for the folder, the captain passed the new one to Fornell, who placed it into Tony's hands, an undisguised expression of sorrow.

The young man fanned himself with the cardstock cover before dropping back into the chair. The clenched jaw gave away his emotional upset, and the other three allowed him several moments to collect himself.

This time two snapshots took up the inside cover, one of a toddler girl, and the other of an elementary level boy. The little girl's blue eyes reminded Tony of the lightest blue of the sky he could imagine, and her dark blond hair fell straight and just past her little dimpled chin. The boy, on the other hand, had hair so blond it was almost white, framing an elfin face with dark blue eyes and a dimple in his left cheek.

Both children stared unsmilingly at the camera, neither sad nor happy.

Tony scrunched his eyes closed a few seconds before inviting a sit rep.

"Same cartel, same motive," the Captain began, cutting to the chase. "Kids belonged to dealers in Nebraska, a couple both at the lower end of the Black Widow pipeline. They made the mistake of supplying names when the drug task force busted them six months ago. Released on bail, cops found them when reports of a car fire summoned the fire and police to a public park in Iowa, about an hour from the residence. The medical examiner determined they had been bound, shot, and placed in the car. When the vehicle caught fire, they were still breathing but had no way of escaping. Their deaths were excruciating."

Fornell exhaled loudly. "Police picked up the kids when the sitter called and said no on had come to collect them the night before, which is when she expected one of the parents. Sitter identified the parents through identification of the car. Officers worked quickly and had the kids with a family in a couple of hours. No one is sure whether the cartel knows about the kids, but to be careful, they are relocating them. Someone placed a couple of questionable calls to the foster home, disconnecting before the calls could be traced. As you could expect, the foster parents freaked. I don't blame them."

"How old?" Tony asked, studying the innocent faces more closely.

"Eighteen months and seven years, and the locals pinned down a paternal grandmother who will eventually get to keep them."

"Sometimes this job…" Fornell began.

"Drags you down, but then you remember that somebody needs you," Forbes finished.

Tony shrugged his shoulders in question, "What do these five children and I have in common? I haven't come across this cartel in any of my cases."

The men exchanged knowing glances, and Tony felt his spidey sense activate. He sat up taller and focused, certain that he needed all of his wits about him.

"Remember Athens?" the Captain prodded.

He nodded.

"The Navy School calls Athens home. A military presence already permeates the community, and the campus there functions as part of the city and pretty much as another campus, like the University." Forbes rooted around in his briefcase and produced a colored map. He handed it to Tony, pointing out the location of the Navy school.

"This op combines local forces, the FBI, NCIS, and the DEA. We shared the background already, but to reiterate, we have laid the groundwork already and started crippling the cartel. The different enforcement agencies worked solo for a while, then combined and created a timeline to the final countdown. So far we are winning, we've hit the deadlines running, but the ultimate prize, of course, is taking down the kingpin. We can make it happen in the next six months, Tony."