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Chapter 17 - Program Problems

End of September

A week later, Nadine found a message from the school on her phone. As Tamara had mentioned would happen, the return of the unsigned forms resulted in a call from the school; it was a request to come to the school to discuss their refusal. Wilson and Nadine went early on Tuesday morning and Tamara accompanied them. They were directed to see Mr Kovacs. When they entered his office, Nadine saw Tamara staggering slightly and noticed that her face had turned pale.

“One moment,” Nadine said as she took Tamara back out to the hall.

“What’s wrong?” Nadine asked. “It’s him, right? I got the creeps when I walked in there, myself.”

“Manman, he’s part of what Erzulie Mansur warned me about. He’s evil, like the one who came to our house, but evil in a different way. Oh, he doesn’t belong here either, just like the other evil one. He must be here illegally. One of his tastes feels like fear of being caught.”

Then Wilson came back out to see what was wrong.

Nadine asked her, “Can you ‘push’ him?”

“I’ll try. I need some kind of rapport to connect and he’s... ugh. Rancid. I could destroy him like I did the other, but...”

“No, we don’t want that. See what you can do,” Nadine told her.

Tamara nodded. “Good. I still feel bad about Mr Evil, even though he deserved it.”

She set her shoulders and followed her parents back into the office.

“Sorry for that. I wanted to tell my daughter something,” Nadine told Kovacs.

“I hope it was not to interrupt her elders,” Kovacs snarled.

Jeez, this is a nasty one, Wilson thought. Aloud, he said, “Okay, we can start. I’ll introduce us all. Again, we’re the Alexandres. I already told you my name, it’s Wilson. My wife is Nadine and the daughter is Tamara. We returned some forms unsigned.”

Tamara focused on Kovacs and shuddered when she locked her eyes with his.

Kovacs winced for a second, but then replied, “Yes. You must sign, it is absolute a requirement. Parents must acknowledge the participation of their children.”

“Correction. No, we don’t have to sign and you have no authority or enforcement powers over parents. My wife and I don’t consent to her participation. Also, according to her doctor’s orders, Tamara must not be given any birth-control hormones; they are dangerous to her health.”

“Not acceptable. We do not recognize state authority or medical authority other than those who are Program officials. If you do not sign, then we will choose your daughter among the first participants and of her we will make an example of what... urk.”

Wilson was on his feet in an instant and quickly had the man in a judo choke hold before he could utter another syllable.

“You will not threaten my daughter like that now, or ever again. Raise your hand to say that you agree that you will not ever threaten her.”

While Wilson had been talking to Kovacs, Tamara had been busy ‘pushing’ Kovacs, trying to find the color-tastes which would make him more amenable to her suggestion. What she had accomplished, instead, was to strip away his outward veneer and any politeness, so that when he spoke to Wilson, he said just exactly what was on his mind; thus he revealed his intention to make an example of her.

Meanwhile, Kovacs had been trying to struggle but when he moved, Wilson increased his choking pressure.

“Mr Kovacs, if you keep it up, you’ll regret it,” Wilson warned him. “I insist that you agree to my demand. You will not threaten her or make an example of het.”

“Dad, wait. Let me tell you this...” She moved to him and whispered, “He’s definitely evil. I told Manman that somehow, it’s even worse than Mr Evil. Let me work on him some more...”

A few seconds later, Tamara found the key taste to “push.” A yellow-brown taste with black-tinted edges, and when she “pushed” it, Kovacs’ muscles went slack and he slumped. Wilson was caught by the fringe and he let go of the man, who fell to the floor, as Wilson stumbled away.

“Holy shit, Tamara! That hurt! My muscles felt weak suddenly, too.”

“Sorry, Daddy... It’s hard to aim this stuff. Quick, ask him what he’s doing here. I already told Manman he doesn’t belong.”

“Like um... Leger?”

“Yeah. But worse than him. Ask him who sent him.”

Nadine and Wilson hauled Kovacs up onto a chair. He was pale and his breathing was shallow. Then Nadine said, “One second,” and quickly grabbed her phone and turned on the voice recorder.

“Who sent you?” Wilson asked, after Nadine nodded to him.

“A kartellem. Itt kellene átvennem az irányítást,” Kovacs, still dazed, responded weakly.

Wilson glanced at Nadine who covertly displayed her phone and mouthed “Okay” to him.

He nodded at her, “All right. But what language is that?” he wondered aloud. “What now?”

Tamara answered, “Papa Legba says he’s Hungarian and said, ‘My cartel. I'm supposed to take over here.’”

Wilson nodded. He’d need to find out later how Tamara did that. “What cartel is that?” he asked Kovacs.

Kovacs’ face began to turn bright red and he began gasping for breath.

“Daddy! I think he has something wrong inside him! He’s panicking! Maybe ask him who hired him!”

“Kovacs! Who hired you? Are there others?”

“Társadalomismereti Iroda. Az egész csoportom itt van a kartellért.”

Wilson looked at Tamara, who frowned, answering, “He said, ‘Office of Social Awareness. My whole group is here for the cartel.’”

“What were you sent here to do?”

Apparently, that caused another panic attack because, as Kovacs began saying in a rasping voice, “A szívem... nem kap levegőt... Megijesztjük a gyerekeket és...” he grabbed his chest, gurgled, and keeled over.

Wilson checked him for a pulse in his neck and found none. He picked up the office phone and dialed 911.

“This is 911. What is your emergency?”

“I’m at Edison High talking to an official here and I think he had a heart attack.”

Wilson answered a few questions and was asked to stand by.

Nadia asked Tamara, “What was that last thing?”

She answered haltingly, “He said, ‘My heart... can't breathe... We frighten the kids and...’ Then he died. I could feel his spirit go, Manman,” she sobbed, holding onto Nadine. “I was still a little connected to him. I feel so dirty...”

Wilson shook his head angrily. “...frighten the kids,” he mused. “He’s the Program official here, and a Hungarian. He was sent here by some kind of cartel; a group of them was hired by the feds. He said he’d make Tamara’s life difficult. Something’s really wrong with our government to let this crap happen!”

Within several minutes, the school security officer ran in and ten minutes later, two EMTs arrived. Then the Miami police. The Alexandres were questioned for an hour before they were allowed to return home.

“Wilson, I’m impressed at how quickly you moved in there,” Nadine told him as they left the school.

He chuckled ruefully. “My patron. Now I know the feeling when Ogorin is with me—like a hand resting on my back. I actually felt a push! But, Tamara—hell, sweetie, what you did was scary!”

She nodded. “To me too, Daddy. But like Ogorin was with you, I could feel Erzulie Mansur helping me—other lwa were with her there too and Papa Legba translated. Now I have the feeling that the great danger is still there but that it’s more distant.”

Wilson was troubled, but in awe of Tamara—what power she had! And that she could hear Papa Legba, whom he recalled knew all human languages, and that Legba could help her translate Hungarian, of all languages. And the powers of other lwa were hers too. But if the mundane world—not the spiritual world—was involved in “frightening the kids,” and foreigners were involved too, he knew just who to call.

“Secretary Masters’ office,” the voice said. “This is Shirley Harper, his deputy assistant.”

“This is Wilson Alexandre; I’m a... well, I guess a ‘protectee’ of the State Department. I learned something disturbing about possible aliens being hired by the government.”

“I’ll see if he’s availab... yes, he’s off his line now. Let me connect you.”

“Hello, Wilson?” Masters said a few seconds later. “Shirley said this was a hot call.”

“It is,” Wilson told him.

He went on to explain what had happened, leaving out Tamara’s part and making it seem like Nadine had gotten Kovacs to speak.

“So I have a recording of what the guy said and it looks like there’s something really wrong with that Naked in School office in D.C.”

“Huh,” Masters replied. “This isn’t the first report like that circulating around here. A few days ago, the president ordered a major investigation within the executive branch of the government. It’s gotten into the news reports today, so it’s not a secret. The Department of Education and the Justice Department are both involved; agents from the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service are all over the State Department now demanding passport data and visa apps and other records. Your report just now fits into some of the questions they’re asking.”

“Good,” Wilson commented. “The guy’s name was Laslo Kovacs and he died—the medics said it was sudden cardiac death. He had a medical alert bracelet that said, um...” Wilson looked at his notes. “...tak-o-tsubo cardio-myopathy.” He said slowly and then spelled it out. “The medic explained that’s a weakening of the heart’s pumping ability that can be caused by a surge of adrenaline from severe emotional or physical stress. The Miami police have the details of what happened, so since you said that the FBI’s involved already, they’d probably want this Miami info to help connect the dots. The recording of what he said is in Hungarian. I didn’t give it to the police because... well, it might have warned any possible accomplices of his here. I guess my Haitian reluctance to trust cops is showing. I’ll email it to you and you can do whatever with it.”

“Thanks, Wilson. Once again, another service to our country.”

Wilson copied the recording, cutting out Tamara’s voice when she spoke, and sent the edited copy off to Masters.

“What do we do now?” Wilson asked, turning toward Nadine and Tamara.

They decided to wait several days before calling the school office again. Nadine wanted to make sure that Tamara wouldn’t be forced to take the hormone shot, but then, she thought ruefully, that no one could force Tamara to do anything that she didn’t want to do—providing she were conscious, that is.

Early October

About a week later, there was a buzz among the students in Edison High about the anti-Program website—that the feds were about to get it shut down. Tamara heard more about that news in the week-ending school assembly.

After a few announcements about the evening’s and weekend’s sports teams’ games, Principal Barello brought up the current situation about the forthcoming Program.

“You’ve heard of our unfortunate loss of the Program coordinator,” she paused for a few hisses, “so I’d like to tell you where the planning now stands. We are supposed to be assigned another person as coordinator but we haven’t heard anything yet. Many parents have refused to sign the Program forms that we sent home, so the district officials are looking into how to proceed. Apparently many parents at other schools have refused too—so we’re not alone.

“I’ve heard from a lot of parents who have asked about exemptions for their children, giving reasons ranging from religious to medical. This matter will need to wait until our new Program coordinator arrives.

“Copies of the Naked in School Program rules will be available just before our winter break. That will give you the chance to read them and become familiar with them before you return to school in January.

“Finally, we have received a request from the Office of Social Awareness, the federal agency which runs the Naked in School Program, to read a statement, so here goes. ‘We at the OSA have become aware of an illegal pirate website which is providing inaccurate, false, misleading, and sensational information about the Program’s operation in schools around the country. We want to warn all high school students that if you post any information on that site, or even access it, you are committing a federal crime. Our office will have that site shut down before this coming Monday; we will identify, arrest, and prosecute all students who have contributed to it or visited it.’ That is the text that they wanted to have us read to all students.

“That’s all we have for you today. Come out to support our teams! Go, Red Raiders!”

When Tamara’s parents got home that afternoon, she learned that they had also heard about the federal plan to shut down the anti-Program site.

“How can they do that?” Tamara wondered. “Also, how can they punish anyone from going to a website? Or posting on it? In my Civics class, we learned that the First Amendment protects speech; writing and reading what others write are protected too.”

“I think it’s just posturing, honey,” Wilson said. “Maybe they’re trying to scare the site operators into doing something that the feds can detect so they can find where that server is located. Did you hear anything else about the Program?”

“Nothing important. There’s no one to replace Kovacs yet. I wonder what he was up to?” Tamara mused.

It wouldn’t be long before everyone learned the answer to that question.

One week later

The answer came early the following week. Tamara was in class when the room’s P.A. system activated.

“Your attention, please. We have been given a message from the school district that an important announcement is to be made in ten minutes in a news conference from the office of the U.S. attorney general. The news conference concerns the Naked in School Program. Because of the importance of the announcement, we’ve decided to interrupt your classes; this way students will be able to discuss it without the disruption extending for the rest of the day. Thank you.”

There was a flurry of comments from kids wondering what this was all about.

“Okay, students,” Ms Lowell, the teacher, interrupted, “let’s get back to work. We have just ten minutes before we lose the rest of the period.”

And as promised, the P.A. system crackled to life about ten minutes later. The announcer was already doing an introduction.

“... Department in Washington for a statement from the attorney general about this major news development. Here’s Attorney General Minners.”

“Good afternoon, fellow American citizens. I’m here to report to you on an incredible event, a major success in fighting crime and identifying and ending a major breach of our country’s security committed by criminals operating within the halls of our government itself.

“Every listener is certainly aware of the national Naked in School Program that is in operation in most high schools in the country. The Department of Justice recently became aware of the operation of an international criminal organization, members of which had managed to infiltrate the offices of the Program administration and changed the Program’s operation, not significantly, but enough to achieve their nefarious goals.

“Federal law enforcement officials recently managed to penetrate the computer system that the organization was using to coordinate its activities and learned the details of its operations and were able to identify the people responsible, from its leaders to the people who carried out the criminal ring’s plans.

“Early this morning, in a series of simultaneous, coordinated raids, the U.S. Marshals Service, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies raided nine locations around the country and rescued 47 teenaged children who had been kidnapped during the past seventeen months. These children had all been participants in their school’s Naked in School Program and had disappeared either during their Program participation week or on the day prior to beginning their participation. Records seized by the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI indicate that the criminals belonged to an international sex-trafficking cartel which was known to be involved in kidnapping children to be sold to the sex trade.

“Law enforcement officials have recovered all of the children who had been reported missing, they are now safe and have been placed in hospitals where their health is being evaluated. Many appear to have been mistreated and some are malnourished, but none have life-threatening injuries or conditions. An operation like this is unique in our nation’s history of fighting crime, but also unique was the failure of the government in preventing a situation like this from occurring in the first place and safeguarding agencies from being compromised by insiders.

“All of the individuals connected with this crime have been identified and most have been taken into custody. There are sixteen additional individuals whose whereabouts are unknown; most of them are apparently not U.S. citizens and border control officials have increased surveillance.

“Within the government Program agency, a number of employees have been arrested and are being held for indictment for lesser crimes than kidnapping. These people were not part of the criminal ring and had no knowledge of the kidnapping plan, but they had improperly implemented procedures that violated the law that authorized the Program.

“We will provide further information about the rescued children and their condition as soon as we have details, but I want to remind you that they are all minors and their identities must be protected. Thank you. I can take a few questions. Over there ...”

While the attorney general was speaking, there were many hushed exclamations among the class members as well as a few outbursts of “oh, shit.” But the class was mostly quiet, listening in total shock. When the audio ended, however, chaos broke out; the room exploded in noise with everyone shouting questions at each other while the teacher was attempting to restore order, with no success. After a minute, she sat down at her desk in defeat and watched the kids. She let them blow off some energy for another two minutes, then stood, and with her pointer, brought it down on the desk.

CRACK!

Silence.

“Seats, everyone, please.”

Everyone sat.

“All right, I think we all need to decompress after hearing that unbelievable news. So anyone who wants to speak about his or her thoughts, let’s do that. Raise your hand; one at a time; be orderly now. Jamie,” she pointed to a raised hand.

“Does this mean that the Program won’t happen now?” she asked.

Lowell shrugged. “Truthfully, I have no idea, but it sounds to me that the national office is being gutted. But Congress would still need to repeal the act. Andrew,” she called.

“Do you think that, um, that Kovacs guy was part of it? He had like an eastern Europe accent.”

“Again, I can’t answer that. I know as much as you all do. Sally? Your hand was up?”

“Um, what about the other schools in Miami? Were any kids kidnapped here?”

Lowell shook her head. “I’m sure there weren’t. The Program has only run in the other schools for, ah, a couple of weeks. At least there are no missing children reported by the district. No more questions? Can we get back to where we were? Good. We were on page 9 of your handout. Read number 7 and let’s discuss that issue now. Raise your hand to participate.”

~~~~

“When I got off work today, I found I had a voice message from Evan Masters at the State Department,” Wilson told Nadine when he got home.

Nadine smiled at him. “You didn’t hear the news, news, then.”

“Okay? No. I had my head buried in a Peterbilt truck tranny all day. Good news?”

“You could say that—good and bad. Let’s not play which comes first, because it’s both at the same time.”

Wilson shook his head to clear it. “Gotta be the government, then. They’re bad news all the time but sometimes, rarely, something good happens. Must be what Evan’s call was about.”

Nadine grinned. “You guessed right. Government news. Ogorin’s gift of prophesy is working, see? This is Tamara’s story to tell, then. She’s doing her home... ah. Here she is.”

Tamara ran to Wilson and hugged him. “I heard what Manman was saying. The good news is that the terrible threat that the lwa were warning about is almost gone and the children will be safe now. But that threat was in the Washington government—that ‘cartel’ that Kovacs told us he was part of was a sex-trafficking gang. They had managed to take over the national Program office and were using the Program somehow to kidnap kids. Oh, look. It’s almost six o’clock. The story will be on the news.”

The family listened to the replay of the news conference and when it was over, Wilson’s face was livid.

“That filth came here. He threatened my daughter...”

“Relax, Daddy,” Tamara soothed him, sitting in his lap. “It’s over. I wonder if the stuff Manman recorded helped catch them?”

“Oh! I forgot. Voice mail from Evan; said I could call him on his cell at home if I didn’t get the message till after 5.”

He made the call and actually connected with Masters. He had expected the he’d need to leave a message.

“Hi there, Wilson,” Masters said. “I figured that I owed you this call-back after getting the information you sent to me. I’m sure you heard today’s news.”

“I did. But it raised all kinds of questions, mostly along the lines of ‘how was that possible?’”

“Here in D.C. too, heads rolled, are rolling now, and will be rolling into the future. The shakeup—well, it’s massive. I’ll give you the official rundown, but it’s mostly confidential; that is, not to be shared with any media.

“The director of the Office of Social Awareness was caught in a blackmail scheme by this sex-trafficking cartel when he solicited under-age sex in Europe. The cartel forced him to place members of the cartel in several vital positions in the OSA and in quite a few local schools in medium-sized communities. They avoided small communities because members knew each other too well and children’s disappearances would be difficult to mask; large communities have well funded police forces with good resources like data collection and kidnapping patterns would be quickly seen. Your Mr Kovacs was one of the cartel group, but his assignment was changed to Miami right about when Florida came on line.”

“But Miami is huge! How could that fit their model?” Wilson objected.

Masters laughed. “Kovacs was to go to Miami, Ohio, not Florida. Something in his orders got jumbled because the big news in the OSA was that Florida school postings would be becoming available and the OSA was scrambling to fix the problem with Kovacs’ assignment when the takedown began.”

“Ah. That’s actually funny. But with officials in school offices, how did they do kidnapping... oh... they scare the kids. I’m afraid I see the pattern,” Wilson said thoughtfully.

“Yep, I think you did. The job of the Program coordinators was to make participating in it so odious and frightening to the kids that many would attempt to somehow avoid participating, or fight being forcibly stripped, or tell peers that they’d run away rather than go to school. That gave the operating cartel members the chance to abduct the kids, either by using their ‘enforcers’ to take the kid into ‘protective custody’ from which they would ‘escape’ or making it look like the kids went into hiding somewhere and avoid suggestions of a kidnapping.”

“What an evil plan,” Wilson remarked. “So if my info from Kovacs was just one of the corroborating elements, how were they found out?”

Masters laughed. “A teen in North Carolina somewhere; I haven’t got any details about that yet. Seems there are plenty of genius teens around, in addition to Tamara. He was hard to pin down, too. Wilson, did you teach this kid your disappearing tricks? That kid’s been running a number of federal agencies into the ground during the last month, trying to keep up with him, and whenever they thought he was done stirring things up, another jolt came from a different direction. Even the president got into it. It began when that kid got a lawyer to start a background check on the Program coordinator at his school. That got Justice interested so the FBI started looking at what the kid was doing. They learned that, as a result of the background check the kid had gotten started, his lawyer put a private investigator firm on the job and they traced emails back to Europe. Following that trail, they infiltrated the computers of a sex-trafficking cartel in Europe and were able to link the European information to operations in the U.S.A. but that’s when the trail stopped and they couldn’t get any further concrete details. The lawyer turned all that info over to the FBI.

“Then, when federal Program enforcers were sent to that teen’s school to detain him for not following Program rules, he physically disabled them. But get this, somehow he had also arranged for U.S. Marshals Service agents to be his backup. How he did that had lots of folks here scratching their heads. When the FBI questioned those disabled Program enforcers, they found that they had fabricated identities. Then the president began asking questions because one of his ambassadors told him that he had heard from a trusted source that there were all kinds of irregularities with the Program Office—so the president got the Secret Service involved too. He apparently had stopped trusting agents in some departments when he learned about all of the fabricated identities in one of his agencies.

“And again, a week later, teacher in that kid’s school got arrested for assault and battery against a student. The school’s Program coordinator was involved somehow and was arrested as a material witness. The FBI was brought into that case because the cops found that man also had a fabricated identity and could be linked to the others with fabricated identities. Finally, the teen’s attorney sent some written evidence that the teen had assembled from an anti-Program website to the Justice Department—and that evidence linked all of the information, data that the various agencies had been amassing about irregularities in the OSA, to a series of teen kidnappings. All of that activity had clearly originated from this teen in North Carolina. By that point, every federal agent in D.C., from three agencies, knew about who was responsible. They only had to figure out exactly who it was.”

“That’s some story,” Wilson said. “So what’s the situation with the Program office?”

“The president ordered it abolished. The few people in it who weren’t arrested were reassigned and the Department of Education is assuming control of the remains, but I know that the secretary of Education was a fierce opponent of the Program, so I suspect he’ll deep-six it now. The setting of education curricula is a state matter anyway, so what happens now is up to the states.”

“How did all of those people get into the U.S.? There must be a hundred or so.”

“They only found the tip of the iceberg so far. Almost all of them came here on tourist visas and then were provided with false identity documents. We’ve pulled all passport control records for the past four years and are cross-checking everyone with a European, Russian, or former Soviet Union country passport for their entry and exit status. And doing much more, which is all secret. The FBI caught a lot of them, though.”

“Well, that’s good. Hey, many thanks for the update.”

“Glad I could fill you in, So, next time you get to D.C., give me a buzz and we’ll get together and get caught up.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks again; bye.”

Wilson looked at the women. “You heard the scoop. That story is just crazy. Tamara, you...”

“... can’t breathe a word of that to anyone. Yes, Dad, I know.”

“Right. So. Maybe the schools here will just drop the Program?” Wilson wondered aloud.

Nadine shook her head. “Very doubtful. Look at all the work the Florida senators and house did to change the SiF Act. You think they’d just say ‘water under the bridge’? I think that they may believe that if they get kids naked any way they can, more kids would sign up for the SiF thing. Don’t accuse any lawmaker of being logical, honey.”

~~~~

The next day in school, the kids were in an uproar, demanding that the plans for the Program be terminated. Hurried calls to the district office and district calls to the state and state calls to Washington all resulted in responses of “we have no idea,” and “it’s too early to decide” and “let the (president) (governor) (legislature) (education department) (school board president)/(pick one or more of those) decide.”

Finally, like any unresolved issue, the question went to the lawyers. And, like any unresolved issue sent to lawyers, it was resolved by not being resolved: the status quo is always the safe course, they decided. The decision was a non-decision. Do nothing. The Program would go on—but under state jurisdiction. Each school would provide the personnel to run it in their school.

Every school district in the state scrambled to decide who on the school staff would get the job. The choices were people throughout the staff of every school—except the custodian. Custodian unions were troubled by this slight.

With 128 senior high schools in the Miami-Dade system, the school district had a financial problem—providing 128 additional full-time senior staff positions. The Program coordinator job duties couldn’t be simply added to the job of an assistant principal or counselor, because they already had full-time duties. There were insufficient funds in the district to pay the salary and benefit costs for 128 additional positions, which by state law, as state school employees with supervisory student contact, had to be accredited teachers. So the decision was to treat the Program like an interschool sport and pay a teacher a sport supplement to act as the Program coordinator. Officials realized that many of the coordinator functions would have to be dropped, such as monitoring classrooms to ensure curriculum goals were met and policing the halls for student adherence to reasonable request rules. The record-keeping duties would need to be minimized as well. School-district officials thought this would be a good compromise.

Of course virtually none of the teachers in any of the high schools were interested in the position. What usually happened was that the most junior teacher in each school wound up with the job. This was almost always the teacher with the least experience. So it was at Miami Edison.

Watch out, folks; Tamara’s coming—and she’s angry now.

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