The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  “And that person in the lab coat is a nobody. The Sensaa who was working that rooftop is one of the best ones the council has gotten for us and he was sure that not one of them were a Seraphim. So there’s no way it was anyone we’re searching for in connection to Detective Lane’s death.” Doherty watches Susan as she looks a couple of the photos over again. She hands them back to him. He takes them, setting the stack down to the left of where they’d been on his desk. He sits back to open the top drawer in front of him taking out a pen identical to the pens he already has out.

  Susan scans the manila folders on his desk. “What else you got for me?” she says, all business.

  Ash absentmindedly looks at the wall behind Doherty’s desk as Doherty gives her more interviews from captured Rogues to review for potential leads. Ash sees her look at him before she turns to go. He stays silent looking at Doherty’s forty-eight years old college degree from Stanford University. The door shuts quietly behind her.

  “What’s really going on?” he asks Doherty once they’re alone expecting to hear about what was found in the upper levels of the tallest building in the complex.

  What detectives had found out about the large, multi-building complex since their initial encounter was that the complex took up an entire city block. Three of the structures were joined with the tallest being the sky scraper that nestled the helicopter pad on top. It took money and man power to get the surveillance equipment and proper authorization necessary to monitor all of it at one time.

  It had been determined that the first few floors of the main complex was used for normal businesses like a gym, small investment firm, and youth counseling center with general public access. All of which were average enough in appearance and function but the gym was managed by a Seraphim-only staff and that the investment firm handled the funds generated by the gym and youth center. The youth counseling center targeted troubled youth which Doherty had no doubt was a way to find and recruit Seraphim children whose parents were nonSeraphim.

  Housing for all of the Rogues working on these floors and their families were believed to be what made up the mid to higher levels but Doherty’s was going off of this premise based on the one floor Ash had gained access to while chasing the wanted Seraphim upstairs.

  The mid-level floor that detectives and SWAT gained entry to ended up being where Rogues had been housing the group of Seraphim who had been kidnapped on their way to a new hospital. With all of the Rogues taking off upstairs it became a mass scavenger hunt for the kidnapped Seraphim to find a way out. It slowed police and detectives down so much trying to locate all of the Seraphim on that level and get them safely downstairs that Ash and Lane had to continue canvassing upstairs with only a handful of SWAT with them.

  It was the upper levels where the labs were that they never gained access to, and still haven’t as far as Ash knows of.

  Doherty picks up his coffee mug. “What do you mean?” he asks, swirling the contents of the mug.

  “You’re fidgeting around like you do when you’re not wanting to talk about something.”

  “You sound like my ex-wife.”

  “Look, I get it. Susan’s in mourning. Keeping her in the dark as to why we haven’t stormed that place is understandable, but at least tell me what’s going on. I already know it’s not just Seraphim housing in there.”

  Doherty sets his coffee down to give Ash a long look. “Did you know that Kian Sipe is a Turkish ambassador?”

  “You aren’t creative enough to come up with something like that,” Ash tells him.

  He gives Ash a lazy smile. “He’s a silent ambassador at that. He was born in Turkey but raised in the states. He went back to Turkey for a time, only returning when his brother Kent Sipe was killed.”

  Ash tries to recall the Sipe family history. It was a short one, from what he remembers. “He’s the one that was on Aurora’s Council?”

  “The same.”

  “So Kent became a martyr in Aurora for being killed by the people his older brother, Kian was working for?”

  “If Kian was in the movement at the time, you would be correct,” Doherty says, pushing the mug over just a hair so that it covers the ring on the desk that he spent about two minutes trying to get out when he’d first moved into the office before saying to hell with it.

  “So we would need one of the Rogues in custody to call Kian out as the leader to get around his ambassadorship?”

  “Not only that, but we would require witnesses to him calling the shots—witnesses who were brave enough to testify.” Doherty drops his head. He purses his lips and begins shaking his head disapprovingly at the ground.

  “What is it?”

  “It would be hard even if we had that.” He looks up at Ash. “We would need a confession, his confession. I’ve spoken to officials in Turkey. They all hold Mr. Sipe in high regard. He denies testimonies, and their problems go away.”

  “We can still try to go after him with what we have. At the very least he might hand over the Rogues who ambushed us to get us off his back, or even the Rogues we have left on our wanted list from the raid.”

  “The Council won’t settle for bottom-feeders,” Doherty tells him.

  “Can’t the Council force an ambassador to stand trial, then?”

  Doherty frowns. “Even they have their limits.”

  Ash shakes his head in frustration. “So we have to catch Kian holding a smoking gun.”

  “Or we don’t stand a chance; yes, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Marvelous,” Ash says slowly, drawing out the word as Doherty stands and circles his desk.

  “What are these?” Doherty asks, eyeing the faxes still in Ash’s hand.

  “Oh, I had Susan look them over for me to see what she thought, but she let me know pretty quick that she isn’t going to help me with them with her tunnel vision of prosecuting Lane’s killer.” Ash keeps a hold on the faxes. He’ll have to ask to see them, Ash decides for him to show Doherty what he’s been working in correlation to they’re investigations.

  “Take it easy on her,” Doherty says gruffly. This is her first time to lose a colleague.” Doherty’s cell phone buzzes. He pulls it out of his pocket and glances at the screen. “One of our eyes in the city,” he tells Ash before holding the phone to his ear. “Doherty,” he announces in the no-nonsense tone he always has while on a call.

  Ash waits, unsure whether he should take the phone call as a dismissal. He flips through the faxes absentmindedly. “He walked out? Is he in custody?” Doherty asks. Ash sneaks a glance upwards. “No, you keep everyone watching those buildings. Especially the rooftops. It could be a ploy. But that doesn’t mean…” Doherty grimaces. “Yeah, I hear it. Call the pilot you mentioned. We need to know where that bird is headed. I want all of the pictures taken to be sent directly to me, every last one of them.”

  “Who walked out?” Ash asks when Doherty stuffs the phone back in his pocket. Doherty collects his wallet from off of his desk.

  “One of the men who ambushed you and Lane. He just turned himself in to one of our surveillance vans. They were loading him into a car when that damn helicopter showed back up.”

  “You’re thinking the guy was a decoy?”

  Doherty scratches his chin. “Or it was damn lucky timing on their part. Two of our men were called down from the surrounding rooftops—we only had one set of eyes on that helipad.”

  “And don’t tell me,” Ash says, already feeling what’s coming next. “The helicopter blocked his view?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.” Doherty walks to the door. “I’ll keep you updated on what I can,” he adds as he opens the door. “I’ll be at lockup waiting for our new inmate.”

  “Let me get this right,” Doherty smashes the cigarette he’s been holding into the ashtray sitting in the middle of the table. The interview room isn’t as warm as Doherty would like it but the hot cup of coffee the Rogue is sipping on between the drags on his cigarette will help. He wants this guy to sweat. H
e has to watch him with the cup though. Being seated across from a Dynamar, a Rogue at that, with only a tiny table between them there’s a chance that the coffee could end up in his face if he pisses the guy off enough. The last thirty-something Dyna Doherty had questioned was such a hothead from the very beginning that he never offered him coffee, just water. “You were told to save company assets, so you and the other Dynamar armed yourselves with semi-automatic rifles to storm through the complex you work at. That about right?”

  The man seated across the table confirms with a brisk nod. Doherty lets the nonverbal confirmation slide. “Is ‘company assets’ code for the police?”

  “Nah,” the man says dismissively. “We weren’t after the police.” He neither glares nor smirks at Doherty. All of the other Rogues he’s questioned seemed unable to do anything besides one or the other. This guy could just as easily be talking about the weather.

  Doherty grabs his pack of cigarettes from the table. He isn’t planning on lighting another one but if this guy wants another smoke Doherty wants him to have to ask for it.

  “The police weren’t a concern for our people,” he says as if talking to an idiot. Doherty’s grip on the cigarettes tightens. “We were dispatched to a secondary security breach that was going on upstairs.”

  “Who made the call to dispatch everyone?”

  “Can’t give you names,” he says. Doherty’s not surprised, most of them won’t confirm who they are much less other Seraphim in The Movement, but still, it was worth a shot. “But tell you what—I’ll tell you what I did, and then you can put me in jail, but that’s all you are going to get from me.”

  “You already confessed to shooting at my guys to the men you turned yourself into. What I want are the people who ordered you to attack my agents.” The man slouches back in his chair seeming to get more comfortable. Doherty looks down at the closed folder he hasn’t touched since he came in and slapped in on the table for the man to see. Doherty grabs the folder sitting back in his chair in a similar fashion as the Rogue. He holds it up as he opens it so that his suspect can’t see its contents.

  Calvin Sanchez is the name he gave detectives when he turned himself in. From what Doherty was told, Calvin strutted out of the complex, hands in the air, and walked straight up to the van detectives were sitting in snapping photos of everyone who came and went. He was confessing to ambushing the police and FBI as he was put in cuffs. The folder in Doherty’s hands is full of pages. Every suspect has a folder. Most Rogues’ folders are full of information about their families, schools they attended, and any criminal background. This folder however, is full of blank pages. They don’t have anything on Calvin Sanchez besides that he’s a high school graduate, his parents are retired living in Florida, and what he’s told them, less than one page of information. Doherty grabbed a stack of paper from the printer to put behind the lone sheet of Calvin’s life before walking into the interview room. Why is he turning himself in?

  Doherty decides to switch tactics. “Do you have family living in the complex?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You wouldn’t be turning yourself in unless there’s something else that would be worse than jail. Now, what would that be?” He looks at the first page in the folder. “Your parents are in Florida.” He looks back to Calvin. “Do they threaten to hurt your parents?”

  Calvin frowns, looking unimpressed. “I’m here because I decided to be here.”

  “There are ways we can make them think that you’re talking,” Doherty says. Calvin lowers his head to stare down at the table. “You have a family?” No answer. Doherty goes with it. “If I was you, I’d think real carefully about how to keep them safe. Because if I go on the news and talk about the leads you’ve given us…I don’t know how well that would go over for them.”

  Calvin rubs the end of his pinky over the edge of the table. “What are you proposing?”

  “You tell me everything, and I mean everything. You do that, and I will make sure that there is nothing that connects you to that intel.”

  Calvin’s head pops up, the left side of his mouth curling up in a tight smirk, but there’s no amusement in his eyes. “If I give anyone’s name, and I mean even one, they’d know.”

  “No names then,” Doherty agrees. “Tell me what you were trying to protect? Was it stuff from the lab?”

  The Rogue tilts his head back to look down his nose at Doherty. “What weren’t we protecting in that place?”

  Doherty takes pleasure in the tiredness that passes over his face. With everything that he knows about how Rogues treat their captives, Doherty is inclined to keep him from getting any decent rest for the next month.

  Calvin nods toward the pack of cigarettes that Doherty has sitting in front of him next to where the folder had been. Doherty doesn’t move. Calvin sits up and begins to reach across the table. Doherty shakes his head at him. “Give me something first.”

  Calvin withdraws his arm, sitting back in his chair again looking defeated. “The labs would have been locked down first before anything else,” he begins. Doherty makes a metal note that there was more than one lab in the complex. “You got to understand that assets mean a wide range of things to the people I work for. It isn’t even necessarily a what that we were trying to keep in the building. It could have been a who.”

  “So the asset was a who?” Calvin nods for the pack of cigarettes again. Doherty plops the folder down to pull one cigarette out of the pack. He holds it out for him. Calvin leans over swiping the cigarette out of his hand in one swoop. “Answer the question. Who was it?”

  Calvin sits back in his chair. “To be honest, I don’t know.”

  Doherty smirks when Calvin brings the cigarette up to his lips and then frowns noticing that the lighter is also no longer on the table. “What do you know?” Doherty asks as he takes the lighter out of his pocket. As gentlemanly as Doherty can muster, he sits up in his chair to lean across the table and light the end of the cigarette for him. That’s the only part that Doherty enjoys about smoking, that first drag. After that, he can always feel the hot stench creeping over him that coats everyone involved until toothpaste or a bath takes it away.

  “I’ll tell you a secret as long as you promise not to tell anyone,” Calvin says jokingly, knowing full well that the camera mounted in the top corner of the room is recording every word. “I think it was more than one asset that they were sending us after. But I don’t know much; I’m just the muscle.

  “How would you know if you had found an asset if you weren’t told who or what you were after?”

  “There is always an eye in the sky at that place. They watch us just like they were watching your people. One of the top floors had been compromised. That’s what we were told, and that’s where we were headed.” He takes a long drag, closing his eyes a little as he does. “But,” he says, blowing out the smoke in the direction of the ceiling, “someone upstairs started shutting down cameras. We were only allowed to go as far as they could watch us. We got to some offices in the back when your people walked right out in front of us.”

  “There was a group of Seraphim being shot at too. It wasn’t just my people. Did you not see them?”

  “Course I saw them. An order came in over our comms to halt any contact between your people and them.” He points the pointer and middle finger holding the cigarette as Doherty, “That’s why your people got hurt. They got too close to company assets.”

  “Okay, then one of those folks was the asset.”

  Calvin taps his cigarette on the ashtray and then balances it on the side of the ashtray. He then uses both hands to wipe his face. Doherty sees the dark circles developing under his eyes. “You give me your word that this doesn’t come back to haunt me.”

  “You are only looking at standing trial for your part in the death of my detective. If all you did was shoot at my detectives, then you don’t have much to worry about from the Council.” Doherty glances at the camera in the room
. Neither Ash nor Susan are watching, but if they were they’d be thinking the same thing. “You’re going to be the least of their concerns.”

  “Man, I’m not worried about any Council. I’m worried about me and mine.”

  Doherty’s done this dance before. It’s hard to flip someone when they know it might cost them their lives.

  “We have a lot of people in custody who know a whole hell of a lot more about the dicey stuff happening within your organization than you do. Let me ask you something. Have you heard anything about any of them spilling the beans?”

  Calvin looks at Doherty for a minute before saying cautiously, “Can’t say I’ve heard about any marks. I mean, I’m sure they know some of them are going to end up talking eventually, though.”

  “Anything you tell me won’t be shared,” Doherty points up at the camera monitoring them, “even this recording won’t get out.”

  “Right,” he says, looking up at the camera unimpressed. “I don’t know anything,” he says to the camera before turning back to Doherty. “And my girlfriend is as equally in the dark as me.”

  Doherty lifts Calvin’s folder up keeping it so Calvin can’t see the contents. On the bottom of the first page Doherty jots down the girlfriend aspect. “She lives at the complex too?”

  Calvin looks at the camera out the corner of his eye. “Nah, in the city. Her and her kid aren’t Seraphim, so they wouldn’t allow them to move in. But they know everything about her—her job, her kid’s school, their routine, everything.”

  Doherty flips to the blank, second page. “I could get her and her kid out of the city and somewhere safe.”

  The man looks Doherty over, unconvinced. “As safe as those sick people were when we took them off that bus?”