“Evren Kuroglu, you are under arrest for the purchase of stolen antiquities,” she said, holding up her FBI badge.
Kuroglu glared at me with a look of pure evil on her face, then spun on her right heel, the skirt of her beige dress flaring. She took off into the dark of the storage building, her heels clicking on the concrete as she headed into the light that came in from where an open bay faced onto the glittering water of the canal behind the warehouse.
Her bodyguard stepped up to block the two SWAT guys, and I exploited that moment to feint left, then dart to the right around him. Instead of heading directly for the water, Kuroglu turned right, then left along an aisle along one side of the warehouse. I took off after her. I was glad that I’d memorized the layout of the building before getting there.
Around me, I noticed the man and woman who’d been drinking wine jump off their boat and head toward me. The two guys polishing brass did the same thing, but because of the layout of the building, with slim catwalks between boat slips, I was the only one close enough to her to follow.
Kuroglu was surprisingly agile for an older woman in heels. She ran down that aisle between boxes of engine parts, knocking them into my path, and I had to jump around them. She reached the transom of the yacht as I was dodging the last obstacle, an open box full of aluminum hoses curled around like the shells of a snail.
The deckhand, another guy in a T-shirt and jeans, helped her on board, remaining on the dock to cast off the stern and bow lines. Too bad one of the other agents hadn’t been positioned back there.
I sped up, determined to catch her. I couldn’t let her get away with the stolen brothel tokens. If that boat left the warehouse, she wouldn’t pay for her crimes, and we’d have no evidence to stop the immigrant smuggling out of Turkey.
I reached the end of the walkway as the boat began pulling out into the channel. I didn’t have a choice.
I jumped.
31 – Right in the Middle
Evren Kuroglu turned around as I landed on the stern. I held my arms out and struggled to gain my balance as the boat rocked beneath me. The sun blasted us from directly overhead, glinting against a metal railing to the right, and a trickle of sweat made a trail down my right cheek.
Surprise was written on Kuroglu’s face, but she reacted almost immediately. She cleared the few feet between us in a moment, her hands out to push me overboard.
I ducked below her approach and moved around her, so that I wasn’t so close to the gunwales. I pulled my badge out of my pocket and held it up. “FBI. You’re under arrest.”
She laughed, and kicked out toward my hand. I pulled it back quickly before she could send the badge flying. I shoved it back in my pocket as she took on a wrestler’s stance. The sweat had begun to drip down my sides. I doubted that anyone on shore was able to monitor my conversation by then, as we got farther from the warehouse and the dual engines thrummed beneath us.
The boat made a sharp right turn, heading east toward open water. Both Kuroglu and I took a moment to rebalance ourselves. I wondered if I would have the chance to pull out my gun.
The bulk of the warehouse was still to our right, a condo tower with a waterfront pool on the left. The engines revved as we gained the center of the channel. The shore on either side was lined with condos and boat storage facilities, with luxury yachts and sailboats docked along the seawall.
I didn’t know how many other people were on the boat. Kuroglu’s bodyguard had been detained by the SWAT officers, and the deckhand who’d tossed off the rope had remained on the finger pier. I assumed there had to be someone up at the controls. Who else was with us? Anyone I needed to worry about?
I took a quick look around, and Kuroglu seized that moment of inattention to launch herself at me. She raked my cheek with sharp fingernails and attempted to knee me in the balls. But I’d trained too much at Quantico, and then with Lester, to let her get that advantage. I pivoted, trying to grab her arm with one hand and reaching for the cuffs I had hidden deep in the front pocket of my cargo pants.
She slipped away from me, but I did manage to get my cuffs out. “I’m going to take you down,” I said. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way.”
“You are a foolish boy,” she said, in that gravel-laden voice of hers. “And if you are with that stupid Venable, probably a fairy, too.”
“And you are an evil witch,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of fairy tales they have in Turkey, but in the ones I grew up with the witch always loses.”
She kept edging around, trying to get my back to the water, but I wouldn’t let her. Every time I moved in close she feinted back. The deck was coated with some kind of non-slip material, so the salt water that sprayed as the boat raced forward didn’t bother us.
Over Kuroglu’s shoulder, I saw that an island blocked our forward path. Unless the captain turned into a north-south channel ahead of us, we were going to ram right into it.
While I kept edging around Kuroglu, feinting and blocking, I tried to remember the aerial maps I’d looked at before I met Venable at the boat storage facility. If my memory was correct, a left turn would take us into the Intracoastal Waterway heading north. It would be a long time before we could hit open water that way.
A right turn, though, would funnel us toward the port. We could go under the 17th Street Causeway and into the cruise ship basin. Then the captain could gun the engine and we’d quickly be in the ocean, and then not too much later out in international waters.
I’d just been in a bunch of different boats in Venice, so I had the idea that the captain would have to slow down to make his turn. Struggling to remember my high school physics about the vectors of an object in motion, I thought that if I positioned myself correctly, I could use the turn to launch myself at Kuroglu, hopefully catching her off guard.
In the distance I heard the siren of a police boat. Had Miriam called in the Coast Guard or the harbor police? I hoped so, but I couldn’t count on that.
The captain blasted his horn and we approached the turn. As I felt the boat skew toward the right, I launched myself at Kuroglu and knocked her down. I was on top of her, struggling to cuff her, as she kicked and clawed at me.
I took a deep breath and grabbed her side, flipping her onto her stomach. Then, as I’d been taught at the academy, I quickly slipped a cuff on her right wrist. She wiggled and screamed but I used my weight to force her down and drag her left arm up.
I was drenched in sweat by the time I snapped the left cuff on. At least I didn’t have to worry about the wires of the recorder any more. I slid off her as I felt the boat begin to slow down. When I looked up I saw a small boat approaching us with sirens blaring. A police officer at the controls used a megaphone to direct the captain to cut the engines and prepared to be boarded.
I left Kuroglu on the wet wood, screaming epithets in Turkish, and walked to the stern, where I pulled out my badge and identified myself to the officer on the launch. I was surprised to see the boat read Hollywood Police on the side; we were in Lauderdale, weren’t we? But perhaps the port itself was within the Hollywood city limits.
Another police boat pulled up with Miriam and one of the two SWAT agents, Mark Hawkins, as I was explaining the situation to the police officer. Hawkins looked like he’d stepped out of one of the Terminator movies, weighted down with gear, including an assault rifle over his shoulder, while Miriam could have been featured on the cover of Vogue, in her dark green suit.
I held out my hand to Miriam and she stepped on board, one sandal-clad foot after the other. I loved the way she was able to maintain her nonchalance all through an operation.
“You can run, but we’ll catch you eventually,” she said, as she knelt beside Kuroglu. “Once again, Evren Kuroglu, you are under arrest for the purchase of stolen antiquities.”
Kuroglu kept her face to the deck, ignoring us, though that was hard as I grabbed her cuffed hands and tugged. Agent Hawkins and I combined forces to bring her up to her knees.
&nbs
p; I turned to Miriam. “I know there’s a captain up there but there could be someone else on board.”
“You didn’t search the boat already?”
I nodded toward Kuroglu. “I had my hands full.”
Miriam laughed. “I guess you did. Mark, you want to handle that? Angus, you back him up.”
I followed Agent Hawkins up a set of narrow steps to the helm, where the captain, a slim guy in his forties with slicked-back blond hair, waited for us with his hands up. “Anyone else on the boat?” I asked.
He shook his head.
Hawkins leaned forward and pointed at a long finger pier jutting off the island to our left. “Why don’t you bring us over to that pier for now,” Hawkins said. “Agent Green, you wait here until we’re docked. I’ll check out the rest of the boat.”
“You might want to tell Agent Washington what we’re doing,” I said, as Hawkins went back down the stairs.
“Already on my to-do list,” he called back over his shoulder, and I felt foolish, telling a more experienced agent what to do.
“Am I under arrest?” the captain asked, as we moved toward the dock.
“I’m not the agent in charge, so I can’t say,” I said. Partly because it was the truth, and partly because I didn’t know. Was he an accomplice of some kind? Miriam would have to interrogate him to find out.
I watched as the captain idled the boat gently forward. Looking out the back window I saw that the police boat was following us, its lights flashing. When we got to the dock, Hawkins threw a rope over to the deckhand, and we tied up. The captain turned off the engine, and I followed him down to the stern.
I watched as Agent Hawkins forced Kuroglu to step off the yacht and onto the dock. Miriam said, “I’m going to stay behind until we can get a qualified pilot to bring this boat back to shore. You and Agent Hawkins take Kuroglu to Miramar and give her the chance to call her attorney.”
Agent Hawkins and I led Kuroglu down the dock to the police boat, and the officer at the helm drove us back to the yacht storage facility. I stood at the stern as the stiff breeze wicked away a lot of my sweat, though my hair was plastered down on my head like a bad fright wig.
Agent Hernandez was dressed like Hawkins, both of them built for power, not speed, and he looked like a distant cousin of a couple of WWE fighters I’d seen. “Fancy footwork hopping on that moving boat,” he said, as he shook my hand. “Better you than me. I’d have ended up in the drink for sure.”
And made a huge splash, I thought, but didn’t say. They took Kuroglu with them in their Bureau SUV, and I hurried back down the long alley to the parking lot where I’d left my car, sticking to the shady side of the street. I hoped I hadn’t spent enough time out in the sun to burn—it would be embarrassing to show up at work the next day with my face as red as my hair.
In the car I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled out the wires, and whenever I was stopped at a light I leaned forward and let the air conditioning blast my chest. I caught up to the Bureau SUV on I-595 and then followed them back to Miramar.
While Hawkins and Hernandez handled Kuroglu, I returned to my office and began filling out an FD-302 based on everything that had happened that day. It was long and tedious, and all I wanted was to get out of there, take a shower and have a beer to release all the tension of the day.
Close to five o’clock, Miriam called to ask how I was doing. “Revising and polishing,” I said. “I want to make sure I get everything right.”
“Put it aside and come back to it tomorrow morning,” she said. “That’s something I learned in my years in academia. You need a fresh set of eyes to review anything you write.”
Was she criticizing the writing I’d done so far? Or just being kind? Either way, I was glad to escape. I drove home, where I took that shower and drank that beer, a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat from a nearly-depleted six-pack in the refrigerator. As I felt the gold brew wash down my throat, I thought about what had happened that day.
Once again, I’d acted without thinking, by jumping on Kuroglu’s yacht as it pulled out of the bay. Would Vito yell at me? Or commend me for following my instincts? If I had waited for one of the other agents to reach me, the moment would have been lost, and we’d have been left standing there watching the yacht motor down the canal.
Had I put myself into a situation of excessive risk? Kuroglu could have knocked me into the canal. I could have drowned, or been caught by one of the yacht’s engines.
Stupid, stupid. How would Danny feel if something happened to me? Lester? I had people in my life who cared about me, and I owed it to them to learn from my mistakes and stop taking big risks.
But with big risks came big payoffs, too. If I hadn’t jumped on that boat, Kuroglu would have escaped, and our case would have dissolved. Now at least we had a chance to put an end to Kuroglu’s smuggling operation, and potentially save dozens or hundreds of lives.
In the end, that was what mattered. I was an instrument of the law, and of God’s purpose for me. I would have to trust in that.
I SPENT THURSDAY GOING over my paperwork, adding details, reorganizing material until I was sure it was perfect. Early in the afternoon I emailed the forms to Miriam, who called and asked me to come down to her office.
Vito was with her, and I slid into the visitor’s chair beside him. “ADA Lewin met with Evren Kuroglu and her attorney this morning and convinced her to give up information on the refugee operations in exchange for a lighter charge on the gold smuggling,” Miriam said.
“Isn’t that a bigger charge, though? The immigrant smuggling?”
“She insists she was just the financier, and she’s already given us the names of several Turkish nationals who handle the recruitment and the boats. We’ve sent that on to Interpol, who will liaise with the Turkish authorities.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Your job isn’t done yet, Angus,” Vito said. “I want you to get in touch with the museum with your pal at the Carabineri and make arrangements to return those brothel tokens to the museum in Sicily.”
“I can do that. I hope they’ll put in some enhanced security so this doesn’t happen again.”
“Not our concern, sadly,” he said.
My phone buzzed with a text message from Danny, that his plane had landed at Miami International Airport. I turned to Vito. “Would it be okay with you if I cut out a little early today?” I asked. “My brother’s at the airport in Miami and I’d like to get over there and pick him up.”
“I think you’ve earned a little comp time,” he said. “It’s probably too late to get in touch with Italy by now anyway.”
I thanked him and Miriam, and nearly forty-five minutes later, I pulled up in the pickup lane at the airport and popped the back hatch. I jumped out to hug Danny hello. “I’m so stoked to be here,” he said. “Not just to see you, but to get this internship at the museum. I can’t wait to get started there and—”
I interrupted him. “Let’s get your bags in the car and get out of here before I have to show my badge to someone and pretend I’m arresting you.”
As we negotiated our way to the airport exit, I let him talk about leaving Florence, his flight to Miami, and what he hoped to get out of the museum internship. When he’d finally run out of steam he said, “So, what’s new with you, bro? Did you get the painting back to the guy who sent you to Italy for it?”
“Eventually. It turns out that you were onto something when you pointed out the different wood on the back of the frame. Our buddy Remigio Grassini hollowed out that wood and stuck a bunch of gold coins in there.”
“Gold coins? How cool.”
“Even more cool than normal ones,” I said, and described the brothel tokens. “Stolen from a museum in Sicily.”
“And you carried them into the United States without even knowing they were there.”
“Yeah, my bad. I should have paid more attention to the way you pointed that out.”
“It’s still awesome. You solved a major smuggling
case. My brother the hot-shot Federal agent.” He reached over for a fist-bump. “You’re rock, Angus.”
I basked in my brother’s pride as we kept talking, about his last days in Florence, seeing the girls we’d met in Venice. It was funny that we’d fallen back into our childhood ease of talking with each other, despite the years and the distance that had separated us.
Lester joined us for dinner that night, and I invited Jonas, too, because I felt guilty that I’d been ignoring my friendship with him. And I wanted him to like Danny, too, because my brother was going to be camping on our sofa for the next month.
We went to a brewpub in Oakland Park, on the north side of Fort Lauderdale. They had twenty-one different beers on tap, from the Floridian Hefeweizen that smelled of bananas, citrus, and cloves, to a Piña Colada Ale aged in Jamaican rum barrels for months and then blended with pineapple and coconut.
My brother chose that one, in honor of his first day in Florida, and I went with the Devil’s Haircut, a red ale flavored with ginger and cherry because, well, red hair and all. Lester went for the High West Whiskey Barrel-aged Mint Julep because the description said that it mirrored the recipe of a Bourbon mash.
Jonas was the only wimp, asking the server if they had anything that wasn’t so weird. “I’d go with the Hop Gun India Pale Ale,” he said. “It’s one of our most popular, particularly with women who don’t want a strong beer.”
We ribbed Jonas after that, for ordering a girlie beer, and he laughed and let it roll off his shoulders. He’d changed a lot in the year that I’d lived with him—lost weight, gotten more confident, started dating. I hoped I’d had something to do with that, dragging him to the gym, bringing home healthy food, and focusing on his good points.
I was pleased to see that Lester and Danny hit it off immediately, although part of their bonding was because Lester demanded embarrassing stories about me as a kid, and Danny happily complied. We laughed, ate burgers and ordered a second round, and by the time we were done we were all mildly drunk, except for Lester, who held his liquor better than anyone I’d ever known.
Survival Is a Dying Art Page 21