The Presence of Evil

by J. T. Patten

Fuck it. This is how it ends.

  “Don’t shoot!” someone yelled. “He’s FBI.”

  “The fuck he is,” the detective responded back.

  As Drake jumped down the stairs, he could hear the detective trailing close behind. “There’s no way that guy’s FBI. I swear it’s the same guy who shot Daniels.”

  Drake quick-footed each step and thought he heard down below Halliday yelling FBI. What a shit show.

  * * * *

  The two old men sprawled out drunk in the apartment stairwell posed no threat. For that reason, they had no idea what a woman with the FBI would want with them. They were just having a small party, laughing about old times.

  “I told you, I don’t care. Did you see a girl come down here?”

  “Yeah, yeah. She ran out that way.” One of the men pointed.

  “No, she turned and went the other way,” the other protested with a gentle and friendly push.

  “Do you know her?”

  “I know she one of Oz’s candy kids is all.”

  “What are candy kids?” she asked.

  “They go off to all the places around the area and sell candy. Jus’ like I said.”

  “Underprivileged and underaged kids pulling a profit for adults.” The bitter reality of the sweets they sold and for whom sunk in.

  Drake jumped down the last steps to the main floor. There was a boiler room sign adjacent. Oswald must have also been the super in addition to his other money-making schemes. “CPD’s on my ass. Move!”

  In the light of a sole bulb above, Halliday hesitated.

  Drake assumed she was struggling with the decision to bring him in or not. He wasn’t privy to her orders of trying to infiltrate the task force by getting closer to Woolf.

  The footfalls grew closer.

  Halliday cast her eyes up then back down to Woolf. “Stay close to me.” She shouted up the stairs, “FBI, don’t shoot.”

  Chapter 70

  Sean Havens was still trying to stay back and out of the fray of EMTs responding, officers taping off the area, and onlookers trying to get a look or share their opinion about the unwanted police presence notwithstanding the belief that cops threw Oz from a window.

  CPD worked well with the FBI, but by all indications, this situation didn’t have anything to do with current collaborations or information-sharing of the Chicago field office, which raised some questions at first. But within a few minutes of Sean doing everything he could to confuse those asking him questions, he had a number of the top responding brass standing around him laughing.

  Halliday and Woolf slinked around the corner, screened by the darkness and high bushes around the decrepit building.

  Havens had his bandaged hand and foot raised in the air. “The guy said, ‘I knew the husband was that small, I wouldn’t have taken a chance jumping out the window with a Doberman in the backyard.’”

  The CPD District 10 cops busted out laughing.

  “Hope she was worth it?”

  “Who?” Havens asked straight-faced.

  “The wife,” a hefty officer asked, giving Havens a swipe on the arm.

  “That’s just it. The guy was doing the husband while the wife was at work.”

  The officers in the semicircle fell silent for just a moment, then erupted, slapping at Havens and each other and wiping tears from their eyes.

  “What the hell?” Halliday asked rhetorically.

  “I swear to God, he’s one of the best intelligence pros I’ve worked with.”

  Sean caught their movement. “Hey, guys,” he said to the officers, “I think they’re waving you up.” He pointed them in another direction.

  “Where?” an officer asked.

  Sean pointed. “Up at the window.”

  The men all turned around.

  “Pretty sure I saw one of your blues giving you a wave to come up.”

  The men traipsed over the crumbled sidewalk through the courtyard.

  “We need to move out?” Sean asked Halliday and Woolf. “Where’s Mena? You guys all turned off your comms.”

  “She’s dead, and if you didn’t see him before, one of your detective pals is going to be coming around the corner after me.”

  Halliday tried to steer Drake toward the SUV, but he pulled back.

  “Sean”—Tresa gestured with a thumb to Drake—“she was going to kill him.”

  Drake checked to see if the detective was nearing. “She had orders the whole time to take me out. Do you have the same orders, Havens?”

  “No.” Sean didn’t beat around the bush with any sarcastic remarks. He exhaled. “Let’s get out of here while we can. For now, CPD will think she’s FBI. That gives us time to get ahold of Sebastian.”

  “And say what?” Drake grumbled as he fast-stepped around the SUV. “Sorry, boss, but the chick I thought you sent to help us didn’t succeed in killing me, but what would you like us to do next?”

  “We don’t know that Sebastian did that.” Sean smiled to other officers and gave a wave as he cautiously stepped in to drive.

  “Oh, goddam,” Drake said. “Tresa’s on the hook for taking her out. We’re in the black, but she’s in the wind for a shooting with the Bureau. You can’t just leave the scene, Tresa.”

  Sean wasn’t taking any chances and started driving away. “Then we’ll spin it that Mena was working with the Iranians. Like SA Halliday suggested. She was a mole.”

  “No,” Drake protested again. “She wasn’t a mole. She was an operator. She was doing her job. We’re not going to defame her. I don’t care if she tried to kill me. If there’s going to be any spin, it was that she sacrificed herself. She did it for her adopted country.”

  “You’re fucking crazier than I thought. You grew a conscience in the last minute?” Havens accused. “We’re all fucked and all way outside the law.”

  Drake said nothing.

  “I can’t figure you out, Woolf.” She blew out her cheeks and continued. “You kill a dozen people in a day and then want to give full honors to a person on your team that tries to kill you.”

  “She wasn’t a traitor,” Drake insisted again.

  “Whatever.”

  Drake’s tongue started to click.

  “And what’s with the cli—”

  “Enough!” Havens shouted with enough volume to fill the SUV without turning heads outside. “Halliday, shut the fuck up. And Drake, she doesn’t know the situation and isn’t trying to be belligerent. So, both of you just chill the fuck down before I turn around, stop this car, and slap the shit out of you. I’m dealing with fucking children.”

  Though in the moment Sean didn’t mean to make a joke out of the situation, the levity was welcome and the team settled down.

  After a couple minutes of driving in silence, Drake reached over and put his hand on Tresa’s leg.

  “Knock it off. I’m serious.” She laughed, keeping the new mood in the car light as they cooled off.

  Drake turned to her with a look of pain.

  Havens looked in the rearview mirror and just shook his head as the two behind him exchanged glances.

  * * * *

  In the glow of the console and spinning emergency lights, Tresa Halliday held her eyes on Drake and saw the man she had seen just weeks before. A kind and vulnerable man with a youthful sadness in his eyes. Which man Drake Woolf really was, she didn’t know.

  Earl Johnson wanted her to get close, though. Those were her orders. Would she be the next person to receive orders to just take out Woolf, she wondered. And if Mena really was acting on orders, she had just killed an intelligence community officer and as a sworn agent of the FBI. Not only was Halliday supposed to remain at the scene, she was supposed to turn in her weapon as soon as a superior arrived until they cleared her. But this was not her first use of deadly force. It could cost her her
career. Then again, before she got this gig, her career was over. No, this was Earl Johnson’s mess. He could clean it up. She was doing whatever was necessary just like he asked. And the guy sitting next to her was not only beyond the bad choices she usually made in men, he was unquestionably the most unstable and violent human being she had ever laid eyes on, on either side of the law. He scared the living shit out of her, but yet she could feel the intensity of his pain and what must be the deepest and darkest emptiness if he could do the things he did to people.

  Halliday reached to put her hand on his. As she stared at him, she remained confused as to how the complex and violent warrior next to her could be shuddering with emotion, his face wet with tears.

  She couldn’t know that the voices in Drake Woolf’s head were screaming to kill her.

  Chapter 71

  Earl Johnson sat at the dining room table, looking into his study and longing to sit in his espresso chair and finish the last chapters of Moby Dick with a glass in his palm of Taylor’s Vintage Port 1985. It was Saturday night. Saturday nights, now that the kids were out of the house, meant his wife played bridge. She played bridge, and he was free to go out and see a movie, listen to chamber music in Georgetown, dine on Ethiopian food, and do whatever the hell else he wanted to do because it was his Saturday night.

  “Dad, are you paying attention?” His son-in-law Darryl had both elbows on the table. His breath smelled like foul beer.

  Earl watched Darryl hold in a burp then release it under his breath to the side. The smell still lingered. Corned beef. Earl squeezed his face, reacting to the repugnant smell. Darryl graduated from Yale, but he was pedestrian. He had all the advantages in life that could be afforded to him, and yet he still preferred to indulge in bad swill beer and tubed meats, taking in any and all Nats and Redskins games with the early start of full pregame intoxication. Worse, his wife, Earl’s firstborn, Ellie, graduate of Georgetown Law, sat across from her father, wearing a green Notre Dame bucket hat with a button, Screw You I’m Welsh.

  “Dad,” Ellie barked, snapping her fingers in front of Earl. “You’re not listening.”

  “I am listening. You came in wanting to talk. Your mother isn’t here, and I don’t very much feel like talking. You’re both drunk, smell like a two-bit commercial tavern, and are interrupting my quiet evening. It isn’t enough I have to still slave to pay off your education while you spend your earnings frivolously, that on the free nights I have you insist on sponging off that, as well.”

  “It’s an opportunity, Earl,” Darryl said, getting up from the chair, sliding it across the floor.

  Earl leaned over to examine the floor, fully expecting to see a blemish on the hardwood. “You should have waited for your mother.”

  “We wanted you to hear and be excited for us. We got the call tonight while we were out. Darryl has been waiting for an opportunity like this to really skyrocket his career.”

  Earl slammed his hand on the table. “He works for one of the most prestigious private equity firms in Washington and is taking a year off to write a finance book from a beach in Australia!”

  “When else will he be able to do it?”

  “When my grandson is older. That’s when.”

  Earl’s phone rang from the study. “If you’ll excuse me.”

  “Dad, please,” Darryl huffed. “I’m sure it can wait.”

  Earl swung his finger into Darryl’s chest. “You can wait when you want a…a…beef jerky stick in the middle of the night. My job does not afford such luxuries as waiting. I am a public servant who neither summers on my yacht nor winters in Belize. And I certainly do not care to wait for my grandson with Asperger’s, who I’ll add only relates to me, and who is routinely subjected to waiting for his parents to come home from who knows where getting drunk while he cries with that shrewish nanny of his who has no capacity for understanding him or communicating with him.”

  Earl spun and stormed off into the office and slammed the door.

  “Johnson,” he answered as he walked to the window blinds and peered out to the street to see if that same car was parked along the curb. While he did so, the Chicago field office’s special agent in charge spat a litany of details into his ear. Earl closed the blinds and made a mental note to raise the recent vehicle tail to his counterintelligence staff. “Excuse me. Can you repeat the name again?”

  Earl moved to his grandfather’s well-worn chair and collapsed. He thumbed through the first edition novel of Robert Louis Stevenson that rested on a small table by his armrest, while the man on the line ranted away. Deputy Director Johnson next scanned the room for the bottle of port he could have sworn he brought into the den. Curses. I left it by the kitchen cupboard. “I’m sorry, SAC LaVerne. Theresa Halliday?” He paused. “I’m still not sure who she is. Oh, Tree-sa you say. My apologies.” He paused again. “Sir, I’m dreadfully sorry, but I know no one by that… Wait. Isn’t she the agent who struck her superior and shot a suspect in the back last year?”

  Earl crossed the room, opening a lower bookcase cabinet where he had stashed the gift of a fine Macallan 12 Year bottle of scotch. He listened as the special agent in charge briefed him of the situation that was far less troubling than the situation in the kitchen. As he did that, he activated the speakerphone and searched his text messages. Halliday had sent a note stating, “Trouble is coming. But I’m in.”

  “Excuse me.” He opened the box and then the bottle. “Excuse me!” Earl said with raised voice then took a pull straight from the bottle. God, I may as well be drinking this from a red Solo cup with Darryl. “It’s Saturday evening. Quite late, I might add. If you know me, or anything about me, I direct the Bureau’s counterintelligence capacity. From headquarters. Headquarters. Did you hear that?”

  Earl only paused for a confirmation of understanding.

  “Then, sir, you can understand my confusion as to why you have called me directly regarding a woman in a capacity who you say is NSB. Really?” Earl took another swig, and then another. “The NSB. Since when in my illustrious career at the Bureau did the National Security Branch concern counterintelligence, SAC LaVerne?”

  Earl swallowed a final long pull during the mumbling of the SAC and then the silence.

  “Forgive my impatience, but I am having difficulty understanding how a man has risen to your level of responsibility and attainment of role who lacks a fundamental organizational construct understanding of how a lackluster performer now gone AWOL from a crime scene who evidently works in WMD is my concern, unless of course you are reporting a CI concern, which, my good fellow, has an internal protocol to follow so we don’t have agents calling up without a paper trail of allegations on Saturday nights, forcing accusations of field agents when it’s my night.”

  Earl eyed the bottle’s amber content, which in the last minutes had slipped under the label mark.

  “Yes, apology accepted. Please have a good night in Chicago.” Earl smiled before hanging up. His free hand tightened into a fist.

  Earl’s attention shifted to the seven-thousand-dollar first edition novel, and he placed it back between two similarly valued books on the shelf, then slumped into his grandfather’s chair with a pouty scowl. His feet hooked around the hand-carved chair legs. “They’re not taking Elon to the other side of the world where I can’t see him when I want.”

  He stood and crossed the room to check out the window again for the car that had been following him all week long. Earl thumbed his phone, pressing hard on the numbers, and hit the speaker function. He spoke aloud to himself, “Now what disaster have you created, SA Halliday, that I have to get you out of on my Saturday?” As it rang, he heard the garage door open. He expected that it was his wife returning. Give them hell, Lorraine. They’re not taking our grandson away.

  Chapter 72

  Earl Johnson’s number popped up on Tresa’s phone as it buzzed. She held the device with contemplation.
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br />   “I’m guessing you’re in deep shit,” Drake offered. His eyes focused on his own device.

  “Yeah. Most definitely.” Tresa pocketed the phone. “We’re not any closer to finding this bomb or whatever, are we?”

  “I’ve got a name. Two-bags. He runs a gang back in Lawndale. Somehow they’re tied into this whole thing.”

  Sean turned his head for a moment while side-eyeing the road. “Mojo told me a lot of the links were between these Lawndale Legends, Hezbollah, and IRGC. From what I got from Sebastian before leaving, there has been message traffic coming from Tehran that looks like they’re trying to stop whatever is going to happen.”

  “Or cover it up,” Drake added.

  “There’s that possibility for sure.”

  Tresa remained silent, taking in the conversation, then spoke up for clarity. “So you guys are hunting down terrorists on US soil but getting intel directly from NSA?”

  Neither Sean nor Drake said a word.

  “This is so fucked up,” she said. “And you two are like some dynamic duo, killing anyone who gets in the way or who comes in on your list?”

  The two men stared ahead.

  Tresa looked out the windows, trying to orient herself. She had been using the building formerly named the Sears Tower as a landmark, but Havens was taking them away from the direction of the Loop, and it sure looked like he was staying clear of the field office area. “Where are you headed?”

  Sean looked down at his mobile device screen map. “About two blocks from here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Next bad guy house,” Drake directed, still transfixed on his device.

  “We aren’t going to get him some rest and talk about all this? He can’t go in there and just shoot up another place, and Sean, you sure as hell aren’t going to do any good doing stand-up comedy by the car. What are you expecting?”

  Havens pulled to the curb, stretching in a number of directions, using all mirrors to ensure they wouldn’t have any street guests. He smiled as he turned around. “Listen, Doc.”