Unwanted Company - Barbara Seranella

by Barbara Seranella

  "This is Detective Cassiletti," Munch said.

  Ellen extended her hand, all eyes. "Now a girl would feel real safe with you," she said.

  "Why don't we all go in the kitchen," Caroline said, casting a nervous glance down the hallway at the open bedroom door.

  "I'll make some coffee."

  After they were all seated around the kitchen table, Munch turned to Ellen. "Tell them what you saw," she said.

  "Where would you like me to start?" Ellen asked.

  "Pick it up from the bar," Munch said. She noticed the stack of official-looking police documents in the center of the table.

  "What bar is this?" Mace asked.

  "Some miserable little hole in the wall in Tijuana," Ellen said. "I was going to wait in the car, but Raleigh insisted I come inside."

  "Raleigh Ward?" Mace asked.

  "Yes, and that other fellow, Victor."

  "Victor Draicu?" Mace asked.

  "Just Victor. I never got the last name," Ellen answered, casting a look at Munch as if to ask, Does this man want to hear me out, or not? Munch shrugged an answer.

  "This man? " Mace asked, holding up the photograph Steve had given him.

  "Yes, that's him," Ellen said, then pointed a second man out. "And Raleigh here."

  Mace took the picture back and stared at it. "One of these men is Raleigh Ward?"

  Munch looked at the picture, too. "Yep, he's the guy right here. With the drink in his hand."

  Mace took a pen and circled the image of Raleigh Ward.

  "Go on," he said.

  "Finally," Munch muttered.

  "Well, I wasn't going to have anything to drink," Ellen began, shooting an apologetic glance at Munch. Munch raised her hand and shook her head. They'd been through all that in the car. Whatever her intentions had been, she'd blown it. Now all she could do was start oven hopefully that much wiser.

  "There was another little gal who joined our party," Ellen continued. "A working girl. Victor took a shine to her."

  "How old a girl?" Mace asked, exchanging looks with Munch. She nodded affirmation.

  "Same one," she said.

  Mace sorted through his papers until he found a photograph. "Is this the same girl?" he asked, showing it to Ellen.

  She gasped.

  Munch was pretty sure her reaction was genuine. Even though Munch had told her about it all, there was nothing like staring violent death in the face. She looked up at Caroline, whose eyes were moist, rimmed in red.

  "Bastards," Caroline hissed.

  Mace took her hand in his.

  "Her name was Giovanna," Ellen said. "And we're going to get the bastard that did it."

  "I'm not so sure about that," Mace said. "Victor Draicu has diplomatic immunity, and Raleigh Ward has disappeared."

  "Oh," Ellen said, smiling sideways at Munch, "we might be able to turn over the rock he's hiding under."

  "What are you talking about?" Mace said.

  "Tell them about—" Munch's words were cut off by the thunder of helicopter blades.

  "Oh, shit," Ellen said. "Here we go again." Her words were followed by a pounding on the door that woke up Asia and set the dogs to barking with all their teeth showing.

  "FBI," a man's voice boomed from the other side of the door. "Open up."

  Mace and Cassiletti took out their badges. Mace pointed for the women to stand in a corner of the kitchen, then strode to the front of the house. He opened the front door with his badge prominently displayed.

  "What's this about?" he asked.

  "We have arrest warrants for Ellen Summers and Miranda Mancini," a sandy-haired agent said.

  "Can I see them and your identification? Mace asked.

  Asia emerged sleepy-eyed from the bedroom and went to stand at Munch's legs. A sharp rap was heard at the back door, and Munch saw the faces of two more men clothed in SWAT gear.

  "Mom?" Asia asked.

  Munch bent down and picked her up. "It's okay, honey," she said, smoothing a hand over the girl's sleep-damp curls. Asia snuggled her cheek into the hollow at the base of Munch's neck.

  Mace frowned as he looked over the paperwork the FBI agent had handed him.

  "What are the charges?" Caroline asked.

  "Parole violation, crossing interstate lines to avoid prosecution." Munch looked at her friend with true sympathy. Would she be going back to prison so soon? A

  "What about Munch?" Caroline said.

  Mace looked at her, puzzled. "Kidnapping."

  Munch felt the floor lurch, then she realized it was her knees collapsing. She caught herself before she went all the way down. Asia's hands clutched her arms.

  "We'll be taking the child, too," the agent said. Another woman entered the room.

  "I'm Mrs. Flamm," she said. "I'm with Social Services."

  "Wait," Caroline said. "I'm an officer of the court. I work with social services all the time. Leave the child with me until this misunderstanding is straightened out."

  "I'm afraid those aren't my orders, ma'am," the sandy-haired agent said.

  "Mommy?" Asia asked.

  Mrs. Flamm reached for her. The FBI agent produced a set of handcuffs.

  Munch blocked out everything and everyone else in the room as she sought the eyes of the child she loved more than anything or anybody in the world. "Don't listen to them," she said. "It's not true. Remember, I love you."

  CHAPTER 26

  Raleigh picked Victor up in his wheezing Vega. Victor eyed the car with disdain. "Get in," Raleigh said. "This is it."

  Victor threw his suitcase into the backseat, cast one more disparaging look at the faded upholstery, then lowered himself into the passenger seat. "This is the best you could do?" he asked.

  "Low-profile," Raleigh said. "You've gotta slam the door or it doesn't latch."

  Victor pulled his door shut with a resounding crunch. Even though he was ready for it, Raleigh still winced as the vibration and sound played off his bones. He was always extra sensitive like this when the end of a mission was at hand.

  "Where to?"

  "The bus station in Santa Monica," Victor said. "It's in a locker."

  Raleigh waited in the parking lot of the bus station while Victor went inside to retrieve his goods. After ten anxious minutes of breathing diesel exhaust fumes, Raleigh was ready to go in after the guy. But then Victor emerged, carrying a card board box and smiling.

  "You want to put it in the trunk?" Raleigh asked, slipping a mint into his mouth and wishing he had something stronger.

  "No. Where is the sixth can?" Victor asked. "I cannot make the delivery short."

  Raleigh reached into the bag of groceries in the backseat and removed the plutonium-laden coffee can that would complete the case. Victor inspected the seams carefully. He would find nothing amiss, Raleigh knew. The engineers who secreted the miniature homing device into the welds at the base of the can didn't make mistakes. They knew lives depended on their work being flawless.

  Victor placed this can with the rest of the case and got into the car with the cardboard box balanced on his lap. The exchange was to be made at crowded Pauley Pavilion. It was the perfect venue for this sort of intrigue. The Olympic Committee had voted to have no metal detectors or bomb-sniffing dogs there. The thinking was that Los Angeles was not going to appear to the world to be a police state.

  Raleigh handed Victor a green press badge. Victor clipped the badge to his collar.

  "So this is it," Victor said.

  "Are you okay?" Raleigh asked.

  "What is it they call this?" Victor said. "The first day of the rest of my life."

  Raleigh couldn't help but smile. He didn't know how right he was.

  * * *

  Ellen and Munch were handcuffed and taken away in separate gray sedans.

  "Where are we going?" Munch asked. She had lost sight of the car Ellen was in.

  "Downtown," the agent in the passenger seat said.

  "I want to talk to whoever's in charge," Munch said. She
twisted so that the handcuffs weren't digging into her back. The two men in the front seat exchanged amused looks.

  "You do, huh?" the agent in the passenger seat said. "Why don't you tell me whatever it is you want to say, and I'll deliver the message."

  "I'll wait," she said. She looked out the window, thinking how long it had been since she'd had her hands bound behind her and her freedom in the control of another. She'd hoped all this stuff was behind her. Someone had told her once that she would have to repeat sober everything she'd done drinking and using. She'd thought they were speaking more metaphorically.

  They took her to a sprawling three-story building made of concrete and glass with the California state and American flags flanking the entrance. Her captors drove around to the side of the building, to where an electronic gate slid open. The driveway leading down to the underground parking lot was dark and angled steeply. A yellow sign above the entrance designated the building as a fallout shelter. Inside the black circle with the three inverted yellow triangles was another smaller yellow ring and the words CAPACITY 1730 also printed in yellow.

  The garage smelled of exhaust fumes. If the radiation didn't get you, the carbon dioxide would. The passenger agent came around to her door and opened it.

  "Let's go," he said, grabbing her arm to help her out of the car.

  She shrugged him off and stood on her own. They led her to a small interrogation room and sat her in a straight-backed chair. The walls were lined with acoustical board. Were they keeping sounds in or out? she wondered uneasily. There was no wall of two-way mirror, nothing as obvious as that. She read the graffiti scratched into the metal desk in front of her and waited for her interrogators to return.

  After what seemed like an hour—the room had no clock—two different agents unlocked and entered the door.

  The first fed, a thin blond man, showed her a birth certificate. It was for a live birth of one Asia Garillo. The mother was listed as Karen Parker, the father Jonathan Garillo.

  "I don't see your name anywhere on this document, Ms. Mancini," Blondie said.

  "It's bogus," Munch answered, knowing that Karen had given birth at home and never registered Asia's entry into the world.

  "There are tests now," the other agent said, stroking his small goatee.

  "DNA," Blondie said. He rested his knuckles on the desk top between them. "Ever hear of it?"

  Munch remained silent. She was sure one of these guys was going to tell her.

  "Every living thing has distinctive markers in its cellular construction," Whiskers said. "Those markers come from two sources, the mother and the father. What do you suppose we'll find if we test you and your so-called daughter?"

  "The deal was," Munch said through gritted teeth, "I keep my mouth shut about how a certain situation was handled, and in exchange everybody lives their own lives."

  "Don't forget the money," Whiskers said.

  The money they referred to was from an FBI fund earmarked for confidential informants. Jonathan Garillo, known to his friends as Sleazejohn, had been killed in an FBI scheme to catch a group of dope—smuggling bikers. Asia had been only six months old. Karen Parker, Asia's birth mother, preceded Sleaze in death by two months from a drug overdose.

  Munch had helped bring the case against the bikers to a successful close. All she wanted out of the deal originally was to ensure Asia's safety. But the more she learned about how things had gone down, how reckless the feds could be with the lives of others, the angrier she'd become. "You make it sound like I was the one to do something dirty," she said. "The money was for Asia."

  "And you used that money to buy a limousine," Blondie said, showing her a copy of the DMV receipt.

  "I've got some damaging information on you guys, too," she said, in one last ditch attempt to gain some footing.

  "I don't think blackmailing the government will help you win any custody battles," Whiskers said.

  "What do you want?" she asked, feeling her eyes shut with sudden, overwhelming exhaustion.

  "Your cooperation," Blondie said. "You and your friend have managed to get yourself in the middle of a matter that involves national, indeed worldwide, security."

  "Maybe we can find a way to avoid a lot of grief for all of us," she said.

  "That's more of the attitude we like to see," Whiskers said.

  "What did Ellen tell you about her trip to Mexico?"

  "Just that everybody got drunk. She wandered away from the car and got lost. The next morning she hitched back up to Los Angeles, and I had to go down to Mexico to get my car back."

  "That's it?" Blondie asked.

  "Ask her yourself," Munch said.

  "We're polygraphing her now," he said.

  Munch relaxed back into the chair and fought back a smile. Ellen ate lie-detector tests for breakfast. "Do what you have to do."

  CHAPTER 27

  After Victor left the car, Raleigh went to a pay phone and dialed the day's number. When he heard the call go through, he said, "Echo, bravo, two, niner."

  "Confirmed."

  Several beeps sounded, then another man came on the line. "What's the status with Gameboy?"

  "He's making the exchange right now."

  "We've begun tracking. Good job."

  "Any word on our bogies?" Raleigh asked.

  "The two women were apprehended?

  "Have they been debriefed?" he asked.

  "Yeah, you can relax. The Summers woman remembers nothing from the time she left the bar until she woke up in the bushes the next day."

  "You confirmed that with a polygraph?" Raleigh asked, wiping his hands on his pants.

  "She came across one hundred percent truthful."

  Raleigh knew the news should have given him some sense of relief, yet it didn't. The way this mission had gone to date, he knew it was much too soon to start celebrating. Nothing in this world was ever one hundred percent. That was one of the reasons people like him were needed.

  * * *

  Victor entered the small kitchen off the pressroom and set his case of coffee on the counter. A swarthy man wearing a head scarf approached Victor with a canvas athletic bag in one hand and a cumbersome aluminum briefcase in the other. Victor took the bag. The Libyan locked the door behind himself. Victor pointed to the case of coffee cans next to the sink. The Libyan nodded curtly and set his valise down next to the cardboard box. He opened the briefcase, and Victor saw delicate and expensive-looking test equipment nestled in foam rubber.

  While Victor unloaded and then stacked the cash on the counter, the Libyan made a small puncture in one of the cans and placed a small piece of what looked like gum foil over the opening. He then took the foil and placed it inside a device that was approximately the size of a portable typewriter. That would be a neutron detector, Victor knew. As much as he understood the process, plutonium's neutron-emitting properties were what split atoms and created fission. The Libyan studied the screen on his machine, then brought out a second device. This piece of equipment was slightly smaller than a shoe box with an L-shaped handle. Two dial-faced gauges protruded from the end. One was labeled ALPHA RADIATION, the other BETA RADIATION. Along the side in neat black letters were the words: SCINTILLATION COUNTER. Victor returned his attention to the bundles of cash, while the quiet man in the head garb did his thing.

  Some minutes passed. Then, apparently satisfied with what his instruments had detected, the Libyan resealed the opening he had made in the can with a lead-colored paste.

  Throughout the exchange, the two men said nothing. Victor finally broke the silence with, "Are you satisfied?"

  The Libyan nodded. Victor clapped him on the back.

  "Very good," he said. Satisfaction was always good.

  * * *

  Raleigh watched Victor approach the car clutching a canvas bag to his chest.

  "How did it go?" Raleigh asked.

  "No problem."

  They got on the 405 freeway and drove north. Victor asked no questions, which suited R
aleigh just fine. The sooner he was shed of this guy the better. Once again, it had all come down to him.

  "We had to make some adjustments to the plan. Seems there was a witness to what happened in Mexico."

  "Ellen?"

  "That's right, and she's threatening to go public."

  "This is bad," Victor said. He smiled. "Bad for you."

  "We're going to turn it around."

  "Turn what around?"

  "You're really going to disappear, Victor," Raleigh said. They had crested the Sepulveda pass. Raleigh stayed in the right lane, the one that fed into the Ventura freeways. They passed under the sign that read VENTURA FREEWAY WEST. Victor nodded at the passing scenery, smiling. "At last."

  They got off the freeway at Sherman Way and followed signs to the Van Nuys airport. "We're going to go one better than you simply dropping out of sight. We're going to make sure that nobody ever looks for you."

  Raleigh reached behind him and grabbed a valise. He hoisted it between the seat and dropped it in Victor's lap.

  "Open it."

  Victor did. "This is just blank paper," he said. "Hotel stationery."

  "Take the pen and write your suicide note."

  "My . . . ? Oh, I see. Very clever."

  They stopped at a padlocked gate. Raleigh got out of the car. Shielding his activities from Victor, he picked the lock and swung the gate open. When he got back into the car, Victor was still staring over the blank page.

  '°What should I say?" Victor asked.

  'Just write that you can't go on living this double life. Apologize to your family and country. Say that this was the only way out for you. "

  Victor nodded as Raleigh spoke. The hotel pen moved quickly across the page. "This is a good idea. Make sure a copy of this note gets to my brother's superiors."

  Raleigh was gratified that Victor was thinking of someone else besides himself for a change. He knew the Romanian had left his brother holding the bag for the missing shipment of uranium. lf Raleigh had had a brother, he would never have done such a thing. If he had had a brother, the two of them would have stood together against their mother.

  "Say that what happened in Mexico was unavoidable," Raleigh told Victor. "That someone must answer for the tragic way those three people died."