The phone had already finished charging. She switched it on and was about to stick it into her purse when it rang.
The noise startled her. No one knew this number. No one except ...
She checked caller ID. It was Wyatt.
Years ago she’d given him this number in case she ever had to disappear. He was the only one she’d told.
She almost didn’t answer, but she had to.
“Hey, Vic.” She tried to keep her voice steady.
“Abby.”
“So ... how much do you know?”
“Guy was found dead in Faust’s neighborhood. The feds are all over it.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you called this number,”
“I think it does. You weren’t answering at home or on your regular cell. And the way you acted last night ... I can put two and two together. You’re going away, aren’t you?”
“I have to.”
“For how long?”
“Forever. That ought to be long enough.”
“And that’s it? You’re just going to leave? No goodbyes?”
“I didn’t want to”—say good-bye, she almost said—“drag you into this.”
“Like I’m not in it already.”
“You know what I mean. Vic, I’m radioactive. You can’t be anywhere near me. It’s not safe.”
“Nothing about us has ever been safe, Abby.”
“I can’t talk. I have to go. Maybe when I get where I’m going, I’ll find a way to get in touch.”
“You won’t. It wouldn’t be safe. Right?”
She closed her eyes. “Right.”
“It’s hard to believe this is the last time I’ll ever hear your voice.”
“Me, too.”
“I wish we hadn’t ended things the way we did.”
“I shouldn’t have argued with you. You were right. Getting mixed up with Faust was a bad idea.”
“Is that all I was right about?”
“I should have confided in you more. I should have opened up.” She felt tears starting. “We ... we could have had more than we did. It’s my fault. I was ... afraid. Afraid to get close.”
“I never knew you were afraid of anything.”
She smiled, blinking away the wetness in her eyes. “Only of you, I guess.”
“I want to see you.”
“No, that’s not possible.”
“One more time. We can’t say good-bye over the phone.”
“It’s too late—I’m already on my way out of town—”
“Then why don’t you sound like you’re in a car? Come on, Abby, don’t lie to me.”
“All right, I’m still in L.A. But I’m leaving now. I can’t hang around. You said it yourself—the FBI is doing some heavy breathing on this one.”
“You’re smart enough to steer clear of them for another hour or two. Unless you’re just making excuses.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Have it your way.” His voice had turned cold. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll drop me a postcard sometime. Be sure to use a remailing service so there’s no traceable postmark. And don’t say anything about the weather where you are. It might tip me off.”
“Vic—”
“I thought I meant more to you, that’s all.”
She knew it was a mistake. Any deviation from her carefully arranged escape plan entailed unacceptable risk. But ...
“There’s a closed-down Texaco station in San Fernando, near the corner of Glenoaks Boulevard and Haver Street. Meet me in back, away from the street, in an hour. That’ll be”—she checked her watch—“eight o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.”
She clicked off. As she put away the phone, it occurred to her that he could be working with the feds, trying to trap her. But she wouldn’t believe it. She’d never shown him the trust he deserved.
She was going to trust him now.
* * *
Wyatt rested the telephone handset in the cradle. He turned to face the two FBI agents.
“It’s arranged,” he said.
Tess McCallum reached out and touched his arm. “You did the right thing.”
He thought Judas must have heard the same words.
36
Hauser spent a few minutes on his cell phone, while watching Wyatt get cleaned up. The two of them met McCallum in the parking lot.
“You drive Wyatt’s car,” he told her, tossing her the keys. “He’ll ride with you. I know the streets better than you, so you’ll follow me.”
“Why take two cars?”
“We need Wyatt’s vehicle there so Sinclair will see it.” Besides, he needed some time to himself.
“How about backup?” she asked.
“I called the field office. Four agents will meet us at the scene. They’re wearing vests and bringing two more.”
McCallum glanced at Wyatt, standing a few yards away, and lowered her voice. “He needs a vest, too.”
Hauser shook his head. “No go. If Sinclair sees body armor underneath his shirt, she’ll book before we can take her in.”
“I guess that’s right. You know, six agents isn’t a lot for a high-risk takedown.”
“It’ll be enough.”
“This is a severe arrest, Ron.”
“She’s only one woman.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Just keep your eye on Wyatt. His heart’s not in this.”
“There’s no chance he’s carrying?”
“I frisked him. Unless he’s got a twenty-two up his rectum, he’s clean. Now let’s move. We don’t have much time.”
He put the magnetic emergency light on the roof of the LTD, then waited as McCallum transferred her laptop to the cop’s Mustang and got in. Wyatt joined her, riding shotgun. With the red light flashing, Hauser led them out of the lot and picked up speed, heading for the freeway.
For the first time in hours, he was alone. He could think. He could wonder how it had all gotten so fucked up, when it should have been so simple.
Brody was the problem. He saw that now, in retrospect. Of course, he had always known about Brody’s record. His less than perfect background. He had liked to think of himself as a model officer, but that wasn’t how his colleagues saw him, at least not toward the end of his tour. He’d shown bad judgment on too many occasions. He’d become reckless.
During the engagement at Karbala Gap, when he and his team came under enemy attack, Brody risked leaving cover to return fire. It was a stupid move, suicidal. His captain tried to pull him back and took a bullet in the head for his trouble. The man died. Everyone else on the team saw it as Brody’s fault, even if Brody would never admit it.
Afterward, they refused to go into the field with him. Brody was offered a promotion to a staff job that would keep him out of combat. But he didn’t want a staff job. He received an honorable discharge, but stayed in Iraq, hanging out at bars, waiting for a chance to show the army they’d been wrong.
Hauser gave him that chance. The same qualities that made Brody a liability to the service—a willingness to take crazy risks, break the rules—made him useful to the Bureau, as long as they could keep him at arm’s length.
And Brody was effective. He and his small team of like-minded vets hunted down the Fedayeen militiamen and their allies. They prevented the assassination of at least one interim government leader. No one inquired too closely into Brody’s methods. It was a goddamned war zone, after all.
Then things went bad. Brody got played by one of his own informants. Acting on a tip, he picked up a group of men he thought were terrorists, imprisoned them in his home, and subjected them to what might be euphemistically called extreme abuse. The prisoners were hung from the ceiling by their wrists, scalded with boiling water, beaten with sticks. They confessed to nothing. The fact was, they had nothing to confess to. They were innocent. Brody had been given faulty information.
His informant promptly contacted the Iraqi government with word that Brody
was holding the men in custody. One of the prisoners just happened to be the nephew of a prominent Iraqi official. The house was raided. The prisoners were freed. Brody and his team would be charged with running a renegade military operation. The Bureau couldn’t let that happen, so by means of a liberal dispersal of cash to the appropriate pockets, Hauser got the men out of the country. He himself was rotated stateside a few months later. By then, Brody had already been taken on as a full-fledged agent of the FBI.
Given their prior relationship, it only made sense for Brody to work under Hauser in L.A. When the sting operation was approved, Hauser put Brody in the field.
Then Faust called Hauser to ask if he knew anyone who could handle a stalker. Of course, there was no way Faust could have known that the stalker in question was an FBI operative under Hauser’s direct supervision.
Hauser saw his opportunity immediately. As a matter of fact, he answered, keeping his voice casual, I do know someone. Her name is Abby Sinclair.
The whole plan had come to him in an instant, in the beat of silence between Faust’s inquiry and his response.
He would have Faust sic Sinclair on Brody. Sinclair would get close to Brody; she would have to; that was her job. And once Brody had her alone and defenseless, he would kill her.
Oh, not right away, naturally. First he would use his interrogation skills to find out how much she’d learned about the operation and whom she’d told. Only once he was satisfied that she had revealed all her secrets would he finish her off.
The next day Hauser would approach Michaelson and reveal that he had encouraged Faust to hire Sinclair. His rationale would be plausible enough. He had rehearsed the conversation numerous times.
If I hadn’t given Faust a recommendation, he would have gone on looking until he found someone on his own. At least if it’s Sinclair, it’s somebody we can control. We can tell her to back off if she gets in the way and threatens the operation. She’ll have to listen to us. She doesn’t want to mess with the Bureau again.
Michaelson would have bought it, just as he would have bought the rest of Hauser’s story: that he had tried to contact Sinclair, but she wasn’t answering her phone and hadn’t been to her apartment. She had vanished.
Not long afterward, the mystery of her disappearance would be solved, when her remains were found in Griffith Park, only a short distance from Peter Faust’s home. It was the same locale where Roberta Kessler had been found. And Sinclair’s body would be in the same condition: no head, no hands.
Brody would have taken care of all that, and left the body where it was sure to be discovered by some jogger or dog walker.
Given Faust’s connection with Sinclair and the condition and location of the body, Faust would be the obvious suspect. Then, even if Brody’s blackmail scam hadn’t worked, Faust could still have been taken down for Sinclair’s murder. Hauser had no qualms about framing the son of a bitch. Faust was guilty of multiple homicides—Hauser was certain of it—and he deserved whatever he got.
It had been a good plan, an unbeatable plan. With one stroke he would eliminate Sinclair and incriminate Faust.
The only possible obstacle was Brody. He had to agree to play along. It was one thing to kill ragheads in Iraq, and another to blip an American citizen on U.S. soil. He might balk at Hauser’s orders. But Hauser took care of that, too. He let Brody understand that if he chose not to comply, then certain documents—documents proving conclusively that Brody was guilty of a variety of unsavory crimes against Iraqi nationals—might find their way to the L.A. Times.
The ensuing uproar would expose Brody’s misconduct to public view for the first time. The Iraqi government, unable to overlook this affront to its dignity, would insist that Brody and his associates be extradited for trial in Iraq. The outcome of that trial was a certainty. To make those documents public was to sign Brody’s death sentence.
Hauser himself could not be touched. There was no proof that he had known Brody was engaged in illicit activities.
Brody understood the situation. He did not try to fight it. Perhaps he even appreciated the irony. His job in the sting operation was to blackmail Faust. Now he was the one being blackmailed. He accepted his orders without complaint. I’m a realist, he said with a cold shrug.
The assignment should not have been too difficult for him. He had killed warriors in Iraq. All he was required to do in this case was kill a woman who had gotten in the way.
Incredibly, he had failed. He had proven to be the weak link in the chain, the one variable Hauser could not control.
And now everything was going to shit. Hauser was caught in a bind. He couldn’t admit to Michaelson that he’d put Sinclair on Faust’s payroll. If he did, he would be confessing to a fuckup of monumental proportions, a fuckup that had gotten Brody killed. The blowback would kill him.
He had to resolve the situation on his own. Had to get Sinclair into custody so the investigation would focus exclusively on her, and no one would think to ask any dangerous questions.
But there remained one worry. Faust. Hauser had to be sure he continued to keep their secret. Had to know, for certain, that Faust would cover for him. He thought he was on relatively safe ground. Faust never gave away anything to the authorities, never cracked, never opened up. And since he was no longer a suspect in Brody’s murder, he would be under no pressure.
The only risk was if Faust learned that Brody had been an FBI agent. Then he would know that Hauser had been using him, setting him up. If that happened, all bets were off. But it was unlikely he would ever find out. The Bureau wasn’t going to advertise a failed sting op to anyone, and certainly not to the operation’s intended target.
Anyway, Faust didn’t have to stay silent forever. He had to stay silent only for now. The future ... well, the future would take care of itself.
As he hit the 405 Freeway, he took out his cell phone and punched in Faust’s home number from memory. The phone rang twice before a cool voice answered. “Faust.”
“It’s Ron Hauser.”
“Ronald, my friend. How is life treating you?”
“I’ve been better. Look, something’s come up, and I just need a little reassurance from you.”
“How unusual. People seldom turn to me for reassurance or comfort of any kind.”
“Yeah, well, this is a rare occasion. It’s possible you’ll be receiving a visit from my colleagues before long.”
“And why is that?”
“Abby Sinclair killed a man last night. I’m betting he’s your stalker.”
“I see.”
“We’re closing in on her now. Should have her in custody within an hour. When she talks, she’ll say you hired her. That’ll bring you into the picture.”
“So it will.”
“The thing is, I need your assurance that you won’t tell anyone how you got Sinclair’s name and number.”
“You do not wish to be involved.” Faust chuckled.
“As I told you at the time, it’ll be bad for me if I’m known to have recommended Sinclair. FBI employees aren’t exactly encouraged to direct people to vigilantes for assistance.”
“I recall the conversation. You were most emphatic.”
“And now, of course, there’s this other thing ...”
“The death of my stalker, you mean? And the fact that you are indirectly responsible?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Perhaps not. The fact remains that you steered me to Sinclair, and Sinclair in turn has committed homicide. This cannot look good on your record.”
“Right. Which is why I want your, uh, assurance”—he wished he could come up with another word for it—“that you won’t bring me into this.”
“And who shall I say mentioned Miss Sinclair to me? Your associates will insist on knowing.”
“I can give you a name to use. Someone who can’t be checked out. It’ll be a dead end. Just give me a few hours to do a little research.”
Faust’s voice was ver
y soft. “I am afraid those hours would be wasted, Ronald.”
Hauser felt a chill move through him. “What does that mean?”
“There is an old adage to the effect that a secret can be kept only when it is held by two persons. Such was our arrangement. But now the mathematics have changed.”
“Changed?”
“A third party has learned the secret. Which means, I suppose, that it is no longer a secret at all.”
“What third party?”
“Our Miss Sinclair, of course. She has proven herself distressingly unpredictable, has she not? She is, I believe, emotionally unstable. Most unprofessional in all respects.”
“You told Sinclair,” Hauser said, his voice flat.
“She abducted Elise and threatened her with bodily harm. Elise was badly shaken. I did what was necessary to ensure her safe return.”
“It was a bluff. She wouldn’t have hurt your girlfriend.”
“She killed my stalker, you said.”
In self-defense, Hauser almost blurted out, but caught himself. “Yes. Right. But she wouldn’t hurt an innocent party.”
“I did not wish to take that chance.”
“So you gave her my name.”
“Yes. Ronald Hauser of the FBI. I believe she remembers you.”
“I’ll bet she does,” he muttered.
“I have no idea why she was so insistent on obtaining that particular piece of information.”
“I don’t know, either,” Hauser lied.
Obviously Sinclair had put it together. Which meant it was over. As soon as she was in custody, she would talk. Hell, she would have spilled everything to McCallum on the phone if she’d had the chance.
For a moment he considered the quickest, easiest way out. He was in a car, on a freeway. All he had to do was grind the gas pedal into the floor and accelerate to top speed, then steer straight into the abutment of the next overpass. Death would be immediate. He would feel nothing. He would know nothing. It would all be over.
But there might be another way.
“You would not be withholding something from me, I hope,” Faust said quietly, noting Hauser’s long silence.
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