“I’m not withholding anything. I don’t know what she’s after or what she wants.”
“Mmm.” A noncommittal sound. “So you see, it will do no good for me to mislead your colleagues, because Miss Sinclair has no reason to protect your secret. She will surely tell the truth.”
Hauser tightened his grip on the phone. “What if she doesn’t?”
“I hardly see what would stop her.”
“Suppose I find a way.”
“In that event I will be glad to relate any plausible falsehood you concoct.”
“You’d better. You owe me.”
“Do I?”
“We had an agreement. You made me a promise.”
The voice on the other end of the line sounded darkly amused. “Perhaps this will teach you not to take the devil at his word.”
Silence. The call was over.
Hauser pocketed the phone. The game plan had changed. He had thought Sinclair could be taken alive. Now he knew that her capture would be fatal to his future.
All right, then. He would handle it. McCallum herself had said this was a high-risk arrest. The kind of situation where things could go wrong.
Where somebody could get killed.
37
At seven thirty-five, as the sun was setting, Hauser met the four new agents at the intersection of Glenoaks Boulevard and Harding Avenue, a few blocks northwest of the Texaco station. They couldn’t risk a closer staging area in case Sinclair was already in the neighborhood, scoping out the rendezvous site.
All four of the agents were from his squad. They had shed their telltale business suits and shrugged on windbreakers that concealed their duty weapons and body armor. Unfortunately, the vehicles they drove were Bucars—a Bureau-issue LTD and a Ford Crown Vic—and he wasn’t too happy about that. A pro like Sinclair could spot an official car a mile away.
“I told you I wanted you undercover,” he said.
Garcia, the most senior agent, answered. “The field office didn’t have any UC cars for us. We would’ve had to go through SOG, and we didn’t have time.” SOG, Special Operations Group, was responsible for most undercover surveillance ops. The group was headquartered in a secret location away from the field office.
There was no time to worry about it now. “Okay, here’s the situation,” Hauser said crisply. “We’re arresting a female civilian, Abigail Sinclair, who is the prime suspect in Agent Brody’s murder. She will be alone but armed. Typically she carries a Smith thirty-eight in her handbag. She is a private security operative trained in self-defense, evasion, and escape.”
He passed around a file photo of Sinclair. The men studied it with grim faces.
“Don’t underestimate her just because she’s slightly built. She’s a killer. She already has the blood of one field agent on her hands. The rendezvous site is a closed-down Texaco station on the east side of Glenoaks, one door south of Haver Street. Sinclair will go to the rear of the station intending to meet a friend. That’s where we’ll take her down. I’ve already done a drive-by recon of the site. There are only two exits—the street out front and an alley in the rear.
“Your job is perimeter control. Baker and Sorenson will cover the entrance to the alley. Garcia and Kent will cover the street. You need to be as inconspicuous as possible. Sinclair may use either route to approach the gas station, and we can’t risk spooking her.”
“Who handles the actual arrest?” Sorenson asked.
“I will, assisted by Agent McCallum.”
Kent frowned. “Do you think that’s wise, considering—”
Hauser cut him off. “I’m taking her in. If she bolts, you are to pursue. Otherwise you remain off-site until the arrest has gone down. Is that clear?”
Heads nodded, though the men were clearly skeptical. Standard procedure, as taught in Hogan’s Alley on the Academy training grounds, would be to swarm the suspect on Hauser’s signal, a tactic that could effectively nullify any resistance. But Hauser was boss, and they knew enough not to question him when his mind was made up.
“Where is Agent McCallum?” Kent asked.
“She and a civilian who’s assisting us are positioning themselves at the scene. I’m headed there now.”
Before leaving, Hauser accepted two Second Chance tactical vests with a Kevlar weave and a pair of LASH II radio headsets—plastic ear-molded receivers and throat microphones on elastic straps. The microphone picked up throat vibrations, allowing the user to communicate without raising his voice. The whole assembly could be plugged into almost any portable radio, including the Handie-Talkies used by Bureau personnel.
“I want all units on channel blue three. Minimize chatter.”
Garcia asked if they were to deploy the rifles in the Bucars’ trunks.
“That shouldn’t be necessary,” Hauser said. “We want Sinclair alive.”
“But if she books?” Garcia pressed.
“Then you’re green-lighted to take her out.”
He left them with that thought.
* * *
Tess waited with Wyatt at the rear of the gas station. She was nervous, edgy, as she always was before a takedown. Wyatt seemed impossibly calm. Or maybe calm was not the right word for it. He seemed detached, emotionally shut down, as if he had lost all interest in his surroundings.
“It’ll be all right, Vic,” she said, knowing that the reassurance was meaningless and stupid.
He nodded, but he didn’t seem to hear. His face was pale and slack.
“If Abby has a good explanation for what happened,” she added, “she can still walk away from this.”
“Yeah.”
“We just need to get all the facts. We’ll be as fair to her as possible. I guarantee that.”
He was far away. “She’ll never forgive me,” he said softly.
“It’s for her own good.”
“That’s not how she’ll see it.”
“Maybe she will. In time.”
He lowered his head. His voice was a whisper.
“Never.”
There was nothing she could say to that.
* * *
Hauser drove past the gas station for a final recon, then parked in a supermarket lot down the street and walked to the rendezvous site. A strange phrase played in his mind: a downward spiral. It applied to lots of things, didn’t it? To water running down a drain, to an airplane trapped in a nosedive. And to his life. His life since Medea. That was when the downward spiral had begun for him. That was when it all started going to hell.
Now, like the pilot of that spiraling plane, he was plummeting down, down, and there was nothing he could do but let events play out.
Behind the Texaco station he found McCallum and Wyatt standing together near Wyatt’s Mustang. The sun was gone now, but the sky had not yet faded to the dusky orange of an urban night. In the dimming light he surveyed the layout. Sinclair had chosen a good place for a rendezvous. The area behind the station would be unseen from the street. A high cinderblock wall protected the north side of the lot. To the east there was a hurricane fence, densely overgrown with weeds and climbing plants, with an open gate that led to the alley. The alley afforded a second means of approach, as well as an escape route. A windowless, warehouselike building loomed on the south, affording further privacy.
Wordlessly he handed McCallum her vest and radio set, while donning his own.
A small plane buzzed past, coming in for a landing at a private airfield just three blocks south. He thought of the nosedive again, the plummet and crash.
“She could be here any minute,” McCallum said, attaching the LASH II’s skeleton ear mold and fitting the strap around her neck like a bow tie. A transparent tube ran from the neck-mounted speaker to her ear. “Where are the others?”
“Guarding the perimeter.” Hauser embedded the radio’s press-to-talk switch in the webbing of his Kevlar vest.
“We need more than the two of us to take her in, Ron.”
“No, we don’t. We have the eleme
nt of surprise. We can get the jump on her. Now I want you”—he pointed at Wyatt—“to wait here in plain sight. And if you attempt to signal Sinclair or give her any warning ...”
“I won’t,” Wyatt said in a voice that was low and defeated.
“I’ll position myself between the gas station and the warehouse. There’s a narrow space between the buildings at the gas station’s three-four corner.” In Bureauspeak, a building’s front side was side one, with the other sides numbered clockwise. “McCallum, you are to take cover behind the Dumpster in the alley. Hold that position until my signal.”
She looked down the alley at the large trash bin some distance away. “That’s too for. I need to be closer.”
“No, you don’t.”
“From behind the bin I won’t have a clear line of sight.”
“You won’t need one. Just wait for my signal.”
“I don’t like it, Ron. You’re trying to pull off the takedown singlehandedly. It isn’t like you to be a cowboy.”
“You’re not in charge here. This is my turf and my case, and we’ll do things my way.”
She gave him a long, hard stare. “It’s your call,” she said finally. “But I want it on the record that I object to the deployment.”
“Duly noted. Now move. Sinclair could get here at any time.”
He watched McCallum retreat into the alley and duck down behind the bin. With a parting nod at Wyatt, Hauser slipped into the narrow space between the gas station and the warehouse. He pressed the transmit button.
“One-oh-one, on-site and in place.” Agent names were never given over the radio. “Report, two-oh-one and three-oh-one.”
In quick succession, the leaders of units two and three—Baker and Garcia—confirmed that they were in position and standing by.
It had all worked out. Of course, he was violating procedure, and he would catch hell for it later. But he could weather that storm. What he needed was an opportunity to act without witnesses.
The other two teams were out of sight. McCallum was too far away to have a decent view, especially in the gathering darkness. Wyatt would see what went down, unless his back was turned, but if the claims of a bereaved boyfriend contradicted Hauser’s account, the boyfriend would be ignored, even if he was a cop. The Bureau always favored one of its own over an outsider.
There were no witnesses who mattered. When Sinclair showed up, Hauser would simply emerge from hiding and draw a bead on her. He would shout, “Federal agents, you’re under arrest!” And he would fire.
His story, later, would be that she had been drawing down on him. If possible, in the confusion that followed the shooting he would remove the gun from her purse and leave it near her hand. Even if he couldn’t manage that detail, he could always claim that he’d seen her reach into her purse. He knew she carried a .38 in there; he’d found it when he examined the purse during her prior arrest.
He might receive a reprimand for poor judgment, but no one would cry too loudly over a civilian vigilante who’d murdered a special agent in the line of duty.
McCallum might suspect the truth, especially since Sinclair had opened up to her on the phone. But she could prove nothing, and Faust would say he’d obtained Sinclair’s number from some other contact. There would be nothing to tie Hauser to the events that had led to Brody’s death, and thus no way to establish a motive for him to kill Sinclair.
The thing was, he had to be sure he did kill her.
Wounding her would do no good if she recovered sufficiently to tell what she knew. He had to nail her cold.
A head shot would be best, but too tricky, under the circumstances. In the movies, cops and FBI agents were always snapping off bull’s-eyes in the heat of action, but in real life, with adrenaline roaring and hands shaking, it just wasn’t that easy. And he would have only one shot, or two at the most. He could hardly justify emptying his magazine into her body. No review board, however sympathetic, would buy it.
Sinclair wasn’t expecting an ambush, and as far as he knew, she didn’t own any body armor. So he would go for her midsection, her main body mass. Put a round in her heart, or near enough to do mortal damage. If there was any doubt, he might risk a second shot with better placement.
Wyatt was unarmed, so he would be unable to shoot back. He would probably be screaming in protest, but that was okay; the more emotional he was, the easier it would be to discount his testimony.
This was going to work. He could feel it. Despite all the setbacks, he would make it work.
He had been unable to hurt McCallum. Despite her abuse of regulations, her outright violation of law, she had come through the Medea case unscathed. She had wrecked his life, ruined his chance to finish out his career on the seventh floor—the power center of the Hoover Building, where the key players were found. She had screwed him over and gotten away with it. But Sinclair was equally responsible. And killing her would be a public service. She was a lawbreaker, a vigilante, which made her no better than a virus. She was a pathogen to be eliminated from the system.
And she had destroyed him. Without meaning to, but what did that matter? She had taken everything from him—his reputation, his career, his future. Now he was going to take just one thing in return.
Her life.
He heard a car approaching from the front of the station. He risked a look and saw a Miata pull into view. Sinclair’s vehicle. The dark-haired woman at the wheel was his target. She was right on time.
He unholstered his Beretta.
Wyatt stepped away from the Mustang and walked toward the convertible just as Sinclair got out. She was carrying her purse—perfect. He had been afraid she might leave it in the car, weakening his justification for the shooting.
Wyatt stopped a few feet from her.
Their placement was nearly perfect—the cop with his back to Hauser, Sinclair facing this way. The only drawback was that they were farther from him than he would have liked. He wondered if they might move a little closer, away from Sinclair’s car.
Their voices weren’t loud, but in the silence they carried easily.
“Hi, Vic.”
“Abby.”
“Sorry I almost ran out on you. You deserve better than that.”
He averted his face, obviously uncomfortable. “I’m not so sure I do.”
“Of course you do. That’s what I was trying to say on the phone. I’ve never really treated you right. I’ve taken you for granted, and I’m sorry about that.”
Wyatt turned and moved a few steps away from her. Sinclair followed. They were coming closer, narrowing the range.
“You don’t have to say that,” Wyatt said.
“Yes, I do. I need to say it.”
He pivoted to face her. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t want you to say it. I don’t want to hear it. It’s too late.”
She approached him. He retreated another step.
They were coming nearer all the time. Another yard or two, and he would strike.
38
Tess didn’t like it. The way Hauser was playing this thing made no sense.
Either Hauser was mishandling the arrest out of sheer overconfidence, or ...
Or what?
She didn’t know. But on the phone Abby had called Brody a rogue agent. Was it possible?
And if there was one rogue agent—could there be two?
She shook her head. Hauser was a veteran of the Bureau. He wouldn’t be involved in anything dirty.
Even so, she found herself slipping out from behind the trash bin and advancing slowly up the alley toward the gas station’s rear lot.
She would stay low, in the shadows, and use what concealment was offered by the overgrown oleander bushes along the fence.
Abby’s voice carried to her from a distance. “I just think we both need closure.”
“I already have closure,” Wyatt said. “I ended it, remember? I ended us.”
Apparently he had already broken things off with Abby. Tess hadn’t ant
icipated that. Somehow it made the whole situation more painful, more tragic and confused.
“Nothing’s ever final between us, Vic.”
“This time it is. Come on, you know it.”
“I guess I do. I just don’t want to admit it. Even if you hadn’t made your decision, I’d still be leaving town. And I won’t be coming back.”
“Why did you do it? Why’d you kill that man?”
“I had no choice. It was him or me.”
“Then why do you have to run?”
“Because no one will believe me. There was one person who I thought might listen to my side of the story. But it didn’t work out.”
Tess winced. She suddenly understood how much Abby had lost—her home, her career, her lover. And the one person she’d turned to, her last resort, had refused to hear her out.
She crept nearer. Hauser still hadn’t executed the takedown. What was he waiting for?
* * *
Sinclair was close enough now, but Wyatt was standing in front of her, blocking Hauser’s shot. If the cop would just move out of the way ...
“Just because one person wouldn’t listen,” Wyatt was saying, “doesn’t mean nobody will.”
“You don’t understand, Vic.”
“So explain it to me.”
“There’s no time. And it doesn’t matter. Remember last night? What I needed from you then?”
“You needed me to hold you.”
“I still do.”
They embraced.
Hauser gritted his teeth. No good going for a kill shot now. The two of them had to be apart in order to afford him a clear shot at Sinclair.
After a long moment they separated, but Wyatt, damn him, was still in the way.
“Abby,” Wyatt said, “I hope you can forgive me.”
Forgive him for what? Hauser had the bad feeling that the cop was going to say too much.
“There’s nothing I have to forgive you for.”
“Yes, there is. You shouldn’t be here.”
Hell. He was about to blow the whole thing. Hauser had to fire, but he still didn’t have a decent shot.
And then Wyatt turned aside from Sinclair, and there she was, totally exposed.
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