by Dale Nelson
Daniel Choi stood next to Danzig. Andelić wasn’t getting out of his bracelets, but on the extreme off chance that he did, Choi had more than enough hand-to-hand combat experience to handle that. Choi wouldn’t participate in the interrogation, he was here as security and, perhaps, as a little intimidation.
They’d had him in custody for four days. It had taken that long to figure out what to do with him, and given the governments involved, it was amazing they’d moved this fast. Danzig urged that putting him in the general population to await trial was a recipe for disaster. They were either inviting Andelić’s escape or his murder at the hands of mafia for robbing their bank. The Italian government, once they’d learned the extent of Andelić’s public corruption campaign, were only too happy to agree to Danzig’s plan. Anything to keep this quiet. Or as quiet as possible.
The Italian courts appointed Andelić their equivalent of a public defender for the purposes of his interrogation. Rafael Castillo was nowhere to be found, and the prevailing theory was that he’d disappeared as soon as he’d learned how badly things had gone in Rome. Danzig asked Burdette if he had any idea where Castillo might be, and Burdette only shrugged, saying he didn’t have a clue. Given Andelić’s usage of a lawyer in the perpetration of the corruption scheme, the authorities were taking no chances, and though Andelić said he had another lawyer he wanted to use, that lawyer had to first be rigorously vetted. The Italian legal system believed that would take weeks.
This was going to be fun.
“Mr. Andelić, my name is Special Agent Katrina Danzig of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. Are you comfortable?”
“We’ve met,” he said ruefully.
Ignoring him, she continued. “I’ve been appointed as a joint representative of the American and Italian governments to negotiate your transfer to another, more secure facility. Our ability and willingness to move you depends entirely on your cooperation, however.”
“What makes you think I’d want to do that?” Andelić spoke with a leering grin on his face, his voice in smooth, easy tones. If he was in pain, he didn’t show it.
“I don’t have a lot of patience under normal circumstances, Aleksander, and these are anything but normal circumstances. I’m here to arrange your extradition. I want you alive long enough to see a trial.”
“Oh, is that right? And where exactly are you proposing moving me?”
“There is a special prison in the Hague for war criminals. It’s about the safest place on Earth for someone like you.”
“A war criminal? Really? I’m not sure that I meet that bar.”
“Oh, I’ve read your file,” she said flatly. “If the CIA’s dossier on your time in the Serbian Army is even half-accurate, I’d say you more than qualify.”
Andelić didn’t have a response for that.
“Now, if you choose to cooperate, you’ll remain in isolation until your trial, and you will remain under guard every time to you move. We know your organization’s propensity to escape confinement. I wouldn’t count on any help from the jail staff either. Not that we thought your reach extended that far, but everyone at the detention facility is having a thorough background investigation right now. Further, the presiding judge and public prosecutor are from a special anti-mafia criminal court the Italians set up. They are incorruptible.”
“Everyone is corruptible.”
“Statements like that are not going to help you.”
“Agent Danzig, we should be clear on one thing. I’m not afraid of you, and I’m not afraid of your agency, your government, or the stern-looking gentleman to your left.”
To his credit, Choi didn’t even shift his stance.
“And I’m sure as hell not afraid of the Italian government. So, please, say what you have to say and be done with it. They were kind enough to put a TV in here, and I’m becoming rather fond of their daytime dramas. I’m sure the Italians would be kind enough to give me a private cell.”
Danzig gave him his moment.
She waited for several long seconds, perhaps it was a full silent minute. Eventually, the smug smirk slipped, and he said, “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Aleksander, you’re not going into solitary when you leave this room,” she said in a flat voice. “You will either leave under armed guard to a private plane for transport to the Netherlands, or you will be entered into the general prison population when you’re well enough to leave this bed. Up until now, you’ve been under protection. If you don’t deal with me, that protection ends.”
Danzig saw a tic, very slight, on his right cheek, and he blinked. He was cracking. Danzig pressed.
“Here’s what happens if you get put in the general population. I suspect you know this already, but let me lay it out for you just so that there is no misunderstanding. You can file this under, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ The Cannizzaro family is going to have you killed. Our best estimates are that you make it a week. The last thing they want is to see you go in front of a judge in a highly publicized trial. With cameras. And the press. And international television. You will die in jail, and it will not be a pleasant one because of the trouble you’ve caused them. We can offer you protection in exchange for cooperation, or we can let you take your chances inside.”
“That doesn’t seem—”
“Quiet,” she said in a tone like distant thunder, holding a hand up. “I’m talking now. This deal is contingent on your answering my questions. If you don’t tell me everything I want to know right now, or if I think you’re lying, hiding something, or anything short of deathbed confession honesty, you go into G.P. Are we clear?” She opened the folder on the tray attached to the hospital bed so that he could see the papers inside.
Andelić was silent, and Danzig could read in his eyes that he was calculating, planning, running the odds.
She wasn’t going to give him the time.
“Are we clear? You have five seconds to decide.”
Andelić let all five tick off the clock.
“Okay, we’re done here.” She closed the file. Danzig nodded to the guard at the door.
“Wait,” he said.
Danzig folded her arms, tucking the file under one armpit. She said nothing.
“I’ll talk.”
“I know you will,” she said. Danzig sat, opened the file, and put a pen in front of him. “This is your agreement to testify in exchange for extradition.”
“What do you want to know?”
Now it was her turn for the smug mile. “Oh, you’re going to tell me everything.”
The initial debriefing took two full days, and that was just to verify they had enough the satisfy the various governments involved. First, they wanted a full accounting of the Pink Panthers and names of key leaders. Then they wanted a list of the public officials in France, Italy, and Spain that Andelić had conspired to corrupt. He balked at this initially, and then Danzig shared the documents Burdette provided her. His objections unraveled quickly after that. For his part, Andelić certainly did try to implicate Burdette as much as he possibly could. Danzig stopped him eventually and said that she’d just convicted Burdette of three counts of passport fraud, so she was completely uninterested in petty theft.
Andelić was kept in isolation for the two days leading up to his transfer and was allowed no unsupervised time with his attorney, nor was he permitted to pass him anything. Cleared by a doctor for air travel, Andelić was moved in an armored van with a guard of DSS agents to a private airport where he was flown to the Netherlands on a US Air Force C-21A, which was a militarized Learjet the Department of Defense used for transporting high-ranking defense and government officials in Europe. The aircraft was moved down from Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
Once Andelić was in confinement at the Hague, he was more rigorously debriefed by professional interrogators. At that point, Danzig handed off the case, but as the arresting agent, she was kept informed. Andelić painted a comprehensive picture of the Pink Panther
s, and that intelligence was already being shared with INTERPOL and EUROPOL. She expected aggressive campaigns by national law enforcement agencies in the weeks and months to come. She didn’t know of the exact logistics of his trial for the Commerce Bank heist but suspected that would be conducted virtually from the Hague. He would then face corruption charges in Italy, Spain, and France.
This guy wasn’t going to breathe unsupervised air the rest of his life.
Because of her involvement in this, she wasn’t able to escort Burdette back to the States. DSS handled that, but she would testify via video conference. Burdette would sign his plea agreement in New York and then be released on his own recognizance. He surrendered the passports in his possession before he left and was then issued a temporary one in order to return home. That was a complicated mess to sort out. She learned that, contrary to what he’d once told her, his real name actually was Jack Burdette but that he’d been declared dead in 1990 by the state of Illinois.
Danzig wasn’t sure what to feel about that. On the one hand, Burdette was walking on every jewelry theft he’d ever committed, and he was keeping every dirty dollar he’d ever made. Not that she could prove any of that right now, but she had made him a deal and would honor it. The intelligence they were getting from Andelić was so much more valuable than anything Burdette could provide.
Burdette was a serial burglar and nothing more.
Ambassador McMillan didn’t see it that way, unfortunately.
She was furious that the FBI wasn’t pursuing charges against him for the Hôtel Ritz. Danzig tried to explain the greater good to her, but the ambassador’s pride was inextricably wound up in this, and she couldn’t be reasoned with. The word from Heidegger was that the French wanted this to go away quickly and quietly. He shared his fears privately with Danzig that the ambassador was going to make things worse by demanding the FBI do more. However, the FBI director had already publicly praised Danzig’s swift and decisive action in bringing an international criminal organization to its knees (perhaps overstating it a bit, but Danzig wasn’t about to correct the director).
Danzig was immune to any bureaucratic retribution that Ambassador McMillan might try. But that didn’t mean she should get the chance.
Danzig flew to Paris anyway.
The woman was a US Ambassador. She deserved to hear this in person.
Maybe Danzig was learning the game after all.
The plane touched down in Paris, and Heidegger, again, greeted her in person with a DSS vehicle.
“This isn’t necessary,” Heidegger said when they met outside the arrival terminal at De Gaulle.
“I know.”
“She knows you didn’t pack an overnight bag,” he said.
Danzig gave a cold chuckle.
The ambassador made her wait for an hour, just long enough to send a message. An aide told Danzig that she had two minutes.
“I got the memo,” Ambassador McMillan said in a voice that was terse and frosty.
“I know that Agent Heidegger briefed you on this, ma’am, but I felt that I owed you an explanation in person.”
The ambassador’s eyes narrowed and said clearly, What are you waiting for?
“The evidence we had from the Ritz wouldn’t hold up in court. A top-tier defense attorney, one that someone like Burdette could easily afford, would be able to make a convincing argument that there is reasonable doubt that the man in the video is Burdette. Between that and the French government refusing to prosecute, we don’t have enough to go on. I couldn’t bring this to a U.S Attorney. However, the passport fraud is significant. If fact, I’d argue that’s the greater crime.”
“Then why’d you goddamn let him plea it out?”
Danzig was ready for that.
“He wouldn’t talk otherwise. If Burdette knew he was going to prison for ten years, he’d have no reason to cooperate with us. We needed the information he provided to be able to stop not only a crime in progress, but also to shut down a major jewelry trafficking ring. The proceeds from these thefts are used to fund dark money pipelines for terrorists the world over. It’s a favored method of Al Qaeda.” Danzig paused.
How to say that Burdette risked his life once to save his friend Bachetti and again shooting Andelić? Or that he could have ran? Burdette could easily have disappeared again, simply slipped away in the chaos following the bank robbery. But he didn’t.
Danzig didn’t know what to make of the man. A serial thief on the one hand, but one who’d repeatedly risked his safety and his freedom for people he cared about. He didn’t fit the profile of the nonchalant, fancy sociopath she thought she was chasing all these years. Giovanni Castro certainly saw something in Burdette that Danzig had missed.
Burdette not being convicted for his long career of stealing jewels bothered her, and it probably always would. But Danzig also understood the trade-offs that needed to be made for the greater good. They’d taken down the head of an international criminal gang and a war criminal. And it’s not as though Jack Burdette was getting away clean. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was still good. And perhaps the conflict was necessary, is what kept her sharp, focused. More importantly, it helped her regulate those darker impulses that made her lose sight of what she was really there to do.
“What if I say no?” the ambassador asked.
Is she serious?
Danzig forced herself to remain calm. She wanted nothing more than to remind the sanctimonious bureaucrat that she didn’t get a say in what the US government did or did not charge a criminal with. But Danzig also knew the answers were never that clean.
“Ma’am, you should know that State is getting credit for Burdette’s conviction. The DSS did the legwork on the passport fraud. We felt that was the stronger conviction to pursue.”
“Then what’s the bureau walking away with?” McMillan had cooled from angry to an irritated aloofness.
“We get the Pink Panthers, a war criminal and a lot of international cooperation. I want to follow the money, keep working up the food chain until I uncover their distribution network.”
“The police officer who was killed, the Italian, he was a friend of yours, I understand.”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s the one who gave me the first lead on Jack Burdette about fifteen years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Ma’am,” Danzig said and turned to leave.
“Agent Danzig,” the ambassador said.
Danzig turned.
“Thank you for coming here today. That was unexpected. It speaks well of you.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am.”
The ambassador’s expression changed again, this one a wistful sort, and Danzig could tell immediately that it was a show.
“Did you know that I own a winery in the Napa Valley?”
“Yes, ma’am. Agent Heidegger mentioned that to me.”
Where is she going with this?
“It’s my other home. I suspect I’ll move back there when my posting here is up.”
Danzig refused to take the bait. She didn’t want to give the ambassador the satisfaction of her perceived need for revenge. If that’s even what you called what this veiled threat was. Danzig thanked the ambassador for her support and cooperation, leaving any further discussion of what McMillan thought she’d do as a private citizen hanging in the air between them.
Angela Mendez called her to first congratulate her and second to ask where she wanted to go next. Apparently, she’d earned her way out.
“New York. Gem and Jewelry Program. I want a squad if they’ll give me one.”
“I think they’ll do better than that,” Mendez said.
But truly, that’s all Katrina wanted. What she learned about herself was that she was a street cop—or the closest thing the bureau had to that. She was not interested in climbing the ladder. She didn’t want to be an SAIC, didn’t want to run a fusion center, she didn’t want the kind of DC staff job that got you noticed. Danzig knew she wasn’t cut o
ut for that administrative work, and it took a few years in the penalty box for her to really understand that she was chasing the wrong thing in her career. All she wanted to do was catch the bad guys. Personally.
Angela Mendez asked her to give it some thought, and Danzig told her that she would.
But she wouldn’t. Danzig knew what she wanted now.
And, it seemed, they were going to let her do it again.
Before leaving, she wrote up Choi’s actions in a report for the LEGAT Rome, citing both his bravery and his willingness to support her investigation on such short notice. She was recommending a commendation. She called Choi when she learned she was getting her own squad and asked if he wanted to be a part of it when he finished his tour in Rome. He said that if that job would be anything like their few hours together in Rome, she’d need to file an injunction to keep him out.
So far, the leads on the missing jewels from the Al Thani Collection were cold. But Burdette provided the name and full description of the perpetrator, Viktor Petrić, and Danzig knew that would just be a matter of time. There was no where he could sell them, and according to Burdette, this guy wasn’t that bright. After all, he stole some of the most recognizable jewels on Earth. There wasn’t a fence on the planet that would touch them.
The last thing Danzig had to contend with was Giovanni Castro.
She didn’t believe for a fast second that he’d committed suicide.
Burdette never offered her more of an explanation than what he said when she first told him. Danzig told Castro’s commander that she believed someone from Andelić’s organization followed him home and shot him in reprisal for arresting their boss. The colonel didn’t challenge that idea. Danzig didn’t know if it was because murder was an easier explanation to handle in the hyper-macho Italian culture or if he actually believed it. She didn’t care. The part of her mind that she could never turn off, the detective’s mind, told her there was more to the story between Castro and that mafia hit man.