Cold Hit

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “First thing in the morning I’m gonna call Texaco’s executive offices,” I said. “See who used to own that station, see if I can get the employee list, and if there’s a record of credit card sales receipts from back then so we can start making up a new wit list.”

  “Good thinking,” Roger said, as his cell phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and put it on the table in front of him without opening it.

  “What do I do now?” he said. “If I answer it and they have a satellite track on there, will the feds know where we are?”

  “Ya ask me, there’s a big difference between being careful and just bein’ a pussy,” Emdee drawled.

  Roger frowned, snapped up the phone and answered it. “Yeah?” He listened for a moment, and then gave us a thumbs-up. “Good. No, that’s okay. No problem. Now’s as good a time as any. See ya in twenty minutes.” He disconnected and smiled.

  “Good thing we bought you some deodorant,” he said to Emdee. “Bimini Wright returned my call. We’re invited to midnight tea with the CIA.”

  Ten minutes later we were in Broadway’s blue Caprice heading down Coldwater Canyon on our way to the CIA offices on Miracle Mile, a favored location for U.S. intelligence agencies.

  “She ain’t gonna be easy,” Broadway said as he drove.

  “Long as you don’t plow too close to the cotton we’ll do fine,” Emdee answered.

  “She doesn’t like you, so let me do the talking,” Broadway cautioned.

  “Lay some Ebonics on the woman. That oughta light her fire.”

  The CIA building was actually called the Americas Plaza. I wondered if that meant it was owned by some foreign government. We parked in the basement. Zack had my badge, so Broadway and Perry vouched for me and signed me in. We took a secure elevator up to the twenty-fifth floor and exited into another beautifully decorated hallway. Our tax dollars were certainly getting a good workout in the Los Angeles counterintelligence community. Lion claw feet held up polished Queen Anne tables with tapered legs.

  But the best tapered legs in the joint belonged to Agent Wright, who was standing on the ivory cut-pile carpet wearing three-inch heels and a short, tan skirt. Her Icelandic blonde hair was done in a graceful cut that curled in just under her chin. Blue eyes the color of reefwater gunned out of an ivory complexion, clocking us. If I worked on this floor, I’d never get anything done.

  “Let’s go,” she said, without even waiting to be introduced to me. Of course, after the funeral she’d probably run a full profile.

  Agent Wright led us through a door marked Fire Exit, up a flight of stairs, and out onto the roof, which had a flat, tarred surface. We followed her to a spot between two huge, boxy air-conditioning units, which were roaring even though it was midnight. The hot Santa Ana weather had the cooling system working overtime.

  Bimini Wright stopped between the A/C units and spoke, just over the roar. “This is far enough.” Her voice mixed with the loud, growling exhaust. It was the rough equivalent of turning on faucets in a bathroom before a covert meeting.

  Broadway introduced me. “This is Detective Scully.”

  We shook hands. She had a surprisingly strong grip, as if she’d been taught by some butch station chief that, if you want to make it in a man’s world, you better shake hands like a trucker.

  “Okay, guys. Your call. What’s the deal?”

  “It’s the Davide Andrazack murder,” Broadway said, not giving her much. She shrugged, so he dribbled out a little more. “It was in Shane’s serial murder case, but now it’s been stripped away from us by Homeland. The Andrazack hit is involved with another investigation we’re still working. We were hoping you could give us some background.”

  “Davide Andrazack was never one of your serial murders,” she said, looking over at me. “He wasn’t a homeless bum. He was killed by Red Shirts.”

  “Company speak for enemy spooks,” Emdee explained.

  “You three need a Come to Jesus meeting,” Bimini said. “So here it is. If you don’t back off, you’re gonna get spun and hung. You need to do exactly as Mr. Virtue instructs and leave the Andrazack thing alone. Robert Virtue lacks humor, and there’s lots of heat coming down on that situation. You work it without portfolio against his wishes, and you’re gonna be swept so far out into the bush we’ll never find the hole you’re buried in. That’s the best advice I have.”

  “What about my murder case?” I asked.

  “Believe me, they’re all over it,” Bimini said. “R. A. Virtue and the FBI come off a little headstrong, but they’ve got huge national security concerns to deal with so I try to cut them a little slack. Take it on down the road and leave this to us.”

  “ ’Cept, somebody’s planting bugs all over town,” Emdee said. “We pulled a basketful outta the police administration building yesterday. It’s not hard to guess that Davide Andrazack was over here trying to find out who was bugging the Israelis. I’m also guess’n we’re not all standing up here on this roof ’cause you like the smell of L.A. smog. You ain’t all that sure about your shop either.”

  Just then, the air filtration system switched off, banging loudly as the spinning fans stopped. It was suddenly very quiet.

  “We know you met with Eddie Ringerman at the Russian Roulette last night. We were in the next booth and got it on tape,” Broadway said.

  She smiled. “You’re really gonna try and bluff me with no face cards showing? You’ve gotta do better than that, Roger.”

  “Are we just completely forgetting about the Lincoln Avenue shooting?” Broadway countered. “I thought you were good for your old debts.”

  “That’s five levels below this on the threat assessment board.”

  “Then why don’t you tell us about the ’Eighty-five Problem?” I ventured, and saw immediately that I’d hit a nerve.

  She looked at me sharply. “I guess you were in the restaurant listening,” she said, coloring slightly, not enjoying being busted. After a moment she added, “Okay, since it’s only history, I guess I can tell you a little about that.”

  “We’re waiting,” Broadway said, frustration showing in his strained voice.

  “Back in the eighties, I was stationed at our embassy in Moscow,” she began. “It was the Cold War, and we were mixing it up pretty good with the Reds.” She looked over at me. “I know you’re probably interested in Stanislov Bambarak since he also came to your funeral. Back in the Cold War days, Bam-Bam Stan was a KGB legend. Our paths crossed a lot when I was in Moscow. We never hit it off, because I managed to recruit quite a few of his frontline officers as double agents. It really pissed him off. He got so jacked he ran me in four times and questioned me at the Moscow Motel, which was an interrogation center the KGB had under the Kremlin. Stan couldn’t understand how I kept infiltrating his Apparat. But I was young, pretty, and flirtatious, and his station officers were lonely, horny, and alcoholic. A perfect recipe for defection. The trick was to cook up their emotions, get them half in the bag and see how scared they were that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. The Cold War was winding down and it looked to everybody like we were winning. A good many of these KGB officers were willing to give me covert information in return for a promise that I would arrange for them to come to the States after the Cold War was over. Once the Berlin Wall came down, everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Block fell apart.”

  “We can get all of this on the History Channel,” Roger said, still pissed that his Lincoln Avenue trade hadn’t worked.

  “I was really on a roll in those days,” Bimini continued. “More and more agents were taking my deal. Then, one night in August of ’eighty-five, there was a roundup. Stanislov picked up all of my Russian double agents in the middle of the night and took them to Lubianka Prison in Moscow. Lubianka was a shooting prison. People would go in there and never be heard from again. All of my doubles were interrogated, and then summarily executed. That fat bastard gave the order. They were all shot in the back of the head.”

>   “With a five point four-five millimeter automatic,” Broadway said.

  “That was how they did it back then,” she concurred. “I was devastated. I couldn’t conceive of how Stanislov could have learned about every single one of my assets. I had spread out the case info, distributed their encrypted files to a lot of different service computers. NSA, FBI, CIA…It shouldn’t have all leaked. It became pretty damn obvious that somebody far up in our own system had sold us out. Some embassy official with high security clearance was giving up these Russian double agents. We investigated diligently but couldn’t find out who it was. It came to be known on station as the ’Eighty-five Problem.”

  “And you never caught the guy?” I asked.

  “A few years later, R. A. Virtue got a phone tip at the FBI in Washington, giving him the name of one of our ex-CIA Moscow agents. After a lengthy investigation, Virtue and some other D.C. counterintelligence types finally turned up man named Edward Lee Howard. He’d been passed over for promotion and had gone into business with Stanislov to help beef up his CIA retirement fund. We searched his records, and found out that he had probably given up some of my double agents. But the more we studied him, the more it became obvious that he didn’t know anywhere near all of it. And then before we could bust him, he shook his tail and got out of the U.S. and back to Russia. But I know there was still another traitor out there.”

  “You were in charge of the investigation?” Roger asked.

  “It was my op. But it was Virtue who really made his bones on the ’Eighty-five Problem.” Bimini took a deep breath. “In February of ’ninety-four, Virtue caught another anonymous tip. A CIA officer named Aldrich Ames was eventually arrested for treason. He, too, had been selling the identities of Russian double agents back to the KGB. But again, when we checked his exposure to the names, there was no way he could have known about all of them either. By then Virtue was a rising star in the FBI, and was put in charge of large aspects of the case. We all knew there was still another traitor involved. With the arrest of FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen in two thousand one in Virginia, it finally seemed that we had uncovered the last of them. But as we debriefed Hanssen, we realized that we still couldn’t account for all of the lost KGB doubles. That’s when we knew there had to be a fourth man. Somebody with connections high up in our operation, who also had damn good contacts inside the KGB. In effect, a double-double. Covert intel I’m not willing to give you leads me to believe the fourth man is hiding in L.A. It’s why I’m stationed here today.”

  The air-conditioning unit switched on again, and this time Bimini’s nerves must have been getting to her, because she flinched.

  “Stanislov was probably the one who recruited Howard, Ames, and Hanssen, just like you recruited his double agents,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Bimini replied. “When you boil it down, he had the exact same problem as I did. The fourth man was selling assets to both sides. Stanislov Bambarak’s trying to find him, same as Virtue and me. Bambarak would do anything to get even. Both sides were losing their doubles. We arrested our traitors. Stanislov, asshole that he is, executed his.” She took a breath. “I’m still looking for my last traitor. Hopefully, I’ll beat him to it this time. That’s all I can tell you. The rest is classified.”

  45

  It was almost 2 A.M. when I finally flopped down on my bed in the sparsely furnished safe house. I closed my eyes, but my mind wouldn’t shut down, so I lay on top of the covers, picking at an array of troubling self-doubts. When I’m in these self-analytical moods, attempting to dissect my confusing life journey, I often start with my police academy graduation, the most fulfilling day of my life to that point. I stood at attention in Elysian Park and received my badge, full of pride and a sense of accomplishment. But as the years passed, my pride dissolved in a brutal mixture of street violence and bad rationalizations. As my pride left, the sense of accomplishment I’d won disappeared with it. Then came the drinking.

  But in the beginning, right after graduation, I felt very righteous in my new uniform, armored by its ironed blue fabric and the LAPD badge. It gave me a stature I’d never had before, and I was comforted by the ballsy sound of my own gun leather creaking. I rode the front seat of a department A-car, secure in the belief that my turbulent upbringing had taught me how to survive. I also knew that loners rarely got double-crossed, so I affected a carefully orchestrated isolation. If I didn’t depend on anyone, even my partner, I reasoned, then I was in complete control of my environment. But the obvious flaw in this thinking was since I didn’t depend on anybody, nobody depended on me. I told myself that I treasured that. I was a lone gunman.

  What I had really become was an afterthought on the job. Underneath my strutting arrogance were hidden doubts and a lurking suspicion that I had chosen to isolate myself because I never really mattered to anyone and couldn’t figure out how to change that. I thought if I just didn’t look inward, I wouldn’t have to deal with the insecurities and could believe in that uniformed power image that looked back at me from my mirror each morning. But I was wrong.

  As I stared up at the exposed beams in my borrowed bedroom, I realized that in the last four years I had made a complete transformation. Now I depended almost too much on others.

  I had Alexa and Chooch to share my feelings with. Broadway and Perry were becoming more than just case-mates. I could bask in their banter. It felt good, but I had sacrificed control. This all happened because I opened myself up; made myself vulnerable to others. But just when I finally reached the point where I was maturing into someone I could actually respect, I found myself miles from my wife and son. I was back where I’d started. It surprised me that my new, hard-won sense of self lay behind such a transparent veil of doubts.

  At that moment, my cell phone buzzed. I looked over at the bedside table, watching it pulsate every two seconds doing a little vibration dance. I didn’t give this number out, and Alexa would use the SAT phone, not my cell, so I knew who it was. The phone just kept taunting me, moving stupidly to its right, every time it buzzed.

  There’s a difference between being cautious and just being a pussy, I thought. So I rolled over, opened it, and put the cell up to my ear.

  “Shane,” I said, and waited for Zack to reply.

  “We need to talk, Bubba.”

  His voice sounded tight.

  “Turn yourself in, Zack. Then we’ll talk.”

  “You need to meet with me, just us, face to face.”

  “I’m not meeting with you.”

  “I know what you think. That’s why I jumped you. I had to get outta there.” Then there was a long pause before he said, “I didn’t kill Vaughn Rolaine. You owe it to me to listen. You’ve got to hear my side. I know how it looks. You’re my last chance.”

  I took a deep breath and decided to press him hard and see what happened. “I’ve been wondering about something, Zack. You were getting into a lot of shootouts back when we were in the Valley. How many perps did you light up? Three or four in twelve months? Wyatt Earp didn’t drop that many guys in Dodge City.”

  “We had big problems in that division. IAD investigated. You know they wouldn’t rate them clean kills ’less they were.”

  “Were you covering my ass because you were trying to help me, or because you wanted to keep me on the street ’cause you needed a partner who was too out of it to hurt you at any of those shooting review boards?”

  His pause seemed a fraction too long.

  “Come on,” he finally said. “Whatta you talking about? That’s nuts.” Then he lowered his voice. “You gotta help me. I can’t explain how Vaughn Rolaine ended up in both my cases. It makes me look bad. You gotta help me come up with something.”

  “I’ll meet you in Jeb Calloway’s office anytime you pick,” I said.

  “Get serious. I ain’t goin’ nowhere near Mighty Mouse till I got some answers. I’m not some drooling monster. How can you think that?”

  “It’s there, or nowhere.” Another
long silence stretched between us. “Turn yourself in, Zack. If you’re straight on this, then it’s gonna all come out fine. Nobody is out to sink you, not Alexa, not Jeb, and especially not me.”

  “Yeah, right. Fuck you very much, asshole.”

  Then he was gone and I was listening to a dial tone. I closed the phone and turned it off.

  I got up, went out onto the deck, and sat on one of the canvas chairs under a three-quarter moon. When I looked out at the beautiful canyon, I noticed a pair of feral yellow eyes turned up at me from the sagebrush. They glinted gold in the moonlight for a flash, before disappearing.

  Probably a mountain lion or a coyote. But I’d been on the street long enough to recognize a killer’s eyes. There was predatory hunger in that crafty yellow stare.

  Then a strange thought hit me. When that beast looked up at me, what did he see in my eyes? Was there nobility and honor, or did he see another killer?

  46

  The next morning I called Texaco. After sitting on hold for almost five minutes, a stern woman came on the line and identified herself as franchise manager. She sighed loudly after I explained my time-wasting errand.

  “We don’t generally give out the names of our franchisees,” she snipped. “Wait one moment.”

  More recorded music followed as I dealt with the corporate ego of Chevron Texaco.

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess we can supply that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where was our station located again?”

  “The corner of Melrose and Fairfax in Los Angeles.”

  “One moment.”

  This time she didn’t put me on hold, but came right back on the line.

  “You’re mistaken. We have no franchise located there.”

  “This was back in ’ninety-five. It’s not there anymore. I told that to the first woman I spoke to.”

  “But you didn’t tell me, did you?” Frigid. Finally, I heard computer keys clicking.

  “Okay, ’ninety-five. That station was actually not on a corner, but one up from the intersection with a Melrose Avenue address.”