by Mark Terry
“I can walk,” she said. She was a slim, pretty girl with big brown eyes. Very serious and very smart, she seemed entirely too American to Kalakar.
“But your mom’s not home, Malika. Come on. No arguing.” He kept his voice gentle.
Dominica, her hair black and long and straight, wearing a denim miniskirt and a T-shirt, piped up, “Malika can come to my house, then.”
Kalakar thought Dominica was dressed like a whore. A mouthy, bitchy whore. “Her mother specifically told me to bring her home. We’re going to go see your mother. Come on.”
Doubtful, Malika walked along with him. Dominica, hands on hips, said, “I don’t think you should go with him, Mal.”
Malika seemed doubtful, too. “I … I think it’s okay, Dom. He’s a friend of my dad’s.”
“But you should have a note or something. Your mom should have called the school and told them someone else was picking you up today.”
Kalakar couldn’t believe what a hassle this was turning out to be. He wished the little bitch would shut up. He reached out to take Malika’s hand, aware that some of the parents were starting to pay attention to this little minidrama playing out here. Maybe he should have waited for them to get closer to home, away from the school.
“Your mom was a little busy. There’s been an emergency.”
“An emergency?” Malika’s eyes grew wide. “What kind of emergency?”
“I really think it would be better if she told you about it herself, Malika. Please, we don’t want to be late. Tell your friend goodbye and get in the truck.”
“Is it Daddy? Did something happen to Daddy?”
“Malika, please, just get in the truck. Your mother is waiting for us.”
Malika gave Dominica a last, backward glance, then popped her friend a quick wave and followed Kalakar across the street. She jumped into the front seat and he hurried into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and got out of there fast before anything else could go wrong.
In his rearview mirror he saw Dominica staring after them. The intensity of her gaze made him a little uneasy, but he put it out of his mind. After all, she was only ten years old. What trouble could a ten-year-old girl be?
CHAPTER 38
Derek decided he had better get back into L.A. and pay a visit to the law offices of Jamieson, Perzada, Suliemann and Hill in the Avco Center on Wilshire. It seemed a lot like walking back into the lion’s den—it was right by the Federal Building—but he couldn’t just ignore it. An awful lot of leads seemed to point toward the entertainment attorneys. They employed someone who had been asking around about suitcase nukes. They owned a boat that had been used in a terrorist attack.
He went online and pulled up a website for them. Glancing at his watch, he noted it was almost five o’clock. There was no way he would be able to get back into downtown in anything resembling a reasonable time frame.
Plan B involved calling the two FBI agents in Pakistan.
Instead, he searched his memory and made a call. Shelly Pimpuntikar picked up.
“Oh good. I remembered your number right. It’s Derek.”
“Where are you?”
“Look, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I gather I’m officially off the START team. I’m going to—”
“I’m on my way to Culver City.”
“What? Who are you with?”
“I’m by myself.”
Derek sat up straight. “Shelly, you don’t have any field experience. You really should do fieldwork with a partner. Someone to watch your back. What’s in Culver City?
“Coming from you? Seems like a laugh.”
“Shelly—”
“Derek, if you’re really off the team, I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“Fine. At least call Cassandra.”
“I don’t need her permission—or yours—to follow a lead.”
He sighed. So much for a well-organized START team. “What’s in Culver City?”
“Aleem Tafir rented a storage garage in Culver City. I’m headed over to check on it now.”
With alarm Derek thought of the bomb that went off in the storage facility in Washington, D.C. And that had been an entire experienced START team. “Wait, wait for—”
“I’m almost there. Bye, Derek.”
She clicked off. Frantic, Derek plugged into the net, Googling for Culver City storage facilities. Heart sinking, he discovered there were eight of them.
Turning to the rental car’s GPS unit, he started stabbing in the addresses, planning the fastest routes to each one. As soon as he was done, he stomped on the gas, hoping he got lucky and intercepted Shelly before she got in trouble.
CHAPTER 39
When Shelly Pimpuntikar was ten years old, her parents took her to see the movie, The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert DeNiro. It planted the idea of becoming an FBI agent in her mind, although her parents did little to encourage the notion. Her father was a physician, her mother a veterinarian, and they fully expected their only child to pursue some sort of science field, preferably medicine.
But it became clear early on that Shelly’s head for numbers was going to lead her into business or accounting or, her parents hoped, physics or mathematics or computer science. Because her parents made it so obvious they didn’t support a career in law enforcement, Shelly took what she sometimes thought of as the path of least resistance, and earned a degree in accounting. She became a CPA and took a job at KPML, a large accounting firm in Chicago. She became one of the star players in their forensics division, tracking down mishandled or missing funds.
On September 11, 2001, Shelly, like many others, found herself questioning her background and path in life. She thought someone with her particular set of skills and experience would be a valuable asset in trying to prevent another terror attack. She understood that those three operations hadn’t occurred in a vacuum; they had been well-funded and there had to be a money trail.
So she applied to the FBI. Fresh from the raw wounds of the 9/11 attacks, uncertain of the nature of the enemy, the FBI was not quite ready for a female Muslim FBI agent.
Furious, Shelly left her lucrative job at KPML and returned to school, earning a dual master’s degree in economics and history with a focus on Islamic financial law and, specifically, hawaladars. She completed her degrees, applied to the FBI, and was hired, although her initial placement wasn’t as a special agent, but as support staff for an organized-crime unit in New York City.
It had taken several more years of constant applications before she was transferred to special agent status in the finint division. Mostly she was expected to stay in the office and crunch numbers, but Shelly had more ambitions that that, perhaps remembering the movie character of Agent Oscar Wallace, the FBI agent from accounting who realized they could bring Al Capone down via tax evasion charges.
Shelly checked her gun and pulled her bucar into the parking lot of Bel Vista Toro Self-Storage. Her cell phone rang. She glanced at it and noted that it was Derek again. She ignored it, letting it turn over to voice mail. He was going to be patronizing and lecture her on proper procedure, but from what she had seen, the man was a cowboy who never spent any time following proper procedures. Besides, all she was going to do was check things out.
She walked into the office, a small trailer-like structure whose sole occupant looked like he was interested in leaving for the day. He was leaning back in a creaky old office chair covered with cracked green leather, a small color TV playing soundlessly in one corner. In one hand he had a cell phone and from what she could tell, he was either playing some sort of video game on it or looking at pictures of some sort. Maybe twenty-five, his head was shaved bald, and his goatee was black. He barely glanced at her.
“Just about closed for the day,” he said. “We’ve got a couple boxes open for rent, though.”
She held up her badge. “I’m with the FBI. I’m afraid I’ll need a little bit more of your attention than this.”
<
br /> The expression on his face didn’t change much, but he looked at her. One hand swept over the shaved scalp. “Yeah?”
She stood at the counter and cocked her head. “You rented a storage locker to a man named Aleem Tafir.”
The guy shrugged. Bulging biceps and a potbelly pushed at his blue shirt. “Okay.”
Shelly felt the fabric of her patience fray just a little bit. “I would like you to verify this for me, please.”
He clicked a couple keys on his cell phone and dropped it in his shirt pocket. Acting as if she was asking for a lung or a kidney, he hauled himself to his feet, pointedly looking at his watch as he did so. As if in slow motion, he shuffled over to the computer on the counter.
“What’s that last name again?”
“Tafir,” she said.
Frowning, he tapped at the keys. He scratched at the goatee, wiped a finger across one eye. “Nope.”
She craned to look around at the screen. “T-A-F-I-R,” she said. “Not T-A-Y-F-U-R.”
“Huh. Spell that again?”
She did. He tapped away. “Al—how you pronounce that first name?”
“Aleem.”
“Raghead, right?”
She blinked. “He is Pakistani. I don’t believe ‘raghead’ refers to Pakistanis.”
“Whatever. Yeah. He rents a box. Started in June, pays by the month. Visa.”
“What number is the box?”
Her slow-mo pal blinked like a turtle. “Number?”
“Yes. What is the identification and location of the storage unit?”
“Oh.” He stared at the computer screen. He frowned, tongue poking at the inside of his cheek. “You’re with the FBI, you said?”
“Yes.”
“I see that ID now?”
With a barely concealed sigh, Shelly handed him her FBI credentials. He took it and stared at it. “Yeah. How you pronounce that last name?”
“Pimpuntikar.”
“Pimp-yer-car?” His expression showed blank expectancy. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he came off, Shelly thought. He seemed to enjoy yanking her chain. Or maybe he was just bored.
“Close enough,” she said.
“You got a warrant or something?”
“No,” she said. “But if you think we need one just to get the number of the storage unit, I’ll have to take you down to the Federal Building in downtown L.A. while I write one up and then hunt up a judge. Should take a couple hours. You’ve got plenty of time, though, right?” She was bluffing, but it was a good bluff.
He stared at her, mouth half open. After a moment in which she swore she could hear the rusty gears in his head clank and grind, he said, “Unit eighty-three. It’s toward the back. If you want to enter—” He reached beneath the counter and Shelly tensed, hand darting toward her gun. He pulled out what looked like a white credit card—an electronic keycard. “—just use this. Drop it in the mail slot when you leave.”
She took the keycard from him. “You’re leaving?”
“My shift is over. Time to go home.”
“And does someone work the next shift?”
“No. We just have someone here during the day in case someone wants to rent a unit.”
She raised the keycard. “Thanks. You’ve been very helpful.”
He shrugged.
She walked over to the gate and used the keycard. The gate ground open and she walked through, looking for unit 83.
CHAPTER 40
Derek careened into the parking lot of Palm’s Self Storage. A stoop-shouldered woman in her sixties was locking the door of the office. She looked as if a stiff breeze could blow her away. He rushed over. “Did someone just stop in here?”
The woman, her white hair looking like it had been cut with a butcher knife, shook her head. “Been dead today. You lookin’ for someone?”
“A woman. She’s coming to one of the Culver City self-storage places. She’s FBI.”
“You FBI?”
He flashed his ID. “Homeland Security.”
“Haven’t seen anybody in an hour or two. Sorry. What’s this about?”
Without answering, he returned to his rental, jabbing the number for Shelly’s cell. He gritted his teeth when it shifted him over to voice mail. Dammit, Shelly. “Shelly, it’s Derek. I’ve got a bad feeling. I trust my intuition. Don’t go in there without me. Call me.”
And the feeling was really bad. He knew he could be just as wrong as anybody else, but he paid attention to his instincts. His instincts told him something was wrong, seriously wrong.
Jumping into the Nissan, he checked the list on the GPS. Three down. Five more to go. The next stop was called Bel Vista Toro Self-Storage. He screeched out of the parking lot, blood roaring in his ears.
CHAPTER 41
The little girl, Malika Seddiqi, wouldn’t shut her mouth. Kalakar was doing the best he could to keep her relaxed, but she was pestering him with questions:
Where are we going?
Is my Mommy okay?
Is it my Daddy?
What’s going on?
She was persistent. He tried to reassure her. Kalakar knew the time would come when she would realize exactly what the situation was, but he was trying to delay that as long as possible, certain it would create its own set of problems. So his answers were: I’m taking you to your mother. She’s the one that asked me to pick you up at school. I think your father is just fine (although I’m mighty angry with him, child, and you can blame him for your current predicament), and I think it would be better for your mother to tell you.
When he pulled into the entrance of the Bel Vista Toro Self-Storage facility, Malika said, “My mother’s here?”
“No, honey. I just need to stop here and drop something off.” It was going to be a headache enough trying to keep the girl quiet. He might have to rent a motel room and tie her up and gag her. He didn’t want to take the risk of driving around L.A. for the next fifteen or sixteen hours with a Stinger missile in the back of his pickup truck. He didn’t want to get pulled over by a cop or any other fluke of bad luck that might happen to scramble his careful plans more than they already were.
He noted the Grand Marquis in the parking area, but was too distracted by the girl to think much of it. He pulled the keycard from his pocket and activated the gate.
“What are you dropping off?”
“Just some things I don’t want to carry around with me.”
“What?”
Kalakar sighed and shot the little girl an annoyed look. Maybe he should tie and gag her and leave her in the storage unit; except he was going to need her to leverage her father into helping him. “Do your parents ever tell you you talk too much?”
“Daddy says asking questions is good. Mommy does, too. She says I have an active mind.”
“And an active mouth.”
The little girl pouted. “Don’t you like me?”
Kalakar closed his eyes for a moment. “Of course I like you, Malika. But I’ve got a lot on my mind right now and you’re kind of distracting me.”
“Why are you here?”
“I told you—”
“No, here in the United States. Daddy says you’re an old friend, but he doesn’t act like he knows you very well.”
And doesn’t act like he likes me very much, Kalakar thought.
“I’ve just got some business to do, and your parents let me stay with them a while to save money.”
He pulled the truck up to his rented unit and clambered out. Malika slithered out and came around to his side of the truck. He snapped his fingers at her. “Get back in the truck.”
“Why? I’ve never seen one of these places before. I want to see.”
“There’s nothing to see. Now get back in the truck.”
She crossed her arms over her narrow chest and scowled at him. She looked exactly like her mother at that moment and he wanted to do nothing more than slap that petulant expression off her face. But he would not strike this girl. If he could not con
trol a ten-year-old girl without resorting to violence, he wasn’t much of a mujahedin.
“You’re not the boss of me.”
He modulated his voice so he would sound angry without shouting. “Malika, get back in that truck right this instant or I will tell your mother what a bad girl you’ve been.”
“I have not!”
“Now.”
“No.”