Red eyed the dial, pointing to the right side of the building. “That narrows it down to one of those apartments. Any way of determining altitude?”
Carter turned the device sideways. It seemed to point toward the second floor. He grinned smugly.
Red took the stairs three at a time. The door was a cheap flat slab, though it held a fat dead bolt. The one on the first floor he’d just passed didn’t have that. The paint was fresh and unchipped. No signs of forcible entry. He drew his pistol and stood to one side. Carter took the other. Both froze in silence for a couple of minutes. No movement sounded from the interior.
The knob didn’t budge. Red stretched an arm and knocked, quickly stepping back. Warm, damp exhaust from the dryer vent of the facing apartment floated by his cheek, smelling of lilac. He pressed an ear to the wall, then the door, cupping a hand to listen. Still nothing.
Carter reached in a pocket and pulled out what looked to be a fat pen.
Red raised an eyebrow. “You know how to pick locks?”
A flat needle poked from one end of the tool. “Some better than others.”
“That’s a Schlage, commercial grade. Won’t be easy.”
Carter glanced back, doubt on his face.
“I’ve got a past you don’t even know about. I picked up some special skills.”
“Like how to pick a Schlage?”
“Yeah.” He snatched the device from Carter’s hand, pushed a red button, and another pin popped from the opposite end—this one thicker. This thing was useless. Needed a breaching ram. But mostly they needed to keep moving. “Whatever.” He flung the instrument at the door, and it stuck just below the peephole like a knife in dirt. He stepped back and launched, planting a flying kick squarely above the handle. The jamb splintered with a sharp crack as the dead bolt ripped through it. The door flung open, slamming against an inside wall, punching the handle through gypsum board. Not the proper way to clear an opening, but it would do.
Red landed low, weapon drawn. Carter followed, wide eyes searching. Red lifted a long brown suede couch and peered beneath. Nothing. He turned a corner into a hall and they cleared the kitchen and two bedrooms. Evidently no one was home. He slipped the sidearm underneath his sweater and holstered it.
Carter went back and yanked the lock pick from the front door it had impaled. Then, gripping the outside handle, he jerked it free from the hold of the drywall. He slowly ran his fingers into the crater where only half the jamb stud remained. He picked out a few shards, allowing the door to close completely, with a little coercion from his shoulder. “Special skills?”
“Works on most locks. Kinda universal.” Red glanced around a taupe-walled living room. Over the couch hung a watercolor painting of ducks with wings set, landing among decoys. He frowned. Was this even the right house? “Get Jamison to call the number again.”
The dial lit up, but no phones rang. Red walked back down the red-oak-floored hallway, stopping between bedrooms. A low buzzing came from the one with an unkempt bed. He lifted a pillow and a black phone with tiny silver keypad glowed yellow, vibrating. “I found it.” He stretched fingers toward the device.
“Don’t touch!” Carter yelled.
He jerked back his hand.
“I swear, you’re worse than a kid.” Carter reached inside to his breast pocket. The coat hugged his V-shaped frame nicely. It looked expensive, like the one Bollywood Mossad had sported. Red glanced in a mirror with a wide silver frame. Green sweater, scruffy red beard, and dark half-moons sagging below his eyes. The whole effect, he decided, suggested a hungover Irishman. Maybe he should pick up some fashion tips from the man.
Carter pulled out two pairs of blue nitrile gloves, handing one set to Red. “I’ll get this.” He slipped the phone into a plastic bag. “Have a look around, but don’t touch anything. The forensics team will appreciate it later.”
Forensics? Sure, they could get a team, even the best in the country, but what would Red tell them to look for? And the more people who knew of their search, the higher the chances any link between Marksman and Lori might lead to another attempt on her life.
“We can’t do that. The only thing we’ve got going for us is keeping a lid on this investigation.”
Carter squared up to him, looking even taller and broader in the mirror’s reflection. His complexion was sallow. “You’re doing it again. You can’t give me a job, then cut my legs off.”
Secrecy is our only ally, Lori had told him. “I’m not saying that. But we don’t know where the leak is. Let’s see what we can get while we’re here. Maybe we don’t need to treat this like a crime scene.”
Carter, expression still morbid but somewhat appeased, walked out of the room. Red stepped around a queen-sized bed. Only one side had covers thrown back. The rest of the room was neat, sparsely furnished. Orange walls with small framed prints of red and blue flowers hung in groups of three. Slowly, he opened bifold closet doors. Two black Pelican rifle hard cases leaned in one corner. Another sized for a large pistol sat on the tan carpet. Atop it, a tidy wooden box.
He leaned to pick up the smaller cases, then straightened. Would Marksman have booby-trapped his closet? Maybe. He knelt and studied the carpet at the threshold, then the wood trim up the sides of the opening and across the top. No trip wires or optical sensors he could discern. Carefully, he reached in and slid the boxes out.
Starting with the plastic case, he slowly pinched two releases. It was an SKB military spec container. He lifted the lid and whistled a catcall. “Hey. Come here.”
Carter stuck his head back in. He was putting clumps of black hair into a plastic bag, using tweezers. “I said don’t touch. What’d you find?”
Red lifted a matte black six-inch Korth PRS. Like a balled fist, a short silencer was affixed to the end. A laser pointer was clamped to a Picatinny rail beneath the slide.
“What is it?”
“About a year’s mortgage. A Korth, the Mercedes of handguns. What’d you find?”
“Got some hair from the shower. For DNA. Also found some baby powder under the sink and used it to lift three prints from the vanity. There’s a laptop on the desk and...” He trailed off, pointing to the wooden case. He stepped next to Red. “What’s in that? Looks like a silver chest.”
Red flipped a brass catch and lifted the lid. The container held a box of Nosler Match Grade 9mm ammunition, an oil rag, but no weapon. Still, the blank cavity in the foam traced a pistol’s distinctive outline, but with a fifty-five-degree grip angle. The Luger. So Marksman was outside their house that night three weeks earlier when a wet team had attacked his family. Even then, he must’ve been protecting them. “Before he died, he said, ‘Give the pistol to my brother.’ He knew we’d find this.”
A black uniform flashed into the doorframe. “Police. Hands up!”
Carter’s arms rose. Red’s eyes flashed to the Korth. It was Marksman’s, so there’d be a full clip and one in the chamber. He could get to it faster than his own pistol beneath his sweater.
“I’m a detective,” Carter said, stepping sideways. “We’re here on official business.”
The officer curled his lip. “Yeah. Detectives always bust doors and trample a scene like a pack of monkeys.”
Carter pursed his lips and squinted at Red. He slowly pulled out the lapel of his coat. “Let me get my ID, and—”
The officer pointed the weapon toward Red. “I said hands up!”
Red hesitated. He could drop and snatch the Korth. The officer might get a shot or two off, but the bed’s mattress would provide some cover while he squeezed a double tap himself. Marksman’s rounds probably had tungsten steel cores. Go right through the man’s Kevlar.
“At me! Point your gun at me,” Carter said. “You don’t want to aim anything at him.”
“Quit talking and put your hands up! Both of you!” The pistol wove like a cobra’s h
ead, moving between the two of them. “We’ll find out who you are in a minute.”
Was Carter wanting Red to make a move? Drawing the man’s attention away on purpose? All Red’s instincts told him to neutralize the threat. He was no peacekeeper. No policeman, either. His nature was to make war, sanitize the area, neutralize the risk, stop it breathing. But this man was an innocent civilian. Then again, how’d he get to the apartment so quickly? And why was he so plainly nervous? It was as if he’d known they would be there.
Carter took a step toward the man, hands still up, and said calmly. “I’m on your side. We’ll wait till your backup arrives. For your own sake, don’t point that toward—”
The officer was unstable. He radiated the aggressive musk of fear. Carter must’ve sensed it too, or he wouldn’t be advancing. The weapon swung once more toward Red. Bending at the knees, throwing himself back, he dropped toward the floor, grabbing the Korth on the way down. One shot from the officer’s gun zipped by his chest. Red squeezed the trigger twice before his back hit the carpet, out of sight behind the mattress. A heavy thud sounded across the room.
“Son of a bitch!” came Carter’s voice, then the scuffling noises of a struggle.
Red peered over the bed, but neither man was in sight. He scrambled around the end. Carter lay atop the officer’s back, holding one uniformed arm racked painfully high. He threw the police revolver upon sheets, then slipped the cop’s own cuffs onto his wrists.
“Don’t shoot me! Please. I’ve got a family,” the officer pleaded through blood-smeared lips.
“I’m not going to shoot you, idiot! I just saved your damn life.” Carter stood, a foot still pinning the man to the floor. He shoved Red in the chest with a free hand. “What the hell was that? You almost shot me.”
“He was unstable.”
Carter snarled, “You’re the unstable one.”
“The guy was going to pull the trigger, even if he didn’t know it.”
Carter pressed a finger to his lips. Pointing toward a pillow, putting on a low, guttural tone, he growled, “Get me the cover.”
Red yanked off the pillow case and Carter tied it over the cop’s head. Groping across his chest, Carter yanked off a body-worn camera and slipped it into his pocket. He leaned close to the man’s ear and whispered, “I saved your life. So we’re the good guys. I suggest you tell your sergeant that while checking the apartment you engaged a suspect and were struck from behind. Now, I’m going to give you a knot on the head. It’ll hurt, but it’ll be convincing. Understand?”
The hooded head nodded.
Carter grabbed a baton from the man’s belt and struck him a glancing blow across the back of the skull. Muffled curses pressed through the gag. Red grabbed the wooden box and the Korth while Carter snatched the laptop and a notepad resting near it. Thirty seconds later, they were driving out a rear entrance as sirens sounded from the front.
Carter flipped through the notepad. “Hmph.”
“What?”
“Jamison, he’s a computer geek. Right?”
“He’s a geek on many levels.”
“This laptop will be encrypted. You’ve got the resources to crack that, though it’ll take time. The notes on this paper are pretty obscure, but here’s one that talks about a leaf.”
Red, pulling back onto Richmond Highway, narrowly dodged a blue RV. The note from his locker had read: Pick up the leaf on your way home. He shot Carter a glance. “We’ve gotta get that thing decrypted before I pull the trigger on this op.”
Chapter 20 – Reload
Red leaned over Jamison’s shoulder, squinting at a laptop screen. His shoes tapped, thumping the floor like a dog scratching a persistent itch. His desk was shoved in one corner of a square cubicle cluster, with a workstation in each corner. Three oil-soaked pizza boxes were stacked on the edge of a printer. The other cubes were separated by a steel work counter spread with computer intestines like a coroner’s table, autopsy in progress.
Red waved a hand as if he were shooing a fly. “Just skip to the point.” The kid had called him back only an hour after Carter had dropped Marksman’s computer off to him.
Jamison’s eyes widened. The geek pushed narrow black cat-eye glasses higher on the bridge of his nose with a pinky. “The hard drive wasn’t encrypted. I just used a password reset USB dongle and got in. All the data is here.”
“OK. But you said you’d found something.” Ask this kid what time it was, and he’d tell you how to build a Swiss watch. Short on sleep now, Red had no patience. Carter stood several steps behind him, keeping his distance.
Jamison wrinkled his nose and shoved his spectacles with his pinky again. “I started going through his e-mail, but thought that’d be too obvious. I checked his browsing history. He’d searched for lots of random stuff, but there were several IP addresses he’d visited regularly. I dialed one and came to a user ID and password screen; both were already input. He’d never cleared his cache.”
Carter leaned onto a desk. “This is too easy.”
Jamison pushed his glasses back up. “How old was this guy?”
Grace hadn’t delivered their file on him yet, so Red guessed. “Midfifties, I’d say.”
“Not uncommon. Elderly folks just don’t know how to cover their tracks.”
Red’s neck tensed, and anger started to rise in his belly. “The ‘old’ guy could speak seven languages and split your skull at three hundred meters.”
Jamison wrinkled his nose, pushing the spectacles back up. “Well, data can be just as deadly.”
Red took a few steps, closing the distance between them. “Only when someone like Marksman decides to act on it.”
Carter’s hand fell on his shoulder, pulling him back. “Let it go,” he said.
Red closed burning eyes. “OK, fine—so what did this IP thing have to say?”
“It was a file server. I’ve only gone through one directory, but called you when I found this memo.” Jamison clicked a mouse and a document filled the screen. The writing looked like blocky hieroglyphs. “I ran it through optical character recognition, then a translator. There isn’t any mention of Mossad, but it’s written in Hebrew.” He glanced up.
“And what made you find this one?” Red asked.
“Ran through files with the most recent updates. The first few were benign. Requisitions. Bank transfer confirmations of small amounts, a couple thousand US dollars at the most. This one...” He paused. “But this one isn’t pretty.”
Red glanced at Carter, now leaning against a partition with a huge black toner stain blossoming in the middle, the picture of disinterest. “Please, help me with this kid.”
Jamison pointed to the document, as if finally getting the hint. “Someone was ordering your man Marksman to shadow the asset, ensuring protection. This guy Marksman was an undercover bodyguard, best I can tell.”
Carter walked to the far side of the examination table. “That would explain why he was at your house, Red, the night the wet team hit.”
Jamison shook his head. “Nope. Can’t be. One, the asset is referred to with a female pronoun. A her.”
Lori? It was becoming difficult to deny a tie between her and Marksman. He pointed to Carter, then an empty office. The two stepped inside and closed its heavy door. Red kept his voice low. “If he was assigned by Mossad to protect Lori, what the hell does that mean? And why’d he carry an antique Luger when he could’ve brought any weapon he wanted?”
“Could be lots of reasons, but who cares? Don’t get sidetracked. You’ve got the note talking about a leaf. That’s one link. You’ve got Marksman’s Luger you found at your house, that’s another. Then he died protecting her. Now you’ve got this protect their asset memo. The data point here is that Lori and Marksman are definitely linked. And with CIA and Mossad saying he was dirty, this doesn’t look good.”
Red drew a breath and
held it. But the idea of Marksman being a mole was crap, too. Still, Carter wasn’t accusing anyone. Yet. “Maybe. But how?”
Carter spoke through gritted teeth. “Ask your wife.”
Red lifted his hands in surrender. “I would if I could find her! She was under CIA’s thumb yesterday at the hospital. Now I can’t even get her on the phone. I’m about to go into the ops center and have someone track her tag.” He would, but couldn’t think of a good excuse to put with the request. He paced the room. The more he learned, the more questions he had.
“Don’t worry about tracking her. It’s only been a day. Hear Jamison out. Information never hurts.”
Unless it comes from Jamison.
The two stepped back into his cubicle cluster. Red pushed a small shiny box out of the way on the workbench to clear a space, breaking a wire affixed to it. Jamison winced but didn’t say anything. Red leaned on the newly tidy surface.
Jamison’s pinky pressed his sliding glasses. “I’ll print you a full translation of the memo, but the CliffsNotes reference a mole within the CIA who leaked a list of names of the Det’s cooperating agencies and foreign governments. Even names of operators, analysts, and agency liaisons. The memo says it’s to North Korea’s Ministry of State Security.”
Red closed his eyes. He had to be misunderstanding. “Say again.”
“A mole, sir. We’ve been burned, it claims. The memo is somewhat vague, but clearly states the intel was uploaded to a North Korean server two months ago.”
Carter leaned on the table now as well, across from Red. “Don’t believe this shit. It’s too convenient. You don’t just find a laptop, unencrypted, with server passwords not cleared from the cache. I don’t know much about computers, but this evidence was planted.”
The information, though painful, was consistent with what he’d heard from Mossad back in the command center. Maybe they had planted the computer, knowing it’d be discovered. Maybe they were trying to frame Marksman for some other leak. Needling pain shot through Red’s temples. If Marksman had been dirty, what about Lori? He massaged the bridge of his nose. Marksman’s reputation was taking hits from all sides, but it could end up sinking Lori’s as well.
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