by David Grace
“Are you sure? I didn’t notice anything,” Jason said, nervous now that they were into the trees and the highway was almost out of sight behind them. The dirt road took a jog to the right and Jason saw a silver Jeep Cherokee parked at a wide spot fifty feet ahead. “What the hell is–” Jason began, staring at the Jeep, but stopped when he heard the CLACK of Farber’s weapon being cocked.
“Change in plans, kid,” Farber said, his nine-millimeter pointed at Jason’s head.
“How much did he pay you?” Jason blurted out. It was a dumb question, he knew. What difference did it make to him anyway? But a man tends not to do his best thinking when a loaded gun is being pointed at his head. Farber answered anyway.
“Enough. Take it easy and you’ll live through this. You’ll be a little cold back in the trunk but we’ll tell them where to find you once we’re safe. Now, slowly, put your hands on the dash.”
This was the most dangerous time for both men. Jason still had his weapon. If he managed to get it out and started firing inside the car anything could happen. The odds were that Farber would blow him away before he ever got off a shot but there was always the chance that he might get lucky. Comply or fight? If Farber was going to kill him anyway one chance in a hundred was better than no chance at all.
“I’m not going to screw around with you, kid. You’ve got until I count to three. Then I pull the trigger. One.”
Jason tried to find some hint of fear or uncertainty in Farber’s face. He might as well have been looking at a mannequin.
“Two.”
Jason put his palms flat on the dash. Farber reached all the way over and used his left hand to snap a cuff on Jason’s right wrist.
“Keep your hands straight out in front of you and slowly turn to face me.”
Still using his left hand Farber snapped the other handcuff on Jason’s left wrist, then he backed out of the driver’s seat, never taking his gun off Kane. Once outside Farber grabbed the chain linking Jason’s cuffs and pulled him across the seat and out the driver’s door. In an instant he had Jason pinned face down with his knee on the young man’s neck. Strong hands quickly removed Jason’s weapon. A moment later Jason heard the THUNK of the trunk being opened.
“On your feet.” The pressure on Jason’s neck relaxed and he felt himself being hauled upright. A shove sent him stumbling toward the back of the car. “Get into the trunk.”
He’s not going to kill me after all, Jason thought and released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The cruiser’s steel floor was cold as he clambered over coaming and curled down into the trunk. Twisting his face up he saw Farber silhouetted against the dirty sky.
“Sorry, kid,” Farber said. “Nothing personal,” then he centered his gun and fired a bullet through Jason Kane’s brain. Farber took a breath then switched to a two-handed grip for the next two rounds. Guys had lived with a bullet in their heads. Look at the kid’s uncle, still alive and kicking after taking one to the noggin. But no one was coming back from three shots in the center ring. Farber shut the trunk then opened the rear door.
“Clothes, ID and money are in the Jeep,” he said as he unhooked Munroe’s shackles. Munroe stepped out and took a long, deep breath.
“Free air. It’s good to breathe free air again.” Munroe held out his right hand. “Keys.”
No smile, Farber noticed. No thanks either. A cold fish. No emotion. All business, which, Farber figured, was just as it should be. In the real world life didn’t pat you on the head and give you a free lollipop. You did the job and you took what you wanted.
“I’ll be in touch,” Munroe said. “I’m going to have a lot of work that needs to be done.”
“Contact me through the email address that I left with your new ID. And don’t forget the rest of my money.”
“Don’t worry about your second payment. Like I said, I’ve got more work for you.” Munroe turned and walked to the Jeep. Farber had located an abandoned barn where he planned to stash the cruiser until nightfall but first he drove it to within half a mile of the prison where he disconnected the GPS. As far as the Department was concerned he and Kane made it to Sykesville before the car went off the grid.
He had considered and discarded several scenarios for dumping the cruiser from just leaving it parked someplace a hundred miles away to bribing the night-shift guard at a junk yard into crushing it into a cube of scrap iron bound for China. But simpler was always better. He’d found an isolated spot not far from where Liberty Lake turned into the Patapsco river where he could sink the cruiser in thirty feet of water without any witnesses. Yesterday he’d called in sick and stashed a clean car a two mile walk away. He had one of Munroe’s guys pick him up a mile beyond that. He didn’t like involving other people but getting a ride back to town was safer than taking the bus. Besides, even if the guy ever talked, the junker Farber has stashed would be scrap metal long before they started looking anywhere near the place where his ride had picked him up.
Half a million dollars, Farber thought, assuming Munroe paid the second installment, and Farber figured that Munroe would pay it. That was another of the differences between them. If he had been in Munroe’s shoes he would have skipped the country and never looked back. What could he, Farber, do if he didn’t get the rest of his money? Sue? But Munroe wasn’t built that way. He wasn’t an ordinary crook. He had a Cause. He was a man on a mission. Farber had no idea what that mission was beyond some vague grudge against the government, against the idea of there being a government at all, but who the fuck cared? Mearle Farber was a quarter-millionaire and, he thought, he’d soon to be a half millionaire. Whatever crazy schemes Ryan Munroe had were of no interest to him as long as the money kept rolling in.
Farber checked the darkened highway down the hill from the barn where he was parked then quietly pulled the cruiser out into the night.
* * *
“Agent Kane? Agent Kane?” Danny repeated. “Are you all right?”
Kane blinked and the vision of Mearle Farber murdering his nephew faded but did not completely disappear.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he mumbled, still in a fog.
“What do we do?” Danny asked.
“Do? About what?”
“About the tape, about this Mearle Farber maybe having something to do with Albert Brownstein?”
“We find him,” Kane said, staring into Danny’s worried face. And then I’ll kill him, he whispered only to himself.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kane planned the events of the following morning as if plotting an affair. Step one was getting Useless to cooperate, which wasn’t very difficult as long as Kane dangled the right bait.
“Grant,” Greg half-whispered followed by a “come here” wave. Reflexively Eustace glanced toward Immerson’s office then rolled across the aisle in his chair. Typical, Kane thought, too lazy to even stand up and walk over.
“What’s up, Big Guy?” Eustace asked. Kane hated Useless’ little nicknames – “Big Guy”, “Chief”, “Boss”, “Killer” – but this morning he struggled to keep his displeasure off his face.
“I’m on to something. It could be big,” Greg said. Eustace would be suspicious if Kane flat-out said it was big. Paranoid by nature Grant responded more readily to the hint of a big score than the actual promise of one.
“What’s up?” Eustace asked, cocking his head to one side.
“I think I may have stumbled across a terrorist attack in the offing.”
“A bomb?” Eustace asked, clearly interested.
“Probably a chemical or bio-weapon. You want to help me shut it down?” He might as well have asked a German shepherd if it was interested in a free steak.
“I’m all ears.” Eustace hunched forward a couple of inches.
“The HHS director responsible for keeping out toxic chemicals and bio-weapons has disappeared. It could be that somebody’s trying to coerce him into bringing some bad stuff into the country. We need to find him before that can happen. You up f
or a little legwork?”
The only legwork Eustace liked was kicking down doors and he flinched back a couple of inches but Kane knew that he was still hooked. The thought of grabbing a bunch of terrorists was Useless’ wet dream. Kane could tell that Grant was already imagining the press conference where he received a personal commendation from the Attorney General.
“What do you need me to do?”
Kane pulled out the Brownstein file and dropped it in Eustace’s lap. “We need to find the victim’s car. If we can figure out where they dumped it we might be able to get some video of them, maybe even catch their plate. Plus, that’ll firm up our time line about exactly when they grabbed him.”
“Did it have a GPS?” Eustace asked. If Brownstein’s Volvo had GPS I’d have found it an hour after getting the case, moron! Kane thought.
“No, that would have been a $2,500 option.”
“Cheapskate, huh,” Eustace said with a little laugh and flipped open the file for no purpose other than having something to do. “You want me to put out a BOLO and check with parking enforcement?”
For a split second Kane thought about actually playing it straight then gave it up as a waste of time. The old saying, Pearls before swine, ran through his head.
“Sure, those are good ideas but we need to dig a little deeper. I think that they might have dumped it in one of the Metro lots or at the Amtrak or the airport. We need to contact airport and Metro Security and get them to run the victim’s plate through their systems and then send us any video showing when it clocked into their lot. Are you up for handling that?”
“What are you going to be doing?” Eustace asked suspiciously.
“I thought I’d take Rosewood over to HHS to try to get a line on the kind of chemicals that we should be on the lookout for.”
“The kid? What do you need him for?”
“Do you know anything about chemistry?”
“Yeah, right!” Eustace snorted.
“There you go.” Kane stood and waved in Danny’s direction. “I’ll catch up with you in a couple of hours.” Eustace stared at Kane, his lips pulled into a tight line. He smells something wrong but he isn’t sure what, Kane thought.
“I hope we don’t end up having to shoot it out with them.”
A shoot out? Eustace thought. With terrorists? Holy shit!
“Yeah, we wouldn’t want to get into something like that,” Grant agreed.
“You’ve got this covered?”
“I’m all over it, Big Guy.”
Kane stretched his lips into a semblance of a smile and motioned for Rosewood to follow him. With Danny in his wake Kane stuck his head into Immerson’s office.
“I’m borrowing Rosewood to help me retrieve some surveillance tapes,” he told the boss. “We’ll be back before lunch.”
Immerson looked up from the manpower logs barely in time to catch a glimpse of Rosewood’s back heading toward the exit. He could have stopped them but he found the vision of himself standing in the doorway and shouting at Kane undignified and bad for morale. Kane was going to do whatever he wanted anyway and so long as he closed cases without pissing off the FBI or some federal judge Immerson was willing to give him a little slack.
* * *
Kane got behind the wheel of a four-year old department Crown Vic and a second later Danny piled into the passenger seat. The truth was that Greg didn’t need Rosewood but Immerson had a bug up his ass about allowing Kane out of the office alone. Greg figured that if he had to spend every trip into the field with Useless, sooner or later he was going to lose it and kick Grant’s ass. At least he wasn’t likely to end the day breaking Rosewood’s nose.
Danny clicked his seatbelt and stared thoughtfully through the windshield. They drove a block in silence. Kane liked the fact that the kid knew when to keep his mouth shut. Even though Danny was no genius Kane decided that maybe he could be trained.
“I know you read the Brownstein file,” Kane began. “What’s your take on what happened to him?”
“The guy I spotted on the tapes grabbed him,” Danny answered.
“We don’t know that the man on the tape had anything to do with Brownstein. Maybe our guy just ran off.”
“You think so?”
“Why do you think he didn’t?”
Danny looked around as if the answer might be written on one of the storefronts sliding past their windows.
“Well?”
“It doesn’t seem like something he would do,” Danny answered as if asking a question.
“People do things for a reason. Half the time it’s a stupid reason – they’re pissed off or arrogant jerks or insecure or whatever but there’s always some reason. Brownstein had a month’s accrued vacation. If all he’d wanted was some time off he didn’t need to disappear. All he had to do was pick up the phone. You checked his financials. Degenerate gamblers and drug addicts don’t have $19,000 sitting in an IRA earning a big one-percent interest. No agency had any open cases on him. He wasn’t running from the law or an ex-wife. So, why would Brownstein have run away?”
“I guess he wouldn’t have,” Danny said.
“So, if he didn’t run away it stands to reason that he was taken away. Why do people get grabbed?”
Danny parted his lips then clamped them shut.
“It’s not a rhetorical question.”
“Uhhh, ransom?”
“Is Brownstein’s family rich enough to make him a target for kidnappers?”
“His father’s a dentist. His mother’s a retired school teacher.”
“So, that’s a ‘no’ on the rich family question?”
“He wasn’t likely kidnapped for ransom,” Danny agreed.
“Do you see him dealing coke and failing to pay his supplier or sleeping with the wife of some guy in a biker gang or something like that?”
“No. That’s pretty unlikely,” Danny agreed.
“It’s more than that. If someone had a personal motive to hurt him they would have just killed him. If you stiff a shylock then they leave your body in front of your house as a warning to other would-be deadbeats. If you fool around with the wrong guy’s wife he just blows your head off. But somebody went to a lot of trouble to make Brownstein disappear. What could be the motive for something like that?”
“The only reason I can think of is that it has something to do with his job,” Danny replied.
“OK. Let’s see if we can narrow that down. Maybe somebody had the idea that they could slip some coerced paperwork into the system, get a shipment through customs over Brownstein’s signature, but we’ve already had ICE flag anything with his name on it and nothing has shown up. If that was the plan they’d have run the bogus paper and gotten their shipment in before anyone noticed he was missing. The longer he’s gone the more likely people would start looking for something like that.” Kane glanced at Danny and almost asked, So, what does that tell us about why they grabbed him? but the blank look on Danny’s face killed that idea.
“Here’s the thing that stands out – it’s easy to kill a citizen. Bang-bang and he becomes another statistic – a drive-by shooting, he runs into a drug addict desperate for some cash, he becomes part of a gang-banger initiation – that stuff happens every day. So if someone wanted him dead why would they disappear him instead of killing him on the street?” Danny just stared.
“Because the point wasn’t to get him to do something but rather to prevent him from doing something. If you kill a bureaucrat another one steps in to take his place. If a bureaucrat disappears then the system freezes up. Everything has to wait until they’re sure that the guy is really gone. Then they have to process a ton of paperwork to declare his job vacant and then they’ve got to go through all the civil service mumbo-jumbo to bring in somebody new. In the meantime everything’s in a holding pattern. It could take months to get Brownstein’s department back on track. We need to find out what projects were on his desk for the next few weeks, what was in the works that someone might have wante
d to keep from happening.”
“So, we’re going over to his office to talk with his assistant?”
“First, we’re going to check the bus station.”
“Why the bus station?” Danny asked more curious than confused.
“If you want people to think that a guy has just run off you dump his car someplace that’ll make it look like he’s still alive but hiding out. Airports and train stations are no good because you’ve got to show your ID to buy a ticket and the first thing we’d discover is that Brownstein didn’t get on a plane to New Orleans or hop a train to Florida. You don’t need to show any identification to take a cross-country bus so if you’re smart the bus station is where you’ll dump the car to make it look like the guy is on the run.”
“What if they’re not smart?”
“That’s why Eustace is checking the train stations and airport parking lots. Just in case.” Kane pulled into the bus station and began to cruise the aisles. “Keep an eye out for Brownstein’s Volvo,” he told Danny, secretly figuring that they had maybe a ten-percent chance of actually finding it.
Five minutes later Danny shouted, “There it is!” and pointed excitedly toward the end of the row. “Gee, Agent Kane, you must be some kind of a genius.”
“Yeah, I’m a genius,” Kane agreed, all the time thinking of his failed marriage and his shattered Baltimore PD career.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Grant Eustace’s happy vision of himself knocking over balaclava-clad terrorists like tin ducks in a shooting gallery quickly faded into frustrated tedium. He stopped counting Metro stations when he got to fifty and that didn’t include the Dulles and Reagan parking lots and the separate Amtrak lots at each airport and the ones around Union Station. What the hell kind of crap job has Kane stuck me with anyway? he grumbled. Still, Eustace reminded himself, Kane closed cases. Grant picked up the phone and made the next call on his list. What kind a cheapskate jerk buys a Volvo S60 and doesn’t get the GPS package? Eustace muttered then stood and tried to untwist the kink in his back.