The Enemy Inside

by Steve Martini

  “I’m not talking to any cops,” she says. “I do that, I’ll lose my job.”

  “OK. All right. But you can give us a written statement.”

  She thinks about this. “I suppose. On condition that I don’t have to talk to the police.”

  “Fine,” I tell her, as if a signed affidavit under penalty of perjury won’t have them knocking on her door.

  “You said you were willing to pay.” Brutus standing at the end of the bed inserts himself as her business manager.

  “Only if we have to,” I tell him. “It would be best if we didn’t. For our client as well as for Ben.”

  She shoots me a startled look, surprised that I know her name.

  “For legal reasons it would be better if no money changed hands on this.”

  “No. That ain’t gonna work,” he says. “You’re gonna have to pay. Don’t tell them anything more and don’t sign anything. Not ’til we see the color of their money.”

  “Who am I talking to, you or her?” I look up at him.

  “Right now you’re talking to me,” he says.

  “And what is it exactly that you can tell us that might be helpful?”

  “I can tell you to jam it up your ass,” he says.

  “Hey, hey. None of that,” says Herman.

  “Tell your monkey man here to put a cork in it.” He looks at Herman and rolls the bow in his neck until it looks like a python crawled under his jacket.

  “You know, we can go outside and monkey man here can get a hammer and fix that for ya,” says Herman. “What you need’s a good spinal adjustment and a colonic.”

  “Who’s gonna do it? You?”

  “Jeff, that’s enough!”

  He looks at her. The muscles in his jaw relax just a hair so that he is no longer crushing his molars.

  “I know what he wants. How much are you willing to pay?” she asks.

  We’re back to this.

  “What we talked about earlier.”

  “Twelve-fifty?”

  I nod.

  She looks at him.

  He gives her an expression as if to say, “it ain’t much” even though he was willing to sell her body for it ten minutes earlier. “Where’s the money?” he asks.

  “At my bank,” I tell him. “The ATM.”

  “See? They don’t even have the cash,” he tells her. “How were you gonna pay her for her services?” He turns this on me.

  “I wasn’t.” He still doesn’t get it.

  FOURTEEN

  A pimp and his ride,” says Herman. He is glaring at the shiny new black sports car that Ben and her boyfriend slip into out in the parking lot as we get ready to leave the motel.

  It grinds on Herman as we settle into the worn seats of my beat-up Wrangler to lead them to the office. I have called ahead. Brenda, who was working late, is waiting for us so she can type up the affidavit. It is best that we get this done now, without any delay. The longer the girl thinks about it, the greater the danger that Ben may come down with a case of second thoughts and disappear. That or Midas her manager may get greedy and up the price. We need to strike while we still have the scent of money to hold their interest.

  “First the bank,” I tell Herman.

  He is driving my car, leaving his Buick parked back by the club. We can pick it up later. Herman hasn’t had anything to drink. Besides, I’d rather not make it a parade to the office.

  We loop around and head east on Narragansett, back toward the airport and I-5. Herman glances in the rearview mirror every few seconds to make sure they are following us.

  “You think you can find this guy Becket?” he asks.

  “I am hoping that maybe we won’t have to.”

  “Told you,” says Herman.

  I am starting to fall under the sway of his original notion, that if we give the police a strongly worded affidavit and then lead them quickly to the witness, that she may go to pieces in front of them, enough to convince them she is telling the truth. If that happens, the entire case may disappear. They will dump the charges on Ives and we can go back to afternoon naps in the office.

  “What do you think a car like that runs?”

  I look over and catch Herman checking out the sleek black luxury sports car in the mirror. There is a look of lust in his eye and it is not for the woman in the front seat.

  “I don’t have a clue,” I tell him. “Never shopped for one. As you might have guessed, I’m not into cars.”

  “I’d like to be,” says Herman. “That one, the series, the wheel package, leather interior, navigation . . . think it comes in a convertible hardtop?”

  “Beats me.”

  “I think that one’s a convertible hardtop.” Herman convinces himself. “Fully tricked out, trip the meter, I’m guessing six figures. You’re talkin’ a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten thousand you get the little brass cup holders. We’re definitely in the wrong business.”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” I tell him.

  “I wonder if he pays any taxes.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”

  “What?”

  “You know he’s takin’ all the money from the girl, don’t you? Probably got a stable of ’em to boot. He can afford a car like that, she’s gotta be givin’ him beaucoup bucks.”

  “And your point is?”

  “Say we feed him to the IRS?” Herman looks over at me with a gleam in his eye. “No. No, listen,” he says. “They tell me you get ten percent of whatever the wolf man gets in back taxes and penalties. That’s probably more than you make in a year. More than I make in a decade. Besides, what’s he gonna do with a car like that, they ship him to Terminal Island. What I hear, they don’t let you drive there. He ain’t gonna need that car,” says Herman. “Pick it up for chump change. And besides, you be doin’ her a favor.”

  “You know, Herman, that’s what I like about you the most.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve got such a big heart, always looking out for orphans and defenseless women,” I tell him.

  He laughs.

  “Let’s not forget the bank.” If he blows past that stop there is going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth and noisy disappointment from the car behind us.

  We work our way toward Harbor Drive, swing onto it and head toward downtown. As we approach the airport, we pick up speed. By now the rush hour is ebbing. We roll along in front of the airport doing forty, catching all the lights. Herman has them timed.

  “Where’d they go?” He’s looking in the mirror.

  “What?”

  “They’re gone.”

  I turn and look. “No, they’re not. They’re in the inside lane.” They are just behind us in the lane to our right, the hood of the dark sports car moving up on us, sitting in Herman’s blind spot, in the gap between the rearview and passenger-side mirrors. Herman keeps stealing glances into the glass but he still can’t see them. “What’re they doin’ out there? Why don’t they stay behind us?”

  As he says it, the car pulls forward until it is even with us. Herman is gaining speed. I glance at our speedometer. He is doing fifty.

  “Slow down!”

  I look over at the other car and the hulk behind the wheel is looking down trying to do something with one of the controls on the dash while he steers with the other hand. Suddenly he turns and looks directly at me through the driver’s-side window. There is a quizzical expression on his face, something between surprise and panic. He yells at me, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.

  The girl in the passenger seat is terrified. She looks at me, her eyes two huge ovals as she struggles for a handhold on the leather seat. The roar of the accelerating engine as it’s jammed into passing gear sounds like a jet heading down the runway. The girl’s hair streams back around the headrest, her body thrust deep in the seat by the sudden force of the acceleration. The last vision I get of either of them. They rocket past the entire line of cars
in our lane.

  “What the hell?” says Herman. “Is he crazy?”

  “Stay with them,” I tell him.

  “Are you kidding? He’s gotta be doin’ ninety.”

  “Follow him!”

  Herman jerks his head to check the blind spot and gooses the Jeep into the right lane. He picks up speed, weaves in and out of a few cars.

  I watch the black car as its taillights fade into two dim red specks in the distance. Herman is getting up on seventy by the time I see the traffic light up on the Pacific Highway maybe a quarter of a mile away. The light is red. There is a growing line of cars stopped in both lanes. I can’t tell if Ben and her boyfriend are there.

  Suddenly a huge flash erupts off to our left, a billowing ball of orange and yellow flame. It lasts for a few seconds and is quickly engulfed in dark black smoke. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, somewhere off in the distance.

  “Airport runway,” says Herman.

  It’s the right location. It appears to be in the area of the blast deflectors at the end of the runway where the jets turn up their engines for takeoff. But as we approach the area I can see a large passenger jet sitting there waiting for clearance. No problem.

  The smoldering flames, the smoke that is now several hundred feet in the air, are beyond the airport, just to the other side.

  Herman takes a left on Laurel and races toward the smoke. Another left on Pacific Highway and there it is. The flaming remains of a fuel tanker truck, both trailers ablaze.

  Herman brings the Jeep to a stop in the middle of the road. Traffic is shutting down. People are running frantically away from the gas station where the truck is parked. A fueling hose already on fire snakes from the front trailer into a hole in the blazing concrete apron of the station fed like a burning fuse into one of its underground tanks.

  Under the center section of the truck’s rear trailer, its crumpled nose embedded and flaming, almost unrecognizable, is what is left of the black sports car. Herman was right. Its hard convertible top has been opened and peeled back either by the force of the collision or the blast that followed. The searing heat generates its own wind. In the dancing flames, two figures still strapped in their seats, little more than bobbing skeletons, seem to dance in the heat waves that rise up from the blistering asphalt pavement under the car.

  Without warning, the blast hits us, a gust of searing heat so intense that I don’t even hear the sound of the explosion as the shock wave passes through us. I shield my face with one hand and turn away as Herman and I try to huddle, taking what cover we can below the dashboard of the Jeep. The concussion rocks the car and leaves us momentarily stunned. I can hear nothing but the pounding of my own heart, as if I have been immersed in a sea of instant silence.

  As I raise my head above the dash I see that most of the truck is gone. Only the frame of the tractor with its engine block and dual rear axle remain, the melted rubber from its tires still flaming as black smoke rises from the wreck. There is no sign of the car or its two occupants, only a massive molten hole in the ground where moments before I had seen it.

  FIFTEEN

  Ana Agirre methodically tracked the location of the signal as she drove south down I-5. She continually glanced across to the passenger seat of her rental car as she watched the beeping signal on the map overlay from her open laptop. The signal was being fed by a small satellite antenna on the car’s dash that was wired into the computer.

  Just as she passed under Interstate 8, less than four miles from the city center, she looked back up at the road and saw a massive ball of fire as it erupted in the distance somewhere off to the right of I-5. Whatever it was, she guessed that it was no more than two, maybe three miles ahead. The ball of flame continued to roll high into the sky as if in slow motion, brilliant yellow turning to orange until it was enveloped in a thick veil of black smoke. Both hands on the wheel, she glanced back over at the computer and its beeping signal. The location of the explosion and the signal on the map caused the muscles in her stomach to tighten.

  She veered to the right onto the shoulder of the freeway and gunned the small car, passing a line of slower vehicles. Traffic on the highway began to pile up as she got closer to the column of smoke. The roiling black cloud, like an evil genie out of its bottle, reached several hundred feet into the air as it drifted across the elevated freeway ahead. She could see cars, their front ends dipping in a parade of red lights, as drivers stomped on their brakes.

  Agirre took an exit and found herself emerging down a long ramp from the freeway onto a broad surface street. It was three lanes in each direction divided by a raised curb and the cylindrical concrete pillars supporting the overhead freeway. There were signs to the airport ahead. She followed them and within minutes found herself driving through a dense fog of black soot. She turned the fan of the air con to the off position on the little car’s dash to keep the acrid smoke from filling the passenger compartment.

  Ana began to wonder if they had used her equipment to bring down an airplane. If so, she would be running for cover for the rest of her life. The US authorities would turn over every rock to find out who was responsible. If they found any trace of the equipment it would lead back to her. She navigated blindly for three blocks until the breeze off the ocean began to clear the air, pushing the smoke to the east, toward downtown.

  As she eased into an intersection behind traffic, Ana saw the burning wreckage off to her right, the smoldering remains of a truck. Next to it was a cavernous hole in the ground belching smoke and flame, the odor of gasoline wafting in the air. The electronic baying of emergency vehicles in the distance could be heard as they approached the scene, first responders. She looked for burned bodies on the ground. She couldn’t tell how many might have been killed.

  Ana hesitated for only a second. She knew it was now or never. She had to recover the equipment. She was furious, seething with anger. They had used her equipment in a garish display of pyrotechnics that was certain to result in dramatic news coverage. She could see cameras on some of the light poles along the street. This meant that authorities would have videotape of the seconds leading up to the crash and its resulting explosion. These pictures would make international news. Depending on the body count, the images would spur authorities to dig deep looking for the answers as to the cause.

  Cars were stopped on the road ahead of her. Ana didn’t care. She drove up onto the sidewalk to get around them. She kept going, one eye on the bleeping signal still emitting from her laptop as she approached the location. It was now less than two hundred meters ahead. Ana knew that if they turned off the equipment she would lose the signal and, with it, any hope of recovering her equipment.

  Bright graffiti covered part of the exterior of what had once been a spit-polished building owned by the military. A man in his early thirties wearing a blue hardhat and white coveralls climbed down the shaky steel ladder fixed to the structure’s rear wall, a kind of fire escape. The place was an old warehouse once used by the navy to mothball supplies. It had been turned over to the city during one of a series of base closures designed to bring down government costs. Instead, costs skyrocketed and the building lay largely abandoned, used mostly by vagrants who lit fires inside its crumbling walls on chilly nights.

  As soon as the man reached the bottom rung he jumped the four-foot gap to the ground, then looked back up to his colleague. “Send it on down!”

  The man on the roof was similarly attired. He passed a sealed case the size of your average rolling luggage over the parapet on the roof and lowered it quickly on a rope to the man on the ground. Anyone seeing them would think they were doing maintenance, except that it was getting late, already well past dusk.

  The man down below unfastened the rope from the handle on the case and lugged the heavy ribbed, stainless-steel box toward a car. The case contained a laptop, an external power pack, and two large batteries, enough energy to operate the computer and the small antenna for three hours.

  The man’s
car was parked a few feet away next to a white utility van they had rented to carry the larger part of the load. It took maybe thirty seconds to open the trunk of the car and load the box inside. When he was finished, he headed back toward the ladder. By then the rope had disappeared once more up onto the roof of the building.

  Blaring horns and the sound of sirens could be heard in the distance. The man at the bottom of the ladder looked nervously in the direction of all the commotion, about three blocks away. He cupped his hands to direct a restrained shout up to the man on the roof. “Hurry up!” It was getting dark. With all the squad cars descending on the area, headlights coming from an abandoned building might draw attention.

  Up top, the other man stuck his head over the edge of the roof and looked down. “Gimme a second. I don’t want to drop it.” He disappeared back to his task. A few seconds later, a large heavy tubular tripod was eased over the edge of the roof and lowered to the ground.

  The man down below undid the rope and carried the tripod toward the van. By the time he returned there was no sign of the rope or his compatriot up top. “Get a move on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Go ahead!” said the man on the roof. “I can handle the rest.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes! Go!”

  The man on the ground wasted no time. He jogged toward the car. In less than a minute he was out on the road, headed the other way, away from all the flashing lights and the high-grade action down the street.

  His partner on the roof had only two more items to load up, the fourteen-inch satellite antenna and the coil of cable that came with it. He strapped these together with a cable tie, wrapped the end of the rope through a metal bracket on the back of the antenna, and lowered the whole package over the edge of the roof and down. As it settled onto the ground he dropped the rest of the rope over the side. He climbed up and over the parapet onto the ladder and down. By now it was nearly dark. He moved quickly to gather up the antenna, cable, and the nylon rope as he headed toward the van.