Sleeping Dogs

by Tony Vanderwarker

  But as he walks down the stairs and takes in the scene, he’s glad he changed his mind. The two agents stand in the center of the entrance hall. Between them is an older man dressed in khakis and a parka. He’s handcuffed and disheveled, a bruise on his forehead. One of the agents has the barrel of a .45 jammed into his ribcage.

  “We found him sneaking across the front yard, stopped him before he got to the front door. We’ll take care of him, Mr. Secretary. But first we wanted to see if you recognized him.”

  Jimmick does a double take. He’s never seen him without a suit. He looks older, and roughed up with a nasty scrape on his head, more like a vagrant than a veteran CIA agent.

  He takes the stairs in twos, ordering the agents, “Remove his restraints right away. I know him.”

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  “Absolutely. I hope you didn’t beat up on him too much.”

  “We didn’t know who he was, Mr. Secretary. We saw him heading toward the house and didn’t want to take any chances.”

  “Yes, thank you. I understand,” he says, throwing his arm around Winn Straub’s shoulder and leading him into the kitchen. “Are you okay, Winn? Sorry they treated you like that. Can I get you an icepack for that bump?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “Great. Sorry to wake you up like this, Lucien, but no one can know we’re talking. I didn’t even want the record of a call. So I let your security guys find me. They’re good, Lucien, they’ve got eyes in the back of their heads.”

  “Again, I’m sorry.”

  “I expected as much. You don’t go skulking around the secretary of Homeland Security’s house without expecting some rough treatment.”

  “I’m glad they didn’t shoot you.”

  “Believe me, I didn’t put up much of a fight. I just wanted to talk, not get killed.”

  Jimmick closes the door behind him and heads for the coffeemaker.

  “You’re obviously paying me a visit at two in the morning for a reason . . .”

  “Are we okay here?”

  “The house was swept again yesterday,” Jimmick says as he spoons coffee into the basket, his back to Straub.

  “It’s breaking fast, Lucien.”

  “What’s the latest?”

  “I just got an email. Collyer’s located the nuke.”

  Jimmick whirls around to face Straub. “Where?”

  “The worst place you could imagine—the Chesapeake.”

  “Christ, twenty or thirty miles from DC.”

  “It gets more serious. He’s confirmed the bomb is an early version of the Mk-15 with a nuclear capsule.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Crude as hell. Never should have gone into service in the first place but we feared the Russians were ahead in the arms race. Later models had safeguards, failsafe mechanisms built in, codes and counter codes that had to be entered before the weapon would be armed. Setting off this model is as easy as turning on your cell phone.”

  “It could be detonated in the water?”

  “Anything’s possible, we don’t know for sure.”

  “I hope to hell someone else doesn’t figure it out first. Does Collyer know the exact spot?”

  “Only roughly, he’s going to have to do a search. That’s where your Coast Guard comes in.”

  “I’m all set. Who else knows Collyer’s got the location?” Jimmick asks, carrying coffee over to the kitchen table and taking a seat across from Straub.

  Straub wags his head back and forth. “No one so far. About four hours ago Howie was able to get the pilot to recall where he jettisoned the nuke. I’ve got him on a secure server. So right now we have the inside track.”

  “What about the terrorists?”

  “We have to assume they are still shadowing him.”

  “But if Collyer goes out there on the bay and starts towing around metal and radiation-detecting gear, the whole world’s going to be watching.”

  “Maybe, but think about it. If he’s the only one who knows where the bomb is, don’t you think the interested parties are going to keep their heads down and let him lead them to it?”

  “You mean hide in the reeds until he finds it?”

  “If I was Vector Eleven or the terrorists, that’s what I’d do. All they want is the bomb, neither of them gives a shit about Howie.”

  “What if he gets caught in the middle?”

  “I’m bringing him in today.” Straub checks his Timex. “He’ll know what he’s up against.”

  “What are the chances he’ll back out?” Jimmick chuckles, as if he’s suddenly thought better of what he’s said. “I guess from what you’ve told me about Collyer that’s a stupid question.”

  Straub can’t resist a literary allusion. Even though he was an econ major, he had taken every literature class he could. “There’s a poet, Dryden, I think it was, who once wrote about someone, ‘Fate seemed to wind him up.’ That’s Howie. Back in school he was a mediocre placekicker on a team with one of the worst records in the country. But one Saturday afternoon in the beginning of November, that group of guys stepped up and had a nationally ranked team on the ropes at the end of the fourth quarter. Down by two, with three seconds left, Howie booted one through the uprights from forty yards out to put UVa over the top.”

  “That’s a great story, Winn, but this isn’t football, this is hardball.”

  “Howie can handle it, believe me.” Straub narrows his eyes, his voice tells Jimmick he shouldn’t pursue this line of questioning any longer,

  “Okay, what’s our next move?” he asks.

  “Let’s find out how good your Coast Guard guys are.”

  32

  Fairhaven, Maryland, western shore of the Chesapeake, Friday, mid-morning

  Hearing vehicles coming down, Charlie Grimes drops what he’s doing and heads for the office. On a one-lane gravel road a couple miles out of town, during the winter he sees maybe three cars a day coming past his boatyard, if that.

  Standing overlooking the parking lot, Grimes watches as the procession of vehicles swings into the parking area and pulls to a stop. He counts seven. Four Hummers, a pickup truck, a large black van and a trailer towed by a rig that pulls up and parks on the road outside, evidently too large to turn around in the boatyard’s lot. He guesses some kind of boat is under the black canvas stretched tight over the trailer, looks to be thirty-foot plus.

  Repo people is the first thing that comes to Grimes’s mind. His heart sinks. Maybe they’ve finally caught up with us. Damn bank’s gone and sold my yard without telling me. Every winter is a struggle to get enough repairs to make ends meet and stay two steps ahead of his creditors.

  He watches a group of men clamber out of the vehicles, looking around his boatyard, sizing the place up.

  “Shirley, did you miss a mortgage payment?” Grimes yells to his wife who’s working in the storeroom behind the office.

  “What?” she calls.

  “The mortgage, did you not send it in?” he shouts at her.

  Shirley comes down the corridor wiping grease off her hands with a rag. “Did I what?”

  “Miss payments—there’s a bunch of strangers out here.”

  “No, I wrote the check just last week. Why do you ask?”

  “Take a look,” he says, directing her attention to the front window. “Why else would a crew like this show up?”

  “There are at least twenty. Don’t look too friendly either.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Charlie says, heading toward the door. Opening it and stepping onto the porch, he yells to them, “Something I can help you fellows with?”

  The leader of the group is in his late thirties, dressed in a dark windbreaker and navy cargo pants, a blue baseball cap on his head. He’s clean-shaven and pleasant-looking, yet his smile is tight and calculated.

  “We’d like to talk to you about an opportunity, Mr. Grimes,” he says as he approaches the porch. “May we come in?”<
br />
  “You’re not from the bank?”

  The man shakes his head, smiles faintly. “No, Mr. Grimes, we’re here to make you an offer.”

  “I’m not selling out for development or anything like that. I’m just a small boatyard owner trying to keep my head above water. It’s my life’s work.”

  Four of the men walk into his office, the rest wait on the porch.

  “Where are you boys from?” Grimes asks as an icebreaker.

  No one’s interested in small talk. “We’re interested in leasing your boatyard for a month.”

  “Sorry, I’m not in the lease business. If you’ve got a boat that needs fixing, bring it in. But no leasing.”

  “Charlie, hear the man out,” Shirley butts in, stepping forward, a smile on her face and money on her mind. “It might be okay if the price’s right.”

  “We’re prepared to offer you thirty thousand dollars to lease your boatyard for a month. In return, you are to vacate the premises within an hour and not come back until the lease is over. That date would be January 2nd. And you are not to say anything about our arrangement.”

  “Did you say thirty thousand dollars?” Grimes, dumbfounded, knows in a good year they barely manage to net forty.

  “We could go to Florida for the entire month,” Shirley adds.

  “That’s correct, Mr. Grimes. Thirty thousand dollars.”

  “Can I ask what you are going to do with my boatyard?”

  “We will leave it as we found it. It’s all written up in this contract,” the man says, pulling out an envelope and handing it to Grimes.

  “How about I take a couple hours reading it and give you a call sometime this afternoon?”

  “We’re prepared to give you the entire amount in cash upfront if you sign the agreement and leave by 10:30.”

  Grimes checks the clock on the wall. “That’s an hour from now.”

  “I can pack fast, dear.”

  Grimes is shaking his head. “I like the idea of the money, don’t get me wrong on that. It’s just that we have all these boats to repair.”

  The man in the navy baseball cap pulls out a second envelope. “Here are two round-trip first class plane tickets from Reagan to Miami in your names and a hotel reservation for a month. The flight leaves at 5:30. One of our people will drive you.”

  Grimes snatches the tickets. “I guess we can pack in an hour,” he says, hustling the agreement over to his desk. Fishing a pen out of the drawer, he scrawls his signature on the document and hands it over.

  “Thank you, Mr. Grimes. Here is your cash.”

  Grimes eyes bulge as he sees the fat stack of hundreds coming in his direction.

  “I’m going to run and pack, Charlie,” Shirley squeals as she hustles down the stairs.

  Grimes takes the money and holds out his hand, an incredulous smile breaking across his face, “Thanks, Mr.—”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Sure wish I knew what you’re going to do with my boatyard, but now I took the money I guess that’s your business, huh?”

  “Yes, sir. The car will be waiting for you. Better get going, you don’t want to miss your plane.”

  A half hour later, the husband and wife are tossing their bags into the backseat and climbing into the Hummer for the ride to Reagan. She’s wearing a flowered sundress and flip-flops, Charlie Grimes in his best pair of Bermudas and a Hawaiian shirt, the two looking like just another two of the millions of snowbirds flocking down to Florida every winter.

  “So are you guys CIA or what?” Grimes jokes to the driver as they pull out of the boatyard.

  The look the driver gives him when he turns around tells Grimes he had no business asking that question.

  His wife is glaring at him for being nosy, her scowling expression immediately telling him that he’s stepped in it. “Okay, forget I asked. Never mind, it’s not important,” Grimes backs down.

  Both Mr. and Mrs. Grimes got the message. For the remainder of the trip to the airport you could hear a pin drop.

  By the middle of the afternoon, the Grimes’s boatyard is transformed from a collection of shabby wooden shanties with rusting roofs littered with a clutter of discarded engines, driveshafts and broken-down boats to a bustling hubbub of activity. A crew of men in blue utility suits readies two boats, a thirty-foot rigid inflatable with an inboard engine and jet drive plus a weather-beaten workboat tied up at the dock.

  Commander Thomas Warren, assigned to the Coast Guard station at nearby Little River, Virginia, is the officer in charge. His orders came down from the secretary of Homeland Security directly. He took the call from Jimmick at four in the morning and has been scrambling ever since. His orders were extensive and explicit: locate a boatyard on the upper Chesapeake, secure it and ready it for a mission. Commander Warren feels like a Vegas high roller—half a million is major money—the first time his pockets have been crammed with that much cash.

  Warren knew better than to ask any specifics. Not something you tend to get into with the secretary of Homeland Security when he wakes you up in the middle of the night. But Warren knew it would not be a run-of-the-mill operation when the secretary instructed him to remove all Coast Guard insignia and identification not only from the boats but also from their uniforms.

  A series of questions cycles through his mind as he watches the crew carefully peeling and scraping Coast Guard emblems from the inflatable. Why is Jimmick flying in cutting-edge metal and radiation detection gear? Airlifted in from a top-secret facility in California, he spent the time coming up from Little River reading up on the equipment. He understands the latest metal detectors make searching deep, murky water like looking into a bathtub, and the radiation apparatus is capable of sniffing out emissions lower than the levels coming from your dentist’s X-ray machine.

  What could Jimmick possibly be searching for? And in the Chesapeake of all places?

  33

  Tysons Corner, DC suburbs, Friday afternoon

  Tysons Galleria is one of DC’s tonier malls with ritzy shops like Versace, Coach, Ferragamo, pricey restaurants and a Ritz-Carlton. Dressed to the nines for the holidays, every square foot is embellished with bells, bows, wreaths, angels and elves, thousands of lights twinkling, silver and gold balls glittering, the sparkling and gleaming decorations transforming the vast mall into a magical Christmas wonderland.

  “Despite all the glitz, I’m not getting in a festive mood,” Howie says as they walk through a courtyard festooned with thousands of red and silver candy canes and endless loops of glimmering metallic rope, mobbed with hordes of frenzied holiday shoppers hustling from store to store making sure they don’t miss a bargain in the pre-Christmas sales.

  “Tell me about it,” Sharon says. “And I’m not dressed for it either.” She’s wearing her last clean clothes, jeans and a secondhand sweatshirt she bought at a thrift store in Lancaster plus her once gleaming white but now scuffed and stained Danskos that have been on her feet since she left the VA hospital. “Back home, I would have dressed better to take out the garbage.”

  “Keep your eyes open, maybe we can find you a new outfit.”

  “Let’s find your buddy Straub first. I’m dying to meet him.”

  Straub’s email gave precise and detailed instructions on leaving the motel and the route to the shopping center.

  Risstup was to remain at the motel, Winn would have someone keeping an eye on him. They were to grab a cab in the neighborhood and wait under the tall archway clustered with silver ornaments that spans the south end of the atrium.

  “Don’t expect to see him right off the bat,” Howie says as they head across the wide, open space.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I know Winn, he probably has some elaborate rigmarole to insure we’re not being followed.” Collyer’s eyes are scanning the floors above for the reflection of a binocular, or someone in a suit wearing an earpiece.

  “And if we are?” Sharon asks. Howie can tell she’s getting anxious.<
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  “Winn’s done this a thousand times.”

  “So what do we do, just wander around the damn mall until we get a signal?”

  “Relax, you were the one who was so eager to come in from the cold—remember?”

  Howie takes Sharon’s arm and brings her to his side as they pull up next to the soaring silver arch. They stand listening to the Christmas carols echoing throughout the mall while they watch the teeming crowds of shoppers dragging along petulant children and lugging shopping bags jammed to the gills with Christmas goodies, the music and chatter of the shoppers punctuated by the persistent dinging of the Salvation Army Santas’ tinny bells.

  “What does Straub look like?”

  “Back in school, we used to call him ‘the accountant.’ Sylvie claims he’s a dead ringer for Karl Malden, remember him?”

  “Won an Oscar for Streetcar Named Desire.”

  “Jeez, on top of knowing everything about football, you’re a movie expert too.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “Wife’s big on the Washington party circuit so she drags him to everything, but he’s a pretty average-looking guy, not a flashy dresser, colorful people don’t last long at the CIA.”

  “Talk about flashy dresser, take a look at me. I feel so yucky,” she says, holding out her sweatshirt to show the collage of spots on it.

  “You look fine.” Howie knows it’s better not to argue with a woman about her appearance so he isn’t surprised when she fires back.

  “Don’t go there, okay? If I feel nasty, Collyer, that’s my own damn business. I look like something the cat dragged in and I know it. My hair’s a mess, I don’t have my makeup . . .”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” A slim and attractive young woman wearing a green satin cocktail dress interrupts Sharon. Elaborately coiffed and dolled up with enough blusher, mascara and foundation for three women, she’s showing a perfect set of teeth as she holds out a fancy spray bottle.