The Operative

by Falconer, Duncan

  All in all, Stratton felt good about the little operation and could not help thinking now about finishing the job and going after Ardian. It seemed that now he had started he should finish. The internal voices of caution returned but he was tiring of them. They were right, of course, but so were the others. Besides, what was particularly sweet about killing Ardian was that he was the brother of the prick who had tried to kill Stratton in the limousine.

  It was well worth carrying out a feasibility study, Stratton reckoned. If it looked good, there’d be another test run.

  15

  Hobart arrived at the main entrance of the Santa Monica District courthouse as the sun was setting behind him. He walked towards the door at the far end of the courtroom lobby where a couple of police officers stood guard. He knew his way around, having made several recent visits to the building. As he approached the door he flipped open his FBI badge and clipped it to the breast pocket of his jacket. The officers were already inspecting the badge as he walked towards them and stood aside to let him through.

  He walked down the steps and paused in the doorway of the interview room to observe the activity. A camera flashed inside a cubicle somewhere towards the end while several officers in plain clothes were inspecting the area and taking samples.

  ‘Is it okay to walk through here yet?’ Hobart asked no one in particular.

  One of the officers looked up, saw the badge, and waved him in. ‘Walk down the centre and keep clear of that area,’ the man said, indicating the seating alcove.

  Hobart obeyed the instructions and stopped outside a cubicle inside which were two more officers. One was examining the far wall, which was spattered with dark bloodstains, while the other stood still, looking at the floor while holding his chin and apparently contemplating something. Hobart had been an FBI agent for nearly twenty years and had long since learned that time spent patiently studying people and crime scenes before talking to anyone or touching anything was often productive.

  Hobart’s early working years had primarily been devoted to the eastern seaboard of the USA, mostly New York and Washington DC, followed by nine years in Eastern Europe, specifically the Balkans. He’d spent the last eighteen months in Los Angeles, the FBI’s single most heavily populated territory. He had worked so long for the massive bureaucratic machine that his youthful eagerness, zeal and keen response to the dramatic had become dulled. He had hoped, too, by this stage in his career to be further up the promotional ladder. Too many disappointments, more than anything else with the organisation’s unhealthy indulgence in politics, had dampened much of the fervour which had originally inspired him in his chosen vocation. But he was not a burn-out and had lost none of his enthusiasm for the purity of the job. A fire of some kind still smouldered somewhere deep inside him, fuelled by hostility towards the enemies of his country. He often suspected that much of what he had left was a kind of patriotic mania or anger. Not the best reason to get up each morning and go to work.

  Hobart was something of a dormant volcano and it was that aspect of his character that made him memorable to others, the impression he gave that he was about to erupt at any moment. What kept him on an even keel was the belief against all the odds that there was someone somewhere on top of this wasteful, misguided heap of bureaucracy who actually knew what they were doing and had a plan for a saner and more logical solution to the madness of the world.

  Hobart’s wife, a former journalist for the Washington Post, always accused him of naivety when it came to his work, usually when she was drunk – which, fortunately, was not often. Her most damaging rhetoric, however, came when she was sober. She had written several accusatory articles about the FBI, exposing incompetence, misinterpretation of intelligence and inappropriate use of funds. Although her exposés were, in the great scheme of things, a small cry in the dark, she was as irritating as a paper cut to Hobart’s superiors, sufficiently so for them to include an unwritten condition to his offer of promotion to the LA office: she would have to quit her job on the Post and accompany him to the West Coast. To Hobart’s surprise, she agreed without much of a fight. It seemed that he wasn’t the only one in the family who had grown cynical about their contribution to world enlightenment.

  Hobart was robust, though. He applied this quality to his own shortcomings when he recognised them, or when they were pointed out to him by his wife. But it was things over which he had no control that frustrated him most and contributed more than anything else to his private cynicism. Most of these things were politicians.

  It was during Hobart’s tour of duty in the Balkans that the greatest blow to his confidence regarding US foreign policy, specifically on Kosovo, had been dealt. But even though he felt isolated in his views – enough not to air them with fellow agents, at least – he still wanted to believe there was an intelligent game plan in place. When the Los Angeles posting came along he was content to put aside his private concerns, expecting to be preoccupied with more routine FBI work – until he arrived in his new office and was briefed on his chief assignment and told why, in fact, he had been on the shortlist for the job.

  All Hobart’s troubling thoughts returned with a vengeance when he realised that, despite being on the other side of the world now, he was going to be drawn even deeper into the gut of his old East European problem. But had he been told that he would soon find himself in such a dark place that he would tear down the pillar principles on which his entire professional life had been built and light a fuse that would start a war against one of the most powerful crime lords in America, he would not have believed it.

  ‘What happened?’ Hobart asked.

  Both scene-of-crime officers looked up at the three white letters of his badge boldly emblazoned on a black background and then at Hobart himself. He was used to every kind of response from fellow law-enforcers who were not directly connected with the Bureau. The expressions on the faces of the two cops in front of him conveyed the most common reaction: ‘What’s the god-damned FBI doing here?’

  ‘A detainee got whacked,’ the officer who had been contemplating the universe offered while the other went back to picking at the brick wall with a small tool.

  ‘I know that much,’ Hobart said. ‘Leka Bufi. What happened?’

  ‘Not exactly sure yet. Bufi was sitting in the chair here, his back to the window, and he got it through the head. One hell of a gun, if that’s what it was. This bullet-proof glass is good against any pistol and most assault rifles.’

  ‘It’ll stop high-velocity up to 7.62 long,’ the forensics officer said to the wall.

  ‘You saying someone got a gun in here?’ Hobart asked, inspecting the glass. The hole was large, the size of a tennis ball, and surrounded by a thick black scorch mark.

  ‘We’re considering everything at the moment,’ the first officer said. ‘Mind if I ask what the FBI is doing here?’

  ‘Bufi was a name on my case file.’

  ‘Albanian Mafia?’

  Hobart ignored him as he looked at the body outline draped over the table and the dried blood on the floor and wall.

  ‘Took most of his head clean off,’ the officer added.

  ‘Got it,’ the forensics officer said with satisfaction as he yanked something small out of the wall and inspected it. ‘If that was a gun it sure fired a strange kind of bullet.’

  He carried the object in a pair of tweezers and placed it on a plastic evidence bag on the table. They all took a close look at the small, twisted, charred piece of metal the size of a fingernail.

  ‘Looks like there’s a pattern along one of the edges,’ the forensics officer said, holding a magnifying glass over it. ‘A coin, maybe,’ he added, glancing at his buddy who gave him a surprised look.

  Hobart straightened to study the walls and windows of the corridor once again. He was interested in the bit of metal but would wait until the lab report to find out precisely what it was. There was a concentration of pockmarks in the wall and door directly opposite the cubicle, suggesting some
kind of back-blast effect from whatever had gone through the window. Hobart had had a lot of experience with explosives, particularly in Kosovo, and had seen many bodies shredded by bits of flying metal from mortars, grenades, artillery shells, mines and booby-traps and such like. He had never seen anything quite like this before, though. If he had to choose a word to describe how it stood out from other examples he had seen, that word would have to be ‘precision’. This had been an IED of some kind, he was sure of that, and it had been small, clean and exact.

  Hobart looked back at the two officers who were still examining the piece of metal. ‘Sergeant – or is it Lieutenant?’

  ‘Sergeant Doves,’ the first officer said.

  ‘I want every piece of debris collected up – every bit of cloth, metal, glass, everything – and placed inside its own evidence bag and sent to the FBI office on Wilshire.’

  Doves looked around at the countless bits covering the floor, some of it stuck to the soles of his own shoes. ‘You gonna be sending down one of your teams?’ he asked hopefully but not expecting much. Resent ment was his underlying response to the request since it meant that he was effectively working for the Feds.

  ‘Not if you do a good enough job, sergeant,’ Hobart said, looking directly at both men, making his point clear, before walking away.

  16

  Stratton leaned against the concrete barrier that skirted the top of Santa Monica’s cliffs a hundred feet above the Pacific Coast Highway, a road that stretched, with some interruptions, from Panama to Alaska. He was pretending to read a newspaper while at the same time keeping an eye on all movement into I Cugini, an Italian restaurant on a corner just south of his apartment building. It had a broad, exposed entrance with quiet sidewalks and most of the clientele arrived by car. After drivers and passengers had alighted the vehicles were whisked away by redwaistcoated valets to an underground parking lot beneath the large, modern shopping complex of which the restaurant was a small part.

  This was the fourth day in a row that Stratton had occupied the same spot in the busy park during the lunchtime hour to observe everyone who went into the place. Seaton’s file had listed two of Ardian Cano’s favourite daytime food stops, the other being a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills. I Cugini was certainly the most convenient for Stratton, being literally a stone’s throw from his apartment building. Had it not been for a hotel next door he would have been able to watch the restaurant entrance from the comfort of his living room.

  It was nearing the end of the lunch period and still there had been no sight of the Albanian. Stratton was beginning to have doubts about this method of finding him. The file described Ardian as passionate about his food and a creature of habit and listed several of his night-time hangouts where he was often joined by colleagues as well as by his brother Ivor – or Dren. Stratton preferred not to run into that crowd again unless it was on his own terms and placed his hopes on the Italian restaurant.

  The newspapers had revealed sufficient detail to confirm that Bufi was dead. The police were not prepared to discuss the cause other than saying that a projectile had entered his head. The media turned this into a grenade attack, based on advice from their so-called experts. The papers went on to describe Bufi’s crime-syndicate dealings and the beating-up of his girlfriend, stating how he was a generally unsympathetic character that the world was better off without. Typically, the media dramatised it further by speculating that it had been a contract killing commissioned by rival mobsters.

  Stratton had considered tracking Ardian from outside one of his nightspots to one of the three places where he was thought to be living: with a girlfriend, with a colleague, and – the third and most likely location – his brother’s house in the plush residential area immediately north of Sunset Plaza. Stratton decided to give the Italian restaurant another couple of days before reviewing the matter since it was too convenient for his apartment – and also for visiting Josh who was little more than a mile away. The boy continued to weigh heavily on Stratton’s mind since the child’s immediate future remained unclear. Still, according to Vicky there were signs of stirrings from the UK side.

  Vicky and Josh had been visibly shocked by Stratton’s bruised face, which looked even worse two days later. But he managed to satisfy their curiosity with a tall story of a bar brawl between him and two short but stocky Irishmen who had taken a dislike to him for being English, though it had to be said that they’d been a little drunk at the time and Stratton had not been very polite on first meeting them, distracted by all that had happened.

  Vicky was sceptical at first. But by the time Stratton had added the finishing touches to his elaborate tale, colouring it with historical ‘facts’ to help explain the Irishmen’s ill feeling, she was so absorbed in the stories that went back as far as the Roman Conquest that she couldn’t begin to imagine what else could have happened to him. He created a happy ending by explaining how, being typical, big-hearted Irishmen, after the fight was over with no clear winner they’d returned to the bar and bought each other a couple of rounds. All Josh wanted was to be reassured that the other guys had come off worse than Stratton. He was not disappointed with the descriptions of their injuries – out of earshot of Vicky, of course.

  The one bit of bad news concerning Josh, which Vicky asked Stratton not to share with the boy, was that even though it looked as if he would be flown back to the UK sometime soon, possibly in the next two weeks, he might have to move to a temporary foster home until that day because of the child-protection centre being overcrowded. The trouble with that was that it would be more difficult for Stratton to see Josh since the visits were essentially a privilege bestowed upon him by Vicky and because he was not a relative that privilege would not transfer with Josh to the foster family. Stratton decided to deal with that when the time came but at least for the time being things seemed to be moving ahead.

  Another problem was Sally’s body. The FBI were dragging their feet – deliberately, it would appear – in processing the paperwork needed to release it to be shipped back to England. But still Stratton remained optimistic, hoping it could all be sorted out around the same time and sooner rather than later.

  Then, as if the gods had heard Stratton’s other plea, a sedan pulled up outside the restaurant and a man who matched the file’s photograph and description of Ardian lifted his large frame out of the passenger seat and onto the sidewalk. He had a brief exchange with the Mexican valet as if they knew each other. Then he walked up the short flight of steps with the driver and in through the restaurant entrance.

  Stratton was certain enough that it was Ardian to carry on until he could confirm it, leaving himself ample scope to abort if it was not. He folded the newspaper as he headed across the park to the intersection and then along the sidewalk to his apartment building.

  As Stratton entered the elevator he checked his watch. Three minutes had passed since Ardian’s arrival. He pushed all the what-if scenarios he had gone through out of his mind as he stepped inside his apartment, pulling off his sweatshirt and heading for the bathroom where his disguise was waiting. For this little operation he had selected a ginger goatee, dark glasses, and a colourful tie to go with his white business shirt. He opened a jar of hair gel, scooped out a liberal amount and rubbed it into his hair, pushing it back to give himself a slick look, washed his hands and tied his tie. A small amount of glue applied to the goatee stuck it neatly to his chin and after a quick check in the mirror he went to the living-room table to collect a small Gucci shopping bag that he had picked up in the mall.

  A moment later Stratton opened his apartment door a crack to check that no one was about. Then he hurried along the corridor to the emergency exit, down the stairs and onto the street. It took less than a minute to reach the front of the restaurant and eleven minutes after leaving the park he stood in front of the little reception desk where a sign asked patrons to wait to be seated.

  The restaurant was quite large and tastefully decorated in a classic Italian
country style with a patio and seating for around sixty people. There was no sign of Ardian at the two occupied tables that Stratton could see from the entrance. He stepped further into the restaurant to look around a large pillar draped in an imitation grapevine. He saw the back of a man seated at the end of a table tucked into a corner. He took another step forward to see two other men, then stepped back as he sensed a figure walking towards him from the kitchens. It was a pretty young woman, colourfully dressed and wearing a broad smile which Stratton returned as she approached.

  ‘Are you here for lunch, sir?’ she asked sweetly.

  ‘Are you still serving?’ he asked in a Scottish accent. After the struggle he’d had trying to sound American he had decided to go for something more manageable. The city of Santa Monica had one of the largest single populations of expatriate Brits in the world: few Americans who lived and worked there were surprised to hear any of the multitude of UK accents.

  ‘We serve all day,’ she assured him. ‘Is there just one?’

  ‘I’m alone, yes,’ he said.

  ‘Inside or outside?’ she asked.

  ‘Outside would be nice.’

  The girl picked up a menu. ‘This way,’ she said as she walked into the restaurant. Stratton followed, glancing at the table in the corner where four men were seated, all Slav-looking, the one at the end facing him being the one whom he thought was Ardian. Stratton stared at him and just as he moved out of sight the man looked up at him. All the file pictures of Ardian were full-face and they matched what Stratton now saw in the flesh. He even detected a resemblance to the Albanian’s younger brother that was not so obvious in the photographs.