by Gene Riehl
“Jesus Christ, Monk, look out!”
Roger’s shout snapped Monk back to life.
He slammed on the brakes, but it was too late.
He’d blown the red light at K Street and was halfway into the intersection. Directly into the path of a white Cadillac Escalade, its tires screaming as the driver fought to stop before running right over the top of the Saab. Monk stomped even harder on his own brakes, but could only stare wide-eyed as the man driving the SUV clutched the steering wheel with both hands. Monk braced for the impact.
But the Cadillac skidded to a stop just inches from his door.
The driver glared at him, then slumped over the wheel for a moment before looking up and shaking his head. Monk lifted his hand in an “I’m sorry” gesture, then continued through the intersection, his heart pounding and his hands shaking. He turned to Roger Forbes, who was staring hard at him.
“Christ,” he said. “I didn’t see the light. I was thinking about that damned phone call.”
Roger shook his head, but said nothing.
Until they got all the way up to M Street without turning left.
“Now what are you doing, Puller? I thought you wanted to take the freeway.”
Monk stared through the windshield, perplexed. Where the hell was he going? Not only had he almost killed them at K Street—where he’d planned to turn left to the Whitehurst—he’d gone right past L Street as well, past the Columbia Hospital for Women, and was now halfway through the intersection at M.
“What’s the matter with you?” Roger said. “If I hadn’t been with you for the last hour, I’d swear you were drunk.”
“Drunk?” Monk scowled at his partner. “I didn’t even have wine with dinner tonight.”
Roger shook his head. “Your driving has been getting worse and worse, Puller. To the point where I don’t want to ride with you anymore. It’s like you’re in a fog or something.” He paused. “Are you feeling okay? Are you getting enough sleep?”
Monk nodded. He was getting way too much fucking sleep. And it seemed like the more he slept, the fuzzier his head became. He felt a stab of fear in the pit of his stomach. Roger wasn’t the first to mention his fog, it was becoming a daily issue at home with Lisa as well. Had his behavior become that obvious? Monk hoped not. He needed this job, needed to keep his head together enough to hold on to it. He couldn’t help thinking about the MRI test his doctor had scheduled for Thursday. There was no doubt he needed the brain scan, but he wasn’t nearly as sure he wanted to find out the results. Without the possibility of a cure, what good would it do for him to know?
“It’s just that goddamned phone call,” he repeated, as he took the next left to loop back to the freeway. “And that business about dry cleaning.”
Three minutes later they were on the Whitehurst and heading toward the Special Operations Group building near the foot of the Key Bridge. He glanced at the light traffic around them. “The last exit,” he told Roger. “Be ready to watch when we hit the bridge exit.”
Ninety seconds later they approached the exit for the Key Bridge, the last one before the Whitehurst ended in Canal Road. Monk stayed in the far left lane, accelerating past the few cars to his right until he was almost on top of the bridge exit, when he jerked the wheel and swerved to his right, cutting off a slow-moving truck to take the exit and swing around the big loop that would take them up on the bridge. He turned to Roger, who had climbed around in his seat to watch the traffic they’d left behind.
“Nothing,” Roger said. “Trucker gave us the finger, but that was about it.”
Monk didn’t bother telling his partner to watch for the same thing on the other end of the bridge. It was standard operating procedure. When he got to the Rosslyn, Virginia, side, he took the first exit and circled around to get back up on the bridge.
“Still nothing,” Roger said.
Monk nodded. Satisfied they were alone, he got off the bridge onto M Street and took a left on Thirty-fourth, continued for half a block before pulling to the curb and parking. Roger got out of the car first and looked around before tapping on the roof as a signal to Monk to follow. Together they hurried through the clammy night, and five minutes later approached the nondescript entrance to the converted trolley-car barn just off Canal Road that served as headquarters of the Special Operations Group. Monk used his card key on the battered metal door before he and Roger stepped through into the vast, dimly lit garage that served as the heart of the group. Despite the fact that Monk had been working at SOG for almost a year, the sight of the garage still made him blink.
The FBI had field offices in more than fifty cities—public offices anyone could walk into—but what most people didn’t know was that in many of those cities there was a second office as well, one with no public face, with no visible connection to the bureau at all. Designed to serve as command and control centers for covert operations, these secret offices were home to the FBI’s special operations groups. And nowhere in any of these SOG facilities was the mission more apparent than in the garages that housed their vehicles.
Fifty yards long and at least that wide, this garage had been built in the 1800s as a trolley-car barn to house the streetcars that traveled back and forth across the Francis Scott Key Bridge. A century and a half later it was still a car barn, although the rolling stock was vastly different. Filling every available square foot, nondescript Dodge sedans cozied up to slouching Ferraris, Winnebagos to massively chromed Harley Hogs. Only the breathtaking Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible in the farthest corner escaped such democratization. The cream and brown Roller sat by itself and gave off the distinct impression that it knew the reason why.
Monk led the way as he and Roger navigated through the vehicles toward the far end of the garage. Half a minute later they stood in front of a dull gray steel door that had been deliberately beaten and dirtied to make it match the rest of the place. Monk used his card key again. They went through the door and into a long corridor, then moved up the hallway to the second of two doors on the left. The same gray steel as the outer door, but this one was spotless. It featured a combination lock the size of a grapefruit set just under eye level. The door was ajar, probably left that way for their arrival. Monk glanced at Roger, who shrugged before following him into a room no civilian would ever see.
At eight hundred square feet, the wiretap-monitoring room was still too small. Fluorescent light fixtures lined the twelve-foot ceiling and kept the room bright as day no matter the hour. Gray carpetlike soundproofing covered the floor, walls, and ceiling. A dozen or so FBI agents sat in black-fabric chairs in front of metal tables pushed against three of the four walls. On the tables sat the machines that the room had been specially built to house. Electronic wiretap receivers predominated—squat black boxes that looked like overgrown DVD players—but there were reel-to-reel audio and videotape machines as well, and portable cassette recorders, too. In the little bit of space left over, desktop computers sat side by side with flat-screen monitors.
On the wall opposite the door hung a sign on white posterboard:
QUIET!!!
IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO—DON’T TALK!
Headphones clamped to their ears, the agents were straining to hear conversations in a cacophony of languages. Mostly Spanish and Arabic these days, but still lots of Russian, more and more Korean, and several other tongues. The last thing the agent-monitors needed was more chitchat, and the only sounds to break the silence were the annoying buzz-hum of the lights, the whir of computer cooling fans, and the clicking of fingers against keyboards. The rule against bringing food in here was just as strict as the no-talking prohibition, but a lot more easily ignored. Monk saw no physical evidence, but the place carried the unmistakable odor of furtive burritos and surreptitious pizza.
Midway down the room stood three men. The tall one—almost seven feet tall—in the green windbreaker was Kendall Jefferson, the Special Operations Group supervisor. The deadly one in the dark blue suit was Burt Malone, th
e bureau’s assistant director in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
The sight of the third man brought Monk to a stop.
What the hell? he thought. What was William Smith doing here?
Monk stared at the NSA spook from Fort Meade. Monk had trained himself to show no reaction to surprise—pretty much a necessity for a man who spent his days off sitting over a poker table—but he damned near allowed his eyes to flicker. William Smith had gained some weight in the five years since Monk had last seen him, but he was getting close to forty and that was to be expected. His black mop of hair showed no gray and was still just as slicked back as ever, and he was dressed even better than in the old days. A tan linen suit tonight, with a crimson tie, and brown Italian loafers that hadn’t come off any sale table. And he’d kept his mustache too. Just as black as his hair, and a perfect match for his deep-set eyes.
Kendall Jefferson motioned for them to approach.
Monk saw that Jefferson was sweating—his milk-chocolate skin glowing despite the chill in the room—but that was as it should be. With an AD in the room, a middle manager was expected to sweat. The AD was not only dry as a bone, but scowling as Monk got closer. Monk smiled. Smiling confused assistant directors.
“This is Puller Monk,” Jefferson told Malone, “and his partner, Roger Forbes.” He didn’t bother announcing the AD’s name, before turning toward the third man. “And this,” he said to Monk and Roger, “is William Smith from NSA.”
Monk extended his hand. “William,” he said. “Been a long time.”
William Smith stared at his hand for a long moment before shaking it. “Monk,” he said. And nothing more.
In the suddenly less than comfortable silence, Assistant Director Malone turned to William. “You know each other? Did you mention that earlier?”
“No,” William said. “No, I didn’t.”
There was another short silence as the AD appeared to be waiting for the customary pleasantries that should be attending such a reunion, but Monk knew better. It would snow in August before William Smith would say anything the least bit pleasant to Puller Monk.
Again it was Burt Malone who broke the silence.
“We’ll go to Jefferson’s office to talk, gentlemen,” the AD said, “but we have to stay here to watch the elsur intercept first. I don’t want any of the electronic surveillance video to leave this room.”
Malone nodded at Kendall Jefferson, and everybody turned to the table against the wall to their right. Jefferson leaned over and picked up two sets of headphones, handed one to Monk, the other to Roger, before touching a key on the gray keyboard in front of a twenty-inch flat-panel monitor. Monk adjusted the phones over his ears.
The blue screen turned fuzzy for an instant before the picture appeared, a crystal-clear picture of an apartment living room, with numerals in the lower right corner, showing the date and time of day. The date was today, August 8, and the time 0047—12:47—just over half an hour ago.
Monk watched as the video began to run. His eyes widened as he saw the three men in the living room, as he realized he didn’t need the date-time readout at all. Not when he’d been there in person.
FIVE
“What the hell’s going on here?” Roger Forbes whispered to Monk, as the two of them hung back on the way upstairs to Kendall Jefferson’s office. “What have you done this time?”
Monk shook his head but said nothing before they hurried to catch up.
To get to Jefferson’s office, they had to pass through the deserted squad room, another of the SOG’s bizarre departures from cookie-cutter FBI conformity. The place was a mess. Stacks of brown cardboard boxes littered the room, many open to display electronic gear of one kind or another. Audio and video recorders predominated, but there were all kinds of cameras, along with a wide selection of magnetic tapes and a variety of other devices for looking and listening.
Against the wall to the right, a long table held a couple dozen battery chargers, half of them filled with the portable handie-talkie radios the SOG people used out on the street. Ten gray metal desks sat amid the clutter, shared by the forty or so agents assigned to the group, crummy and outdated desks that had been thrown away by the field office downtown but were considered plenty good enough for the trolley barn.
If the point was to make the place look like anything but a government office, the bureau had done a hell of a job, and the cover story they’d created was the best Monk had ever heard. Any civilian stumbling in wanting to know what kind of business they were running was told the same thing. That this was a car-storage facility, that the people working here were repo men—and women, of course—doing contract work for banks across the city. Paid to grab vehicles from deadbeats, to store them until the banks could dispose of them. What made the cover so effective was that it explained everything at the same time. Not only the bizarre collection of cars and trucks, but the rag-tag clothing of the agents as well.
Inside Kendall Jefferson’s glass-walled cubicle in the far corner there wasn’t enough room for all five of them to sit, so nobody did. Assistant Director Malone went around Jefferson’s desk and stood facing the rest of them. Monk and Roger lingered near the open doorway.
“Close the door,” the AD told Monk.
Monk did so, but he wasn’t happy about it. In the bureau, closing the door meant a number of things, none of them good. Malone turned to look through the glass wall into the squad room. Monk followed his gaze. The agents had been glancing in their direction, but suddenly became intent on the far wall as they realized the AD was staring at them.
“Damn it, Monk,” Malone said, turning back. “What were the two of you doing in that apartment?”
Monk took a moment before answering. He couldn’t help noticing that Malone was no longer calling them “gentlemen,” as he’d done in the wiretap room downstairs. He also knew that from here on his partner was just along for the ride. At forty-five, Monk was ten years Roger’s senior, and in the bureau that meant he had to take the hit. Glancing at Kendall Jefferson, he wondered if he’d misunderstood Malone’s question. It seemed pretty clear from what they’d just seen in the wire room what they’d been doing in Trevor Blaine’s apartment, but that wasn’t the sort of answer one gave to an assistant director.
“We’re working the Madonna case,” he said. “The da Vinci that was stolen from a private home a couple of hours ago.” It was easier to call it a da Vinci than get involved in the argument about who might actually have wielded the brush. “The Madonna with the Yarn Winder, they call it.”
“That’s not what I asked you. What we want to know is how you ended up with Trevor Blaine.”
“One of my criminal informants, Mr. Malone. He’s sitting in jail for sentencing … burglary, possession of stolen property. He was the first one we went to, and we offered him a deal. He gives up the names of fences who might handle something as valuable as the Madonna, we put in a good word to the judge. The informant gave us half a dozen names. We knew all but two of them already, no way they were big enough for a job like this. Trevor Blaine we never heard of, so we started with him.” Monk glanced at Roger. “I guess I should say we were starting with him when my phone rang.”
Malone glanced at William Smith, and William took over the questioning. The sour look on his face was augmented by the tone in his voice.
“I don’t give a damn how you got there, Monk. What I’m more interested in is that report you pulled out of your pocket. The Interpol stuff … at least that’s what you told Trevor Blaine. And something about Scotland Yard.”
Monk reached into his jacket and pulled out the sheaf of paper in question. “This?” he said, as he fanned the pages to show William they were blank on both sides. “I was just running a game on him. Just wanted to see what he’d say. Never hurts to try.”
William Smith stared at the paper, then laughed out loud, a sharp bark of cynicism that seemed to echo off the glass walls. “Christ,” he said. “Why am I not surprise
d?” He looked at Monk. “Why would I ever have imagined you’d be telling the truth?”
Monk ignored William, turned to Malone instead. “What’s this all about? What’s going on here?”
“You know better than to ask something like that,” the AD told him.
Monk felt his shoulder muscles tightening. He glanced at Roger Forbes. Roger’s brown eyes were telling him to shut the fuck up, but Monk shook off the signal.
“It’s our case, Mr. Malone. It’s part of a year-long investigation, an international series of similar robberies. I’d think that qualifies us to know what NSA is doing here. And why the bureau’s counterintelligence division is running a wiretap I know nothing about.”
“It isn’t your case anymore, Monk, that’s the simple answer. National security matters are handled at headquarters level … and you no longer have a need to know.”
Need to know. It was the classic basis for dissemination management when it came to keeping secret things secret, but still Monk frowned. “National security? A woman in a tight dress seduces some poor bastard and it’s national security?”
He turned to look at William before going back to the AD.
“I grant you the Madonna’s worth a pile of money, but what possible interest could NSA have in the theft of a …”
Monk’s voice died as he finally put it together.
“It’s not the painting,” he said. “Not directly anyway. It’s the—”
“That’s enough!” the AD snapped. “Don’t say another word! You and Forbes may already have alerted the target. It’s too late to fix that now, but your part in this operation is over.”
Monk took a short step toward the desk, closing the distance, before he felt Roger Forbes’s hand reach out to restrain him. He pushed Roger’s hand away.