An elaborate and elusive in-house infrastructure of subdivisions of departments, shadow bureaus, third-party cutouts, adjunct offices, and a host of similar bureaucratic shell games and dodges was in place to fund and supply the Dog Team, a unit that, again, had no official existence.
That was the beauty part of the Army, a bureaucratic organism so big, complex, intricate, and far-reaching that it provided any number of nooks and crannies to hide things in. Steve often wondered what other mind-staggering secret projects and divisions were concealed within its leviathan bulk.
He realized that his mind had been wandering while Doc Wenzle continued to grouse about the laborious paper-shuffling chores Steve’s caper last night with the Crown Vic killer and company would entail.
When Wenzle paused in his complaint to take a breath, Steve said, “Don’t blame me, blame Beltway Towing. They’re the ones who wrecked the car.”
“We checked on that,” Doc Wenzle said, switching gears. “Beltway Towing is a legitimate outfit. They’ve got a contract with the city to haul away stalled cars, illegally parked cars, vehicles with too many unpaid traffic tickets—”
“And you call that ‘legitimate’?” Steve said, scoffing.
“They reported a stolen tow truck last night,” Wenzle went on, ignoring Steve’s remark. “It was boosted out of one of their garage lots. The police dispatch record shows that the call came in not long before you had your little run-in with the wrecker. The company looks clean, as far as that goes. No tie-in with your playmates that we can find.”
Steve shrugged, then winced. He was a mass of aches and pains from the roughing up he’d gotten last night when the tow truck had played bumper cars with his sedan. Nothing was broken or sprained—he’d been checked out by a medic earlier today—but he was bruised and tenderized from head to toe.
The back of his neck, his shoulders, and upper back were scored with so many minor cuts and abrasions from being showered with a spray of broken glass when the windshield was shot out, that they looked like somebody been using them for a tic-tac-toe board.
It was early afternoon of the day following his night with the Crown Vic killer. Steve was in the inner office of a modest-sized suite on the fifth floor of the Gall Building, an office building in a commercial business section in Washington, D.C. A brass nameplate on the outside of the door accessing the hall corridor identified the office suite as the locale for “Holloman Research Associates.”
The suite consisted of a small waiting room and beyond that, a larger inner office with a storeroom and a bathroom branching off it. The waiting room featured two singularly uninviting straight-backed, armless wooden chairs, a coatrack tree, and a potted plant. The plant was artificial, but it still looked droopy and wilted. There was no reception area and no receptionist.
The inner office was where Wenzle held court. Opposite the door, a window with a southern exposure was set in the wall from a point waist-height to the ceiling. A desk the size of a compact car was parked in front of the window. Behind the desk sat Doc Wenzle, his back to the window.
The desktop sprouted a keyboard and several flat-screen monitors. Piled high on it were several stacks of files and documents. A side table held a printer and two computers. The hardware was all linked and interconnected with a web of cables.
An oversized brown leather couch stood against one of the side walls. An armchair stood facing the desk at an angle. Steve Ireland sat in it, perched on the edge of the seat. He looked fidgety because the seat cushion had a broken spring in the middle of it and it was damned near impossible to get comfortable on.
The office was a Dog Team front. Secrecy, insulation, and compartmentalization, that was the Dog Team way.
For example, Steve Ireland had been in the Pentagon any number of times on various service-related tasks, but never once on Dog Team business. As far as he knew, the outfit had no connections inside that building, not an office or a desk or even a scrambler phone in a broom closet. As far as he knew—which didn’t go very far. The Team could be run out of the Secretary of the Army’s office and he wouldn’t have an inkling of it. Hell, maybe it was. But that was a matter way above his pay grade. Besides, the higher-ups, whoever they might be, reportedly took a dim view indeed of overinquisitive Team members. And that could be hazardous to your career. Not to mention your health.
Even working through cutouts and assumed identities, the outfit tried to minimize direct contact with military bases on U.S. soil. Overseas, especially in hot spots and hostile environments, the restrictions were a bit more flexible, but still tight.
Here in the Capital, the Gall Building was just one of hundreds of civilian, commercial office buildings. Its anonymity suited Team purposes. Holloman Research Associates was more than a front; it was a real business. It was legally incorporated, registered with the appropriate financial regulatory agencies, and duly paid all federal, state, and city taxes.
It published a monthly newsletter, “J.D. Holloman’s Information Alert Bulletin,” an investor’s tip sheet specializing in precious metals and currency trades. It had several hundred paying subscribers.
There was no J.D. Hollomon, or rather, Doc Wenzle was J.D. Hollomon, at least as far as purported authorship of the newsletter went. Most of the computers and filing cabinets were used for collecting, collating, and analyzing data about the worldwide precious metals and currency trading business.
Wenzle had a feel for the market, and managed to crank out fairly creditable forecasts, thanks in no small part to information supplied by Army Intelligence sources and specialists.
It was a front that was nearly impossible to crack because it was for real. But it was still just a front for Dog Team business.
Here in Washington, Wenzle was Steve Ireland’s handler, his case officer. Steve assumed that Wenzle had a stable of other Team members that he also ran; in any case, Steve kept his assumptions to himself.
The office site was fixed with hardened security precautions. The windows, made of bulletproof glass, were tinted on the two-way-mirror principle; those inside could look out, but those outside couldn’t see past the reflective exterior. Hair-thin wires embedded in the glass generated inaudible interference patterns that prevented outside snoopers from beaming the panes with lasers that would otherwise turn them into listening posts, allowing those with the proper hardware to eavesdrop on any conversations taking place inside the rooms.
Most of the computers on display in the office were store-bought civilian hardware with no more than the ordinary security features. What seemed to be a storeroom annex off the main office was the real nerve center of the outpost. Built into a wall panel was a cunningly concealed, ultra-secure communications console that served as Wenzle’s link to the Dog Team’s datalink net for sending and receiving encrypted messages. Any unauthorized personnel tampering with the wall panel or console would trigger an auto-destruct mechanism that within seconds would turn the hardware innards into lumps of fused metal.
Doc Wenzle was a big man running to fat. Thin, stringy strands of dark gray hair were plastered down in a comb-over across the top of a shiny, mostly bald scalp. Watery pale blue eyes in baggy pouches peered out from behind round-lensed, wire-rimmed spectacles. He had a bushy, iron-gray walrus mustache. He wore a sleeveless blue sweater vest over a long-sleeved shirt and tie. His collar was sweat-stained, his tie knot loosened, and his sleeves rolled up over his elbows.
Wenzle looked as unmilitary as they come, another mark of the effectiveness of his cover. The Dog Team was strictly an Army op all the way, and to be holding down Wenzle’s post here in the Capital called for an outstanding service record. Steve figured him to be probably a colonel, but the trappings of rank were just one more potential giveaway to be shedded by a veteran Team player.
Was “Doc Wenzle” his real name? Steve doubted it. There was no need for Steve to know his handler’s true identity and every reason for him not to know. Security. Steve said, “As long as you’re doing the paperwork,
you could put in for another gun for me, too.”
Wenzle said, “What happened to yours?”
“The one I used last night? Lying in pieces scattered around the bottom of the Potomac.”
“Good.”
It was a good gun and Steve hated getting rid of it, but that was standard operating procedure. Ballistics could have tied the gun to the two guys in the tow truck that he’d killed. He wasn’t going to take a chance on having it in his possession and then, by some quirk of ill luck, getting picked up by the police on some trivial beef like a traffic violation.
Like all the hardware he used on an assignment, it was “sterile,” its past history of ownership a dead trail. Somewhere along the way, it had been acquired so that there was no way of tracing it back to him or the Army.
The same went for the car he’d used on the job. He’d picked it up at a prearranged site, a midtown parking garage. The license and registration were legal enough, made out to an assumed identity he’d also been supplied with for the mission. But a trace run on the vehicle identification numbers and the plates would only lead the authorities up another blind alley.
Doc Wenzle said, “You didn’t come here unarmed.” It was not a question.
The office door opening on the corridor was fitted with sensors that would detect the presence of weapons or explosive devices on any visitor standing outside it. All doors in the office were made of armor plate covered with a wood-finish veneer.
Under his sporty blue blazer jacket, Steve was heeled with a small, snouty blue black semiautomatic pistol worn in a clip-on rig that held it flat against the small of his back. It was one of his own pieces, legally registered to him under his real name of Steve Ireland. He had a permit to carry it, too, no small feat in the antigun environment of Washington, D.C., where the crooks all had guns but law-abiding citizens were disarmed to the fullest extent possible by a squalid, cynical, and infinitely corrupt city government.
The permit was another example of the long reach of the Dog Team’s phantom arm. It was part of Steve Ireland’s cover identity. That is, the artificially crafted persona, the legend, that he went under using his real name of Steve Ireland.
In that guise, he was a salaried civilian employee of the Department of Defense, a postal inspector attached to ECOMCON, a courier system used solely by and for the Pentagon. The post allowed him to carry firearms while on duty, and since he was potentially on call twenty-four hours a day, technically, he was always on duty and authorized to be armed night and day, around the clock. The courier system covered both foreign and domestic routes, providing him with a pretext to operate anywhere the Pentagon had interests, meaning pretty much anywhere around the world. His cover job came with a civil service rating and matching pay grade; he used his real Social Security number and duly paid his yearly federal and state income taxes.
Yes, Steve was armed, and if he’d had his druthers, he’d be packing a heavier-caliber gun and a knife up his sleeve, too. But that would have been overdoing it for going about his routine chores on a hot June weekday.
He said, “I’d be afraid to set foot in this town without something I could lay my hand on fast if needed. Don’t you read the papers? Washington’s the murder capital of the nation.”
Doc Wenzle nodded. “I know. Makes you kind of proud, doesn’t it? At least we’re first in something. Speaking of the papers, last night’s little escapade got a pretty decent splash in the morning editions.”
Steve nodded. “Quentin and his lady friend made the front page of the Post and the Washington Times.”
Steve had made a point of picking up both papers earlier to read their accounts of the double kill. Reading his press clippings was one of his guilty pleasures. Though he could claim only a peripheral involvement with this one.
“Looks like the cops and the press both bought the murder-suicide angle,” he said.
“Which ties up the Quentin sanction nice and neatly,” Doc Wenzle said. “No thanks to you.”
Steve held out his hands palms-up in a what-are-you-gonna-do? kind of gesture. “Maybe if I had a little better advance intelligence, I wouldn’t have gotten beaten to the punch.”
Wenzle said, “Consider yourself lucky you didn’t wind up as a page one headline yourself.”
“That’s not luck, that’s skill,” Steve said.
Wenzle looked dubious.
Steve actually figured he’d been lucky, damned lucky, to come out of the ambush alive, so he didn’t press the point. “Those two guys I bagged didn’t make page one. They were in a little squib buried in the back of the metro section.”
“A gang killing, the papers called it,” said Wenzle, chuckling.
“On Tyburn Street, that barely qualifies as crime news. More of a social event,” Steve said. “That’s one tough neighborhood. I was glad to get out of there in one piece.”
“Too bad. Won’t make much of an entry in your scrapbook.”
Steve shook his head. “No scrapbooks for me, Doc.”
Wenzle’s bushy eyebrows rose over the tops of his glasses in mock surprise. “No? I thought all you top-ranked trigger-pullers keep scrapbooks of your exploits. A passel of elite prima donnas, the whole lot of you—killer elite. Always checking up on your stats to see where you rate among the competition. More ego than a theaterful of ham actors.”
“Not me. I’m the modest type.” Steve assumed a righteous expression. “Humility is my greatest virtue. I take great pride in it.”
“Bah.”
Steve went on. “The papers said the two bodies were unidentified. Any leads on them?”
“Ah, now you come to the point of our little kaffeeklatsch,” Doc Wenzle said, smiling. It was not a particularly nice smile. “As a matter of fact, we do.
“The shooter was one Gavrilo Sandor. The driver was burned too badly when the tow truck caught fire to make a definitive ID, but based on Sandor’s modus operandi and known associates, it’s a pretty sure bet that he was one Dimity Vane.”
Steve said, “Sandor? Vane? Never heard of them.”
“No reason why you should have,” Wenzle said. “We wouldn’t have either, except that we got a line on them through their bossman, Quentin’s executioner.”
Steve leaned farther forward in his chair, and not just to get some relief from the broken springs in the seat cushion. “The man in the Crown Vic…”
“That’s right.”
“And who might that be?” Steve’s expression was mild, almost dreamy.
Wenzle grinned, showing yellowed buck teeth. He knew he had Steve’s full attention now. He made a show of shuffling around some files on his desk, making room on the blotter for his folded hands, savoring the moment, making it last.
He said, “Those cell phone photos you snapped of him going into the club were no great shakes, but they were adequate enough for us to run them into the Netlink facial identification software.”
“And?” Steve prompted.
“We identified him,” Wenzle said, smug and relishing it.
“What is this, a quiz game show? Who is he?”
“Donny Piersall.”
“Who?”
“Donny Piersall,” Wenzle repeated. “Odds are that he’s the one that did the job on Colonel Sterling and made it look like suicide.”
“Ah,” Steve said.
“An interesting local character, is our Donny. A real personality. He used to be a city cop in the Detective Bureau, working vice and narcotics. For a while there, he cut quite a swathe through the ranks of the big-time pimps and drug dealers, busting them left and right without fear or favor of how well connected they were with City Hall, racking up a string of high-profile convictions. He wasn’t too particular about how he did it either, leaving behind a trail of broken bones and busted heads as well as a half-a-dozen kills. Justified kills, all in the line of duty, mind you, and considering the character of the deceased, nobody was too broken up about it. The media ate it up, calling him ‘the Hero Cop,’ a one-man an
ticrime crusade.”
Steve said, “Sounds like a candidate for Officer of the Year so far, but I sense a ‘but’ coming up.”
Wenzle nodded, all outward affability. “Donny the Dick’s motives weren’t entirely selfless. Seems like all his crusading was being done to wipe out the competition of the drug and vice lords who’d been paying him off for just that.”
“In that case, I’m surprised he wasn’t made Chief of Police.”
“Luck is all,” Wenzle said. “His turned sour when he shot the wrong man by mistake. He was supposed to hit an independent dealer who’d been operating on protected turf without permission. The spotter who pointed him out to Piersall messed up and fingered the wrong guy. Donny shot him in the line of ‘resisting arrest.’ He must’ve put about twelve bullet holes in him. Then it turned out that he’d gotten the wrong man, some innocent citizen who’d been out enjoying a night on the town. He was clean, with no police record, which made it even more suspicious when he was found in possession of a handgun, a cheap Saturday night special. Donny claimed he’d been reaching for it, causing him to shoot in self-defense. Of course it was a throw-down gun, a plant which Donny’d brought along for just that purpose.
“Even so, he might have been able to wriggle out of it, but the kid was the son of a ward boss whose district was instrumental in getting the mayor elected and keeping him in office. So Piersall had to go. Rumors and allegations about his extracurricular activities were flying, but nothing was ever proved for two good reasons. One, any potential witneses turned up dead, and two, Donny had plenty of dirt on the city government, from the cop on the beat all the way to the up to the mayor’s office. He was kicked off the force, but skated clear of all criminal charges.”
Steve said, “So how does a rogue ex-cop tie in with Durwood Quentin III and the Brinker scam?”
“I’m coming to that,” Wenzle said. “Want some coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
Revenge of the Dog Team Page 6