by Lee Child
“The lawyers next door have gone home,” I said. “There won’t be anybody in the building until Monday morning. So go ahead and shout and scream all you want, but nobody will hear you.”
She said nothing. I closed the door on her. Tied the phone cord tight around the knob. Opened the office door as wide as it would go and tied the other end of the cord to its handle. She could haul on the inside of the bathroom door all weekend long without getting anywhere. Nobody can break electrical wire by pulling on it lengthwise. I figured she’d give up after an hour and sit tight and drink water from the sink faucet and use the toilet and try to pass the time.
I sat down at her desk. I figured an operations manager should have some interesting paperwork. But she didn’t. The best thing I found was a copy of the Keast and Maden order. The caterers. 18 @ $55. Somebody had penciled a note on the bottom. A woman’s handwriting. Probably Emily Smith’s own. The note said: lamb, not pork! I swiveled her chair around and looked at the wrapped dress on the coat rack. Then I swiveled it back and checked my watch. My ten minutes were up.
I rode the elevator to the garage and left by a fire exit in the rear. The rent-a-cop didn’t see me. I walked around the block and came up on Duffy and Villanueva from behind. Their car was parked on the corner and they were together in the front, staring forward through the windshield. I guessed they were hoping to see two people walking down the street toward them. I opened the door and slid into the back seat and they spun around and looked disappointed. I shook my head.
“Neither of them,” I said.
“Somebody answered the phone,” Duffy said.
“A woman called Emily Smith,” I said. “His operations manager. She wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“What did you do with her?”
“Locked her in the bathroom. She’s out of the picture until Monday.”
“You should have sweated her,” Villanueva said. “You should have pulled her fingernails out.”
“Not my style,” I said. “But you can go right ahead, if you want. Feel free. She’s still up there. She’s not going anywhere.”
He just shook his head and sat still.
“So what now?” Duffy asked.
“So what now?” Kohl asked.
We were still inside the utility truck. Kohl, the judge advocate, and me. Frasconi had taken the Syrian away. Kohl and I were thinking hard and the judge was in the process of washing his hands of the whole thing.
“I was only here to observe,” he said. “I can’t give you legal advice. It wouldn’t be appropriate. And frankly I wouldn’t know what to tell you anyway.”
He glared at us and let himself out the rear door and just walked away. He didn’t look back. I guess that was the downside of picking out a royal pain in the ass for an observer. Unintended consequences.
“I mean, what happened?” Kohl said. “What exactly did we see?”
“Only two possibilities,” I said. “One, he was ripping the guy off, plain and simple. Classic confidence trick. You drip, drip, drip the unimportant stuff, and then you hold back on the final installment. Or two, he was working as a legitimate intelligence officer. On an official operation. Proving that Gorowski was leaky, proving that the Syrians were willing to pay big bucks for stuff.”
“He kidnapped Gorowski’s daughter,” she said. “No way was that officially sanctioned.”
“Worse things have happened,” I said.
“He was ripping them off.”
I nodded. “I agree with you. He was ripping them off.”
“So what can we do about it?”
“Nothing,” I said “Because if we go ahead and accuse him of scamming them for personal profit, he’ll just automatically say no, I wasn’t doing that, actually I was running a sting, and I invite you to try to prove otherwise. And then he’ll not very politely remind us to keep our big noses out of intelligence business.”
She said nothing.
“And you know what?” I said. “Even if he was ripping them off, I wouldn’t know what to charge him with. Does the Uniform Code stop you taking money from foreign idiots in exchange for briefcases full of fresh air?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
“But whatever, the Syrians will go ape,” she said. “I mean, won’t they? They paid him half a million bucks. They’ll have to react. Their pride is at stake. Even if he was legit, he took a hell of a big risk. Half a million big risks. They’ll be coming after him. And he can’t just disappear. He’ll have to stay on-post. He’ll be a sitting target.”
I paused a beat. Looked at her. “If he’s not going to disappear, why was he moving all his money?”
She said nothing. I looked at my watch. Thought: This, not that. Or, just perhaps, just for once, this and that.
“Half a million is too much money,” I said.
“For what?”
“For the Syrians to pay. It’s just not worth it. There’ll be a prototype soon. Then there’ll be a preproduction batch. There’ll be a hundred finished weapons down at the quartermaster level within a matter of months. They could buy one of those for ten thousand dollars, probably. Some bent corporal would sell them one. They could even steal one for free. Then they could just reverse-engineer it.”
“OK, so they’re dumb businessmen,” Kohl said. “But we heard Quinn on the tape. He put half a million in the bank.”
I looked at my watch again. “I know. That’s a definite fact.”
“So?”
“It’s still too much. The Syrians are no dumber than anybody else. Nobody would value a fancy lawn dart at half a million bucks.”
“But we know that’s what they paid. You just agreed it’s a definite fact.”
“No,” I said. “We know Quinn’s got half a million in the bank. That’s the fact. It doesn’t prove the Syrians paid him half a million. That part is speculation.”
“What?”
“Quinn’s a Middle East specialist. He’s a smart guy, and he’s a bad guy. I think you stopped looking too soon.”
“Looking at what?”
“At him. Where he goes, who he meets. How many dubious regimes are there in the Middle East? Four or five, minimum. Suppose he’s in bed with two or three of them at once? Or all of them? With each one thinking it’s the only one? Suppose he’s leveraging the same scam three or four times over? That would explain why he’s got half a million in the bank for something that isn’t worth half a million to any one individual.”
“And he’s ripping them all off?”
I checked my watch again.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he’s playing for real with one of them. Maybe that’s how it got started. Maybe he intended it to be for real all along, with one favored client. But he couldn’t get the kind of big money he wanted from them. So he decided to multiply the yield.”
“I should have watched more cafés,” she said. “I shouldn’t have stopped with the Syrian guy.”
“He’s probably got a fixed route,” I said. “Lots of separate meetings, one after another. Like a damn mail carrier.”
She checked her watch.
“OK,” she said. “So right now he’s taking the Syrian’s cash home.”
I nodded. “And then he’s heading out again right away to meet with the next guy. So you need to get Frasconi and get some more surveillance going. Find Quinn on his way back into town. Haul in anybody he swaps a briefcase with. Maybe you’ll just end up with a bunch of empty briefcases, but maybe one of them won’t be empty, in which case we’re back in business.”
She glanced around the inside of the truck. Glanced down at her tape recorder.
“Forget it,” I said. “No time for the clever stuff. It’ll have to be just you and Frasconi, out there on the street.”
“The warehouse,” I said. “We’re going to have to check it out.”
“We’ll need support,” Duffy said. “They’ll all be there.”
“I hope they are.”
“Actually I think they’re all on their way to someplace else. It’s possible they’ve left already.”
“Where are they going?”
“Later,” I said. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”
Villanueva moved the Taurus off the curb.
“Wait,” I said. “Make the next right. Something else I want to check first.”
I directed him two blocks over and one up and we came to the parking garage where I had left Angel Doll in the trunk of his car. Villanueva waited on a hydrant and I slipped out. I walked down the vehicle entrance and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. Walked on until I came to the space I had used. There was a car in it. But it wasn’t Angel Doll’s black Lincoln. It was a metallic green Subaru Legacy. It was the Outback version, with the roof rails and the big tires. It had a Stars and Stripes sticker in the back window. A patriotic driver. But not quite patriotic enough to buy an American automobile.
I walked the two adjacent aisles, just to make sure, although I already was. Not the Saab, but the Lincoln. Not the maid’s missing notes, but Angel Doll’s missing heartbeat. Now he knows all about you. I nodded to myself in the dark. Nobody knows all about anybody. But I guessed now he knew more about me than I was totally comfortable with. I walked back the way I had come. Up the entrance ramp and out into the daylight. It was cloudy and gray and dim and shadowed by tall buildings but it felt like a searchlight beam had hit me. I slid back into the Taurus and closed the door quietly.
“OK?” Duffy asked.
I didn’t answer. She turned around in her seat and faced me.
“OK?” she said again.
“We need to get Eliot out of there,” I said.
“Why?”
“They found Angel Doll.”
“Who did?”
“Quinn’s people.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “It could have been the Portland PD. A suspicious vehicle, parked too long?”
I shook my head. “They’d have opened the trunk. So now they’d be treating the whole garage as a crime scene. They’d have it taped off. There’d be cops all over the place.”
She said nothing.
“It’s completely out of control now,” I said. “So call Eliot. On his cell. Order him out of there. Tell him to take the Becks and the cook with him. In the Cadillac. Tell him to arrest them all at gunpoint if necessary. Tell him to find a different motel and hide out.”
She dug in her purse for her Nokia. Hit a speed dial button. Waited. I timed it out in my head. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings. Duffy glanced at me, anxious. Then Eliot answered. Duffy breathed out and gave him the instructions, loud and clear and urgent. Then she clicked off.
“OK?” I said.
She nodded. “He sounded very relieved.”
I nodded back. He would be. No fun in crouching over the butt end of a machine gun, your back to the sea, staring out at the gray landscape, not knowing what’s coming at you, or when.
“So let’s go,” I said. “To the warehouse.”
Villanueva moved off the curb again. He knew the way. He had watched the warehouse twice, with Eliot. Two long days. He threaded southeast through the city and approached the port from the northwest. We all sat quiet. There was no conversation. I tried to assess the damage. It was total. A disaster. But it was also a liberation. It clarified everything. No more pretending. The scam had dissolved away to nothing. Now I was their enemy, plain and simple. And they were mine. It was a release.
Villanueva was a smart operator. He did everything right. He worked his way around the warehouse on a three-block radius. Covered all four sides. We were limited to brief glimpses down alleys and through gaps between buildings. Four passes, four glimpses. There were no cars there. The roller door was closed tight. No lights in the windows.
“Where are they all?” Duffy said. “This was supposed to be a big weekend.”
“It is,” I said. “I think it’s very big. And I think what they’re doing makes perfect sense.”
“What are they doing?”
“Later,” I said. “Let’s go take a look at the Persuaders. And let’s see what they’re getting in exchange.”
Villanueva parked two buildings north and east, outside a door marked Brian’s Fine Imported Taxidermy. He locked the Taurus and we walked south and west and then looped around to come up on Beck’s place from the blind side where there were no windows. The personnel door into the warehouse office was locked. I looked in through the back office window and saw nobody. Rounded the corner and looked in at the secretarial area. Nobody there. We arrived at the unpainted gray door and stopped. It was locked.
“How do we get in?” Villanueva asked.
“With these,” I said.
I pulled out Angel Doll’s keys and unlocked the door. Opened it. The burglar alarm started beeping. I stepped in and flipped through the papers on the notice board and found the code and entered it. The red light changed to green and the beeping stopped and the building went silent.
“They’re not here,” Duffy said. “We don’t have time to explore. We need to go find Teresa.”
I could already smell gun oil. It was floating right there on top of the smell of the raw wool from the rugs.
“Five minutes,” I said. “And then ATF will give you a medal.”
“They should give you a medal,” Kohl said.
She was calling me from a pay phone on the Georgetown University campus.
“Should they?”
“We’ve got him. We can stick a fork in him. The guy is totally done.”
“So who was it?”
“The Iraqis,” she said. “Can you believe that?”
“Makes sense, I guess,” I said. “They just got their asses kicked and they want to be ready for the next time.”
“Talk about audacious.”
“How did it go down?”
“The same as we saw before. But with Samsonites, not Halliburtons. We got empty cases from a Lebanese guy and an Iranian. Then we hit the motherlode with the Iraqi guy. The actual blueprint.”
“You sure?”
“Totally certain,” she said. “I called Gorowski and he authenticated it by the drafting number in the bottom corner.”
“Who witnessed the transfer?”
“Both of us. Me and Frasconi. Plus some students and faculty. They did it in a university coffee shop.”
“What faculty?”
“We got a law professor.”
“What did he see?”
“The whole thing. But he can’t swear to the actual transfer. They were real slick, like a shell game. The briefcases were identical. Is it enough?”
Questions I wish I had answered differently. It was possible Quinn could claim the Iraqi already had the blueprint, from sources unknown. Possible he could suggest the guy just liked to carry it around with him. Possible he could deny there was any exchange at all. But then I thought about the Syrian, and the Lebanese guy, and the Iranian. And all the money in Quinn’s bank. The rip-off victims would be smarting. They might be willing to testify in closed session. The State Department might be able to offer them some kind of a quid pro quo. And Quinn’s fingerprints would be on the briefcase in the Iraqi’s possession. He wouldn’t have worn gloves to the rendezvous. Too suspicious. Altogether I thought we had enough. We had a clear pattern, we had inexplicable dollars in Quinn’s bank account, we had a top-secret U.S. Army blueprint in an Iraqi agent’s possession, and we had two MPs and a law professor to say how it got there, and we had fingerprints on a briefcase handle.
“It’s plenty,” I said. “Go make the arrest.”
“Where do I go?” Duffy said.
“I’ll show you,” I said.
I moved past her through the open area. Into the back office. Through the door into the warehouse cubicle. Angel Doll’s computer was still there on the desk.
His chair was still leaking its stuffing all over the place. I found the right switch and lit up the warehouse floor. I could see everything through the glass partition. The racks of carpets were still there. The forklift was still there. But in the middle of the floor were five head-high stacks of crates. They were piled into two groups. Farthest from the roller door were three piles of battered wooden boxes all stenciled with markings in unfamiliar foreign alphabets, mostly Cyrillic, overlaid with right-to-left scrawls in some kind of Arabic language. I guessed those were Bizarre Bazaar’s imports. Nearer the door were two piles of new crates printed in English: Mossberg Connecticut. Those would be the Xavier Export Company’s outgoing shipment. Import-export, barter at its purest. Fair exchange is no robbery, as Leon Garber might have said.
“It’s not huge, is it?” Duffy said. “I mean, five stacks of boxes? A hundred and forty thousand dollars? I thought it was supposed to be a big deal.”
“I think it is big,” I said. “In importance, maybe, rather than quantity.”
“Let’s take a look,” Villanueva said.
We moved out onto the warehouse floor. He and I lifted the top Mossberg crate down. It was heavy. My left arm was still a little weak. And the center of my chest still hurt. It made my smashed mouth feel like nothing at all.
Villanueva found a claw hammer on a table. Used it to pull the nails out of the crate’s lid. Then he lifted the lid off and laid it on the floor. The crate was full of foam peanuts. I plunged my hands in and came out with a long gun wrapped in waxed paper. I tore the paper off. It was an M500 Persuader. It was the Cruiser model. No shoulder stock. Just a pistol grip. 12-gauge, eighteen-and-a-half-inch barrel, three-inch chamber, six shot capacity, blued metal, black synthetic front grip, no sights. It was a nasty, brutal, close-up street weapon. I pumped the action, crunch crunch. It moved like silk on skin. I pulled the trigger. It clicked like a Nikon.