The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “We bagged another racist, and with a little of my own needlework we were able to recover a dozen weapons and ten pounds of commercial explosive they didn’t have time to move before we broke the son of a bitch,” snapped Hirsh. “One would think that would meet with the FBI’s approval. This is our city, Elliot, and we don’t need your supervision to combat terrorist murder and hatecrime here. Nor are we obligated to share the credit for our own success and professionalism with you people.”

  “That’s not all you’re not sharing,” muttered Weinstein’s Director of Operations, an overweight and seedy-looking agent with a red boozer’s face and blue broken veins in his nose named Don Farley. Farley was a short-timer who was about to complete his twenty years, draw his pension, and head for a cushy job in corporate security or somewhere in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy, one that would hopefully not interfere with his drinking as much as his present post. He was sticking it in Portland for the extra $1500 per month hazardous duty pay. With two ex-wives as well as his current spouse, several children going through college, and a mountain of credit card and mortgage debt that was massive even by American standards, he needed every penny he could scrape together, although the tension of life in the NVA’s crosshairs had driven him into the bottle even more so than was usual for him. There were bets around the FBI office as to when Farley would go down for his first heart attack. Weinstein didn’t like Farley or trust him, and he had tried several gambits to get rid of him or at least ease him out of the DO slot, but although Farley was a sloppy law enforcement officer, like many Bureau lifers he was an adept at inter-office politics and intrigue, and he had accumulated enough juice to stay firmly in the saddle as DO.

  Linda Hirsch’s eyes flickered briefly and then she turned abruptly to a list of vehicles and license numbers, stolen in the Portland area in the past two weeks and which might be in NVA hands. To someone used to her ponderous and inscrutable meeting persona, it was as noticeable as if she’d jumped like a scalded dog, and Weinstein picked up on it. His eyes narrowed, but he held his peace for the moment. When the lunch break came he tracked Farley down in the Justice Center bar and grabbed his coat lapel, spilling Scotch and soda over his already stained shirtfront. “Hey!” yelped Farley.

  “What the hell was that cryptic crack you made in there about Portland PB not sharing?” demanded Weinstein. “Not sharing what? It seemed to get under Hirsch’s skin, whatever the hell you were talking about.”

  “Nothing, just water cooler scuttlebutt,” said Farley with a shrug. “The kind you’d pick up yourself if you’d be sociable, hang out with the guys after work and hoist a few cold ones like a normal person. I was yanking the fat bitch’s chain. It’s probably just bullshit.”

  Weinstein restrained an urge to put his hands around his subordinate’s wattled neck and start squeezing. “What is probably just bullshit?” he asked, forcing himself to be calm.

  “Portland PB is supposed to have somebody on the inside with the NVA.”

  Weinstein looked at Agent Farley strangely. Behind his spectacles, his eyes goggled dementedly. “And you . . . did not see fit . . . to tell me this?” Weinstein choked out, his voice rising to a maniacal scream.

  “Cool your jets, man,” said Farley in irritation. “I would have said something if I thought there was a damned thing to it, but it’s crap. Gotta be crap. Jesus, Elliot, come on now! If we can’t get anybody inside, trained agents with years of undercover experience, how the hell are the local yokels going to do it? It’s just jealousy, probably comes from those apes in BATFE who can’t stand seeing their thunder stolen. The Portland cops are on a lucky streak, sure, but that’s all it is. If they had somebody inside, do you think they wouldn’t have busted the heavy hitters like Coyle and Jackson and Lockhart, and this mysterious Oscar character we keep hearing whispers on the wind about?”

  Farley was a fool. Elliot Weinstein was not. He went back to his office, closed the door, held his calls, sat behind his desk and went over in his mind everything that had happened over the past six to eight months, all the “lucky” busts and raids that the Portland Police Bureau had managed to pull off, as well as the increasingly transparent excuses given for those successes. He analyzed and assessed it all, and he knew. He spent the next several minutes kicking himself in his mind for being so slow on the uptake as to not have figured it out on his own, then he rose and walked down a long series of corridors and into Linda Hirsch’s office. “Is she in?” he asked her receptionist. “Never mind, I hear her.” He walked into Hirsch’s office and stood in front of her desk, waiting for her to get off the phone, looking down at the Chief like a basilisk of doom. When she hung up he did not wait for her to speak. “The game is up, Linda. I want your informant. I have the legal right to him under a string of regulations that you know as well as I do, and if you try to withhold him from me or feed me a line of bullshit, I will call the Director of Homeland Security personally, and he will come out here. We will have a sit-down, and when we stand up, you probably won’t be employed any longer. You know I can do it, and I will. It’s over, Linda. Who is he?”

  Hirsch stared at him in baffled rage, but she knew it was over, too. She sighed and scowled. “It’s not a he, it’s a she,” she replied.

  Half an hour later, Detective Sergeant Lainie Martinez and Detective Sergeant Jamal Jarvis were seated in a conference room with Chief Hirsch, Elliot Weinstein, and Special Agent Don Farley. It was hard to say which of the three Portland cops were the most angry and horrified and chagrined, but they all knew they’d been busted and it was time to put as good a face on things as possible, and salvage what they could before the FBI commandeered Operation Searchlight completely. Lainie explained things in her usual cool and professional manner. “The undercover operative in question is not a police officer. She is an ex-convict, a prostitute and former drug addict who is cooperating with us for two reasons: to slither out of a first degree murder charge wherein she killed her pimp, and also because we now have custody of her two-year-old daughter. She is a very reluctant informant, she is subject to all of the psychological and personality problems you would expect from someone of her background, and she is completely terrified of the people she’s with, as well she might be, since if she were even suspected of being a snitch she would be murdered without a second’s hesitation on their part. The girl is a bundle of raw nerves, and she requires very careful handling. Agent Weinstein, I know you’re not happy that you weren’t informed of the operation, but I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you keep Sergeant Jarvis and myself on as her handlers, at least for the time being until you can transition to your own team. She’s used to us.”

  “De bitch is mo’ scared shitless of the Mami and the Monkey than she is of the goots, is what,” contributed Jarvis.

  “Agreed,” said Weinstein coolly. He didn’t like keeping the Portland PB involved any longer than necessary. He wanted Kicky all for his own so bad he could taste it, but he knew that he needed to appear magnanimous in victory. “On one condition. I want to see everything you’ve got, everything you’re doing, and every scrap of intel that you’ve been able to gather through this woman.”

  So they took the two FBI agents to the inner sanctum, the janitorial supplies suite in a remote part of the Justice Center, and Weinstein’s jaw nearly slammed into the floor when he saw the huge organizational tables with photographs, file reference numbers, neat little boxes and flowcharts that now covered two walls of the operational center. The FBI doted on this kind of thing, and he was quietly frantic with stunned jealousy as he walked up to the charts and studied them. “Okay, the two brigades I get, we know that much, but First Battalion, Second Battalion, Third Battalion? When the hell did they create battalions? Hatfield and those bandits down on the North Coast are now a whole separate battalion by themselves? And all these others? Who the hell are these guys?”

  Farley was studying the org charts in fascination. “Jackson I know, Racine and Carter Wingfield I know,
Coyle I know, but who the hell is this guy Hannon? We thought Second Brigade was commanded by somebody named Wagner?”

  “One of Hannon’s code names,” said Lainie.

  “My God, who are all these people?” Weinstein muttered to himself. “What is all this?” he asked, gesturing to a large map of the greater Portland area on a corkboard studded with black, red, green, blue, orange, and yellow pins, as well as one white pin.

  “Black are NVA murders and red are bombings, which I’m sure you can figure out from the locations,” said Chief Hirsch. “Green are suspected arms dumps which we have under intermittent surveillance as much as our manpower allows, and as far as we can do without exciting suspicion and blowing the informant’s cover. Blue are suspected NVA safe houses. Orange are the addresses of suspected terrorists, although those change all the time and we can’t guarantee their accuracy for more than a day or two. Yellow are reported sightings of the Jack of Diamonds Sniper, Jesse ‘Cat-Eyes’ Lockhart, who is a person of especial interest to us.” Detective Andy McCafferty walked up to the board, with a sidelong glance at the FBI agents, and moved the white pin to a different spot on the board.

  “What’s the white one?” asked Weinstein.

  “That’s the present location of Sharkbait, our code name for the undercover,” said Lainie. “Her real name is Kristin McGee, her street name is Kicky, and her Volunteer name is Comrade Jodie. We have a GPI on her all the time, of course, as well as fiber-optic sound and occasional video monitoring, but we find that keeping her marked on the board gives an added perspective.”

  “Nice code name for an NVA snitch,” chuckled Farley grimly.

  “We like it,” said Lainie neutrally.

  “How specific is your intel?” asked Weinstein, shaking his head. “For example, do you have any idea who killed Ambassador Whitman and his wife outside the Nordstrom department store in November?”

  Andy looked at Lainie, who sighed and nodded her head. “Yeah, we know,” McCafferty told them. “That was Billy Jackson, Jimmy Wingo, and our girl. Actually, we have the whole hit recorded on digital audio.”

  “What?” shouted Weinstein in astonishment.

  “You want to hear it go down?” asked McCafferty.

  He provided two sets of headphones, and Weinstein and Farley sat with their jaws gaping while they listened to the soundtrack of the double hit and the subsequent ditching and booby-trapping of the vehicle. “My God, you’re years ahead of us!” muttered Weinstein.

  “We got our shit together,” agreed Jarvis.

  “I would like to point out that the audio clearly indicates the murder of the Ambassador was a crime of opportunity, and we had no chance to intervene . . .” began Linda Hirsch.

  “Never mind that,” said Weinstein, waving it away. “Hillary never liked Whitman when he was in the State Department, he was a Republican, and she sent him to South Africa to get rid of him. He made waves about the occupation of Gaza, and frankly I think if the NVA hadn’t whacked him, Hillary might have done. She’s getting more and more impatient of contradiction. Of course you have to preserve this undercover at any cost. Don’t worry, I get it. Now, let’s get down to cases. You people have been using this woman for nickel and dime shit. It’s time we got her up higher on the food chain, and I have just the right starting point. The Bureau doesn’t have this kind of humintel, true, but we do have some sources of information through phone and internet monitoring, and our analysts have gotten pretty good at tracking the chatter and cracking the revolving codes these guys use. Not good enough to get ahead of them, but good enough to get a whiff of things now and then, and we’ve got a Portland whiff. You know about the plans that are on the drawing board in Washington for a Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization?”

  “We’ve heard rumors,” said Hirsch sourly, sensing an upcoming reduction in her authority when a federal paramilitary army descended on Portland.

  “So have the NVA, apparently. We’ve picked up a buzz that a high-ranking Army Council member is on his way down from the Seattle area sometime in the next few days, for a sit-down with the local warlords here in Portland to discuss the matter. This is one occasion when we can be reasonably sure that a lot of their heaviest hitters are going to be in the same room together somewhere. We need to find out where, and we need to get our girl in there listening in somehow, or at least get the meeting wired. If the fish look big and tasty enough, we move on them.” “Our” girl is she, now? thought Lainie bitterly.

  “Were you planning on sharing this interesting bit of information with us?” asked Linda Hirsch with asperity.

  “I don’t think you’re in any position to throw stones about not sharing information, Linda,” replied Weinstein sarcastically. “Sergeant Martinez, you’re in the enviable position of being the American law enforcement officer most familiar with the day to day operations of these people. Surely there has to be some way we can insert the undercover into this meeting?”

  “This isn’t a video game, sir,” said Lainie, tight-lipped. “We can’t move her across the screen and have her do flips and throw fireballs with a flick of a switch or touch of a button so she can break through to the next level. Right now she’s just a foot soldier, a driver, an errand girl. I’m still not sure that they trust her fully, which may be one of the reasons none of them has approached her sexually yet. She hasn’t even been issued a permanent NVA weapon. They give her a pistol every time she goes out driving for them, but they take it back afterwards. She goes where they tell her to and she does what they tell her to, and they’re using her for more and more heavy stuff now, like bombing runs, but it’s not like she can walk up to Jackson or Wingo and volunteer to show the Army Council guy the sights around Portland. All we can hope for is that she somehow gets involved in the normal course of NVA events.”

  “Okay, tell you what, let’s just start at the beginning and see what we’ve got, and where we can go with it,” said Weinstein, literally rubbing his hands together in sheer delight at the prospect of hurting the hated anti-Semites and at the same time salvaging his slipping reputation at the Justice Department in Washington.

  The first time that Kicky heard that she was under new management was when she came in via the usual circuitous route for what she thought was a routine debriefing several days later, and she walked into the conference room in the operations center to find a vulturine panel of people waiting for her, including Martinez, Jarvis, Weinstein, and Farley. Beside them sat a balding, hook-nosed man in a white lab coat, and when the door closed behind her she found two large men dressed as hospital orderlies standing behind her, one black and one Mexican. “What the fuck?” she hissed.

  “Kristin, there’s been a change in your situation,” said Lainie. “From now on, you’re working for the federal government, although Sergeant Jarvis and I will still be participating in Operation Searchlight. One of the things we are going to be doing is updating your surveillance and tracking technology. This is Doctor Feldman. He will be performing a simple surgical procedure on you today.”

  “The hell he will!” shouted Kicky, but he did. The two men in white grabbed her by both arms, and she was forthwith dragged by force, kicking and screaming and cursing, into a nearby elevator and then down two floors to the police infirmary, which had been cleared of all unauthorized personnel. There she was manhandled onto a gurney and strapped down. By now Kicky was hysterical and fighting violently, but to no avail. She thought from the gurney that her masters had tired of her, and that she was about to be put to death by the standard American execution method of lethal injection. She cursed them wildly and spat and bit, until without a word Feldman turned on a canister of anesthetic gas and fitted the mask over her face, and she lost consciousness.

  To her surprise she awakened less than half an hour later, and half an hour after that she was back in the conference room. Her upper left arm and her shoulder was starting to hurt as the local anesthetic wore off. “We’re a bit worried that the NVA people you’re spy
ing on for us might notice that you always wear the same several sets of earrings and you always wear the same ring containing your global positioning indicator,” Weinstein explained smoothly. “We have accordingly inserted a subcutaneous microchip about the size of your thumbnail into the musculature of your arm, just below your armpit, where the bandage is. You’ll be able to have that off in a couple of hours, and the swelling should go down within a day or so. Just wear long-sleeved blouses or a jacket until then, and it won’t be seen. This device is all plastic and silicon, so it won’t trip any metal detectors if you have to go through one or anyone scans you, and it serves the same purpose as all that fancy jewelry you’re wearing. It’s got full audio capability, it can pick up a normal speaking voice up to twenty feet, and it’s got a GPI so we will know your whereabouts at all times. It also has the advantage of not being removable, in case you get any ideas about taking off your ring and your earrings and bugging out on us.” Kicky buried her face in her hands. Now her last emergency option of simple flight after she took off her tracking devices was gone.

  She listened with mounting horror as Weinstein explained what was wanted of her. She desperately tried to explain the facts of life to him. “Look, Mr. FBI, I don’t know what these two have been telling you, but I am the lowest Injun on the totem pole in the NVA. I’m not even officially a Northwest Volunteer yet, at least I don’t think I am. I’m still what they call an asset, a wannabe. The only way I have been able to avoid ending up lying dead in the woods with a plastic bag over my head is I do what I’m told, when I’m told to do it, and I do not ask questions! If I start probing and fishing and trying to find out about this guy you say is coming down from Seattle and this meeting you say is going down, that’s going to set off every alarm bell in these guys’ minds. I can’t do what you’re asking! How am I even supposed to explain the fact that I know about this stuff I’m trying to find out about? It’s not like there’s a rumor mill or grapevine in the Army. These people are as tight as clams about stuff like that. I’ve got a kind of semi-friendly relationship with Jimmy Wingo, yeah, but I don’t think he’s all that high up either, and other than Jackson I don’t even know any officers, except maybe that guy I saw in Jupiter’s Den and later in Lenny Gillis’ apartment, the one who was with Lockhart.”