by Mason Cross
I kept pulling him down and got up on one knee, bringing the wrench across his throat and pulling his body back against me. He coughed and gagged again, fingers scratching at mine. I pulled harder. His body convulsed and he tried to shake his head from side to side. I grunted and increased the pressure. From somewhere far away, I heard somebody screaming. It was Annie. I felt Wardell’s fingers relax a little on my grip on the wrench and felt the beginnings of relief myself, knowing that the last of his strength was beginning to ebb away.
I was wrong.
Wardell’s right hand dropped to his side, and a heartbeat later I felt a white-hot pain in my thigh. Although I couldn’t see it, I knew I’d been stabbed. Stupid. I should have known he’d always have a backup. I gritted my teeth against the pain and increased the pressure again. The gash in my leg sang out another chorus of agony as I felt the blade twist and draw out. Wardell’s hand swung dazedly outward, and I saw the steel of the blade winking out from under a thick shroud of my own blood. He brought the knife back toward us and I felt a stab in my right side.
This one didn’t feel white-hot, just the opposite: like a perfectly formed sheet of ice had been slid into my abdomen. I felt a sickly numbness and was aware of my own blood soaking into my clothing and running down my leg. My grip on the wrench relaxed just enough, and Wardell was able to squirm out from under.
I fell back, holding my side. A second later I realized with surprise that I’d fallen to the ground. Wardell was still on his feet for now, but he didn’t look like he’d be far behind me. He was staggering in a circle, holding his throat with one hand, the blade in the other. His breath rasped out. It sounded like I’d broken something important in there. I didn’t feel any remorse. He looked down at himself and saw dirt, sweat, blood—his and mine. His face contorted into a mask of revulsion. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if he might save me some trouble and die of fastidiousness.
I struggled to one knee and tried to get up, pressing harder on my side and feeling blood seep between my fingers. Wardell looked at me, then at the blade in his hands. From between his teeth, he issued one word: “Kill.”
“Freeze, FBI.”
The shout from behind Wardell stopped both of us as though we’d been flash frozen.
“Mommy!”
I looked at Annie, then followed her gaze to see Banner edging down the stairway, her gun gripped in both hands and aimed squarely at Wardell.
“Drop it,” she said.
Wardell turned slowly to face her.
“Last warning,” Banner snapped before he’d completed the rotation. “I will shoot you.”
Will you? I wondered. Because I really think you’re going to need to, Banner. Something about Wardell’s movements told me he was thinking the same thing. It didn’t reassure me in the slightest when Wardell appeared to comply, dropping the knife to the floor, where it made a dull clink.
Banner was at the bottom of the stairs now. Wardell was opening his hands in a gesture of surrender. I didn’t buy it for a second.
I tried to say, “Shoot him,” but I couldn’t seem to get it out. My lips were moving, but there didn’t seem to be anything left in me to force the sound out. The room was starting to spin. The neon tubes on the walls were casting out rainbows that I was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.
I knew I couldn’t pass out now, because somehow I had to stop what was going to happen next. I knew what Wardell was going to do because we both knew what Banner was going to do, and in this situation it was entirely the wrong thing to do: follow the rules, follow procedure.
If you carry a badge, you’re trained to observe certain rules of engagement in situations like this. Rules like not discharging your weapon unless you are absolutely certain there is a threat to your life. Like not shooting an unarmed suspect. Like ensuring you give him time to surrender. Those rules were about to get Elaine Banner killed, because despite his injuries, a moment’s uncertainty was all Caleb Wardell would need.
He was going to wait another second or two, because he knew that would only move Banner that much more out of the heat of the moment, and then he was going to rush her. Banner’s gun was a Glock. Three separate safety mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge. She might get an accurate shot off in that split second, but if she didn’t, that would be all she wrote.
Banner was speaking again. Her words sounded echoey, like she was half a mile away at the end of a drainage tunnel. “Get down on the floor, Wardell.”
Wardell was nodding, moving his arms as though he were about to do just that. I opened my mouth again to try to warn her.
Then something confusing happened. Wardell tensed and stepped back. What seemed like a long time later, I heard a shot. And then two more in quick succession. Wardell stepped forward, then pinwheeled, falling hard to the concrete floor and landing crooked. His head was angled back toward me, his sightless blue eyes staring back at me from an inch below a weeping entrance wound in his forehead.
I closed my eyes for a second, but the image stayed there, like a strobe flash. I felt myself being rocked and opened my eyes. Banner was above me, Annie clinging to her side. She was shaking me and saying a word I couldn’t understand over and over again. It took me a second to realize it was my name.
“I’m okay,” I said.
A wave of skepticism crossed Banner’s face, but she did a good job of getting rid of it. “Hang on, Blake. Help’s on the way.”
I looked over at Wardell’s body. I was pleased to see it hadn’t moved. “I thought you were supposed to . . .” I began, and then had to pause to get my breath. Banner understood anyway.
“Yeah, well,” she said, glancing back at the body. “He shouldn’t have tried to shoot my daughter.”
I started to laugh, but it came out as a coughing fit. The coughing hurt. It seemed like hard work, and yet somehow I couldn’t stop. And then I stopped feeling the pain. I slipped blissfully into a dark, warm pool of something.
TWO WEEKS LATER
83
“You look good, Blake. I mean, better than I’d have expected, anyway.” Edwards’s tone was one of pleasant surprise, artificially so, since he’d received the call alerting him to my visit five minutes before.
“I heal fast,” I said, keeping pleasantry scrupulously absent from my voice. I glanced at Agent Paxon, who’d escorted me up to the tenth floor of the FBI building. She got the message, nodded at Edwards, and stepped back out into the corridor, closing the door behind her.
That damned grin. It was there again, smeared all over his face as he came out from behind the desk to shake my hand, physically grasping it when it wasn’t offered.
“Good to see you, son.”
I winced as the unexpected movement jolted the stitches in my side. Edwards didn’t notice.
“Donaldson’s in Washington,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t come here to see Donaldson.”
His face blanked for a moment—though the grin stayed in place, naturally—and then the lightbulb went on. “Of course. I’ve got what you’re looking for right here.” He crossed back to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a large manila envelope. “Half on completion, just like we agreed,” he said. “We didn’t have an address to forward it to, so to tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping you’d drop by. And here you are.”
“Keep it,” I said.
“Excuse me?” He waited for a nod or a smile or something from me. I kept him waiting. He shrugged, sat back down, and put the envelope back in the drawer.
“We’re very grateful for your help, you know. Me, Donaldson, Banner, the whole Bureau. Hell, the whole country would be, if they knew what you’d done.”
I sat down in the chair opposite Edwards’s desk. Apparently, this move was unanticipated, because he sat back a little. Clearly, he’d been hoping the act of producing payment would make m
e disappear like a rabbit in a hat.
The desk was mostly clear, with only a couple of papers, an expensive fountain pen, and a folded copy of today’s Chicago Tribune. There was also a vintage baseball sitting on a little slate plinth, the indecipherable name of some now-retired ball player scrawled across it in Magic Marker.
After another ten seconds of uneasy silence, Edwards spoke. “We thought it was only fair to ensure you received the full payment we’d agreed upon. Despite the ah . . . problems that were encountered.”
“Very generous of you,” I said.
“But that’s all in the past now. And I’m not going to sit here and say we could have done it without you. You helped us get our man, and that’s exactly what you said you’d do.”
“That’s right. And I got him despite your best efforts.”
That didn’t leave him much option but to willfully misinterpret me, and he didn’t disappoint. “Now, come on, Blake,” he said, the smile still in place. “That’s just not fair. You know we have to play it by the book. We just don’t have the luxury of going off the reservation like you do. Even when it does get results.” He kept talking, carrying on in this vein for another minute, talking to fill the silence. I tuned out and looked beyond him at the gray late-afternoon sky. The clouds were pregnant with snow. It looked like the weather forecasts were on the money. When Edwards finally ran out of platitudes about working within the rules, I looked back at him, nodding at the Tribune. The headline was about the reelected governor’s announcement that he had terminal cancer. The sidebar was House Votes to Increase Appropriations to DOJ.
“I gather election season went well,” I said.
He looked down at the paper and shrugged. “I guess you could say that. Looks like thinking is finally turning back our way.”
“How so?”
“Well, spending on law enforcement, of course. And I mean real law enforcement, not this terrorist crap. For the last decade, all the money’s been going to hunt down fruitcake jihadists in caves in Pakistan. Meanwhile, we’ve taken our eye off the ball back home. The country’s been going to hell.”
The way he was speaking now was in marked contrast to his prevarications only a moment before. He sounded confident, authoritative, on comfortable ground.
“You really think it’s going to hell?” I asked.
He widened the grin and this time it looked quite genuine. “How can you even doubt it? Look at Wardell, at what just one man like that can do.”
“Look at Wardell,” I repeated slowly, as though considering it for the first time.
“We’ve seen real cuts in genuine law-enforcement budgets—local and state cops, prosecutors, the Bureau—since the early nineties. Now a lot of people who ought to know better think this is just fine. And why not? Crime rates are down. They’ve been falling since ninety-one. It’s like the way they cut military spending to the bone after the Berlin Wall came down.”
“The peace dividend?”
“Exactly.” Edwards pointed at me, delighted. I realized he wasn’t just on comfortable ground. This was a kind of religious fervor. “Well, this is more like . . . more like a ‘safety dividend,’ I suppose. Crime’s falling, so we don’t need as many cops, so why not spend the money on schools, hospitals, tax cuts, whatever.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“No.” He almost yelled the word, slapping the desk.
“No?”
“No. Because here’s what nobody seems to be thinking about, Blake: What if it isn’t a decline? What if the fall in crime rates is just a blip?”
I furrowed my brow as though concentrating on keeping up with him. “You’re worried about a sudden upswing, that we’d be caught with our pants down.”
Edwards nodded vigorously. If he was suspicious about the fact that I’d suddenly become such a receptive listener, he didn’t show it. “Exactly. Read the runes, Blake. The economy’s in the toilet; unemployment’s rising. It’s a damn tinderbox out there. The right spark and the whole damn country goes up in flames. And we won’t have the manpower to put it out.”
“I see where you’re going. We needed a wake-up call. As a country, I mean.”
“Bingo.”
“And you decided Caleb Wardell would be the perfect candidate to make that call.”
Edwards’s mouth hung half open for a second, on its way to another approving affirmative. His mouth twisted into the beginnings of several other words before he settled on a simple, “What?”
I leaned forward in the chair and put my elbows on the desk. “I underestimated you, Edwards. When I worked out what was happening, I thought it had to be Donaldson who was behind this.”
Edwards tried a bemused smile on for size. It didn’t match the look in his eyes.
I continued. “From almost the beginning I knew there was something else going on. It just took me a while to figure it out. Some of that was because the motive was obscured by Wardell’s random killings, but some of it was because the motive was so goddamn insane to begin with.”
“I . . . I don’t . . .”
“I was trying to see a pattern in the victims. A pattern in the predictable victims. I thought that would give me a motive. If I could identify a specific target that someone could know Wardell would pick, then that would give me the motive and the motive would give me the mastermind. It got me running in circles looking for something that wasn’t there. And then I realized I was looking at it the wrong way: Wardell wasn’t released to kill anyone specific, but just to kill anyone. It was Banner who made me see it. It was impossible to predict exactly who he’d kill. The one thing someone could predict was the basic fact that Wardell would kill, and do it in a way that attracted mass media attention.”
“Now, hold on a second, Blake.”
“You wanted to reverse the trend. The decline in spending. Lobbying was getting you there, but too slowly. You needed a nudge. A big media event to push it over the edge, right around election time. Like the way Hoover used Dillinger and the Lindbergh kidnapping to justify the War on Crime back in the thirties. The Markow kidnap, the ransom drop that went mysteriously wrong—that was you too, right?”
I stopped for breath and waited for Edwards to say something: confirmation, or more likely more denials. He just sat there looking back at me. The oleaginous grin banished at last. I decided to play my hole card to shake him up. It didn’t seem like much. Just two words.
“Martin Bryce,” I said.
It worked. Edwards flinched in his chair as though I’d touched a live wire to the metal armrests. He moistened his lips and opened his mouth, but nothing issued forth.
“Yeah, I know about Bryce,” I continued. “Or ‘John Edgar,’ as you were calling him lately. It was Bryce who approached Korakovski and told him which transport to ambush and how. Then he bribed Paul Summers to switch Wardell to the transport Korakovski’s men were going to hit. Then he killed Summers to cover his tracks. It was a nice plan, I have to admit. It never occurred to anyone to question the timing of Caleb Wardell’s escape because from the outside it looked entirely coincidental.”
Edwards had given up on denials. He just looked utterly bewildered. “How did you . . . ?”
“It was the only way it could have happened,” I said. “Bryce was there in Fort Dodge and in Nebraska. He was there at Hatcher’s place. He was always one step ahead of me and two ahead of the task force. Which means you must have found a way of tagging Wardell after you broke him out. Something on his clothes wouldn’t have worked, because you knew he’d ditch them, so I’m betting the rifle was bugged. How am I doing?”
Edwards said nothing. He didn’t have to. The look in his eyes said it all.
I continued. “So you have a fake agent who’s working on the flip side. Keeping tabs on Wardell for you, but also enabling him when he needs help, like with the phony tip on the red van, or putting Hatc
her in his sights. I’d hazard a guess he set up the mugging attempt on me in the motel parking lot in Cairo, when you realized I was getting a little too close a little too soon.
“This guy is not on staff at the FBI, and yet he has inside knowledge of the investigation. He could move freely among the task force; he has a look and a bearing and identification that are all good enough to fool any real agent. How is that possible? Because he’s not fake at all. He’s the real deal. Like I said: the only way it could have happened.
“I had a long time to think about it in the hospital, and I kept coming back to that conclusion. So how come he didn’t show up in the system? I asked Banner to get me ID photos for every male agent in the Bureau who died in the last ten years. Some of those were killed in the line of duty, but I didn’t spend too long looking at them. I was interested in people who’d died unrelated to the job. Over the entire United States, that fit less than two dozen men in the period. Few enough that I could really focus on those faces. It didn’t take too long to find the one I wanted. He had a little more hair and contact lenses, but there was no mistaking it: Martin Bryce, who was supposed to have been killed in an automobile accident in San Diego three years ago, somehow shows up as John Edgar two weeks ago. The dental records were different, but if you can fake an FBI ID, dental records are a piece of cake. We did a little more digging, and guess what? Bryce was assigned to your team back when you worked Organized Crime, which would have brought you both into contact with Vitali Korakovski. Quite a coincidence. How many more John Edgars do you have, Edwards? How many ghost agents working behind the scenes?”