The Bricklayer

by Noah Boyd

  Then it hit him—the webbing on the tank. That’s why it was so long. The extortionists had used an excess of nylon strapping to rig the tank so he could extricate himself from this cell. It was some sort of test that they hoped the FBI would fail.

  After stripping the strap out of the tank’s frame, he quickly measured it using the nose-to-fingertip method. It was three lengths, about nine feet long. Great, he thought, nine feet to get me up ten feet and through the trapdoor. And with the moneybag. He let his sailor’s knowledge of knots run through his mind for a while before the answer came to him.

  He laid the scuba tank against the wall, and because it was round, he jammed the two wedge-shaped fins underneath it to prevent it from rolling out as he stood on it, getting him a foot closer to the hook. After knotting a simple loop in the middle of the strap, he tied a large slipknot at one end and threw it over the hook. Pulling it down slowly, he tied the moneybag tightly at the bottom end of the webbing.

  As West started climbing, he realized how much the swim had taken out of him physically. He began to wonder if part of the Pentad’s plan was to exhaust him. If it was, that meant a face-to-face confrontation could lie somewhere on the other side of the trapdoor.

  Once he could stand in the knotted loop, he was able to straighten up and, with a full shove, push up on the door, causing it to rotate 180 degrees and slam against the floor in which it was hinged. West waited and listened. Still there was only silence.

  The room he was climbing into was pitch black. He pulled himself up, drew his weapon, and got into a crouched firing position before turning on his light. It was some sort of holding room in a cellblock, about twenty feet by twenty feet. White paint was peeling off all the walls, and he could now smell it in the salty, damp air. Knowing how old the facility was and what the navy used for paint thirty years earlier, he was sure it was lead-based. An old dry-rotted ladder lay flat on the floor next to the trapdoor.

  There was only one door in the room and he walked to it, turning off his light before opening it. He tried to do it carefully, but its rusted hinges echoed shrilly ahead of him. It opened to a narrow corridor. A hundred years ago the navy probably figured that whether on sea or land, a sailor needed only minimal width to move from compartment to compartment, so why waste money on aesthetics. At the far end of the corridor, he could see three more glowsticks fastened to a heavy stairwell door that had a small window of wired glass embedded in it. The sticks were shaped into an arrow pointing up. He went back to the trapdoor and pulled the moneybag up.

  If he was going higher, maybe the transmitter would eventually work. He taped it to the small of his back and ran the mike up onto his chest, taping it in place. Then he put on his shirt to hide it. Jamming everything else into the bag, he headed for the glowstick arrow.

  The stairwell was even narrower than the corridor. A metal railing ascended alongside the stairs. Peeling paint lined the deck and he could feel some of it sticking to the bottom of his feet. West turned off his flashlight. Of course they knew he was coming, but they didn’t need to know exactly where he was. In the dark he put his hand on the railing and started up. There was a landing between each floor, and he stopped on each one, snapping on his light to check the next set of stairs. Then he turned it off and listened for a few moments. He heard nothing, though he knew they were there. He continued on up the stairs.

  On each floor he checked the metal door to determine if it was where he was supposed to enter the prison, but they were all locked. The window in each had been covered with paper on the opposite side so he couldn’t look through.

  It took a few minutes to reach the top floor, the eighth if he had counted correctly. He tried the door and it opened. He turned on his flashlight and checked his weapon. He was now on a small landing with doors on either side. Shining a light through the glass windows, he could see they led off to different parts of the floor. Both were locked. Between them was a shoulder-width opening that looked down over an eight-story airshaft. All at once he could see the vastness of that part of the prison. Each floor was ringed with a catwalk accessing hundreds of cells. Underneath the railing at the edge where he stood was another glowing arrow, this time taped to the floor and pointing straight out. West leaned out through the opening without touching the ancient railing. On the deck one floor down was another arrow pointing back toward the stairwell. Was he supposed to rappel down to the next floor? He stepped back and tested the railing and, surprisingly, found it was rock solid. He leaned over again, trying to see what was on the landing below, but it was shadowed in darkness, and he couldn’t get enough of an angle to use his flashlight. Quietly he tried his transmitter once more, but there still was no answer. He turned off the light and listened. Suddenly he felt the damp coldness that surrounded him, and shivered involuntarily.

  Rappelling without a harness was chancy, but it was only about eight feet to the floor below. The nine-foot webbing was going to leave his descent a little short because of the four-foot-high railing and the knots at both ends, so he untied the bag, looping the webbing through the handles. Then, leaning as far over the side as he could, he swung the bag back and forth toward the landing below. When he was sure it would clear the railing, he released one end of the strapping, and the bag landed softly on the concrete deck below.

  He pulled the webbing back up and tied it to the railing. Slowly he started to lower himself. When he came to the end of the strap, he could just reach the railing on his tiptoes. He took a moment to gain his balance on it and then let go of the webbing. As soon as his full weight transferred to the seventh-floor railing, he heard the horrifying sound of metal tearing. Both uprights supporting the crosspiece had been almost completely sawed through. He tried to grab the strap but it was already out of reach.

  As he started to fall, he felt adrenaline explode through him. He turned himself in the air as best he could, hoping to catch a railing of one of the six remaining floors. But he was accelerating; it wasn’t going to get any easier. He threw his hands at one of them, but because his body was askew, his right hand caught the railing before his left. With a sickening crack, his right shoulder dislocated as his left hand grabbed the railing, stopping his fall.

  Blinding pain shot through the entire right side of his body, and he could hold on with only his left hand. Unable to pull himself up, he looked down, trying to count the railings below. The flashlight dangled from his useless arm as its beam swept the airshaft haphazardly. He was still three stories up. Something streaked by him and he thought it might have been the railing. Then he saw the cut and bundled magazine pages hit the ground and burst apart. The moneybag, now empty, floated by. Helplessly he watched his left hand, as if it belonged to someone else, come off the railing.

  DAN WEST DIDN’T think he had been unconscious very long. The first thing he became aware of was footsteps. Help had arrived.

  But there was something wrong with the approaching steps; they were too slow. And they belonged to only one person. West tried to look around but the flashlight had come off his wrist and lay beyond his grasp, giving off only a small fan of light in the opposite direction. He was lying uselessly on his gun as his entire right side was all but paralyzed by the searing pain. Slowly so his movement wouldn’t be detected, he reached back with his left hand and pushed the body recorder’s button to the On position.

  A man came up behind him and stood silently for a few seconds before walking around and standing in the flashlight’s beam. Enduring the pain, West looked up as well as he could but still wasn’t able to see his features in the shadows.

  “Did you want to see my face?” he asked in a cold whisper that caused West to understand the consequences of being able to identify the individual. He picked up the flashlight and scanned the agent’s sweating face. “You are young. That would explain the lack of self-preservation.” He then shrugged and turned the light on himself. “Here you go.”

  West stared at the man’s face, memorizing it. It was unremarkable
except for his eyes; they were a stony gray but beginning to widen with pleasure. The agent tried to bring his injured right hand to his holster, but the extortionist easily kicked it away. “And they say the old BU was tougher. That must have been very painful.”

  Hoping the recorder wasn’t damaged, West grimaced and said, “I don’t suppose you’d want to tell me your name.”

  “What good would that do you now?”

  “One last bit of satisfaction.” He laughed painfully. “It’s not like I’ve got much else to look forward to.”

  “And what’s in it for me?”

  “Come on. It’s the ultimate act of control. Completely exposing yourself and then completely taking it away. For someone like you, that has to be damn near sexual.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Someone like me?” the extortionist said, his voice amused but still in that hissing whisper. He then drew a black automatic. “I’m sorry, but we’d better move things along. I would imagine surveillance is getting close.”

  “I was hoping you’d stick around. Give them the opportunity to meet you and, with a little luck, shoot you to death.”

  “That’s the saddest thing about being young—you actually believe there is such a thing as hope.” He raised his gun and fired one round that hit Dan West in the right temple. The shot echoed metallically for a few moments, and the killer closed his eyes as if trying to prolong its sound.

  When it was completely quiet, he scanned the floor with the flashlight until he found the spent cartridge. He picked it up and slipped out a side door.

  THREE

  ROBERT LASKER KNEW THAT IN WASHINGTON, D.C., THE QUICKEST way to have one’s public-service résumé reduced to a one-line obituary was to get caught lying to the White House, especially if that individual happened to be the director of the FBI. But that was what he had just done. Anyway, he wasn’t sure what the truth was, or whether he cared if, as director of the FBI, he ever found out. He told his driver that he needed to clear his head and would walk back to the office.

  Pushing his hands deeper into his pockets as he walked along, he tried not to think about the meeting with the White House staffer who had summoned him because of the press the Bureau had been receiving about the Rubaco Pentad murders. “After three murders of well-known people, silence is not an option with the media. It looks like you’re hiding something. You have to make some sort of statement,” the staffer had said.

  Actually, they were hiding something, not only from the public, and now the White House, but from most of their own agents as well. Lasker, without giving any details, told him that the investigation was at a critical juncture and the smallest miscalculation could cause additional deaths. The fear of the administration being dragged into the circle of responsibility for more murders was enough for the aide to back off, at least for the time being.

  In truth, the FBI had not developed a single lead as to who was responsible for the murders or how to stop the killers from striking again.

  Twelve hours earlier, the Rubaco Pentad had claimed its third high-profile victim, Arthur Bellington, a nationally known defense attorney who took particular delight in preventing or overturning FBI convictions, which he often followed with a press conference detailing the Bureau’s ineptitude.

  A month earlier, a former reporter had been murdered in her L.A. home. Within a couple of days, a million-dollar extortion demand was mailed to the FBI. When Agent Daniel West tried to deliver a dummy package of money to catch them, he too was shot to death. The Bureau had covered up the death, reporting it as a training accident, because of the Pentad’s demand for secrecy concerning all monetary aspects of the case.

  A couple of weeks later, Nelson Lansing, a Utah state senator who had coauthored a book about Ruby Ridge concluding that the Bureau had methodically executed members of the Randy Weaver family, had been shot and killed by the Pentad as he was leaving his Salt Lake City home early in the morning. To no great surprise, a two-million-dollar demand arrived at the FBI within a week. What followed then was anything but predictable. The letter also named the agent who was to make the delivery, Stanley Bertok of the Los Angeles division.

  As instructed, Bertok, this time with the entire two million dollars, flew to Phoenix, rented a car, and took off on a four-hour drive to Las Vegas. The Pentad had warned about using FBI aircraft, which, like so many things in this case, indicated an uncommon understanding of Bureau procedure. The prescribed route was desolate and relatively free of commercial airline traffic so any plane would be spotted easily. Also, the terrain was flat and the roads were straight. Any trailing vehicle could be seen for miles. So the Bureau left it up to electronics, hiding GPS devices in the car and in the bag containing the money. Bertok was also given a cell phone with additional Global Positioning System abilities. Two and a half hours into the trip, the car, according to all three GPSs, stopped dead. Fearing discovery, the agents monitoring Bertok’s movements waited almost another hour before closing in. When they arrived at the indicated location, the only thing they found was a fast-food bag on the shoulder of the road. Inside were the two GPS devices along with the cell phone. Bertok, the car, and the bag containing two million dollars were nowhere to be found. Twelve hours later, the rented vehicle was found at the Las Vegas airport.

  Lasker continued his way back to the Hoover Building, forcing himself to walk slower. The weather was perfect and he took a moment to watch a couple of attractive young women pass him.

  With the Pentad claiming its fourth victim the night before, it seemed improbable that the missing two million dollars was in their possession. If they didn’t have it, the most plausible explanation was that Stan Bertok had just become America’s newest millionaire. And that meant the FBI would soon receive another demand for money to prevent a fifth killing.

  If an agent selling out wasn’t bad enough, an even worse possibility existed. Just hours before, the lab had confirmed that all four victims, including Dan West, had been shot with the same weapon, a .40-caliber Glock, model 22. That particular gun was FBI issue and was part of Bertok’s property. Coupled with the possibility of “insider info” with which the group operated, the thought had crossed more than a few minds that Bertok himself might have committed the murders to set up the extortion drop.

  Involuntarily, Lasker shook his head at the ingenuity of the Pentad. Everything it did was carefully designed to defeat the FBI, especially its choice of victims. Not only were they high-profile individuals, their deaths instantly gaining national attention, but their murders took place in California, Utah, and Pittsburgh, implying that no one was safe anywhere. And maybe most important, each of the victims was known to have a conflicted history with the FBI, making the Bureau waste time either defending itself or planning circuitous avenues of investigation to avoid the appearance of any “further” impropriety. With the public not knowing why the victims were really being murdered, the confusion continued as to who was actually killing the “enemies of the FBI,” as the media were now referring to them.

  Most puzzling was how difficult the Pentad made it to deliver the money. It almost seemed that they wanted the FBI to fail; in fact, that was exactly what one of the Bureau profilers theorized. “Their primary motive,” he said, “is to disgrace the FBI. It is such an obsession with them that they consider murder nothing more than a necessary tool. They may not even want the money. Some people find self-validation in destroying institutions. They find power in destroying power. It’s being done every day through lawsuits. But legal channels wouldn’t produce the dramatic damage they feel they have a right to. And even though their methods would be considered by most as cowardly, they see themselves as great unsung heroes, defeating, in this case, an institution that the American people mistakenly see as heroic. The more times they can defeat it, the more heroic they are. And the more foolish we look. Do they want the money? Eventually they probably will. Greed is pretty dependable. But they’re not going to be in any hurry to get it as long as
they’re beating us in these skirmishes. Waco and Ruby Ridge are apparently the justification of their actions. No one from the FBI was ever punished for those incidents, so they are taking retribution into their own hands. If Bertok did suddenly become a thief and take the money, they couldn’t have hoped for anything better. It proves their point that the FBI is really corrupt and can’t be trusted. And at some point they will reveal to the world that he took it. Again, to humiliate us. Not only do we have a dishonest agent, but we routinely cover up something like this. Which at the moment we are.”

  Lasker knew that whoever was pulling the strings, whether it was the Pentad or Agent Bertok freelancing—or both—the effect was paralyzing the Bureau’s ability to go after them. That the FBI might be assassinating its enemies and blaming the killings on a fictitious group of terrorists was a ridiculous notion, but if the information about the Glock 22, the gun the Bureau had issued Bertok, became public, it might not seem so far-fetched.

  At each of the crime scenes, a folded piece of paper with the same two words, “Rubaco Pentad,” had been left on the victim’s chest. Since “pentad” is defined as a group of five, the press felt safe in concluding that some sort of small domestic terrorism cell was committing the murders. And “Rubaco,” they decided, was an amalgam of Ruby Ridge and Waco, two of the FBI’s most enduring black eyes, especially among the more radical antigovernment groups, most of which would list the FBI as first-strike targets.

  Seeking to further sensationalize the case, the press drew a more abstract but marketable conclusion: that each of the three known victims, because of his or her individual history with the Bureau, could be considered an enemy of the FBI. However, the two assumptions collectively formed a paradox. If the Rubaco Pentad were committing murders to save the world from the FBI, then why was it killing individuals who shared the same beliefs?