The Bricklayer

by Noah Boyd

  “I’m with the FBI.”

  “Why are you alone?”

  “You’re safe now, that’s all that’s important.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I paid three million dollars.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You were supposed to be someone else.”

  She noticed his cheek for the first time. “Are you all right?”

  “Other than being short one assistant United States attorney and some hundred-dollar bills, I’m fine.” Vail’s cell rang. It was Kate. “Hello.”

  “Steve, where are you?” she asked in a tone edged with panic.

  “Sounds like something is wrong.”

  “Somebody took the three million dollars from my safe.”

  Radek still had Tye. He had told Vail that no one could know about it, and he wasn’t sure that just because the money had been delivered, he could tell anyone. Maybe Radek wanted to hold on to her until he got away completely. “I’m sorry, Kate,” Vail said, and hung up, turning off his phone.

  “Something wrong?” the woman asked.

  “Let’s get out of here.” He led the woman up the stairs. On the second floor, he walked over to a window that was marked as a fire route and opened it. He helped her out onto the fire escape and followed her.

  Once they were in his car, Vail said, “I’m going to take you to the nearest police station. I want you to tell them what happened.” He wrote down the address of the factory and Radek’s full name and handed her the paper. “Tell them there’s a large bomb at the front door that’s been disarmed, but they should still go in through the second-floor window we came out of just in case.”

  “Aren’t you going with me?”

  “I’m going to be straight with you. There’s another woman’s life at stake, and it’s better that no one know about her or me until I can find her. So if you don’t give them a good description of me or tell them I’m an FBI agent, it would buy me some time.”

  “Are you really with the FBI?”

  “Yes.” He showed her his credentials. “But not for much longer.”

  “THAT’S IT, he’s sorry,” Kaulcrick said. “I guess we don’t have to look any further.”

  They were in Kate’s office. “There’s got to be a reason,” she offered.

  “Yes, there is. He wanted three million dollars.”

  “You know he’d never do that.”

  “Then why didn’t he give you an explanation?”

  Mark Hildebrand recognized the charged tone and knocked on the door frame as a formality before entering. “Don, the United States attorney just called me. He’s been trying to get ahold of Tye Delson since that article came out, and they can’t locate her.”

  Kaulcrick looked at Kate angrily. “Maybe we just found his motive. Quite a coincidence, the two of them and the three million all disappearing at the same time. Mark, get the entire office on this. We need to find both of them. Two separate investigations. Call the USA back and get a warrant for Vail. Theft of government property. See if he can’t find a way to get one for Delson too. Go!”

  THIRTY-ONE

  AFTER WALKING THE WOMAN INTO THE STATION AND POINTING OUT the desk sergeant, Vail turned to leave. She started to thank him, but he held a finger up to his lips, and she understood the only thanks he needed was her promise to keep him as anonymous as possible.

  There was only one thing that mattered for Vail now—finding Tye Delson. Back in the car, he started driving. There was one unexplored possibility. And it was a long shot. When Vail had asked Radek who had been killed in the elevator, he had said “Benny,” from prison. And they had all been at Benny’s apartment before he sent his crew to kill Vail and Kate. Maybe that’s where he was holed up. It wasn’t likely Radek would give away any information that would help, but then he expected Vail to be dead by now.

  When Kate and he had identified Radek through prison records, there was a report being assembled on his associates from the Bureau of Prisons. It was supposed to be e-mailed to him and Kate. But he never checked, because they had identified Radek and immediately began focusing on finding him.

  The problem was that Vail’s laptop was still in his room at the hotel, and by now it was likely that the entire Los Angeles division of the FBI was hunting him. That meant, in all probability, there were agents waiting for him in his room. But he had no choice. Making a U-turn, he headed for the hotel.

  When he arrived there, he drove around the block at a normal speed looking for Bureau undercover cars. He couldn’t see anything that indicated any type of outside surveillance, probably because they were afraid he would spot it. Ahead, across the street from the hotel, was a ten-theater cineplex. Perfect, he thought.

  After parking in the lot, he went up to the ticket seller. When he told her it didn’t matter which movie, she gave him a strange look. “Don’t tell me you’ve never had people come in to hide out for a few hours.” She replied that if they did, they never discussed it with her. Vail was now sure she’d remember him and the open abrasion under his eye, which made his performance a little more sinister. The model for what would happen within the hour had been played out at the Biograph Theater in Chicago sixty-five years earlier when the G-men had to surround the neighborhood movie house to wait out John Dillinger rather than risking a shoot-out and endangering innocent civilians.

  Vail had read the undisclosed but accurate accounts of the termination of the bank robber’s life one night after he had spent three days locked down in the bowels of the University of Chicago’s archives while finishing his master’s thesis, a period he found as dreary as one of the Russian gulags he had repeatedly read about. The special agent in charge of the FBI office, after missing Dillinger during a shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin which left three civilians and an agent dead, didn’t want any further embarrassment. So that night at the theater he went to the ticket office to see what time the movie ended. While they waited, he nervously made several more trips back to the box office with the same question to reverify the time. The ticket seller became so worried about a robbery that she called the Chicago police, who had been intentionally omitted from the case because it was feared that they couldn’t be trusted.

  Vail knew that as soon as the FBI traced his cell phone call, someone would go up to the cashier and show her his picture. She would remember him and tell them about his “hiding out” comment. Hopefully, like with Dillinger, that would draw in all available agents, including those at the hotel.

  Inside the theater, he found a hallway away from the mainstream and turned on his cell phone. He checked the GPS function and it displayed all zeros. The office had been “pinging” his phone trying to determine its location, which is why he had it turned off immediately after talking to Kate. It was how they had found Radek’s two-million-dollar cache. He dialed the hotel number and asked for the manager.

  “This is Tom Mallon. I’m the manager, how can I help you?”

  “Tom, this is Mark Hildebrand. I’m the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI. How are you?”

  “Fine, Agent Hildebrand.”

  “Some of my agents are over at your hotel on a surveillance, and we’re not sure which rooms they’re in. I need to talk to them on a landline. Could you tell me where they’re located? We want to make sure they’re in place before we go ahead with another part of the operation. I appreciate your continuing discretion in this matter.”

  “One moment, sir.” The manager came back on the line. “Agent Hildebrand, that’s room 431. I’m told there were three of them. Would you like me to connect you?”

  “Thank you, no. I’ll have someone call them on one of our security phones.” Vail hoped the manager would be distracted enough by the wonder of what kind of technology could do that, that he wouldn’t have any afterthoughts about whom he had actually talked to. Vail walked down the corridor until he found a large trash can outside one of the theaters, and dialed the weather. As s
oon as he was connected, he dropped the phone in the receptacle and walked out to the parking lot.

  Vail judged he had at least a few minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, before they pinged his phone and reacted. He parked his car in a private garage across the street behind the hotel. In the trunk, he opened his briefcase, took out his handcuffs, and ripped off a couple of Post-its from their small yellow pad and put both items in his pocket. He used the rear entrance of the hotel and walked through to the lobby. He found a chair that was out of the foot-traffic area so he wouldn’t be noticed by anyone rushing out of the building. He settled down and waited.

  Vail’s room was 432. Three men in the room across the hall was fairly standard. They would take turns watching his door through their peephole, a task that Vail knew from experience could be done effectively for only fifteen to twenty minutes before eyestrain and stress set in. The others would watch TV in between. If Vail did enter his own room, two of the agents would step into the hallway to intercept him while the third called for backup.

  He also knew that because of proximity, these agents would be called first to respond to the theater until reinforcements could arrive.

  Vail figured he needed no more than thirty seconds in his room, enough time to retrieve his handgun, hidden on top of the TV cabinet, and the laptop.

  Not twenty minutes later, the elevator doors opened and two agents came hurrying through the lobby, not taking the time to maintain their anonymity. Vail got up and went to the house phone and dialed the operator, asking for room 431. “Hello,” the voice answered inquisitively; Vail could hear the television on in the background.

  “Yes, sir. This is room service. The manager has instructed me to call you and offer you a complimentary lunch. We have a very nice chicken parmigiana today on a bed of angel-hair pasta.”

  Of the thousands of rules in the FBI, there was only one that had yet to be violated: Never turn down a free meal. “Sure, that would be great.”

  Vail wanted to make sure he had the head count right. “How many orders?”

  “The other two guys had to run out for a while. Can they get something when they come back?”

  “The chicken is very good, but not when it’s cold. I’ll put two orders aside. Call when they’re back. Anything to drink?”

  “A Coke?”

  “Yes, sir. It’ll be about a half hour.”

  Vail hung up and headed to the stairwell. He stopped at the second floor looking for a maid’s cart. On the third floor, he spotted one. She was busy in the room’s bathroom. He took two hand towels, two bath towels, and a steel-handled dust mop and disappeared back into the stairwell.

  Before entering the fourth floor he tied each of the bath towels around the ends of the steel shaft. Out of his pocket he took out the Post-its and peeled off the top one. Quietly he moved to room 431. First he stuck the yellow tab across the peephole so the agent would have to come out to discover him there. Chances were that with Vail being “located” at the multiplex, the remaining agent’s vigilance would be intermittent, leaving him watching television more than the peephole.

  Vail then slipped one of the hand towels around the door handle. He took out his handcuffs and hooked them around the handle and squeezed the strands tightly against the cloth. Raising the mop handle horizontally, he adjusted the positions of the bath towels so each rested against one side of the doorjamb. He wrapped the last hand towel thickly around the middle of the steel bar and tightened the other cuff to it. Now the door could not be pulled open.

  Immediately he turned and used his key card to open the door to his room. The Do Not Disturb sign was still hanging from the knob. He reached up to the recessed top of the TV cabinet—his automatic was gone. They had already searched the room. The laptop, however, was still in place. If he came back, they probably wanted him to have the initial impression that no one had been there. He unplugged the computer and, as he wrapped the cord around it, opened his door. As he started to close it quietly, he saw his handcuffs on the door across the hall strain against the mop’s shaft. The agent inside was trying to get out.

  Vail ran to the stairwell and down to the first floor, exiting through the back of the hotel. Just as he walked into the garage’s first floor, he saw a Bureau car come slicing around the corner behind him. Then another. Fortunately, they hadn’t seen him. He was going to have to hole up for a while.

  He had parked on the third level in an end spot. Hopefully, once the search at the theater was abandoned, they wouldn’t think to look for him so close by. He turned on the Bureau laptop that was equipped with an internal wireless Internet card, but because of the garage’s construction, he couldn’t get a signal. It would have to wait.

  Suddenly he realized he had not slept in thirty-six hours, the night after his first dinner with Kate, and then not very well. He crawled into the backseat and was asleep in minutes.

  THIRTY-TWO

  VAIL SLEPT LESS THAN TWO HOURS AND THEN FITFULLY, AWAKENING at the sound of any vehicle passing by in the covered garage. He got out of the car and walked down to the street, where he watched the traffic for fifteen minutes from a shadowed doorway. When he was satisfied that there was no longer a search being conducted in the neighborhood, he went to his car and drove out.

  When he finally found himself a safe distance from the hotel, he pulled over. After turning on the laptop again, he waited while his e-mails downloaded.

  There were only three of them. He found the Bureau of Prison’s report and opened it. It was almost twenty pages long and contained a lot of boilerplate because of the extensive records that are necessary in a federal institution due to lawsuits. He scanned it quickly until his eyes landed on the name Benjamin Charles Lavolet, a known associate of Victor James Radek. He had been serving a fifteen-year sentence for narcotics distribution and was paroled just a month before the first Pentad murder in Los Angeles. His last known address was 1414 Sistine Lane, apartment 2W, in Los Angeles. Vail located it on a map Web site and saw that it was about half a mile from the Spring Street house. The factory on Keller Street was about a mile away. The building being refurbished on Seventh was less than a ten-minute drive.

  Vail pulled back into traffic. The sun was starting to set. The air smelled like rain and the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees. It would be a good time to set up on the apartment. Since the report didn’t have a phone number for Lavolet, and since he could no longer call the FBI office to get one, Vail had only two options: The first was to try to get into the apartment, which, if Tye and Radek were there, could be disastrous. The other was to surveil it and see if any lights came on once it got dark.

  The building had four units and two of them already had lights on when he got there. Benny’s windows—assuming that 2W was the westernmost apartment on the second floor—showed no signs of life. He waited another half hour and still the unit remained dark.

  Deciding to read the Bureau of Prisons report in full to see if there were any more associates of Radek in the area, Vail opened the laptop and turned it on. He took notes in case there were others who might have since moved to the L.A. area. But, as far as known addresses, Lavolet’s was the only one. Vail was about to shut off the computer when suddenly it beeped. It was an incoming message—from Tye Delson.

  It was a streaming video of her. But it couldn’t be from her cell phone, because Radek had smashed it, plus there was no sound. Then he remembered her PDA. He had e-mailed some information to it for the search warrant at the steam laundry.

  The angle of the image indicated that it was being taken by her, possibly from down at her side. It was shooting up at her face. A piece of duct tape was securely across her mouth, a second across her eyes. Somehow she had managed to pull up one corner, enough to have limited vision out of one eye. A trickle of blood from her nose had dried on her upper lip. The exposed eye was wide with fear, but Vail thought he detected something else—rage. If her condition wasn’t disturbing enough, Vail could see a thin slice of he
r shoulder and chest. She appeared to be naked.

  Then she pulled the device down behind her back as it flickered on and off indicating the battery was low. He saw the unmistakable double strand of a handcuff around one wrist, and then a chain with a padlock that hung from it and was attached by a second lock to a heavy radiator. On the floor was her purse, its contents scattered. Radek must not have known about her PDA, if he even knew what one was.

  The camera moved to the window and showed the surrounding neighborhood. The image flickered again, this time the black screen lasting a second or two. An ornate two-story building seemed to be the target of her effort. It was distinctive and apparently the best clue she could offer as to her whereabouts. The screen went black, and Vail feared that the battery was finally dead. He waited a few interminable seconds but there was no more.

  It started to rain. He turned on the wipers and let their rhythm hypnotize him for a moment. Then he closed his eyes tightly, trying to recall every detail of the building. It was more Victorian than anything else, but with some possible French influence. The architectural details were so elaborately overdesigned that he judged the structure to be at least a hundred years old. But how did you find a list of hundred-year-old buildings in Los Angeles, if he was even right about the age? Then suddenly it occurred to him that he had seen the building somewhere before, not from that angle, but from street level, maybe the day Bertok was killed. The windows were unusual, projecting out from the building face at least two feet and complex in their detail. They were bordered with stone pillars, the crowns of which were semicircles capped with triangles. He hadn’t been to that many places in Los Angeles, so hopefully it was retrievable from wherever it was hiding in his memory.