The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  “On the other hand, the bait idea worked,” Gary said. “He did make a move.”

  “We might not like his next move,” Swamp said. “Hell, I’m ready to go out there tonight.”

  But Gary was shaking his head. “Carl thought you might say that. He says tomorrow is a much better idea. Let the hornet swarm subside a little.”

  “As in they’re embarrassed. No time for feds to show up. They’d assume we were gloating.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Swamp, disappointed, nodded. Carl was probably right. He wondered if he ought to inform his newfound ally over in PR, but decided against it. Wait until you have the facts, he thought. All the facts. Evidence, even. Admissible evidence, even better. “Okay, tomorrow it is. I’ll need to bring McNamara up to speed first thing; then we’ll try to get some face time with Ms. Wall. Assuming she doesn’t bolt first.”

  Heismann cleaned the Walther in the kitchen sink and then reassembled it, wiping each component with an oiled rag before fitting it back in place. He replaced the two spent rounds, but not before first emptying the entire clip and oiling the spring. He could just hear the sounds of a television from the duplex next door. It was one of those stupid Ammie shows where the television laughed all by itself, whether what was being said was funny or not. He needed to get a television set, as none had been provided with the furnishings. He didn’t want to rely entirely on newspapers for news of the city, especially when he’d been out making some of that news. He would need one on der Tag.

  The television switched to a loud automobile advertisement, complete with some brute yelling about zero something. He put the gun down on the table, resisting the temptation to start shooting through the wall until the brute shut up. Time to have a better look at his neighbor, he thought. He turned out his own kitchen light and looked out the window to verify that her kitchen lights were on. Based on the wedge of white light spilling out onto their shared back porch, they were. He went to find the minibinoculars, then put on a jacket and his loden hat. He went out the back door as quietly as he could, down the steps, and walked quietly to the garage at the back of the yard, not looking back until he was at the garage’s side door. He could see her through her back kitchen window; she was washing something in the sink. Short dark hair, plain face with a short, pointed nose. Indeterminate age. Late forties, early fifties. Glasses. He couldn’t see anything of her figure, but, based on that face, she was probably not overweight.

  He stepped into the garage and closed the side door behind him. He had to squeeze past the left front of the van, as the garage had been built a long time ago, when cars were not as wide and high as they were now. There was a tiny dirty window at the yard end of the garage, and he wiped off some grime so he could examine her through the glasses. Yes, late forties. The oyster complexion of an office worker. He could see the television behind her, colors flickering silently now that he was in the garage. He felt the contour of his nose and looked at her face again. Similar enough. He raised the glasses once more and studied that face as an idea solidified in his mind.

  With the right wig, and that nose…yes. He lowered the glasses. He was probably much thinner than she was. He’d have to get into her house when she was at work. Check the sizes of her clothes. Find some pictures with her face in them so he could begin the study of her makeup, eyebrows, lip colors. He’d also have to see about relatives, children. But if she was a solitary individual, what he had in mind would work on der Tag. When all was in chaos and there were police scrambling all over the neighborhood. It only had to work for sixty seconds at most, and that within one minute of the attack itself. He wouldn’t have much time to fix his own face, but the essentials would take only about thirty seconds, with practice.

  He’d have to get her out of the way, of course. Not now, but perhaps the day just before. He raised the glasses again, waiting for her to turn in profile. The nose was the key. He ran his finger along the curving contours of his own brand-new nose, the one Mutaib had said looked like his. And so it did. Never mind that it was a total betrayal of his Aryan heritage. He had wanted a physical change, and he had succeeded beyond his expectations.

  She turned to reach for a dish towel. Yes, indeed. This would work. He lowered the glasses and leaned back on the front grille of the minivan as he began to go through the list of things he would need to acquire in the next seven days. Another vehicle, one that could pass for a police unit. A television. A GPS navigation device—he’d need to find a boating-supply store for that. The woman moved away from the kitchen window and then turned off the light and the television. A minute later, her bedroom light came on upstairs. He moved back to the window and raised the glasses again. He could see her shadow moving around the room. There were sheer curtains in place in the window, but the tiny binoculars allowed him to see through them fairly well. She passed into his field of vision briefly, visible from the waist up, wearing what looked like a slip. Full-breasted, with just the beginnings of a belly. Too full? Her bra size would tell him.

  She would do for the day in question. Do very nicely.

  Seven days. He shivered, both from the cold and the thrill of what was coming.

  5

  SWAMP GOT IN TO SEE MCNAMARA AT TEN O’CLOCK ON FRIDAY morning. He took Gary White with him, and together they briefed McNamara on the clinic transcript and the status of the case. When they were finished, McNamara said he had three questions.

  “First, the conclusion that the guy on the clinic transcript and the one whose phone call was taped are one and the same is based strictly on the language, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any other evidence of that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And the leap from that to the guy’s name, this Heismann, is it? That’s based on what again?”

  “In the original transcript, it’s the one name that’s not notorious. Hitler, Heydrich, Hess, Himmler, all Nazi superstars, and—Heismann? I’ve looked up the history of the Third Reich and can’t find anyone prominent with that name, civilian or military. I think he has this secret dream to join the Nazi pantheon.”

  McNamara just looked at him. “I know,” Swamp said. “It’s a reach, except that we’ve put a face to that name, as I told you. A German, and this guy was ranting in German on the transcript. ‘Heil Hitler…raining dead people,’ among other things.”

  “And you got the profile from whom?”

  “Across the river,” Swamp said. McNamara knew exactly what that meant, and Swamp did not expect him to push for specifics. He didn’t.

  The boss picked up a piece of paper. “And the third question is, Have you seen this memo?”

  Swamp took it. It was a copy of the one Lucy had given him last night, but then, he’d been interested in what it said. He hadn’t noticed to whom it was addressed—namely, McNamara. Now he’d have to come clean about his arrangement with Lucy.

  “Yes, sir, I have.” He described his meeting last night with Lucy VanMetre, and their deal.

  “And you trust this woman? Who I’m told is Carlton Hallory’s deputy in PRU?”

  “Until she does me dirty,” Swamp said. “Besides, they have nothing to lose.”

  “Well, let’s verify that she wasn’t sandbagging you, shall we?” He checked his Rolodex, placed a call to PRU, and asked to speak to Ms. VanMetre. When she came on, he asked her to confirm that PRU had no objections to OSI continuing to probe the transcript case, as long as any pertinent information that surfaced was shared with PRU. He listened for a moment, thanked her, and then hung up.

  “Good to go,” he announced. “Okay, so now you get together with the D.C. cops. Find out what they’re doing to find this guy who’s been embarrassing them. Did your source give you a picture?”

  “An old one from Interpol,” Swamp said. “That’s what he used to look like. If we’re correct on this string of assumptions, then we think he’s changed his physical appearance. That picture might be useless.”

  “Then how the
hell will you find him? And if you do, how will you know it’s him if somebody happens to take him into custody?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Swamp said. “Right now our only hope is to keep building our house of cards.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning more assumptions, unfortunately. If we assume that Heismann is our guy, then we can put the patient code number we found for the night of the fire together with Heismann. Then we screen all the record fragments the District cops retrieved and see if we can put together a list of cosmetic surgery procedures done on the patient with that code number. Then—”

  “Yeah, I get it. Is a month enough time to do all that?”

  “Funny you should mention that, boss,” Swamp said. “I was thinking of getting some Bureau help to go through the clinic’s record wreckage. One of their evidentiary analysis teams.”

  McNamara nodded thoughtfully. “Outside DHS. I’d have to go to the fusion committee for that. Unless…”

  “That’s a big paper drill. Takes time we don’t have. Don’t you know anybody?”

  “Yeah, I do. And she owes me a big favor. But you know what they’ll probably give us, don’t you?”

  “Let’s see,” Swamp mused. “This is the Bureau we’re talking about. So we’ll get one guy, probably. Some poor bastard who pissed off his supervisor so bad that they’ll be dying to cross-deck him to OSI for what they see as the ultimate shit detail?”

  McNamara was laughing. “Pay attention, Agent White. This is Swamp Morgan in oracle mode.”

  “Yeah, well, I still think it’s worth doing. Grunt-level police work. But sometimes—”

  “Got that right. More often than we ever wanted to admit when I was in the Bureau. In the meantime, start building a dossier. Trace his movements for the past two years. Check in over at the Justice Department with the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force. Get a profiler down in Quantico going on this guy.”

  “Right.”

  “And I’ll call in an IOU or two.”

  Connie Wall stood in her bedroom and surveyed the empty suitcase, photo-equipment bag, and her backpack. She’d awakened this morning with the decision crystallized in her mind: Connie Wall was going to get the hell out of Dodge City. Cops or no cops, creepy terrorists, secret agents, and all their plots notwithstanding. The three cop cars parked around her neighborhood had instructions to keep bad guys out, but, supposedly, not keep her in. She hoped. Either way, she was going to pack up some stuff, stop by the bank, and head west to the hills of West Virginia, where she’d been doing her wildlife photography expeditions for the past seven years. Once you got outside of the major towns in West Virginia, damn near everybody at least looked like a domestic terrorist of some kind. Any foreign variety who came up there after her probably wouldn’t come back.

  She started putting things in the suitcase while making a mental inventory of what she’d need in the way of outdoor gear. It was January, so the West Virginia hill country would be cold, snowy, and barren. Ironically, winter photography was often the most spectacular, if only because there was so little cover. Fall and spring were gorgeous, but the background competed with the animals. She made a mental note to call one motel in particular so that she’d have a reservation for the first leg of her trip. She didn’t think the cops would actually chase her, as she was under no legal restrictions. She’d call Jake Cullen once she was out of town and tell him generally where she’d be.

  Then she remembered that the Shelby’s brake job was scheduled for Monday at Steve’s Vintage Motors down on Wisconsin. She’d waited three months for that appointment, and they’d called just last week to say they had found all the parts and were ready to do the deed. But Monday was too late. She wanted to go now. Even with two cops sitting at her kitchen table last night, she hadn’t slept very well, dreaming of guns and crashing mirrors.

  She went downstairs to her phone book and then gave the shop a call. Asked for Steve himself and went into her best begging-damsel mode. She asked if she could bring the Shelby in this afternoon instead of Monday. Pick it up Saturday morning if that made things easier, but she had to have the car this weekend. Had to have it. Steve, a burly ex-Marine, who’d given her more personal attention than many of his customers, wavered. She offered to do phone sex, gave him a little intro work until he started laughing. “Pretty please?” she said. Steve relented. Said to get it in by two, she could get it back at six. An hour’s job, but with a ’68, they always allowed time to fit parts, in case something had to go up on the lathe.

  She was halfway up the stairs when the phone rang. She came back down into the dining room and looked at the caller ID, thinking it might be Steve. But it was one of those 998 numbers. Phone booth. The cops had told her to answer the phone if she was there, no matter what. And to keep the bastard talking if at all possible. To be cool, unruffled. But when she thought about those two bullets zinging through the bathroom like that, she felt a flush of anger. I’ll show you unruffled. She picked up the phone.

  “Listen, asshole,” she hissed, “I don’t know what your act is, but why don’t you just come on up here and I’ll meet you out in the street? You bring your little popgun and I’ll bring my ten-gauge. Compare some notes.”

  “Um, I guess we could do that,” a familiar voice replied. Then she recognized it: the big Secret Service agent. “But I think the local cops might get upset. You know, District gun laws and all that.”

  “Oh shit,” she said, suddenly remembering that the police were taping all this.

  “Actually, we need to talk,” he said. “You free for lunch?”

  “I guess so,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Now’s when I say something elliptical—like ‘We have developments.’ Fact is, we don’t. We’re stuck in first gear. I just want to pick your brains on the record systems at that clinic—how they were organized, how much of the medical procedures were recorded, like that.”

  “Sounds like a pretty dry lunch,” she said, peering out at the street, where one of the District cop cars was still parked. She wondered where they did their listening.

  “Well, we could cover other ground, I suppose.”

  She frowned, but then she understood. What he was saying: Your phone’s tapped. Why don’t I tell you what I really want once we get there?

  “O-kay, right,” she said. “What time, and how dressy?”

  “It’s a business-lunch spot. Gucci Gulch clientele. The ladies will be in their power skins. I’ll pick you up at twelve. Tell your minders I’ll have you back by two at the latest.”

  “Twelve it is,” she said, “Oh, wait. I have to drop off my Shelby at a shop down on Wisconsin Avenue on the way. It’s right across from that mega Chevy dealership.”

  “Something broke?”

  “Nah. It needs a brake job, but it’s taken awhile to find the parts. You can follow me down there, if you don’t mind.”

  “No problem. We’ll probably have an escort, though.”

  “The more the merrier,” she said, and hung up the phone. She went upstairs to resume packing. She wasn’t going to tell the cops what she planned, and she wasn’t going to tell the Secret Service, either. And after the fiasco last night, she had diminishing confidence in her so-called police protection. Now all she had to do was figure out a way to get her bags into the Shelby without the watchers seeing them. They did a shift change every eight hours. Left the car in her driveway and walked down to a police van out in the street. Do it then. Tomorrow morning, she’d get one of the cop cars to take her down there to the shop, and then get Steve to let her out the back doors. Give her two blocks’ lead and she’d be down the road and gone.

  Heismann dutifully allowed the babbling car salesman to show him another brand-new Suburban, this one smaller than the last one. He was wearing his heavy overcoat and a hat, and the oversized square sunglasses. He sported a bedraggled goatee, and he’d thickened his eyebrows with some makeup. His appearance was entirely different from what he’d exp
osed last night. He’d already spotted the vehicle he wanted, after taking a walk earlier through their used-car lot: a dark-colored ten-series Suburban with oversized tires, lightly tinted windows, and a luggage rack on the roof. Three years old, 58,000 miles, standard interior, and missing the third-row seats. Perfect. He thanked the car salesman for his time and then walked back across the lot towards the used cars—or, as they called them with a perfectly straight face, “previously owned.”

  He was amazed at how easy it was for a foreigner to purchase a vehicle here in the United States. Once Heismann had told him what he needed, Mutaib had set the whole thing up with the dealership manager from his office in the Royal Kingdom Bank. He’d messengered over a preauthorized bank draft for up to twenty thousand dollars. Heismann had a temporary foreign-national District of Columbia driver’s license, good for six more months, and the proper visa on a German passport in the name of Erich Hodler. Title and registration were to be sent to the Royal Kingdom Bank. The price scrawled on the vehicle’s windshield was $15,900. So presumably, all he had to do now was—He stopped.

  The nurse’s fire engine red race car was turning right in front of the dealership’s entrance on Wisconsin Avenue and pulling into the chain-link-fenced lot of a commercial garage on the opposite corner. The sign read STEVE’S VINTAGE MOTORS. There was a District police car right behind her, and another vehicle that looked like an unmarked police car right behind the black-and-white. All three vehicles pulled into Steve’s parking lot.

  “And how can I help you today, sir?” an enthusiastically friendly voice asked from behind him.

  “What is that place—over there, that Steve’s?” he asked without turning around.

  “Classic-car garage.”

  “‘Classic’? What is this?”

  “As in old,” the salesman said. “Like that ’68 Mustang that just pulled in there. See those cop cars? Probably has a dozen unpaid speeding tickets on it.”