The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Nineteen sixty-eight? That’s quite old for such a car, yes?” In Germany, a car that old would have been ordered off the roads a long time ago.

  The salesman shrugged. “That’s a Shelby GT five hundred KR. Classic muscle car. Four twenty-eight CobraJet engine, three sixty ponies, clean. Probably run a flat fourteen seconds on the quarter mile.”

  Muscle car? Did that mean race car? None of these terms meant anything to Heismann. “So,” he said, “very fast, yes?”

  The salesman grinned. “You might say that, pardner. Most guys’d give their left nut to drive one just once. And how about you, sir? We’ve got some fine vee-hicles of our own right here on the lot.”

  Heismann looked over the salesman’s shoulder in time to see the nurse, this time riding in the right front seat of the unmarked car, leaving Steve’s and heading back up Wisconsin Avenue. The District police car followed them, but not so closely this time.

  “That one—Suburban is it called?” he said, pointing with his chin. “Right over there? May I see that one, please?”

  Swamp took Connie to a twelve-table bistro just off of Wisconsin and two blocks from the back entrance to the Naval Observatory. He’d booked a table in the back for one o’clock. And for a change, there was no waiting. Connie wore a dark green suit with a knee-length skirt, and she’d obviously taken some time with her hair and makeup. Swamp was always amazed what a difference it made when a woman took some time and effort in the powder and paint department. She was actually quite attractive, and he told her so. She smiled at the compliment and asked him what he recommended from the menu. He took a quick look and told her the prix fixe lunch looked pretty good, and that’s what they both ordered. Connie had a glass of Chardonnay, and Swamp settled for mineral water. He asked her about the Mustang, and she walked through some of the technical specs.

  “Where can you run something like that? Surely not here in D.C.”

  “Not anymore. My avocation is wildlife photography. I usually go up into the hill country west of here. West Virginia, western Maryland.”

  “I grew up in West Virginia,” he said. “Harpers Ferry, to be precise. My folks were innkeepers. When they passed on, I inherited the inn, but I was already away in the Secret Service. Got a local couple to run the place. Eventually, we made a business arrangement. I go out there on weekends now. I own the property, but it’s basically their show and their livelihood.”

  “I’ve been to Harpers Ferry,” she said. “You’re not talking about the Jackson Inn?”

  “Right.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve stayed there. Going after eagles along the Potomac palisades, right below the junction with the Shenandoah. And you own that?”

  “I own the property. They own the business.” He paused while the waiter put down their main courses and topped off Swamp’s water. Then Swamp switched direction abruptly and got down to business. “We gave up on finding the code list. Gary ran down the two doctors’ home addresses, but both families had already decamped back to Pakistan. Along with some fairly substantial bank deposits.”

  “And the off-site storage?”

  “Closed down. By the family, apparently. Wiped clean.”

  “Can’t Pakistan produce those people?”

  “I’m sure they could, but we felt it would be pointless now. Why would they keep the code list? They got out of America with lots of money, which is why they were here in the first place. The clinic is history.”

  “I believe it about the bank deposits,” she said. “But I never knew anything about their personal lives. They’d speak in Pakistani, or whatever it’s called, among themselves. But for us, it was just doctors giving orders and nurses doing what they were told to do. Professional, businesslike—no booze, no drugs, nobody patting anyone on the ass, and absolute control of each patient’s true identity.”

  “Sounds like they knew what they were doing.”

  She nodded.

  He withdrew a picture from the pocket of his suit jacket and passed it across the table. She put her fork down and examined it. “Yes,” she said. “He was in for some major work. Photo transference, if I remember.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Guy comes in with a picture, says, ‘Make me look like this.’ If his facial structure can stand it, the docs can do it. I remember him because we did the nose first. It was major.”

  “What’s ‘major’?”

  “Not for discussion at lunch,” she said. “But totally different from that. I think we had to harvest some cartilage to get what he wanted.”

  “‘Harvest’?”

  “Like I said, not for lunch.”

  “Oka-a-y. Was everything done on this guy ‘major’?”

  She looked across the table at him. “Where we going with this, Secret Agent?”

  “Special agent,” he said, trying to disarm her with a smile. “We know who this man is. We think he’s the bad guy who burned the clinic, who killed Lieutenant Ballard, and who’s after you. Because you’re the last survivor from the clinic. What we don’t know is what he looks like now. Do you?”

  She shook her head immediately. “Can’t know,” she said. “See, it’s not like I took him through every procedure, all the changes. I was undoubtedly there for some of it, but, like I said, if they were working on hands, only the prep nurse would have seen his face. I’d see the hands. There were at least two operations a night, sometimes three. We saw body parts.”

  A laser-eyed woman sitting close by flinched when Connie mentioned body parts. Swamp gave her a look that encouraged her to quit eavesdropping.

  “Look,” she said. “I want to help. I have a personal stake here, too, right? But I can’t give you something I don’t know. I can tell you this: Some of our patients came out looking very, very different from when they started. One Italian-looking guy came in and had himself turned into an Arab, for God’s sake. Hair transplants, eye color, nose job, everything.”

  “And did he have anything else done?”

  She threw up her hands. “Yes?” she said. “No? Who knows? I think he was an actor. Wanted to have a permanent face for the chance to do character parts—playing Arabs in terrorist and war movies. But only the docs had the full picture.”

  “So if we go through the medical records, searching by the code for one patient, and then summarize all the procedures done on that person, we’d have the full picture?”

  “If you got them all, yes,” she said. “But if you missed one, because it’s gone, you might miss the fact that ‘he’ became a ‘she.’”

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Connie said, pushing her plate away. The waiter appeared to clear the table and then brought their salads.

  “Well, we’re going to try,” he said. “In the meantime, the cops are going to watch you like a hawk.”

  “One with two eyes this time?”

  “Yeah, we heard. That was pretty ballsy, walking right down the street and up to a cop car like that. He does that again, I think the cops are gonna grab his ass. He embarrassed them.”

  “I should hope so,” she said. “But what if he decides just to wait? Like until the cops run out of overtime hours?”

  “Then we’ll take over,” he said, mentally chiding himself for making a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. “We think the guy’s real and is planning some kind of shit.”

  “Oh, he’s real all right,” she said. “But how do you know my bad guy is your bad guy?”

  “Well, right now, we’re working on a daisy chain of assumptions. Plus the fact that the name we’re working on is tied to Muslim networks in Germany.”

  “Then why don’t you federal guys take over now?” she asked.

  Good question, he thought. “Two reasons. One, all he sees right now are D.C. cops. Made him confident enough to do what he did last night.”

  “And two?”

  “Two, not everyone on the federal side of the fence agrees that he’s a real threat to national securit
y.”

  “Too many assumptions?”

  “Yeah. But we’re all talking to one another, for a change. And we’re trying to build a picture. Profilers, forensics experts.”

  “And the District cops?”

  “They’re looking to stage a really dramatic arrest, if you follow me, when he tries again.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know about those. Where the bad guy resists to the point where he gets dead.”

  “In a way, that would solve everyone’s problem.”

  She smiled. “My, how things have changed,” she said. “And you said ‘when’? Not if?”

  “Unfortunately, you’re still our best hope for catching him. Because, like you pointed out, there’s a big hole in our plan to screen the records.”

  “Got a plan C?” she asked. The expression on her face indicated that having a plan C would be a really good idea.

  “We need one, Ms. Wall?”

  “Look,” she said. “I’ll do this bait gig for a while, Special Agent. But not for ever and ever. I’m a girl who likes to keep things moving, you know?”

  “We’re grateful you’re even giving us the time of day, Ms. Wall. For Lieutenant Ballard, if nothing else.”

  She gave him an arch look. “Oh, right,” she said. “For Lieutenant Ballard.”

  Heismann stepped into the office of Steve’s Vintage Motors and approached the counter. The sounds of a busy auto-repair shop came banging through a large metal door behind the counter. A pretty young woman with an enormous hairdo asked how she could help him.

  “I was across the street, looking at autos. I saw this race car—the red one, out front? I saw it come here. Can you tell me what that is?”

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s not really a race car, though. That’s a 1968 Ford Mustang Shelby GT five hundred KR.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if those details meant something to him, which they still did not. “And how much is it, please?”

  She smiled. “This isn’t a car dealership, Mr….”

  “Hodler. Erich Hodler. I am visiting from Germany, you see.”

  “Ri-i-ght, okay. This is a car shop. We work on classic cars. Some of them are really old, like that Shelby out there. People own a car like that, they can’t take it just anywhere, put any old parts in it. To keep the value, they have to keep it authentic. You with me?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, trying not to show how baffled he was. “And who owns that car?”

  “She wouldn’t sell it, Mr. Hoffler,” the girl said. “She just brought it in for a brake job, and she’ll come get it first thing in the morning, when we open. Nine o’clock sharp.”

  “Ah,” he said wistfully, grateful for the error on his name. “There is no possibility the owner would sell it, then?”

  “No, she actually drives it. Like, she’s cutting out to West Virginia in the morning. Some place called Garrison Cap. Already got her stuff in the trunk.” She leaned forward, lowered her voice. “Didn’t want all those cops to know. Gonna hit the road right from here. She’s a big-time wildlife photographer, you know.”

  “Ah, I am also photographer, too. She is a good one?”

  “Oh yeah. She’s won some prizes and everything. Cool lady.”

  “And how does she come to drive such a car?”

  “It was her brother’s. He was a D.C. cop, got killed several years ago. That’s why she’d never sell it. No way, no day.”

  “Ah, so it is valuable, then?”

  “Oh yeah. We’ll pull her into the shop tonight before we close, and that’s where she’ll stay.”

  He clucked his disappointment. “It would be really something, to drive such an old auto in Germany. All we have is Mercedes, boring Mercedes, everywhere.”

  “We don’t work Mercedes at this shop,” she said. “Strictly Dee-troit iron. American cars. You want to work classic Mercedes, you have to go to Georgetown.”

  “I am so bored with Mercedes,” he said, looking again at the Shelby, memorizing the shape and color of it.

  “You get really bored with yours, I’d be happy to take it off your hands,” the girl said brightly.

  But Heismann wasn’t listening. He was making plans.

  Swamp Morgan found a window seat on the train and settled in, his Washington Post folded in his lap. Like many Washington commuters, reading the city newspaper was a luxury reserved for lunch at the desk or the ride home. A duffel bag with the week’s laundry was perched in the overhead rack. The bulk of the rush hour was over, but this was the last train running via Baltimore out to Harpers Ferry, so it was filling right up. He had been surprised at how many people commuted this way from so far out in the country, but it took only one attempt at driving it on a workday to make him a believer. Now he took the train home on Friday evenings and back in on Monday morning, staying in his sparsely furnished one-bedroom box over in Ballston for the other four nights of the week. In the rush to get talent back into the anti-terrorist game right after the attacks in 2001, the government had thrown in a housing allowance to entice retirees back into harness, so the bulk of his in-town living expense was covered.

  The train lurched uncertainly out of the station, through some short tunnels, and then began the run to Baltimore through the drab northeast corridor of Washington, D.C. He stared out through grit-scratched windows at the grubby rail yards and thought about his weekend routine. He’d be in his room at the Jackson Inn by 7:30, dinner downstairs in the weekend restaurant at 8:30, when the dining room began to thin out. Then, weather permitting, a night walk along the Shenandoah River Civil War ruins, followed by a cognac in the river bar with Ben and Lila Hardee, proprietors of the inn. His rooms were on the third floor of the house. There was a small bedroom, which adjoined the much larger room created by the Victorian-era round tower, whose major asset was a spectacular view of the Potomac River palisades, overlooking the junction with the Shenandoah. The rest of the third floor was, for all practical purposes, attic storage space, but the bedroom had a working gas fireplace, air conditioning in the summer, and its own bathroom. He’d made a study-library out of the round room, with its conical ceiling and wavy-glass French doors. He paid no rent and generally stayed out of the way of the paying customers on the ground and second floors. He would help Ben with repairs and maintenance if he had nothing else to do, which was often these days, and there was always something that needed fixing in a vintage 1870s wooden house.

  Because of his intense schedule when he had been on active duty in the Secret Service, weekends had been frenetic, although often fun, because that’s when the family got to operate together, even if it was often on a semi-chaotic basis. But then he’d risen to supergrade, the Senior Executive Service—deputy assistant director. And more often than not, Saturday mornings had been spent at headquarters. It wasn’t so much the workload as the fact that the director started coming in on Saturdays. If the director was in, then the senior principals felt they also had to be in. By Saturday afternoon, the kids’ activities were already in full motion, and he’d missed more and more of the family’s activities.

  He shook himself out of this familiar introspection. Those chapters of his life were over. Done. Finished. His kids weren’t kids anymore, and they had written him off when Sherry died on the sidewalk while he stood there helpless. Sherry had told them what she was going to say that day, and the fact that neither of them had called to warn him spoke volumes about relationships long squandered. “She wouldn’t have been there to talk to you if you had been there for us those past five years; this was on you, Dad,” his son had told him bitterly during their last conversation. Thanks a heap, Billy. What was that old saying about a child’s ingratitude being sharper than a serpent’s tooth? He’d made no effort since then to reach out to his son, although he wondered from time to time who’d be the first to make an overture—if ever. Kenny was young. Eventually, he’d get over it, or he wouldn’t. Swamp didn’t have to get over it. He was in it.

  “This seat taken?” a woman asked from
above his left shoulder. He didn’t even bother to look up.

  “All yours,” he said looking out the window at a rapidly blurring vista of row houses along the right-of-way, lights on here and there, interspersed with bare winter-blackened trees. He switched on the reading light and picked up his paper.

  Heismann maneuvered the Suburban into the garage and winced when the can of tennis balls he’d stood upright on the luggage rack came tumbling off. The light bar would have maybe an inch of top clearance to spare, if that. He had to pull the vehicle toward the right wall just to leave himself enough room to open the door on the driver’s side. Tight, very tight. He shut it down, got out, squeezed back along the left side, and tried to pull the two garage doors closed. The Suburban was just too long, so he found some string and tied them as close to shut as he could. He’d moved the minivan to the front street, where each resident was allowed to park one vehicle, after having obtained a color-coded permit.

  Buying the vehicle had been a quick transaction, especially since he’d met their price. The paperwork was done in a half hour, and he was given the keys and a half a tank of gas. If it had been a new car, the salesman explained, he’d have received a full tank of gas. Heismann could fully understand that logic. He’d driven the vehicle to a gas station, filled it up, and then found an auto-parts store on Wisconsin, where he’d purchased some whip antennas for CB radios, maps of the states surrounding Washington, and an emergency flasher bar with red and white lights. For fifty dollars in cash, he got one of the kids at the counter to wire the lights for him out behind the parts store. The antennas were only going to be for show. He had the kid put the switch for the lights into the ashtray’s lighter fixture.

  The nurse was supposedly going to pick her race car up at nine o’clock in the morning, and then leave town. Without the knowledge of the police, apparently. His plan was simple: He would wait on the street in his new Suburban, then follow her when she left town. The salesman had assured him that the big Suburban could go plenty fast enough on the highway to keep up with any car except a police car with an interceptor package. “Pass everything but a gas station,” the salesman had said, smiling.