by Allen Wyler
Feist asked Raymore, “What do you want to do when you quit working?” to distract him, get him thinking about something else.
“Huh?”
“Me, I want to retire after maybe a few more jobs, kick back, enjoy life. You like motorcycles?”
“Never much thought about them. Why?”
“Got me a collection of Harleys, I do. Plan to take a cross country Easy Rider road trip on me classic Flathead. Start out in LA, cruise through the south, on up the East Coast, circle back over I-90. Maybe even schedule it for a stop at Sturgis for the festival.” None of that would happen if he got nailed because of Raymore Fuckhead Thompson.
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“Just making conversation, is all.”
Thompson whined, “The dude saw us, man, and he was going to run. The fuck was I supposed to do?”
Feist took the first of two adjacent exit ramps, the road angling down off the viaduct to Harbor Island to his right. Long loading docks, gigantic orange cranes, dented steel containers piled ten high in huge rows, a cruise ship’s looming black hull dry-docked three blocks further west, railroad tracks and warehouses in the shadows ahead. The blue Toyota slowed while he scanned the deserted area for the best spot.
Feist said, “Maybe you got a point there, mate.”
Thompson nodded. “Hell yeah, I got a point,” with a note of relief. Then muttered something Feist couldn’t make out.
Rather than ask him to repeat it, Feist just kept scanning the shadows. When he spotted a likely place up ahead, he nosed the rental off asphalt onto chip seal and gravel and slowed further, keenly alert for signs of another person in the area, but it appeared deserted. He pulled alongside a dark green SUV and cut the engine behind a squat, one-story, cinderblock building with sooty black windows and an oxidizing aluminum radio mast guyed to a flat roof. This would do.
“Get out.” Feist stepped out, into the smell of diesel and drying barnacles and the steady hum of tires from the West Seattle Bridge overhead. A boat horn echoed across the harbor. Nothing moved and no one came from the shadows to investigate. No dog bark, no approaching crunch of tires, just the stillness of an industrial area locked up for the night.
“What?” Raymore asked, staying glued to the passenger seat, the whites of his nervous squinty eyes flashing in the weak fluorescent light.
Feist put a hand on the car roof and leaned into the interior. “Out. We’re changing vehicles. That SUV there?” with a nod, “is what we’ll be using.” He walked over to the driver’s door and pretended to fumble a key from his pocket.
Raymore whined, “Dude, you didn’t say nothing about no change-up before now.”
“That’s right. I didn’t. A contingency plan is what it’s called. Not smart what you did, shooting that witness like that. Changes everything. Now fetch our gear and let’s be done with it.”
Thompson asked, “What gear?”
“Don’t hear too well, eh? I said to get the fucking gear and stop whining.” It took a supreme effort to rein in his anger.
Feist watched Thompson pop the trunk and hunch over, look this way and that like a fucking idiot. Before Thompson could straighten back up Feist tapped the gun to the back of his head and fired. Thompson went limp, half in the trunk, half out. Feist leaned in, nudged the barrel against his temple, and discharged an insurance round. Then, lifting Thompson’s legs, he rotated the body sideways, dumping him completely into the trunk, and slammed the lid. Standing still, he listened for the sound of feet or tires approaching, but heard nothing. Using an oily rag, he meticulously wiped down every spot he’d touched, including common areas he wasn’t sure of. After slipping on a pair of disposable exam gloves, he tossed the rag in a Dumpster and climbed back into the car.
Feist retraced his route onto the Alaskan Way viaduct, then south to the first Sea-Tac Airport exit. Drove US Highway 99 to a long-term airport parking lot, accepted a time-stamp ticket from a machine, cruised the lot for a spot as far from the pick-up point as possible. He nosed the car to within a foot of the cyclone perimeter fence, set the brake, and stepped out to look around. Only one other person waited at the pickup site. Feist tore up the ticket and stuffed the pieces in his pocket to dump later. Not much sense in letting anyone know your time of arrival.
Staying in the car shadow, he waited for the van to pick up the other customer. As soon as it drove out of the lot, Feist walked the street to an adjacent lot where he waited for the next van.
The courtesy van drove him to the airport departure zone, where he rode the escalator down to Arrivals/Baggage Claim. He bought a ticket for an Airport Express to the downtown Seattle Sheraton. Although the odds of a taxi driver remembering him were low, he figured it would be safer to blend in with a group of tired travelers on a van than to be a single fare in a taxi. Attention to details, regardless how insignificant, kept you from the jaws of the shark.
Forty minutes later, he dumped the keys to the rental car in a sidewalk waste bin two blocks from the hotel.
3
FBI SPECIAL AGENT Gary Fisher eased the black Explorer past a clot of reporters and looky-loos and stopped next to the narrow guard booth in the center of the road. It had a peaked metal roof and Dutch doors on both sides to handle vehicles in either direction. Fisher lowered the window and flashed his creds at the campus cop leaning out of the booth. “FBI.”
After a cursory glance and a nod, the officer pointed toward the large three-level parking garage ahead. “See where the road splits? Take the lower one down to the second level, go straight ahead. Can’t miss it.”
“Thanks.”
Ahead, the two-lane road divided, the left lanes slicing between the south side of the Health Sciences Building and the top floor of a subterranean parking garage. The right half curved away from the building before angling down into a cavernous cement garage. Following the cop’s directions, Fisher entered the second of three levels and immediately saw a mix of University and Seattle Police cruisers thrown haphazardly together, most with their blue lights still flashing, several with doors open, adding a touch of chaos to the image. So far, the campus cops seemed to be doing a good job of keeping TV reporters at bay, but Fisher knew this wouldn’t last much longer.
He parked on the periphery of the confusion and scanned the crowd of cops for Jim Lange, saw him talking to two uniformed campus police. He and Lange were assigned to the national task force hunting the Nuremberg Avengers, a group of militant anti-abortionists who claimed responsibility for blowing away two doctors and a nurse from three separate women’s clinics during the past six months. A group of grade-A shitheads, far as Fisher was concerned; an opinion Lange shared.
As he approached Lange, Fisher saw a body on the oil-stained cement. His gut knotted. A week ago the Avengers had posted Professor Jon Ritter’s profile on their website. But because those shitheads targeted so many individuals and institutions, it was impossible to access the level of threat to any one. He suspected that might be their strategy. Seeing a body on the concrete made apparent the difficulty of rooting out these guys.
Lange saw him approach, said, “Gary, like you to meet Lieutenant Helms and Officer Crawford, UWPD.” Then to the officers: “Special Agent, Gary Fisher. The one I told you about.”
Fisher shook hands and asked Lange, “What’ve you got?”
Lange nodded for Helms to answer; this was university jurisdiction. Although the campus was within Seattle city limits, the land remained state property with a sovereign police department. The FBI would take control only if this turned out to be Avengers related.
Helms said, “One homicide, one assault.”
Fisher’s gut knotted tighter. He asked Lange, “Ritter?”
Lange nodded. “Yeah, but he’s the assault. The corpse,” pointing at the body, “was just IDed as a university employee, name of Gabriel Lippmann. White male, sixty-seven. Apparently, Ritter’s boss.”
Fisher asked Helms, “How bad is Ritter?”
Helms shrugged. “No idea. Didn’t see him. Paramedics say he was banged up a bit when they transported him. Head wound. Probably a concussion.”
Fisher shifted his weight from one leg to the other and eyed Lange. “Who found them?”
“Guy’s over there, in my car.” Helms jutted his chin toward the blue Caprice police special.
The three men walked over. A man in his mid-forties was sitting in the back seat, door open, one foot dangling out. Helms introduced him to Fisher and Lange.
The witness explained that when he exited the tunnel from the research building he saw Lippmann lying in the middle of the entrance, so ran to him but on seeing Lippmann’s chest wound, realized he was dead so called 911 on his cell. Wasn’t until he was on the call that he noticed Ritter sprawled out several feet away. He didn’t remember seeing anyone else in the area but admitted to being too upset to look all that closely. Fisher thanked him and then he, Lange, and Fisher moved away several feet to talk.
Fisher said, “You know for sure it’s Avengers or is Ritter a coincidence?” Hoping it might be, improbable as that was. Shit! They couldn’t guard every person on that list.
Lange said, “Nope, there’s a note, just like the other times. Except this one’s atypical.”
Fisher was about to say something when he noticed a security camera above the door to the tunnel. To date, no one could give a description of an Avenger because their kills were done at long range with a hunting rifle. A video could be a game changer. With a nod toward the camera, he asked Helms, “That security camera, you view it yet?”
“Not yet. I’ve been too busy here. But I asked for the feed to be frozen until I get a chance.”
Lange hitched up his pants, added, “That’s what we were discussing when you arrived. The recorder’s at their office. I wanted to wait for you before we took a look.”
Fisher had mixed emotions: The last thing he wanted was another Avengers-related murder. On the other hand, it could be extremely helpful to have an image good enough to enhance into a detailed picture. Was the resolution of the security cameras here worth a damn? Assuming, of course, they had been on and recording.
Helms, Lange, and Fisher piled into the Lieutenant’s cruiser, Fisher taking the back seat, Lange riding shotgun. Blue misery lights flashing, siren blurting out an occasional yelp, Helms nosed the car through the thickening group of onlookers clogging the parking lot road as reporters leaned in for a look inside the rolled up windows, hoping to recognize someone.
They followed N.E. Boat Street along the north shore of Portage Bay for three blocks to the Bryants Building, a drab, rectangular, two-story clapboard wedged between the street and the water. Took the wheelchair ramp to a pitted aluminum-frame glass-door. Then, with Helms leading the way, they walked single-file along chipped linoleum to an overheated room smelling of tuna fish and orange peel, probably from the brown lunch sack lying open down the counter. A long counter ran the length of the far wall and held an aged PC, a flat panel display, and numerous DVD jewel cases. A stocky female officer sat studying the screen as her right hand navigated a mouse.
To Fisher, she looked to be in her early thirties. About the same age as his younger sister, Carrie, had she lived. He caught the similarity between their profiles too, which was kind of spooky. He and Carrie grew up together in a small Tennessee town under the humorless eyes of strict Baptist parents who enforced Bible study every Wednesday evening along with endless bun-busting Sundays on pews hard as granite, during which he played head games instead of listening to how he was destined to eternal hell fire unless he put his faith in Jesus. Two months into senior year at Chickasaw High Carrie fainted. The principal pulled Fisher out of class to accompany her to the hospital while the school officials tried to locate their parents. Holding her clammy hand in his, the aid car siren screaming, she’d made him swear to never tell their parents of her abortion. She died from septic shock twelve hours later.
Although he kept her secret, he learned it was performed by a poorly trained midwife in the kitchen of her home because the only clinic in a fifty-mile radius capable of providing clean abortions had been shut down six months earlier by hard-line pro-lifers. The way Fisher saw it, the pro-lifers, not the midwife, were the ones who killed Carrie. When the Avengers case came up, he volunteered for the task force.
He had no problem with either pro-lifers or pro-choicers. Everyone was entitled to their own beliefs. But no one was entitled to ignore due legal process in favor of enforcing their own ideals.
Helms asked the officer at the computer, “What’ve you got for us, Diane?”
She clicked the mouse. “Caught the whole thing. Here, watch.” She scooted sideways in the rolling chair to give Helms a straight-on view. “I’ll start from the beginning.”
They huddled around the monitor that showed a grainy wide-angle image of the tunnel entrance and immediate surroundings. She scrolled the time bar at the bottom, found the minute she wanted, hit the pause button, “Here’s where it begins,” then clicked play.
In jerky sequence, a man, probably Jon Ritter, entered the field, walking toward the camera. He stopped suddenly. A second man appeared from the opposite direction, his face and hair distorted by something. The masked man aimed a gun aimed at Ritter. Helms muttered, “That’s panty hose, don’t you think?”
Lange said, “Looks like.”
The first man turned slightly, giving more facial definition. Fisher said, “That’s Ritter.”
“Sorry about the jerkiness. Runs at only three frames per second,” Helms said.
A moment later Lippmann stepped from the tunnel into the garage. Ritter turned around, appeared to yell and wave him away, but without audio the scene was eerily silent.
The officer froze the scene, said, “Okay, now watch the left side of the screen. All you’re going to see is what looks like a hand with a gun.” A mouse click and the action resumed.
From the left of the screen came a blur of motion, then Lippmann jerked and went down. Ritter seemed to yell and start forward, but the first gunman slammed him in the temple with the butt of the weapon and Ritter went down. The first assailant exchanged words with the second one before both ran from view.
“See that? Guy’s left handed,” Fisher said. Then to the officer: “Can you run it again?”
After they’d seen it twice more, Fisher asked Lange, “What about the note?”
Lange scratched his chin. “Yeah, they left it on the windshield of Ritter’s car. But this one’s different.”
Fisher said, “How so?”
“Didn’t claim responsibility. Just gave Ritter an ultimatum. Said if he doesn’t stop work they’ll kill him and Dobbs.”
Helms seemed puzzled. “Mind explaining that?”
Fisher nodded. “Dobbs is Ritter’s partner; they work together on research. The thing that bothers me more is the other Avenger assassinations have been so different, so much more methodical. This entire garage thing is too damn sloppy.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t add up.”
Fisher asked Lange, “You check out Lippmann to see if he has anything to do with anything?”
Lange shook his head. “You’re kidding, right? I haven’t had time to take a leak. Speaking of which . . . ”
Fisher was looking at the monitor again, the frozen frame of the second assailant shooting Lippmann. The images could be enhanced but he didn’t have faith that the campus police, although part of the Washington State Patrol, had the horsepower to do it to FBI quality. He pointed at the computer. “Make a copy for yourself. I want to take the original with me.”
As the words came out, Fisher wanted to take them back, but before he could Helms shot back, “Don’t start that shit with me. We have the capability of enhancing images too.”
Fisher considered how best to smooth things over but decided to hell with it. “Aw Jesus, here we go. Look, I’m tired and you don’t want me to take this to the next level. You do, and you’ll lose, and that’ll waste ev
erybody’s time. We can do a better job with it. You know it and I know it. In the end, isn’t that all we want? Right?”
The room fell silent. The female officer stayed seated with her eyes diplomatically glued to the screen instead of turning to watch her superior officer’s face grow deep crimson.
Fisher added, “You got other cameras at the entrance to the garage or the road approach?”
Helms nodded. “Yep.”
“I want the originals of those too. Oh, while you’re at it, make yourself a copy of the note they left.”
4
NIGEL FEIST STROLLED north along the waterfront, past the Edgewater hotel with the huge red neon E on the roof. By now he was certain he hadn’t picked up a tail. At the bulkhead connecting the pier to Myrtle Edwards Park he leaned on the railing and listened to the steady rumble from the massive concrete grain elevator feeding a freighter’s holds. Spotlights lit up the ship’s rust-streaked hull and he could read the white lettering on the stern: The Voyager. Allegedly from Panama. Feist didn’t believe it. Figured the vessel was probably Russian owned and operated out of Vladivostok. He checked his watch and decided to wait a few more minutes before making his phone call.
The smell of brine and seaweed triggered memories of the two-bedroom flat close to the Cairns Harbour where his old man ran a barely profitable SCUBA dive operation and Mum jockeyed drinks for tourists at the local casino. Hated the town. Couldn’t wait to escape to see the world. Now he can’t imagine living away from the ocean. Funny, the decisions that chart the course of a life.
Instead of participating in the high school graduation ceremony, he walks into the small, cramped local Royal Australian Navy recruiting office.
The lieutenant looks up from reading the newspaper. “May I help you?”
With excitement filling his chest, his mind dreaming of foreign ports, he says. “I want to enlist.”