by Steven Gore
“I’d like you to consider taking Sheridan on as an adviser in a couple of months. I’m the lamest of lame ducks, so there’s not much for him to do around here after tomorrow.”
Landon straightened. “I respect his abilities, Mr. President, but I’m not sure how that would play in the media.”
“That’s not a problem. His wife has been diagnosed with a medical problem. He can resign for family reasons.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Landon said, looking at Sheridan. “I hope it’s not serious.”
Sheridan shrugged. “She’ll get over it.”
Chapter 87
Rosa M. dropped her dishrag as her eyes widened at the man filling her apartment doorway. It was the look on his face. She drew back, cowering.
“No me haga daño.” Don’t hurt me.
“I’m not going to.” Gage flashed his ID. “I need some information.”
She nodded once. Slow, hesitant.
“It’s about a guy who stayed in room 527 of the Mariner Hotel a while back. A Texan.”
Rosa’s cheeks flushed.
“It’s not about that.”
Gage called Casey as he drove away. “It’s somewhere South of Market. A warehouse. It was used as a marijuana grow room before it got busted by the DEA. She overheard Boots talking on the phone just before he checked out. She thought it was part of an investment deal he’d been offered. It has an inner plywood structure. Almost soundproof. Boots referred to it as cocoon. A perfect place to take a hostage. But she doesn’t know the address, or even the street.”
“We’ve already driven by a half-dozen warehouses. Nothing.”
“You have somebody in the DEA you can call to find out all the places they’ve raided?”
“I’ll have the information by the time we hook up.”
How many of these grows have there been in San Francisco?” Gage asked as he read Casey’s notes. They were parked under the freeway a block south of the California Supreme Court building.
“Dozens and dozens. The medical marijuana movement has been good for business.”
“How many are South of Market?”
“Eight that have been closed down in the last couple of months.”
“Map it out. I’ll drive.”
Gage climbed into the cab while Viz and Casey got into the back. Casey gave him the first stop and Gage headed south through the dark streets.
They hit six in the next forty minutes. They were nearly to the waterfront, four blocks from Gage’s office. And there were two left on the list.
“Maybe we missed it,” Viz said, lifting off his headphones. “I haven’t heard a thing. Maybe they found the device on Brandon.”
“We’re in big trouble if they did,” Gage said. “Joe, where’s next?”
“Near the Flower Mart on Brannan.”
Gage drove west from the bay, then south away from downtown. He hit Brannan Street just east of the deserted flower market, then drove farther west toward Gilbert. The commercial street was abandoned except for the generic homeless people curled up in doorways with their overfilled shopping carts parked next to them on the sidewalks. Gage slowed when he neared his turn, then crept along, searching the street, headset pressed tight against his ears.
Listening.
Chapter 88
Sometimes you have to take one for the team.”
The voice was faint and staticky, but recognizable.
“We got it,” Gage said. “We got it.”
Gage peered through the van’s windshield as they crept along. The voices strengthened.
“Are you listening to me?”
Gage spotted the numbers stuck on the brown-painted brick front of the second warehouse from the next corner. The streetlight reflected off a red-on-white “For Sale or Lease” sign hanging above the trailer-wide roll-up door. He scanned the unlit windows filling the prongs of the sawtooth roof, then pulled around the corner and into a parking space.
Gage slipped though the divider curtain and into the back.
“Let’s go,” Viz said, reaching to remove his headphones and turning toward the rear door.
“Wait,” Gage said. “We don’t know what we’re up against.”
“What if . . . ?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
Gage pointed at Viz. “Just wait.” He closed his eyes and concentrated on the voices.
“Why are you dragging this out, Brandon?”
Gage knew why. Brandon would keep talking and stalling, hoping Gage would pick up his voice in the ether. Brandon had read enough search warrants and took enough testimony to know the range of the device was at least two hundred and fifty feet, and he knew Gage was somewhere out there.
“I’m not,” Brandon said. “I just need time to think.”
“We need those DVDs. The time for thinking is over.”
“But Socorro will never say anything. Will you, Socorro? You won’t say anything?”
“No,” Socorro said. “Never. Just let me go. I have children.”
“See,” Brandon said, “you always have that threat. She can’t be there all the time to protect her kids. Now she knows you’re serious. And she needs medical attention.”
Gage reached out and grabbed Viz’s shoulder. Casey locked on his arm.
“Let’s not get her killed,” Gage said.
“It’s hard to think in here. It’s like a coffin.”
“The grow room is still there,” Gage said.
“A plywood coffin. It’s suffocating.”
“Viz, get us a satellite shot of the warehouse.”
Viz flipped open his laptop.
“Suffocating? Brandon, you look like you’re about to vomit. A little blood make you queasy?”
Viz’s hands shook as he typed the address into the SAT-View Web site. Seconds later he had the image.
Anston again: “It all looks a lot different down here in the trenches instead of up on the bench. It’s easy to be a tough guy in a black robe.”
“There are skylights up there,” Viz said. “I can climb up the fire escape of the building behind, then drop down.”
“You’ll sound like an explosion when you hit the roof of the inner structure.”
Viz glanced around the inside of the van. He reached for a fifty-foot coil of coaxial cable and held it up. “This is strong enough to hold me.”
Gage nodded. “You head for the roof. Keep an eye out for Boots. And be careful, he may have called in someone to back him up. I’ll take the front door.” He looked at Casey. “You take the office window.”
Gage slipped a handheld receiver onto his belt and pointed toward the rear of the van. Viz headed out first. After he called to say he’d gotten into position on the roof, Gage and Casey climbed out and walked down the sidewalk toward the warehouse.
“What’s going on. First we had a trip down memory lane on the way over here, practically a geography lesson. Then an architectural review of this place. Jesus Christ, you talk like a maniac when you’re panicked.”
“That’s not it.” It was a new voice. A Texas accent.
Footsteps and scuffling replaced the voice.
Brandon yelled. “Anston, let go of me.”
Gage heard the sound of Brandon’s shirt ripping.
“You traitor. Boots, help me. You . . . whatever your name is . . . check the perimeter.”
Then a yelp and a crash, and silence.
Gage yelled into his cell phone:
“Viz. Go, go, go.”
He held his hand up toward Casey, who was poised with a garbage can raised above his head, ready to throw it through the office window and climb inside.
Gage pressed himself against the brick wall next to the warehouse door. He turned his head toward Casey and mouthed, Wait.
The metal door scraped opened an inch, then two inches, then three. The barrel of a 9mm semiautomatic appeared. Then a hand. Gage chopped down on it with the butt of his gun. The wrist cracked and the 9mm crashed to the sidewalk. Gag
e grabbed the arm, dragged the man through the door, and swung him headfirst into wall. Gage winced at the thunk of flesh and bone.
Casey set down the trash can and cuffed the man to a water pipe.
Gage ducked his head inside. Boots’s Lexus SUV was parked just inside the roll-up door, next to the plywood grow room occupying most of the warehouse. Gage’s angled view through the opening revealed a series of ten tables stretched across the room, each topped by an empty, full-length black plastic tub.
He slipped through the warehouse entrance, then edged toward the inner door. The smell of marijuana, long since seized by the DEA, but still infusing the plywood, filled the air. He peeked inside the grow room, then ducked back, everyone’s places fixed in his mind:
Brandon was slumped against the right wall, holding his chest where the tape was torn off.
Anston was crouched behind Socorro, who was tied to a wooden chair by the left wall, his gun to her head.
Boots was poised behind a four-foot-tall grow table, pointing his gun at the ceiling, trying to track Viz’s steps moving from north to south, waiting for the order to fire.
“Back off, Gage.” Anston’s voice was calm. Hard. He sounded like a thirty-year-old intelligence agent. Not a sixty-eight-year-old white-collar lawyer.
“I’m not coming in,” Gage said. “Let her go. There’s no point. We’ve recorded everything.”
“Then you’ll just have to give me the recording.”
“And we’ve got Brandon’s records from the hotel.”
“That’s Brandon’s problem.”
Gage heard Viz’s boots hit the cement outside the structure behind Anston, who then fired through the plywood. Gage ducked inside. He heard Casey’s footsteps behind him. He pointed to the right and dived left and rolled behind bags of potting soil stacked three feet high. He crawled farther toward the left as Casey took up his position in the right corner.
A four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood exploded inward. Gage looked over and saw Anston falling into Socorro, whose chair toppled to the side. He then spotted the motion of Boot’s handgun and his arm stretching over the grow table to target Viz as he ducked through the opening in the wall. Gage and Casey opened fire together, the bullets cutting through the plastic shells of the tabletop tubs. Boots grunted, then collapsed.
Viz spun away as Anston fired, then collapsed to the floor, reaching for his sister.
Anston alerted to the motion of Gage rising from behind the bags, turned his head and raised his gun just in time to see the flash from Gage’s barrel.
Chapter 89
Casey slid along the right wall until he got close enough to see whether Boots was still alive, then reached down and took the gun from the dead man’s hand.
Gage didn’t give Anston a second look. He’d seen where the slug struck his forehead. He ran to where Viz lay shielding Socorro. Blood soaked through the upper right back of his shirt.
Viz rolled over and stared up at Gage. “Is she okay?”
Gage dropped to his knees between them. Socorro was lying on her right side, still bound to the chair, her face bruised and bloody. She nodded.
“She’ll be okay. Hang in there.”
Gage saw blood pooling by Viz’s shoulder. He ripped open Viz’s shirt, then reached around and pressed his palm against the open wound.
“Man, I never thought I’d die like this,” Viz said, looking up at Gage. “It’s too soon . . . I’ve got . . . I’ve got things . . .”
Gage locked his eyes on Viz’s.
“You’re gonna make it. You need to trust me. If you weren’t, I’d say so. I wouldn’t take that away from you.”
This is Graham.”
“Let me turn it down,” Spike Pacheco said.
Gage heard television voices fade in the background.
“I guess you just saw Landon on TV, too,” Spike said.
Gage’s world mushroomed outward from the carnage lying before him.
“Graham,” Spike finally said, “you still there?”
“Yeah. I’m at Gilbert and Brannan. I just called 911 for an ambulance. You better get over here before your whole department shows up.”
Spike shook his head as he surveyed the bodies of Anston and Boots. It wasn’t the worst crime scene he’d been called to, but it was the only one that ever had a federal judge curled up in a corner, rocking back and forth like an infant.
“I’m not sure I can contain this,” Spike said. “The media listens to our 911 dispatcher.”
“Just try to keep things muffled,” Gage said, “at least until seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Then what?”
“Speculate your ass off.”
“What about Viz and the bruises on Socorro? How are you going to explain all that at SF Medical?”
“Casey knows what he needs to do. He’ll think of something by the time the ambulance gets them there.”
Chapter 90
Gage turned on his cell phone and checked for messages as the United Airlines red-eye from San Francisco set down on the runway at Dulles International Airport at ten o’clock the next morning. He scrolled through the texts until he found one from Faith reassuring him that Viz and Socorro would be all right. He then activated the CNN Internet site. A reporter stood in front of the Gilbert Street warehouse, a microphone in his left hand and an open notebook in the other. The camera panned up toward the “For Sale” sign, then down again to the reporter.
“Details are scarce and the crime scene is still being sorted out, but the story we’re getting is terrifying. Apparently, Judge Brandon Meyer, the brother of presidential hopeful Landon Meyer, went with an ex-law partner, Marc Anston, and another investor to scout a possible site for a live-work loft development. Judge Meyer was spotted by a disgraced and deranged ex-DEA agent named Boots Marnin who pursued them into the warehouse. By chance, FBI special agent Joe Casey was in the area on an assignment when he noticed Marnin following Judge Meyer. It’s still unclear what happened inside, but the result was that Anston and Marnin now lie dead and Judge Meyer has been taken to SF Medical for what they’re calling observation.”
“Does that mean medical observation?”
“They didn’t say. But one source claims he had some sort of mental breakdown.”
“I understand Judge Meyer and Special Agent Casey had a recent conflict.”
“Yes, Bob. The irony is overwhelming. Just a few days ago, in open court, Judge Meyer all but accused Casey of perjury in the OptiCom trade secrets case.”
Gage climbed into the black Escalade to find Senator Landon Meyer sitting on the rear bench seat. The tinted windows shrouded the interior in near darkness. Gage sat down next to him.
As the SUV pulled away from the curb, Landon asked, “Were you there?”
Gage recounted the battle.
“And Brandon?”
“He’ll recover, but he’ll never walk out of federal prison.”
“That bad?”
“That bad.”
Two hours later, Gage removed Charlie Palmer’s DVD from his laptop, closed the spreadsheets Alex Z had copied from Brandon’s computer, and flipped down the screen. The click echoed in Meyer’s Senate office.
Landon’s face was gray. He gripped the arms of his chair to rise, then stopped as though afraid his legs would give out. He lowered his hands to his lap and exhaled.
“I know Palmer and Anston didn’t talk about my first campaign on the video,” Landon finally said, “but you don’t think Anston was behind the killing of those poor children in Compton?”
Gage shook his head. “He just paid off some community leaders to sound like they were reversing their stand on the death penalty. He used Pegasus to funnel the money, like with the fake jihadist contribution.”
Landon leaned forward in his chair, then hung his head.
“So every election was tainted . . . every single one.”
Gage didn’t interrupt the silence that followed, and didn’t have an answer to the que
stion that would surely come next.
Landon looked up, his face nearly bloodless, his fists clenched, his whole body rigid.
“Tell me . . . please God tell me they didn’t kill Ed Lightfoot.”
Chapter 91
Since Watergate,” Landon told Gage, “everybody says follow the money and you’ll find the source of the corruption. But it’s not that simple.”
It was an hour before the press conference. Landon had met briefly with his staff and sent them away to make the arrangements.
“I remember when I was young and heard my father railing about the links among organized crime and the Teamsters and Longshoremen’s unions and the Democrats and asked myself how politicians could’ve let that happen to themselves. What were they thinking? How could they have been so self-deceiving? Now I know.”
Landon opened his lower left desk drawer and withdrew a humidor of Cuban Cohiba cigars. He opened the box, selected one, and held it up.
“You know where I got these?”
Gage didn’t answer.
“The vice president.” Landon paused, then added, “of the United States,” a reminder of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo.
Landon reached into the drawer again, withdrew a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and set it next to the box.
“You know what’s wrong with the phrase ‘follow the money’?” Landon unwrapped the plastic cigar casing. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. It’s no secret where the money comes from. Everybody knows from where and what it does.” He looked over at Gage, and then said, “Remember years ago I wondered aloud why Americans had stopped reading James Fenimore Cooper?”
Gage nodded. It had been during a late night talk, up at his cabin. Landon pacing, struggling to understand the country and his place in it.
“It was because of a line of his that had stuck with me since college. He said it ‘was the proper business of government to resist the corruptions of money, not to depend on them.’ Now I know why we turned away from him. It was too much like looking into a mirror that revealed all our hypocrisies and self-deceptions.”