Last Chance to Die

by Noah Boyd

  “He was a lot more educated than a bookkeeper should be,” Vail said. “When we were nose to nose, he started discussing game theory with me. It’s scary to think the Russians plant one of their people in a Chicago bank for that length of time just to handle wire-transferred funds. Makes you wonder how many more there are out there.”

  “Maybe the Russians didn’t plant him there only for the Calculus scam. Maybe they were washing money through the bank, or something else. I’ll open a case on it and have Chicago check it out. Some Russian operations have been around for twenty years. There’s probably some that have been in place since the thirties, and we just haven’t uncovered them yet. They’re not like us—they’re got that long-haul mentality.”

  “Maybe you should let them know the Cold War is over.”

  “It’s all about technology now. They want to steal as much of it as possible. It converts directly into their country’s economy.”

  “Did you get the court order for the bank here? What’s the name of it?”

  Kalix tapped the breast pocket of his suit coat. “Right here. Northern Virginia Trust in Annandale. When do you want to go out there?”

  “Kate’s still in custody—what do you think?” Vail increased his stride, and Kalix hurried to keep up.

  Once they were in the car, Kalix said, “After your not-so-low-profile shooting, I had no choice but to tell the assistant director that you’d been reinstated.”

  Vail laughed. “Sorry I missed that.”

  “I wish I had. If I hadn’t implied that it was the director’s idea, I’d be working the Migratory Bird Act in the Bronx right now.”

  “Why don’t you just give me the court order? I can take it from here if you want to go repair some bridges.”

  “I think I’ll hang in there a little longer.”

  “I’d almost admire your courage if the director weren’t your ace in the hole.”

  Kalix smiled. “Actually, he’s more like a royal flush in the hole, so I’m with you—unless, of course, he becomes disenchanted with you. Then I’ll be calling for your head,” he said. “I assume this bank account will also turn out to be a phony?”

  “I’d be surprised if it were legit, but it’s our best shot right now.”

  As they walked through the bank lobby, Vail started scanning the faces of the employees, wondering if one of them was another plant by the Russians, put there to move money. Kalix led the way to the manager’s office and flashed his credentials, introducing himself and Vail. Once he did, he handed the bank officer the court order and pointed out that it instructed him to provide the mentioned records and that any disclosure regarding the FBI’s visit would be a violation of federal law.

  “Sure, I understand.” After reading the document, the manager started typing at his desktop computer. He took a pen and wrote down a woman’s name, her phone number, and an address in Alexandria. “This is all the info we have on the account holder. There was a transfer of five hundred thousand dollars to it yesterday, but that was canceled first thing this morning. The balance is zero.” He slid it across to Kalix, who glanced at it and handed it to Vail. The manager went back to the court order. “What are these three other dates you’re requesting?”

  Vail said, “They are additional transfers made from the same Chicago account. We’re not sure whether they came to your bank, but if you could check, we’d appreciate it. They were each a quarter of a million dollars.”

  After a few more minutes on the computer, the manager said, “They weren’t sent here.”

  Vail said, “Again, if someone asks, it’s best that we were never here.”

  “I understand,” the banker said.

  As they left, Vail said, “I’ll drive,” and got behind the wheel.

  “I assume we’re going to Alexandria.”

  Vail glanced over at him, indicating that an answer wasn’t necessary. “Can you get that name checked?” Kalix pulled the radio mike from its mounting, and Vail put his hand on top of it. “I don’t think you want that name going across the air, even if the channel is scrambled.”

  “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” Kalix dialed his cell phone and after giving some instructions waited a couple of minutes before saying “Thank you” and hanging up. “Nothing on the name, but according to the utility check the address is good.”

  “Let’s go take a look at it.” Vail glanced at him as if trying to decide something about him. “Are you carrying a gun?”

  Kalix blushed a little. “For the first time in years.”

  “Really? Why now?”

  “I guess for the same reason I’m helping you instead of fully protecting my flank.”

  “Which is?”

  “Do you remember when you got your appointment to new agents’ training, what an adventure this all was going to be? How daily life was going to go from ordinary to fantastic? That’s what I thought. Then I got to the field. The first two years in WFO were spent working wiretaps. I had no choice but to go into management to get out from under the earmuffs. In seventeen years with the Bureau, I haven’t had one of the days I signed up for.” He looked at Vail to see if what he was saying was registering. “This may be my only chance to be something other than the man in the gray paper suit.”

  Vail laughed. “It sounds like you’re ready to do something stupid.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Do you really think I’m the person to ask?”

  For the next twenty minutes, neither of them said anything. Finally Vail pulled over and motioned to a house in the distance. “That’s it there.”

  Kalix sat up. “It doesn’t look like much.”

  “One of the little lessons I’ve learned during my stay in Washington is that the Russians prefer their ambushes to be isolated.”

  “You think this is a trap?”

  “A trap or a dead end. Unfortunately, a dead end isn’t going to help us.” Vail opened his cell phone and dialed the number that the bank manager had given them. He held it away from his ear so Kalix could hear. After three rings a woman with a heavy Eastern European accent answered. “ ’Allo.”

  “Is Clarence there?” Vail asked.

  “No one that name here,” she said, and hung up.

  Vail put the car in gear. “So far so good.”

  “What’s good? You’re not going to the house, are you?”

  “I thought you wanted to do something stupid.”

  “Shouldn’t you get some help?”

  Vail smiled at him. “I’ve got some. When I go to the front door, you take the back.” Kalix had his hand on his automatic, unsure whether he should draw it or not. “It’s okay, John. Haul ’er out.”

  Kalix gave him an embarrassed smile and eased the automatic from its holster.

  They pulled up in the driveway, and as both men got out, Kalix hurried to the back of the house. Vail walked up the three stairs onto the front porch and knocked hard on the door’s window. He didn’t wait for an answer, knocking again even more loudly. After a third time, there still was no answer. He yelled back to Kalix, “I’m going in!”

  The house was a small one-story structure, and Vail could tell by the exterior construction that there was no basement. The door wasn’t locked, so he pushed it open, drawing his own automatic.

  Someone had tried to rehab the drab interior cheaply. The floors were unfinished plywood, and the walls were mostly unmatched paneling. Like most houses that old, it was a basic rectangle with low, seven-foot ceilings, which were clogged with spiderwebs. To the right, through a doorway, Vail could see into the kitchen. There were two partially eaten carry-out meals on the table, which was a card table flanked by two folding chairs. Two beer bottles sat next to two empty glasses. At the bottom of one of the glasses, Vail could see small bubbles hugging the inside, indicating that whoever had been drinking beer had been gone no more than a few minutes. Since Vail and Kalix had been sitting outside that long, it meant that at least one person was still in the house.
Not able to remember how to say “good afternoon” in Russian, Vail yelled “Dobroie utro!” and then, in English, an even louder “Good morning!” There was no answer.

  Vail backed out of the kitchen and into the entryway. Straight ahead was what looked like a living room, although it was difficult to say without any furniture. Carefully, he walked into the room, his face brushing against more cobwebs. He caught a glimpse of Kalix out the back window, peeking in. Vail tried the door on the right side of the room, but it was locked. He moved from in front of it and knocked. “Dobroie utro.”

  Again there was no response. The dead-bolt lock on the door looked brand new and out of place on an interior door. Across the room, directly opposite, was another door, leading to the left rear of the house. It was ajar and without any sort of visible lock on it. Cautiously Vail moved to it and pushed it open. At the top of the door, he noticed that some of the cobwebs that hung from the ceiling were matted against it, indicating that it had been closed recently. As he peeked around the jamb, he could see that the room had probably been a bedroom, with a surprisingly large closet crudely constructed in one corner.

  Vail pulled his head back and leaned against the wall. Someone was in the house, and as far as he could tell, there were only two places to hide: in the locked room across from him or the closet in this bedroom. The fact that the one room had a locked door made it the more logical. The door, a hollow-core laminate, would not present any problem to kick in, but he wanted to eliminate the closet first. Once he determined that it was empty, then he could call Kalix in and they wouldn’t need to watch their backs as they went after the more likely target. With the two of them working in tandem, they could safely make entry into the locked room.

  Raising his handgun to eye level, Vail went into the bedroom and moved quietly to the closet. Standing at the side, he grabbed the wooden knob on its door and pulled it open. When nothing happened, he looked in. It was empty, except for a full-length mirror that ran from the top to the bottom. What a bizarre place for a mirror, he thought.

  He turned to go but then realized something that hadn’t immediately registered when he looked inside. At the top of the mirror, as on the door of the room, the ceiling cobwebs were matted against it. At the same moment, he heard a tiny metallic click that he’d heard a thousand times before. He spun around 180 degrees and fired four shots into the mirror. It exploded as the body of a man fell through it, a silver automatic dropping from his hand.

  The cobwebs that were caught against the top of the mirror were in a triangular pattern, indicating that it opened on a hinge, catching them in a pattern similar to the one above the room’s door. Vail could now see the secret compartment behind it. The click he’d heard was the gun’s safety being released. As he stooped to pick up a piece of the mirror, there were a half-dozen shots fired from behind him. He dove to the side and rolled over, looking for a target.

  In the doorway was a second man, slumping to the floor. Vail could see Kalix looking in through the window he’d just shot through. “Steve, you okay?” he shouted, his adrenaline apparently still pulsing.

  “Yeah, come around to the front.” Vail went to the man whom Kalix had shot and verified that he was dead. Holstering his gun, he walked back to the closet and picked up a piece of the mirror, examining it.

  Kalix came in at a trot. “You really are okay, right?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I heard some shots, and when I looked in the window, I saw this guy coming up behind you ready to fire, so I opened up. He is a bad guy, isn’t he?”

  Vail smiled. “Not anymore.” He held up the mirror fragment. “Two-way glass. I should have realized that the closet was deeper, but the mirror was meant to distort its depth.”

  “Any idea who they are?”

  “I would imagine they’re guys who get their paychecks in rubles.” Vail looked up at Kalix, who continued to stare at the man he’d just killed. “You want to go wait in the car? I’ll take care of searching these two.”

  “No, no, I’m all right,” Kalix said. “Should I have yelled for him to surrender or something first?”

  “This isn’t exactly a surrendering bunch. If you had yelled, I’d be dead.” Vail rolled over the body of the man he’d shot and started going through his pockets.

  “They were here to ambush us?” Kalix said.

  “They were probably here to ambush me. But now that you’ve killed one of them, maybe they’ll give you equal consideration next time. With Kate in custody, they probably figured I’d be alone.”

  “Why you?”

  “Apparently they’re finding me to be a bit of a nuisance. Sakis had a photo of me in Chicago.”

  Kalix studied Vail’s face, looking for fear. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “A gift horse?”

  “I must be moving in the right direction, otherwise why try to kill me? I just have to figure out exactly what I’ve been doing to upset them.”

  Kalix chuckled. “Better you than me.”

  “You’re about to have your own problems.”

  “I am?”

  “Somebody needs to call your boss and bring him up to date.”

  The smile disappeared from Kalix’s face. “Who would have thought that keeping you from getting killed would be a bad thing?”

  Vail laughed. “Is that a rhetorical question, or do you want an alphabetical list?”

  Kalix squatted down next to the second man and started searching him. He pulled a cell phone out of the man’s pocket and turned it on. Staring at the screen, Kalix said, “Whoa.”

  “What?”

  Kalix turned the phone so Vail could see it. On the screen was the same photo of Vail that had been found in Sakis’s pocket. Vail took it from him and scrolled through the phone’s options. “It was sent last night around eleven thirty.”

  “They must have figured that this would be your next stop. And where one man failed yesterday, they felt two would succeed today.”

  Vail pushed a couple more of the phone’s buttons and handed it back to Kalix. “There’s the number the photo was sent from. Think you can get someone to break it down?”

  Kalix started dialing his own phone. “What do you think it is?”

  “I’m hoping it’s a link to whoever is behind all this. But I’m not betting anything over a dollar. Someone’s trying awfully hard to make sure Kate stays in prison.”

  21

  After more than three hours of interrogation by the Annandale police and Bureau agents, Vail and Kalix headed back to Washington and the off-site. “Come on in. I’ll buy you a beer,” Vail said.

  They walked into the workroom, and Kalix motioned toward the wall. “You and Kate sure covered a lot of ground on this.”

  Vail came back from the kitchen and handed him a beer, cracking open his own. “A lot of it is the tracking information from the phone you guys gave Calculus.”

  “It looks like a lot more than that.” Kalix opened his beer and took a small sip as his phone rang. “John Kalix.”

  He went over to the desk and got ready to write. Then he dropped the pen and straightened up. “There’s no way to trace it at all. . . . You’re sure? . . . Okay, then your best guess. . . . Okay, thanks.” He disconnected the line. “That was one of the techs. The phone company has no record for that number.”

  “How can that be?”

  “After being told it didn’t exist, he called the number and got a busy signal. So, since the number was active, he called a contact who handles covert government ‘contingencies,’ as he calls it. Best guess is that it’s CIA. It’s a clearing number. If a source needs to leave a message, he leaves his code name so it’ll get routed to his handler. But it’s mostly used for dry-cleaning traces, a dead end in the trail. Say you wanted to make a pretext call, like you did today before we went into that house, but you didn’t want anyone to be able to trace it. You dial the covert number plus a code and then th
e number you want to call. It’s then put through like a regular call. You can send photos, or text, or anything else you can do with a regular line. And if anyone tries to track it, you get the answer we just did. It doesn’t exist. If you call it, it rings busy unless you enter the code.”

  “How do Russians get access to a CIA tool like that?” Vail asked.

  “Maybe one of their moles sold it to them. Once you pay a source for something, you generally feel it belongs to you. But the problem is, we can’t even determine if it was the CIA who gave it up. Other agencies know about things like this. We figured it out. Even if we did find out it was CIA, there are hundreds of employees who probably have access, authorized or unauthorized, to that number.”

  Vail said, “Instead of this getting clearer, it seems like we’re getting further and further from any answers.”

  Kalix didn’t answer. He was back at the wall, studying the charts. Vail could see that something had caught his attention, so he sat down on the couch and sipped his beer, waiting.

  Finally Kalix turned around. “I haven’t told anyone this, but ever since I was up here with Langston and saw these charts and realized that’s how you found the three spies, I had a duplicate set made for me from the file. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying them, especially while you were in Chicago. I really wasn’t making too many connections until we came up with this CIA number. See if this makes sense: We know that someone has framed Kate. Most likely the Russians. But why Kate? She’s not in counterintelligence, at least not now. And she was only exposed to that work twice. Once in Detroit when you were there and she was supervising a squad covering the Middle East, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And her only other CI assignment was when she had liaison here at headquarters with the CIA. So now with this phone number probably being the agency’s, that’s twice we’ve had the CIA come up. The big question is, how do the Russians and the CIA fit into a frame of Kate?”

  Vail said, “I don’t know.”

  “I can think of one possibility. Let’s say the Russians have a highly placed source in the CIA. But there’s a problem. Somewhere in his travels, he ran into Kate Bannon at the wrong time. Maybe he was doing something he shouldn’t have been, something that might compromise him, something that, coupled with an upcoming event, might click together for her. So this CIA agent and his Russian handlers now have a problem. Maybe they decide to kill her, but they can’t just assassinate her, because the investigation would never cease, and once solved the Russians would be considered more evil than they were during the Cold War. So they decide to make it look like an accident. I assume you know about her ‘suicide attempt.’ ”