Last Chance to Die

by Noah Boyd

  “Are they doing anything to find him?” Vail asked.

  “They’ve called his home, and there’s no answer. They’re getting a search warrant for his house and bank records. They still don’t want us involved in it officially, so they’re moving at warp speed before the director and Langston come back.”

  “Okay, I’m going to let Kate know.”

  “I’ll stay with them until we get an answer one way or the other. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  26

  Bursaw parked the Bureau car in his sister’s guest parking space, and they went up to the apartment. Vail used a key to open the door and yelled inside, “Kate, it’s us!”

  She came around the corner wearing an apron, a curious expression on her face. “I thought you’d be longer.” Then she read something positive in Vail’s expression. “You found Sundra?”

  “No, not yet.” He told her about Rellick’s vanishing act. “When John called to tell me, he said the CIA was getting search warrants for his bank and house. There’s a good chance that he wouldn’t have confessed to the polygrapher, so this might turn out even better.”

  “Except he had time to clear out anything incriminating.”

  “You weren’t supposed to figure that out, at least not so quickly. Stay positive—this is moving in our favor.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “Lunch is not going to be ready for a while. You guys want something to drink?” she asked with surprising nonchalance.

  “No thanks,” Bursaw said.

  “I’m all set,” Vail said. “You’re taking this well.”

  In a faked whisper, she said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve got a couple of really good guys looking out for me.”

  Bursaw said, “You went and got somebody else?”

  After lunch Vail picked up one of the Calculus folders and started rereading it. Ten minutes later he tossed it onto the table in front of him. “That’s it, I can’t read anymore. I’ve been over this stuff so much that I wouldn’t recognize the answer if it were highlighted.”

  Bursaw’s phone rang; it was Kalix again. He put it on speaker. “I’m with the group going to Rellick’s house with a search warrant. They pinged his cell phone, and it shows he’s home. I’ll call you—we’re just about to make entry.”

  Everyone tried to appear unexcited, as though too much optimism might jinx the outcome. Kate went back to the kitchen, and Bursaw turned on the news. For the next half hour, he listened to the local broadcast. Vail became lost in his thoughts, reexamining everything, looking for another way to prove Kate’s innocence in case Rellick proved to be uncooperative. When nothing came to him, he got up and went into the kitchen. He stepped up behind her and slowly pulled on one of the apron strings. “I think I know what we need.”

  She let him get it completely untied before she turned around. Reaching behind her, she retied it. “Yes, Steve, that’s exactly what we don’t need right now.”

  “I never even got a real New Year’s kiss.” He put an arm around her waist.

  “I kissed you. Which, by the way, triggered my one New Year’s resolution—to only kiss men in tuxedos.”

  “I’ve been thinking about canceling my diving trip and going to maître d’ school.”

  “You greeting people for tips. That sounds like a shorter career than you had with the FBI.”

  Bursaw’s phone rang again. He called in to Vail that it was Kalix. Vail put Kate at arm’s length—“It’s so easy to mock someone else’s dreams”—then walked into the living room and took the phone. “Yes, John.”

  “Is everyone there?” Kalix asked.

  Vail called Kate in from the kitchen and pushed the Speaker button. “We’re all here.”

  “Rellick’s gone. He left his phone here and turned it on as a decoy. That’s the bad news. But up in his attic, there have to be fifty of those banker’s boxes—you know, for storing records. Not only his own, but all kinds of family stuff his parents must have accumulated for decades. Everything—his divorce records, stocks sold twenty years ago. So far they’ve found five or six of them with classified documents in them, all copies he evidently made. So now the CIA will be able to reconstruct exactly what information he turned over to the Russians. They’re most appreciative.”

  “Will that be enough to clear Kate?”

  “It will be with what they found in one of them. Remember on that thumb drive, the typed list of eight FBI-CIA joint investigations along with their named targets? The one that Kate’s latent was supposed to have been on?”

  Vail looked at Kate. “It was in there?”

  “They’re going to examine it for prints to see if Rellick’s are on it. It hasn’t been processed before, so the Russians must have copied it and fumed the copy for the flash-drive setup.”

  “You’d think Rellick would have destroyed everything, especially that.”

  “He probably panicked, and maybe he intends to defect. If so, why bother? Considering where this box was, under all the rest, he may have just forgotten it, and even if he didn’t, it would have taken him some time to find it in all that mess. From the other documents in the box, it looks like it’s a couple of years old, so if he did think about getting rid of it, he probably knew that it would take too long to find.”

  Vail said, “That sounds like all good news to me.”

  “For us, yes, but for them there’s a new problem. As soon as they discovered he was gone, they unleashed the techs on his work computer. They found a deleted file that he’d cobbled together from a bunch of different files that he shouldn’t have been able to gain access to. They’re thinking maybe the Russians helped him ‘jailbreak’ some of the CIA security measures.”

  “What was on it?” Vail asked.

  “Dozens of the agency’s European sources. If he’s taking it to the Russians, the likelihood of their being killed is quite high. It would set the Agency back ten years.”

  “You said ‘if he’s taking it to the Russians.’ ”

  “The last entry in the file was just two days ago. And it was deleted last night after the polygrapher told him about the impending test. So they don’t think he had completed the list yet. But somehow they were able to tell that it was downloaded before it was deleted.”

  “Did they check his e-mail?” Vail asked.

  “Both at the office and here. He didn’t send it through either of them. I don’t know, maybe he put it onto another thumb drive. As you can imagine, there’s a fairly large amount of panic around here. Right now they’re trying all their super-secret spy stuff to find him. The problem is that he knows how to avoid it,” Kalix said. “Steve, they found one more thing on his computer here. That photo that was sent to the two guys at the house who tried to kill you, through that untraceable CIA phone line—it was on there. The Russians must have had him send it so it wouldn’t come back to anyone.”

  “Well, that answers who,” Vail said.

  “Anyway, before Kate’s innocence gets lost in all the impending catastrophe, I’m going to go see the United States Attorney. He says he’ll see me as soon as I get there. In the meantime, maybe we can find something else here that will eliminate any doubt that Kate wasn’t part of this.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, John,” she said.

  “You’re not clear yet, Kate. As long as Rellick’s on the loose, they are going to need somebody to blame. They’ve got evidence against you, and even though it’s all manufactured, the United States Attorney probably isn’t going to be a fan of yours the way you made a fool out of him when you escaped. But I’ll let you know once I talk to him.”

  After Kalix hung up, Vail said, more to himself than the others, “He’s right.”

  “Think so?” Bursaw said.

  Realizing he’d said it out loud, Vail looked at Kate. “Sorry. It would be better for you if they found Rellick. Much better.”

  She thought for a second and then said, “See if this sounds right: Rellick left his cell phone behind a
t his house, mostly as a decoy. Would he have another one? You know, just for spy business?”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Vail said.

  “You have that CIA dead-end number, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since you were last in the Bureau, we’ve developed fairly sophisticated reverse-toll record traces, especially for cell phones, because every call is noted for billing. So we can take a call if we know the date and time and, with a fairly simple computer run, determine the phone it was made from.”

  Vail said, “So if Rellick does have another cell and we can identify it through the reverse records, if he’s got it on, we can ping it.”

  “And find out where he is,” Bursaw added.

  Vail had his pocket notebook out, turning pages. “Here it is.” He started to write it down, then stopped. “But how do we get it done? Technically, you’re still wanted.”

  “If you think about it, there aren’t many people at headquarters who know my situation. The worst thing that could happen is that someone could find out I’m here. We really have no choice.” Both men nodded. “Why don’t you guys get out of here, and I’ll make the call. That way if something happens to me, you’ll still be able to look for Rellick.”

  “Just remember, if you get locked up again, you’re on your own.”

  “Talk about your one-night stands.”

  Vail looked over at Bursaw, who had a huge, self-congratulatory smile on his face. “Thanks, Kate. Now I can spend the rest of the day fending off questions from the Special Agent Lust here.”

  After eating burgers in the car again, Vail and Bursaw sat parked a half mile from the apartment, where Kate was making calls. “Steve, do you think we’ll actually find out what happened to Sundra?”

  “Huh? Oh, I don’t know. We could. Right now I’d guess fifty-fifty.”

  “You’re worried about Kate, aren’t you?”

  Vail looked at him carefully to make sure this wasn’t a lead-in to a salacious line of questioning. “The way everything’s gone today, I shouldn’t be, but every once in a while I get worried that things won’t work out. That usually happens when I can’t do anything except sit and wait.” He took Bursaw’s phone and dialed Kate. After a number of rings, he hung up. “Does your sister have call-waiting?”

  “I think so.”

  “I didn’t get the machine, so hopefully Kate was busy on the line.”

  Then almost immediately the phone rang, and Vail could see that it was Kate. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Put me on speaker. . . . It looks like we got Rellick’s second cell. They queried that CIA dead-end number on the date and time you gave me and came up with a phone whose subscriber is William Jackson, with a billing address at that Russian safe house in Denton you tried to burn down. There were a number of calls on it from another cell that comes back to a Vladimir Demeter, same billing address. I’m sure they’re both aliases, one for Rellick and the other is probably Calculus’s, since the two of them were meeting regularly around that time.”

  “And you’re having them ping Rellick’s number?” Vail asked.

  “They’ve already started, but it’s not on right now. They’ll ping it every ten minutes. Our people at headquarters are going to track it with the Bureau satellite. Where are you?”

  “About a half mile from you.”

  They heard her other line click in. “Okay, hold on.”

  Bursaw said, “You ever think about moving here?”

  “You mean because of Kate?”

  “We’ve got brick buildings, too.”

  “I’m thinking Kate’s a little too well adjusted to handle me full-time.”

  “Hey, contrarians need love, too.”

  “That’s true, they do, but never each other.”

  “In philosophy that would constitute a paradox. Just remember, a paradox, while seemingly illogical, is in fact true.”

  “Go ahead, caller, you’re on the line with the love doctor.”

  “Deflection is a sure sign of hitting a nerve.”

  “Yeah, the auditory nerve.”

  They heard Kate click back. “They’ve got him. He’s not far away. The GW Memorial, heading north just below the Arlington Memorial Bridge.”

  Bursaw put the car in gear. “We’re on our way.”

  It was starting to grow dark, and the evening traffic was getting heavier. Just as Bursaw’s car reached the on-ramp for the GW Memorial Parkway, his phone rang again. Kate said, “He’s pulled off the GW just after the Roosevelt Bridge. The only thing there is the parking area for Roosevelt Park.”

  Vail said, “I told you the Russians love parks. He may be meeting his handler there. If so, they’re probably going to try to get him out.”

  “I’ll have them keep tracking him in case he starts moving. I’ll call you back in five.”

  Bursaw pulled into the lot. There was only one car, a midsize Chevrolet. It was freshly washed, and there was a car-rental sticker on its bumper. Both men drew their guns and, leaving their doors open should they need cover to retreat to, approached the car from opposite sides. It was empty.

  Bursaw said, “He must have crossed the footbridge into the park. There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “Is there another way out of there?”

  “It’s an island. The footbridge is the only way on or off, unless you want to swim across a freezing Potomac.”

  “How many flashlights do you have?”

  “Just one.”

  “Okay, you lock up the car and I’ll make sure he can’t drive out of here.”

  As Bursaw went to the trunk to get the light, he watched Vail pull out his lockback knife and slash all four tires of the rental. Then he took out his phone and turned it on. “Put yours on vibrate,” he told Bursaw. “We’re going to have to split up. When we get across the bridge, you go north and I’ll take south. If you spot him, call me and we can pin him in.”

  Vail then called Kate. “I’ve turned my phone on. It looks like Rellick’s in the park. Luke and I are going to split up. Just keep on Rellick’s phone.” He hung up. “Ready?” he asked Bursaw.

  “I don’t think we should cross the bridge together. If he’s waiting for us, all he’ll have to do to take both of us out is fire straight along the bridge. There’s no place to get cover unless we’re willing to go into the water.”

  “Sounds right. You go first.”

  “Hey, it’s your girlfriend we’re trying to get off.”

  Vail stepped onto the footbridge. “Okay, but next New Year’s I’m definitely getting a hooker. In Chicago.”

  27

  As soon as Vail reached the other side, he took up a defensive position to cover Bursaw while he crossed the bridge. He checked his watch—almost eight o’clock. It was dark, but there was enough light from the roadways crisscrossing the island to follow the footpaths. Without a word the two men glanced at each other, Vail heading south and Bursaw north.

  Vail walked a hundred feet and then stopped to listen. Since the only car in the lot besides Bursaw’s was the rental, Vail felt that Rellick had to be there waiting for someone to arrive. Possibly one of the Russians, so he could exchange the list he’d downloaded from the CIA files for a way out of the country and probably one last, very large payment. Rellick still had his phone on, so there was a good chance he was making calls or waiting for one. A gust of frigid wind came off the Potomac, and Vail waited for it to subside before he continued.

  He was surprised at how rustic the park was. Except for the footpaths, some of which were endless three-foot-wide wooden planks, the ground was heavy with trees and undergrowth, creating more of a wooded setting than an urban park. There were very few evergreens, and the hardwoods were bare. The path he was on was dirt, and there were still leaves cluttering it. The lights from the surrounding cities allowed him to find his way south.

  Off to his left, Vail could see a frozen pond. He took out his phone and made sure it was on. As he neared the southern end of the
island, he could see the tall buildings of Arlington across the Potomac. There was another path off to the right, and it seemed to head toward the great dark shadow of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge as it passed overhead connecting D.C. to Arlington.

  He thought he heard something and stopped. After thirty seconds the wind blew from the same direction where the suspected sound originated, and this time he recognized an indistinguishable voice. Vail thumbed the safety off his Glock and lightened his step, moving toward its source.

  It seemed to be coming from the bridge’s underpass, a corridor of fifteen-foot-high off-white concrete walls that curved overhead. At the other end, Vail could see the lights of downtown Arlington reflected off the Potomac. He stopped again and listened. Now, because of the hum of the tires driving over the bridge, he seemed to be in some acoustical dead space, because the voice suddenly vanished. It was the perfect place for spies to meet on a winter night. Especially for Russians, who loved parks, the cold, and vodka.

  At the midpoint of each of the walls were walk-in doors, probably leading to maintenance storage. Vail wondered if Rellick had somehow gotten into one of them to wait. He started toward the closest one with his weapon pointed at the other. When he reached the door, he tried the knob. It was locked.

  All of a sudden, ahead of him, around the end of the concrete wall, he heard a man’s voice. “Call me back in five minutes, Tanner. . . . I’m not going to wait much longer. . . . Where else would I be?” Rellick walked around the corner and into view as he ended the call. Vail pointed the automatic at him. “That’s it, Rellick, FBI. Right there.”

  The CIA agent raised his hands, still holding the phone. Glancing up at the lighted screen, Rellick pushed a couple of buttons and placed his finger on another, ready to press it. “Unless you want that list of European informants to be e-mailed to the Russian embassy, you’d better drop the gun.” He lowered his hands slowly but confidently.