Last Chance to Die

by Noah Boyd

  “Why?” Vail asked, almost before Zogas finished.

  “We have worked extremely hard since coming to this country and taking citizenship. We enjoy having this sanctuary and, in relative anonymity, being allowed to socialize with men of similar interests. This is a small but, we feel, elite group. I doubt that the membership would approve of the U.S. government knowing exactly who we are. We fear that it wouldn’t be long before someone from some governmental agency would be demanding we admit two Hispanics, four females, and someone in a wheelchair.”

  “We’re only looking for a quick way to cross you off our list of people who might know something about one of our employees disappearing. We’re not going to turn your membership roster over to Health and Human Services.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Agent Vail. I will present your argument to the members, and they’ll put it to a vote.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “A day, two at the most.”

  “I’ll call you. Is there a number here?”

  Zogas took out a business card and wrote it on the back. “Give me two days. By then I should have a definitive answer.”

  For the first time since entering the club, Vail heard the men in the back speak. He listened for a moment and then asked, “Is that Lithuanian?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Interesting. People, probably myself included, have a tendency to lump all the Eastern European languages together. But it is definitely different from, say, Russian.” Vail watched him closely to see if “Russian” hit any nerves.

  “You have a good ear. They are definitely different languages.”

  Once they were outside, Kate said, “I guess we’ve solved one mystery today. Now we know the whereabouts of Himmler’s, Goebbels’s and Göring’s sons.” When Vail didn’t laugh, she thought that his mind had once again raced ahead, trying to find the next turn. She glanced at him and saw something in his face she’d never seen before. He actually looked shaken. “Steve, what is it?”

  He turned and searched her face as if he didn’t know who she was. Then he said, “I know who framed you.”

  31

  “What!”

  When Vail didn’t answer, Kate asked again. “What did you say?”

  “Not here.” He grabbed her by the arm and glanced back at the club, pushing her toward their car.

  He started the engine, and she asked again. “What is it?”

  Still he wouldn’t answer but pulled away from the curb and drove off, once more checking to see if anyone from the club was watching. When he got a block away and was certain that none of the Lithuanians could see them, he pulled over. “That night you and I broke into the Russian safe house in Denton, remember?”

  “Guys in ski masks, large handguns, you setting off explosives, fire—something about it rings a bell.”

  “Did you notice anything funny about that guy Barkus or the other one playing chess with him?”

  “Other than their warmth toward FBI agents, especially the female subspecies, not really,” she said. “Oh, Barkus had dark circles under his eyes. Probably something to do with his not getting back to the coffin until after sunrise.”

  “You weren’t as close to him as I was. Or the other one. They both had them, dark circles all the way around their eyes—and around their mouths, too.”

  “What were they?”

  “Dozens of tiny cuts scabbed over.”

  “The areas left exposed by ski masks. From the shattered lightbulbs,” Kate said.

  “And that night they were speaking in some foreign language that wasn’t Russian. It sounded Eastern European. It could have been Lithuanian. It all makes sense now. That guy in the tunnel in Chicago, Jonas Sakis, he made a reference to game theory and zero-sum games. And when I said something about him being Russian, he gave me this strange smirk. It was because he was Lithuanian.”

  “That means—oh, my God!” Kate said. “That means these guys are tied directly to the Russians. They’re working with them, and they have ears and eyes in the NSA, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and who knows where else.”

  “That’s why we’ve got to be very careful. You, me, and Luke, no one else.”

  “No one else? The three of us against all of them?”

  Vail ignored Kate’s plea. “The real question is, what’s the connection between the Lithuanians and Sundra—and you?”

  She shook her head in disbelief at his self-control, gaining her own calm from it. “Connected how?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but I got the feeling that the Lithuanian Chess Society is going to vote nay to our getting a membership list. So let’s drive around here while you write down as many tags as possible. Maybe we can identify some of them.” Vail put the car in gear, and said, “There was also something Zogas said that bothers me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re familiar with statement analysis?”

  “A little bit. It’s been years since I used it at OPR.”

  “Do you remember what he said in his announcement to the others about Sundra?”

  “No.”

  “I told him that she works for the FBI. He told them that we had a photograph of a missing woman who had worked for the FBI. Past tense.”

  “Couldn’t that just be a translation problem for him?”

  “It could be. He had an accent, but his grammar was almost flawless. Anyone who uses words like ‘commiserate’ or can explain game theory in a few words or think of something like ‘antibiography’ has a better command of English than I do.”

  “Then that’s not a good omen for Sundra, is it?” Kate asked rhetorically.

  When they pulled up at the off-site, they saw Bursaw’s car parked in front. “Good, Luke’s here. Maybe he can help figure this out.”

  In the workroom they filled Bursaw in on everything that had happened and their conclusion that the LCS was somehow connected to both Sundra Boston’s disappearance and Kate’s being framed. Vail explained about Zogas’s possible slip in verb tense concerning the well-being of the missing analyst.

  Bursaw considered it for a moment. “More often than not, that stuff is accurate. I hope it was just a translation problem. I’d like to think we haven’t been looking for a dead body.”

  Vail handed him the list of license plates Kate had taken down at the chess club. “Can you get these run, but not through WFO? Have the locals run them and keep it quiet.”

  “That detective from Metro Homicide we turned Jonathan Wilkins over to said if I ever needed anything. I’ve known him for a while, so it won’t be a problem to keep it quiet.”

  “Until we figure it out, we don’t need to be distracted by who might know what. You, Kate, and me—that’s it. If something leaks out, we won’t have to waste time wondering if someone from the Bureau innocently mentioned it to someone that they shouldn’t have. We’ll know it’s something the opposition somehow came up with on their own and we can trace it back that way,” Vail said. “How’d you do with the missing persons?”

  “I found only one. Maurice Lyle Gaston, late of Matrix-Linx International, Springfield, Virginia. We did a security clearance on him. Matrix-Linx has a defense contract. The only fly in the ointment was that he disappeared in Las Vegas. A sister who lives here reported him missing to Fairfax County when he failed to come back from a weekend getaway there.”

  “Las Vegas. Interesting.” Vail wrote down the information in a small notebook. “Good. Kate and I will look into it.”

  “On a more definitive note, I did find out how Longmeadow came up in her files.”

  “How?”

  Bursaw smiled as if he were about to unveil an important piece of the puzzle. “In a counterintelligence case. Surveillance was following a Russian by the name of Dimitri Polakov. He was later expelled from the U.S. for suspected spying activities. It was Labor Day, last year, and a surveillance team was looking for a target to follow around. They had no reason to believe he was doing anything�
�they just wanted to log enough hours to qualify for holiday pay. You know, before they lost him and had no choice but to break off the surveillance and go home. All of a sudden, this guy coasts up to a mailbox and then takes off. The team leader sees there’s a signal chalked on the box, so now they realize that they’ve stumbled onto something. There was going to be a drop. Polakov drives all over for the next two hours and lands at an apple orchard that’s open to the public—you know, to pick your own apples. The target gets out of his car and wanders off down one of the paths. The crew goes into the parking lot, and they start copping tags, hoping that whoever he’s meeting has a car there. They write down fourteen of them. Meanwhile two agents follow Polakov on foot, but he never makes a drop or picks any apples, so the team thinks that they may have gotten burned. But still they had the plates. Maybe one of the tags belongs to whomever Polakov was supposed to meet. They give all of them to Sundra to look into. Subsequently she was just running out the leads by the numbers when she requested tolls on the owners of the cars in the lot. One of them was Chester Alvin Longmeadow.”

  “So he was there for a drop but probably made the surveillance, and the exchange never took place. That’s nice work, Luke,” Vail said. “It ties Sundra to Longmeadow, who we now know is connected to the LCS through the sergeant’s phone records. And we know that the Lithuanians are connected to the Russians because of their coming to the safe house in Denton.”

  Bursaw held up the list of license plates collected at the chess club. “I’ll head over to Metro and get these run.”

  After he left, Kate said, “Well, it looks like we’ve got all the players. Now we just have to figure out how they fit together.”

  “That’s why I thought the three of us should sit down and brainstorm this.”

  “You’re going to wait until Luke comes back?”

  “Actually, I thought we’d enlist the help of Sakichi Toyoda.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He was considered the king of Japanese inventors, at least in the early twentieth century. He started a little company called Toyota,” Vail said. “But more important, at least for us, he developed the concept of the Five Whys. Ever heard of it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Toyoda figured out that when a problem occurs, if you ask why five times, give or take, you’ll trace any problem back to its root cause and then can prevent it from recurring.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Let me give you an example. You have a business manufacturing and selling porcelain dog figurines. One day your customers start calling to complain that the items they received all have the same damage. Let’s say the left ear has a crack in it. So you ask why are they arriving in that condition? That’s one. You find that every one was shipped that way. So, through a series of whys, you discover—number two—that they’re coming out of the mold like that because the mold tears during the injection process. And—number three—that’s happening because the person who’s operating the machine isn’t calibrating it properly. Why hasn’t he been calibrating it? Number four—because he’s new and he didn’t know he was supposed to. And—number five—why didn’t he know? Because it wasn’t part of his training. So you make it a requirement that anyone performing that task has to receive x number of hours of training. Problem solved and, in all likelihood, permanently.”

  “So if we can answer enough whys, we can figure all this out?”

  “I suppose if a person can answer enough questions, he can figure out anything. This is not easy to do. It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of looking at the big picture and the small picture at the same time. However, it does have a way of cutting through the layers of distraction, which in this case are everywhere. If we can do it, we might find a starting point.”

  “Okay, what’s the first why?”

  Vail moved to a wall adjoining the one with the documents pinned to it. “I think you’ve already asked that.” With a black marker, he wrote:

  1. Why would the LCS be connected to Sundra, the safe house, & the Calculus list?

  Kate said, “Shouldn’t that be ‘How’?”

  “The important thing is to pursue answers to the questions. Toyoda probably wasn’t an English major, but he was a genius. Out of respect, let’s just use his whys.”

  “Sorry.” Kate thought for a second. “The LCS has to be working with the Russians.”

  “That’s the only possible explanation, with them coming after us in that safe house. And now we can trace Sundra back to Longmeadow, who we know is spying for the Russians. But Lithuanians, historically, have never been fond of the Russians. In fact, Lithuania was the first of the Soviet states to declare its independence after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So . . .” Vail wrote:

  2. Why would the LCS and the Russians be working together?

  “I don’t know, why?”

  “What’s always the best guess for motive? Someone wrote a song about it making the world go round?”

  “I’m guessing it’s not love, so you think this is about money?”

  “Very few things aren’t. Zogas described himself as a businessman. He said they all own small businesses. They’re entrepreneurs. When the Russians need somebody taken out, they call the LCS and are able to keep their own hands clean. If that is true, it brings us to ‘why’ number three. If the Russians are paying the LCS . . .” He wrote:

  3. Why do the Russians want their moles dead?

  Kate thought about it for a second. “Like we’ve been saying all along, it doesn’t make any sense, because historically the Russians have always done everything to help their double agents escape to Russia or some other communist country.”

  “That’s a good point. And it brings us to the next why.” Turning to the wall, he wrote:

  4. Why didn’t they kill Rellick immediately?

  Studying the wall, Kate said, “We haven’t really answered number three yet, have we?”

  “No, we haven’t. I think we need to consider both questions together. That Rellick was the exception might answer why the others weren’t given the option to escape.”

  Kate said, “The whole point of framing me was to protect Rellick. Maybe he was that valuable to them. Maybe they thought that once he was safely in Russia, he would have been some sort of monument to Russian ingenuity and American decadence.”

  “Let’s assume you’re right, or at least partially right. That leaves one last unanswered question.” He wrote:

  5. Why are other people with security clearances, who are not spies, disappearing?

  “First the air force sergeant and now—for the sake of argument— let’s assume that Maurice Gaston with Matrix-Linx International is also part of this,” Vail said.

  “At this point that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said mechanically, his voice already slipping away. Vail took a chair from the desk and rolled it over in front of the wall. He sat down, and his face dissolved into a reflective blank. Kate lowered herself onto the couch to wait, occasionally glancing at the questions and trying to guess where Vail’s mind was at the moment.

  Almost fifteen minutes later, Vail stood up out of his chair. “There’s only one possibility—at least that I can think of. The LCS isn’t killing these people for the Russians, they’re doing it to protect themselves.”

  “From what?”

  “This is the age of outsourcing. They saw the need for a new service industry and offered it to the Russians. This is also the age of incompetence in government. Maybe the SVR wasn’t recruiting sources like the old KGB had, and Moscow was pressuring them to find a solution. The LCS is a full-service intelligence enterprise. Not only will they kill someone for you, but they also recruit informants for the Russians.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Two things. First, that’s why they’ve been killing their own moles when we get close. They’re afraid they may talk if we get them in custody, and once i
t’s exposed, that would be the end of what I’m guessing is a very lucrative business venture for the Lithuanians. It’s the only way to explain the two missing people. If you’re going to go out and recruit people to betray their country, chances are you’re not going to be one hundred percent successful. So if the LCS approaches someone and they’re turned down, what would they be most afraid of?”

  “Their recruit going to the FBI.”

  “And the LCS can’t have that. So if you refuse, you lose—your life.”

  “They can’t be approaching these people cold and expecting them to turn,” Kate said.

  “You’re right, they’re probably not. The key is Gaston disappearing in Las Vegas. Where better to compromise someone than a place with unlimited liquor, gambling, women, and desperation?”

  “So they’re blackmailing them into giving up classified secrets.”

  “That’s the only way everything makes sense. I suppose they may occasionally get a lead on someone who’s heavily in debt or overleveraged with the bookies, but I think their tool of choice is most likely extortion. It’s as old as spying itself. Another advantage to it is that if you’re just an everyday double agent for the Russians, you can quit anytime you want to, but if our Lithuanian chess players have got something on you, you’re in forever.”

  “So these people they recruit aren’t being paid?”

  “Once they’re compromised, and probably recorded, the LCS owns them. I’d guess they’re given a small percentage of what the Russians pay. At this point I think we can safely assume that Longmeadow is Preston. Remember what he said on the tape: ‘This time I want a hundred thousand dollars in cash, just for me.’ In other words, he’s tired of sharing. He wasn’t talking to his Russian handler, he was negotiating with an LCS extortionist.”

  Now it was Kate who stared at the five questions on the wall. She filtered them all through Vail’s conclusions. Finally she said, “You’re making some leaps, but I can’t think of anything to disprove it. It does all fit.”