The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  He put his hand back into the light and traced the smaller lines he was talking about on the DWP map.

  “If they did this right,” he said, “what they did was get in the gate down by the freeway and drive their equipment and all up to Wilshire and then over to your target area. They unload their stuff, hide it in one of these service tunnels, as we call ’em, and then take their vehicle back out. They hike back in on foot and set to work in the service tunnel. Hell, they could be working in there five, six weeks before we might have occasion to go up that particular line.”

  Bosch still thought it sounded too simple.

  “What about these other storm lines?” he asked, indicating Olympic and Pico on the map. There was a crosshatch pattern of the smaller service tunnels running from these lines north toward the vault. “What about using one of these and coming up behind the vault?”

  Gearson scratched his bottom lip with a finger and said, “That’s fine. There’s that too. But the thing is, these lines aren’t going to get you as close to the vault as these Wilshire offshoots. See what I mean? Why would they dig a hundred-yard tunnel when they could dig a hundred-footer here?”

  Gearson liked holding court, the idea of knowing more than the silk suits and uniforms around him. Having finished his speech, he rocked back on his heels, a satisfied look on his face. Bosch knew the man was probably correct on every detail.

  “What about earth displacement?” Bosch asked him. “These guys are digging a tunnel through dirt and rock, concrete. Where do they get rid of it? How?”

  “Bosch, Mr. Gearson is not a detective,” Rourke said. “I doubt that he knows every nuance of—”

  “Easy,” Gearson said. “The floors of the main lines like Wilshire and Robertson are graded three degrees to center. There is always water running down the center, even most days during a drought. It might not be raining up top but water flows, you know. You’d be surprised how much. Either it’s runoff from the reservoirs or commercial use or both. Your fire department gets a call, where you think the water goes when they are done puttin’ the fire out? So what I am saying is, if they had enough water they could use it to move the displaced earth or whatever you want to call it.”

  “It’s got to be tons.” Hanlon spoke for the first time.

  “But it’s not several tons at once. You said they took days to dig this. You spread it out over days and the runoff could handle it. Now, if they are in one of the service tunnels they’d have to figure a way to get water through there, down to your main line. I’d check your fire hydrants in the area. You got one leaking or had a report of somebody opening one up, that’d be your boys.”

  One of the uniforms leaned to Orozco’s ear and said something. Orozco leaned over the hood and raised his finger above the map. Then he poked it down on a blue line. “We had a hydrant vandalized here two nights ago.”

  “Somebody opened it up,” the uniform who had whispered to the captain said, “and used a bolt cutter to cut the chain that holds the cap. They took the cap with them, and it took the fire department an hour to get out here with a replacement.”

  “That would be a lot of water,” Gearson said. “That would have taken care of some of your earth displacement.”

  He looked at Bosch and smiled. And Bosch smiled back. He liked when pieces of the puzzle began to fit.

  “Before that, let’s see, Saturday night it was, we had an arson,” Orozco said. “A little boutique in behind the Stock Building off Rincon.”

  Gearson looked at the spot Orozco pointed to on the blueprint as being the location of the boutique. He put his own finger on the fire hydrant location. “The water from both of those things would have gone into three street catches, here, here and here,” he said, moving his hand deftly over the gray paper. “These two drain to this line. The other drains here.”

  The investigators looked at the two drainage lines. One ran parallel to Wilshire, behind the J. C. Stock Building. The other ran perpendicular to Wilshire, a straight offshoot, and next to the building.

  “Either one and we’re still looking at, what, a hundred-foot tunnel?” Wish said.

  “At least,” Gearson said. “If they had a straight shot. They might’ve hit ground utilities or hard rock and had to divert some. Doubt any tunnel down there could be a straight shot.”

  The SWAT expert tugged Rourke’s cuff and the two walked away from the crowd for a whispered conversation. Bosch looked at Wish and softly said, “They’re not going to go in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t Vietnam. Nobody has to go down there. If Franklin and Delgado and anybody else are down there in one of these lines, there’s no way to go in safely and unannounced. They hold all the advantages. They’d know we’re coming.”

  She studied his face but didn’t say anything.

  “It would be the wrong move,” Bosch said. “We know they’re armed and probably have trips set up. We know they’re killers.”

  Rourke came back to the gathering around the car hood and asked Gearson to wait in one of the bureau cars while he finished up with the investigators. The DWP man walked to the car with his head down, disappointed he was no longer part of the plan.

  “We’re not going in after them,” Rourke said after Gearson shut the car door. “Too dangerous. They have weapons, explosives. We have no element of surprise. It adds up to heavy casualties for us. . . . So, we trap them. We let things take their course and then we will be there waiting, safely, when they come out. Then we’ll have surprise on our side.

  “Tonight SWAT will make a recon run through the Wilshire line — we’ll get some DWP uniforms from Gearson — and look for their entry point. Then we’ll set up and wait in whatever’s the best location. Whatever’s safest from our standpoint.”

  There was a beat of silence, punctuated by a horn from the street, before Orozco protested.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He waited until every face was on his. Except Rourke’s. He didn’t look at Orozco at all.

  “We can’t be talking about sitting out here with our thumbs up our asses and letting these people blast their way into that vault,” Orozco said. “To let them go in and pry open a couple hundred boxes and then just back out. My obligation is to protect the property of the citizens of Beverly Hills, who probably happen to constitute ninety percent of that business’s customers. I’m not going along with this.”

  Rourke collapsed his pen pointer, put it in the inside pocket of his coat and then spoke. He still did not look at Orozco.

  “Orozco, your exception can be noted for the record, but we’re not asking you to go along with this,” Rourke said. Bosch noticed that along with failing to address Orozco by his rank, Rourke had dropped all pretense of courtesy.

  “This is a federal operation,” Rourke continued. “You are here as a professional courtesy. Besides, if my thinking is correct, they will open one deposit box only. When they find it empty they will cancel the operation and leave the vault.”

  Orozco was lost. His face showed it. Bosch could see he obviously had not been given many details of the investigation. He felt sorry for him, hung out to dry by Rourke.

  “There are things we can’t discuss at this point,” Rourke said. “But we believe their target is only one box. We have reason to believe it is now empty. When the perps break into the vault and open that particular box and find it is empty, we believe they will back out in a hurry. Our job now is to be ready for that.”

  Bosch wondered about Rourke’s supposition. Would the thieves back out? Or would they think they had the wrong box and keep drilling, looking for Tran’s diamonds? Or would they loot the other boxes in hope of stealing property valuable enough to make the tunnel caper worth it? Bosch didn’t know. He certainly wasn’t as sure as Rourke, but then he knew the FBI agent might just be posturing to get Orozco out of the way.

  “What if they don’t back out?” Bosch asked. “What if they keep drilling?”

  “Then we all have
a long weekend ahead of us,” Rourke said, “because we are going to wait them out.”

  “Either way, you’re going to put that place out of business,” Orozco said, pointing in the direction of the Stock Building. “Once it is known that somebody blew a hole through the vault they’ve got sitting out there in the big window, there will be no public confidence. Nobody will put their property in there.”

  Rourke just stared at him. The captain’s plea was falling on deaf ears.

  “If you can catch them after they break in, why not before?” Orozco said. “Why don’t we open up that place, run a siren, make some noise, even sit a patrol car out front? Do something to let ’em know we are here and we know about them. That’ll scare ’em out before they break in. We catch them, we save the business. We don’t, we still save the business and we get them another day.”

  “Captain,” Rourke said, the false congeniality back, “if you let them know we are here, you take away our one advantage — surprise — and invite a firefight in the tunnels and perhaps up on the street in which they will not care who is hurt, who is killed. That’s including themselves and perhaps innocent bystanders. Then, how do we explain to the public and even ourselves that we did it this way because we wanted to try to save a business?”

  Rourke waited a beat to let his words sink in, then said, “You see, Captain, I am not going to hedge on safety on this operation. I can’t. These men that are down there, they don’t scare. They kill. Two people that we know about, including a witness. And that’s only this week. No way are we going to let them get away. No fucking way.”

  Orozco leaned across the hood and rolled his blueprint up. As he snapped a rubber band around it, he said, “Gentlemen, don’t fuck up. If you do, my department and I will not hold back our criticism or the details of what was discussed at this meeting. Good night.”

  He turned and walked back to the patrol car. The two uniforms followed without being told to. Everybody else just watched. When the patrol car drove down the ramp, Rourke said, “Well, you heard the man. We can’t fuck this up. Anybody else want to suggest something?”

  “What about putting people in the vault now and waiting for them to come up?” Bosch said. He hadn’t really considered it but threw it out as it came to him.

  “No,” the SWAT man said. “You put people in the vault and they are in a corner. No options. No way out. I wouldn’t even ask my men for volunteers.”

  “They could be injured by the blast,” Rourke added. “No telling where or when the perps will come up.”

  Bosch nodded. They were right.

  “Can we open the vault and go in, once we know they have come up?” one of the agents said. Bosch couldn’t remember now whether he was Hanlon or Houck.

  “Yes, there’s a way to take the door off the time lock,” Wish said. “We’d need to get Avery, the owner, back out here.”

  “From what Avery said, it looks like that would take too long,” Bosch said. “Too slow. Avery can take it off time lock and open it, but it’s a two-ton door that swings open on its own weight. At best, it would take a half minute to get it open. Maybe less, but they’d still have the drop on us, the people inside. Same risk as coming at them through the tunnels.”

  “What about a flash bang?” one of the agents said. “We open the vault door just a bit and throw in a flash grenade. Then we go in and take them.”

  Rourke and the SWAT man shook their heads in unison.

  “For two reasons,” the SWAT man said. “If they wire the tunnel as we assume they will, the flash could detonate the charges. We could see Wilshire Boulevard out there drop thirty feet, and we don’t want that. Think of the paperwork.”

  When no one smiled, he continued. “Secondly, that’s a glass room we are talking about. Our position in there would be very vulnerable. If they have a lookout, we’re dead. We think they go with radio silence when they’ve got the explosives out. But what if they don’t and this lookout lets them know we’re out there. They might be ready to toss something out at us while we’re tossing something in.”

  Rourke added his own thoughts. “Never mind the lookout. We put a SWAT team in that glass room and they can watch it on TV. We’ll have every station in L.A. with a camera out on the sidewalk and traffic backed up to Santa Monica. It’d be a circus. So forget that. SWAT will get with Gearson, do the recon and get the exits down by the freeway covered. We wait for them underneath and we take ’em on our terms. That’s it.”

  The SWAT man nodded and Rourke continued. “Starting tonight we’ll have twenty-four-hour surveillance topside on the vault. I want Wish, Bosch, on the vault side of the building. Hanlon, Houck, on Rincon Street so you can see the door. If it looks or sounds like it is going down, I want to be alerted and I will alert SWAT to stand by. Use landlines if possible. We don’t know if they are monitoring our freeks. You people on the surveillance will have to work out a code to use on the radio. Everybody got that?”

  “What if there is an alarm?” Bosch asked. “There have been three so far this week.”

  Rourke thought a moment and said, “Handle it routinely. Meet the callout manager, Avery or whoever, at the door and reset the alarm and send him on his way. I’ll get back to Orozco and tell him to send his patrols on the alarms but we’ll handle things.”

  “Avery will get the callouts,” Wish said. “He already knows what we think is going to happen here. What if he wants to open the vault, take a look around?”

  “Don’t let him. It’s that simple. It’s his vault but his life would be endangered. We can prevent it.”

  Rourke looked around at the faces. There were no more questions.

  “Then that’s it. I want people in position in ninety minutes. That gives you all-nighters time to eat, piss and get coffee. Wish, give me status reports, landline, at midnight and oh six hundred. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Rourke and the SWAT man got in the car where Gearson was waiting and drove down the ramp. Bosch, Wish, Hanlon, and Houck then worked out a radio code to use. They decided to switch the streets in the surveillance area with the names of streets downtown. The idea was if anyone was listening to the simplex 5 public safety frequency, they would think they were hearing reports on a surveillance at Broadway and First Street in downtown instead of Wilshire and Rincon in Beverly Hills. They also decided to refer to the vault room as a pawnshop while on the radio. That done, the two sets of investigators split up and agreed to check in at the start of the surveillance. As Hanlon and Houck’s car headed toward the ramp, Bosch, alone with Wish for the first time since the plans were set, asked what she thought.

  “I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of letting them go into the vault and then run around loose down there after. I wonder if the SWAT team can really cover everything.”

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  A car came up the ramp and drove toward them. The lights blinded Bosch, and for a moment he thought of the car that had come at them the night before. But then the car swerved and came to a stop. It was Hanlon and Houck. The passenger window was rolled down and Houck held a thick manila envelope out the window.

  “Mail call, Harry,” the agent said. “Forgot we were supposed to give this to you. Somebody from your office dropped it by the bureau today, said you were waiting for it but hadn’t been by Wilcox to get it.”

  Bosch took the envelope and held it out away from his body. Houck noticed the discomfort on his face.

  “The guy’s name was Edgar, a black guy, said you used to be partners,” Houck said. “Said it had been sitting in your mailbox two days and he thought it might be important. Said he was showing somebody a house out in Westwood and decided to drop it by while he was in the area. That sound legit to you?”

  Bosch nodded and the two agents drove away again. The heavy envelope was sealed but the return address was the U.S. Armed Services Records Archive in St. Louis. He tore off the end of the envelope and looked inside. There was a thick file of papers.


  “What is it?” Wish asked.

  “It’s Meadows’s package. I forgot I ordered it. Did it Monday, before I knew you guys were on the case. Anyway, I’ve already seen this stuff.”

  He tossed the envelope through the open window of the car onto the backseat.

  “Hungry?” she asked him.

  “I want some coffee at least.”

  “I know a place.”

  Bosch was sipping steaming black coffee from a plastic cup he had taken from the restaurant, an Italian place on Pico behind Century City. He was in the car, back in place on the second floor of the parking garage across Wilshire from the vault. Wish opened the door and got in after making her midnight check-in call to Rourke.

  “They found the Jeep.”

  “Where?”

  “Rourke says SWAT did the reconnaissance ride through the Wilshire storm sewer but found no sign of intruders or a tunnel entry. Looks like Gearson was right. They’re tucked in one of the smaller tributary lines. Anyway, the SWAT guys then went down to the drainage wash by the freeway to set the trap. They were deploying at three exit positions from the tunnels when they came across the Jeep. Rourke said there’s a car pool parking lot down by the freeway. There’s a beige Jeep parked with a covered trailer attached. It’s theirs. The three blue ATVs are in the trailer.”

  “Is he getting a warrant?”

  “Yeah, he’s got somebody trying to find a judge now. So they’ll have it. But they aren’t going to go near it until they take down the operation. In case their plan is for someone to come out and get the ATVs. Or somebody already outside is going to show up and drive ’em in.”

  Bosch nodded and sipped. It was the smart way to go. He remembered he had a cigarette going in the ashtray and tossed it out the open window.

  As if guessing what he would be thinking, she said, “Rourke said that from what they could see there was no blanket in the back of the Jeep. But if it’s the Jeep Meadows’s body was carried to the reservoir in, there still should be fiber evidence.”