Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  He got on his knees, ready to fire, cracked the door, saw that the stub hall was empty. He got to his feet and took three fast steps down the hall and, as he did, heard perhaps fifteen full-auto sound-suppressed shots in the main hallway, then three fast, noisy pistol shots, another brrrp of full-auto, and then sudden silence.

  He cracked the door to the outer hallway, and Bob shouted, “Lucas! Lucas!”

  Lucas shouted back, “You guys okay?”

  “We’re okay. She’s down the stairs.”

  Lucas stepped into the outer hallway and saw Bob, barefoot, in a T-shirt and white boxer shorts. He was pointing down the hall, and Lucas looked past him toward the exit sign. Seconds later, Rae, wrapped in a bathrobe, burst into the hall with a gun in her hand, saw the two men, and shouted, “Where’d he go?”

  Bob and Lucas shouted at the same time, “Woman. Down the stairs.”

  Rae and Bob started running toward the stairwell, and Lucas, running behind them, shouted, “No, no, no, Bob, stop!”

  Bob and Rae kept going, and Bob shouted over his shoulder, “She’ll get away.”

  “Stop. Stop, goddamnit!”

  Bob and Rae, now uncertain, slowed as Lucas caught up to them, and said, “You really want to go into a concrete stairwell with an assassin who has a machine gun?”

  Bob and Rae looked at each other, and Rae said, “Maybe not.”

  “She’s gone anyway,” Lucas said. “She had a suppressed pistol and a machine gun. She’s some kind of pro, and she’d have a getaway set up. Let’s find out if anybody’s hurt, see if the security people have any video.”

  “And maybe call your man Russell and see who’s gonna pay for all this shit,” Rae said, waving down the hall.

  Lucas looked, saw the carpeting covered with plaster dust and soundproofing, the walls scarred with bullet holes, with more holes in the wall at the end of the hallway. A man poked his head out of a room, saw three people with guns, slammed the door.

  Bob was talking fast, riding the adrenaline wave. “She had an MP9. It’s a rare gun, I’ve only seen one before this. She had it on a sling under her jacket. I saw it coming up and jumped back, and she hosed down the door. I fired three shots down the hall without looking, hoping to hit her.” He looked down at the carpet. “No blood. When she fired that second burst, I heard her kick the door open . . .”

  “Got lucky,” Lucas said. “She thought I was in my original room . . .”

  “Gotta call the cops right now,” Rae said, “or they’re going to show up with their own machine guns, and we’re the only people around they might think worth shooting.”

  “Right,” Lucas said. “Let’s do that.”

  Another door popped open, a woman looked down the hall, and shouted, “What happened?”

  “You okay?” Lucas called.

  She was. Bob put on some pants, and he and Lucas ran down the hall, knocking on doors, checking to see if anyone had been hurt. No one had been.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WAS NEVER SURE how many D.C. cops showed up, but it looked to be about thirty, right on the heels of the on-duty security man. The full-auto was what had drawn them in, thinking terror attack. They’d gotten a couple of dozen reports of the shooting before they even got the call from Rae, who told the 911 operator that there were marshals on the scene and, as far as they knew, nobody was injured.

  Lucas called Forte, who listened to Lucas’s story, then said, “This is now officially out of control. This is now officially nuts. This is now officially about six hundred pounds of paperwork.”

  “Get to it tomorrow,” Lucas said. “Right now, it looks like we’ll be up half the night with the D.C. cops.”

  “And the FBI and DHS. You can’t shoot up the Watergate pie without getting a whole lot of fingers in it.”

  * * *

  —

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning, Lucas, Bob, and Rae gathered in Lucas’s room, and Lucas said, “She was wearing a camouflage face mask; I’ve seen them in pictures of soldiers in Iraq. All I could see were her eyes, and her body, but I think I’ve seen her before.”

  Rae: “Where?”

  “That girl in the photo at Ritter’s place. The one where she’s turning away because somebody’s taking her picture.”

  “You think . . . she’s with Heracles?”

  “I don’t know, but she knew what she was doing,” Lucas said. “If she’d come to the right door, I’d be dead right now.”

  Bob nodded, and said to Rae, “You know what that would mean? No more Business Class, no more suites. We’d be back at Motel 6.”

  “Let’s not even think about that,” Rae said, shivering, wrapping her arms around herself. “Tourist Class—the Walk of Shame.”

  “We’re not there yet,” Lucas said. “But I’m worried.”

  * * *

  —

  JANE CHASE didn’t call in the morning—she’d warned them she might not. Lucas, Bob, and Rae were rousted out of bed at nine o’clock to be interviewed by three Homeland Security guys, accompanied by a D.C. cop and two FBI agents. They were gone by noon, having extracted everything that Lucas, Bob, and Rae knew by ten o’clock but insisting on going over and over the same territory for the next two hours.

  “Excuse me, but those guys wanted it to be a terror attack,” Rae said.

  “If you don’t have the occasional terror attack, what are those guys going to do for jobs?” Bob asked.

  “There you go,” Lucas said.

  At one o’clock, Lucas called Chase’s office number, but nobody picked up, and he left a long message about the firefight at the Watergate. They got sandwiches at a Subway, and the three ate lunch in Lucas’s room.

  “You see the reporters out there last night?” Rae asked. “We’re national news everywhere. We’re probably all over CNN and Fox right now.”

  Lucas turned on the television, surfed the news channels, and on the third click found a reporter, standing outside the Watergate, talking to a woman who’d either seen or heard something. “They were shouting in Arabic, clear as day, Allahu Akbar . . .”

  “Aw, man,” Rae said, and Lucas turned it off.

  “Homeland Security is handling it,” Lucas said. “Or their PR department is.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY TALKED about the documents from Ritter’s safe-deposit box and concluded that while there may have been illegal activity at Heracles, it wouldn’t directly help them with the Smalls investigation.

  “I’d need a lot more background to even understand the documents. I mean, I know all the words, but I don’t know what they’re saying. If you know they shipped twenty cases of used/surplus full-auto SAWs, what does that mean? Is it illegal? I don’t know,” Rae said. SAWs, Squad Automatic Weapons, were belt-fed light machine guns. “The fact that Ritter saved the paper suggests there’s something wrong, else why would he save it? If it’s all legal, there wouldn’t be any difference between shipping a SAW and a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  “There’s something wrong with it,” Bob said, “I promise. That’s why Jane Chase said they’d have some specialists look at it.” After a moment, he said to Rae, “I’d like to get one of those SAWs for our equipment bag. Remember that dipshit Willard pecking away at us with that .25? Think about stepping out there with a SAW and powdering his whole fuckin’ trailer.”

  They both laughed, thinking about it, and Lucas shook his head, and said, “Jesus Christ, guys, try to hold it together, huh?”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS’S PHONE RANG. He took it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and said, “Speak of the devil and she calls you.”

  Lucas put the phone on speaker, and they all bent over it as Chase came up. “We’ve been working through the documents. We can make a strong case against Heracles for illegally expo
rting these weapons,” she said. “They show end-user certificates issued to approved users—national governments, mostly, along with a few militias in North Africa—but Heracles personnel delivered the weapons to different buyers altogether, including some groups on our FTO lists.”

  “What’s an FTO list?” Bob asked.

  “FTO is an acronym for Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” Chase said. She said lists were maintained by the State Department.

  “What are you going to do?” Lucas asked.

  “The documents implicate Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core Ballistics, which are all interlocking. The men who actually delivered the weapons are the low-hanging fruit. We can pick them up right now and try to turn them. We plan to do that. Today. We invite you to come along; two of the men implicated are McCoy and Moore, who you want to squeeze for your Smalls investigation.”

  “This is dang quick for the FBI—no offense,” Rae said.

  “None taken, but you’re right. For us, this is quick,” Chase said. “We have a problem. Two of the most critical documents, the clearest cases, will fall under the statute of limitations in a matter of a few weeks. That’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. So, we’re going to pick up McCoy and Moore and three other men today, interview them separately, and use their statements, if any, to launch a raid on Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core tomorrow morning. Frankly, we’re planning to use the possibility of a murder charge, those that you’re pursuing, to motivate the men we grab today to make a statement on the gun diversion case. We’re waiting now for warrants for both the arrests and for searches of their apartments.”

  Lucas: “Wait—you’re not going to promise them immunity?”

  “No. Not at this point anyway, and most likely never,” Chase said. “But these papers open the possibility of putting the whole illegal weapons trade under the microscope. We’re talking about hundreds of possible deaths, maybe thousands, not two.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to Mallard about all of this?”

  “Yes, and he’s with us,” Chase said. “He thinks you’re a great guy and all, but he said, and I quote, ‘Get me the guns, and fuck Davenport.’ The f-word was his, not mine.”

  Lucas said, “I understand, but I might have to oppose you on some of this.”

  “We’ll be talking to your director,” Chase said.

  “And I’ll be talking to Senator Smalls,” Lucas said.

  Chase said, “Lucas, please, I’m telling you—no, I’m asking you—if you want to fight us over the process, that’s fine. But please don’t do anything until tomorrow. Please! We’re putting these men under heavy surveillance, and we plan to pick them up after they leave their offices this afternoon or tonight so they can’t warn the Heracles people. They’ll want to bring their attorneys in, but when we begin questioning them, we’re going to use what we get for the warrants for the raid on Heracles. If you break this whole thing into the open before we get the warrants, there’ll be some bonfires in the Heracles offices tonight. It won’t hurt you to wait a day.”

  Lucas thought about that, and said, “Okay. I won’t talk to anyone until after your raids.”

  “Thank you. We . . . thank you. Somebody will call you in an hour or so when we’re ready to launch.”

  “Will you be there? For the arrests?”

  “I won’t be making the arrests myself. I’ll be observing.”

  “See you there,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  BOB SAID, “Good, we’re gonna do something. These guys . . . I don’t think we need to go in heavy. Maybe keep some shit in the truck, but, basically, civilian dress.”

  Rae nodded, and Lucas said, “Take your Glock.”

  “I take my Glock when I go to bed,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  TWO HOURS LATER, Chase’s assistant called, and told Lucas that Chase was on her way to monitor a surveillance team that was tracking McCoy in preparation for his arrest. “We believe McCoy will be leaving Heracles around four o’clock, and we will keep him under surveillance until we can pick him up. You’re welcome to observe. She knows you’re also interested in Kerry Moore, but we’ve been unable to locate him. We will serve search warrants on both of their apartments later this evening.”

  “Where is Miz Chase now?” Lucas asked.

  “She’s on her way. She’ll be in a communications car at the corner of Wilson Boulevard and North Veitch Street. If you go around the corner on Veitch, we’ve reserved parking for members of the group.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS DROVE, with Rae in the passenger seat, Bob in back. Lucas normally didn’t like to ride with other law enforcement officers because too often everybody wound up wanting to go to different places. In this case, they’d be more observers than an action team, so it was unlikely they’d need to split up.

  On the way over, Lucas said, “Her assistant said they expect McCoy to leave around four o’clock. I think they’re doing some electronic monitoring. I don’t know how, but they’re doing it.”

  “Wonder where Moore is,” Rae said. “Hope he’s not in a landfill.”

  “Don’t even think that,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  TRAFFIC WAS already tightening up as they crossed the Potomac into Arlington. They turned the corner off Wilson onto North Veitch and found a line of large sedans and two Chevy Yukons parked on the right side of the street, and a man in a suit who waved them away from an open parking space. Lucas pulled in anyway, got out, and held up his badge: “U.S. Marshals, here to meet Miz Chase.”

  The man nodded, and said, “Okay. White Yukon.”

  Chase was in the passenger seat, and Lucas, Bob, and Rae piled into the empty second row of seats, squeezing Rae in the middle. Lucas asked, “Where are we?”

  “We’re looking at five men: Luther Franklin, Ray Shelve, Arnold Buckram, and your two, Kerry Moore and John McCoy. I’m worried about Moore; we’ve picked up some chatter from Heracles, and they don’t seem to know where he is, either.”

  “You’re monitoring Heracles?”

  Chase turned her head to glance at him, and said, “We have some . . . resources in place.”

  “Hope he’s not dead,” Bob said. “They kill both McCoy and Moore, we marshals be suffering some serious butthurt, Smalls-wise.”

  Chase looked over her other shoulder. “What? Butthurt? Is that a marshal technical term?” First hint of a sense of humor.

  * * *

  —

  THE YUKON’S DRIVER was a serious young agent with a Caucasian-colored earbud in one ear, which made Lucas wonder whether the feds had other ethnically correct monitors. The man said, “Franklin’s leaving Heracles, and McCoy is with him . . . They’re talking . . . They’re splitting up. Ben’s on Franklin, Clark’s on McCoy.”

  Chase said to Lucas, “McCoy’s meeting his personal attorney at the Corner Bakery Café. He made the appointment this afternoon, and he made it walking down the street from his office, like he didn’t want to be overheard. We plan to approach both men at the same time. We arrest McCoy and give a National Security Letter to his attorney.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Lucas said.

  “It’s like a gag order. It’ll keep him from tipping off Heracles, should he be inclined to do that. We can do it administratively, but the director herself has to approve. That’s why we’re running late today. It took a while to get that done. The lawyer—his name’s Roy Bunch—can challenge it in court, but by the time he does that we’ll be all over Heracles. Bunch has a general practice that has included some criminal law, and we’re hoping he’ll agree to come along with McCoy when we take him in.”

  “Where’s this café?” Bob asked.

  Chase gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “On the corner . . . There’s
a Dunkin’ Donuts on the other side of the street, around the other corner . . . You’ve got time—you know, being cops and all.” Second hint at a sense of humor.

  “I could go for a couple of those powdered jellys,” Bob said.

  Rae: “You probably will.”

  The young agent muttered, “McCoy’s in his car. He’s headed this way.”

  Chase: “There’s no parking. As soon as he gets to the corner, one of our cars will pull out and leave a space for him. When he gets out of his car, we take him. Then we’ll go down to the corner and fetch his lawyer. If he’s not there yet, we’ll wait. But his office is across the street, so he should be on time.”

  “Still got time for donuts?” Bob asked.

  Chase: “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I’ll get a bag and wait on the corner. You can wave when he gets close. Rae can wait down at the other end of the block. In case he runs and gets past your guys. He’s supposed to be tough.”

  “He won’t get past our guys,” Chase said.

  “He sure as shit wouldn’t get past me or Rae,” Bob said.

  Chase said, “Whatever,” and Bob and Rae got out of the car, and as she was getting out, Rae said to Bob, “Get me a chocolate cake donut.”

  “’Kay.”

  They split up and hurried away from the Yukon. Chase watched them go, and said, “It’s a little hard to take them seriously.”

  Lucas said, “If there’s a problem, McCoy won’t get past them. They do this for a living. Rae was a starter in basketball at UConn. She has a degree in art history. Bob wrestled for Oklahoma State and finished third in the NCAA tournament his senior year, which means he lost just once. He has a degree in social work.”

  “All right,” she said.