Sleeper Cell

by Chris Culver

  “Are you threatening him, Lieutenant?” asked the Hulk, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet.

  I lowered my right hand to the pistol on my hip and shook my head. “I’m not threatening anyone. I’m stating a fact. Think about that when you go to bed tonight.”

  Before the Hulk could respond, I got in my car and shut the door. As I left the compound, I pulled out my burner cell phone. As the commander of the city’s major case squad, I worked the most challenging cases our department came across. Unfortunately, due to some budgetary constraints, I didn’t have detectives permanently assigned to my squad, which meant I had to borrow from other units. That meant I got to choose who I wanted to work with. I didn’t mind that one bit.

  I dialed a familiar number and waited for the other end to pick up.

  “Paul, it’s Ash Rashid. I know it’s the middle of the night, so sorry I woke you up.”

  He coughed, clearing his throat. Paul Murphy was a middle-aged sergeant with over thirty years on the job. He smoked constantly, he swore quite often, and he had a love of deli meat that had expanded his waistline to epic proportions. He was also one of the few people on the planet I considered a friend. He was a good man, even if he tried to hide that fact.

  “Don’t apologize to me,” he said. “Apologize to my wife. I’ll put you on speaker.”

  I laughed. “You serious?”

  A woman’s voice answered. “Yes. It’s the middle of the night, and you woke me up, Lieutenant. I think I deserve an apology.”

  “Sorry, Becky.”

  She grunted but didn’t say anything else. Then I heard Paul sigh.

  “What do you want, buddy?”

  “Am I on speaker?”

  He sighed again. “Nope. I’m walking to the toilet.”

  “You want to work an antiterrorism case?”

  He paused. “Not especially.”

  “Would you meet me somewhere if I ordered it?”

  “If you ordered me to meet you somewhere, I wouldn’t have a whole lot of choice, would I?”

  “Nope,” I said. I opened the envelope the Hulk had given me and found a single paper with an address and a six-digit passcode scrawled across the top. I read both aloud. “I’m heading out right now. I need Emilia Rios there as well, so give her a call. And one other thing: This is an important case, but you need to keep it quiet for now. Don’t call the dispatcher and tell her what we’re doing.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Paul, his voice betraying his annoyance. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  I thanked him and then hung up. Even though he was annoyed for being woken up in the middle of the night, Paul was an excellent detective. He and Emilia would be there. I put my car into gear and drove.

  Bukoholov’s warehouse was in a mixed-use neighborhood near I-65 on the city’s southeast side. There was a mobile-home park up the street and a body shop next door. The building itself had gray brick and a lot of rectangular windows. It looked like it could have been a cabinet maker’s shop, or maybe the home base of a heating and air conditioning company. That was probably what made it attractive to men and women who needed a quiet place to store illicit goods.

  I drove through the surrounding streets to get a feel for the area and to see whether anyone was around. At this time of night, the streets were empty.

  About half an hour after leaving Bukoholov’s house, I parked on the edge of the warehouse’s parking lot to wait for my backup. Paul must have met Emilia somewhere because they arrived in her unmarked cruiser. Instead of parking beside me, though, they pulled to a stop directly behind my vehicle, boxing me in.

  My shoulders tightened.

  Emilia opened her door slowly and crept out, keeping her car’s engine block between the two of us. Paul opened his door but didn’t step out from behind it. Both detectives kept their hands near their weapons as I got out of my car.

  “Hey, guys,” I said. “You want to tell me why you’re approaching me as if you’re going to arrest me?”

  “Sorry, Ash,” said Paul, unholstering his weapon. He didn’t raise it toward me, but the threat was still there. “Turn around and put your hands on your car. You’re under arrest for the murders of three John Does in the parking lot of your mosque this morning.”

  I slowly turned and put my hands on the roof of my VW but looked over my shoulder.

  “That isn’t what you think it was.”

  “A guy walking his dog shot a cell phone video,” said Emilia. She had her weapon out. I started to turn around. “We saw everything. We saw you shoot them, and we saw you drive off.”

  “We should probably talk about that.”

  She pointed her weapon at my chest. “Keep your hands on the vehicle. I don’t want to hurt you if I don’t have to.”

  I turned around and put my hands back on the roof of my car. Paul took the weapon from my hip and the cell phone from my pocket before securing my hands in front of me with cuffs. I swore under my breath.

  “Something you want to say, Ash?” asked Paul, leading me to the backseat of his cruiser.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at him. “I should have just called Special Agent Havelock for help.”

  Chapter 17

  Emilia drove. Paul stayed beside her in the front seat, while I stared at the backs of their heads from the cruiser’s rear. I wanted to tell them they were making a mistake, but suspects had yelled that same thing at me from the backseat of my own car so many times that I hardly heard it anymore. Emilia and Paul were two of my closest friends, but they were cops first and foremost. They were just doing their jobs. I didn’t want to waste their time or my breath by screaming at them.

  So I stared out the window at the changing countryside.

  Eventually, Emilia tapped Paul on the shoulder and pointed toward the parking lot of a Baptist church. None of the overhead lights were on, leaving it dark and more than a little foreboding. There was a shuttle bus on the edge of the lot. The congregation probably used it to pick up senior citizens who couldn’t drive to church events on their own. Paul nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked.

  “Driving you to the station for an interrogation,” said Paul, glancing into his rearview mirror. “But first, I’m tired. I’m going to get some coffee. You’re buying. I was having a wonderful dream when you called, by the way.”

  “Sorry to interrupt your dreaming.”

  “Me, too, my friend,” said Paul. “Me, too.”

  We drove for another few minutes, and then, true to Paul’s word, we pulled into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, where Emilia ordered three large coffees in the drive-through. When it came time to pay, she rolled the car forward and pushed the automatic window down so the restaurant worker was just beside me. She was subtle like that. Once I paid and had my change—which was not an easy feat with my hands cuffed together—Emilia rolled up the window and put the heavy police cruiser in gear.

  As Emilia pulled to the restaurant’s exit, Paul pointed to the left. “He’s half a block to the west in a red Ford sedan.”

  “Good catch,” said Emilia, pulling into traffic. Instead of heading back downtown, she drove about half a block, turned into the parking lot of a grocery store that was open twenty-four hours a day, and parked in the fire lane. Immediately, she got out of the car and pulled open my door.

  “Come on. We’ve got to move.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Buying groceries,” said Paul. “Emilia needs someone to carry her bags.”

  I looked at Paul and then to Emilia. Paul mouthed for me to go. Both of them were very good officers, and they rarely acted without reason. More than that, they were my partners. I trusted them implicitly. There was more going on than I recognized, so I swung my legs out of my car.

  “This is an inappropriate use of your time at work,” I said. “When I get to the office, I plan to write you both up.”

  “I look forward to seeing the report,” sa
id Emilia. “Come on.”

  The moment I got out of the car, Paul got into the driver’s seat and drove off. Emilia put her hand on my elbow and led me into the store. Even though there were few shoppers at that time of morning, the overhead lights illuminated every square inch of the building’s interior as brightly as if it were the middle of the day. Emilia shot her eyes around and then pulled me toward the produce section.

  “You do a lot of shopping here?” I asked.

  “I worked here when I was in high school,” she said. “I know the manager.”

  We walked through the produce section and then to the bakery, where she led me to the end of a display, effectively hiding us from view from the front of the store. Nobody in the bakery noticed us, but a woman near the butcher counter stared at us as if we were nuts.

  “Police matter,” I whispered. “Don’t worry. We do this all the time.”

  Emilia snickered. The shopper nodded and then put down the package of chicken she had been inspecting before moving on quickly.

  “We should probably get out of here,” I said.

  “They didn’t follow us in, so they must have stayed with Paul.”

  I didn’t know who “they” were, but I nodded anyway. She started moving again, escorting me out of the bakery. A guy in a paint-spattered T-shirt caught sight of us as he walked up an aisle. Despite the fact that I had my hands in cuffs, he didn’t even bat an eye. He just kept his head down and walked past. That was probably the sane thing to do.

  “Who would be following us?” I asked.

  “We’ll talk once we’re out of here,” she said, squeezing my elbow and directing me toward a hallway between the dairy and meat departments. We walked past the bathrooms and then toward an employee-only section, where an older man in a red vest held the door for us.

  “Hey, Emilia,” he said, smiling at her. “¿Cómo estás?”

  “Bien, bien,” she said, hurrying past him. “Thanks for doing this, Mateo.”

  “Anything for my best bagger.”

  Emilia smiled as we passed. The room we entered looked like a warehouse complete with a loading dock in the back. We stepped around a pallet jack and hurried to an exterior door on the other side of the room. It was almost pitch black outside the store. The air smelled like stale smoke, and I could see cigarette butts on the ground in the moonlight.

  There was a police cruiser beside the loading dock.

  “Get in,” said Emilia, hurrying toward the passenger door. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You want me in the front or the back?”

  “I don’t care. Just get in.”

  I got in the front, and the moment I sat down, Emilia took off but didn’t turn on her headlights.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on now?” I asked.

  “You pissed off a couple of people you shouldn’t have pissed off,” she said. “Paul’s losing them now. I am going to try to avoid letting them see us. We’ll talk in a second. I’ve got to concentrate.”

  We pulled out of the parking lot, still without her headlights on. The roads were empty, but I could barely see ahead of us in the dark. About five minutes after we left the grocery store, we pulled into the gravel lot of the church we had passed earlier. Paul wasn’t there, but we parked on the far edge of the lot in the shadow cast by the building.

  Emilia opened my door for me and then led me across the lot to the shuttle bus. There, she finally took off my cuffs. A cricket chirped nearby, and a warm breeze blew across the church’s lawn. We were utterly alone. I rubbed my wrists and leaned against the bus.

  “While I appreciate the tour through your grocery store, can you tell me what’s going on now?”

  “How about you tell me?” asked Emilia, crossing her arms. “We’ve got you on video shooting three people and then driving away in a Cadillac.”

  I softened my voice. “To be fair, I wasn’t driving. That was my brother-in-law.”

  “Whatever,” said Emilia, closing her eyes. “Tell me you didn’t murder three people and run.”

  “I didn’t murder three people and run,” I said. “There’s a lot more going on there than you realize. I thought Special Agent Havelock would have cleared that up with IMPD, but apparently not. I’ll tell you what I can, but where’s Paul?”

  “Like I said, he’s shaking our tail,” she said. “Since news of your shooting came out, we’ve had people watching us. Somebody in the prosecutor’s office thinks Paul and I are too close to you to be trusted.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

  “It’s on video, Ash,” she said, her voice growing harder. “Don’t try to bullshit me. I saw you.”

  “If it’s on video, where are the bodies?”

  “We don’t know,” said Emilia. “Somebody swooped in and picked them up. They hosed off the parking lot, too.”

  While it was nice that the FBI cleaned up after themselves, it would have been even nicer if they’d told my department they had an operation planned.

  “You didn’t see a shooting,” I said. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you when Paul gets here.”

  “Fine,” she said, turning and pacing alongside the shuttle bus. I stayed leaning against the bus, waiting. Paul finally pulled into the lot about five minutes later. Like Emilia, he had kept his headlights off. He nodded to me as he stepped out of the car.

  “Lost ’em,” he said, looking to Emilia. “He tell you why he shot three people this morning?”

  “I didn’t shoot three people,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “But I can’t tell you what’s really going on because it might be classified.”

  Emilia smiled, but there was little amusement in her eyes. “In the movies, people usually say they could tell us, but then they’d have to kill us afterward. Is that the line you were going for?”

  I looked at her and shook my head. “I could tell you, but then I’d be sent to Fort Leavenworth’s prison for the rest of my life. It’s in the document I signed granting me a security clearance. You would then be taken into federal custody and debriefed by somebody from the US Attorney’s Office. If you refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement, you’d probably end up in prison beside me.”

  Neither Emilia nor Paul said anything.

  “You’re serious?” asked Emilia, a few breaths later.

  “Yes,” I said. “For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working an antiterrorism case with the FBI. Those men I supposedly shot this morning are FBI agents. The whole thing was a setup to make some bad guys trust me. Those FBI agents are alive and well. That’s why you didn’t find any bodies.”

  “There are people who can verify that?” asked Paul.

  I nodded. “That cell phone you took from me is a burner. It’s only got a few numbers in it, but one belongs to Kevin Havelock. He’s the special agent in charge of Indianapolis’s FBI field office. He’s running the operation.”

  “If you’re working with the FBI,” said Emilia, “why did you call us tonight?”

  “Because I trust you. I don’t know if I can trust the Bureau right now.”

  Paul snorted and shook his head. “Let me guess: You can’t tell us why you don’t trust people there, either?”

  “I’m already telling you more than I probably should. I’m investigating a suspected Islamic terror cell in Indianapolis. This terror cell rented that warehouse I met you at earlier. I had hoped you’d help me search it. Beyond that, I can’t tell you much. If you don’t want to help me, that’s fine. I understand. You can go on your way. I need some help, though, and I called you two because I thought I could trust you.”

  Paul looked at Emilia. Neither said anything, but Paul nodded. Finally, Emilia looked at me.

  “If it’s important, we’re with you,” she said. “I wish we could help you with the department, but we’ve been boxed out of the investigation into your shooting.”

  “Who’s stirring this up?” I asked.

  “Tim Smith,” said Paul.
/>   Should have known. Sergeant Smith and I had a long history. He was the supervising officer of the investigative unit assigned to the prosecutor’s office. He wasn’t corrupt, but he worked under the supervision of a corrupt politician. We didn’t always get to choose the men and women we worked for, so I could forgive him that. I had a lot harder time forgiving his strange preoccupation with having me fired or arrested.

  “I’ve been home all evening,” I said. “I’m not hiding. If he wanted to talk to me, he could have just knocked on my front door or called.”

  “If he did that, he wouldn’t get the chance to shoot you,” said Paul. “He sent an email this afternoon to department heads describing you as one of the most dangerous felons the department has ever investigated.”

  “That douchebag,” I said. “I’ll have Agent Havelock call Chief Reddington to see if we can figure this out. In the meantime, I need your help checking out that warehouse.”

  “Do you have a warrant?” asked Emilia.

  “No, but a confidential informant told me to check it out. This guy wouldn’t have contacted me without very good reason.”

  “So this is an illegal search to go along with your classified investigation. If we go in there, we’d be committing a felony, and we wouldn’t even know why we’re doing it,” said Paul. “You’re not selling this well, Ash.”

  “It’s an antiterrorism case. You help me, you could save a lot of lives. If something goes wrong, I’ll take as much responsibility as I can. Better?”

  “Considerably,” said Paul. “You should have led with that whole ‘save a lot of lives’ thing.”

  I ignored him and looked to Emilia. “You with Paul on this?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You buried the lead. You should have told us that we could save lives earlier. It would have made for an easier decision.”

  I closed my eyes. “Your attempts at being funny aside, are you with me or not?”

  “Of course, boss,” she said. “I don’t lead just anybody handcuffed through the grocery store. You’ve got to be really special to receive that kind of treatment.”