Jack made several anonymous donations to the California Red Cross, organizations that helped out in wine country, and one dedicated to the families of firefighters who’d lost their lives battling these fires. In total, he’d secretly donated two and a half million dollars—half of what he’d gotten from Cannizzaro. The rest of it would stay in various accounts, should Jack ever find himself needing to run. That was the price of not accepting Danzig’s offer. Jack wouldn’t live as though he had a foot out the door, but he always had to be prepared to run. He wouldn’t face a threat from Cannizzaro or Reginald, but he would live with the chance that the IRS’s criminal investigation division would renew their digging into his offshore finances, and if that happened, Jack Burdette and Frank Fischer would have to disappear for good.
So, he had two and a half million left.
Less a little.
A year ago, Frank Fischer bought himself a present.
Jack found a company that rebuilt classic muscle cars. They’d licensed the original specifications from Ford and Shelby American and recreated some of those Mustangs, among the most legendary and iconic cars ever produced, using modern technology. The result was a 1968 Shelby GT 500 in a matte silver-gray with black hood intakes and a lowered, curved front valance that looked like a shark was grinning at you. They’d finished the build over the summer and delivered the vehicle to Jack just before he left for Los Angeles.
Jack got in and fired up the car, gassing it slightly to feel the throaty rumble of the engine.
He was staying with Megan until he bought a new house. They weren’t ready to move in together permanently, though they had talked about it. For now, Jack was going to buy a new place, though Megan was looking with him, and the unstated agreement was that she’d get a soft vote. His place on Dry Creek Road would likely go for about two and a half, which was more than enough to find them a new home. It would have to, because Jack would have to pay cash. He wasn’t sure how Reginald’s death there would affect the price, but that was a manageable problem. He had plenty of money, and if he had to take a loss on the house, that was fine. The money Cannizzaro hadn’t intended to pay him would be more than enough.
Jack backed out of his space beneath the tall trees of the square. The winery was shut down for a few days while they brought everything back from storage and tried to reorganize. Plus, it had been a traumatic and trying time for his employees and they deserved a couple of days off. Jack would head up there shortly just because there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
“Just drive,” came a voice from the back seat, and Jack saw a dark form rise in the rearview mirror.
46
True to his word, Lieutenant Colonel Bruni blamed Danzig fiercely, often, and in public.
Not the FBI, not America in general, not even her squad, but Special Agent Katrina Danzig.
He held a news conference where he explained that Danzig had an informant in the Cannizzaro organization and refused to share his identity with the DIA, despite numerous attempts at cooperation. Perhaps this all could have been avoided and the Italian people could have gotten the justice they so richly deserved if only Danzig had done otherwise. Bruni also informed the LEGAT in Rome of his feelings on the matter and said he wanted to issue a formal complaint.
Special Agent Max Silva, the Rome LEGAT, took Bruni’s complaint. Silva assured the officer that it would be passed on to the appropriate offices in the FBI. He did nothing else with it. Silva told Danzig that his job was liaising with local law enforcement, a job which required strong, personal relationships and trust. If he believed that there were merits to Bruni’s accusations, he’d have been bound to pass them on. As it was, Danzig kept Silva apprised of the investigation at every step. The only things she’d held back were the details he wasn’t authorized to know anyway. Silva also understood why Danzig held back on sharing Mazza’s identity with Bruni, an issue that Danzig and Silva had discussed at length several times.
Danzig asked Silva’s opinion and advice as both a brother agent and as the LEGAT—potentially two different perspectives. She knew it would be a controversial decision and also one that would have consequences for Silva later on. Given the circumstances of the Cannizzaro organization’s massive corruption scheme and their history of buying off law enforcement officers, including in Bruni’s own agency, Silva agreed with her reluctance to share. He also didn’t see how sharing Mazza’s name would have changed the outcome. She was sharing the intelligence they got from Mazza, which is what mattered. Bruni was being petty. Silva assured Danzig that in his report back to headquarters, he would state that he’d have made the same decision. Silva would also put a call into his counterparts in Italian law enforcement, though he didn’t expect much to come of it.
Danzig stayed in Rome for an extra two days after the Cannizzaro hit, mostly to package up their case files for shipment back to the US and to help Silva with the fallout. Most of that time, she was quiet and despondent. Though he’d died in the way his kind usually did, Cannizzaro escaped any measure of justice. What they’d learned about him over the last year and the extent of his criminal activities, branching into drug and gun smuggling and human trafficking, said that Cannizzaro got what he deserved but the Italian people didn’t. Nor did Cannizzaro’s incredibly long list of victims, one that would stretch back decades and could likely never be fully tallied. Worse, though, was Sokolov. He was human dirt, but his value as an intelligence asset was incalculable. More than that and the basis for Flipside’s dual meaning, Danzig came to learn, was that if Sokolov didn’t want to cooperate and provide information on the Russian president, they had a mountain of evidence with which to prosecute him for numerous cybercrimes perpetrated against American citizens. Sokolov’s “media companies” were little more than hacker banks running digital blackmail schemes.
Sokolov was a big target, perhaps one of the most significant the Americans had gone after in decades. There were certainly other plays the Bureau and CIA were considering, though Danzig had no clue about them. Above her pay grade, as the saying went.
On the flight back home, she drank.
Danzig had official coverage but there was always blowback in any organizational failure. Bruni claiming the Cannizzaro end of this was her fault, while untrue, would only increase the number of times her name was associated with it and might just lead some Assistant Deputy Director, far removed from operational reality, to wonder did Special Agent Katrina Danzig do everything she could? Would another agent have done better? Was this just someone with a reputation for being hard to work with struggling to manage a complicated and important diplomatic situation?
Monaco weighed heavily on her mind during that flight, and she wondered about the decisions she’d made. Could she defend them? Burdette couldn’t find the diamonds but was able to give her a name. They ran Clint Sturdevant down and found an alias that hadn’t been used in fifteen years. Two-time bank robber, that they knew about, at any rate. In and out of the system most of his life. Connected with several murders, though none of them proven. There was no obvious link to LeGrande in his National Crime Information Center system file, other than Burdette’s word, but she knew how well LeGrande compartmentalized, so that wasn’t surprising.
There were two angles about Monaco that unsettled her, unquiet feelings she couldn’t shake. The first was the location itself. Why there? Clearly, the reason was to draw attention and men away from Rome, but the question was whose. Was this to outmaneuver Cannizzaro or the FBI? They almost got there in time. The second aspect that Danzig had trouble with was the man on the street. Someone watched her. Not an uncommon thing, considering that there were shots fired on the street maybe ten minutes before, but she wasn’t in uniform, had no outward indicators that she was a cop. So why focus on her? Danzig tried not to pay attention to him, and then when she did, she looked up to find he was gone. Knowing that you were being watched was an unsettling thing.
So was having dots that you just couldn’t connect.
> Burdette gave her Sturdevant’s name, and soon enough they’d track him down and prove if he was the third conspirator in LeGrande’s scheme. Burdette also shared that Niccoló Bartolo had been the one to receive the diamonds on behalf of Cannizzaro, then Bartolo apparently called Jack to brag about it. That seemed excessively flamboyant, arrogant, and stupid, but this was also a man who’d served sixteen years in prison because he was flamboyant, arrogant, and stupid, so perhaps it fit. Danzig contacted some old colleagues at Europol and INTERPOL so that they could pick up the hunt. She’d let Silva handle any communication with the Guardia di Finanza.
When Danzig reported into her home office for the first time in months, she learned that Vito Verrazano would be extradited to Italy. The only thing they could charge him with was entering the United States illegally and possessing a false passport. The Italian government might prosecute him; on the other hand, they might just say he was a seventy-year-old man and maybe it wasn’t worth it.
Danzig’s boss, Ed Dysart, told her they’d done great work, the best they could have done under the circumstances. Those words seemed to hang in the air around him, under the circumstances. That was the kind of left-handed compliment bureau-speak for telling someone they failed without actually saying it. He’d gotten Silva’s report and said it was highly complimentary of her and her team—was just a shame they couldn’t have gotten to Cannizzaro before the Russian did.
Real shame. He made a point of saying that twice.
Danzig amassed a lot of vacation time over the last year. She planned on burning most of it. Travel a bit and not have her phone on. When she came back, she’d figure out what she was going to do next. Danzig would have twenty years in the Bureau the following spring. Fifteen of those years she’d spent following the dark money trails the villains of the world used to finance themselves. Most of that time was in precious gems, a lot of it abroad. She sacrificed much for this pursuit. Katrina was not married, in fact she didn’t even remember the last time she’d been on a date. The only men she knew were other agents or industry contacts or informants, and that’s not what she was looking for. Her work already occupied all of her thoughts; she didn’t want it to dominate a relationship as well. This pursuit also cost her advancement in the Bureau. Danzig wanted to chase bad guys, she wanted to be a cop. But that meant not taking certain jobs, the kinds of things that got you noticed. That was a conscious choice and one she knew would likely limit her growth and certainly her advancement. It was an easy calculus when you’re single and in your mid-thirties, a little different when you realize that you’re looking at forty-three and your job is the only long-term relationship in your life.
Danzig didn’t know what would come next, but she knew it would be in a different division. She needed a change. Not every investigation resulted in an arrest, and she also knew that she and her team had done good police work. That mattered. To her, at least. Her boss was a bureaucrat and had been behind a desk too long. Danzig also had two high-profile arrests on her record—a Castro regime hit man who’d been hiding out in Miami and later, a Serbian war criminal. Her reputation had enough horsepower that she could make a good transfer when the time came.
She’d debated giving Burdette a call and letting him know the outcome of it all. He’d tried to help her, that was true, though with him there was always an angle. Gentleman Jack Burdette was no Samaritan, there was nothing he did out of the goodness of his heart. He certainly didn’t assist FBI investigations out of some lofty notion of civic-mindedness. Burdette only gave her Andelić because the FBI got to him first and because Andelić was going to kill him.
Danzig didn’t know exactly what Burdette’s involvement in this case was, but she knew it was more than he was letting on. She also knew that whatever it was, it no longer mattered.
She put her leave request in and told Dysart that she planned to take a full month. No can do, he’d said, like he was an auto mechanic. Two weeks at a time was division policy. Fine, she thought, I’ll come back for a week and check email for two days and then leave again.
Danzig was angry and justifiably so, but she held her tongue, a lesson she’d learned the hard way too many times. She guessed it finally took. Dysart was just the messenger. And that’s not even what she was angry about, what she could feel starting to boil up in her blood. The shock of seeing Cannizzaro shot dead had registered at the time, she knew what it meant, but the gravity of it hadn’t registered until just now when her boss told her that the policy was two weeks of time off. Long months of hard work, nearly a year, without any break were just gone. Enduring the petulant whims of a misogynist cop that obstructed her at every turn and then blamed her publicly for their collective failure. The one thing she refused to do was ask the question of whether or not she should have stepped aside and let a male colleague take the lead. That question would be asked, she knew. It was coming. We understand that Lieutenant Colonel Bruni refused to work with a woman, and that’s deplorable. We all object to it. We just couldn’t help but wonder, for the sake of the investigation, would it not have made sense to let Agent Choi or another member of the team take the lead with Bruni? Perhaps that would have effected a different outcome.
She’d done her job and done it well. She had a good squad and they did their jobs well. She almost looked forward to the asshole bureaucrat who asked the question of whether she should have stepped aside.
Danzig left that thought in her office. She told Dysart she was taking the rest of the day off, starting her vacation early. It was obvious she was worn out and jet-lagged, and he didn’t fight her on it. She did think about Flipside and whether that might be an option for her. That seemed like the kind of thing she was cut out for. Bring Choi over if she could. But those were problems for another day.
Danzig wasn’t sure what she was going to do next, but whatever it was, it wouldn’t involve diamonds.
47
“How’d you get in here?”
“You forget how many cars I stole on your behalf over the years?”
“What do you want, Rusty?” Jack’s hand went to his waist on impulse, but as soon as he felt nothing, he remembered that his pistol was still tagged in an evidence locker at the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.
“I came to explain why I did what I did.”
“I don’t care why you did it,” Jack said. He was about to ask Rusty if he’d known what he’d caused but stopped himself. Rusty could be wired up, probably was. He couldn’t deliver Jack before, so this was the next pass.
“I was tired of running, Jack.”
“You mentioned that already.” Jack drove through an intersection and rolled past the old, restored buildings of the square. He wheeled the car onto West Spain Street to take him out to Highway 12 and then north. “I’ve got things to do today, so if you don’t have anything new to share, you can get the hell out of my car.”
“I came to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I know I don’t have anything to worry about. All I’ve done today is buy a coffee.”
“They don’t care about you,” Rusty said after a few strained, silent breaths. “They weren’t interested in you anyway, and after that shitshow in Inglewood, the Bureau—at least my part of it—didn’t want anything to do with it.”
“What deal did you cut, then? You couldn’t just turn yourself in or you’d have done it, and you’re obviously free now.”
“I’m not free, not like it looks. But ultimately what they decided was that what I know was more valuable to them if I was on the inside than the outside. If I’m here, they can watch me. And I have to go back to work for them.”
“So what, they’re giving you your badge back?” Jack said, acidic irony oozing off his words.
“Not exactly. It’s more like witness protection. But now that we’re finally acknowledging that Russia is a threat again, I will have to provide some specific knowledge and expertise whenever they want. There is also some work that I did abroad t
hat’s useful to them now. That’s part of the deal too. Otherwise, I have to work some bullshit job, live in a bullshit suburb, and pretend to be ‘Eric Warner.’”
“If you’re looking for sympathy, you got in the wrong car.”
“I’m not,” Rusty said slowly and softly. “I just wanted you to know that you’re in the clear. I figured I owed you that.”
“Until you need something to trade,” Jack said.
“No. Counterintelligence is a different world, Jack. They deal with the worst of humanity to protect the rest of it from people that are even worse. All that to say, no one I know gives a shit about a jewel thief.”
Jack made a left turn and followed it around a snaking road to a small shopping center. The buildings were dark brown and stood out in contrast against the wet, gray sky. Jack pulled into a parking spot, got out, and pulled the seat forward so Rusty could get out of the back. He did. Rusty’s hair was brown now, and his eyes looked haunted.
“You saved my life,” Rusty said awkwardly. “We both know Enzo’s temper, and I wasn’t sure which way that was going to go.”
“It was a matter of logistics,” Jack said in a flat tone. He wasn’t letting Rusty off the hook. “I didn’t have time to hide a body.”
Rusty nodded. He understood, was one of the few people in the world who did.
“Listen, I hope you don’t, but if you ever need my help.” Rusty pulled a card out of his jacket pocket. It was a blank business card with a handwritten phone number on it.
“You can get into a lot of trouble just offering me that. Your new friends will say you haven’t learned your lesson.”
Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3) Page 42
