Side by Side wm-3

by John Ramsey Miller

  “They can’t share their information with the Attorney General or the FBI or anyone else without admitting to the source of that intelligence. M.I. has a very big stake in this case. If you two don’t find the Dockerys, people in the highest places will have to make sure Judge Fondren convicts Bryce anyway. There are two factions within M.I. Those who want Bryce freed for profit reasons and to keep him from selling them out to save his own skin, and those who want him convicted so they can get the names of his accomplices.”

  “This military interest in the trial judge doesn’t fit,” Winter objected. “Colonel Bryce wasn’t a member of the military when he killed the ATF agent. What am I missing here? Does Bryce have classified information he’s threatening to disclose?”

  Alexa said, “This is a bit more complicated than I may have mentioned. I didn’t want to go into this until you were here.”

  Winter ran his hand through his hair and inhaled. “Lex, you know how much I hate surprises. Let’s get everything out in the open.”

  “The reason for kidnapping Lucy and Elijah Dockery is to free Bryce,” Alexa said. “We can’t sweat Bryce for the names of his accomplices because if he knows we’re on this, the accomplices will too and they’ll kill the Dockerys and sanitize everything.”

  Clayton said, “Bryce was in the process of dealing military weapons when he killed that agent and was arrested.”

  “What sort of weapons?” Winter asked.

  Clayton said, “The good stuff. First-rate, latest military weaponry probably being sold to less-than-America-friendly people. Weapons directly from military stockpiles. No Stinger missiles yet, but just about everything else. The weapons will be shipped out of this country in containers to South America and the Far East and you can guess into what sorts of pipelines after that. We’re potentially talking about drug cartels and terror groups. Bryce has connections inside the Pentagon to make this work.”

  “Man,” Winter said. “That’s insane. A soldier doing that is just crazy.”

  “Crazy profitable,” Alexa said. “That kind of danger, times scarcity, plus value to the recipients, translates into tens of millions.”

  “You can imagine that breaking Bryce’s smuggling operation is more valuable to the Pentagon than any two lives. What else do you need to know?” Clayton asked.

  “I don’t suppose M.I. wants Bryce convicted so he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison,” Winter said.

  “We all know it’s more likely they want him facing life in prison so they can cut a deal with him,” Alexa said. “What Bryce has been doing couldn’t be done without brass involvement, and Military Intelligence wants those names.”

  “And the people involved with him want him freed,” Winter mused. “Even if he walks, they’re not going to be able to keep doing business with him.”

  “Don’t bet on it. There’s a power war going on above this, and both sides have a short trip to the door if they fail,” Clayton said. “That is fascinating, but irrelevant. I could expound on it if you’d like.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” Winter said.

  Clayton Able couldn’t hide his surprise that someone didn’t crave more information. “But. .”

  Winter locked eyes with Clayton. “I could care less where who is doing what to whom unless they are going to be doing it between me and the Dockerys. Anything that doesn’t impact what Alexa and I have to do is drama for somebody with too much time on their hands. The only thing I want to know is where do we start.”

  “If we don’t find them, Lucy and Elijah will be killed,” Alexa said grimly. “Even if Judge Fondren did call the FBI, they’d be too late to break this open.”

  “But Mr. Able does,” Winter said.

  “I do,” Clayton said, smiling. “I put it together from several different sources that, despite what the government says, do not share information with each other unless specific requests are made through proper slothish channels. Don’t worry about M.I. They can’t afford to interfere with your investigation. They will want you to succeed. Well, those of them who want Bryce to take the fall for a murder he committed will. Nobody else knows where the Dockerys are being held, or even who took them.”

  “M.I. is aware of what we are doing?” Winter asked.

  Clayton removed the pipe from his mouth. “Dear boy. What I do is trade intelligence. I only get it as long as I give it back.”

  15

  Seated on a sofa in the corner of the lobby of the Westin Hotel, Click Smoot played games on his laptop while he monitored the pedestrian traffic. Just about the time the power indicator on the laptop was down to a single bar, someone of interest arrived. A lone man entered carrying a black nylon bag. The man picked up a key folder from the desk clerk, got into the elevator, and went directly up to the fourth floor.

  Click was sure the man was connected to the two other people on four. The stranger was close to the woman’s age, was just south of six feet tall, and was built like a man who stayed active. He walked with an erect fluidity that brought to Click’s mind a feral tomcat that made a living catching and eating rodents at the hunting camp. This animal wasn’t afraid of anything on four legs or two, Click was sure of it.

  The bastards could sit up there in a room and plot and plan solving this until hell froze over. Even if there were hundreds of FBI agents looking for the Dockery woman and her kid, they’d have to be honest-to-God psychics to connect the Smoots to the kidnapping.

  16

  Five-letter word for darker than dark.

  P-i-t-c-h

  The trailer’s windows were covered with something that totally blocked outside light. The constant darkness allowed Lucy Dockery no sense of time, but since she knew the difference between the noises generated by daytime and nighttime television, she could sort of judge her place in a twenty-four-hour cycle.

  Periodically a central unit would kick on, causing the trailer to vibrate violently for a few seconds. The forced air made a hissing sound as it exited the register and smelled like a vacuum whose bag was overfilled with dog hair and dust.

  So far they hadn’t drugged her again, so maybe they planned to let her and Elijah go as soon as her father paid a ransom. As far as Lucy was concerned, the captors could have every penny she owned. It had to be obvious that she was unaccustomed to violence, and she posed no threat physically to her larger and stronger captors. They had to know she wouldn’t try anything that would risk getting Elijah harmed.

  Keeping quite still, fighting back tears, she listened for her son’s voice, hungry to know that he was all right. Sometimes she could hear both the television and a radio, like audio combatants. She could, when the radio and TV both lulled at the same time, hear her son jabbering. The word “no” was prominent in his recent communications. She could also hear the big angry woman barking or cooing at him, but she knew none of it contained any useful information about their circumstances.

  Elijah, who walked with confidence, hadn’t been afraid of strangers lately, having passed through a couple of stages where he would react badly to them. Lucy had employed several babysitters and he was long accustomed to strangers caring for him, having his mother in bed, weeping and disinterested. Grief for Walter and for her mother had been like a weight that, for weeks at a time, had made moving beyond her bedroom a Herculean challenge.

  Lucy wasn’t afraid for herself. The worst they could do was kill her. And dying couldn’t be any more painful than living without Walter. She wouldn’t have been as terrified if Eli wasn’t there, but his well-being mattered like nothing in her life had ever mattered. Against the terror of Eli being harmed, no fear she had ever felt even rated a mention. She figured that was just how nature wired mothers.

  The woman said they were in a trailer. What’s the difference between a mobile home and a modular home? Wheels. It dawned on Lucy that not once in her twenty-six years on earth had she ever before set foot inside a mobile home.

  Lucy had always believed that, with the possible exception of Gy
psies, nobody but people without any alternative would choose to live in a flimsy aluminum-sided crate with a foundation by Goodyear. She wondered if she should regret being prejudiced against something that was merely foreign to her world. No. The woman who seemed at home here was a poster child for the worst examples of the trailer-park-trash stereotype. Lucy understood on a visceral level that the violent woman shared the pathology of the aristocratic-hating Madame Defarge depicted in A Tale of Two Cities. The woman captor hated Lucy because she wasn’t toothless white trash.

  She wished she could stop thinking like that. This wasn’t about class, but about human decency-about choices. She knew deep in her heart that she couldn’t depend on their captors’ humanity. If this was about revenge, they were dead. If the kidnappers’ motives weren’t related to gain, and if the authorities had no way to find them, she couldn’t just sit there and wait to see what happened. Since she had seen their faces, she had to assume they didn’t think she could identify them because she’d be dead. And if she died, what would happen to Elijah?

  When the woman had opened the door earlier, Lucy had seen that the bedroom she was in was cluttered and wooden crates were stacked against one wall. Might there be something there she could use to facilitate an escape? She doubted she could take on any of them, but could she use her brain to get Elijah away from this place?

  Some abductees did escape their captors. The news was filled with examples of all kinds of people getting away from armed captors.

  But Lucy knew she wasn’t ever going to get free.

  So she wept.

  17

  Clayton Able’s top-opening valise was so jam-packed with file folders he had trouble at first prying enough of them out to free the stack. He piled the entire stack on the bed, opened one of the folders, and started flipping photographs faceup on the coverlet like playing cards.

  The first picture Clayton flipped was that of a thin individual wearing an expensive suit and carrying an overnight bag. The shot had obviously been taken in an airport and, based on the angle, by a fixed security camera.

  “This is from airport surveillance yesterday,” Clayton told Winter and Alexa. “A little out of focus for my taste, but it’s been blown up and had gone through a couple of generations before I acquired it. The face triggered some flags in the NSA mainframe. They sent the information to another computer at the Homeland Security center, and because of the location of the individual involved, my friends plucked it out of the stacks. Thank God for biometrics.”

  “Nice suit,” Winter said.

  “Serge Sarnov.” Clayton tapped the photo with his finger. “He works for Intermat Ltd., an investment firm with principal offices in L.A., New York, London, Paris, Moscow, and with smaller and unlisted offices in cities not known for political stability or ethical behavior.”

  “Russian mob?” Winter asked, frowning.

  “Mobs,” Alexa answered.

  “You know him?” Winter asked her.

  “I’ve been briefed already,” she intoned. “This one’s for you.”

  “A dozen mobs united by a need to move and launder large sums of money safely. The firm, Intermat, is made up of the leadership of each group, with the president selected by them from among themselves. Just like the Pope’s selection by a vote of fellow cardinals. There are at least ten major criminal organizations with links to the firm. Once they put their funds in Intermat’s accounts, the money is as safe as it would be in a bank. Intermat invests the pooled currency in deals that promise a healthy profit, and all members share equally in the profits.”

  “And if our government is aware of this, how does this firm stay in business?” Winter asked.

  Clayton took his pipe out of his mouth and smiled. “Isn’t a poisonous snake in a glass case less dangerous than one running around the house loose?” he asked. “Serge Sarnov runs Intermat’s department of policy enforcement. Ex-GRU, where he specialized in handling tricky state problems. This picture was taken last night at Douglas International Airport, a few miles from here.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the wind,” Clayton said. “You should keep an eye out for him.”

  “He’s involved in the kidnapping?”

  Clayton shrugged. “Not directly, but he has a stake in its success.”

  “And his connection to the Dockerys?” Winter pressed, growing low on patience.

  The next picture was of a man who stood shaking Sarnov’s hand in the airport’s baggage area. A third shot showed the second man putting Sarnov’s bags in the back of a dark Tahoe. The pictures were all taken from different security cameras.

  “Here is the connection. Lt. Maxwell T. Randall, twenty-seven. Ex-Special Forces. Randall is one of Colonel Bryce’s associates-served with him the last two years Bryce was active military. You don’t want to mess with either of these men. The government is actively pursuing them and they are connected to continuing investigations beyond this. If you tangle with these two, the consequences could be unpleasant no matter the outcome of the meeting, if you get my drift.”

  “If they don’t bother me, I won’t bother them back,” Winter said, seriously. “What’s Sarnov’s involvement with Bryce?”

  “Intermat was dealing for the weapons that Bryce’s arrest short-circuited. Bryce is the only one who knows where the shipment is. The only other man who may have known is a dead undercover agent who got killed before he could pass the intelligence to his handlers. The firm has millions invested in the shipment Bryce has. They won’t walk away from it.”

  Alexa said, “Bryce had to have figured that if he told Intermat where the container was before they sprung him, he’d either do life, get the needle, or the firm would kill him to keep him from talking.”

  “So, if Sarnov didn’t do it, who grabbed the Dockerys?” Winter asked. “Randall?”

  Clayton sucked loudly on his Falcon pipe. “Randall was in Atlanta when the Dockerys were snatched. M.I. ran the voice of the person who phoned Judge Fondren after the snatch for a matching print. They got one the FBI had filed as that of an unidentified female doing business with a local syndicate.”

  “At the Bureau, we call them the Cornpone Mafia,” Alexa told Winter. “They are made up of small southern groups that are hooked up to a larger syndicate based in Kansas City.”

  “That female voice has showed up several times on taps on people doing business with this local bunch,” Clayton said. “This one is a particularly challenging one. Stanley Smoot, who goes by ‘Peanut,’ is at the top. Peanut pays the best legal firm in the region a healthy retainer, and they have managed to extricate him from every crime he’s been charged with over the past twenty years. He’s street-smart, a classic psychopathic personality, and he keeps his books in his head. His lawyer of record is Ross Laughlin, the senior partner at Price, Courtney, Laughlin, Vance and Associates. Of interest is that Ross Laughlin also happens to be Colonel Hunter Bryce’s attorney. Laughlin’s firm has fifty top attorneys in Washington, D.C., ninety-seven in Charlotte, and seventy in Miami. The old boy has some very impressive connections.”

  “Ross Laughlin knows everybody in Washington worth knowing, and contributes to all of the right people of both parties,” Alexa said.

  “Got a picture of Peanut Smoot?” Winter asked.

  Clayton found one in a second file folder and put it beside the one of Randall.

  Winter studied it.

  “Should be easy to spot,” Alexa said.

  “Peanut’s family has been involved in criminal enterprises as far back as records go. He’s got a rap sheet goes back to his teens, but like I said, last twenty years he’s been golden. He is the highest up the chain anybody’s charted, and I’d say he is the top guy. Peanut’s crew deals in hijacking, running untaxed cigarettes, prostitution, selling stolen firearms up North to gangbangers, extortion, car theft and chop shops, insurance fraud, loan-sharking, pawnshops, stolen credit cards, gambling, counterfeit sporting-event tickets. Not sure what the connectio
n to Colonel Bryce is. Maybe Peanut does business with him or maybe he was just hired to do the heavy lifting on this kidnapping. But the Smoots took the Dockerys. The woman’s voice is all the connection you need. The voice belongs to one of their own, and it shares definite regional accentual similarities with the rest of the clan. A female, probably mid-twenties to early thirties, who wears dentures, is all the description I have. Called the judge from a pay phone outside a convenience store on Central Boulevard. Her voice has never been caught except on pay phones and disposable cells.”

  “And Laughlin is the connection,” Winter said.

  “No proof of that,” Alexa said. “Big risk for a man at his social, economic, and professional level.”

  Winter frowned but held back comment. Of course Laughlin was the connection between Bryce, the Smoots, and Intermat. He couldn’t believe Alexa questioned it. An attorney being a crook wasn’t a stretch in Winter’s mind. The more powerful he was, the more above reproach he felt, the easier it would be to go bad. A man like that could see himself as smarter than anyone in law enforcement and feel bulletproof.

  “How large is the Smoot crew?” he asked.

  Alexa said, “Peanut’s crew is made up of fifty to sixty uncles, aunts, cousins, even his own children. It’s a tribe that settled in the forties in remote northern South Carolina, about an hour from here.”

  “Will they kill the Dockerys personally?” Winter asked.

  Clayton nodded. “Killing a woman and child would be easy money.”

  “Then we have to get to the Smoots,” Winter said.

  “They’re our starting place,” Alexa agreed.

  “I’ll put together a field file for you with all the appropriate intel on the Smoots,” Clayton said.

  Winter stared at Peanut’s wide-apart almond-shaped eyes, the smug arrogant smile belonging to a man who’d enjoyed a long successful run.