“Bill, I need to borrow your Zodiac. Canaan got away from the yacht club in a dinghy. I think I can catch him.”
“Hit the garage door opener and pull straight into the garage,” Bradford said. “The door into the house isn’t locked. Just inside on the wall is a key rack. The Zodiac’s keys are on a blue Yamaha floating key chain. It’s a 70-horsepower outboard, so you’ll have plenty of speed.”
“Thanks, Bill.”
When he reached the intersection of Main Street and Beach Road, he slowed the Audi to a slightly safer speed through the residential neighborhood. At Bradford’s waterfront home, he hit the door opener before he turned into the driveway. The garage door was barely up enough to allow the Audi in when he locked up the brakes and slid to a stop a foot short of the storage lockers on the far wall.
Then he grabbed the Zodiac’s keys off the key rack just inside the door into the house and ran out to the door at the back of the garage. The steps led down to the dock and the bobbing white inflatable. As he ran down the steps, he searched the water to the southwest, hoping to see the dinghy Canaan had escaped in.
Bradford’s home was directly across Belvedere Cove from the yacht club, but Drake thought it unlikely that Canaan would try to put ashore anywhere along Beach Road, which was lined with palatial waterfront homes built closely together. To the south, at the tip of Corinthian Island, was the Corinthian Yacht Club, and beyond the Tiburon Ferry Terminal to the east was Shoreline Park. At night, he figured, the park would provide the best place for a fugitive to land and disappear into the night. If Canaan was headed there, there was a chance the Zodiac could catch him.
Drake cast off the lines, jumped into the boat, and put the key in the center console’s ignition. When the outboard roared to life, he shifted into reverse and gave it so much gas that it rocketed backwards and he was almost thrown over the steering wheel to the boat’s front well.
Slow down cowboy, he told himself. You won’t catch him if you find yourself swimming beside the Zodiac instead of standing in it.
After he shifted into forward and brought the inflatable up to a planing speed, he slipped on the night vision goggles and scanned the open waters ahead. The brightest lights on the water came from a ferry heading north from San Francisco. He didn’t see anything coming from the San Francisco Yacht Club across Belvedere Cove to his right. When he pulled even with the southern tip of Corinthian Island, however, he saw the green-hued wake of the dinghy three hundred yards ahead. Canaan was headed straight for the open space of Shoreline Park.
Chapter 66
Drake closed to within a hundred yards of the dinghy before it reached the rocky embankment that ran the length of the park. Canaan turned and stared at his pursuer for a second, then jumped out and scrambled up to the path at the top of the embankment. He stood up and looked again at the speeding Zodiac, then took off running toward an old, two-story, white building at the southern end of the park where two cars were parked.
Drake veered right to follow, looking for a place to land and tie up. He wasn’t prepared to leave Bradford’s Zodiac adrift in the bay. As he got closer to the old house, he saw that the shoreline path that bordered the embankment had white cement posts every twenty feet or so with a safety cable strung between them. He turned in and cut his speed, letting the wake behind carry the Zodiac forward until it bumped against the rocks.
With a quick look, Drake saw that Canaan was trying to break into one of the cars parked next to the old building. He jumped out with the forward tie down line in his hand, climbed to the top of the embankment and threw a quick bowline hitch around the post.
Canaan was now trying to break into the other car. Drake ran along the shoreline path and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. If Canaan made it out of the parking lot before he got there, Detective Cabrillo would have to cut off his escape with roadblocks around the Tiburon peninsula.
“Cabrillo, Canaan’s at Shoreline Park in Tiburon. He’s trying to break into a car. If he gets it hotwired and gets away, we’ll never see him again.”
“I know the park. We’re on our way. Get the license number of the car.”
Drake shoved the cell phone back in his pocket and pulled Cabrillo’s Glock out of the waistband of his pants as he ran. Canaan was still trying to break the driver’s side window of the second car, an older Ford Taurus. When he saw that Drake would reach him before he had time to hotwire the car and escape, the terrorist ran to the old building, kicked in a door and ran inside.
Drake wasn’t far behind. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the sign on the outer wall next to the door announcing it as the Tiburon Railroad & Ferry Museum. He ran to the side of the building and stopped to listen. He heard Canaan knock something to the floor inside. He edged closer to the door with the Glock held high near his shoulder.
“Canaan,” he shouted, “there’s no place to go. The police are on the way. Come on out.”
When he heard glass breaking, Drake stepped inside and flattened himself against the wall beside the door. The night vision goggles showed him the large model train display of the original railroad and ferry terminal was directly in front of him. On the other side, Canaan was kneeling on a counter and breaking out the glass of a small window. He turned and spotted Drake’s shadow and fired a shot at the open door.
Drake fired once. Canaan fell off the counter and behind the model train display.
“You shoot like a woman, lawyer. We should have killed you in Oregon. But here is just as good.”
Drake suddenly knew who he was facing. “You were with Barak and his men when they tried to blow the dam. Too bad you failed.” He started to move slowly around the model train display so he could get a shot at Canaan.
“He failed, I didn’t,” Canaan said, “and they weren’t his men, they were mine.”
Drake could see clearly through his night vision goggles. He picked up a miniature telephone pole from the model train display and threw it to the other side of the room.
Canaan reached up and fired toward the far wall where the telephone pole had landed.
The only way to get a clear shot at Canaan, he saw, was to step around the train display, but there Canaan would also have a clear shot at him. Drake moved back toward the door and stopped behind the museum’s small ticket counter. He assumed a strong isosceles stance with the Glock as he waited for Canaan to make a mistake.
“Would you like to know how we knew you’d be at the yacht club?” he asked.
“I figured that out,” Canaan said. “It was the banker, Walker. He said he was tying up loose ends when he had me kill the congressman. That meant I might be next.”
“You work for him?”
Canaan laughed. “He thinks we do. We cooperate with them when it serves our purpose.”
“What purpose and who are them?”
The approaching sounds of police sirens silenced their conversation.
Drake recognized the words of a Muslim prayer being said on the other side of the room.
When the words stopped, Canaan suddenly stood up and fired wildly as he dashed around the train display, then walked toward the door.
Drake fired twice, hitting Canaan’s center mass both times.
Chapter 67
What else was there to do? After making sure Canaan was dead, Drake walked outside and waited for Detective Cabrillo to arrive. It was all starting to make some sense. Canaan had been involved in the failed attempt to use a nuclear demolition device to blow up a dam in the Cascade Range. The death toll that would have resulted from the inundation in the valley below had been estimated at over one hundred thousand people; men, women, and children. The man behind the plot had been a Muslim terrorist by the name of David Barak. If Canaan had worked with him in Oregon, the chances were good they had learned who he, Drake, was.
Canaan had recognized him at EIS. The next day, he had almost been killed i
n a drive-by shooting, and then Mike had been poisoned outside his hotel room. Canaan was right. They should have killed him in Oregon. He kept turning up like a bad penny, spoiling their plans.
What he didn’t know was how the banker figured into it. But he intended to find out.
Detective Cabrillo’s black Tahoe stopped six feet from Drake. The detective opened his door.
“Gun shots just reported. Was that you?”
“Yep. Canaan’s inside. He heard you coming, said a prayer, and came out shooting.”
As Cabrillo gestured to his men in one of the two police cruisers that had pulled in behind him to check it out, Drake dropped the magazine out of the Glock, racked it twice to make sure it wasn’t loaded, and handed it to Cabrillo, butt first.
“Canaan said he killed the congressman,” Drake said.
Cabrillo nodded as he got out of the car. “We found his body in the back of that Ford van at the yacht club. There were ligature marks on his neck from a wire. It would be nice to prove it was Canaan, because if it’s not wrapped up quickly, this will be one messy murder investigation once the press gets on it.”
“Were you able to trace the call from the anonymous tipster?”
“Not before I left for the yacht club. Why?”
“DHS says Canaan is rumored to be Hezbollah operating out of Tijuana. We need to know who he was working for. If we don’t prevent the blackout, someone will have to pay. If it is Hezbollah acting on orders from Iran, the President needs to know it.”
“I’ll check on the trace. Do you need to get back to EIS?”
Drake nodded. “If you don’t need me here, there’s something I need to check out.”
“Go ahead. I’ll get a statement from you tomorrow.”
A crowd was starting to gather on the other side of Paradise Drive as more patrol cars arrived and the investigation of the shooting in the old Railroad & Ferry Museum got under way.
Avoiding the crowd, Drake walked along the shoreline path to Bradford’s Zodiac, untied it, and picked his way back down the embankment. When he pushed off and got underway, he forced himself to slow his breathing and relax. The temperature was in the low sixties and the sky was clear, although the stars were faint overhead due to the light pollution from across the Bay. He stayed close to shore and let his mind spin to neutral for the remainder of the ride.
When the Zodiac was secured at Bradford’s dock, he checked in with Strobel to see if the EIS rapid response team had made any progress.
“Not yet,” she told him, “but they arrested the Fort Mead analyst at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. He’d driven the extra thirty-two miles from D.C. because he knew we were looking for him. They’re putting him on a plane tonight, and we’ll have him here tomorrow, hopefully to cooperate with us and work out a way to prevent the blackout. Did Canaan show up?”
“He did. And we almost missed him.”
“Is he talking?”
“Not anymore. He’s dead.”
“What happened?”
“He slipped out in a little dinghy and I followed him in Bradford’s Zodiac. He chose to die a martyr’s death.”
“Did you find out how he was involved in all this?”
“He said that the ‘banker’ had set him up after having him kill Congressman Sanchez.”
“The banker we were going to see?”
“That’s my guess. I’m going back to his house in Pacific Heights to see if he’s there. I’ll come back to EIS after that.”
“If the banker is the man behind the curtain, you shouldn’t go alone.”
“We don’t have time to call in the cavalry. I’ll be fine.”
Backing the Audi out of Bradford’s garage, he knew she was right. If the banker had the pull to get Hezbollah to do his dirty work, he was no ordinary banker.
Chapter 68
Drake drove back into the Pacific Heights neighborhood, where the banker’s house was located. He drove past painted Victorians and a row of mansions, some of which he suspected housed the consulates of the six or seven foreign countries he knew were somewhere in the Heights.
Ryan Walker’s house looked like it could have been one of the consulates. It sat in the middle of a row of six mansions. Red brick steps led up from the sidewalk to a formal entry on the second floor of the three story structure. The mansions on either side had similar brick steps leading to their main entrances, and there was no wasted space between them. If the three period homes were connected, they would look something like the restored brownstones on the street in Georgetown where his in-laws lived.
There were no lights on that he could see as he walked up the twenty-one steps to the front door. He pulled the chain for the door chimes. Sandwiched between Walker’s mansion and the one next to it, the landing in front of the main entrance could not be seen from the street.
After a minute, he pulled the chain again and listened to the door chimes inside. When another minute passed without someone coming to the door, he pulled the chain one more time and considered his options.
If no one was home, he could find a way in, but a place like this was sure to have a sophisticated security system. By the time he’d had a quick look around, the security service or the police would be there, and he didn’t have time to deal with that.
Detective Cabrillo could probably get a search warrant tomorrow, based on Canaan’s statement that the banker had had him kill Congressman Sanchez, but the blackout was scheduled for the day after tomorrow. They were running out of time.
Drake took out his cell phone and called Strobel.
“Liz, I need your help. How soon can you get here?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, but please hurry, I’m at the banker’s house and I think evidence is about to be destroyed inside.”
He didn’t like deceiving her, but she needed to be able to say that she’d been told that exigent circumstances existed and that entry without a warrant was justified. When she arrived, he would apologize for the deception and hope that she trusted him enough to back him up when the police arrived.
Twenty minutes later, she pulled up to the curb in Bradford’s white Audi. When she jumped out and ran up the steps, the scowl on her face told him she didn’t like what he was thinking about doing.
“Let me guess,” she said. “No lights on inside, no one’s answering the door, so you want in?”
“Short answer, yes. We have twenty-four hours, plus or minus, before everyone’s lights go out. This is the only lead we have.”
“And what am I supposed to do? Help you break in?”
“I’ll do that,” he assured her, “but when I do, I’ll probably set off an alarm somewhere. When the police get here, I want you to hold them off with your special agent badge so I can look around.”
“And I tell them what?”
“That I told you I said I heard someone inside, that the lights went out, and that I thought evidence was being destroyed. Exigent circumstances. So you sent me in.”
“No judge would believe that.”
“Liz, who cares? This isn’t about evidence to convict someone. This is about saving thousands of lives that will be lost in a nationwide blackout. I have to go in!”
“Okay, five minutes. Here, take these.” She handed him a lock pick tool set in a small leather case. “I was afraid this was what you had in mind.”
Drake took out a half-diamond pick and a tension wrench out of the case. As a Delta Force operator, he’d received extensive training in covert methods of entry. But it was a skill he hadn’t used in years.
Relax, he told himself, and focus on the skills he’d learned and not on just opening the antique brass Schlage deadbolt lock. Just as sweat and frustration were about to break out on his upper lip, he felt the pins click into place. He opened the door.
“Stay here
,” he said to Strobel. “If I’m not back in five minutes, call me.”
“And if you don’t answer?”
“Come find me. I’m probably in trouble.”
Chapter 69
Drake stepped inside. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he took out his tactical flashlight. Developed by Pelican for the L.A.P.D., it had a momentary mode that shot a quick 130-lumen beam for a split second to avoid detection. Not knowing if anyone was home, he intended to make a quick, quiet sweep of the house without disturbing anyone inside or outside the house.
From the street level, the house had four floors. Directly ahead of his position in the vestibule on the second floor, a quick flash of light from his Pelican 7060 showed him the stairs to the two upper floors. He moved quickly to them and kept going until he reached the top.
The top floor consisted of just three rooms, an open area that might have been a family room, a bathroom, and a study. He checked to make sure the bathroom wasn’t occupied, then moved into the study. The elegant antique desk had a small brass lamp on one corner and a pewter mug with a couple of sharpened pencils in it on the other corner. The three drawers on the right side of the desk were empty, and all the center drawer held were a legal pad and a small container of paper clips. The three drawers on the left were locked, but there wasn’t time right now to force them open.
Drake returned to the stairs and moved down to the floor below. Two doors closest to the stairs opened into empty bedrooms. Moving down a long hallway, he passed a large bathroom and then came to the door of a master bedroom suite that was also empty. Both the master bedroom closest and the antique wardrobe were also empty. He was beginning to think the mansion, large as it was, wasn’t really anyone’s home on a full-time basis. It looked more like the presidential suite of an elegant European hotel; elegantly appointed and functional, but not lived in. He went down another flight of stairs.
Dark Trojan (The Adam Drake series Book 3) Page 20
