Joanna had no illusions about her situation. Those bullets outside the apartment house had been meant for her. Had she not ducked getting into the car, the shots would have blown her head off. The terrorists wanted her dead, and they could come after her again, with or without Jake at her side. What is it I know? What is it that concerns the terrorists so much?
Her gaze went to the fireplace as the blazing logs cracked loudly. Even the chimney was a danger, Joanna thought miserably, wondering if the terrorists could devise a way to cut through the titanium screen. That was all it would take. Then the terrorists could drop a brick of C-4 down the chimney and blow everything in the condominium to kingdom come. In her mind’s eye she saw the victims being pulled out of the West Hollywood bomb site. Now she was envisioning a fireman carrying a dead little child out of the rubble. She would never forget that image. Nor would anyone else who saw it.
Joanna took a deep breath, thinking that nothing in her life had gone right since that damn explosion. Nothing. Her whole world had been turned upside down.
But it wasn’t the explosion that had done that.
Jake glanced over and saw the faraway look on Joanna’s face. He came to the sofa and sat next to her.
“Are you all right?”
She rested her head on his shoulder.
“I should have told you.”
“About what?”
“Paul du Maurier.”
Jake shrugged.
“You did what you thought was best.”
“Are you angry?”
“I’m past that now.”
Joanna managed a weak smile.
“No, you’re not.”
Jake growled softly.
“If you already know the answer to your question, why do you bother to ask it?”
“That means you’re still angry. Right?”
“A little,” Jake admitted. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“My problem is I never realize how important something is until I’ve damn near lost it.”
“Welcome to the club.” Joanna reached for his cigarette and took a puff, then handed it back.
“I had almost gotten you out of my mind, Jake. Almost.”
“Forgotten me altogether?” “I wasn’t trying to forget you,” she said candidly.
“I was trying to stop loving you.”
Jake squeezed her shoulder gently.
“I guess fate has thrown us together, for better or worse.”
“I guess,” Joanna said, staring at the fire but seeing Paul du Maurier’s face.
He was smiling at her.
“I’m still hurting bad, Jake. The damn pain just won’t let up. It’s going to take time for me to get over this.”
“Don’t try to get over it,” Jake advised.
“Just accept the pain and get on with your life.”
“Is that what you did when you lost Eleni?”
“Yeah.”
“How did it work out?”
“I ended up with you, didn’t I?”
Outside the rain was coming down harder, now pounding against the bay window. In the distance there was a loud crack of lightning followed by a rumble of thunder. The entire apartment shook for a moment.
“Are you going to sleep in here?” Joanna asked, getting to her feet.
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“I want to be near the door. If you hear anything, any disturbance at all, you dive for your closet and pull down everything on top of you. Got it?”
“Got it.” Joanna leaned over and kissed his cheek.
“Thank you for being here, Jake.”
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
“Good night,” she said and left the room.
Jake watched the blazing logs in the fireplace crumble and turn to dead cinders.
It was like life, he kept thinking. One moment everything was bright and warm and felt good. Then, in an instant, everything turned to shit. And people had no control over that. Events did it to them. Or fate. Whatever the hell it was. He thought back to his former wife, Eleni, and the pain he’d experienced when she was gone. Christ! What a mess I was. And it had taken forever to get over it.
But Joanna was doing a lot better than he had. She was at least functioning.
She’d do fine, he tried to convince himself. Hell! She’d already smiled a few times earlier that evening. She was already starting to heal.
A moment later Jake realized how wrong he was. Faintly, above the
sound of the rain, he heard Joanna crying herself to sleep. Wednesday, April 14, 2=20 p.m.
Jake and Lou Farelli walked past the concrete barricades outside the federal building in West Los Angeles. The area between the barricades and the building was being patrolled by armed guards with police dogs.
“Do you believe this shit?” Farelli asked disgustedly.
“Look at what a few terrorists can do to a city.”
“And it’s going to get worse,” Jake told him.
“Just wait until April nineteenth.
Every federal building within a fifty-mile radius is going to turn into a cement fortress.”
“And you think the terrorists will still strike, huh?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jake said.
“You can’t secure every window and every door in every building. It’s just not possible. And remember, these terrorists are experts at finding weak spots and exploiting them.”
Jake nodded, thinking back to the explosion at Memorial Hospital. There had been two policemen guarding two doors in a deserted corridor, and still the terrorists had detonated a bomb, killing a cop in the process.
“They’re going to blow up something big right in front of our eyes.”
“Unless we nail them first.”
“We’ve only got five days until the nineteenth,” Jake said gloomily.
“What do you think our chances of catching them are?”
Farelli shrugged.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Yeah. And maybe pigs will start to fly.”
They came to the curb and stepped up onto the sidewalk. A row of drive-by mailboxes had been removed; the entire area was now a red zone. No vehicles were permitted to stop, not even to let off passengers. A motorcycle cop was nearby, watching. He recognized Jake
and Farelli and gave them a half salute. They entered the twenty-story building and had their id’s checked by two armed guards. They were still required to put their shields and weapons in a plastic dish before passing through the metal detector. A German shepherd eyed them warily, then lost interest.
Taking the elevator up, Jake stared at the ceiling and the trapdoor leading out of the car. There were no screws or devices locking it in place.
Farelli asked, “What are you looking at?”
“I was just thinking,” Jake said, standing on his tiptoes and reaching up to the trapdoor. It moved without resistance.
“We’re all assuming the terrorists are going to sneak in and plant a bomb. Right?”
“Right.”
“How can we be sure the bomb isn’t already in place?”
“Because the dogs would have sniffed it out.”
Jake pointed to the trapdoor.
“Suppose the terrorists climbed up through there and hid a bomb in the wall of the elevator shaft. Unless our guys actually put a dog into the shaft and let him sniff around, he’d never find it. And there’s got to be a hundred nooks and crannies like that in every building.”
“Jesus,” Farelli hissed under his breath.
“There’s no place safe from those bastards.”
“Tell me about it.”
They exited the elevator and hurried into the reception area of FBI headquarters. Their id’s were checked again. Then they were escorted down a corridor to a spacious conference room. Dan Hurley, with a man they didn’t recognize, was waiting for them.
“Sorry we’re late,” Jake apologized.
“No problem.” Hur
ley stood and introduced them to William Kitt, section chief of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Unit.
“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Kitt said formally.
“The new information is being faxed to us now.”
Jake glanced over at the fax machine, again wondering about the urgency of the meeting. He hadn’t been told who or what or why, only to get over to FBI headquarters as soon as possible. The first sheet came out of the fax machine, and Kitt reached for it.
Hurley couldn’t hold back the news any longer.
“Jake, we know who the bastards are.”
Jake’s brow went up.
“You got names?”
“And faces.” The lieutenant leaned over the table, his eyes fixed on Hurley.
“Are you absolutely sure?”
Hurley nodded.
“We lifted a partial set of fingerprints off the wallet you uncovered in the buried duffel bag. And an even better set of prints was on the razor Farelli found in the murdered woman’s kitchen.”
Jake looked over at Farelli and gave him a thumbs-up signal. No one had been able to find the razor that was used to slice up Maria Gonzalez. They had all but given up when Farelli decided to disassemble the garbage disposal. And there it was, twisted but still intact.
“And the prints are a match,” Hurley went on.
“They belonged to the same person.”
Jake’s mind flashed back to the woman the razor had been used on. Every part of her had been mutilated. He didn’t even want to think about the pain she must have suffered. He took out his notepad.
“You got a full name for this sadistic son of a bitch?”
“Rudolph Payte,” Hurley said.
“Known to his friends as Rudy.”
“A real piece of work,” Kitt added, now stacking the fax sheets together.
“Let’s begin with the group he belongs to.”
Kitt described the extremist group in precise detail. Although he appeared to be reading from the fax sheets, it was obvious that he already knew a great deal about the group.
“They call themselves the Ten Righteous. All of their members are white supremacists who are violently opposed to the federal government and its laws. A few years ago they claimed a twenty-five-square-mile area of wilderness in northern Idaho as their own nation. They built a large compound, closed off roads, refused to pay taxes and shot at anyone who entered uninvited.
When a United States marshal came to serve papers on them, they killed him in cold blood for trespassing on their nation.
“That federal marshal had a wife and two children,” Kitt continued, his voice noticeably lower. He took a deep breath before going on.
“Within days an army of federal agents moved in and a war broke out. A real firefight. The compound was set ablaze. Most of the supremacists perished in the fire. A few were shot to death. Unfortunately, Walter George Reineke, the leader of the group, escaped.
And so did his bodyguard, Rudy Payte.”
Jake asked, “So this Rudy Payte wasn’t a true believer?”
“If you paid him enough he was,” Kitt said flatly. “Anyhow, we thought the group was done and finished and would no longer be a problem.
Obviously we were wrong.”
“Who’s the woman we’re after?” Jake asked.
“Reineke’s daughter, Eva.” Kitt passed them a faxed photograph of Eva Reineke.
The details were hazy, but there was no doubt the woman in the photo was the same as the woman in the police artist’s sketch.
“She’s the mastermind behind the bombings.”
“How did she get so good at it?”
“We taught her,” Kitt said.
“Eva Reineke joined the army out of high school and became an expert in demolition. Her specialties were plastic explosives and the usual timing devices. She was so good at it she was considered a prime candidate for the Special Forces. She applied for the elite unit and was accepted. Her training performance was consistently rated as outstanding.
“A week before she was to be given her green beret,” Kitt went on, “she was dishonorably discharged.”
“For what?”
“For joining a paramilitary group and trying to persuade the other troops to do the same.”
Jake asked, “Did any of the others join up?”
Kitt nodded.
“Rudolph Payte. He was also dishonorably discharged.”
Kitt handed them photographs of Walter George Reineke and Rudy Payte.
“These will be given to every law enforcement officer in Los Angeles County. And of course they’ll be on television as well. On April nineteenth, every guard at every federal building will check every visitor against these photographs.”
Jake thought back to the first explosion, in West Hollywood.
“Those photos should also be shown around the supermarkets and convenience stores on the Westside.”
“And in all airports and bus and train stations,” Hurley chimed in.
Farelli flipped through the photographs of the three terrorists. They looked so ordinary, like people you’d see at a baseball game.
“Well, these photos should make things easier.”
“Not by much,” Kitt cautioned.
“Homegrown terrorists are far and away the most difficult to catch. They speak our language perfectly. They look like us and act like us. They know our customs, they know the lay of the land. They fit right
in because they are us.” There was a sharp knock on the door, and a tall, well-built FBI agent entered. He quickly walked over to Kitt and handed him a folder.
“Sir, these new pictures just arrived,” the agent said.
“They’re of much better quality.”
“Good.” Kitt opened the folder and scanned the new color photographs.
“Have you finished cross-matching the names of the Righteous against the employees at Memorial?”
“Yes, sir. No matches were found.”
Kitt sighed wearily.
“Another dry hole.”
“Sir, some of the women who died in the Idaho compound had middle initials.
Those may represent maiden names.”
“Check it out as rapidly as you can.”
“We’re trying, but the going is tough,” the agent said.
“None of the women had social security numbers, and the courthouse that housed the records of their births and marriages was burnt to the ground.”
“Shit,” Kitt grumbled.
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep on it.” Kitt waited for the agent to leave, then passed the new photographs around for the others to see.
He tilted his chair back, now thinking about the problems in tracking down the terrorists. He needed a tip-off or an informant, otherwise nailing the terrorists before they acted would be almost impossible. That was why finding their so-called friend at Memorial was so important. Maybe he could be squeezed hard enough to talk.
Farelli growled under his breath as he looked at the photograph of Rudy Payte.
“Where do vermin like this come from?”
From everywhere, Kitt wanted to say. From every part of America. They were in compounds spread from the Pacific Northwest to the desert Southwest to the Ozarks and beyond. All were zealots, all bent on destroying the country and then rebuilding it in the form they favored.
It was Kitt’s view that domestic terrorists represented the single greatest threat to America. And the threat was growing. His agents were currently investigating nearly a thousand cases of potential domestic terrorism. Some were straightforward, like threatening letters sent to the IRS. Other cases were far more ominous, like the recent unsolved theft of twenty-five tons of ammonium nitrate from a West Virginia farm supply business. The amount stolen was twelve times
that used in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Kitt wondered if any of that ammonium nitrate had found its way to Los Angeles.
No, he decided promptly. Eva Reineke was an expe
rt with C-4 and other plastic explosives. She wouldn’t use something bulky like ammonium nitrate. But, then again, maybe she had a backup plan. The best terrorists always did.
Kitt checked his watch. In twenty minutes he would meet with agents from the Secret Service.
“I’ll have copies of the photographs made for you, along with the terrorists’ other physical characteristics.”
Jake was studying the photo of Walter George Reineke. The terrorist looked more like a grandfather, with his thinning gray hair and benign smile. But his eyes were small and dark and cold. They resembled BB’s.
“What turns a guy like this into a terrorist?”
“Having your wife and son and daughter-in-law die in a burning compound,” Kitt told him.
“And blaming the federal government for it.”
Jake picked up the photograph of Eva Reineke and examined it.
“I take it Eva wasn’t in the compound at the time of the attack?”
“Oh, yes, she was,” Kitt said.
“According to an eyewitness, the old man led Eva and Rudy out through a secret escape tunnel that only he knew about.”
“Why didn’t he take the rest of the family with him?”
Kitt gathered up the photographs and stacked them together. Then he rose from the table.
“That’s a question you’ll have to ask Walter George Reineke.”
Thursday, April 15, 10=18 a.m.
((it-< -there are cops with Joanna Blalock everywhere she goes,” Rudy said.
“How many?”
“Two,” Rudy answered.
“One follows her into the hospital. The other stays in a black-and-white and watches her car.”
“Which one is hers?”
Rudy pointed through the windshield.
“The blue BMW next to the handicapped parking spaces.”
They were sitting in a dark green Chevy van at the rear of the parking lot behind Memorial Hospital. The morning sun was bright and shining directly into their eyes. Both of them were wearing baseball caps and oversize sunglasses.
Eva studied the police car parked close to the back entrance of Memorial. It was positioned so a cop could see anyone coming or going well in advance.
“Does Blalock remain in the hospital all day?”
Rudy nodded.
“Just about. At lunch yesterday she went out for a little bit.”
Lethal Measures Page 26
