Checkmate

by Steven James

  Maybe he has information he’s willing to share or trade?

  But trade for what? He has to know there’s no way we would ever give him immunity.

  My thoughts circled around each other, spinning back to the first time I apprehended Richard, back in that abandoned slaughterhouse in Milwaukee fourteen years ago, when I was still a homicide detective.

  There was a woman lying there, cut very badly, cut in the way only Richard could cut someone. After I cuffed him I tried to save her, but it was too late. The words he spoke as I went over to try to help her came back to me now: “I think we may need an ambulance, don’t you, Detective?”

  I lied to her.

  Told her she was going to be alright.

  And unlike Stu Ritterman, who died in my arms on Monday morning, that woman didn’t get a chance to share anything with me before she died.

  I can still remember standing up, blood dripping from my hands.

  Her blood.

  Then I turned to Richard.

  I lifted him from the concrete where I’d left him while I tried to save her, and I was about to read him his rights when he spoke, his eyes on the woman’s fresh corpse: “I guess we won’t be needing that ambulance after all.”

  That did it.

  I hit him in the jaw hard enough to send him flying backward onto the ground.

  Then I was on him and I hit him again, shattering the bones in the jaw. I was ready to keep going, ready to pull the scalpel out of my leg where he’d stabbed me a few minutes earlier when we were fighting, ready to drive it into his chest or deep into his throat, but then he said those words that I’ve never forgotten and never will: “It feels good, doesn’t it, Detective? It feels really good.”

  Yes, it did.

  That’s the thing: Unleashing my anger on him did feel good, and it would have felt good to keep going. It was terrifying to realize that I had cords of darkness in my heart that were just as thick, just as unwieldy, just as lethal as those running through the hearts of the people I tracked.

  Since then I’ve done my best to convince myself that I’m not like him, but in a very real way, I am.

  Basque was no more, no less human than I was.

  I was like him. Of course I was.

  We all are.

  In this business you have to catch yourself before you drift too far.

  You have to keep the demons at bay.

  And now words came to me, words that unsettled me: You have to keep yourself at bay.

  So, that was the first time I faced off with him.

  Then last spring, after he’d been set free in his retrial and had started killing again, I caught up with him at the house he was using near a marsh about an hour from DC. We fought there on the shore, and as we did he nearly drowned me, but at last I was able to get him under the water.

  And I held him there.

  I could have pulled him to his feet, but I waited until he started convulsing.

  And then I waited longer, until the convulsions stopped.

  Until he drowned.

  Moments later, a car came careening down the bank and I hurriedly dragged him to the shore to get his body out of the way.

  I waited. He was gone. It was over.

  He was dead.

  But in that moment, duty and justice wrestled with each other in my heart, deep questions that have no easy answers, questions about who I was, what I was capable of, who I was choosing to become, and although I could have left him dead, I did not.

  I’m still not sure if it was a sign of weakness or of strength, but I went ahead and performed CPR. I brought him back.

  I wanted justice to prevail. I just wasn’t sure exactly how to help it do so.

  If Basque is partially responsible for Corrine’s death, then you are too because you saved his life. If you hadn’t, none of this would’ve happened.

  But then, soon after that, when he escaped and took Tessa, when she was drowning and I had to choose between saving her and killing Basque, I squeezed the trigger and sent him reeling backward into the Potomac.

  He didn’t have a weapon.

  He was ready to turn himself in, but if I’d taken the time to apprehend him, my daughter would have died. I chose to save her. I fired at him.

  I had no regrets at the time and I still didn’t.

  It was hard to figure out how to feel about him contacting me now.

  We hadn’t known for sure whether or not he was alive.

  Now we knew.

  We hadn’t known how to find him.

  Now we did.

  And now, finally, I had the chance to end all this and bring him in for good.

  * * *

  I put a call through to Lien-hua and told her about the meeting. She was quiet, and when I’d finished and she didn’t respond, I said, “Are you okay with this?”

  “What happened out there by the river?”

  “What?”

  “The Potomac. In April.”

  “I shot him.”

  “Yes.” She said it as if she were both agreeing with me and disagreeing with me at the same time.

  “Tessa was in the car,” I said. “Trapped. She was drowning.”

  “I know. And you shot him.”

  “I had to get to her. I had to save her. And he was . . .”

  “He was what? Threatening you? Coming at you? Trying to kill you?”

  No. He was surrendering. He was going to let me take him in.

  When I said nothing, she continued, “You never told me exactly what happened. Even in the case files it wasn’t a hundred percent clear.”

  I heard a voice in my head: You promised you wouldn’t lie to her. That you would tell her the truth no matter what.

  But I also wanted to protect her and that might mean not letting her know the kinds of things I was actually capable of doing.

  It would have been so much easier if Basque had threatened me, if he’d pulled a gun or a knife. It would have made it a lot easier for me to know how to look at myself.

  But he had not.

  And I’d squeezed the trigger.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I had to take the shot,” I said simply. “And I have to go and meet with him now.”

  “You chose Tessa’s life above his.” My wife wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

  Truth or not?

  “Yes. I did.”

  A long silence ebbed between us.

  Too long.

  I debated what to say, how to defend my decision, but everything I came up with seemed insufficient.

  Finally she spoke, and her response surprised me: “You made the right choice.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “But now, you need to bring him in.”

  “I intend to.”

  “No. Bring him in, Pat.” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “Don’t do something either of us would regret.”

  “If I can, yes, I will. I’ll bring him in.”

  “Do what you have to do, but don’t let him steal from you the thing you care about most.”

  “My family?”

  “Your integrity.”

  Then, as I tried to process the implications of what she’d just said, she told me that Brineesha was doing alright, but that the doctors wanted to give her some Pitocin to make her contractions stronger. Before I could pivot back to the topic of Basque, Lien-hua was telling me Debra was calling to check on Brin, and then she was wrapping up the call.

  After we’d both said our good-byes, I returned to the conference room, informed the team I was taking off, and left for my car.

  Lien-hua’s right, you know. You need to bring him in.

  Do what you have to do, but don’t let him steal from you the thing you care abou
t most: your integrity.

  But was that really what I cared about most?

  Or was it my family?

  Basque had gone after Lien-hua, tried to kill both her and Tessa, and I would’ve given up anything, and would still give up anything—my integrity, my honor, my life—to protect them.

  I wasn’t sure exactly where that left me at the moment, but it did make me feel even more motivated than ever to bring Basque in.

  Fourteen years ago it’d felt good to hit him, and earlier this year, it had felt good to shoot him in the chest.

  And, honestly, I wasn’t sure if that was because I believed in justice or because I was attracted to the darkness.

  They were two ends of the spectrum, and somehow when I faced off with Basque, I found myself with my feet in both places at the same time.

  That’s what I thought of now as I got ready to meet him again.

  Yes.

  Bring him in.

  Don’t give in to the demons.

  Keep them at bay.

  Keep yourself at bay.

  Justice.

  The darkness.

  Do what has to be done.

  Okay, I think I will.

  We were going to have a team ready, but still it was foolish to think that Basque was just going to walk up to me on the street and turn himself in. He had something up his sleeve.

  So I wanted something up mine.

  I put a call through to Professor O’Brien, who hadn’t left the UNC Charlotte library yet, and swung by campus while our agents took their positions Uptown at the intersection of Trade and Tryon.

  Then I went to assemble with the team before meeting with Richard Basque.

  69

  Kurt Mason arrived back in Charlotte and entered the house in Fourth Ward.

  He went online, clicked his way through the firewalls and into the Knoxville Southeast’s dispatch office to keep an eye on the arrival of M343’s engineer and conductor at the rail yard in Spartanburg.

  + + +

  While I was on my way Uptown, I got word from Ralph: They decided to have the doctors break Brineesha’s water. Clear fluid, a good sign. She was dilated six centimeters. Things were moving forward. They expected the baby sometime in the next few hours. And, while I was relieved, I was also distracted by thinking about what was going on right here, right now, in Charlotte.

  I parked, put the items I’d picked up from the university in my pocket, and I was walking over to meet with Ingersoll and his team when a call came in from Angela at Cyber. “It sounds like there’s an echo on that audio from your conversation with Basque,” she said. “Like he might be in a long, narrow room.”

  “An echo?”

  “It’s faint, but when I enhance the digital signature, I can catch hold of it.”

  “Can you analyze the acoustics? Figure out the shape of the room?”

  “Not unless I have a baseline of his voice in a known space.”

  I thought for a moment. “I spoke with him in April, a Friday—it would have been the eleventh or twelfth—in one of their interrogation rooms there at HQ. Pull up the copy of the audio and the room’s dimensions.”

  “Good. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  * * *

  I convened with Voss, Ingersoll, and two other members of the Hostage Rescue Team in the kitchen of a restaurant just down the block from the intersection where I was going to be meeting with Basque.

  While I put on a Kevlar vest, Ingersoll gave me the rundown. “We have three snipers on nearby buildings and four undercover agents—two in nearby restaurants, one dressed as a homeless man, one as a jogger who’ll be stretching out nearby. SWAT’s on call and two ambulances are around the corner, parked one block away. I’ll be across the street in the lobby of a hotel. Stay in radio contact. If you run into any trouble let us know and we will take him out.”

  “Understood.”

  I zipped up a light Windbreaker to cover the body armor so I could look as inconspicuous as possible.

  Recently, for field ops, the Bureau had switched to wireless mics and receiver patches that you wear discreetly behind your ear.

  Ingersoll gave me a set of plastic flex cuffs and an automatic knife, and I put them in my pocket.

  After I’d tested my radio patch, I stepped outside into the sunlight, and at one fifteen I started down the street toward Independence Square.

  * * *

  My senses seemed sharper than normal. I felt the heat of the sun pricking the back of my neck, smelled the scent of coconut sunscreen as a cluster of giggling junior-high girls passed me on the sidewalk, heard snippets of conversations from people talking on their cell phones as they walked by.

  It all became clear, as if life were slowing down, my body preparing me to be more ready than I’d ever been to meet with someone.

  As I neared the corner, I could see that it was bustling with people: the lunch crowd finding their way to the nearby restaurants, parents out with their kids heading to one of the city’s parks or museums, some folks just out enjoying the summer Saturday. I counted twenty-nine people in the close vicinity of the intersection.

  “What do we have?” Ingersoll asked from the other end of the radio. “Anything? Any visual?”

  “Negative,” I said.

  Is Basque really going to meet you here?

  How is he going to pull that off?

  Arriving at the corner, I scanned the people surrounding me for anyone with Basque’s build. He was as tall as I was and muscular, athletic. Even if he were wearing a disguise, he couldn’t have hidden his size.

  No one fit the bill.

  How did he do that with the cell phone and the Bank of America building? How—

  Oh.

  An echo.

  Yes.

  Then I had it, or at least I thought I did.

  Yesterday morning when Guido was showing Ralph and me around Charlotte he’d mentioned that for a news special a reporter had walked through the storm-sewer tunnels to show how vulnerable and easily accessible they are. She’d had phone reception most of the way.

  No, Basque wasn’t in the building.

  He was under it.

  I was evaluating that possibility and its implications when a young man locked eyes with me and started toward me. Early twenties, Caucasian, 1970s sideburns. He looked disoriented, in a daze.

  “Someone’s coming,” I said into my radio. “Hold positions. Do not move.”

  He lurched forward, his steps choppy and uneven.

  Is he high? Drunk? Drugged?

  I approached him cautiously. “Sir? Are you alright?”

  “Are you Patrick?” His voice was as unsteady as his gait.

  He knows your name.

  Basque sent him.

  He had both of his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t tell if he had a weapon.

  This was not the time to take unnecessary risks. I drew my gun. “Hands where I can see them. Now.”

  As soon as I unholstered my weapon, people gasped, screamed. Began to clear the area.

  Maybe that was what Basque wanted.

  There was no way to tell.

  The young man removed his hands.

  His left one was empty. In his right he held a flip phone.

  “Hold positions,” I said into my radio.

  He extended his hand to me, offering me the phone. “I have a message for you from Richard.”

  My heart was hammering. An explosive device? Was this guy a suicide bomber? I tried to decide whether or not to move closer.

  He was three meters away.

  A trap?

  No. Richard contacted you. He wants to meet you.

  Maybe he wants to kill you after all.

  “Set down the phone,” I said. “Do it slowly, then ste
p away.”

  But before he could comply, he went limp and collapsed onto the pavement.

  Holstering my weapon, I rushed toward him. Checked his vitals.

  He was breathing. Had a pulse. Strong, steady.

  I put a hand beneath his neck to support his head.

  The phone he’d been holding had dropped when he fell. Now it rang. I snatched it up. “Richard, what did you do?”

  “The nearest manhole southwest on Tryon. Open it, go down the ladder. If anyone follows you I won’t give you the antivenom. Lose your radio and your phone. You have five minutes before he dies of respiratory arrest. Go.”

  I leapt to my feet and scanned the area for the manhole. “Get an ambulance here now,” I said into the radio.

  As the young man gasped for breath, the undercover agents posing as the homeless man and the jogger hastened to assist him. I ran to the manhole, wrestled the cover off, tossed my own cell phone to the side, and ripped off and discarded the radio patch.

  I kept the flip phone.

  Ingersoll and one of the agents who’d been stationed in the restaurant across the street were racing toward me.

  “Cover this hole behind me,” I told them. “Do not follow me or that man will die.”

  I scrambled down the ladder and landed in ankle-deep water in the storm-sewer system that, according to what Guido had told us the other day, contained three thousand miles’ worth of tunnels.

  70

  I drew my weapon again.

  Narrow shafts of light angled through the storm grates that appeared sporadically overhead, but still the tunnel was dim compared to the blazing day outside. I used the Maglite that Voss had gotten for me to scrutinize the tunnel, but there was no sign of Basque.

  The flip phone worked, but the reception was grainy and I was afraid it was going to fade out all the way. “Where are you?”

  “Southeast” . . . Static . . . “Go a quarter mile.”

  How are you supposed to gauge the distance down here?

  “You said antivenom. Where is it?”

  “Go.”

  I pocketed the flip phone.

  Knowing approximately how fast I can run a mile, I checked my watch and took off. In these conditions and with the wounded ankle from my fall in the mine shaft, I might be able to break ninety seconds for a quarter mile, but it was going to be tough.