Checkmate

by Steven James

  As I sprinted through the ankle-deep water, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, I recalled a time when I’d chased Basque through a series of tunnels similar to these in DC, and I wondered if that’s why he’d chosen to connect with me this way.

  A quick look at my watch: I figured I had another thirty seconds or so of running.

  I passed three intersecting tunnels and eventually came to a ladder.

  Checked my watch.

  The time looked about right.

  No other tunnels or access ladders close by.

  I tried the flip phone but got no reception.

  Quickly evaluating how long it’d taken me to get here, the distance, the direction, and thinking back to the 3-D hologram of Charlotte that I’d studied earlier, I tried to calculate where I was, but after a few seconds when I came up short I didn’t spend any extra time pondering things.

  Go up. Check it out.

  After slipping the flashlight and phone into my pockets, I muscled the manhole cover aside and, gun drawn, emerged inside a shielded construction zone for one of the new high-rise condos being put up. The work had paused for the weekend. No one appeared to be present.

  As I climbed out, a canvas sheet blocked the view from the street and a tarp that stretched overhead blocked the view from the sky.

  When the phone rang again I checked it. Basque’s voice came through: “Slide the cover back over the hole.”

  I did.

  “Okay, enter the building.”

  The half-finished structure that rose before me reminded me in a macabre way of a body with the skin and flesh removed—a steel skeleton rising toward the sky. An appropriate, if unsettling, image, considering who I was here to meet.

  Ahead of me, at the far end of what I assumed would be a hallway extending out from the building’s main lobby when it was finished, stood a figure, vague in the vacant light, but even from here I could tell that he was well-built.

  “Patrick,” he said.

  I aimed the Glock at his chest. “Hands to the side, Richard.” I’d just sprinted a quarter mile as fast as I could and was still catching my breath.

  He raised his hands and held them out, palms forward. He was ten meters away.

  “Where’s the antivenom?” I asked.

  “Give me your phone and I’ll call it in.”

  “Use yours.”

  “I already got rid of it.” He indicated the remains of the phone with his foot. “You’re wasting time, Pat. Give me the flip phone.”

  Richard had a history of working with partners, and I had no way of knowing if he had someone hidden nearby right now. This could be an ambush.

  I edged closer to him. Saw no one else nearby. At three meters away I slid him the cell phone but didn’t take my gun off him. “Make the call.”

  He picked it up. Tapped in 911. “This is concerning the man who was found on the corner of Trade and Tryon a few minutes go. He’s suffering from the venom of a monocled cobra. There are ten vials of antivenom taped to the bottom of the garbage can at the corner of North College and East Fifth Street. You’ll probably need all of it.”

  He closed up the phone.

  “Cobra venom?”

  “A new interest of mine.”

  “Will they have time to save him?” I asked. “Do not lie to me.”

  “It’ll be close. They should be able to stabilize him during transport to the hospital. I’m guessing you had ambulances close by before you came to meet with me, just in case.”

  “We did.”

  “I’m going to destroy this phone. We can’t have anyone interrupting us. When I’m done saying what I need to say, you can take me in if you wish.”

  I could work with that.

  “Go ahead.”

  He snapped the phone in half, then dropped the pieces and stomped the two halves beneath his heel.

  “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to pat you down.”

  He complied. I had him turn and face the unfinished wall. As far as I knew he’d never studied hand-to-hand combat or martial arts, but I’d faced off with him before and he could hold his own in a fight. He was resourceful and he was tough, so I was dialed in, focused, as I frisked him.

  Clean.

  “Hands behind your back.”

  He hesitated so I drew his hands back for him. Using the plastic flex cuffs Ingersoll had provided me with, I secured Basque’s hands, then turned him around to face me.

  I felt like punching him hard for payback for envenomating the young man. I barely managed to hold back.

  “Are we alone?” I asked him.

  “Yes.”

  Though he was cuffed I kept the Glock out and ready. “Do you know where Mason is?”

  “No. But I know how to find him.”

  “And how is that?”

  “I know the alias Mason has been using.”

  “Danny Everhart. We already have that.”

  “Not that one. The other one. He’ll still be in the area. He wants to be close by when it all goes down.”

  “When what goes down?”

  “What he has planned for this afternoon. Listen, I need the Bureau’s resources and you need my information. It’s the only way we’ll find him. You know Mason: He’s good. He’ll disappear. We don’t have much time.”

  “We don’t have much time before what, Richard? What does he have planned?”

  “I can’t tell you that, not until we’ve tracked him down—but if we don’t do it in the next few hours, it’ll be too late.”

  In the mine shaft, Mason told you that he was glad you were alive so you would be around for the climax tonight—not this afternoon.

  Two events? Is that what we’re looking at here?

  “You’re not making sense. If you know how to find him, why contact me? Why go through all this, set up this elaborate meeting? Why not just go after him yourself?”

  “Like I said, you have resources I need. I tried finding him myself but I couldn’t. Neither one of us can catch him in time on our own.”

  “You keep telling me that we don’t have much time. What’s his plan?”

  “It has to do with the Cathouse Signal. That’s all I can say.”

  “What does that mean—the Cathouse Signal?” But even as I asked him the question I knew he wasn’t going to answer me.

  And he didn’t.

  “Is Mason working alone?” I said.

  “I don’t know. He might have a person in DC.”

  “How do you even know what he’s up to here?”

  “We’ve spoken a couple times since his escape. That’s all I can tell you.”

  I eyed him. “I could take you in right now.”

  “Yes, but then you won’t find him in time.”

  “So what’s this proposal of yours?” I said. “You help me find him? What’s in it for you?”

  “After we locate him, you leave me alone with him for five minutes, maybe in the back of a police car, in a room while you’re going for backup—whatever you come up with. Five minutes, that’s all I need. And then after that, you can take me in—or shoot me like you did when we were at the river in April. Your choice.”

  “You know I can’t make a deal like that.”

  “Think about it. Innocent people are going to die. Do we both get what we want or do we both suffer and let Mason win?”

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know I can’t stand by and let you kill an unarmed man.”

  “I was unarmed by the Potomac when you shot me. How is that any different from what I’m proposing?”

  Once more I was tempted to punch him, this time just for annoying me.

  You’ve got Richard
now. Bring him in. Move on from there.

  But Mason would still be free, and if Basque was telling the truth—and right now I did believe that he was—more people would die this afternoon.

  You can’t do this. If you agree to leave Basque alone with Mason, he’ll murder him. You’d be going against everything you’ve sworn to uphold.

  My conversation with Lien-hua echoed in my mind:

  “Don’t let him steal from you the thing you care about most.”

  “My family?”

  “Your integrity.”

  I made my decision and grabbed Basque’s arm to take him to the street, where I would find someone, anyone, with a phone and use it to call for a unit, and we would have Basque in custody once and for all.

  We could work through things then. Find Mason on our own. Stop whatever it was he had planned.

  But how do you know? Can you be sure you’ll find him in time? You don’t even have any leads.

  As I started firmly escorting Richard out of the building he said, “Patrick, you won’t find Mason without my help. If you take me in now, I won’t help you, and I guarantee that by the end of the day you’ll wish you had taken me up on my offer.”

  I kept going. “I’ll find Mason.”

  “Maybe, eventually, but not by three thirty.”

  Mason mentioned this evening, so, regarding the timing, one of these guys was lying—or we were looking at two separate events.

  “Is it at three thirty?” I said. “Or is it tonight?”

  He was quiet.

  Lien-hua had asked me to promise to bring Basque in rather than the alternative—she wanted me to avoid doing something that either of us would regret.

  And letting innocent people die this afternoon would definitely be something to regret.

  Richard is right. You have the opportunity to save people and to get both him and Mason out of the picture.

  Once more, a discussion with my wife came to mind: “What haunts you the most? The pain you’ve already seen or the pain you will see?”

  “The pain I won’t be able to stop,” I’d told her.

  And this was pain I was able to stop.

  I couldn’t believe I was even considering this.

  But if you do this thing, you’ll have both Basque and Mason off the streets. Either get both killers and save innocent people or chance that more might die. Semtex. Two hundred pounds of it. Mason has something big planned.

  But what about protocol? You’ll lose your job if you work with Basque.

  Right now job security was not exactly at the top of my list of concerns.

  “How many people are we talking about with what Mason has planned?”

  “All I can really tell you is that he’s going to make a memorable statement.”

  “And you won’t tell me what it is until we catch him?”

  “When we have him, I’ll give you what you need to know.”

  “And I take you in when it’s done?”

  “Yes. Or kill me. You choose.”

  I knew my preference there—but I also knew that unless the circumstances required it I had an obligation to something higher than my preferences.

  Well, it was a good thing I’d come prepared for something along these lines.

  Sirens whined in the distance and I wondered how long it would take Ingersoll and his men to find me. Even without any way of tracing my location, I had the sense that they would be able to track me down.

  I unpocketed the case containing the syringe and rubber tubing I’d gotten from Professor O’Brien on my way from the Field Office.

  Man, I was tempted to just punch this syringe into Basque’s leg, but when I’d picked it up from O’Brien, he’d told me the injection needed to be in the bloodstream, not just the muscle.

  With Basque’s hands restrained behind him, the angle wasn’t right to get the needle into his vein.

  “Stand still.” Using the knife Ingersoll had lent me, I freed his hands.

  I removed the syringe from the case.

  “You’re going to drug me?” Basque asked.

  “We’re going to tag you. Pull up your shirtsleeve.”

  As he slid his left sleeve up over his elbow he looked at me somewhat uneasily. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to inject this into your arm.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nanobots.”

  “Nanobots?”

  Just the idea of stabbing a needle into a person’s arm unsettled me.

  Needles.

  Man, I hate needles.

  “In your vein.” I handed him the length of rubber tubing to tie off on his bicep to allow his vein to become more prominent. “We want them in your bloodstream. If you miss the vein I’m taking you in right now.”

  He tied off the tubing, using his teeth to pull it tight, then positioned the needle against his vein.

  “Why am I injecting nanobots into my blood? Are these the kind that send back video images?”

  “No. They’re the kind that can track where you are. I thought about an ankle bracelet, but I’ve tried those before and it hasn’t always worked out as well as I’d hoped.”

  “You can get them off.”

  “It’s not easy, but yes. It is possible. Now, go on.”

  Richard slid the tip of the needle into his arm. “So, you knew all along you might be working with me?”

  “I knew all along that I would want to keep tabs on you.”

  He injected the nanobots.

  “So,” he said, “these bots, you have some kind of a sensor or GPS tracker to follow me?”

  “Something like that.” I tapped my pocket where I had the handheld sensor O’Brien had given me. “And this isn’t the only one, don’t worry. Even if it’s damaged or destroyed we’ll still be able to find you.”

  At his lab O’Brien had the only other means of monitoring Basque’s movements, but Richard didn’t need to know that. “No matter where you go for the next forty-eight hours we’ll be able to track you down.”

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  “And by then this will all be over.”

  “Yes.” He seemed deep in thought. “It will.”

  “Get rid of the needle.”

  He discarded it.

  I took out the sensor unit and, after taking a moment to make sure it was working properly, I showed Basque his location on the device. It was overlaid with a street map of the city.

  “Alright,” I said, “just so you know, if you make any attempt to get away, I’m going to warn you once, and then shoot you dead.”

  “I believe you. So you’re going to give me five minutes with Mason?”

  “I can’t guarantee you five minutes, but if I get you both in the same room, I’ll leave you alone with him. That’s the best I can do.”

  He thought for a moment. “Okay.”

  Don’t do this, Pat.

  Yes, you have to.

  The lives of Mason’s potential victims—however many that might be—weighed heavily on my mind.

  “We need to get out of here,” Basque said. “I have a car nearby. We should get moving. I’ll tell you what I know when we get there.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The cemetery.”

  71

  1:30 p.m.

  2 hours until kickoff

  I made Basque drive.

  Though I was tempted to keep a gun on him the whole time, that wasn’t going to be feasible if we were going to be working together to catch Mason before he pulled off whatever it was he had planned for this afternoon.

  But I wasn’t going to let down my guard either. Not for an instant.

  If Basque ran, I could track him down. And if he tried to attack me, I could always shoot him. I’d done it bef
ore.

  Basque had an older-model sedan. I wasn’t sure of the year, but I guessed that even if it’d had GPS capabilities he would have disabled them.

  He took us to a sprawling graveyard not far from Center City. I wasn’t sure why he chose this location except that it provided a good vantage point to see if cars were approaching from any direction.

  Not bad.

  Near one of the mausoleums we got out of the car and he said, “You wish you’d killed him, don’t you? In the mine shaft when he murdered my sister?”

  “Yes. Now, we’ve waited long enough. Tell me the alias Mason is using.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “We’re looking for a guy named Leroy Davenport. He’ll have a place, something, I don’t know—a loft, a condo—somewhere here in Charlotte.”

  Leroy Davenport: I remembered the name from the list of people who’d accessed the information in the UNC Charlotte’s special collections room over the last couple months. “I need to contact the Bureau if I’m going to do a search like that for Davenport’s name.” I didn’t have to remind him that he’d destroyed both of our phones.

  “There’s an iPad in the trunk.”

  I retrieved it. “You do know they’ll be able to track this if I go online.”

  “Not this one. I’ve been using it for the last month. It’s untraceable.”

  I doubted that, not if I had Angela and Lacey working on the trace, but I didn’t bring that up.

  “Mason told me that seven gods use thirty-eight,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No. I’ve never heard it before.”

  Though I could certainly have logged in to the Federal Digital Database using my federal ID number, I wasn’t about to type that information into this tablet computer in case there was some kind of key-logger program running. The last thing we needed was Richard Basque getting those access codes and sharing them with any friends or associates that he might have.

  There was one person I figured I could trust more than anyone else to get me the information I needed without reporting my location.

  My wife.

  “Is there a video-call app on this iPad?” I asked him. “Skype? Anything like that?”

  “Skype.”