Boldt shook his head no. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. He looked exhausted. She convinced herself he wasn’t thinking clearly. He said, “We wait him out. It’s the long route to discovery, admittedly, but it’s the safe way. We may wait only to find out that it’s not Garman, but we will not corner him in a place where he may be storing that kind of firepower.”
She was ready to interrupt, vehemently, but she held her tongue, sensing his own difficulties. Perhaps he wanted to do exactly what she had just described. Perhaps it was better to allow him to talk his way through it and reach the same conclusion.
“If he comes out on his bicycle, without a backpack, say, we pick him. If he comes out with the boy, we watch but we don’t pick. If his father’s truck is in the storage area-and I’m betting it is-we’ve got big problems, because he’s going to leave here sometime before tomorrow morning, ready to do a little window washing and set up the Santori house, believing it to be Martinelli’s. Once he’s in that truck, he’s too dangerous-”
“You see,” she objected, “we should do it now.” She heard him explaining their situation and knew he was right, but the objection came out anyway.
“No, the point is not to do it now,” Boldt countered, “but to find a way to separate Garman from his truck, if that’s what it comes to. We’re going to need a way to distance him from his materials. Once we accomplish that, we pick him and it’s over.” He added, “And it isn’t a matter of simply waiting for him to do his thing at Santori’s, because he’ll have the accelerant with him, on his person. We cannot move on him until he’s away from that fuel-with or without Ben involved.”
It was no place to argue, standing in shadow less than a hundred yards from the assumed location of their suspect. Nonetheless, she heard herself say, “You won’t get him away from that truck.”
“No,” Boldt agreed-too quickly, she thought, sensing she had been tricked. “That’s your job. You know him so well,” he suggested, “you figure it out.” He added, “And don’t move from this spot. I’m going to check on the bicycle and see about the backup.”
Her loyalty to Lou Boldt, her love for him, was far too great. She would not willfully corrupt the investigation. She nodded, though with great disappointment written on her face.
“Promise me, Daffy. Nothing stupid.”
“We’ll wait,” she agreed reluctantly. “But you won’t get him out of that truck. We’d be smarter to do this now.” Her eyes pleaded with him. Listen to me, they said.
But Boldt walked off into the darkness.
By the time the inspiration came to her, she had settled down onto the blacktop, knees into her chest, hidden in shadow. Boldt walked right past her, and she could feel him thinking that she had gone ahead without him.
“Right here,” she whispered.
He pulled her up by the hand and led her around to the far side of the office, where they could talk a little more normally.
“Bike is still there,” he announced gravely. “We have two north,” he said, pointing, “and one south-five of us on the ground. I put Richardson up high,” he said, indicating the interstate, a good distance away, “with a set of glasses. He’s got a clean line of sight on the storage unit. He’ll page me if there’s any activity.”
“He’s there for the night,” she speculated.
“Yes,” Boldt agreed. “Until morning.” He wanted to encourage her. “The car wash, the baiting worked. You saved a life last night.”
“And put another at risk,” she said, meaning Ben.
“If we shoot out a tire,” he said, speculating, “or somehow cause a flat, he’d be forced out of the truck. But if we blow it, or if the truck goes off the road or into traffic, we could cause a disaster. If he picks up on what we’re up to, who knows what he might do? Surrender? I don’t see that.”
“Not once he’s out there,” she said, indicating beyond the fence. “The time to do this is now, Lou.” She wanted one last try at him, for she believed herself right; if coaxed properly, Garman would give it up. “The wild card is his father,” she explained. “We bring Steven Garman down here and him in front of that storage unit. The son is doing this to prove something to his father. They both hate the mother. Jonny Garman never for a moment sided with his mother. If we believe the husband, and we have no reason not to, she had sex with strangers on a regular basis, sometimes in the presence of her son, possibly even in the company of her son. Jonny Garman is trying to one-up his father, show he can do what the father failed to do-kill the mother. Burn her to death. If we get Steven Garman down here, Jonny will walk right out of that storage unit.”
“The father is an arrested felon,” Boldt reminded her. “And no one but the bomb squad is going anywhere near that storage unit until Jonny Garman is a mile away from here. This isn’t productive,” he said. “We’re supposed to be focusing on how the hell to get him out of that truck.”
She felt a confusion of emotions-knowing she had the answer and knowing Boldt, for whatever reasons, felt obligated to lessen the risk for all involved. She couldn’t blame him; she wanted to do the same thing.
“We need to focus on Garman and that truck, Daffy. You asked what I would do if it were Miles. What I know is, if Miles came out of that storage area inside a truck containing that kind of volatile fuel, I would want Jonny Garman as far away from the truck as possible.”
In the silence a corporate jet came in low and loud overhead. It felt to her as if the ground actually shook. She thought again about raiding the storage unit, how they could use the cover of a jet landing to make their move. But then she considered the idea of Ben caught in an inferno of purple flame rising thousands of feet in the air. If it was her plan, and it failed, could she ever find her way out? In that same instant, she wondered how Boldt could live with the pressure of such decisions. She had an immediate out: She could leave it up to him.
“I know how to get him out of the truck,” she announced proudly, surrendering to his plan, prepared to share her moment of inspiration with him.
His face filled both with excitement and doubt. He too had given it much thought but had come up blank.
She answered his expression with a single word. “Fire,” she said. Then, explaining quickly, “The one thing irresistible to Jonny Garman is a fire.”
72
In the hours between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M., sixty-seven on-call patrol officers from seven policing districts, and twenty-four regular-duty firemen, along with four Marshal Fives, organized into an instant task force whose sole mission was to burn an abandoned machine shop to the ground and divert morning traffic south of the International District so that it was required to pass within a city block of the fire. This involved a staged vehicular accident, a road construction crew, and six dozen pink Day-Glo traffic cones.
The building was one of seventeen on various lists for demolition, some of which had been offered to the city-in lieu of tax breaks-for fire training.
For Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz, it was a bout of heartburn and temper tantrums. From the moment Boldt proposed the operation, the lieutenant objected, claiming Boldt had yet to confirm the identity of the individual inside the storage unit. This hurdle was overcome at 2:20 A.M. when Boldt, under advisement of the facility’s manager, entered the U-Stor-It offices, disabled the security device, and confirmed not only that Jonny Babcock-aka Garman-was a paying customer but that he rented unit 311, the very same unit from which the light had come and the voice had been heard. That same unit, 311, went dark at 1:15 A.M., but the door never opened and no one ever left the property. At that point in time, seven different sets of eyes and a video camera using infrared night-sight technology had all aspects of unit 3, as the row was called, under surveillance.
Boldt never experienced a moment of feeling tired. To the contrary, he had to slow himself down on several different occasions, simply to be understood. The nearly one hundred participants engaged in Operation Inferno were his orchestra; Lou Boldt was the con
ductor. Neil Bahan and Sidney Fidler were his first chairs, for only Bahan and Fidler understood both the fire and the police sides of the planned incident. Shoswitz, Bahan, Fidler, two Marshal Fives, an ATF man named Byrant, and three FBI special agents, along with two dispatchers, worked out of the conference room in the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, whose communications capabilities dwarfed any resources owned or operated by the city. Dozens of radios and cellular phones were all tied into a central dispatch, coordinated by the team assembled there.
The Santori house was under full surveillance. A part of ERT was in position to move on Garman if the ruse failed. With that considered a last resort, the emphasis of the police side of the operation was on field coverage. By 6 A.M., there were police officers and federal agents in place posing as telephone linemen, street people, construction workers, garbage collectors, electric company meter readers, a variety of delivery men, and assorted other occupations. Every major intersection between Airport Way and the Santori house had some degree of representation by armed law enforcement. It was a virtual gauntlet-with Jonny Garman its sole target.
At 8 A.M. the U-Stor-It office was opened by an FBI special agent, who took his place behind the desk inside and went about his work as if it had been part of his daily routine for years. At 8:12 A.M., the first report of activity at storage unit 311 was verified by three separate scouts and delivered to Boldt over a radio earpiece. At 8:15 A.M. a light rain began to fall. Lou Boldt felt it a bad omen.
To have driven Airport Way on that morning would have seemed no different than any other, except for a few detours that required different routes. But in Seattle, as in any major city, construction was a daily part of urban life and traffic accidents were a regular part of morning delays. Heading north into the city was not discernibly different from any other day: hurry up and wait.
A white pickup truck bearing Nevada plates pulled out of unit 311 and stopped. A man with a disfigured face, wearing a sweatshirt hood drawn tightly around his head and a pair of sunglasses, was seen climbing out of the truck and returning to shut and lock the unit’s door. For approximately fifteen seconds, Jonny Garman was nearby but out of his truck. This possibility-which some viewed as an opportunity-had been discussed in great depth among various factions of the operation’s coordinators. In the end it was decided that he would be too close to both his lab and his truck to attempt any kind of pick at that location. A suggestion had been made to use a sharpshooter on Garman, but with the boy’s life at stake it had been quickly dismissed. The suspect climbed back behind the wheel of his truck and drove out through the facility’s automatic gate, joining the slow-moving traffic, hindered by detours more than a mile ahead.
“This is Birdman,” reported a voice in Boldt’s ear. The helicopter was owned by KING radio and used for traffic reports. On that day, it was being used for surveillance. “Looking down through the windshield, I’m not showing a hostage. Contents in the back of the truck don’t look as promising. There appear to be two fifty-five-gallon drums, a variety of boxes, and assorted other items. No tarp in place.”
Fifty-five-gallon drums, Boldt thought. Enough to burn a hotel or a shopping mall to the ground. Either Garman had packed up shop or was planning an enormous hit. A flurry of radio traffic passed along the Birdman’s observations. Traffic moved slowly, Garman’s position reported every fifteen to thirty seconds.
At the Santori house, Marianne Martinelli prepared to make herself seen leaving the home, if it came to that.
At the abandoned machine shop, three ladder trucks and two pumpers stood by, lights flashing, hoses ready. Inside, last-minute preparations were made as the incendiary charges and detonator wire were checked and double-checked.
Dressed in coveralls, Lou Boldt threw a pickax into a dirt hole in a vacant lot across from the machine shop. The three men around him, including Detective John LaMoia, also wore coveralls but were working shovels. Boldt didn’t understand why he always got the pickax.
“Dig,” Boldt said. “He’s a half mile and closing.”
LaMoia jumped on the shovel and dug into the wet earth. Boldt’s hands were wet on the pickax’s handle, but it had little to do with the rain. His weapon weighed down the coverall’s right pocket, within easy reach.
“Hey,” LaMoia said, sensing everyone’s sudden tension. “This is a damn good-looking hole. Listen, if we fuck this up, Sarge, maybe we’ve found ourselves a second occupation.”
“Gravediggers?” one of the shovelers asked.
The three other workers stared this man down.
“Sorry,” he said.
73
When Garman’s vehicle crossed an imaginary line one mile from the U-Stor-It facility, two members of the SPD bomb squad moved into place, accompanied by Tech Service Officer Danny Kotch and psychologist Daphne Matthews.
Kotch worked flawlessly with the fiber-optic camera, Daphne immediately alongside. The thin black wire was fed under the gap in the garage door and the first images of the unit’s contents were revealed.
Daphne leaned onto Danny Kotch in order to get a good look at the tiny screen. She gasped aloud and began to cry as she saw Ben tucked into a ball in the corner, a single piece of rope binding him. There was no gag in place, and she wondered why he hadn’t called out. The screen was too small to show his eyes.
Let him be alive! she prayed.
The space was empty except for some black PVC pipe, a pair of beach chairs, and some cardboard boxes from Radio Shack.
Attempting to sound professional, Daphne sniffed back her tears and said to the bomb squad team. “He’s inside. We want him out as quickly as possible.”
“With a torch like this, we’re going to move slowly,” the man wearing the thick vest informed her.
She had been warned of this already, but she found the thought of even a minute longer too long.
“Ben, can you hear me?” she shouted.
The little head rocked up, and a single eye angled to look for her. She felt herself burst into tears. Through a blur she told the others, “Shit, hurry it up, would you? I want him out of there.”
A plainclothes detective ran toward them, a radio held in his hand. He shouted, “Matthews, Garman is a half mile and closing. They need you for the count.” He met up with her and passed her the radio.
The decision of when to light the house was hers and hers alone. Boldt had insisted that, of all those involved, she understood the dynamics of the psychology best of all and the call should be hers. This had offended Bahan and others, especially several of the Marshal Fives.
She grabbed the radio, repeating what she had told Boldt several times. “Is the suspect within full visual range of the structure?” she inquired.
“A half mile and closing,” a deep male voice informed her.
“But can he see the building?” she repeated, amazed how so simple a question could become so complicated an issue.
“No. He wouldn’t have a visual at this time.”
Speak English, she wanted to shout.
“When he’s got the building fully in sight,” she informed the dispatcher, “torch it. But he has to see it ignite if he’s to get off on it. He has to participate in it. If he sees it go off, he’ll stay to see them fight it. Do you copy?”
“Another hundred yards,” the dispatcher told her. “I’m told he’ll have full visual in another hundred yards.”
“Let’s go with full visual, shall we?” she said sarcastically.
Releasing the radio’s button, she told the bomb team, “Hurry it up. I want the boy out of there. And I want it now.”
74
“We’re thirty seconds to ignition,” Boldt heard in his earpiece. “Suspect is a quarter mile off and closing.” With each detour, each intersection, Garman’s position had been carefully reported, and it was deeper and deeper in Inferno’s hastily crafted web.
“Thirty seconds,” Boldt told the others.
“We been here before, Sarge,” LaMoia reminded. “It’
s a grounder.”
Boldt glared at his detective. It was no grounder.
The four cars in front of Garman’s truck were all being driven by members of the operation, exactly as planned. The same had been intended for the traffic following the suspect’s vehicle, but the first glitch in the operation occurred when a Chevrolet four door, driven by a white male in his late thirties, ran a red light and cut into the line immediately behind the pickup.
The ensuing radio traffic was heated.
CAR 1: Dispatch, we have a visitor. Some asshole just cut into our line.
SHOSWITZ: We need him out of there. Now.
DISPATCH: All vehicles maintain position.
Let us jaw on this a moment.
Less than twenty seconds later, the dispatcher came back on line.
DISPATCH: Okay. It’s a bump-and-run by you, One. Copy that?
CAR 1: Bump-and-run.
DISPATCH: Make it a good collision, one he has to stop for. Williamson, we want you to assist at the moment of impact. Get the civilian to safe cover. Copy?
All parties copied correctly.
This man’s safety was now the joint assignment of the driver immediately behind him and the detective in the work crew to Boldt’s right. His existence was a sticking point of the operation. They could not knowingly place a civilian at such close risk. The decision was for a synchronized, coordinated effort. The plainclothes undercover officer driving behind the Chevy was to ram the car at the moment of the fire’s ignition. He would then rush this driver, apologizing over the accident, as one of the workmen went over as a “witness” to the fender bender. Exactly how it would play out was anybody’s guess. Shoswitz had clearly made the decision not to abort the operation over this one civilian. They would do their best.
“Twenty seconds,” the dispatcher announced.
Boldt relayed the timing. He glanced up. The white pickup was advancing slowly in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Into his radio, Boldt announced visual contact.
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