Counterfeit Road

by Kirk Russell

  ‘It’s really up to the bar,’ Celeste had kept saying. ‘The bar will make or break the place.’

  There were twenty-five small tables and rattan chairs, a floor of reclaimed bamboo. The old beams of the ceiling were exposed, the walls white-painted and softly lit. He caught her eye now and she waved for him to come around the back. Her forehead was moist with heat from the oven, face flush, eyes lit with excitement and happiness. People looked happy and it felt right to Raveneau. She pulled him around the corner out of sight of the bar.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s going to work.’

  ‘You like the bar.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s got a good feel.’

  ‘I’ll come out in a few minutes. It’s been crowded like this since we opened the doors at five thirty. Kiss me and tell me some of these people will come back.’

  ‘They will.’

  Raveneau saw la Rosa walk in. She spotted him immediately, looked at his clothes and asked, ‘Did you even go home?’

  ‘Never got a chance.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘It’s all set up. It’s working.’

  ‘How long before the media gets it?’

  ‘My guess is a week at the most.’

  ‘I’ll bet it’s out in less than three days.’

  ‘Let’s get you a drink and then let me introduce you to someone.’

  When Raveneau touched his shoulder Ryan Candel turned from his friends. He looked drunk. He looked puzzled. He asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘This is my partner, Inspector Elizabeth la Rosa.’

  Candel waved one of the smooth rounded glasses Celeste had searched for months to find. It held a dark rum drink.

  ‘Hello, Inspector Elizabeth.’

  The drink slipped through his fingers, almost fell, and one of his friends said, ‘That would have sucked.’

  Candel gestured with his glass toward his friends. ‘These are my drinking friends.’ He turned and pointed with the glass at Raveneau. ‘This detective here is looking for my dad. Together we’re going to prove he was a murderer. Isn’t that right, Inspector? We’re hunting the fucker down.’ He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Dad. We’re coming for you.’

  On his left la Rosa said, ‘The place is beautiful. Introduce me to Celeste. Let’s get away from these guys. I don’t need this tonight.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Raveneau was groggy as he answered the phone. He recognized Secret Service Brooks’ voice and looked at the time, 5:30 on a dark cold morning.

  ‘Hope I didn’t wake you up,’ Brooks said. ‘Special Agent Coe called me.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But why didn’t I hear from you?’

  ‘Why would you?’

  ‘Those weapons are for targeting vehicles. They were sent here for the President’s visit.’

  ‘You’re good at big leaps, Nate.’

  ‘I wish I was. It’s just a different business, Inspector. In yours you like to have a body to work with. Then you can sit around and try to figure out who killed the victim even if it takes twenty-two years. In ours the game is keeping everybody alive so that means we have to work a little harder.’

  ‘Sure, that’s why you brought two other agents to the meeting with me.’

  ‘Are you talking about the meeting where you went out for coffee in the middle of it?’

  ‘It was either that or watch you read. I’m still waiting by the way for a copy of your file on Alan Krueger. Remember, you were going to messenger it over the next day’

  ‘I want to meet with you this morning.’

  ‘So you’ll bring the personnel file with you. Is that what you’re saying? In that case, let’s meet. What’s convenient for you?’

  He met a different Nate Brooks at ten that morning and by then he had also cooled down. Brooks alluded to the pressure on him and Raveneau wasn’t sure about himself. He was surprised he’d gotten into it with Brooks earlier this morning. Could be that the bomb casings troubled him on a lot of levels. He knew the investigation would go full-throated at Khan’s roots. Ortega told him this morning the FBI was forming a task force and sending two teams to Pakistan.

  Brooks held his hands out in front of him, palms down, fingers spread wide.

  ‘I can feel it coming,’ he said. ‘I can feel something is going to happen. It’s getting closer and closer and I’m not getting anywhere. The only thing I’m getting is more worried. Let’s take a drive and I’ll show you what I worry about. Come on, let’s go. We’ll get coffee and I’ll show you.’

  In the car Brooks wanted to hear about yesterday. ‘What did you think when you slid the piece of plywood off and saw them?’

  ‘I thought about San Francisco and how small it is and how powerful they looked. I figured no one would ship something like those casings without planning to assemble and use them here.’

  ‘Welcome to my world.’

  ‘Is that your world, Nate? Have you seen a lot of bombs go off?’

  ‘They are what I worry about most and look at all the people who hate us. I grew up in Baltimore. I learned to watch everything and everybody. That’s how I ended up in the Secret Service. But you’ve been in homicide a long time and I want your opinion. Why kill the employees and bring the TV vans and everything that comes with it? Did they know too much?’

  ‘Someone saw it as a lesser risk to take them out.’

  ‘That’s how you see it?’

  ‘It’s one possibility.’

  ‘Was it Khan’s decision?’

  ‘I don’t know but the plywood delivery was to him and the window of time he was gone and the employees murdered was so narrow it’s hard to believe it was coincidence.’

  ‘That he just happened to be gone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, Raveneau, you think Khan is in on it.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I said.’

  ‘But you’re just dancing around it, and if he’s involved, he’s just one of others. Conspiracy, an organization that knows what it’s doing is my nightmare. Weapons like these can take out a motorcade without having to be perfectly placed, and they don’t have to get the President to change the country. Kill enough others and a motorcade will never be the same again. You hear that, right?’

  ‘If you’re about to start selling me on how you’re saving the country then drop me off at the next corner.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Why did you want to talk this morning?’

  ‘I want to talk because I’m scared of the kind of violence those weapons represent. I’m afraid we’re on the edge of this being the new normal. I want to talk because these cabinet shop murders are ground zero right now and you’re a homicide inspector and I want to know what you think.’

  Brooks pointed in the distance at the Golden Gate Bridge.

  ‘We can close a bridge as the President’s motorcade crosses, but we can’t clear every corridor, particularly in a smaller city like this one. The Presidential limo is a battering ram but there’s a nightmare scenario where the motorcade enters a street without many side escape routes. Let’s say a vehicle rigged with an IED like these detonates ahead and pieces of motorcycle cops and fragments of vehicles go flying. At that point we’re just trying to get the President out any way we can with as much speed as possible.

  ‘Of course, the other side has thought about side streets too. They have a secondary plan. They’ve designed for overkill. I’m talking about something planned like a military operation.’

  ‘But you vary your routes. You take precautions.’

  ‘There’s only so much you can do in a smaller city.’

  ‘Where are you going with this?’

  ‘Once we have coffee I’m going to take you on one of the routes that could get used when the President is out on this next trip. He’s going to give a speech about the subway system San Francisco has started work on. I read they’re going to work eight years, twelve hours a day, seven days
a week. But you’re from here so how many years will it really take?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  They picked up coffee and drove toward Union Square, Brooks at the wheel of a new government car.

  ‘Presidents are fatalists. They know the risks can be overwhelming, but it’s the tradeoff for an open society. The President is going to give a speech here in Union Square and then go down to Embarcadero and ride the light rail with the mayor and at least one senator.’

  He pointed out tall buildings, alleys, bottlenecks the construction was going to cause, the places that worried him most. He doubled back and picked up Grant Street and started through Chinatown where the streets were narrow.

  ‘Bad street but many voters and it’ll make people feel good.’ He pointed at a car. ‘Say there is a bomb in that car but it doesn’t go off until the last car in the motorcade is through. It detonates simultaneously with one ahead of the motorcade.’

  ‘How many times are you going to blow us up out here today?’

  ‘As it goes off, we’re going to get him the hell away from here, right? What are we going to do? We turn down one of these steep narrow streets and now we’re really vulnerable.’

  They followed it to the end, to where the President, the mayor, and the senator got on the light rail system built after the Embarcadero Freeway came down. Brooks pulled over and they watched the rail cars slowly go by and Raveneau knew in Brooks’ head the President was riding on it. He waited for what he guessed would come next.

  But Brooks surprised him, pointing toward the Ferry Building and saying, ‘That’s where Krueger was shot, a little bit back from the near corner of the Ferry Building.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m going to tell you more about him. I’m going to tell you some things you don’t know that I’m now authorized to tell you.’

  ‘Why are you going to do that?’

  ‘Because your friend Coe at the FBI has convinced me that the problem is even worse than we thought.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘First off, we don’t know who killed Alan Krueger, and when he was killed he was working with us, but not for us. I know you probably still don’t believe that, but it’s the truth.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but you seem to want to believe the Secret Service hid information from Inspectors Goya and Govich. Look, Krueger left us in 1985. He’d been outside for four years. In those four years he worked for other agencies as well. He had a pipeline in Hong Kong. He spoke Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Korean. He had an ear for language and a talent for making connections.’

  ‘What’s a pipeline in what he was doing?’

  ‘Good sources for the flow of people, money, and information about counterfeiting, what’s out there in the way of bills for sale, he was in that, he was a buyer.’

  ‘Were you bullshitting me when you said the supernotes he was carrying are now the first known?’

  Brooks tugged on the cuffs of his shirt, a habit he seemed to have, that and pursing his lips.

  ‘You are the worst cynic I’ve ever met.’

  ‘No, I know you guys would never lie to me.’

  ‘We worked with Inspectors Govich and Goya. We tried hard to find who killed Krueger, in part because he was one of us for a dozen years, but also because he was chasing rumors for us and believed he was on to something. He had heard rumors of printing presses sold to North Korea and another of presses set up in a warehouse in Hong Kong. He was working on that.’

  ‘Do you have names, people I can talk to?’

  ‘Time’s gone by on those, but there’s someone here in San Francisco you should talk to. He still won’t talk to us but he might talk to you. I’m going to give you his phone number.’

  ‘Why won’t he talk to you?’

  ‘I can tell you but he’ll do a better job of it.’

  ‘Did the Secret Service know about him in 1989?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did they give Goya and Govich his name?’

  ‘No, and I’m passing it on, but I’m not taking responsibility for what happened before me. I was in college. I wasn’t working for the Secret Service. They don’t hire kids who are in school.’

  It took Raveneau a moment to get it.

  ‘So you’ve talked to this individual recently about Krueger.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Was that because of the supernotes and the current investigation with the Cayman and Mexican banks?’

  ‘Yes. I met with him and as soon as I sat down with him I knew he was going to fuck with me. He was completely uncooperative.’

  ‘I’m ready for a name.’

  ‘Well, try this one. Marlin Thames, Marlin like the fish, and Thames like the river. Before that he was Howard Wright. He reinvented himself out here. He’s how Krueger got caught in a lie and outed. The lie involved his residence and where he was staying at night. Mr Thames also had a criminal record that included fraud. That weighed in. If Krueger had stayed on he would have been transferred to someplace very cold and faraway. Someplace where you drive fifty miles to get to the dentist. Krueger chose to resign. Here’s the phone number.’

  ‘Are you saying Thames and Krueger were a couple?’

  ‘That is what I’m saying.’

  Raveneau called Thames from his car after Brooks dropped him off, and Thames was willing but wanted to meet somewhere neutral. He named a café on Market Street. Raveneau met him in the early afternoon, sat across from him and ate a sandwich as he listened to Thames’ story.

  ‘My hair was gold-colored in those days.’

  ‘You’ve still got some gold.’

  ‘I’m sixty-seven and 1989 was a long time ago. He was killed three years after we broke up and we were still friends, but both of us had moved on. I didn’t see him much.’

  ‘But you were together when he quit the Secret Service?’

  ‘Oh, yes, and I was thrilled, but for Alan it was very hard to leave them. I didn’t realize how important it was to him. He was never the same after that.’

  Marlin Thames wore jeans and a black leather jacket over a T-shirt. He gave off an aura of spry good-nature. Raveneau tried to picture what he looked like in 1985. He watched Thames stir sugar into a double cappuccino and lay the small spoon down.

  ‘How close were you to Alan?’

  ‘We were very close for several years. But those times were very different and our life was even more complicated because Alan had to hide everything from the Secret Service. There was an agent he worked with that suspected Alan was gay. That agent was jealous and suspicious and trailed Alan to my house several times. Then they trapped him in a lie about where he lived and where he’d been the night before, but it was very obvious he lost his job because he was gay. He was outed by Agent Gary Stone. I hated Stone for what he did.’

  ‘Where were you when he was killed?’

  ‘I was at a friend’s house near the Russian River when a friend called me and read the newspaper article to me. “Former Secret Service Agent Slain.” That was the headline.’ He stared at Raveneau and added, ‘He was gorgeous. I still think about his smile.’ He took a sip of his cappuccino. ‘You said you have new evidence. How does that happen after so many years?’

  ‘We have a videotape of the shooting.’

  Thames frowned. He put his cup down awkwardly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was sent to us last week.’

  ‘Is it real?’

  ‘A film expert thinks so.’

  ‘Does it show him getting shot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  Raveneau went through the details of the cold case with this genial and seemingly gentle man sitting across from him. He studied Thames as he talked. Thames’ build was similar to that of the shooter and he looked at Thames knowing he was going to get a photo of him to the FBI. The anger of a former lover could explain the counterfeit bills left behind.

 
‘After he was murdered did you contact the homicide inspectors working the case?’

  ‘No, I was too scared. I wondered if Agent Stone had killed him. It was all so mysterious.’

  ‘Do you know where he stayed in San Francisco?’

  ‘Hotels.’

  ‘The inspectors couldn’t figure out where he was staying when he was killed.’

  ‘Well, it was usually hotels. He had more money for whatever he was doing in Asia, but maybe he had met somebody new that I didn’t know about.’

  ‘Do you have any photos of Alan?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Can I borrow them and get them back to you?’

  ‘If you promise I’ll get them back.’

  ‘I promise. Now I’d like to run some names by you. Did he ever mention a Captain Frank?’

  ‘Oh, yes, the airline pilot. He lived in Hawaii. They were good friends and there were other friends he had there. I don’t remember any names though.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Frank?’

  ‘Yes, I met him and he was here often, and we went to Hawaii once. We were there a week and it was terrible.’ Thames smiled but there was some bitterness in it. ‘His other friends didn’t like me much.’

  ‘Can you try to remember their names and then call me?’

  ‘I’ll try but I wouldn’t wait for me to call.’

  ‘You wouldn’t?’

  ‘No, I really wouldn’t.’

  His smile was warm again but the message was clear. Thames owned a well-maintained two-story Victorian. He found the photos quickly and Raveneau didn’t ask the next question here. He was afraid Thames might see where it was going and ask for the photo back. In the Homicide office he scanned the photo of Thames and Krueger and sent a copy of the file to Mark Coe. He followed with an email.

  Then he called Thames’ cell. ‘Hey, it’s Inspector Raveneau again, and I’m calling to ask if you’re willing to watch the videotape and see if you recognize the man who killed Alan. In the videotape you can tell they knew each other.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’