Caitlin and her assistant, Rosalie Hertel, take a set of glossies around the area of Decklin’s apartment in the South Bronx. The apartment itself is still marked off with yellow crime-scene tape. The photographs are of Anne Marcus; they were freely given to Caitlin and McGee on their first visit to the Marcus’s Gramercy Place home. The other set of photos are of Usama ibn al Bakr of Universal Islamic Assistance Foundation fame scanned from the front cover of the foundation’s brochure without proper attribution. This is real flat-foot cop work—the kind of work that earns beat cops the dubiously complimentary nickname. After knocking on more than 300 doors and showing the photographs to more than a thousand people, Caitlin and Rosalie come up with a large and valuable nugget—positive IDs for both individuals shown in the photos. By the third day, they have collected eleven non-addict, non-crazy, English-speaking witnesses, willing to testify that they had seen the two people individually—and in four instances, together—during the past year. A piece of pure gold comes from a salesman who lives in an apartment half a block away from Decklin’s. He describes seeing the attractive upper-crust woman New Yorker and a “swarthy Arab” looking at and pointing toward the fire escape on the side of Decklin’s building. Rosalie makes a record of everyone who recognizes either of the two people in the photos and gets all of the demographic particulars. She and Caitlin consider that they have done a fine three days of work and deserve a glass of white wine on the firm’s dime.
Caitlin and Rosalie take their investigation a big step further—which in retrospect may turn out to have been a big mistake. They wangle permission to see Mrs. Marcus herself using the good offices of FBI Special Agent Darryl Strathmore, longtime friend of McGee’s. She is being protected in a super-secure area of Fort Meade, Maryland, set aside to protect important VIPs and witnesses—usually those whose lives are in jeopardy from being involved in mob trials.
Anne Marcus is genuinely glad to see them—to see anyone. Her stay is a lonely one because her visitors are almost entirely limited to cops, FBI agents, and attorneys. It is a welcome diversion to get to talk to a couple of attractive and well-dressed women not much younger than herself. Although they are detectives, they are not cops in the same way as her usual keepers; and she considers that a plus.
“Thanks from coming clear out here to see me. It is just mean that I can’t use the phone or the computer to communicate,” Mrs. Marcus says as soon as the women sit facing each other.”
“Thank you for having us on such short notice,” Caitlin says. They have a short period of girl talk; but it is strained, because it is obvious that Caitlin and Rosalie are there on business.
Finally, Anne tires of the stilted conversation and plunges in, “So, Caitlin and Rosalie, what business brings you here? Do you have a better handle on my son’s killer?”
“It is beginning to look like we do. We’ll bring you up-to-date after we ask you a few questions. That okay with you?”
“Sure.”
Caitlin takes out her notebook and reviews it before starting her questions.
“Would you please tell us about your education? Maybe something about your math and accounting experience?”
Caitlin and Rosalie already know everything there is to know about Anne Warren Marcus’s education. This first question is just a softball designed to see if Anne is going to tell the truth. She passes. She has had a fine education. Her parents presumed that she would marry well and saw to it that she could use her good head for numbers. Before she went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, they made her take a year of accounting and statistics. She was only too happy to share that with the private detectives. Although she never worked a day in her life and certainly not as an accountant, she retained her well-honed capacity for understanding money and how people with it are able to protect their assets.
Caitlin throws a few more softballs before getting down to the hard stuff.
She pushes Anne off balance by abruptly changing course and asking, “How well do you know Usama ibn al Bakr?”
Anne is stonily quiet for a moment then replies cooly, “Not that well. I am sure we have met. I think he was a client of the bank.”
Caitlin ignores the half-true response, “How much do you have to do with the Universal Islamic Assistance Foundation, Mrs. Marcus?”
Anne is aware that both the tone and the formality of the interview have changed. She struggles to remain calm and civil.
“I think I may have attended a fund-raiser or two—rubber chicken affairs. I don’t recall having donated much of anything. Howard always took care of that sort of thing.”
That is partially a half-truth and partly a full-out lie. Caitlin and Rosalie know for certain that Anne’s signature is on almost a dozen large checks made out to the foundation.
“Umm hmmh,” Caitlin muses. “Tell us, please, about your San Francisco account. How large is it? Where does the money come from? And where does it go?”
Anne stands up and announces, “That’s it for today. I am very tired and cannot tolerate any more stress. Being in this witness protection situation has taken a severe toll on me. I’m sure you understand. The security officer will see you out.”
She sees that her two guests are not getting up; so, she abandons the façade of courtesy and walks out of the room.
“That’s revealing, no?” Caitlin says.
Chapter Thirteen
The first pair of guards turn the north corner of the rear of the Draguz apartment building and pick their way through the rubble and trash in the rear lot like blind men following a pathway made familiar by repetition. Sybil takes advantage of that aspect of brain function—the mind fills in blanks for vision when vision is limited, but the mind is familiar. The guards move quickly, completely confident in their minds’ eye views. Sybil has the team put a large dead branch of a tree directly across the path. The two men walk rapidly into the impediment and crash to the ground cursing from the cuts and scrapes they get from the tangled branches. In two seconds, Ed and two other agents swarm them and render them unconscious with cloths soaked in chloroform. The three agents bind them hand and foot, gag their mouths, and cover their eyes with the all-purpose spy tool—duct tape—and drag them to the back of the lot. They will not awaken before Sybil and her team are long gone, and they will be disoriented and amnesiac when they are finally found.
McGee has been monitoring the front of the building. He clicks his walkie-talkie on and sends the three-click message that the other two guards are standing in their place in front waiting to make their pass around the back.
Ed, Sybil, and one of the female agents remove one of the glass panes of the rear entry door, reach in, unlock it, and in a couple of seconds they are inside. Their night-vision goggles afford them sufficient visibility to be able to make their way to the fifth floor without making a sound. There, they encounter the first of two surprises—the inevitable intervention of Murphy’s Law that occurs in every covert operation mission.
Despite their prolonged surveillance of the building and multiple, multiple passes by Mazurkiewicz’s apartment room door—which led them to the lulling idea that the hit man had no inside security personnel—there is, in fact, a large, well-armed, and fully alert Bulgarian secret service guard standing there front and center. A frontal attack by the team is untenable. They have to go to plan B.
There is no plan B, and they all slip back into the stairwell to concoct one. Lydia Proxmire, the female CIA covert-ops agent, proposes the only solution that seems at all plausible.
“I can get off the elevator and stagger my drunken way down the hall toward my room, and when I pass by him, I take him out.”
“Great plan,” Sybil says, “except for a couple of flaws. First of all, that behemoth is twice your size; second of all, you will have lost the element of surprise; and third, you are going to walk down the hall in a ninja-SWAT outfit that will put even the dumbest clod on high alert.”
“Thought of all of that. Firstly, I can play the part
of a pretty good drunk. Second, I can get out of my ops outfit and carry only my black-blade ceramic knife. Third, I am the match of any man in the martial arts department. Our unit practices four hours every day—hard hit practices. And finally, there will be the element of surprise and diversion. I’ll wiggle my butt and shake my upper accruements enticingly—that is an extra-curricular skill I have kept a secret. He will be blinded by my dazzle; and, slam, bam, thank you, Ma’am, I’ll put him down.”
They all have a quiet laugh at her chutzpah and decide that they cannot come up with anything better. She pulls off her clothing, revealing a set of form-fitting pink long johns. She has a nice form under that fitting outfit, and it could pass as pajamas. She is barefoot.
“Don’t peek,” she says with a wicked twinkle in her eyes. Ed places his hands over his eyes with large gaps between the fingers, provoking a second small laugh from the women.
“Vaya con Dios,” Sybil says.
Lydia gives her teammates a double thumbs-up and tiptoes away down the stairs to the fourth floor. She gets on the elevator and pushes the “five” button. Her nerves and senses are on high alert. Her well-compartmentalized mind brings up the self-defense compartment, and her brain switches to killer Krav Maga combat mode. She will pass the guard on her left; so, she clutches the black knife in her right hand out of sight. The door opens, and she staggers out—a drunken celebrator from some distant party. She looks fetching and available in her cute pink jammies.
The guard turns to look at her with intense hypervigilance and eyes her with high suspicion at first. Then his internal computer sees the slight, voluptuous, ingénue tottering down the hallway toward him. His manness takes over, and he becomes helpless as all men do with the approach of a tantalizing moving visual image—all curves and swaying “accruements.” His fight and flight adrenaline rush damps down.
He even makes the first move, “Hi, cutie, what’s a nice girl like you doing up at a time like this?”
Of course, he is speaking Bulgarian, of which American Lydia Proxmire does not understand a word.
She gives him a silly but enticing drunken smile and stops directly in front of him and wiggles her “accruements,” enough to keep his eyes centered below her clavicles. He looks and reaches to determine for himself if this is a dream or an incredible and unexpected opportunity. From out of the darkness to her right, Lydia arcs her surgically sharp combat knife across the throat of the totally unsuspecting giant. Acting by reflex with his life’s blood gushing out in front of him, he lunges at Lydia. His three hundred pound bulk, now dead, collapses on the 135 pound American agent, and they crash to the floor with a good deal more noise that Lydia had hoped. She is pinned underneath the man’s inert body and is soaked with four liters of sticky slick blood.
The rest of the team rushes down the hall and is within two feet of Lydia when the second stage of Murphy’s Law occurs. In a second surprise of the evening, the apartment door is pulled open and another—very alert, very formidable—guard rushes out. Ed flies across the two bodies on the floor and rams his head into the man’s gut, propelling him back into the apartment. For a moment, Ed has the upper hand as the guard struggles to get his breath. The commotion awakens Mazurkiewicz who—by dint of his long training and his basic instincts to survive—is fully ready to enter the fight or to escape, whichever becomes the best option for him.
Sybil has no choice. It is her turn to dredge up her martial arts training. She hurtles past Ed and the guard fighting on the floor and tackles the unarmed, but now fully awake, Mazurkiewicz. He is no novice in the martial arts department, and goes down still completely full of fight. He gets Sybil in the guard position with his strong wiry legs wrapped around her slender waist. She makes a mistake—to underestimate her opponent’s skill—and attempts to choke him from her kneeling position—a mistake only a gross novice would make.
Mazurkiewicz throws his right leg up and over her left shoulder and pulls at her right arm to pin it. She realizes her mistake and that she has a couple of nanoseconds to avoid being placed in a triangle hold that will completely incapacitate her, and she will die in ignominy in a dingy apartment in a nothing city in a backwater country. She becomes a wildcat. She leans fully forward and bends her arm at the elbow, preventing him from getting it fully extended and breaking her arm at the joint as he finishes his cruel choking move. He strains to get his leg all the way around behind her neck. Strains too hard.
Sybil summons up all her energy, strength, mobility, and skill and jams her partially entrapped right elbow into his exposed groin. He flinches. She takes advantage and keeps him off balance until she is able to turn him over prone. He makes a mistake then. Instead of maintaining his grip on her wrist, he lets go and struggles up to his knees and elbows. That is the perfect opportunity for Sybil. He has made the novice mistake that violates one of the premier rules of jujitsu—never turn your back on your opponent. His accompanying mistake is to have underestimated Sybil because she is a mere woman, and not a very big one at that.
She does what any Brazilian jujitsu black belt would do: she clamps his exposed neck in the mata leão [kill the lion] choke hold. He struggles in vain, knowing that she can kill him with this choke. He manages to turn her over on her back with him supine on top of her. That is a mistake for two reasons. First, it allows a little blood to flow back into his oxygen-starved brain and to cause brain swelling. Second, that position is a better one to increase the purchase of the mata leão. Those two mistakes hasten the cessation of blood flow to his swollen brain. Now unconsciousness is inevitable; death can easily follow, and he is powerless to stop it.
Sybil whispers soothingly, “Resistance is futile. It is better to give up all hope.”
That is the last thing Byelorussian international killer Viachaslau Mazurkiewicz hears before he slips away into the soft darkness.
Sybil checks. He is not dead, just unconscious, and will remain that way for hours. She quickly directs her attention to the noisy struggle going on between the giant and Ed there on the apartment floor. Ed is losing; and the giant has his beef roast-sized fist ready to smash the smaller man’s face, end the fight, kill Ed, and then turn on Sybil. Ed is thrashing about spoiling the guard’s aim, but he cannot hold out much longer.
The generous coating of blood has created a slick enough lining between Lydia and the huge corpse smashing her into the floor that she is able to squirm out of her fix. She rolls out and takes a few life returning gulps of air. Her brain clears rapidly, and she can now see Ed’s life-threatening predicament. She scrambles to her feet and races into the room and throws her body against the much larger guard, knocking him off balance. He has not nearly lost his advantage and bats Lydia away as if she were a bothersome fly.
Sybil joins Lydia; and, between the two of them, they are able to topple him off Ed. Now it is three little people against one giant. Like the Lilliputians, they are able to turn him onto his back. He is still very nearly a match for the three of them for all of their skills.
Outside, McGee, Mac, and the rest of the team have completed their ambush of the other two outside sentries. Mac takes care of the disposition of their inert, but still living, bodies and sends McGee into the apartment building to see what is keeping Sybil, Ed, and Lydia. He arrives at the door to Mazurkiewicz’s apartment just in time to see the giant guard beginning to tip the scales in his favor in his fight with the three CIA agents. His incredible strength is enough to get all three of his opponents turning over, with him about to reassume the superior position. Unfortunately for him, his back his turned to McGee. Fortunately for McGee and the agents, McGee has a sap, and he knows how to use it from his long street experience in New York. He delivers one well-placed blow with the sap to the giant’s occiput, and the fight is over.
There is only time for a few heaving breaths before a division of labor sets in. Sybil calls the local CIA “cleaners” who arrive from their van hidden up the street in a matter of minutes. They set about to clean th
e blood, package the dead man’s corpse in a large plastic ground sheet, and to bind and gag the remaining, now unconscious guard. Lydia runs into the apartment’s shower and sheds the coating of clotted blood and her once pink, now red, long johns. One of the cleaners hands Lydia a new ninja-SWAT uniform to cover her nakedness. McGee runs back down the four flights of stairs to let Mac and the others know what has transpired.
Sybil, McGee, Ed, and Mac bundle up Mazurkiewicz in a carpet and lug him out of a side door of the building. A second van has been alerted, and they dump the killer’s limp body into the back and speed away back to the airport and off on their three-stop odyssey back to the United States.
The “cleaners” are remarkably skilled and efficient at what they do. In fifteen minutes—the time it takes for the local gendarmerie to mobilize—they remove all traces of blood, tidy the room, and load one dead and five living, but unconscious, security guards into their van. Police sirens and lights round the corner of Sveti Kliment Street as the CIA “cleaner” van turns innocuously away onto Han Asparuh Street. It is as close as it is possible to be, but the “cleaners” are used to that. It is part of the pride they take in their work.
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Before McGee, Sybil, and her team can get back to the US with their human trophy, several things fall in place in the Decklin Marcus case; several things go remarkably well; and all-in-all McGee & Associates Investigations is able to consider the case quite successful overall.
On the debit side, Anne Marcus—the murderess who killed her own son to hide her secret collusion with al-Qaeda—is able to convince her minders at Fort Meade to let her go out for an evening of entertainment with two of the other people for whom they have responsibility—a mob accountant and an NSA whistle-blower, who are both slated to testify—one in court and the other before Congress. In the confusion of the carefree dinner and shopping trip, Anne slips away into a shopping mall ladies room and out the window of the restroom. The next—and only time—she is ever seen again is in a security photo on the Island of Nevis—an island which is part of the inner arc of the Leeward Islands chain of the West Indies and has one of the most privacy protective set of banking laws in the world. She is seen smiling in front of one of its myriad banks. By the time international diplomatic negotiations between the island and the United States are complete, Anne’s bank balance has been transferred to Vanuatu and on into the mists of obscurity.
Friends at Homeland Security Page 9
