by Dana Haynes
The newcomer trudged the rest of the way up. As he passed below her, Daria saw that his grocery bag was filled with beer.
If either man looked up, they would have been treated to a very unladylike vision straight up Daria’s short skirt.
Neither man looked up.
Daria was still standing there, thirty seconds later, when the scratch of lock picks reached her ears. The hinges squealed again.
She waited, pressed against the wall. A spider skittered across her shoulder and clavicle. She plucked it away.
Below her, through the holes in the floorboards, she saw a black man skulking up the stairs.
Now what? she wondered.
Below her, directly beneath her patent-leather heels, Daria saw the stranger kneel. He gripped a matte black Glock in his left hand. With his right, he quietly peeled a Velcro-laden flap off the arm of his dark blue windbreaker.
Daria squinted. Beneath the flap were the letters FBI.
Still straddling the gap in the floor, the floorboard under her left shoe squeaking a little, she craned her neck, peering through the rotted floor. The space below had been a living room, once upon a time. She saw the four Irishmen there now. They’d set up a table and chairs and a couple of couches. They were pirating electricity from somewhere. Probably the next apartment building over. But they were being smart about it; electricity for space heaters and a hot plate and a small fridge, but not for lights.
As she watched, the man she knew as Jack held a finger to his lips. He gestured in the direction of the stairs. Two of Jack’s men disappeared from Daria’s line of sight, moving off to the left.
Daria mouthed the word shit in English and in Hebrew.
Where one FBI man is, can others be far away? She concentrated, listening hard. Where the hell was this man’s backup? Where the hell was Ray Calabrese?
Jack and the biggest of his cronies had drawn their weapons in the room beyond. They were moving cautiously toward the second-story landing. Daria couldn’t see, but she was sure the other two were circling around for the same destination.
Daria mouthed the word shit in Arabic and in Italian.
Ray Calabrese parked himself half a block and across the street from the building that the two agents in the prowl car had told him about. Ray’s cell phone vibrated. He was sure it would be Lucas, but the alphanumeric code that appeared read SWAT, followed by a seven-digit number.
Ray dialed the number and was connected to the special-weapons commander, FBI. He was assured that three unmarked cars had just entered the field of play—a panel truck with the decals of the L.A. Department of Water and Power, a UPS delivery van, and a battered Ford Econoline. Ray could see all three and thought they blended nicely into the down-on-its-luck neighborhood.
His cell phone vibrated again. Again, he assumed it would be Lucas. And again, he was wrong. It was Assistant Director Henry Deits.
Ray told Deits that they had the place under visual surveillance and that the cavalry (mechanized, of course) had arrived.
Satisfied, Deits wished him good luck and rang off.
Ray went back to watching the building, assuming that Lucas had tucked himself into another doorway or alcove along the block.
Standing on the last two decent floorboards of the second-story landing, Daria Gibron made a decision.
Lucas Bell crouched. Since hitting the first-floor landing, all noises had died away. Lucas wasn’t very happy about that.
Concentrate, he told himself. Do your job. Find O’Meara and the others and get your ass back down to the street.
. . .
Donal O’Meara and Johnser Riley approached from the bivouac they’d carved out of the abandoned apartment. They’d definitely heard something near the stairs. O’Meara had sent the other two around through a hole they’d found punched through a bathroom wall; a classic pincer trap.
They were on the verge of greatness. Now wasn’t the time to fuck up.
Lucas Bell had just decided to push forward when a flash of flesh caught his eye at the very edge of his peripheral vision. He turned. The woman he recognized from Calabrese’s files as Daria Gibron stood behind him with a length of handrail the size of a pool cue. Before he could react, the muscles of her shoulders bunched and she jammed the blunt end of the rail into Lucas’s side, right above his kidney.
The pain was instantaneous and paralyzing. Every muscle in his body spasmed. He stiffened, couldn’t inhale. He saw the rail spin like a bo staff, saw the other end swing down and around. It caught him under the chin. With a grunt, Lucas went sprawling, his Glock clattering to the floor.
Donal O’Meara stood, stunned. A black man slid into view only a few feet off the floor. He slammed into the far wall, all but unconscious, blood flowing from a split lip.
The next instant, another figure appeared over the fallen man. It was a woman in an absurdly short skirt and heels and a black shirt with blousy sleeves. She carried a length of wooden dowel, one end wet with a splatter of blood. O’Meara didn’t recognize her at first. Then his eyes narrowed. “It’s you!”
The other two men appeared at the women’s left, four guns trained on her, four shocked faces. Keith O’Shea said, “The fuck?”
She dropped the length of rail. It clattered and sent up a little puff of dust. The man at her feet groaned.
Daria turned to the men and smiled. “Hallo, Jack. Introduce me to your friends.”
O’Meara stood his ground a second, trying to figure out how things had gotten so deeply fucked so very quickly. He looked down at the unconscious black man and aimed his 9-mm at him.
“Don’t be stupid,” Daria said, not revealing that her heart had skipped several beats. An FBI agent was about to be killed by a gun that she and the ATF had sold to this bastard. “You can’t shoot him. He’s FBI. He’s probably not alone.”
“She’s right.” It was the big man, Johnser Riley, moving smartly away from the bombed-out living room. “They’re right outside.”
The stunned men stood at the top of the stairs in a semicircle, trying to figure out what to do next. They’d been ready for the unexpected. Or so they’d thought. But the smallish woman in the stylish outfit was so far outside their wildest expectations that they just stood there.
“Well?” She shrugged. “Do you have a back door or don’t you?”
Donal O’Meara led the three men and Daria Gibron down the hall to an apartment at the far end that smelled even worse than the rest of the building. He hit the door with his shoulder and it bounced open.
A sledgehammer had been taken to the external wall and created a human-size gap, open to the elements. The room reeked of mold and pigeon droppings. Two of the men grabbed long planks hidden behind the door and shoved them out through the hole in the wall, to a similar hole smashed into the next building over.
Daria had shimmied in between these buildings a little while earlier but hadn’t noticed the holes in the walls over her head.
They walked the wobbly planks into the next building, which also had been condemned. They pulled the planks after them, dashed through the apartment, guns drawn, then hustled down the stairs, all the way to the basement. They’d left flashlights along the way.
Led by the bobbing ovals of light, the five of them hurried through the cluttered basement and found a metal door, already opened. This led to the next apartment over and, if Daria’s sense of direction was any good, across the street.
Before anyone entered, O’Meara turned and shoved his forearm against her throat, slamming Daria back into the metal door. Her head ricocheted painfully off the surface. He cocked his Colt Python, stuck the four-inch barrel against her left cheekbone. She smelled cleaning oil and cordite. “Pat her down,” he ordered.
Keith O’Shea ran a meaty hand over her front and down her sides, lifted the front of her skirt, and flashed her tarty, black panties. He yanked her blouse out of the waistband and made sure she wasn’t wearing a wire. He enjoyed his work immensely. Daria stared directly into O
’Meara’s eyes throughout, never blinked or complained.
O’Meara eased the pressure on her throat. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m Daria,” she croaked. “You’re Jack. Although that one called you Donal.” She nodded to Johnser Riley.
He cocked his gun, pressed harder against her cheek, creating a half-moon depression. “Do not fuck with me, little girl. What are you doing here?”
“I was at a disco,” she lied. “That man came looking for you, asking questions. I followed him.”
“Discos aren’t open this early.”
“It is for me,” she said simply and left it at that. It was the perfect kind of lie: too ambiguous to disagree with.
“Why attack that FBI bastard? Why would you do anything for me?”
Daria stared right into his eyes and said, “Because right after I sold you that gun—the one you’re pointing at me?—my place was raided. I didn’t know if you led them to me or if I was under surveillance. Which means I’d led them to you. Either way, I had to find out.”
The lie sounded good to her own ears.
O’Meara glared at her, towered over her. He searched her eyes for fear and found none; for untruths and found none. She seemed totally at ease in the bizarre setting.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
“I’m a businesswoman. My work has little to do with the law. The less, the better. I think maybe you’re the same.”
He stepped back and she relaxed, her hand going to her sore throat. O’Meara softly lowered the hammer of his handgun.
“Where’s your purse? Your ID?”
“In a Dumpster,” she said. “When I decided to follow the agent, I didn’t want any ID on me.”
O’Meara would have done the same. It made sense. Of course, if she had a badge or a gun in her purse, there’d be no way for him to know now.
On the other hand, why throw away a gun before entering this scene?
“Right,” he said, and shoved the gun into his belt. “I snagged this from that FBI wanker before we left.”
He reached behind his back and produced Lucas Bell’s handcuffs and key. He snapped one link around Daria’s right wrist and connected the other one to his left, leaving his shooting hand free.
“We might kill you later. Probably will. For now, you just might be of value.”
He turned to the darkened tunnel and took two steps before he disappeared into the gloom. Before she was dragged in, Daria made eye contact with the three others, holding her gaze on Keith O’Shea for a moment.
Johnser Riley tapped Keith O’Shea on the shoulder and whispered, “God, but she’s a ride!”
O’Shea nodded, thinking the same.
Ahead of them, O’Meara wondered if he should call the cut-out phone and answering machine in the rented apartment in Atlanta, to alert the necessary people that there’d been a change of plans. Plenty of time for that, he thought.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
The tropical depression off the coast made it official. The first storm had socked in Washington, D.C. The next, in what was beginning to look like a never-ending string of storms heading toward the States, now took its toll on Georgia and Tennessee. By 6 P.M.—3:00 Pacific Time—all power went out for large sections of Atlanta.
Including the rented apartment with Donal O’Meara’s cut-out phone and answering machine.
23
KIKI STOOD IN THE field of grass on the side of Interstate 5 and stared at the downed wreckage. She shivered a little. In her left hand was an MP3 player. In her right were a pair of foam headphones that fire-truck drivers use to limit noise damage to their ears.
“Miss Duvall?” A beat, then she turned to the firefighter standing behind her. “I talked to the guys from Silverton. You can use their rig.”
He pointed to a pumper truck with a fully enclosed cab. “That’ll do,” she said. “Thanks.”
A minute later, Kiki was snug in the cab of the pumper truck. She tucked the earbuds from her MP3 player into her ears, then put on the “Mickey Mouse ears.”
She could have done this from the comfort of her hotel room. She could have done it from L’Enfant Plaza in D.C. But she was convinced that it would be better to stare at the downed jetliner while she listened to the last minutes in the lives of Meghan Danvers and Russ Kazmanski.
Across the field, Dennis Silverman watched the tall, lanky redhead climb into the fire truck. He wondered what that was all about.
His laptop pinged. Dennis had downloaded all the evidence from the Gamelan flight data recorder. He rubbed his palms together in gleeful anticipation. This is going to be so fucking fun!
He stepped away from the crushed cockpit. It was taking all his concentration to avoid giggling or even booming his laughter for everyone in the field to hear.
He detached the coaxial cable that linked his laptop to the external controls of the aircraft, then searched the field until he found Walter Mulroney. “The FDR is pretty badly smashed, but I’ll compile the data and have it to you by noon tomorrow.”
“Outstanding,” Walter said, and shook Dennis’s hand. “Thank God we’ve got you on the team.”
LOS ANGELES
A team of heavily armed agents in Kevlar vests, helmets, and face shields led the way into the abandoned apartment building within thirty seconds of the time the planks were being pulled across, into the next apartment over. They fanned out, covered the first floor, and found Lucas Bell as he began to push himself to his knees.
On the street, Ray Calabrese had changed into a flack vest and had picked up his walkie-talkie. His jaw was clenched, and a vein in his throat stood out. He was angry at Lucas Bell and angry at himself. And he almost jumped out of his skin when his walkie-talkie squawked and a voice said, “Agent down! Agent down!”
Ray crossed the dark street, gun drawn, and burst into the apartment building. He saw agents on the first-floor landing. “Calabrese!” he announced and took the stairs three at a time.
He just about burst into song as two of the agents in SWAT black helped Lucas to his feet. Lucas’s chin was wet with blood and he looked nauseated, but nauseated translates as alive, and that was all that mattered.
Ray threw a bear hug around the wounded man, who groaned in pain. In Lucas’s ear, Ray whispered, “You asshole.”
When he disengaged, Lucas nodded his head. “You got that right,” he said in fine agony.
. . .
It took the SWAT unit, plus Ray Calabrese, twenty minutes to search the condemned apartment. When they were done, and realized that the joint was vacant, Ray called for a forensic team to tear it down to the granular level.
He took Lucas Bell into the ruined remains of a bedroom—the walls were lined with Star Wars wallpaper, so faded that it was almost unrecognizable—and closed the door.
“Jesus, Lucas.”
No one was angrier at Lucas than Lucas. “Look, I fucked up big time. But this?” he pointed to his split lip, “came from Daria Gibron.”
Ray’s blood pressure dropped. “You’re sure.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Yeah. She coldcocked me with, I don’t know, a bo staff or something.”
Ray stared at the other agent. “Deits finds out about this, he’s gonna have a fucking seizure.”
“I know.”
“Did she say anything?”
Lucas thought about it for a couple of seconds. “They didn’t know . . . they being the Irish assholes, and there are four of them, by the way. They didn’t know she was there. They were as surprised as I was. Also, she stopped O’Meara himself from shooting me.” From the way he steadied himself on the cobwebby wall, it was clear that his jaw and his gut were killing him.
“She kicks your ass, then saves your ass?”
Lucas shrugged. “Doesn’t mean she isn’t running with them. Doesn’t mean—”
“Hey, guys?”
The voice in the otherwise empty room almost made Ray jump out of his suit. He turned and found a SWAT officer, a Thai
woman he’d worked with a few times before. She was on the floor above them, on her knees, peering down at them.
“Chanpong! I damn near capped you!”
“You’d have tried,” she observed with a smile. “Hey, I heard you guys talking. This chick you’re talking about? She was up here. I’m finding shoe prints up here. High heels. Size five, five and a half.”
Ray digested that. “Could she see the entrance? She’s about five-four.”
The SWAT officer disappeared, came back. “Yeah.”
Ray played it out in his head. “She was up there, spying on the Irish. She heard you enter. She might have seen them react; maybe they heard you, too.”
“Yeah, I supp—”
But Ray was on a roll. “She clocks you to avoid the Irish shooting you. She’s not running with them! She’s pissed that I put her on the bench and she went after the Irish on her own! Jesus Christ!”
Lucas paused. “It . . . it could’ve gone down like that.”
“She’s a player. She was a spook living undercover in a hostile land; a deep-cover Israeli agent surviving in the West Bank as a Palestinian. Then she blew the whistle on an illegal assassination, got herself shot by her own side, became expatriated. All before the age of thirty. Since she’s been in the U.S., she’s been nothing but bored and antsy to get back into the game. This O’Meara prick shows up, she figures boom, this is her chance.”
They heard a knock on the door. Lucas opened it. A second SWAT officer, still wearing his vaguely Nazi helmet and chin strap, said, “Got something to show you. C’mere.”
He led them to the “living room,” which had morphed, through neglect, to the Ulstermen’s bivouac. The room was littered with space heaters, a cooking stove, a ping-pong table turned into a dining-room table with greasy buckets of KFC and empty beer bottles. Four mismatched chairs and a futon with stains that nobody present wanted to think about. The agent knelt and pulled a pile of newspapers out from a moth-eaten futon.
