The Enemy Inside

by William Christie

  When Storey handed over the keys to the apartment in Urca and the safe house in Glória, the fireworks began.

  “You just forgot about these when you dropped off the Arab, is that it?” said Crozier.

  “He’s a Pakistani, sir,” said Storey. Who was standing, though of course not at attention.

  That didn’t touch the match to the fuse, but it did light the match. “And I don’t suppose you know anything about someone getting blown up by a hand grenade about a mile from this house in Glória, do you?”

  “News to me, sir,” Storey said.

  “Or what about the three guys who got machine gunned just down the street? Not to mention another grenade going off.”

  “I’m in the dark, sir. What happened?”

  “I want a complete briefing on everything you’ve been doing in Rio. Not on paper later. Right now.”

  “No, sir,” Storey replied politely.

  “What the hell do you mean, no sir?”

  Storey looked him directly in the eye, and answered in the same polite tone. “I mean that just because I call you sir doesn’t mean I work for you. I answer to my chain of command. If you want a briefing, you need to take it up with them. Sir.”

  Crozier came up out of his chair. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, Sergeant? Don’t think I haven’t heard about you.”

  “I haven’t had the same pleasure, sir,” Storey replied cordially.

  “So you think you can just drop an Arab in my lap, and some house keys on my desk, and I’ll clean up your mess for you?”

  “My orders were to deliver my prisoner and the information on his residences to you, sir. What you do with him and his apartment and safe house is up to you and your chain of command.”

  Storey was of course implying that his report was going up the chain, and it might be a good idea for Crozier if it bumped into his somewhere along the way.

  Storey added, “Since I’ve executed these orders, sir, is there anything else before I leave?”

  Crozier sat back in his chair, defeated. “Just get out. Not just my office. Get the hell out of Rio, and the hell out of Brazil.”

  If Crozier had been looking carefully, which he wasn’t, he might have seen a little crinkling of amusement around Storey’s eyes. “Then good morning, sir.”

  He met Poett back at the only hotel room they hadn’t checked out of yet. Troy hadn’t returned from turning in the last rental car. Storey never liked to do it at the airport.

  “How did it go?” Poett asked.

  “Just like Troy said,” Storey replied. “Same song and dance. Not even worth remembering.” Which was not strictly true. He actually used the digital recorder in his PDA to record every conversation he ever had with every CIA officer. And with military officers giving him verbal orders. He knew he’d burn, and burn good, if he ever got caught doing it. But after nearly twenty years in the Army and seeing quite a few good men burn, Storey had learned that honor and integrity were personal characteristics, not institutional ones. He kept the recordings in a very safe place, and never told anyone about them.

  “And this happens all the time?

  “Just like handling officers,” said Storey. “The last one to get mad wins. They rant and rave—you just talk to them like you’re the most reasonable fellow in the world.”

  “I never mastered that. I always get pissed.”

  “You just got to keep it all business. If you’re right, you make the case. If you’re wrong, you admit it. He talks bad about your momma, well, he don’t know your momma. You care about what he’s saying, but not what he’s saying about you.”

  “That’s hard,” said Poett.

  Storey nodded solemnly. “But it’s how you win.”

  Poett didn’t quite know what to say to that.

  “Before Troy comes back,” said Storey, “I want you to know that you really did an outstanding job on this trip. The whole way through. I’d work with you again in a heartbeat.”

  “Thanks,” was all Poett said. Mainly because he felt like crying. And wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe because it had that kind of impact when someone didn’t give it up that easily.

  Storey went in the bathroom to clean up. Poett knew he’d come out with his appearance totally changed for the flight home.

  The shower was on when Troy returned.

  Poett told him what Storey had said to him. “Did he really mean that, or was he just playing me?”

  “If Storey gave you props he meant it,” said Troy. “But as far as answering your question: you figure that out—you win the lottery.”

  “You two work together pretty good,” said Poett.

  “I think you noticed—we are definitely the odd couple. But man, we operate together. And we do get along. I love giving him shit. And he loves ignoring me while I do it. Then he’ll give it back to me, in that desert-dry Storey way. You won’t even know he tagged you until you feel yourself bleeding.”

  “I saw a little of that. Not much.”

  “When he’s working Storey’s like an all-star goalie—nothing gets past him into the net. And if something does, he doesn’t get over it easy. Off duty he takes things a little easier. A little. But whenever you think you’ve got him figured out he always surprises you.”

  “He’s scary good.”

  “He’s the best I’ve ever seen.” At that Troy smiled wryly. “And I do not make a habit of talking about the Army that way. Thing is, he’s not only getting it done—you start thinking about shit, and you realize he’s been training you to take over your own team all along.”

  “You know, that cracker accent kind of messed me up at first.”

  Now Troy started laughing. “Same.”

  “Every other white master sergeant I ever worked for, he’d get all paranoid thinking the two brothers were going to get together and start plotting against him. But Storey’s not that way at all.”

  “Old Storey wouldn’t even give it a thought,” said Troy. “But if he ever did decide we really were getting together on him, two things would happen. He’d make sure he was right, and then you wouldn’t want to be us.”

  “No,” Poett said thoughtfully. “There’s a Pakistani and four Chechens who’d give you their testimony on that.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was late enough in the morning that the 110 Freeway through Los Angeles wasn’t the nightmare it had been during rush hour. They were driving south, toward San Pedro Bay.

  Beth Royale had been sneaking glances from behind her sunglasses. Her partner was fidgeting in her seat. Beth had been dreading this kind of private time. The questions were bound to come sooner or later, and she’d been hoping for later.

  “So,” Sondra Dewberry began. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  Beth had been expecting the indirect lesbian query. A Kewpie doll like Dewberry wouldn’t consider her nearly girly enough. “I’m seeing someone.” She wanted, oh so very badly, to say that her significant other was a powerlifter named Denise. But she’d been getting the feeling Dewberry wasn’t overly receptive to irony, and that little joke would probably end up all over the office, in various versions, by suppertime.

  “Someone in the office?”

  “No.” God, no. She’d done a lot of stupid things in her time, but never a nightmare like that.

  “What does he do?”

  Jesus. “He’s in the Army. Special operations.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Did you meet him on a case?”

  “We worked together a couple of times.”

  “What is he?” Dewberry asked. “A major? A colonel? My daddy was a colonel when he retired from the Army.”

  Daddy. Daddy was a colonel. This was going to be fun then. “He’s a Master Sergeant.”

  “Oh.”

  Beth had to admit it. Her partner could put more different spins on that one favorite word than she ever would have thought possible. Sensing an opening for even more fun, she said, “But the nice thing about dating a special ops so
ldier is the gifts. They give great gifts.”

  Dewberry brightened up at the mention of presents. “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Beth lifted her left leg, and the bottom of her suit pants, exposing a pistol in an ankle holster. “He gave me my backup gun.”

  “He gave you a gun?”

  “He sure did. It was so sweet.”

  “As a present?”

  “Uh-huh. We’d been involved in this shooting, and he noticed I was using a revolver as a backup piece. He pointed out that if I had to fire all six rounds I was in trouble. So he bought me a Glock 27, the mini .40 caliber. So in a pinch I could reload it with the spare magazines from my full-size model 22. It was so thoughtful.”

  “That’s ... nice. You were in a shooting?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ve never had to use my weapon.”

  “Well, don’t worry. One of these days.”

  “How long have you been going out?”

  Questions, questions, questions. Maybe she wasn’t girly enough after all, because Beth only asked people questions on the job. “I guess about eight months.”

  “Oh.”

  A much sunnier oh this time, Beth thought.

  Then came the follow-up question, though this time it was more of a statement. “Then it’s serious.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Beth said. “We’ve had four dates.”

  “Four dates in eight months?”

  A good octave higher on that one, Beth thought. Not quite enough to crack a wineglass, but still impressive. “He isn’t in the country all that often. The war on terrorism? You know. And when he is we’re on different coasts. Like now.”

  “Four dates.”

  If Beth had only known Dewberry could get dejected so easily, she’d have opened up long ago. The uncomfortable silence was luxurious.

  Then her cell phone rang.

  Beth held it up so she could see the screen. A disapproving look in the peripheral vision. No doubt there was some Bureau policy about cellphone use while driving. “Uh-oh. My mom. I’d better get this.” She brought the phone up to her ear. “Hi Mom. Okay, what’s wrong? You’re calling me in the middle of the day—I don’t have to be in the FBI to figure out something’s wrong. Is it Dad? No reason, just a wild guess. You called, Mom, you might as well go ahead and tell me. Is he all right? He what? He what?” Beth let out a loud chuckle. “Yeah, Mom, I didn’t think that was the way you wore them. Yes, I am laughing. I’m sure you don’t think it’s funny—we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that. Did you try? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You know I can’t do that, Mom. Because he’d kill himself if his little girl tried to talk to him about something like that. Did you? What did he say.”

  Finding it hard to drive while shaking with laughter, Beth pulled into the breakdown lane. “Yes, Mom, I’m still laughing. I realize that, but I can’t seem to stop. No, I don’t think so. Not any crazier than usual, at least. Yes, I know I shouldn’t talk about my father that way, even if he is nuts. Mom, if talking to him didn’t work, it might just be easier to let it go. If anyone else sees it? Mom, if anyone sees it you’ve got a lot worse problem on your hands. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Mom. I’ve got to go now. Right. Call you when I can. Love you. ’Bye.”

  Beth put her phone away and cleaned up her running mascara before pulling out again. She didn’t say a word. Just waited for it, knowing Dewberry was being eaten alive by curiosity.

  Then it came. “Everything all right?”

  “My dad. He just had surgery for prostate cancer.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Everything came out all right, but now he has to wear those adult diapers. You know what I mean?”

  “I understand it’s pretty common after that procedure.”

  Grinning wickedly, Beth said, “Yeah, got himself a leaky garden hose now.”

  Not the kind of thing well-bred Southern belles expect to hear. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me anything so personal.”

  “No, really, it’s okay,” said Beth. “We are partners, after all. My parents were getting ready to go out. And my mom walks in the bedroom.” Beth had to pause to deal with another attack of the giggles. “My mom walks in the bedroom, and there’s my dad, standing there. And he’s wearing the diaper over his boxer shorts.” The laughter came snorting out of her—she almost had to pull over again.

  Dewberry was only puzzled. “Why was he doing that?”

  Beth was trying to hold the steering wheel straight, but the car kept shaking. She had to struggle to get the words out. “He said they were more comfortable that way.” Another roar of laughter. The road was getting hazy through her tears.

  “But you’re supposed to wear them next to the skin,” said Dewberry, dead serious.

  Beth was afraid she was going to go off the highway. Fortunately their exit was coming up. She took the Harbor Boulevard off-ramp, and entered the Port of Los Angeles.

  They skirted the long lines of trucks waiting to pick up a trailer and have a shipping container deposited onto it. Of course all the trucks were running while they waited, and there was a fog of burned diesel in the air. There were a lot of trucks. The ports of L.A. and Long Beach next door handled 40 percent of the entire nation’s seaborne imports.

  With Dewberry calling off the directions, Beth headed toward the shipping basins. They flashed their credentials at the L.A. Port Police checkpoint and continued toward the berthing slips.

  It was like driving through another city, but one made out of a giant child’s blocks, stack after symmetrical stack of red, blue, and white shipping containers. The spaces between them arranged into avenues and streets, stretching out over acres. Toward the water the individual berths could be picked out because over every one towered cranes and gantries like giant Erector sets.

  “Fries Avenue,” said Beth, making the turn. “What was the berth again?”

  “Berth 176,” said Dewberry.

  The berths weren’t the piers Beth had been imagining. It was more like a giant parking lot that ran right down to the edge of the channel, with the container ships parked in a row, one after the other, just like cars.

  As they got closer they could see the line of Port Police and Customs vehicles, lights flashing of course.

  “What the hell?” Beth exclaimed. She could feel her face flushing, as it always did when her dander was up.

  She brought the car to a quick stop and charged out her door, flashing credentials at the uniformed cops and ducking under the crime scene tape.

  The center of attention was an open container and a forklift pulling out pallets of large metal ingots. Except the ingots weren’t solid. A few were sitting on the asphalt cut open, revealing folding stock AKM rifles sitting on the plastic and cloth they’d been wrapped in, each with four magazines, magazine bag, sling, cleaning kit, and plastic oil can. Farther down were the dull green metal cans of ammunition, the Russian kind that opened with a key like a can of Spam.

  It was all lying out there in the open, as if for display.

  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had a bench set up, and an agent in a blue jumpsuit wearing a plastic face shield was cutting open ingots with a metal saw.

  Supervisory Special Agent Benjamin Timmins was holding a paper cup of coffee amid a huddle of other suits watching the action.

  Beth was sorely tempted to embarrass him in front of the others. Perhaps fearing exactly that, when Timmins caught sight of her he broke away from the group and put himself on a course to intercept her.

  “Now, Beth ...”

  “Jesus Christ, Ben. Why didn’t you get the USC marching band to make the spectacle complete? Did the TV crews get stuck in traffic or something?”

  “Beth ...”

  “Why the hell isn’t this being done under wraps in a warehouse? Didn’t we talk about putting transponders in these weapons and sending them on to see where they ended up?”

  “As you’ve no doubt guessed, Beth, it’s been decided not to let
these weapons get out on the street. We’re making the seizure right now.”

  “For the love of Christ, why?”

  “It was decided—above my pay grade, Beth—not to take the risk of letting them get loose.”

  “But why? We could spike every single piece of ordnance and scoop up every single one of the perps literally on the way to do whatever it is they had planned.”

  “No one wanted to take the chance of the transponders being discovered.”

  The realization of bitter defeat seemed to mark a change in Beth’s aggressive body language. She slumped a bit, and began talking slower. “No, of course they wouldn’t. And this is going to be publicized, isn’t it? So the Bureau and Customs can let the nation know we’re on the ball.”

  “Probably.”

  “And what about my C.I.? How do we keep Roshan from getting killed? Those Russian arms dealers are going to wonder who tipped off their shipment. They’re going to wonder about the Arabs they were going to sell their guns to. And the Arabs are going to wonder about each other. Incidentally, has anyone thought about how we’re going to make our case?”

  “The U.S. Attorney says the wiretaps will be more than enough.”

  Beth pointed to the ingots. “I assume that’s lead, or something like it. So out of all the thousands of containers that got unloaded today, how did we find this one? Not by x-ray.”

  “The cover story’s all ready to go. An experienced inspector noticed that the container was too light for that amount of metal.” Timmons waved his head in the direction of a large Customs truck. “So they used one of their new gamma ray scanners on it.”

  It wasn’t bad. At least they weren’t complete idiots. But Beth was still bitterly disappointed. “And you think that’s going to fly?”

  “The Russians weren’t going to have that container delivered to their homes. They’ve got cutouts between it and them. They’re going to look at the seizure as just part of the price of doing business.”

  “Yeah? Well, let me ask you something else then, Ben. Now that we’ve got this shipment of arms, are those Russians going to get suspicious and throw off all the surveillance we have on them right now? Or discover the surveillance and decide to leave the country? This can’t have been their only shipment. What if they fill the order from guns they’ve already got stored someplace else? Did everyone above your pay grade think about that?”