“I’ve got enough,” Blake reassured. “And I can always get you more, if I have to.”
Taggart grinned again. “Well, we’ll see if enough is really enough. Hold this here lantern for me while I rummage about a little.”
Within a couple of minutes, Taggart had excavated two smaller weapon crates and one the size and shape of a long rifle. Opening them revealed a pair of stamped-metal submachine guns and, to Blake’s pleasant surprise, a Browning Automatic Rifle. Blake picked it up and worked the bolt, peering inside the chamber.
“Looks to be in excellent condition. I humped one of these across Okinawa for weeks. Heavy son of a bitch, but it’ll tear a car body to scrap metal at five hundred yards.”
“Figured you’d like that,” Taggart said.
He pulled out one of the other two weapons, a stamped-metal submachine gun that looked vaguely familiar to Lynch, although he couldn’t immediately name it. Richard, however, seemed to recognize it at once.
“That’s an old Soviet PPS-43. They made damn near two million of those. Ugly brute, but it killed Germans well enough.”
Taggart handed it to him. “Bought that a long time ago through some back-channel deals. Got my hands on it unused, still wrapped in oil paper and coated in grease. Cleaned it up and ran a few magazines through it to make sure it worked, but Ivan knew what he was doing.”
“And this one?” Lynch asked. “It looks like the Swedish K some of the older Green Berets carried before my time in ‘Nam, but there are differences.”
Taggart nodded. “That’s a Smith and Wesson Model 76. They copied the Swedish K and made a few changes to build it cheaper. This one was, ah, damaged during manufacture and destroyed at the factory.” He winked at Lynch. “At least, that’s what the government believes.”
Lynch took the stamped-metal weapon in his hands. He’d practiced with a Swedish K a few times back in Vietnam, but never carried one in the field. By the time he was running missions for SOG, they’d transitioned to the CAR-15, and left the lower-powered submachine gun behind. Still, it was a compact, effective weapon at close range, and the folding metal stock made it easy to maneuver, especially if they were in a vehicle.
“You have ammunition for these?” Richard asked. “Especially Tokarev ammo for this PPS-43? They’re not going to have that at your local sporting goods store.”
Taggart unearthed ammunition cans filled to the brim with gleaming surplus ammunition, in all three calibers. He also provided a half-dozen magazines apiece, and a hard case for each of the three weapons.
“I don’t suppose there’s anywhere we could test-fire these?” Lynch asked. “I don’t like going into a fight with an unproven weapon.”
“Smart boy,” Taggart replied. “If you have time for a short drive, I know a little gully a few miles from here. Remote enough that no one is going to notice.”
Blake looked at his wristwatch. “We’ve got time if we keep it short. We need to be back in San Fran in a few hours.”
“Well then,” Taggart said, starting up the stairs with his lantern in one hand, and a can of .30 caliber ammunition in the other, “let’s stop playing with our peckers and hit the road.”
The gully in question was about ten miles away, deep in some rugged territory, and Lynch was grateful the Wagoneer had four-wheel drive. Eventually Taggart stopped in a spot that gave them good field of fire, with the rims of the gully providing an adequate backstop. The three passengers had spent the ride loading magazines, and as soon as they were out of the car, Lynch, Richard, and Blake were cutting loose at some rusty soup cans and glass beer bottles Taggart had thrown in the back of his Jeep.
Lynch found the M76 easy to control, and ran through a couple of magazines firing both from the shoulder with the stock extended, and with it folded, assault-style. The weapon was a little jumpy on full-auto, but with some practice, he could fire off short bursts or single shots with good accuracy.
Blake, Lynch noticed, was grinning like an idiot, reunited with his long-lost love. The old Marine handled the big, heavy BAR like he’d never been without it, and as soon as he was satisfied the weapon functioned as expected, he set it aside and loaded magazines for Lynch and Richard, who took quickly to his Soviet weapon. For a man who supposedly had no military experience, Lynch mused, Richard handled full-auto fire with surprising professionalism, and he wondered again where the enigmatic Texan had found his particular skill set.
Finally, they were all confident everything worked as expected, and Blake thumbed through a fat wad of $20 bills, paying Taggart’s asking price and a little extra for his trouble. Lynch saw the two men were old friends, and seemed to have kept in contact over the decades. He wondered if any of his old Army buddies would still take his call thirty years from now.
Hell, never mind worrying about the future. He might not be alive thirty hours from now.
FOURTEEN
The three men walked back into SEC around six that evening. Steiger had food delivered to his office, and the men were discussing various plans and ideas for dealing with Cranston when his call came through on the private line. Steiger put the call on speaker so everyone in the room could hear.
“This is Steiger.”
“I hope you have the money sitting on your desk.” It was Cranston.
“Fifty thousand dollars. Twenty-five bundles of one hundred used twenty-dollar bills each.”
“How thoughtful.”
“All right now, whoever you are, where are we meeting?” Steiger asked.
There was a soft chuckle on the other end of the line. “We aren’t meeting. I want John Blake to hand over the money.”
The four men in the room looked at each other. Steiger cleared his throat. “Who? Listen, fella, I’m afraid I don’t -”
“Don’t be an ass. I’m sure he’s sitting right there in the room with you. Him and the other two men you’ve hired. Do you think I’m that stupid, Steiger? Do you think I’m such a fucking idiot? I’ll admit, it took me a little while to put the pieces together, but after the roadhouse, oh, I knew.”
Blake leaned towards the desk. “Okay, Philip. Enough shadow-boxing. I’m here.”
“Hello, John. My condolences about Mary. She was a lovely woman.”
Lynch saw the muscles of Blake’s jaw bulge for a moment. “Cut the shit, Philip. I want proof that Roth is alive.”
“Not much for sentimentality, are you, John? No, I suppose not. Not after seeing you whip up your lynch mob and come for me, even after we’d been partners for three years. And now look at you. That shit at the roadhouse? Even I would have thought twice about a stunt like that. This is Northern California, John. Not Okinawa. You’re not in the Marines anymore.”
“I want to talk to Roth, or there’s no deal, Philip.”
Cranston laughed. There were sounds of a struggle on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Blake? Mr. Steiger? It’s Samuel. I’m really sorry I got into such trouble. This is deep, deep, deep trouble. These guys mean business.” The new voice was thin and high-pitched, the sound of a man half a step from complete panic.
Blake and Steiger exchanged glances. “It’s okay, son. We’re going to get you back. Just sit tight, do what Cranston tells you, and you’ll be just fine.”
“I’m just so sorry! Deeply, deeply sorry,” Roth said.
There was the sound of the phone changing hands. “Are you satisfied, John?”
“Okay, you’ve got Roth and the prototype,” Blake replied, “and we’ve got your cash. Let’s do business. When and where, Philip?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Midnight, John. Kezar Stadium. I want you standing on the fifty-yard line. No jacket either, John. You can leave that hand-cannon of yours with one of your flunkies.”
“All right, Philip. I’ll be there.”
“John, I’m not going to insult you by threatening Roth if you go to the cops. I know how important it is to keep this little...indiscretion...off the radar. But if I see
either of your newfound friends, I’m putting Roth and his prototype back in the trunk and I’m doing business with someone else.”
“Understood.”
“It’ll be nice to see you again, John. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while.”
The line went dead.
Lynch turned to Blake. “You never told us he was your partner.”
“That little detail did seem to get left out of the conversation,” Steiger added, giving Blake a pointed look.
Blake dragged on his cigarette and looked down at the coffee table for a moment. Standing up, he walked over to the dry bar and poured himself some bourbon. Taking a long sip, he stared into the glass.
“Cranston and I transferred into Narcotics at the same time,” he finally said. “They partnered him with me, a younger guy needing an old dog to show him the ropes. I tried to keep him in check, but it was clear to me the kid was going sour. After three years, I asked for a transfer back to Homicide. After running across a few too many stiffs that didn’t just stink from decay, I knew something was up, so I did some digging, and began putting the pieces together. Then I got IA involved, and they went after him.”
Richard stared at Blake for a moment. “You know he’s goin’ to kill you, right? You’ll get yourself dry-gulched in that stadium.”
“He’s had years to come after me,” Blake replied, shaking his head. “If he wanted to bump me off, it would have happened already.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t be tempted into taking the shot now. We did just kill ten of his guys last night. What if he feels he needs to make a statement in order to keep face in front of his men?” Lynch asked.
Blake shrugged. “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. Cranston isn’t stupid. He gets paid by scumbags to kill other scumbags, or to lean on people who are already dirty. But if he goes for me, there’s no profit in it. He’s always had an angle, always looked at the bottom line when he made his decisions.”
Steiger leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “John, are you sure this is something you want to go through with? This whole thing has spun way out of control. When I thought of you guys ‘doing whatever it took’, I meant knocking a few heads together, maybe some money exchanging hands, a gun waved in someone’s face. But now we’ve got bodies in the streets.”
“Bullshit,” Lynch said.
Everyone turned to look at him. Lynch got up and walked over to the nearest window.
“Excuse me?” Steiger said, with an edge to his voice.
“I said ‘bullshit’,” Lynch repeated. He turned and looked Steiger in the eye.
“Blake’s a former cop. He could have found you a couple of P.I.s who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty. Maybe even cops who’d work on the side. The kind of guys you pay to find people who don’t want to be found. People like Roth. But instead, you hired an ex-Green Beret with a high body count, and,” he pointed to Richard, “a guy who owns a silenced pistol, and knows exactly how to use it.”
No one said anything for a moment, until Richard, still sitting in his chair, began to chuckle.
“He does have a point, Steiger. This job called for sleuths. You hired mercenaries. Trigger pullers. Seems you’re swinging a little heavy.”
Steiger steepled his fingers in front of his face for a while, lips pursed, as he looked at each of the three other men in the room. Finally, he looked at Blake and sighed.
“You want to tell them?” Steiger asked.
Blake shook his head. “Nope.”
Steiger got up from his desk and went to the bar, where he quickly made himself a Scotch and soda. He turned and looked again at Blake, a sour expression on his face. Then he looked at Richard and Lynch and shrugged.
“The prototype is a fake.”
FIFTEEN
Steiger explained the whole thing.
“Over the last two years, someone has been orchestrating attempts to compromise our security. Most of these have been tentative contacts with our engineers - women approaching them at bars, or guys talking to them at professional conferences. Nothing overly unusual there, but the engineers reported these people were all a little too interested in the projects they were working on. This especially surprised the men approached by women, because let’s face it - this work isn’t exactly exciting to your average lay person.
“We’ve also had six engineers experience break-ins where either nothing of value was stolen, or some token item was taken to cover the break-in. At least four others have suspected break-ins - papers not quite where they were left on desks, documents occasionally missing - but no signs of forced entry. These suspected incidents happened later than the burglaries, so we think whoever’s doing this has become a lot more cautious.”
“What are these people looking for?” Lynch asked.
“In a word, secrets,” Steiger said. “Most of our engineers have Top Secret clearance with the government, and everyone knows to avoid talking about their jobs outside of work, or to avoid bringing home classified documents. But mistakes happen - people get sloppy, or bring home something that isn’t classified, but reveals information to the right people. Finding a research paper on a very specific type of circuit in an engineer’s briefcase can give a lot of insight into the project he’s currently involved with.”
“So, what you’re talking about is industrial espionage,” Richard said.
Steiger nodded. “New companies are forming every day, and the competition for the most lucrative contracts is getting even more intense. Everyone wants an edge, and some are willing to go further than others in order to find it.”
“Have you gone to the police with any of this? The feds?” Lynch asked.
“We reported the break-ins, some of them for insurance purposes, but the rest we’ve kept quiet. Blake and I talked about it at some length, and we finally decided we needed to lure the culprit out into the open and discover who we’re up against.”
“Roth,” Richard said.
Steiger nodded. “We learned of his gambling problems a few months ago. At first, I was determined to fire him - Roth has Top Secret clearance, and the gambling was too much of a liability for us - but Roth was desperate to keep his job. It wasn’t just the paycheck, either; he really does love working here, the engineering, the problem solving. Some of these guys, we have to push ‘em out the door at night.”
“So you made him a deal,” Lynch said.
“We told Roth we’d square him with his debtors and get him some help for his problem - and make sure it stayed off the government’s radar so he could keep his clearance level - if he was willing to owe some money to some shady types, and offer them a prototype microprocessor if they could find a buyer. We figured if it worked, then great, but if not, we’d square his debts and move on.”
“So why did he go on the run? Why put him in a position to get stuck out in the cold like that?” Lynch asked.
Blake cleared his throat. “This had been going on for so long, we weren’t sure we hadn’t already been compromised. We wanted Roth to go in deep cover, to make it look like he was desperate, and keep it as far from here as possible. If he was still coming to work and going home, we didn’t want someone here who was on the take, so to speak, to get suspicious. You don’t have a cop in deep cover keep coming back to the station.”
Richard shook his head. “But Roth was no undercover cop. You folks put him in a dangerous position.”
Steiger tossed back the last of his Scotch and soda and made himself another. “It was either that or cut him loose. I know now it was a bad call, but I actually thought I was doing him a favor. If I’d just fired him, something told me he’d wind up too far in the hole, owe money to the wrong people and not be able to pay. This way, I figured he’d see how dangerous it could get, scare him away from the card table. No one put a gun to his head and forced him to do this.”
“Yeah, well, he’s got a damn gun to his head now,” Lynch said with a sneer.
“He wasn’t supposed to co
ntact us unless it was an emergency,” Blake said. “And if he did, the code-word ‘deep’ meant everything had gone to shit, and he feared for his life.”
“He used ‘deep’ several times in that phone call,” Richard pointed out.
Steiger scowled at Richard. “Yeah, we noticed that, thanks.”
“I’m still not sure where we come into the picture,” Lynch said.
“We knew there was a strong chance the people Roth owed money to would go looking for him,” Blake said. “That could have gotten messy real fast, and no P.I. would risk their necks like that.”
“Could have gotten messy?” Lynch said with a laugh.
Blake frowned. “There was also a chance whoever was coming after us would send their own people after Roth. We weren’t sure how heavy that might get, and we figured if we hired a couple of guys who came on hard enough, the other side might back down.”
“They were stickin’ a hand in your cookie jar, and you wanted us to chop it off with a hatchet,” Richard said.
“A not wholly inaccurate analogy,” Steiger said.
“But now you’ve got bodies on the ground,” Lynch said. “This thing is turning into a war. The cops have to be trying to find out what’s going on, and there’s always a chance this can circle back to you.”
Steiger nodded. “We’ve done our best to isolate the situation from the rest of the company. Only John, Roth, and I know what’s going on. This is why we didn’t let you in on it in the beginning.”
“You told us ‘whatever it takes’ in the beginning! That didn’t exactly protect us from anything!” Lynch fired back.
“Well it’s certainly better than telling you we were carrying out a counter-espionage operation against an unknown rival company, an operation that included trying to get an organized crime syndicate to flush out our competitor!” Steiger shouted, his face flushed.
San Francisco Slaughter Page 7
