Born to Run js-7

by James Grippando

  “To be honest, I’m not sure they’d ever approve it. It’s been over a decade since the FBI botched things up at Waco and got seventy-four hostages killed along with David Koresh, and even longer since the shootings at Ruby Ridge. Those events live on, and the FBI worries about its image. I’m sure there are plenty of people here in Miami who will never forget the midnight raid that sent Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba. With this hostage crisis unfolding live on television, an exit plan with this kind of finality is bound to die from an acute case of paralysis through analysis as it works its way up the chain of command.”

  Figueroa considered it, but not for long. “There has to be precise coordination. The instant my men make the breach, the power has to be cut off. Or at least the broadcast has to be killed. The MDPD may not be as image conscious as the FBI, but I don’t want a takedown on television either.”

  “So you’re up to the task?”

  Figueroa was deadpan. “I need to clear it with my director.”

  Madera shook his head. “If you go up in your department, I might as well call in the FBI. You’re the MDPD crisis team leader. This is a crisis of national significance. Find some balls.”

  Figueroa drew a breath, his chest rising. “All right,” he said. “We’re in.”

  Chapter 48

  Things were quiet in the mobile command center. Too quiet.

  Andie had been staring at the television screen too long.

  If Demetri was striving for must-see TV, he was failing miserably. The single camera was aimed at Jack and the anchorwoman, who could do nothing but wait quietly and try not to freak out. Demetri was somewhere off to the side, out of view. Long periods of silence gave the Action News commentators and guest analysts way too much time to fill. She tried not to listen to them. Her focus was on the hostages, and it suddenly struck her how unusual this situation was. Hostage negotiation rarely depended so much on sight. In fact, one of the City of Miami’s finest, Vincent Paulo, was blind. For the first time in her entire career, Andie was able to see the people she was trying to save. In some ways it was an advantage. At least she knew they were alive. But being able to see into their eyes, to watch the ever-growing worries on their faces from one moment to the next, more than canceled out any advantage. That constant reminder on the television screen only seemed to emphasize the fact that their fate depended entirely on her next choice of words.

  The fact that one of the lives hanging in the balance was Jack’s upped the stakes beyond measure.

  Andie stepped outside for some air.

  A circle of squad cars was still stationed around the Action News studio, but the uniformed officers had downgraded from a state of readiness to a hunker-down-and-wait mode. It was a subtle difference in posture and demeanor, but it came like clockwork about two hours into every hostage standoff Andie had ever handled. Andie looked up at the stars and breathed in the cool night air. A helicopter whirred above the edge of the crowd-control perimeter, and she was relieved to see that police air coverage had replaced the media choppers. A spotlight swept the strip mall at the western edge of containment, and Andie noticed snipers on the rooftops. They were well within range of the studio. She knew the position of all the FBI snipers. These were not FBI.

  Andie checked her cell phone. Still no return call from Jack’s father. She wondered if he’d gotten her messages. Andie was big on vibes, and she didn’t like the one she was getting at the moment. It had been almost an hour since Figueroa had last stopped by the FBI mobile command center to tell her “I told you so, I knew you’d get nowhere in negotiations.” She sensed that something was afoot, and that she wasn’t part of it.

  She was about to dial Harry’s cell again when a car door slammed and Guy Schwartz stepped out.

  “Good news and bad news,” he said as he approached.

  An ASAC spending this much time on-site wasn’t the norm, but this was a standoff with some very long tentacles, ones that reached all the way back to Washington. Schwartz was showing every intention of remaining hands-on from start to finish.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” said Andie. “What’s the good news?”

  “We have approval to deliver five hundred thousand dollars in marked bills to Demetri.”

  “Can it be here before the six A.M. deadline he gave us?”

  “That’s the bad news. He specified old bills, not new bills. That makes it impractical to track by serial numbers. Only reliable way to mark it is with fluorescent ink, and we don’t keep half a million dollars sitting around, premarked.”

  “What am I supposed to tell him? Headquarters is concerned that there’s a one-in-a-million chance that he might actually escape with the money after we deliver it to him, so we need more time to mark the bills?”

  “It’s Sunday morning. You need to make him understand that we need additional time to pull that much cash together.”

  “How much additional time?”

  “Keep it open-ended.”

  Andie shook her head and said, “I worry about this.”

  Schwartz took a half step closer, showing his concern. “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell a Quantico-trained negotiator that you don’t let the hostage taker set the timetable, that you never agree to deadlines. I’m beginning to think that your initial reluctance to get involved has some validity. Maybe you are too personally invested to exercise proper judgment.”

  “Jack is not the issue,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. My concerns are based solely on maintaining credibility as a negotiator. Demetri is holding the future vice president’s son hostage, he’s broadcasting the whole thing live on television, and he must be thinking that he’s dealing directly with the president. He isn’t going to accept an excuse as lame as ‘Sorry, the bank is closed.’”

  “Then lower his expectations. You have to convince him that the president isn’t watching and doesn’t care. Television or not, you can’t let him believe for a minute that he has a direct line to the White House.”

  Tires screeched as a Florida highway patrol car flew around the perimeter-control barricade and cut toward the mobile command center. The brakes grabbed, and the front bumper nearly kissed the pavement as the car came to an abrupt halt just a few feet away from Andie. The trooper jumped out of the car, and the single gold bar on his uniform told Andie that he was a lieutenant.

  “I just got word that Air Force One touched down at Miami International.”

  Schwartz said, “That’s not possible. There’s no way Air Force One would fly into Miami without the FBI knowing about it.”

  “Well, maybe the rest of the FBI just didn’t bother to tell you folks. All I know is that I have to take about half my troopers and my entire tactical response unit off this site to assist with the motorcade.”

  “Is the president on board?” said Andie.

  “That’s what I’m told,” said the lieutenant. “Harry Swyteck is with him.”

  “How do you know that?” said Schwartz.

  “That part was on the news.”

  “The news?” said Schwartz.

  Andie raced inside the command center and checked the television monitor. Jack and the anchorwoman were still on the left side of the Action News split screen. But sure enough, Air Force One was on the other side. The banner below it read, PRESIDENT AND V.P. NOMINEE LAND IN MIAMI.

  Schwartz came up behind her, and Andie’s heart sank.

  “So much for convincing Demetri that the president isn’t watching.”

  “The hell with that,” said Schwartz. “I wasn’t just puffing my rank when I said Air Force One couldn’t land in Miami without me knowing about it.”

  “So what do you make of that?”

  “I want to know who’s keeping you and me out of the loop,” he said. “And why.”

  Andie paused. Thursday’s telephone conversation with Stan White, the ASAC from the Washington field office, was replaying
in her mind-when he told her “there is something you need to understand about Harry Swyteck.” It suddenly made perfect sense to her that Miami was “out of the loop,” so to speak.

  “Were you about to say something?” said Schwartz.

  Again she paused. If Schwartz didn’t know what Washington knew about Harry, it wasn’t her place to tell him.

  “No,” said Andie. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  Chapter 49

  “Y esssss!” said Demetri, clenching his fist like a tennis star who’d served an ace.

  Jack glanced across the news set to see him standing in front of the flat-screen television mounted on the wall.

  Shannon leaned closer to Jack and whispered, “Is that Air Force One?”

  The television was a good forty feet away, too far for Jack to read the news banner at the bottom. But the red, white, and blue Boeing 747 was unmistakable.

  “It sure is,” said Jack.

  “Do you see that?” said Demetri, as he stepped toward his hostages. “You see how seriously they are taking this?”

  Shannon whispered, “He’s delusional.”

  Jack knew that he wasn’t, but he didn’t argue with her.

  Every half hour or so, Demetri had been doing fifty push-ups at a time to keep alert as the night wore one, and he definitely had renewed energy in his step as he crossed the set and looked into the camera.

  “All you doubters out there who have been watching on your televisions at home, do you understand how important this is? How important I am? The president of the United States has just landed. Do you think he flies into Miami at”-he checked his watch-“two thirty on a Sunday morning for just any old reason?”

  Shannon said, “If he thinks the president flew down here to negotiate with him, we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.”

  “Just don’t panic,” said Jack.

  Demetri’s television address was gaining momentum, his excitement growing. “Now we are seeing some action!”

  Shannon leaned closer and whispered, “I have a nail file.”

  “What?” said Jack. He was trying to hear Demetri talk.

  “It’s the metal kind with the pointy tip, like a knife. I found it in the bathroom and hid it in my hair.”

  Jack checked her hairdo. It was full enough to hide a machete.

  Shannon said, “All we have to do is get Pedro to step out from behind the camera and come over here. He can take it from me and then he can-” She paused, as if it were difficult for her to speak of such things. “Pedro can slit his throat.”

  “That’s a suicide mission.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  Jack’s gaze swept toward Demetri, who was still speaking to his television audience.

  “A word of warning,” said Demetri, almost shouting with renewed energy. “If sending down Air Force One is part of a strategy to stall, I got no sense of humor for it. That money-all five hundred thousand dollars-still needs to be here at six A.M., period. No extensions.”

  Jack whispered, “Okay, let’s assume we can get Pedro over here and that he can get it out of your hair without Demetri noticing. Do you have any idea how hard it is to overtake an armed man and slit his throat with a nail file?”

  “No, do you?”

  “It’s hard,” said Jack.

  “But not impossible?”

  Jack’s thoughts suddenly flashed back to Eddie Goss, a former client on death row who had decapitated one of his victims with nothing more than brute strength and a nylon stocking.

  “No,” said Jack. “Not impossible.”

  “Then we have a plan. You got a problem with that?”

  Jack glanced again at the Greek. He was down doing push-ups again, this time for the television audience.

  “Is Pedro a former navy SEAL?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Green Beret?”

  “Pedro? Heck no.”

  “Then yeah,” said Jack. “I got a big problem with that.”

  As the ground crew tended to Air Force One, Harry ducked into the bathroom and placed another call to his FBI contact.

  Supervisory agent Glenn Perkins had told Harry to call whenever he wanted an update, and Harry was more than taking him at his word. Perkins was head of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group in Quantico, and for this standoff, the Miami negotiators-including Andie-reported to him. No decision to pull the negotiators and send in the SWAT could be made without Perkins’s approval.

  “What’s the latest?” said Harry.

  “You saw the same thing I saw on the TV,” said Perkins. “It’s what I cautioned about before you boarded the plane: bringing you and the president down to Miami would only embolden him.”

  “Andie should call him again.”

  “With all due respect, sir, you’re micromanaging.”

  “That’s my son in that newsroom.”

  “All the more reason not to micromanage.”

  “I should give Andie a call.”

  “Governor, I’m urging you not to do that. Agent Henning was not my first choice, not because she isn’t qualified, but for the same personal reasons I worry about you getting too close to this. I agreed to put her in as lead negotiator, but you promised to stand clear.”

  “I have four voice mails from her on my cell. I should at least return the call and tell her I’m behind her.”

  “I’m expecting an update from her in five minutes. I’d be happy to tell her for you. I hope I’m not being too blunt, but the last thing she needs is the pressure of you breathing directly down her neck.”

  Harry grumbled into the phone, nervously picking at the Air Force One bar of bathroom soap with his fingernail. “I feel so useless.”

  Perkins said, “There is one thing you can do to help.”

  “Name it.”

  “Ask the president to power up Air Force One and fly you right back to Washington.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Sir, we went over this before, but now that you’ve seen the gunman’s reaction on television, maybe you’ll understand my position. The next time Demetri makes a demand, Agent Henning needs to be able to buy time and tell him that she has to check with her superiors. If he knows that you’re in town with the president, he’s going to expect and demand immediate answers.”

  Harry considered it, picking even more furiously at the bar of Air Force One soap.

  “It’s basic negotiation 101,” Perkins continued. “In fact, I use Jimmy Carter as a case study for training here at Quantico. Back in the seventies, he offered to intervene in a hostage standoff and accede to a gunman’s demand to speak to the president. The bureau couldn’t have been any quicker or clearer in its response: ‘Thanks, but no thanks, Mr. President.’”

  “I understand your point,” said Harry.

  “Good. Then you’ll do it?”

  “Maybe I can disembark in secret, and I’ll get the president to fly back without me.”

  “Not a good plan,” said Perkins. “It’s best that you stay with the president.”

  “I need to stay near my son.”

  “Sir, that is a totally understandable feeling, but there is nothing you can do to resolve this standoff. In fact, there is nothing President Keyes can do, either. My advice is to stay with the president and help him understand that. Most important of all, make sure he doesn’t pull a Jimmy Carter, try to intervene, and get somebody hurt.”

  The bar of bathroom soap was almost entirely a pile of white flakes, and Harry was still a bundle of nerves.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll stay with the president. But I’m not leaving my son.”

  Chapter 50

  It was officially “last call” at Sparky’s Tavern, and Theo was wiping down the cracked linoleum bar top.

  The band had packed up at 2:00 A.M., but the tavern was emptying out slowly. Theo had started the night at Cy’s Place, his jazz club where music was the priority. The typical crowd at Sparky’s would rather line
-dance to “The Electric Slide” than listen to Duke Ellington reincarnated. It had been a good night, nonetheless, and it was winding down to the usual suspects: a handful of regulars and some Keys-bound college kids who’d challenged a couple of bikers to a game of eight ball. Not smart. They’d lost their shirts. Literally, they were stripped down to their waists. If it didn’t end soon, they’d be walking out stark naked.

  “You’re cute,” said the leggy blonde on the bar stool.

  Theo hadn’t arrived till 1:00 A.M., and by his count she was on her third martini. He had no intention of serving her a fourth.

  “Cute?” said Theo as he rinsed another beer glass in the sink. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m Mia,” she said. “Mia from Miami.”

  Theo smiled and shook her hand. “Now that’s cute.”

  “My ex-husband’s name is Phil. He was from Philadelphia. Mia from Miami, and Phil from Philadelphia. Isn’t that too funny?”

  “Funny, yeah,” said Theo.

  “Where you from, hon?”

  “Never-bed-the-last-chick-in-the-bar…berg.”

  “What?” she said, smiling as if she wasn’t quite sure she should be.

  “It’s a little town in Sweden near-ah, never mind.”

  She tried to rest her elbow on the bar and missed. “Hey,” she said, regaining her balance. “Do you ever watch anything but ESPN here?”

  Theo glanced up at the TV behind him. “Nope.”

  “How many times do we have to see the same highlights?”

  They were showing the Ohio State Buckeyes’ game-winning goal-line stand-for the fifth time of the night. Theo grabbed the remote and scrolled down quickly through the cable news channels. He soon realized that they all had the same coverage, and when he finally stopped surfing to check out the “breaking story,” his mouth fell open.

  “Jack?” he said.

  “You know that guy?”

  Theo ignored her and turned up the volume to hear the live update from outside the studio.

  “We are now well into our third hour of a tense hostage crisis here at Action News studio,” the reporter said.