by Greg Curtis
Still, he put that madness to one side for a bit as he tried to work out how badly he was injured. It was actually quite hard to tell. His body felt a little as though it was wrapped in cotton wool, something that he guessed was due to the pain medication he'd been given. He couldn't see his injuries as he was heavily bandaged. And there was no nurse there to tell him anything useful. But he could wiggle his toes and move his fingers about, so that had to be a good sign when he remembered being shot in the arm and the leg. Equally the beeping from the machine by his head seemed to have a metronomic quality to it. He had to take that as a positive as well. More than that he guessed he'd have to wait to find out.
Garrick let his attention return to the argument in the hallway. An argument that was growing worse by the minute. Well, louder anyway. It was an argument that centred on him.
Charges were being threatened. Charges against him, though for what the unknown man didn't say. And charges had already been laid against the three Treasury agents. In fact from what he could make out, one of them was already in the holding cells and being questioned while the other two were somewhere in the hospital with him.
That was as it should be in his view. Shooting an FBI agent and compromising a sensitive operation; all were unbelievable mistakes to make, and smacked of gross incompetence. Actually it was criminal. And when it wasn't just him who had been shot as a result of their arrival on the scene, Garrick was all for locking them away for life. These people should not have badges and guns. Not even the plastic toy guns kids had.
Yet he was still cuffed to the bed.
That did not strike Garrick as a good thing. No matter how incompetent these Treasury agents were, the fact that he was in cuffs had to mean that they truly did believe him guilty of something. Something that at a guess had to do with Benedict and the girl. Or did it? Could it be something completely different? Taxes maybe?
But it wasn't. It had to be Benedict. He knew that when he heard the deputy director arguing about the press outside and what they would say. Who else could cause such a noise?
It was apparently a media circus. Agents were down, the suspect was dead and everyone was yelling at everyone. The shoot out between agencies had hit prime time news and by the sounds of things Treasury weren't doing too well out of it. So, did they actually believe him guilty of something? Or were they just desperately trying to dig themselves out of a publicity hole by using him as a scapegoat? After all, if they could go to the press and say they'd actually arrested a known criminal FBI agent it might manage to overshadow all the other bungling mistakes the agents had made. Mistakes that had gotten other agents shot and the serial killer killed. That last didn't bother him too much, but he supposed the man had been denied the right to a fair trial by the bungled arrest. And the families of his victims had been denied the chance to see him stand trial.
Eventually Garrick decided to find out just how deep the rabbit hole was.
“Oy!”
He could have been polite. Addressed whoever it was out there more formally. But he'd been shot. He was cuffed to a hospital bed. He didn't feel as though he really wanted to be polite. And when the men didn't answer him, busy as they were with their own argument, he shouted it at them again, louder than before. Finally that got a response, and a moment later he heard the argument stop and then the sound of their feet on the lino floor. Moments later he watched the pair of them push aside the double doors to the ward and step into view.
One of them he knew to be Deputy Director Simons. The deputy director was someone he saw most months, on the TV more often than in the building. He was a smartly dressed man with greying hair who had always impressed him as being sharp. The other he didn't know. But then he didn't know anyone from Treasury. And his experiences with them lately suggested strongly that he probably didn't want to.
“Special Agent Hamilton.”
The deputy director greeted him a little too politely, something that worried Garrick a little. But he still knew he'd done nothing wrong. Well, nothing that these two could know about anyway.
“Deputy Director.” Garrick decided to rein in his attitude a little. At least until he knew what was happening.
“Well the doctors have said you'll make a full recovery with a few month’s rest. That's the good news. The bad is that Treasury are wanting to prosecute you for a whole raft of offences including aiding and abetting a known felon.”
The deputy director didn't sugar coat things, but then he never did. It wasn't his style. He was direct to a fault. Still, it gave Garrick something to work with.
“Who? Katarinka Nelos is a known felon? That doesn't seem likely since she's a teenager. And in any case I asked if she was suspected of involvement in any crimes when the agents turned up at the diner and they said no. So I didn't aid her at all. I just took her to school.”
And that he knew had to be his story. He had to stick to it. It was just fortunate for him then that it was the truth.
“That's not what my agents say!”
The other man was all but bristling with anger as he set about accusing him of something. But then he was the sort to get hot under the collar as far as Garrick could see. His face was already turning red.
“My agents say that you deliberately obstructed their investigation. They say you helped Armando Benedict's associate to flee custody. And they say that you did it because you yourself are a known associate of Armando Benedict.”
“That's a lie!”
Garrick should have been more controlled. More circumspect. But the charges were serious and a complete load of crap. The man wasn't just talking about getting him fired; he was talking about putting him in jail – all for obeying the orders of an angel. That wasn't right. And the one thing he couldn't do was defend himself by telling them the actual truth.
“Is it?” The man suddenly came much closer and stared straight at him as though he was prosecuting him already. “Is it really?”
“And I suppose you're also going to tell me that when you were arrested you didn't then fire on our agents, badly wounding one and starting a cross fire between agencies that resulted in three more agents being shot.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I was in the middle of a shoot out – one started by your own people as they bowled up in the middle of an operation with their sirens flashing and let the suspect know that we were there. They called my name while I was crouched behind a tree out of ammunition. I turned and they shot me. There's no confusion about any of that.”
“You were armed and you had your weapon drawn.”
“I was in the middle of a shoot out!” Garrick almost couldn't believe that the man had said that. “What did your agents expect me to be doing? Holding a bag of candyfloss?”
“Besides my weapon was empty, all three clips expended, and I did not at any stage aim it at your idiots. I just turned when my name was called, they yelled “gun” and shot me. If I wasn't wearing a vest I'd be dead.”
“That's your version of events.”
“Backed up by the eyewitness evidence of half a dozen other agents who saw the entire fiasco and also captured it on video.”
The deputy director jumped back in abruptly and the Treasury man suddenly shut up. There was little he could say against a video. And even Garrick had forgotten that there would be video of the event. The FBI tried to take video of all their most high profile take downs. It was useful in court after the event, and as training material. But eventually the Treasury man tried to defend the indefensible once more.
“Mistakes might have been made during the course of the arrest.”
The man did his best to hold his head up as he said it, but he couldn't. Not completely. And that was enough to make Garrick angry all over again.
“Mistakes!” Garrick wasn't in the mood for political double speak. Not after what he'd heard. “From what I've just heard three agents have been shot. One of them, namely myself, was gunned down in cold blood. The suspect is dead, denied the right
to due process. An operation has been completely botched. And it's not as if the operation wasn't notified in advance. Every police officer and agency within a hundred miles was informed of what was happening. Treasury included.”
And while he had no knowledge of when that had happened or who had done it, he knew it had been done. It was simply protocol.
“Those aren't mistakes. Hell, they aren't even incompetence. Your agent’s actions bordered on criminal recklessness, and I can think of a lot worse charges that could be levelled against them. Your agents will have to stand trial for what they did, and they are going to serve time!”
Or maybe not, he realised when he saw the deputy director's face suddenly darken. They deserved to face trial and do time, but politics was a dirty game. And this was about politics as much as law.
“As I said mistakes. My agents could have and should have done things differently. But they were trying to apprehend an armed man known to have killed another Treasury agent. They had to move quickly and decisively. Especially when the rest of the team weren't there as they should have been.”
“Killed a Treasury agent?” Suddenly Garrick's heart started pounding. “I've never killed anyone, least of all a Treasury agent!”
“Really?”
The Treasury guy was suddenly in his face once more and Garrick was worried. He was talking about murder. He was talking about the rest of his life being spent behind bars. Well, until the execution at least, because it was a Federal agent that had been killed.
“Care to prove that Hamilton?”
“Prove what? How can I prove a negative? Especially when I don't even know whom I'm supposed to have killed.” Which reminded him of the obvious. “Who am I supposed to have killed?”
“I don't have that information at hand. But rest assured an entire task force was set up to arrest you because of it.”
He didn't have that information at hand? That floored Garrick. And by the looks of things it took the deputy director back a bit as well. That was surely the first thing he should have known. And yet it made sense given that Garrick knew he hadn't killed anyone. Could this all be some sort of colossal screw up? Garrick didn't even know how to ask the question. So he returned to what he knew after taking a deep breath to calm his nerves.
“I didn't kill anyone. I don't know Armando Benedict. All I did was deliver a troubled teenager to her new school.”
“So you said to my agents, one of whom is now lying in a critical condition in another ward. You just happened to be there to bring a known confederate of Armando Benedict to safety.”
“I brought a troubled teen to school. Exactly as I said to your agents. Katarinka Nelos's Aunt Cassie turned up on my doorstep the night before and asked me to bring her to the Westlord Academy. She said she was getting herself into some sort of trouble, running a little wild, but didn't tell me the details. And she knew that since I had attended the Westlord Academy that it was a good school where her niece would be set back on the straight and narrow. So I did just as she asked me to.”
“You helped a fugitive to flee justice!” As if he wasn't already close enough the man leaned in even more and Garrick was treated to a wide angle view of his nose.
“I most certainly did not!”
The man was busy prosecuting him again and Garrick knew he shouldn't be doing that. If he was truly suspected of having committed a crime he should have been read his rights and then been questioned officially by a trained investigator. The fact that he hadn't even introduced himself said that he wasn't an agent. What he was doing was a mistake. It violated protocol. In fact it smacked of desperation. As if the wheels were falling off the wagon. As if he was desperate to get any sort of admission he could just so he could bring it to the press.
Maybe he wasn't in as much trouble as he thought? He could hope. Maybe it was time to knock those wheels a little further off the wagon. Garrick also noticed that the deputy director was standing there being awfully quiet. As if he thought Garrick was doing a good job of defending himself. And as he suddenly realised, it was about to get better.
“I asked your agents why they wanted to speak with Katarinka Nelos” Garrick repeated. “They said she was the girlfriend of Armando Benedict. She denied that by the way. And as she is fifteen it did seem a little unlikely. I then asked if they believed she was implicit in any of his crimes or if they had probable cause to arrest her. They said no. I asked Ms. Nelos if there was anything she wished to volunteer to the agents about Armando Benedict and she said no. At which point I informed the agents that she was a minor in my care, that I was not her parent or guardian, nor her lawyer, and that therefore I could not consent to her being interviewed. I also informed them where I was taking her and who would be acting as her guardian when she arrived at the Academy. If they wanted to interview her in relation to her association with a known criminal, they would have to go through her.”
“After that I drove the girl the rest of the way to the Academy and left her in the care of the headmistress of the academy. I believe your agents have had every opportunity to interview her there. And as far as I know she was not at the time charged with any crime so she could not be a fugitive. And as far as I know that is still the case.”
“You may check my logs as I made a full report of the incident, including the agents’ names and the fact that they could only have located her by tracking her cell phone.”
He added that because he knew they would have needed a warrant to do so and he couldn't imagine that they had actually got one based simply on her association with a crook. Not to track a minor. So the chances were that they'd claimed more than just that to get it. Given what had happened they would now have to show that they'd had cause.
“That's not what they say!”
“Well it's what happened and if they say different they're shit out of luck. I recorded the conversation.”
“What?!”
Suddenly the Treasury man changed his tune from that of prosecuting a suspect to one of utter shock as he took a step back. In fact he went completely pale as the ground was cut out from underneath him and he tried to think of something to say. But there wasn't a lot he could say. It was a breach of protocol to record a conversation without an interviewee being aware that he was being recorded, but a minor one since Garrick had never intended for the recordings to be used as evidence. And he had an acceptable reason for recording the conversation.
“As a tracker out in the field on my own a lot, I often record my conversations with suspects and witnesses so I can later recall and transcribe them accurately. Also, so that I can listen to them again later and examine what was said for clues I might have missed before. They aren't for evidential purposes. When three unknown agents walked up to me in a diner while I was in the midst of a pursuit for a serial killer I naturally recorded them as well. Especially when I knew that the only way they could have located either me or Ms. Nelos was through a cellular communications warrant. I had assumed initially that they had come for me. I assumed that it had something to do with my case. My report of that meeting contains an accurate transcription of the conversation and mentions that a recording was made.”
“The recorder was in my truck last I saw it. I'm happy to provide you with a copy and in fact I insist that you do request one since it will show that I acted ethically as well as in accordance with the law and my professional responsibilities as an agent of the FBI at every stage.”
He was lucky to have made the recording he thought. It should be enough to save his hide.
But the Treasury agents wouldn't be so lucky judging from the look of stupefied horror on their boss' face. That pleased Garrick more than a little. The bastards had shot him after all. But it also made him wonder just what the agents had said to their boss. Somehow he doubted it was the truth.
“Thank you Special Agent Hamilton. I'll make sure that a copy is forwarded to Treasury.”
If the Treasury man was looking as though he'd been hit in the head with a
shovel, the deputy director was looking very pleased all of a sudden. It looked like at least some of Treasury's fire had been put out. But that still left one dead Treasury agent to account for and that left Garrick worried. Could they really have some evidence that he'd been involved in the man’s – or woman's – death? Whoever the agent was? And how could the man not even have the name of the dead agent? That should have been the first thing he'd had. The whole thing smacked of desperation.
But as much as he wanted to ask he couldn't. He wasn't given the chance as the two men simply said farewell and walked off without another word. Marching out of the ward, deep in discussion. And by the looks of things the discussion wasn’t a friendly one. The deputy director was all but gloating and even though he had his back to him Garrick was sure the Treasury man was looking very nervous. He was in a hurry to get back and nail down the details of his case. He would be back though. Whoever he was Garrick was certain he would return. After all, he was now faced with the task of digging his department out of a hole. But still, Garrick had to wonder again – how could he not know the name of his dead agent? Maybe it was just too soon since the gun battle.
