“As you see,” Louise said with a frown and a tone of grave concern, “it looks as if the Israelis have their hands full this morning.” She raised her fingers to her earpiece and added, “Jeff, we have a new feed coming in from Tel Aviv,” as a grainy black-and-white photo of a dark-skinned Arabic-looking man with a well-trimmed black beard and moustache filled the screen. Dressed in combat fatigues, he held an AK-47 over his head, exhorting a crowd.
“Yes,” Jeff chimed in seamlessly. “While no group has taken credit yet, our State Department sources say this is more work of Black Flag. They are a Hamas fringe group led by the secretive Ibrahim Al-Bari, shown here in a file photo. The Israelis are now confirming that one of Al-Bari’s younger brothers is believed to have died in the bus attack, and the other was among the dead fished out of the Mediterranean this morning. Unfortunately, there is no word on the fate of their older brother.”
“Well, we can all hope they track him down soon,” Louise said as the camera switched back to her. “But what effect do you think these recent incidents will have on the peace process?”
“You could ask, what peace process, Louise? Everyone knows that the Israelis won’t wait very long before they hit back, and hit back hard.”
“Still, with all the other problems President Wagner has on his plate right now, and his poll numbers dropping like a rock, you have to wonder.”
“Yes, we do,” Jeff turned to the camera with his most ‘concerned’ expression. “So, today’s question is, ‘Terrorism. Can it happen here?’ ”
“TV-6 wants to know,” Louise added. “If you think it can, dial 577-0001. If you don’t, then dial 577-0002.”
“We’ll have your answers at 11:00, right here on Washington’s TV-6,” Jeff said as he stacked his papers and the TV screen cut to a Mop-and-Glo floor-cleaning commercial.
“And Jeff can dial 1-800-Kiss-My-Ass,” Charlie said as he looked up at the screen and shook his head. “You gotta hand it to them Israelis,” he said. “They don’t take no crap from nobody — not from the press, the lawyers, Congress, or even that nitwit we got in the White House.”
“No, they don’t, but they get more than their share anyway.”
Charlie took another long pull on the beer and looked over at Barnett with a sly grin. “By the way, wasn’t that your Louise up there on the tube?”
“My Louise? Oh, that’s funny, Charlie, real funny… and if she hears you called her ‘mine’, she’ll smack you silly.”
“Okay! Okay. Your old ex-sometimes-girlfriend, Louise, then.”
“And if she hears you call her ‘old’ or ‘ex’, it’ll be even worse.”
“Me? I never understood what she saw in your sorry ass to begin with, but you are flat-out nuts to let a good-lookin’ woman like that get away.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“It always is,” Charlie said wistfully as he looked at the Band-Aid on the younger man’s forehead and drained the last of his beer. “But how can Louise stand working with that clown Jeff?”
“Money,” Barnett was quick to answer. “Lots of money.”
“Still, you need to figure out some way to make it right with that girl. You love her, she loves you…”
“And we are terrible together. You know that.”
“Eddie, I been married to Norma Jean for forty-two years, ever since J. Edgar gave me a job, so don’t make me laugh. You don’t know nuthin' about women. That’s your problem.” Finally, Charlie glanced at his watch. “Well, it’s ‘show time’, Podnah — time for you and me to make a house call on old Billy-Ray Perkins.”
Wisniewski slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar and slid off his stool. They were both wearing navy blue nylon windbreakers with “FBI” written across the back in large, neon-yellow letters. Charlie reached under his left arm, pulled out a long, hog-leg, .357-magnum revolver, and spun the cylinder to check the load. As Barnett watched, Charlie did the same for the ‘official’ Bureau-issued Glock 9-mm automatic he carried in a second holster on his hip, seating a round in the chamber, and patted his ankle to make sure the small .32 caliber Beretta automatic ‘bail-out’ gun was still there.
Barnett shook his head. “If you ever fall in the water with all that hardware on, you’re gonna drown,” he said.
“Maybe, but if you ever served warrants in the Cabrini-Greene housing project in Chicago, like I did, you’d carry a bazooka, if they let you.”
Barnett smiled and shook his head, knowing his own .38 caliber Police Special snub-nose revolver was securely clipped to his belt in the center of his back.
“A little pop-gun like that don’t cut it no more, Eddie. It’s gonna get you killed.”
“Not if I shoot straight.”
With their usual pre-op needling over, the two men headed for the door, exchanging knowing glances with a few of their cop friends sitting around the bar. Outside, the twilight had faded into a lovely autumn evening. Charlie paused at the curb and sniffed the air. “Nice night. Too bad we gotta go out and screw it up.”
They had drawn a battered gray Ford sedan from the motor pool and left it parked under a ‘No Parking’ sign near the corner. As they neared the car, both men suddenly sped up and headed for the driver’s side door.
“I’ll drive,” Barnett said as he reached for the door handle.
“The hell you say!” Like a good NHL defenseman, Charlie got one of his prodigious hips in the way and cut him off. “I’ve got six months ’til retirement, Eddie. Norma Jean’ll thump my butt good, if she hears I ever got in a car with you behind the wheel again.”
“Oh, come on. It’s only a wreck from the DEA impound lot, Charlie.”
“It ain’t the car Norma Jean’s worried about, it’s me; and I gotta live with that woman.”
“Ah, she loves me,” Barnett gave up and walked around to the passenger side.
“But she don’t love your driving.”
“Not all those accidents were my fault. Haven’t you ever heard of ‘hot pursuit’?”
“Hot pursuit? That was the third car this year. If it happens again, the Director’ll have your ass and mine too… if Norma Jean leaves him any.”
“Okay, okay, you can drive.” The passenger seat was all the way forward, so Barnett squeezed inside and shoved it as far back as it would go. The cushions were dirty, the car smelled of cigarette smoke, and the rear floor was littered with Taco Bell wrappers, Chinese take-out boxes, and cardboard Starbucks coffee cups. “Damned day shift,” Barnett mumbled.
“What? You think they’re gonna leave us something nice? Besides, this wasn’t the day shift. Our guys don’t eat crap like that,” he threw a thumb toward the back seat. “I heard DEA used it for a stake-out and stuck us with the mess. But Starbucks? Where the hell do those DEA clowns get the money to buy freakin’ Starbucks?”
“We’re in the wrong end of the business.”
“What was your first clue?”
Their old sedan merged into the steady stream of red, rush-hour taillights. To the left and right they passed the City’s big floodlit monuments — the Washington, the Lincoln, the Reflecting Pool in the Mall, the Capitol, and finally the White House itself, cold and white as seen from two blocks away over the rings of barricades. The perfectly manicured lawns were surrounded by decorative wrought-iron fences and a myriad of less visible electronic ones. Thick concrete bollards blocked the surrounding streets, driveways, and parking lots from traffic. Through the trees, they could barely make out the dim shapes of men in dark suits on the move, talking into radios. Barnett knew there were many more Secret Service agents around, prowling the grounds, walking the perimeter, and keeping watch on the roof. Up there, they were dressed in black, wore baseball caps, and carried night vision scopes, sniper rifles, and even anti-aircraft missiles.
“Look at that,” Charlie grumped as he glanced over and shook his head. “Twenty years ago, you could drive by the White House, park, and walk right up to the gate. Now, it is Fortre
ss America. What the hell are we teachin’ our kids?”
“Probably how to survive,” Eddie answered as he slumped down in the seat.
It was late enough now that the District’s normally thick rush-hour traffic had begun to ebb. They turned northeast past some of the City’s posh retail streets lined on both sides with trees and trendy shops. Continuing into the darker, seamy residential streets beyond, the trees began to lose their leaves and ‘trendy’ turned to trashy, abandoned, and half-vacant.
“I’m getting tired, Charlie,” Eddie told him.
“Try gettin’ to bed on time.”
“Not that kind,” he sighed. “I’m tired of this crap. What do you and I ever get? College kids at Georgetown running a real estate finance scam in a fraternity basement, New Jersey ‘wise guys’ short-sheeting the Navy with cheap wire cable, and now, some good-old-boys from the way back ‘hallers’ of Pickshin, West Virginia, exercising their God-given constitutional right to stick up branch banks with AK-47’s. If they weren’t so dumb, they’d be funny, and I’m just flat tired of it. The wrong end of the business? It’s a lot more than that. I’d like to get something that has at least a hint of dignity for a change. You know what I mean?”
“Eddie, I got six months… do you know what I mean? Besides, Billy-Ray and his three cousins may look like an episode of Duck Dynasty, but he happens to be a particularly nasty piece of work and you know it.”
“Yeah, nasty and dumb as dirt. Where’s the challenge there?”
“Why don’t you decide that after we catch him. Besides, you got nobody to blame but yourself. You keep pissin’ off the Director. He may not be able to fire you, but he can sure as hell give you every dead-end job that pops up.”
“Well, when we do finally bag him, I wish somebody would figure out a way to keep ’im in jail long enough for us to finish the paperwork before he’s back on the street again.”
Suddenly, Charlie’s eyes flashed and he studied Barnett for a moment. “Wait a minute. I got it, now! All this pissin’ and moanin’ ain’t about Billy-Ray, the car, or you being tired, is it? It’s about Louise. Oh, yeah,” he grinned and pointed his finger at the younger agent. “She threw you out again, didn’t she?”
“Just because Louise and I decided to elevate our relationship to a higher plain of mutual understanding and affection…”
“What? You popped the question and she turned you down again? Like that ain’t happened before.”
“Not exactly.” Barnett took a deep, reluctant breath. “This time it was kinda the other way around.”
“She asked you? And you said no? Oh, that was a really bad idea, Eddie!”
“I think I know that now,” Eddie said as he touched the Band-Aid on his forehead.
“With Louise that could be a near death experience. What did she throw this time?”
“An ashtray.”
“An ashtray?” Charlie started coughing, turning red in the face as he tried not to laugh. “Huh! I thought she quit smoking… then again, I guess she could have quit bowling, or horseshoes.”
“Or darts.”
CHAPTER TWO
Northeast DC, Friday, September 20, 10:50 p.m.
Billy-Ray Perkins was a quintessential redneck from Pickshin, West Virginia. It’s at the ass end of nowhere, back in the hills where guns, drugs, and moonshine trump law or order and a big night out was making the long drive to Beckley for dinner at Hardy’s. Billy-Ray and his three cousins — Larry, Mo, and Curly as the Feds called them — were wanted on at least a half-dozen open Federal warrants for bank robbery, interstate flight to escape prosecution, running guns up I-95 from South Carolina to the gang bangers in New York City, assaulting federal officers, and the importation of whatever kind of illicit drugs Billy-Ray could get his hands on. Barnett could never figure out whether Billy-Ray was a user who liked to sell the leftovers, or a dealer who was into serious product sampling, but he usually washed it down with Jack Daniels straight from the bottle. In the end, it didn’t matter. Whether it was the drugs, the booze, or sniffing too much glue, he was not the brightest bulb in the pack, but he was as determined and persistent as athlete’s foot. Barnett and Wisniewski had already caught him and arrested him twice, for all the good that did, and these reruns were getting tiresome.
“Let’s face it,” Eddie concluded, “he pays more for his lawyers than we do, and probably more for the judges, too.”
That night’s farce began when the local cops got a tip, probably from a neighborhood competitor, that Billy-Ray was back in town and hiding in a small, run-down house on the city’s northeast side. Eddie figured it was a waste of time, but Charlie decided they had to find out. “Why not,” he said. “You got something else to do?”
That was why the two FBI agents were in that dilapidated undercover car that night, slouched down in the front seat watching the house where Billy-Ray was thought to be hiding. It was a small white clapboard bungalow with a low-peaked roof, maybe four or five rooms inside, and a broad, covered front porch held up by four sagging white columns. ‘Back in the day’, the porch would have been screened, and the family would sleep out there to escape the District’s oppressive summer heat. That was before the gang bangers took over the neighborhood streets, and drive-bys drove people inside behind deadbolts, chain-link fences, and pit bulls.
Fortunately, Billy-Ray was too dumb to be original. This house looked exactly like the last one he hid out in, which in turn looked like every other house he had hid out in over the years. Barnett figured the weeds, the bare dirt ‘front yard’, the dead bushes along the porch, and the scattered beer cans reminded Billy-Ray of Mama’s house back in Pickshin. There was a rusting car sitting on cinder blocks in the driveway and a sagging, threadbare couch lying dead on the front porch. The front steps and front door were centered on the porch, with a double window on each side. There were more windows along the left and right sides of the house. Unfortunately, there were yellowed, roll-down shades on all of them, which someone inside had been intelligent enough to pull down. Behind the shades, several windows were open, allowing heavy metal music to pound its way across the street. Hide in plain sight? Whatever. Billy-Ray was a dumb redneck, but if he ever shifted his base to the suburbs and cleaned up his act, they would never find him.
Three hours later, Eddie had scrunched down in the corner of the front seat, eyes half closed, wrapped in his FBI windbreaker, with his brass badge and credentials wallet hanging on a chain around his neck. It was unlikely that a local police car would come nosing around wondering what they were doing here, but the last thing they needed was a ruckus with city uniforms. Charlie, on the other hand, was talking on his I-phone, looking at the old dilapidated house and doing a slow burn. “Where’s the goddamned warrant, Harry?” he demanded to know. “We’re ready to rock-and-roll here, and we still got no paper… Yeah, well, not to put a fine point on it, but we need a warrant; otherwise, it’s a freakin’ home invasion!”
Barnett could hear the loud and equally frustrated reply from the lawyer at the other end of the line. “The Judge won’t even see me until his dinner party’s over. What can I do? When he signs it, you’ll be the first to know.”
Charlie tried to end the call, but only ended up pushing buttons he did not understand. “I hate this goddamned thing! Smart phone? What’s that make me?” he asked as he finally got it turned off. “My kids got it for me and Norma Jean said I had to learn how to use it,” he said as he dropped the cell phone on the seat. “I’m losin’ it… I got six months left, and I’m losin’ it.”
“You can’t lose what you ain’t got anymore. You gotta learn how to chill, Charlie, or you’ll pop a pipe.”
“Chill? Chill! Billy-Ray and those three skinhead cousins of his have hit six banks, and here you and I sit waiting for some goddamn judge to finish his apple pie. It’s a bunch ’a crap, Eddie. That’s what it is, a bunch ’a crap!”
“Nah, it’s all that red meat and coffee you been pounding down. We are what we eat
, Charlie; we are what we eat… and those ‘police specials’ at The Hog don’t help, either.”
“Cute, real cute! You want Billy-Ray and his dirt-ball cousins to skate out on us and disappear again?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Barnett said as he sat up and stretched, stiff and sore. He had had enough. “Nah, I take that back. I want a clean car, a new front seat, and I want something to do, something useful and real for a change. That’s what I want.”
“Real? Those four clowns in that house, they’re all the real I want tonight.”
“Billy-Ray is a dumb cracker who can’t even spell ‘inter-state flight’.”
“Hey! You’re tired? You’re bored? At least you got that Egyptian to fall back on.”
“Who? Mouse?” he asked, referring to Moustapha Khalidi, the head of security at the Egyptian Embassy, who for some perverse reason had chosen FBI Agent Eddie Barnett as his conduit to pass on security information gleaned on Middle East terrorist groups.
“How come you’re bringing this stuff to me?” Barnett once asked the fastidious little Egyptian.
“Because I like you, Barnett,” Mouse smiled. “Are you complaining?”
“No, but why don’t you take this stuff through channels to State or the CIA? You know they get their noses all out of joint every time you do this?”
“Perhaps they’ll learn better manners. A number of our people have their noses out of joint over the way they treated some of their old friends during our recent ‘Arab Spring’ in Cairo. So, they may ‘pound sand,’ as you say, for all I care. Initially, it was my intention to pass things to an old school chum at ATF — alcohol, tobacco, and firearms — and give it all to him. The new Mullahs and ‘Thought Police’ in Cairo hate the CIA. They would have had no problem with the ‘firearms’ part of ATF, but they would take a dim view of all that ‘alcohol and tobacco.’ So, you are ‘it,’ my friend. Besides, as I hear it, being my ‘conduit’ is probably the only thing keeping you here and not exiled to Boise or Altoona, isn’t it?”
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