Electing To Murder

by Roger Stelljes

  Berman dropped the phone from her ear, “Cummings and Butler are trying to extinguish the fire to get to Connolly’s unit.”

  * * *

  Kristoff opened the door on the fourth floor and started running down the hallway, all the way towards the other end of the building, away from the stairway that came out in the main lobby. At the end of the hallway, he lit the wick and threw the last of his Molotov cocktails back down the hall and watched the fireball explode. As he closed the door, the stairwell down below started to flood with Watergate residents reacting to the fire alarm and order to evacuate the building. He mixed in with the residents as they made their way down the stairs.

  * * *

  Cummings and Butler reached the door for Connolly’s unit. Butler covered for Cummings who jumped into the unit, looked to his left and saw feet sticking out by the end of the center island to the kitchen.

  “Agent Berman, Connolly is dead, shot in the chest and head.”

  * * *

  Berman looked to the group, “Connolly is dead.”

  “Kristoff,” Wire muttered while Mac grabbed the building diagram off the wall to look at the available exits. Four Washington DC patrol officers came rushing into the lobby. Speck grabbed them and McRyan quickly handed out pictures of Kristoff. “We are looking for this man,” Mac held up a picture. “He is a professional killer and extremely dangerous.” McRyan looked everyone in the eye. “Understand?”

  Everyone nodded.

  Mac held out the building layout. Groups of two were assigned to all of the exterior exits and four men were assigned to the parking garage. “Grab more men as they come on the scene. Agent Berman and Speck, you have the lobby.”

  Mac and Wire started to walk out the front when Mac stopped and went back to the Security Desk. “Show me where the fires are in each of the hallways.”

  The security guard pulled up the fires. “The ones on eight and six are on the south ends of the hallways. The one on four is on the north end.”

  Mac looked at the building layout and for the north end emergency exit. “Let’s go,” Mac said to Wire and started running out the front of the building and turned left, running to the north.

  “What are you thinking?” Wire asked as she pulled out her Sig, and checked the clip.

  “That he’s trying to get away from the glut of people that’ll be coming into the lobby,” Mac answered at a full sprint. “Dara, he cut across the building before he set that last fire. He’s coming out on the north end.”

  * * *

  Kristoff pushed out of the stairwell and out onto the sidewalk along Virginia Avenue. Fire engines were approaching the scene on south bound Virginia Avenue. As the truck passed him, he jogged across the street to the sidewalk on the far side, tearing off the beard and tossing his glasses in the process. Looking up he could see smoke billowing out from the balconies above.

  He kept walking and glanced again over to his right and he saw two familiar faces running along the sidewalk towards the stairway he just exited.

  * * *

  “Cripes, this is chaos,” Wire moaned as they approached the north stairwell emergency exit. Mac and Wire scanned the crowd but did not see any familiar faces. Mac stepped back away from the crowd and out onto Virginia Avenue which was now blocked off one block to the north by squad cars. In the middle of the street, he was able to take in the crowd milling around the Watergate Complex.

  “Where would you go? Where would you go?” Mac muttered as he scanned the crowd. “You wouldn’t hang out in the crowd; you’d be looking to get away. You wouldn’t draw attention to yourself. You’d be casual, walking, trying to look normal, but … averting your eyes.” He turned away from the Watergate Complex and looked on the other side of the street.

  “What are you looking for, Mac?” Wire asked.

  “For someone not watching what’s going on here,” Mac answered scanning back to the north on Virginia. “They’re walking away slowly, casually and trying to avoid attention.”

  “Like that man,” Wire pointed to the opposite side of Virginia Avenue, to the south, a man fifty yards away.

  * * *

  Kristoff had his hands in his pockets and was walking south down Virginia Avenue, two blocks from his car now.

  Two blocks from escaping.

  Two blocks from retirement.

  He took one last look back. McRyan was staring at him.

  * * *

  “Kristoff!” Mac barked as he took off at a full sprint, Sig Sauer in his right hand. Wire was right behind him.

  * * *

  Kristoff sprinted straight south down Virginia Avenue behind the fire trucks now parked on both sides of the street, the firemen in the process of connecting hoses to the fire hydrants and pumper trucks. He unzipped his coat and pulled the Walther out of his waistline and when he got to the last of the fire trucks he ducked behind the front of the truck and brought up the gun.

  * * *

  The first bullet hit a tree behind Mac but the sound of the bullet was unmistakable to him as he ducked between two fire trucks as two more shots ricocheted off the steel of the fire rigs.

  “Suppressor!” Mac yelled back at Wire.

  “Get down! Get down!” Wire yelled to the confused firemen seeing people with weapons drawn. Mac pointed to his St. Paul Badge on his belt. In the melee, a cop looked like a cop, DC or St. Paul.

  “There he goes! There he goes!” Mac heard numerous voices scream. He peeked back around the edge of the fire truck and saw Kristoff running again, a block ahead. Mac gave chase with Wire right on his six.

  * * *

  Kristoff couldn’t continue straight, he veered left behind a large office building and into a small open air parking lot between the building and a church. The lot was full of parked cars. As he reached the last car in the lot, he ducked behind to check back.

  He was a little over a block from his car now. He just needed to slow down the pursuit and get lost between the buildings.

  * * *

  Mac saw Kristoff dart into the parking lot. He ran to the edge of the large building and Wire pulled right up behind him. He crouched down and peeked around the corner. Two shots hit the building.

  “That fucking suppressor, I can’t get a bead on him,” Mac groaned.

  Wire saw the car twenty feet in front of them. “Cover me,” she said. “You should be able to get a fix on him if he fires.”

  “You sure?” Mac asked, looking back at Wire who was crouched down behind him.

  She nodded, “Yes.”

  “Go,” Mac whispered and peeked back left around the corner.

  Wire, down in a crouch, ran for the rear of the car. Even with the suppressor on Kristoff’s weapon, Mac got a fix. He zeroed in and fired twice.

  * * *

  McRyan’s second shot caught the top of his right arm. Kristoff winced in pain as he turned away and ran underneath a grouping of trees and across the opening for an entrance to underground parking for another building. He turned the corner around the building and sprinted across H Street and turned left onto Twenty-Fourth Street. He took the key fob out of his left pant pocket.

  * * *

  “He’s running again!” Mac said as loudly as he dared and he and Wire gave chase, but a little cautiously now as they worked their way through a grouping of trees. They quickly zigzagged their way from tree to tree covering each other and then both of them spread apart and ran across the opening for the parking garage and came to H Street.

  “Now where?” Mac asked urgently.

  “He’ll want a car,” Wire answered and pointed to the right. “Cars are parked on Twenty-Fourth.”

  Mac started jogging, his weapon up in front, staying close to the building on the corner of H and Twenty-Fourth, Wire fanning out to his right, behind the cars parked on H.

  Mac heard the unmistakable sound of a car alarm system being shut off with a key fob on Twenty-Fourth.

  He looked to Wire who nodded.

  Mac carefully pushe
d his way around the corner. Halfway up the block he saw a man approaching a car.

  Then he saw another man.

  * * *

  The assassin stepped out of his car and walked back towards Kristoff’s. Kristoff was looking back down the street for his pursuers.

  * * *

  Kristoff turned back to get into the car when he saw him.

  The man was unmistakable.

  It was the assassin Paolo.

  The Bishop betrayed him.

  Kristoff instinctively tried to raise his right hand to shoot but wounded, he was too slow. The first shot from Paolo hit him in his chest and knocked him off balance.

  The second shot blew him off his feet and backwards onto the pavement.

  Kristoff struggled for air as he looked up to see Paolo approaching. The assassin gauntleted his right hand into his left palm. It was just like ten minutes ago with Connolly. You had to finish the job.

  “Sorry,” Paolo said flatly.

  “DROP THE GUN! DROP IT NOW!” Kristoff heard voices yell. Paolo raised his right arm towards the voices. The first shot into Paolo’s chest caused a small gasp. The second shot blew him back and the third shot hit him in the forehead, dropping him.

  Kristoff couldn’t move and his breaths were getting short. He heard footsteps approach and then there he was standing over him, Mac McRyan. The St. Paul detective looked down at him, gun at the ready. McRyan stepped over him and with his left foot, kicked the Walther away and then he leaned down. Wire appeared in view and she had her cell phone out, holding it with two hands, filming.

  “Kristoff, Kristoff, look at me, look at me,” McRyan directed. “Nicholas, look at me. The Bishop sent that man to kill you. The Bishop, who is he? Who is he?”

  Kristoff smiled a bloody smile. His boss never wanted to leave any loose ends. He’d spent ten years tying up his boss’s loose ends. Only now, did he realize that he was a loose end, the last tie back to the boss, the last liability to take care of.

  “Who’s the Bishop! Tell me!” McRyan pleaded with him. “He betrayed you, Nicholas. Tell me who he is?”

  The Bishop would not get away this time.

  Kristoff gasped as he leaned up to speak. “Pope.” He coughed and felt the blood come out of his mouth. “Christian … Pope.”

  * * *

  McRyan’s jaw dropped. “Christian Pope? Christian Pope is the Bishop? Christian Pope of Pope Oil & Gas, P. O. & G. is the Bishop?” he asked Kristoff again.

  Kristoff gave one last smile and gasped, “Y… y… yes, yes.”

  He looked back at Wire, who was shocked.

  McRyan looked back down to Kristoff, hearing the sirens approaching their position. They wouldn’t arrive in time for him. The killer went still. Mac checked for a pulse and there was none. Kristoff was gone.

  Mac looked up to Wire who’d been filming with her phone. “Tell me you got that?”

  She played with her phone and played the video back, “Oh yeah. I got it, Mac.”

  Mac stood up and shook his head at Wire, a look of utter disbelief on his face. “You can’t make this shit up.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “He’s not dead.”

  Judge Dixon stood in front of the large flat-screen television set up underneath the stands at Scottrade Center in St. Louis. The next campaign event would start in a mere ten minutes with speeches from local dignitaries who would fire up the crowd for the governor. Until late last night when the polling data on the scandal started to show a dramatic shift in the polls, the campaign wouldn’t have even thought of staging an event in Missouri, let alone their next and last stop of the campaign, Phoenix, Arizona. Missouri and Arizona were in the vice president’s column, he was up by, on average, eight points in each state. But in a mere twenty-four hours, there was a sea change in the race.

  The Judge rolled his cigar with his right thumb and index finger while he watched the television footage of the fire at the Watergate. It was a victory cigar now. His left hand in his pants pocket was fiddling with the lighter. Voters still had to go to the polls tomorrow but the vice president’s campaign was fully ensnared in the voting machine scandal. Wellesley was getting killed by the media, his own party and from the looks of the polling data, voters. Alternatively, the scandal had significantly intensified the motivation and enthusiasm of Democrats. For the past two weeks, the crowds for Governor Thomson had been growing larger and more enthusiastic by the day. But today, the crowds were in another world, loud, large, fired up and pissed off. Democrats were frothing at the mouth to go to the polls now. Dixon lit his cigar and let the smoke linger and float around him.

  The scandal was having the opposite effect on the other side of the political spectrum. The crowds for the vice president on his last day of campaigning were small, unenthusiastic and you could just feel the pall that had fallen over the campaign. In an absolute rarity, the vice president cancelled his last two events, having thrown in the towel.

  The media was in full attack mode and Republican candidates were avoiding the media at all costs. When more Democrats than Republicans are appearing on FOX News, you know people are running for cover. On top of that, all of the Super PAC advertising for the vice president had been pulled and was being applied towards saving representatives and senators down the ballot. The only question now was whether the victory for Governor Thomson would be a landslide or merely a wide victory margin.

  The Judge knew the vice president and liked him personally. When the Judge was the attorney general, he’d worked extensively with the vice president, then chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he found him a reasonable and honorable man. But the people you hire reflect on you and you’re responsible for them. The vice president hired Connolly. It didn’t matter that Connolly was forced on him as the supposed genius political mind of the party. The vice president could have said no. He didn’t. Wellesley was now paying the price for that decision.

  The Watergate was in flames, once again at the center of a national scandal. The irony of the situation was not lost on Dixon or the governor who now joined him to take in the reporting.

  “Once again a Republican’s political career is in ashes at the Watergate,” Governor Thomson remarked as he and his campaign chief took in the news footage around the complex. “Remind me to tell our staff that nobody should live there.”

  The scene around the Watergate looked to be one of sheer chaos as smoke continued billowing out of the windows of the complex, the flashing lights of the fire trucks and other emergency vehicles illuminating the scene that was serving as the colorful background for reporting for all of the cable news channels now, the Washington Bureaus taking the unusual step of covering a fire. While Dixon and the governor knew that Connolly had perished, that part of the story was just now coming to light.

  “Connolly got what he deserved,” Dixon remarked as he put the cigar between his lips and lit it, letting smoke billow out of him.

  “You really think so?” the governor said evenly. “You think he deserved to die?”

  Dixon shrugged. “He was already dead, shooting him in the head simply made it official.”

  “Kinda harsh,” Thomson teased.

  “Wow, you’re defending the guy who called you, and I quote: ‘A deranged liberal intent on taking your guns, your money and your liberty.’”

  “We said some pretty nasty, perhaps hyperbolic things about the vice president as well.”

  Dixon was nonplussed. “Politics is politics.” The Judge took another drag on his cigar and slowly let the smoke filter out of his mouth. “I never liked Heath but I knew him fairly well and have seen his type come and go for years. Politics was the man’s life, it was all he had. If he didn’t have another race to run, some other candidate to take on, some focus group to test, polling to take and negative advertising to run, he would have just wasted away. On top of that, he was simply a piece of shit. I won’t lose a wink of sleep over his death, not a one.”

  “And I hear our peo
ple were on the scene of this chaos?”

  “Our people?”

  “Yeah, Wire and McRyan.”

  The Judge laughed a hearty deep guttural laugh.

  Governor Thomson didn’t get it. “What?”

  “McRyan as one of us,” Dixon shook his head, chortling.

  “I know, I know,” Thomson smiled. “He doesn’t work for us but he feels like he’s one of us, ya know. I like him and we sure as hell owe him and Wire. We owe them huge.”

  “That we do,” Dixon replied, taking a drag off of his cigar. “That we do.”

  “Has anyone actually talked to either of them?”

  “I was on with Wire about ten minutes ago. She called to let me know Connolly was dead and that there were two other dead bodies, from one of which she and McRyan got some interesting information that she wasn’t yet at liberty to share, but it will be shocking when it comes to light.”

  “And has Ms. Kennedy talked to McRyan?”

  The Judge turned nodded towards Kennedy a hundred feet away, standing by herself in the hallway, talking on a cell phone.

  “She looks rather animated,” the governor observed wryly.

  Dixon guffawed, “Mac’s getting his ass chewed.”

  * * *

  “Jesus Christ, Mac, please, please, please tell me you weren’t in another shootout?” Sally demanded.

  “Weeeelll,” Mac answered, “so we get to the Watergate to question Connolly and then there was a fire, followed by mass panic and one thing led to another and …”

  “And you end up chasing a trained killer in the dark through the streets of Washington DC, streets you don’t know, I might add, and oh, let me guess, you didn’t even have a vest on?”

  Mac’s head dropped. No, he didn’t have his vest on. His silence answered the question.

  “Cripes, you could have gotten your head blown off.”

  “Vest wouldn’t have done me much good if he hit me in the head,” Mac quipped back.

  “Don’t be flip.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What are you, a magnet for these kinds of people?” Sally railed.

  “I try not to be,” Mac answered. “But they do seem to gravitate to me.”