Blood Money

by James Grippando

  At eleven P.M. Jack was pacing across the rug in his family room, ready to leave the house, waiting for the cell phone to ring.

  “You don’t have to do this,” said Andie.

  If it were about Sydney, Jack would have agreed with her. But it was about putting a stop to the guy who had left Celeste in a coma, strangled Rene, and threatened his grandmother. The plan wasn’t to get Sydney her life back. It was to catch a killer.

  “Yeah, I do,” said Jack.

  Sydney’s iPhone from Merselus was the key. All of her calls to Jack over the next ninety minutes would be from that phone to Theo’s cell. Using Jack’s cell wasn’t an option, as suddenly having a conversation with Sydney on a line that Jack had essentially abandoned after Rene’s murder would have surely raised suspicions in Merselus’ mind. It was enough that Sydney’s iPhone was infected with spyware, and the FBI had the technology in place to confirm that someone was actively monitoring the call in real time. And then they would know that Merselus was taking the bait.

  At five minutes past the hour, Theo’s cell rang. The intent was for the ensuing conversation to be for effect only, tied loosely to the script that Jack and Andie had worked out in advance. The less Sydney said the better, and Jack crossed his fingers in hopes that she didn’t screw it up. He put the phone on speaker so that Andie could hear.

  “Did you make a decision?” said Jack.

  “Yes.”

  “When can we meet?”

  “Slow down,” said Sydney. “Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying for sure that I’ll testify in court. I’m not promising I’ll even go to court.”

  Jack stopped pacing and bit back his anger. Just ten seconds into the implementation of the plan and Sydney was already ad-libbing. She really does think she’s a freakin’ movie star.

  “That’s fine, Sydney. I just want us to get together and talk. When can we meet?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Okay. Let’s meet at—”

  “At eleven thirty, Bayfront Park, in front of the central fountain.”

  That wasn’t Jack and Andie’s plan, but Sydney hung up before Jack could respond. Jack put the cell phone away, looked at Andie, and said, “She’s following her own script.”

  “She obviously doesn’t trust you,” said Andie.

  “Or anyone else, I would imagine.”

  Andie’s cell rang. It was her tech agent. The call lasted less than a minute, and then she shared the news with Jack.

  “Sydney’s call to you was monitored,” she said.

  “At least something went as expected,” he said, alluding to the curve Sydney had thrown them about the meeting place.

  “The FBI can work with her ad-libbing,” said Andie. “But that doesn’t mean you have to, Jack.”

  Jack thought about it. “If Merselus wanted me dead, I’d already be dead.”

  “That’s one way to look at it. But this is not without risk. Merselus could figure out that you’re trying to set him up and retaliate. He could come around to the view that you’re the only thing standing between him and Sydney and decide it’s time to take you out. Any number of things could go wrong.”

  “Are you trying to talk me out of this?”

  “I want you to go in with your eyes open.”

  Jack weighed it another minute, his gaze drifting down the hallway and coming to rest on the door to the guest bedroom, where Abuela lay sleeping. “What am I supposed to do, wait for my grandmother to end up like Rene?”

  Andie didn’t answer.

  “And while I’m at it, maybe I should tell the Laramore family that I have to drop their case against BNN because it could be dangerous to find out who grabbed their daughter by the throat. And I can just keep using Theo’s cell for the next six months while the FBI monitors my private phone lines, I can send Max to go live permanently with the Kayal family, and I can just forget about ever taking another walk from my office to Theo’s bar unless I want to get choked by some psycho jumping out of the bushes.”

  “It’s maddening, I know.”

  “Way beyond maddening,” said Jack.

  “So, it’s a go?”

  Jack started toward the front door. “Yeah,” he said as he grabbed his car keys from the hook on the wall. “Let’s do this.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Jack reached the park about ten minutes early, not quite eleven twenty.

  As the name implies, Bayfront Park abuts Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami. Biscayne Boulevard, the city’s widest thoroughfare, borders on the west, separating thirty-two acres of greenery, walkways, and serenity from the sheer face of the towering Miami skyline. To the south is the high-rise hotel from which the big glowing orange drops every New Year’s Eve—which Jack and Andie had learned the hard way was the perfect place for folks who hate cold weather but love that Times Square feeling of ringing in the new year while drowning in a sea of loud, drunken strangers.

  “I see you,” said Andie, her voice somewhat mechanical sounding in his earpiece. Jack did not reply; he had no microphone, as moving his lips could have tipped off Merselus that he was wired for communication.

  “Walk a little slower if you can hear me,” said Andie. She was confirming his reception.

  Jack slowed as he approached the Flagler Street entrance to the park’s main east-west axis. The central fountain was in sight and due east, halfway between him and the shoreline. The Miami Dade Courthouse was a short ride away on the elevated Metromover. Over the years, in many a trial, Jack had strolled past the park’s central fountain on his way to the beach chairs on the shoreline, where he would consult with passing dolphins and manatees on what verdict his jury might return.

  “Okay, we’re good,” said Andie. “Keep moving.”

  Jack resumed walking at his normal pace. Each step took him deeper into the canopy of tall trees and farther away from the urban glow of the office towers behind him. Soon he was entirely dependent on the moon and the streetlamps that lined the walkway to break the darkness. The amphitheater was up and over the embankment to his left, as was the Feng Shui Garden. Jack stayed on course, walking directly toward the fountain. It was quiet at this hour, essentially an oversize concrete bowl of motionless water on an enormous circle of coral-stone pavers in the dead center of the park.

  “Stop,” said Andie.

  He did. Jack was standing on the outermost ring of stone pavers that encircled the fountain. A string of park benches ran along the outer perimeter. Jack counted five homeless people asleep on the benches.

  He wondered if one of them was Merselus.

  Jack’s phone rang. The tech agents had rigged it so that Andie could hear.

  “Answer it,” said Andie.

  Jack took the call, expecting it to be Merselus. It wasn’t.

  “Meet me on the platform at the Bayfront Station,” said Sydney.

  Jack turned around. Miami’s Metromover was an elevated tram system that wound through downtown and the financial district. Jack could see the Bayfront Station from where he was standing, but this wasn’t part of the plan at all.

  “What?” he said.

  “You heard me.”

  “Sydney, what are you doing?”

  “Bayfront Station. Eleven forty-five.”

  The call ended. Jack checked the time. He had fifteen minutes—enough time, but none to waste. He walked while waiting for Andie’s instructions.

  Andie moved into reactive mode. She and her tech agent were inside an FBI special communications van, which was parked at ground level inside the garage at One Biscayne Tower, directly across the boulevard from the park. Two tech agents in the field were feeding her live-streaming video from surveillance cameras. She radioed position one on the rooftop.

  “Novak, can you get Bayfront Station from your current location?”

  “That’s affirmative,” he said.

  She knew position two—one of the “homeless” on a park bench near the central fountain—would be useless in his current location. She r
adioed him with instructions: “Hernandez, relocate to the top of the embankment at the amphitheater. You will be eye level with the Bayfront Station platform.”

  “Roger that.”

  She checked the map on the computer screen. No changes to perimeter control were required—the same streets and alleys were implicated. The ground team, however, required adjustment. Andie started with the undercover agent who was dressed, wigged, and made up to resemble Sydney Bennett—the bait to draw out Merselus.

  “Pederson to Bayfront Station. Eleven forty-five arrival.”

  “Roger,” came the reply.

  The rest of the ground team also needed adjustment if they were going to be in position to move in when Merselus showed his face. There were two more homeless guys, a touristy couple strolling in the park, a guitarist with a plate of coins sitting outside the entrance to the Metromover station.

  “Position three, to south entrance of Bayfront Park; position four, to bus stop at Flagler; position five, to corner of Southeast Second Street; position six”—the guitarist—“stay exactly where you are.”

  Andie checked the computer screen one more time. The final relocation was critical, and it took her tech agent a minute to compute the angles and come up with a clear line of fire for her sniper.

  “Haywood,” she said into her radio. “Rooftop, Edison Hotel. Friedman will meet you at the service elevator at the back of the building.”

  “Roger.”

  Andie switched to another frequency for the final instruction.

  “New destination is covered, Jack. Proceed to Bayfront Station.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Andie’s instruction ended with a crackle in Jack’s earpiece. New destination is covered. He wondered what that meant, exactly. A SWAT team in position? A sniper ready to take out Merselus?

  Paramedics standing by in case it all goes wrong?

  Jack was already at Biscayne Boulevard, the western border of the park. Traffic was light on the four northbound lanes between him and the elevated people-mover station, which rose up like an oil rig from the urban sea of concrete and asphalt.

  Jack stepped to the curb, then looked up at the platform across the street. A rubber-tired tram entered the station, and its doors slid open. One passenger got on. Two people stepped off and took the escalator down to the turnstile. The tram pulled away, leaving the platform unoccupied. Jack drew a breath, taking in the warm night air, and then started across the street.

  Andie’s voice was in his ear again. “No rush, Jack. Decoy to arrive exactly at eleven forty-five.”

  Decoy. He knew what Andie meant—the female agent disguised as Sydney Bennett, the bait who would lure Merselus into the trap. Jack’s head was already filled with worry, but Andie’s last communication had triggered yet another one, as he couldn’t help but wonder how many times Andie herself had been the decoy in one of her undercover operations.

  Jack jogged across the fourth lane to avoid being flattened by a Porsche coming around the corner. Bayfront Station was at the fulcrum of what had once been a famous hairpin turn in the first and only Grand Prix race to actually run in the streets of downtown Miami. Some drivers thought the race was still running.

  “Guitarist is one of ours,” said Andie as Jack approached the street-level entrance to the station. The tune sounded like something from the Gypsy Kings. The guy actually wasn’t bad.

  “You’re early,” said Andie. “Don’t want you trapped on the platform with nowhere to go. Stand where you are and listen to the musician.”

  Jack stopped. The guitarist transitioned into Cat Stevens’ “Moonshadow.” Really damn good.

  “Okay,” said Andie, “take the escalator up to the platform. Decoy will arrive in ninety seconds.”

  Jack fished a couple bucks from his wallet and bought a Metromover token from the machine. He dropped the change in the musician’s open guitar case, which drew a string of “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Nerves had a way of triggering funny thoughts, and special agent Cat Stevens had Jack thinking that it wasn’t just lawyers who yearned for another career.

  “You’re welcome,” said Jack. He pushed through the turnstile and started up the escalator. It seemed painfully slow, but Jack knew it was just the circumstances. Halfway up he spotted the Sydney decoy on the sidewalk across the street. She was walking toward the station.

  He wondered if Merselus saw her as well.

  Jack stepped onto the platform. It was cooler up there, a salty breeze blowing across the park from the bay. His gaze fixed on the FBI decoy as she crossed Biscayne Boulevard. She didn’t look all that much like Sydney Bennett. The blond wig, the scarf, the sunglasses at night—the entire getup was more like what Sydney might look like if she were trying not to be recognized in public.

  Jack moved to the thick yellow warning line in front of the track, right at the edge of the elevated platform. No trams were in sight. He looked up and down Biscayne Boulevard. To the north he could see all the way to the arena, home of the Miami Heat. He spotted a few pedestrians along the sidewalk, not knowing which ones were FBI agents, no way of knowing whether one of them was Merselus. If someone didn’t make a move on the decoy quickly, the whole mission would be a failure.

  Jack’s phone rang. He checked the number. It was from Sydney’s phone.

  Andie’s voice was in his earpiece. “Answer it.”

  Jack put the phone to his other ear. “This is Jack.”

  Silence.

  He glanced toward the escalator. The Sydney decoy was on her way up.

  “This is Jack,” he said into the phone.

  No response.

  Anger rose up inside him. Sydney’s entire role in the operation had been simply to call on her iPhone and tell Jack to meet her at the central fountain at eleven thirty. If Sydney was on a mission to take over and screw things up, she was playing a dangerous game. Jack put his phone away, but it chimed immediately with a text message.

  Check the bench, it read.

  He turned around to face the wood bench in front of the billboard in the center of the platform. The bench was vacant. He was completely alone on the platform until the Sydney decoy reached the top of the escalator. Jack glanced at her, then back at the bench, and something caught his eye. He stepped closer, closer. Then he saw it clearly, a polished copper hoop hanging from the armrest on the bench.

  It was Rene’s necklace.

  “Don’t touch anything,” the undercover agent told him.

  Jack stepped away from the bench, sickened by the symbolism of the swap.

  “He’s got Sydney,” Jack said.

  The agent said something into her hidden microphone about “abort,” which took it from obvious to official that the mission had failed.

  Jack’s gaze drifted back to the necklace on the bench, and he wondered if Sydney was still alive—and how much time they had.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Andie’s surveillance and apprehension team quickly shifted gears to abduction and recovery mode. The FBI communications van was at the exit to the parking garage, poised to speed down Biscayne Boulevard. Andie was buckled into the passenger seat with tech support on the line.

  “I need a location,” she said, her patience waning.

  “No GPS reading,” her tech agent said.

  “Damn.” Andie was certain that Merselus had found Sydney because she had screwed up the FBI’s directions on how to disarm GPS tracking on her iPhone.

  “We’re triangulating now,” tech said.

  Andie crossed her fingers. The electronic pulse that every cell phone in the power-on mode transmitted to cell towers every eight seconds was distinct from GPS tracking, but the process of triangulating between a cell phone and towers took more time.

  “Got it,” he said, and he gave her an approximate address, give or take a hundred-yard radius. Triangulation was less precise than GPS. “That’s the best we can do.”

  “That’s on the river.”

  “North of the
Brickell Avenue Bridge,” he said. “I’m sending you the coordinates now.”

  “Send them team-wide,” said Andie. “And thanks.”

  The driver hit the gas, and the tires squealed as the van raced out of the parking garage. They were headed south on Biscayne Boulevard as Andie confirmed backup and got on the line with Special Agent Crenshaw, whose team was already on the move in a black FBI SWAT van.

  Crenshaw asked, “How current are the coordinates?”

  “About four minutes ago.”

  “Four minutes? They could be five miles from there by now.”

  “It’s all we’ve got to go on for now.”

  “How about an update?”

  “Not likely. Our guess is that he texted rather than called to try to keep the phone on for less than eight seconds. He barely missed it. We got one reading when he sent the text, which by itself may not have been enough for us to triangulate. Got a second pulse just before the phone was powered off, which gave us a little more data to work with. I wouldn’t expect him to turn on the phone again and send another pulse.”

  “Did you issue a BOLO?”

  Andie understood the point of his question. A be-on-the-lookout alert could draw everyone into the conflict—from local police to the neighborhood crime watch. Or even the media.

  “BOLO went out three minutes ago,” said Andie.

  “Shit,” said Crenshaw.

  “Had to do it,” said Andie. “If they’re speeding down I-95, I need highway patrol in the loop.”

  “Be on the lookout for what, though? Do you honestly think Sydney Bennett looks anything like what she looked like in trial?”

  “Probably not. But we have a decent image of Merselus that we lifted from a snippet of enhanced video taken by a Coast Guard officer of him and Sydney on the runway at Opa-locka Airport. He may not even know we have it, so it may be helpful.”

  “Send me that now,” said Crenshaw. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you supplement the BOLO with the usual multijurisdictional caveat.”