Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  She said, “Well, that’s great. Do you want to pick it up right away, or after you sell your truck?” Selling Brad’s truck was the major item on the schedule today, before getting the welcome news that the sail was ready. His pickup was excess, since she owned both the motorcycles and the van. His much newer F-250 was worth several times more than her old Econoline, and they planned to sell it for a large chunk of cruising cash. Brad figured that every thousand dollars of cash could buy them another month or two of freedom in the tropics.

  “I’d like to go get it now, then take it out to Guajira. We can sell the truck later this afternoon. I’ll just feel a lot better when that sail is on the boat; I need to run it up and make sure everything fits. I really want the boat ready to go, just in case.”

  “Do you need help with the sail? How big is it?”

  “Oh, I can handle it all right. Folded up and bagged, it’s going to be about as big as this table top, and about a foot thick. Maybe a hundred pounds; I can handle it.”

  “Well I’ve got some chores to run over in Norfolk and Portsmouth…some insurance papers to sign, and some banking. And I want to buy some prepaid cell phones; we can’t keep depending on pay phones if we need to get in touch.”

  “Get a couple of the throwaways, the el-cheapo kinds in the foil packs. Sixty minute ones should be fine, and pay cash…”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. I’ll get the kind that you don’t have to register to use.”

  “Sixty minute ones should last us until we’re gone,” he said. “But only for us to call each other; nobody else that the feds might possibly be monitoring. I’d rather not use any cell phones at all than take a chance on that.”

  “As long as we’re careful, we’ll be all right.”

  “Yeah. That’ll work. Hey, after I take care of the sail, I’ve got some other things to do too; some banking and shopping back on the Norfolk side. How about hooking up later, down there?”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll be shopping at Boat America, over in Virginia Beach on Shore Drive. It’s a good place to hang out; I can wait there until you’re finished. What’s a good time?”

  “How about noon?” she replied.

  “Noon sounds fine.”

  “I’ll go get my van in Norfolk. We can have lunch somewhere, and then work on getting rid of your truck. Where are you thinking about selling it?”

  “Virginia Beach Boulevard. That’s the best place; there’s one used car dealer after another. They’re going to rip me off, but it’ll be worth it. We’ll need all the cash we can get.”

  “Well I’m not going to sell my bikes, I’m going to put them in a mini-storage. My Enduro is still in the shed back behind my…where my house was. I’m going to get my van and pick it up today, before it gets ripped off. And Brad, I still can’t believe you don’t ride! As soon as we get time, I’m going to fix that! My Night Hawk is the perfect bike to learn on, it’ll be a breeze for you. You turned me on to sailing, and I’m going to turn you on to motorcycles! You can drive a stick shift, I hope?”

  “Hey, I’m not a complete loser. Of course I can drive a stick.”

  The idea of teaching Brad to ride put the smile back on her face, and she unconsciously squeezed and stroked his hands across the table. She had loved riding her Yamaha FZR alongside his truck on the way up to Poquoson, and was now eagerly looking forward to them riding side by side. “Seriously, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on…”

  He was also smiling; they were forgetting their fears for a moment. “I always wanted to learn to ride, but I never got around to it. But now that I have my own personal instructor, I’ll do it.”

  “You’re damn right you will! I’ll teach you how to ride, I’m a good instructor, I’ve taught a few people. You’re going to totally love it! It’ll just take you a few days, and you’ll wonder why you wasted all those years hiding inside of cars.”

  “Maybe there won’t be time, maybe in a few days we’ll be out of here, out on the ocean.”

  “Maybe. How long do you think it’ll take us to find George?” she asked.

  “I don’t know… I wouldn’t get too close to the federal building and try to follow him from there, I’m sure they’ve got cameras all around it. Probably those face recognizing cameras. We definitely don’t want to be lurking anywhere around there.”

  “So dressing in a sexy delivery uniform and strolling into the BATF offices saying ‘flowers for George, where’s George?’ won’t cut it?” Ranya slipped down her sunglasses, and winked at him. “I could hide my .45 in a flower box, and walk him right out of there.”

  She was so damn pretty when she was happy and smiling, Brad thought. Her eyes looked more greenish than hazel today, he wanted to lean across the table and kiss her all over her face. “Uh, no. I don’t think that would be such a great idea. Just getting his last name is going to be a problem. We could do some internet searching, check the federal employee registries for local FBI and ATF personnel assignments, things like that, but those databases are probably classified these days. Anybody that checks those sites is probably going to get their computer flagged, so we’ll have to be careful how we do it. And their personal phone numbers are all unlisted, I know that.”

  Ranya didn’t bring up how she had found the Attorney General’s address in the ODU library. But then, she had his full name to work with, and he was a public official, not a federal agent. She had another idea. “He gave you a cell phone, right? To contact him?”

  “Sure, but I let the batteries run down. I didn’t want him using it to track me.”

  “Well why don’t you just charge it up and give him a call? Tell him you heard something. Offer him some hot information, but tell him you need to have a meeting.”

  “What if he asks me to come to the federal building? I’m not going near that place, no way! And once I call him, he’ll be able to track my location off the cell phone. I’m not too cool with that.”

  “Maybe after you call him, we can use the phone as bait, to draw him to us?”

  “But what if he comes with a whole team? He could have the whole meeting area crawling with undercover feds. That might work for taking a shot at him, from long range, but that won’t work for grabbing him. How about we just shoot him and be done with it?”

  They were talking very quietly, their heads close together, sweetly holding hands across the table while calmly discussing kidnapping a federal agent. They were in a back corner booth; no one was near them. When the waitresses came near, they paused in their talk.

  Ranya said, “We have to set it up as a meeting, and try to arrange it so that he comes alone. Offer him enough of a tip to make it interesting, but not enough for him to bring a backup team.”

  “I don’t see how we can control all that. He’s like an agent handler here; he’ll set up the meeting, and he’ll want to control it. It’s the only way they do it; they never let an informant set the time and the place. It’s a control thing.”

  “I think it’s still our best chance. Anyway, let’s think about it; let’s think of a good story to tell him to bait the trap. Some way to get him to come alone. If we think about it for a while, we’ll come up with something… We’ll figure it out. Hey, we’re done here aren’t we?”

  “Yeah, we’re done. Let’s roll.”

  She grabbed her black helmet and daypack from the seat next to her, and they got up and walked out. Brad left cash for the bill and the tip on the table.

  34

  George Hammet rolled into STUville at 1115. He had phoned ahead to Bullard to tell him that he had actionable information, and the team should be ready to move on it. Bullard called Malvone in Washington, and they all agreed it sounded promising, and they should press ahead.

  Hammet parked his red Jeep Cherokee directly outside of the cinderblock office building and went straight inside. He was still in his gray suit pants and wingtips, but even with his tie cast aside and his white shirt open at the collar he was s
till by far the most formally dressed.

  Bullard and Shanks were already inside, Silvari and Jaeger came from the interrogation center and joined them only a few moments later. George Hammet was jazzed up, much more cheerful than usual. He dropped his black leather attaché case on the conference table, popped it open, and removed a yellow file folder with a flourish.

  “Here it is gang: proof that the FBI is good for something. Even when they don’t know it.” He opened the folder and slid a series of eight by eleven inch color laser copies across the rough wood surface. “Recognize any of these people?” Hammet was grinning like a poker player who had just thrown down a winning hand on the final pot of the night. The pictures showed about a dozen people, mostly middle-aged males, in various poses and arrangements at an outdoor funeral. The perspective foreshortening indicated that they had been taken with a telephoto lens from a distance.

  Jaeger asked, “Who’s the babe? She’s a real hottie! I think she needs the complete Hollywood treatment.”

  Bullard had slipped on narrow reading glasses and marked an X over the head of an older man with gray hair, who was wearing a black suit and tie. “This guy looks like our guest, Burgess Edmonds.”

  “Bingo! Big Bob wins the cigar! Our Burgess Edmonds it is. These pictures have got the Fibbies at the Joint Task Force all worked up, but they don’t know half of what I know, and I sure wasn’t going to tell them! Nope, this is something I absolutely kept under my hat.”

  “Come on, just get to it, get to the point already,” said Michael Shanks.

  “All-righty then, here goes. So right here in the picture is Burgess Edmonds, the famous militia paymaster who is on the run with his fifty caliber sniper rifle. Really, that’s what they think at the JTF. They’ve got his pictures blown up and stuck all over the walls; they’re tracking him like he was John freaking Dillinger. What a joke! They’re clueless.”

  “Okay, we got that, now what do we need to know about these pictures?” asked Bullard.

  “Okay. That little ‘hottie’ is named Ranya Bardiwell. The stiff in the box is her dearly departed daddy; he was a federal firearms licensed gun dealer until he was shot and killed a week back. His store got burned down, and I guess he walked into a bullet. Shit happens… So this is his daughter, and you see this guy next to her in these two shots?”

  In the pictures Ranya Bardiwell was wearing a calf-length black dress with a high collar and full sleeves. Next to her was tallish man, late twenties or thirties, in long khaki pants and a blue blazer.

  “This guy is the prize. Gentleman, I give you Bradley Thomas Fallon, the man who assassinated Attorney General Eric Sanderson.”

  “No shit? How do you know that?” asked Silvari.

  “Because he’s one of my snitches, sort of. That’s how. This Fallon’s a dead shot, a real Hawkeye; the guy can seriously shoot the balls off a gnat a mile away.”

  “That’s all great, but what connects him to Sanderson?” asked Bullard.

  “She does. Tasty young Ranya Bardiwell does. She’s got the motive, her dead father. I guess you could say she’s on the other side in the gun debate, to put it mildly! Anyway, the Fibs have done some of the leg work. They’ve got these two making cell phone calls the evening of Saturday the 15th, that’s the night after her father was shot.

  “Okay, so they know each other? So what?”

  “Well, she’s a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and her cell phone places her up there until Saturday morning.” Hammet laid down a pair of computer printouts of their cell phone records, with one line highlighted in yellow near the bottom on each.

  “There’s no contact between either of them before this call on the night of the 15th. And then that’s it, no more calls between them, and they both just about stopped using their cell phones entirely. Both of them; look at the printout. Now that’s either a hell of a coincidence, or they hooked up and after that they decided to stop using their cell phones. Why? And Miss Bardiwell has dropped out of school, and dropped out of sight.”

  “Where’s Fallon now? You said he’s your CI?”

  “Wait, I’m not finished with Ranya Bardiwell yet. The JTF went through all the internet accessible databases that have anything to do with Sanderson, to see if anybody’s been doing research on him. And they got a cluster right here on Sunday the 16th, all in five minutes. Deeds, mortgage records, utilities, all of them focused on obtaining his home address.”

  Silvari asked, “So then they found the computer that made the queries, right? That should be slam dunk.”

  “They did, but then it gets even more interesting. The computer is in the library here at Old Dominion University. University, as in university student, as in Ranya Bardiwell. Anyway, the computer was logged to an ODU freshman; he’s been checked out and cleared. But lo and behold, he says he let somebody sit in on his time. A young lady asked to ‘check her email.’ The times match.”

  “So did he get a description?” asked Jaeger.

  “Not a good one. He just remembers she was a cute hippie chick in her early twenties, with a nice rack.”

  “So if it’s Bardiwell, she’s pretty smart. She didn’t use her own email account or her own computer,” said Silvari.

  “Put that together with the cell phone cutoff, and you’d have to say she’s smarter than the average bear, definitely. Those are two common mistakes she’s avoided,” said Hammet.

  “So she’s dropped out of school; where’s she staying now? With Fallon?” asked Jaeger.

  “Probably. Maybe,” said Hammet.

  “So where’s he live? Is the FBI onto him yet?” asked Bullard.

  “Well, this is where it gets interesting again. He lives on a boat,” replied Hammet.

  “On a boat? What kind of boat?” asked Shanks.

  “A sailboat, a great big sucker about forty feet long. But the FBI doesn’t know it yet; they’re still out to lunch. The task force doesn’t know what it’s got. If we move fast, we’ll beat them to the punch.”

  “So where’s this boat? You said he’s your informant, right?” asked Bullard.

  “Kind of, but he was never active. I put the squeeze play on him and tried to place him inside the Black Water Rod and Gun Club. He’s a big shooter; I originally found him last August at a rifle match down here. Then after the Stadium Massacre, he turned up on a surveillance video at a hardware store near Shifflett’s place; he was schmoozing with one of those Black Water guys. So I gave it a shot. I tried to infiltrate him into the Black Water club, but it didn’t pan out, and I moved onto bigger and better things. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t given Fallon much thought until I saw the funeral pictures this morning.”

  “So where’s his boat?”

  “It’s way up a river in Suffolk, or at least it was. It’s got no mast. He’s working on the boat; it’s kind of a fixer-upper deal.”

  “Up a river? Can we get there by road? Do we need to get boats now?” asked Bullard.

  “No, no boats, we can get to it by road. If he’s still there. That’s where he was when I recruited him.”

  Silvari said, “He’s not there, forget about it. He’s gone.” He said this with an edge of disdain. “Somebody who lives on a boat and suddenly stops using his cell phone, and then he goes and snipes out an Attorney General? You think he’s going to make it easy for us and stick around? He’s long gone.”

  “But his boat’s not finished; it’s got no mast,” replied Hammet.

  “It’s got a motor, doesn’t it? He didn’t get towed up that river did he?” said Silvari.

  “I don’t know Half-Ass, do you? Maybe he did get towed up there. The boat looked like a dump inside; tools and crap everywhere.”

  Bullard asked, “So what’s the JTF’s take on him? Are they all over this Fallon?”

  Hammet replied, “They know they’ve got something in those pictures, but Fallon’s not the top of their list. The Black Water gang is their primary focus, just like it was for us. Joe Bardiwell w
asn’t in the club, and neither was Fallon, and Fallon didn’t even move to Tidewater until last July. So Ranya Bardiwell and Fallon are on their radar, but they’re not in the center. The dangerous fugitive Burgess Edmonds is the center, him and the rest of the Black Water gang. They’re really not sure what they’ve got with Fallon yet. My ATF paperwork never made it to the JTF; we don’t spread our CI files around, obviously. The JTF has a list of some of the guns he’s owned, so they’re interested, but they don’t know how good of a shot he is. And I sure didn’t tell them.”

  “So what do they drive? Fallon and Bardiwell? They must have cars, we can find them that way,” said Bullard.

  “Fallon drives a red Ford truck; I’ve got their DMV sheets here. Bardiwell rides a motorcycle. Two motorcycles actually; she’s down for a Yamaha and a Honda.”

  Jaeger perked up. “No shit? Ranya’s got two rice burners?” He began studying the photos with new interest. “I think I’m in love! Maybe when we grab them, I’ll be able to get in some quality time with her.”

  Silvari asked Hammet, “Did you put a tracer on Fallon’s truck? He was your informant.”

  “No, and I wish I did. We don’t have enough tracers at the Field Office to put them on every vehicle that’s marginally interesting. We don’t have the STU’s budget, that’s for sure. I gave him a cell phone for contacting us, but it’s out of service. I checked.”

  “What about their plastic? It’s easy to give up cell phones, but have they stopped using credit cards?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see anything on that at the JTF.”

  Silvari flipped open his own cell phone. “Charles, can you run some cell numbers and credit cards for me? Right, most recent use for these two subjects.” He spelled out their names, read off their cell phone and license plate numbers from Hammet’s printout, and gave the other particulars that he had, and put the phone away. “We’ll find out in a minute.” Then he lit up another cigarette, leaned back in his chair and took a deep drag.