The Operative s-3

by Falconer, Duncan

  ‘Down. Dumping this garbage,’ Tony said.

  Stratton kept his back to Cano and repositioned one of the bags as if securing it on the trolley better.

  ‘Okay,’ Cano said, stopping outside. Tony hit the first-level garage button as Cano glanced at the back of the waiter and the doors closed.

  As the elevator descended Stratton moved around to the other side of the trolley. When the lift stopped and the doors opened he pushed it out.

  ‘This way,’ Tony said. He led Stratton through the brightly lit concrete car park where a dozen cars occupied a floor designed to take a couple of hundred.

  Tony turned a corner to a cage where several dumpsters were lined up and stopped to take a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘In there,’ he said.

  Stratton opened the cage, wheeled the trolley in and threw the top layer of boxes into the dumpster until only his bags remained. Then he glanced at the thug who was lighting his cigarette. ‘Can I have one a’ them smokes?’ he asked.

  Tony looked at him as if he were dirt. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he said as he exhaled a stream of smoke towards Stratton. ‘Get the resta that crap in the dumpster and get going.’

  ‘I can’t lift it. My back hurts,’ Stratton said, stretching his torso from side to side.

  ‘You put that shit in there or I’ll throw you in,’ Tony said.

  ‘Give me a hand at least,’ Stratton asked.

  Tony shook his head with incredulity. ‘Goddam faggot,’ he said as he approached Stratton and invaded his space. ‘Pick it up and dump it or I’ll break your fucken’ back.’ Then Tony looked at Stratton closely. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve done a couple commercials on TV,’ Stratton said.

  ‘I don’t watch TV. You’re the guy at the McDonald’s, ain’t you?’

  ‘I never seem to get a chance to eat there these days,’ Stratton said as he turned to grab the first bag.

  Tony reached out to grab Stratton’s shoulder. As he did, Stratton swung his body round, one of his hands gripping the fist of the other for extra leverage, and powered his elbow into Tony’s jaw, snapping it at the hinge. As the large man fell back and hit the ground Stratton moved swiftly to stand over him and stomped on his throat with the heel of his boot as hard as he could. Tony spasmed as his windpipe collapsed. Stratton brought his heel down several more times until something cracked in Tony’s neck and the strength left his body. Tony was still alive – barely – but his breathing was ragged and his limbs quivered. The sound of a car entering the garage down the ramp at the other side of the floor froze Stratton. Its tyres screeched as it turned the corner at the bottom and headed along the length of the garage. Stratton quickly dragged the thug into the cage as the car came to a stop out of sight several rows away. He hid behind one of the dumpsters.

  A car door opened and slammed a second later. Footsteps tapped across the shiny concrete floor to where the elevators were. A moment later the elevator doors opened, the footsteps moved inside and the doors closed.

  Stratton lifted Tony into a sitting position, gripped him under the arms from behind and heaved him up. Then, grabbing him by the waist, he maintained the upward movement until he could tip the goon over the edge of the dumpster and inside. Stratton looked around for something to throw on top of Tony and saw some pieces of wooden boxes broken down and stacked ready for dumping. He grabbed a plank and was about to place it on top of Tony when something about it caught his attention. It was painted green, with black stencilled letters, and it was familiar in some way.

  The stencilled lettering read ER E but was only part of a word or words. Stratton turned over a couple of the other planks and quickly realised that the complete lettering read FLOWER ENGINEERING – the same markings as had been on the boxes placed on Forouf ’s train in Mosul and carried by the smuggling caravan in Almaty. Had he been investigating Skender’s connections to international terrorism the planks might have been an important clue. But now they were irrelevant. He tossed them onto Tony’s unconscious body, spread some rubbish over them and closed the dumpster’s large rubber lid.

  Stratton wheeled the trolley with its load back to the elevator area, pressed the call button and waited. A few seconds later an elevator arrived. He eased the trolley inside and pushed the fourth-floor button. The doors closed.

  As the elevator ascended Stratton’s silent prayers that it would not stop at the lobby were answered. It accelerated up before quickly slowing as the fourth-floor button glowed and it came to a stop. The doors opened and Stratton looked into the empty curving corridor and pushed the trolley out. The doors closed behind him.

  He paused to look around. The design features were familiar to him after the hours of study he had spent on the blueprints but the colours and textures were more 1960s than he had expected. Most of the inside walls were made of frosted green plate glass to give it an open, airy feel and though the floor looked ready to be moved into it was as yet unoccupied.

  Stratton moved the trolley along the corridor past glass office walls that revealed empty rooms. He stopped outside a wooden door, turned the handle and pulled it open. It was a janitor’s room and a tight fit but he managed to get the trolley inside. He shut the door.

  He quickly put the two bags on the floor, removed four of the charges from one of them, put them on the trolley and opened the door to look outside. The glass wall opposite showed a large room with a massive pillar at its centre. This was the central support, eight yards in diameter, of the entire pyramid.

  Stratton pushed the trolley out, up the corridor a few yards, in through the entrance to the large room and towards the pillar. Without a second’s hesitation he jumped onto the trolley, stood up carefully so as not to lose his balance, pushed a ceiling tile up, slid it into the ceiling space, picked up the charges two at a time and placed them inside the roof. Then he grabbed hold of a heavy support strut inside and pulled himself up.

  Once in, he slid the ceiling tile back into place and looked around, familiarising himself with the layout of the struts and beams that he had studied on paper. He did not need a flashlight since the backs of the ceiling lights illuminated the crawl space, which was riddled with electrical, communication and air-conditioning conduits. Sticking out from the massive central pillar beside him was one of the four main horizontal steel struts that passed through the ceiling space to one of the sides of the pyramid. The vertical strength of the design came from the central pillar, supported by the four sloping sides. Every floor hung from these five main load-bearers.

  Stratton had identified the halfway points of the horizontal girders between the central pillar and the sides as the weakest parts of the structure. Theoretically, if they could be cut or even seriously weakened the floor should partially or even completely collapse.

  Modern buildings were designed to withstand natural forces like high winds and, especially in California, earthquakes. But unlike the older-fashioned multigrid structural support system of cubes support ing cubes, they were susceptible to collapse if an unforeseen disaster – such as a bomb – blew away a crucial segment of the structure. A classic modern example had been the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York with a square plan that relied on a four-corner support system with the floors suspended between them. When one or two of the supports were compromised the floors dropped, creating a domino effect of horizontal and vertical collapse.

  Skender’s building was not quite the same. Being a pyramid, its structure got lighter and stronger towards the top with the four outer sides connecting at the pinnacle. But a similar effect might be achieved in reverse, collapsing the building from the ground up. Stratton was not entirely sure of his theory, which was why he chose to blow three different floors. Still, one thing was certain: if only half the charges did their job then the building would need to be demolished.

  He crawled along the ceiling space from minor strut to strut, careful not to disturb any of the ceiling tiles beneath him, until he
was halfway along the main horizontal strut. He took one of the charges and shaped it into a pyramid before placing it across one side of the I-beam. The pyramid shape was vital: it was known as a linear cutting charge and had been developed by a scientist named Munro who had proved that such a charge detonated from the outer edge would produce significantly more blast concentrated at the cut point.

  There was no shortage of rubbish in the crawl space. Stratton used bits of metal and ceiling tile to hold the charge in place before attaching the detonator and receiver to the battery and making his way back to the central pillar.

  He repeated this process with the other three struts within the same crawl space. Then he went back to his start point, carefully removed the ceiling tile, poked his head through to look around, and lowered himself through the hole onto the trolley. He replaced the ceiling tile and jumped down to the floor.

  He pushed the trolley back to the janitor’s room, left it out-side and retrieved the rest of his explosives.

  The eighth floor was the next calculated target location. Stratton considered taking the elevator, thinking he might need the trolley, but then decided to reduce the risk of running into anyone by using the emergency stairwell.

  He walked back past the elevators to the end of the corridor where there was a heavy fire door with an emergency-exit sign above. He pushed it open: according to the plans the only fire door with an alarm was the one leading into the underground car park. He looked up through the spiralling stairs and banisters to the top. There were faint noises coming from above. They sounded like voices but he could not tell for sure.

  Stratton moved quietly up the white-painted concrete stairs. The banister rail was made of simple tube steel. Each floor was clearly numbered, with an emergency light above the number, and as he reached the eighth he stopped at the sound of a cough that echoed from somewhere above. He carefully pulled open the fire door and poked his head inside to see that the floor was basically furnished but still un occupied.

  He stepped into the corridor and made his way along to the central room. The design was similar to the fourth-floor one but obviously the dimensions were much smaller. He headed for the central pillar that was the same size as below and took four charges from the bag, which he then left on the floor with the remaining four charges in it. He climbed onto a desk, pushed a ceiling tile aside, pulled himself up and replaced the tile.

  The process of placing the charges took a little less time since the length of the horizontal girders was shorter and he had now practised his technique. Twenty minutes later he was making his way up the fire stairs, again keeping his hands off the banisters and staying away from the centre in case someone was looking into the stairwell.

  As Stratton reached the twelfth floor he paused as he heard another cough, still from above, and then what sounded like the rustle of a newspaper. It came again and he carefully peered up, catching sight of a foot on the banister rail as if the person was sitting back in a chair. He calculated it to be on the sixteenth floor, one below the penthouse. No doubt one of Skender’s guards was up there.

  As he carefully opened the twelfth-floor fire door voices filtered from inside. Since they were not close by and sounded as if the talkers were in a room he lowered himself to his knees and ventured to peer inside. The plate-glass wall allowed him to make out several blurred figures in the larger central room, a half-dozen or so who, since they were not speaking English, he assumed were Skender’s thugs. Looking along the corridor and into one of the offices he noticed a camp bed. Further scrutiny of the distorted images of furnishings on the other side of the foggy glass walls suggested that the floor was being used as sleeping quarters for the large guard force that Skender had brought in to secure the building.

  The elevators opened and Stratton let the fire door close enough to see through the gap. It was Cano and he let the door close completely.

  Cano called out something that Stratton could not understand and a few moments later the voices went silent.

  Stratton carefully opened the door to take another look but now the floor appeared to be empty. Then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, letting it close behind him. Being even closer to the top the floor area was smaller still, with space for only half a dozen offices.

  He made his way along the curved glass-panelled corridor and stepped into the central room that contained a couple of dozen camp beds surrounding the main pillar. Here the column was tapered, narrowing towards the ceiling. He moved quickly, climbing onto a chair, and within a few seconds was pulling himself up into the ceiling space.

  32

  Cano stepped out of the elevator, followed by half a dozen of his men who dispersed to various posts inside and outside the building. ‘Klodi?’ he called out.

  Klodi, his hand still heavily bandaged, was at the entrance, chomping on a purloined chicken leg which he put into his pocket as his boss called out. He hurried over to him.

  ‘Where’s Tony?’ Cano asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ Klodi said, looking around. ‘He was supposed to be on the elevators.’

  ‘That’s why I’m asking,’ Cano said, becoming irritated.

  ‘Hey,’ Klodi called out to one of the uniformed security guards. ‘Where’s Tony?’

  ‘Tony who?’ the Mexican guard asked.

  ‘The big guy. One of our people who was stood at the elevators,’ Klodi said.

  ‘Okay,’ the guard nodded, remembering him. ‘Last time I saw him he was taking out the trash.’

  An image suddenly flashed into Cano’s head of Tony getting into the elevator with a man in a waiter’s uniform who had his back to him.

  Cano unclipped a radio from his hip and put it to his mouth. ‘This is Vleshek,’ he said into the radio. ‘Anyone seen Tony Dosti?’

  A moment later a voice broke over the little speaker ‘He ain’t on the fifteenth.’

  ‘Ain’t on the tenth,’ another voice said.

  ‘He’s in the lobby on the elevators,’ another voice said.

  Cano gave up and called an elevator.

  ‘Shall I come with you, boss?’ Klodi asked.

  ‘Next person leaves their post I’ll cut their balls off. Make sure everyone knows that,’ Cano said as the doors opened. He walked inside, hit the garage-parking button and the doors closed.

  Klodi nodded and turned to see the Mexican guard grinning.

  ‘You think he’s joking, ass-wipe? That goes for you guys, too,’ Klodi said.

  The Mexican lost his grin and Klodi walked back to the main entrance.

  Cano stepped out of the elevator into the garage and looked around the concrete vault. He walked to the dumpster cage, which was open, and stopped to take another look in every direction. The only sound was the faint hum from the air-conditioning plant in a room at the other side of the car park. Then a slight noise came from behind him and he turned to scrutinise the dumpsters. The noise came again. At first he thought it was a rodent but as he stepped cautiously into the cage it began to sound more like a moan.

  Cano opened the first dumpster and looked inside to find it filled with trash. Then the surface of the garbage moved ever so slightly. Cano reached in a hand and pulled a bag aside to reveal the green-painted wooden planks that had made up boxes which had been used to pack the Albanian artefacts that decorated Skender’s penthouse. He lifted one of the planks to expose an extremely ill-looking Tony who was barely hanging onto life.

  ‘Klodi,’ Cano shouted into his radio. ‘I’m in the garage. Get down here and bring a couple of the guys. Now!’

  A few minutes later Klodi and two others were hauling Tony out of the dumpster and onto the concrete floor where he lay prostrate.

  ‘He don’t look too good,’ Klodi said, kneeling over the man who appeared to be having problems breathing but was still trying to say something. Klodi lowered his ear to Tony’s mouth. ‘Anyone here speak Italian?’ Klodi asked.

  Apparently no one did since there was no reply.

  Cano was g
rowing impatient and shoved Klodi aside. ‘Who did this?’ he asked Tony. ‘What happened?’

  Tony mustered a breath then said something that Cano could not quite understand.

  ‘Say it again,’ Cano said, moving his ear closer.

  Tony softly repeated the word.

  ‘A waiter?’ Cano repeated, not quite understanding.

  ‘English,’ Tony struggled to say.

  The penny dropped with a clang and Cano stood, raising the radio to his mouth as he moved towards the elevators. ‘This is Vleshek. Close all exits. No one gets out of the building. Do you understand? No one!’

  Stratton stepped through a fire-exit door into an alcove that led directly into the lobby. He paused to observe the frenzied activity around the entrance as several of Cano’s men brusquely shoved back people who were coming in as well as those who were on their way out while the goons closed the massive main doors.

  The next phase of Stratton’s plan required him to get outside but all indications were that the building appeared to be closing down. He quickly scanned around for anything that might provide a clue to getting out and his gaze landed not on the perfect solution but probably the only one. A fire alarm was fixed to the wall beside the fire exit and Stratton whacked it with his elbow, breaking the glass. The building immediately erupted in a cacophony of bells and sirens and he walked into the crowded lobby as event staff emerged from the banqueting hall, wondering what the alarm was about.

  ‘Fire!’ Stratton called out. ‘Fire! Get out of the building! There’s a fire!’

  It had the immediate desired effect with a general shift of people towards the main doors. The security guards tried to hold them back. Skender’s thugs were overly physical in their own efforts, which only served to increase tension, ignite tempers and fuel the urgency to escape.

  Stratton joined the pack, shouting scary warnings above the din of the alarm bells. The mass of people quickly began to reverse the efforts of the guards and Skender’s goons to close the doors as Cano stepped from an elevator.