Storm Front

by John Sandford

  “All right. Well, al-Lubnani didn’t get the money, though he saw it. He says three hundred packets of ten thousand dollars each. The Hatchet kept it, and will turn it over to al-Lubnani tomorrow night, just before the exchange, which is set for nine o’clock.”

  “Yes.” Lincoln’s voice was neutral: Virgil couldn’t tell whether that was new information or not.

  “So, have you got the Hatchet covered?”

  “We have the man who met al-Lubnani covered. We hope to confirm his identity tonight.”

  “Have you run a check on the limo driver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you give me like five words on him? Local? Islamic or not? Where did they get the limo?”

  “Local, Islamic. Name—you won’t believe it, but I’ll tell you anyway—is Max Kaar. Eleven years with the company.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Keep your pretty little head out of this, Flowers. We’ve got it. Just get the stone, without interfering with the target, and everybody will be happy.”

  Pretty little head? It pissed him off.

  —

  WHILE VIRGIL was talking to al-Lubnani, Yael Aronov was sitting on her motel bed, pondering the possibilities. She had one moderately large suitcase that she’d bought herself, plus the two enormous suitcases she’d gotten from Tal Zahavi’s room.

  When she first saw them, she’d considered them an opportunity. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Though she’d towed some pretty large suitcases through the green “nothing to declare” zone at Ben Gurion, these seemed excessive: maybe Zahavi, if she were truly with the Mossad, could have gotten away with it—perhaps she could have avoided customs altogether.

  Yael might not be able to do that, with the elephant-sized bag.

  Yael had just bought twenty iPad Minis at Sam’s Club, and if she could get them back in Israel, she could make a hundred dollars each on them—and two thousand was a lot to risk, simply to pile more stuff in an enormous suitcase.

  But the temptation was strong. She’d never been stopped at customs. . . .

  Her contemplation of the bags was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door, a quick chink-chink-chink of a maid using a key. She was not a cop or a spy, so she didn’t even think about her response: she went to the door and opened it.

  A thin, dark-haired woman said in Hebrew, “I am Mossad,” and pushed Yael back into her room.

  Yael said, “Tal Zahavi—I have seen you on TV.”

  “Yes. That putz Flowers, I can’t believe this,” Zahavi said.

  “But you kidnapped—”

  “Borrowed her, for a few hours,” Zahavi said. She saw the suitcases on the bed and said, “Those are my suitcases.”

  “Virgil said I should keep them, since . . . well, we’re both Israelis,” Yael said. “But I don’t want them. What would I do with them?”

  “I was planning to buy Fruit of the Loom underwear, which my uncle can sell in his store,” Zahavi said.

  Yael made a moue. “Not a bad idea,” she conceded. “My brother kills for Fruit of the Loom. If your uncle runs a clothing store—”

  Zahavi poked a finger at Yael: “So now, I require your aid. This is official business. Tomorrow night, the Hezbollah will purchase this stele, for as much as three million dollars in cash. We will stop this—but we can’t outbid them, because we have no money. So, we will intercept the stone.”

  “You maybe, but not me,” Yael said. “I do not work for the Mossad, and I will not. I am surprised that you still work for the Mossad, after this . . . borrowing of Ellen Case.”

  “You are not required to work with me, you are only required to tell me where this Flowers is. I have information that you will be with him tomorrow night as he attempts, also, to intercept the stone. I need to know where he is.”

  “And how do I do that?” Yael asked, her fists on her hips. “He will be there. I say, ‘Excuse me, I have to make a telephone call to betray you?’”

  “You say nothing. When he begins to chase the stone, when he knows where it is and who has it, you press my phone number on your telephone. You do not have to say anything: just call, and I will know he is chasing the stone.”

  “This is crazy,” Yael said. Then, “Are you still on assignment? I would think that your superiors would have put you on a plane back to Tel Aviv when they saw the TV reports.”

  “This is not your business,” Zahavi snapped. “The operation continues.”

  Yael said nothing, but the skeptical look on her face suggested that she didn’t believe what Zahavi said.

  Zahavi: “I was given unreliable support, who abandoned me the minute the trouble started. But I can still do this—”

  “I don’t want you to do it,” Yael said. “I want to take the stele back to the IAA myself, so it can be properly examined.”

  “And so you can publish it and so the Arabs can make propaganda from it forever.”

  “I think you have been in the sun too long,” Yael said. She added, “But, I am a good Israeli, and I will call you tomorrow night, if Virgil leaves me. But I will file a big complaint, a big stink, if you lose or destroy the stone, and I will not stop just because you are the Mossad and you say so. I will go to the newspapers, and we will have it out in public.”

  “I will not lose or destroy it—when the stone is back in Israel, this will all be arranged by our bosses. You will have to be content with that.”

  They talked for another couple of minutes, about the auction for the stone, and then exchanged phone numbers. As Zahavi was preparing to leave, checking the parking lot from the room’s only window, Yael asked, “Are you going to take the suitcases?”

  “No. I will not be leaving here in an airliner, and I will have no time to pull two big bags. My uncle will have to make his own profits.”

  A moment later, she was gone. Yael watched from the window as she hurriedly climbed into the passenger side of a large white SUV, and was gone.

  —

  VIRGIL RARELY TOOK A BATH, preferring the speed and overall cleanliness of a shower, but this night he’d submerged in his oversized bathtub, a relic left behind by the previous renter, a disabled man who’d had it installed to help with muscle cramping. He died, but Virgil didn’t think it had to do with the tub. The man had also left behind an oversized hot-water heater, which meant that Virgil could submerge to his ears, and cook out his frustrations.

  The water had just begun to cool, and his toes were showing wrinkles, when his cell phone rang. Because of the ongoing clusterfuck, he’d left it on a windowsill above the tub, where he could pick it up. He did, and saw that Yael was calling.

  “Did you buy a membership at Sam’s Club?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did, and this membership, which I use only one time, cuts directly into my profit,” she said. “But, I don’t call to talk about Sam. I just had a visitor. She swore me to secrecy as one good Israeli to another.”

  Virgil said, “You gotta be kidding me. I thought she’d be on the other side of the ocean by now.”

  “I think she is in very large trouble, and she tries to save herself. But, that is her problem. My problem, my only problem, is to get this stele. I think tomorrow night that she will try to take it, by force if necessary. I am supposed to alert her, when you leave me to attack the stone carrier.”

  “Hmmm,” Virgil said. “All right. She had a male assistant when she kidnapped Ellen Case. Is he still with her?”

  “Somebody is with her. When she left, she got in the passenger side of a very large white car. But, she said to me that her assistant had abandoned her. I believe that, because . . . she seemed to tell the truth. She was very angry about it. Now, her new assistant will tell her where the exchange takes place, this auction. She says it will be at nine o’clock, but that the minister will not have the stele.”

  “This car . . . was it l
ike a safari vehicle?”

  “Exactly. You know it?”

  “I do. Okay, I will work through this. I will call you tomorrow and tell you what we’re going to do.”

  He punched off, put the phone back on the windowsill, said, aloud, “That fuckin’ Bauer,” and resubmerged to think about it some more.

  21

  Virgil got up the next morning with quite a few thoughts. The first was, if Tal Zahavi was with Bauer, he could bust her and take her up to the Ramsey County Jail in St. Paul and let Davenport worry about it.

  After a fast cleanup, he was out in his truck, where he dug out the tracker, found the signal from Bauer’s Range Rover, which was parked in a residential neighborhood on the west side of town. Virgil drove over . . . and couldn’t find the Range Rover.

  Eventually, with a little fast triangulation, he determined that the Range Rover was parked in exactly the same residential driveway occupied by an orange Mini Cooper convertible. He stared at it for a moment, wishing it away, then parked, walked up to the house where the Mini was parked, and rang the doorbell. A moment later, a tall bony fortyish woman wearing a pince-nez on her tall bony nose came to the door, carrying an open New York Times and a coffee cup, peered at him and asked, “What?” as though he were peddling cable-TV connections.

  “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held up his ID so she could inspect it through the screen door. “Is this your Mini?”

  “Yes, is there a problem?”

  “I was tracking a man using an electronic tracker, and this morning it led me to your car . . . I think. I need to look at your car to see if he found the tracker on his, and moved it to yours.”

  “When would he have done that?” she asked, interested now.

  “I don’t know. Sometime last night, probably.”

  “Around nine o’clock at the Apache Mall?”

  “Did you notice something there?” Virgil asked.

  “When I came out from shopping, there was a big white SUV of some sort parked next to me,” she said. “The man said he was looking at his tire, he said it felt soft, but I had the impression he’d done something to my car. But he didn’t try to stop me from driving away, or anything. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it.”

  “Driver’s side, or passenger side?”

  “Passenger side—right by the door.”

  Virgil went out to the Mini and found the tracker in ten seconds, taped to the Mini’s frame.

  “That goddamned Zahavi,” he said. He was lying on his back in the driveway, looking at the tracking unit, and thinking that a spy would check.

  “Fooled you, huh?” the woman said. She seemed amused.

  “Fooled me, fooled himself,” Virgil said. “It’s a regular fools’ paradise around here.”

  The woman said, “If ye should lead her into a fool’s paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behavior.”

  Virgil got to his feet and said, “Really? Shakespeare?”

  “Romeo and Juliet,” the woman said. “I’m surprised you recognized it at all.”

  “Not that many people say, ‘it were,’” Virgil said. He dusted off the seat of his pants and added, “And I can tell you, just between us, there’s about to be some seriously gross behavior.”

  —

  WHEN HE went back to his truck, he called Davenport, who said, “You got lucky: I’ve been up for ten minutes.”

  “You know, Lucas, I don’t really give a shit about that. I got all kinds of trouble, here. I need to borrow Jenkins and Shrake. I’m on my way up to the Twin Cities, and somebody needs to look up a limo driver named Max Car.”

  “Max Car, the limo driver?”

  “That’s what I said. Call me when Jenkins and Shrake are awake, and find Max Car.”

  “I’m far too important to do that, but I’ll have it done,” Davenport said. “You okay?”

  “No. I’ll be up there in an hour and a half.”

  —

  AN HOUR LATER, Virgil was coming up to I-494, the interstate loop highway around the Twin Cities, when he got a call from Davenport’s researcher, Sandy.

  “Max Car, C-a-r, is actually Maxamed Ali Kaar, K-a-a-r, and it would have been a lot easier to find him if we’d known that.”

  “If I’d known that, I would have told you,” Virgil snapped.

  “Don’t get shirty with me, Flowers,” she said. They’d once had an extremely brief fling—four hours and nine minutes, by Virgil’s cell phone clock—and she was less patient with him than other people might have been.

  Virgil backed away: “He’s a limo driver, right?”

  “With Polaris Service, out of south Minneapolis.”

  “Text me a screen shot of his driver’s license,” Virgil said. “Have you heard from Jenkins and Shrake?”

  “Yes. They’re up and complaining.”

  “Good. Tell them to meet me at Kaar’s address.”

  —

  HE RANG OFF, and a minute later the phone vibrated, with a message: Kaar’s address and cell phone number, and a note from Sandy: she’d taken a quick look at Google Maps, which showed his address as a small detached house not far from the car service, and adjacent to an industrial area in south Minneapolis.

  “Careful going in,” she’d texted. “Looks like a bear trap.”

  Five minutes after that, a screen shot of his driver’s license came in. Kaar was a thin, dark-haired, dark-eyed, bewildered-looking man who wore a gray work shirt for his photo.

  —

  VIRGIL WAS at the address forty minutes later. Kaar’s house was an old shaky white clapboard place with a tiny porch and a surprisingly green lawn, which, at the moment, was being mowed by a heavy white man in red tank top and cargo shorts. The mower was a manual reel-type.

  Neither Shrake nor Jenkins was around, so Virgil called Shrake, who said they were in separate cars, maybe five minutes away. Five minutes later, they pulled in beside Virgil’s truck, a half-block and around the corner from Kaar’s house. They all got out to talk.

  “I need to talk to a guy name Maxamed Ali Kaar, who’s a driver here. He’s supposedly in Mankato, but I was thinking about it last night, and I somewhat doubt it.”

  “But not entirely doubt it?” Jenkins asked.

  “Not entirely. Anyway, his house is right down the street, and the lawn is being mowed by a fat guy in an undershirt, who doesn’t look like the lawn service, but who also doesn’t look like a Maxamed Ali anything. So, there’s a question. Maybe Kaar doesn’t live there at all. But if he does, and if he’s here, we can’t let him see us—but if he does see us, we need to grab him before he can make a phone call. That’s critical.”

  “So let’s one of us brace the fat guy, while the other two wait,” Shrake said. “Find out what’s up, and if he’s there, we rush him.”

  Virgil nodded. “Can’t let him make a phone call.”

  “So who talks to the fat guy?” Shrake asked.

  —

  VIRGIL AMBLED around the corner to Kaar’s house. Jenkins and Shrake, now in Jenkins’s personal Crown Vic, hovered at the corner where they could both see Virgil, but nobody in the house could see them. They could be at the house, Jenkins swore, in four seconds.

  The fat guy was sweating heavily, and as Virgil came up, took off his Twins hat and wiped his face with a hairy forearm. Virgil could smell him from ten feet away: not dirt, just hot sweat. As Virgil came up, the man asked, “How you doin’?”

  “Okay,” Virgil said. He stopped, and pivoted, which put his back to the house. “I’m a cop. Does Max Kaar live here?”

  “Thought you might be a cop,” the man said. “What’d Max do?”

  “Is he here?” Virgil repeated.

  “He was fifteen minutes ago, and still is, unless he went out through the back fence. He lives in the
casita out back.”

  “Casita?”

  “The guesthouse.”

  Virgil stepped back and looked down the narrow driveway. “You mean the garage?”

  “I converted it,” the man said. “It’s really pretty . . . okay . . . inside.”

  “What’s your name?” Virgil asked.

  “Larry Swanson.”

  Virgil waved at Jenkins and Shrake, and gestured past himself, so they’d roll on by the driveway where they couldn’t be seen from the garage. They did, and got out, and Virgil explained the situation, and introduced Swanson.

  “You’re sure the man you saw fifteen minutes ago was Max Kaar?”

  “Well, yeah. I’ve been renting to him for two years.”

  “Was he here yesterday?”

  “Yeah, he said he had a couple of days off. I mean really, is this some kind of terrorist thing? ’Cause he seems like a nice enough guy.”

  Virgil said, “Listen, you guys hang here for a minute, I need to make a phone call.”

  He went back to his car to make it, wound up on hold for a moment, then was put through to an assistant attorney general named Pat Golden, who said, “They tell me it’s that fuckin’ Flowers, lookin’ to get me in trouble.”

  “Pat, I’m really pushed, and I don’t have time to explain it all to you, but I will later, or someday, if I’m allowed to. . . .”

  —

  VIRGIL WAS back out of the car a couple of minutes later and Jenkins said, “There’s no window on the front of the garage, but there’s one down the right side where the main entry door is.”

  Virgil waved him off and asked, “Mr. Swanson, are you married? Is there anyone else in your house?”

  “No, I’m divorced, there’s nobody else here.”

  “Good. I’d like you to put away your lawn mower, get a shirt, and lock your door, right now. Quickly as possible. You’re not being arrested at the moment, but I will arrest you if I need to. Either way, you’re coming with us.”

  “What’d I do? What’d I do?”

  “I’ll explain on the way. Now hurry. Hurry!”

  Jenkins and Shrake were as confused as Swanson, but they asked no questions, just hurried the fat man through a quick armpit-wash and clean shirt, and out the door and into the back of Jenkins’s car. Virgil said, “I’ll see you guys at the BCA. Fifteen minutes.”