by Jake Needham
The Central Fucking Intelligence Agency screwed up some cockamamie operation they were running and killed three Hong Kong grannies?
The cops would have to hang somebody up for that, and right now the only person they had to hang was Rebecca Sternwood.
She could change that, of course. She could give them Reed, and giving them Reed was the same thing as giving them the DCI, but that was both her salvation and her damnation.
Was Reed going to bet his career, even his freedom, that she was going to keep her mouth shut and take the fall all alone? She couldn’t see that. He would never believe she would do that for him, and in that he would be right. She sure as hell wouldn’t.
And even if Reed were somehow willing to roll the dice that she might, it was the DCI who had the most to lose. He was the big fish here, and the moment the FBI had him in their sights everyone else would be forgotten. The DCI wasn’t a man who would march to the gallows with his head held high. He would do everything he could to protect himself. And there was only one certain way to do that.
Get rid of Rebecca Sternwood.
Problem solved.
That didn’t sound good, did it?
Rebecca thought she had a little time. She doubted there was a protocol in place for murdering an Agency employee who could send the DCI to prison. Not much time maybe, but surely a day or two. Reed would have to lay it all out for the DCI, they would have to make the decision to remove her as a threat, and then they would have to create a plan to do that. That would take a couple of days. But probably not any longer than that.
Still, she didn’t need nearly that long. If she was going to tell her story to Inspector Tay, she could do that tomorrow, and as her price for telling him she could demand she be protected. Interpol could hardly refuse. After all, she was the only way they had to tie the bombing to higher ups at the Agency. They would want to keep her safe and sound.
Rebecca didn’t like the idea of dropping a dime on Reed and the DCI, but what choice did she have? If she didn’t, she would take the fall for this all alone, and why should she do that? She was just following Reed’s instructions, doing her job as a dutiful employee of the Agency.
That thought gave her pause. It was starting to sound like the Nuremberg defense, wasn’t it?
But, mein Herr, I wass only following orders.
Still, it was true. She was following instructions from superiors at the Agency. It was what Agency employees did. The senior people there didn’t, and shouldn’t, have to convince every employee that they were doing the right thing every time they gave instructions. That’s not how organizations functioned. The top people told the middle people what to do, and the middle people organized the bottom people to do it. How else could it possibly work?
She didn’t really know for sure that this organization August and the others were supposed to be working for, this super-secret group that Reed claimed was such a threat to national security, even actually existed. Maybe there was something else going on entirely. Maybe Reed had just made up that story to keep from having to tell her the real truth. What the hell was she supposed to do? Investigate Reed’s story before she did what he told her to do? No one could really expect her to do that, could they?
Rebecca sighed heavily, pushed the pillows away, and stretched out on the bed. She really only had one alternative, didn’t she? She had to tell Tay the truth and get him to protect her until the truth became publicly known. Once that happened, she would no longer be at risk.
Would she be going to prison for what she had done anyway? After all, she hadn’t actually killed anybody herself, had she?
The thought gave her no comfort. It was the thinnest of all possible excuses and she knew it. She had to accept there was a risk that the FBI would come down on her, but she thought the odds were in her favor. After all, they would need her to prosecute Reed and the DCI. There was no other way to link them to the operation, and they were both so much bigger fish than she was it made no sense that they would bury her along with them, did it? They needed her, right?
Rebecca looked around the room. She liked it here. She thought she could stay here forever.
But of course she couldn’t.
She had told Tay she would call him tomorrow morning and give him a place to meet her, if she decided to meet him at all.
She knew now that she would.
At least she could give herself one more night of peace before everything hit the fan, and this room was as good a place as any to do it. Better really than most.
Maybe she should go back to her apartment and pack some fresh clothes and toiletries first. After all, she had no idea what would happen when she told Tay the truth. He wouldn’t arrest her, of course. Interpol had no jurisdiction to arrest people on American soil. But he would immediately see the risk to her and therefore to his case so it seemed likely that at the very least he would want to stash her away somewhere. And if he didn’t, she would insist on it herself. She needed to be prepared for that.
Was there any danger in going back to her apartment? What was she expecting? To find it surrounded by an Agency SWAT team? Reed and the DCI were both bureaucrats. They had fancy titles, but that’s still what they were. It had only been a few hours since she had seen Reed at Fort Marcy Park and told him that Interpol had tied her to the bomb in Hong Kong. In the history of the world, no bureaucrat had ever decided anything in a few hours. Reed may not even have talked to the DCI yet. Maybe the DCI was out of town, even out of the country. And there was no way Reed would do anything, certainly not move on an employee of the Agency, without first getting the DCI’s support and authority.
So, it was settled, Rebecca told herself. She would go home, pack some things, and come back to the Hampton Inn to enjoy one more night of utter peace in a place where no one could find her. Then tomorrow morning, she would call Tay, arrange to meet him, and tell him everything.
After that, the world in which she had lived all of her thirty-seven years would burn to the ground.
It didn’t seem fair, it didn’t seem right, but that was simply the way it was.
Chapter Forty-One
Tay was not an early riser by habit and that was why the effects of jet lag from the trip to Washington had been particularly hard on him. He had been coming awake in the darkness every morning and finding himself unable to go back to sleep. Getting up at four or five in the morning was inconceivable to him so he had read some, but mostly he had just tossed and turned and felt miserable and frustrated.
This morning the jet lag seemed at last to have worn off. He had regained his ability to sleep to an hour he considered reasonably civilized so he was the last downstairs to breakfast. When he walked into the kitchen it looked to him like the others had already finished eating, but they were still gathered around the table drinking coffee. He poured himself a cup and took the empty chair, and everyone mumbled the usual morning greetings and then fell silent again.
The woman who looked after the safe house paused in clearing away the dirty plates.
“What would you like for breakfast, sir?” she asked Tay.
“Just coffee’s fine.”
“Everyone else had eggs and bacon,” she prodded.
Tay shook his head and fished in his pockets. He came out with a crumpled pack of Marlboros and a box of matches. As he shook out a cigarette, he glanced up and saw that everyone was staring at him.
“Don’t,” he said, “just don’t. A round of healthy-American anti-smoking bullshit before I’ve had at least three cups of coffee will lead to homicide. At least one. Probably more.”
He lit his cigarette and looked around for some place to dump the match. He settled on August’s egg-stained breakfast plate.
“When did she say she would call?” August asked.
Tay had no doubt that August remembered perfectly well, but he answered anyway.
“Around nine.”
August cleared his throat and studied the tabletop. Tay realized something was comi
ng.
“What?” Tay asked.
“I talked to our tech people to see if they could pin down the call Rebecca Sternwood made to you yesterday,” August said.
Tay waited.
“They found out that her phone was pinging a cell tower on Dolly Madison Boulevard when she called.”
“That’s nice,” Tay said. He drank some more coffee and took a long pull on his Marlboro.
“Actually,” August went on, “it’s not. Dolly Madison Boulevard is in McLean, Virginia, a little over eight miles from here. There’s where the main entrance to the Central Intelligence Agency is.”
“Rebecca Sternwood called me from the Central Intelligence Agency?”
“Personal phones aren’t permitted in most of the buildings and under the circumstances I doubt she would have wanted to call you from inside anyway. My guess is she probably called you from her car when it was somewhere inside the Agency complex.”
Tay thought about that for a moment, but wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of it.
“What are you telling me, John?”
“I’m telling you I think they took the bait. They need to stop this investigation and so they need to shut you down before it goes any further. I think the meeting she’s going to ask you to come to will be a set-up.”
“A set-up to do what?”
August just looked at Tay.
“Oh, come on, John. Do you honestly believe the CIA would kill an Interpol investigator right here in Washington just to try and stop an investigation?”
“Someone over there got Rebecca Sternwood to set us up to be killed because they wanted to shut down the Band, didn’t they? Why should they get squeamish about using the same tactic to shut you down?”
“I don’t believe it. It would draw far too much attention to them.”
“It’s easy to kill people and make it look like natural causes or an accident. I ought to know. I’ve done it often enough.”
Tay stubbed out his Marlboro in the ashtray that the woman who ran the house had discreetly deposited at his elbow.
“I think you’re wrong, John. This woman isn’t a killer. I’m sure she isn’t.”
“Somebody over there is.”
“Not her. She was scared when she called me. I think she’s right on the edge of coming clean and giving us everything.”
“You’re being naïve.”
“This is a silly conversation. Let’s just wait for her to call and see what she says. Why speculate on what it’s going to be? Let’s hear it and then we can decide what it means.”
By ten o’clock, Tay had finished his fourth cup of coffee and his third cigarette, but Rebecca Sternwood still hadn’t called.
“Maybe she changed her mind,” Claire suggested.
“Or maybe somebody changed it for her,” August said.
Woods, as usual, said nothing.
Tay shook out another cigarette, but then he put it back without lighting it.
“I don’t like this,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Do you have any way of locating her, John? Can you track her phone?”
“It’s been turned off since yesterday afternoon. They said they’d call me if it logged on anywhere, but…” August shrugged.
“Don’t you have a tracker on her car?”
“It went dead yesterday,” August said. “That’s the last time I’m using that cheap Korean shit. From now on, I’m buying American.”
“My guess is she went back to her apartment,” Claire put in. “Someplace she’d feel safe.”
Tay thought about it. “Not likely. If she wants safe, she checks into a hotel under a false identity. She’s only going back to her apartment if she has some important reason to be there.”
“Which she would if the plan is to ambush you there,” August said.
“That doesn’t add up. I told her yesterday I’d meet her at her apartment, but she said she wasn’t there. She told me to be ready this morning because she might not be near.”
“Not near where?”
“Her apartment, I assumed. I didn’t ask.”
“I think we should check the apartment anyway,” Claire said. “What have we got to lose?”
“Why not?” Tay picked up his cigarettes and stood. “It’s not like I have something else to do.”
“I don’t want just the two of you there by yourselves if everything goes to shit.”
“What are you talking about, John? Claire and I drive over there, I go up and knock on the door, and either she answers or she doesn’t. What is there to go to shit?”
“Always the optimist, aren’t you, Sam?”
“That’s the first time anyone ever called me that.”
“All four of us will go,” August said and looked at Woods. “Get some gear together.”
“We going heavy or going light?”
“I’d call it medium. Breaching equipment and silenced handguns. Nothing heavy-duty.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Tay said, waving his hands in front of him. “Silenced handguns? What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re just going to knock on the door, not start a war.”
“When you knock on a door, you don’t get to choose what’s on the other side.”
“Nothing is going to be on the other side. She won’t be there. She’s scared. She’s in the wind.”
“And you’d bet your life on that?”
Tay sighed, but he said nothing.
“I didn’t think so.”
August shifted his eyes back to Woods.
“We’re out of here in five.”
Claire drove past Rebecca’s apartment building at a normal rate of speed to avoid attracting any attention. The five-story red-brick building with the big black-framed windows looked exactly like it had when they had been there before. Quiet and unremarkable. The sleepy residential neighborhood was probably at its sleepiest in midmorning, and they saw no one on the sidewalks in either direction.
“Go around to the garage entrance,” Tay told Claire. “Tell John to park here in the front and wait for us.”
Claire lifted a small encrypted radio transceiver off the Mustang’s console and told August what they were doing. When Tay looked over his shoulder, he saw the black Chevy Suburban with Woods at the wheel and August in the passenger seat pull to the curb and stop.
They were approaching the garage on the side street when Tay realized the gate was lifting and a dark blue Honda was nosing up the driveway from the underground garage.
Tay jerked forward as far as his seatbelt would let him and pointed to the driveway. “Get in there before the gate closes! Quick!”
Claire swung the Mustang in right behind the Honda as it turned out of the driveway. She got the nose of the Mustang under the gate just as it started to close, but the gate’s sensors detected the car, immediately reversed the gate, and it opened again. Claire rolled into the garage.
“Tell August where we are and ask him to come in here and park,” Tay said.
“How’s he going to get in?”
“Gates like this always open automatically when cars approach from inside. When you see August turn into the driveway, just move up enough to open the gate for him, then roll back down the ramp.”
Claire looked at Tay and smiled. “You’re not just a pretty face, are you, Sam?”
“I’m a detective,” he said. “I detected.”
When the Mustang and the Suburban were both inside the garage and parked together as far away from the entrance to the lobby as they could get, the four of them got out and waited while Woods retrieved a brown leather valise from the back of the Suburban. Squatting down, he unzipped it and passed out pistols in black nylon paddle holsters. When he got to Tay, Tay held up both hands, palms out, and shook his head.
“A retired Singaporean cop getting into a gun battle with CIA employees in Washington D.C.? Forget it.”
“It’s not Washington D.C.,” August said as he clipped the holster to his belt. “It’s Arlington, Virginia.�
��
Tay just looked at him.
August shrugged.
When the handguns were all safety tucked away, Woods picked up the valise and carried it to the lobby door. He tried the knob, but of course the door was locked. Pulling a small black leather case out of the valise and unzipping it, Woods produced a stainless-steel lock-picking gun. He inserted the snout of the device into the keyhole in the door handle and pressed the button. A dull whirring noise sounded for a few seconds and then stopped. Woods withdrew the tool, turned the knob again, and this time the door opened.
“That’s pretty cool,” Tay chuckled. “Where can I get one of those?”
“Amazon.”
“Seriously?” Tay asked, but no one answered him.
The lobby was small and floored in red Mexican tile. A pair of clear glass doors on the front wall opened out to the street. There were brass-colored mail boxes on one side and a long wooden table on the other. It looked vaguely Spanish in design and seemed to serve no purpose other than to collect the junk mail residents pulled out of their boxes and discarded. The gray metal door from the garage was in the lobby’s back wall, as were the building’s single elevator and another gray metal door with a small white sign on it that said STAIRS.
“Apartment number?” Woods asked when they were all inside.
“31B,” August told him. “Third floor rear. Let’s take the stairs.”
They all trooped up the stairs keeping their body language casual in case they encountered anyone, but they didn’t.
The third-floor hallway was painted a cream color and carpeted in dark green. Woods found the door to 31B while August and Claire made a quick check of the other half dozen or so apartment doors along the corridor, stopping for a few seconds in front of each and listening for any sound that might suggest they were occupied.
