Authors: Jason Austin
****
Glenda looked rightfully confused
and said, “But the police are...”
“
...the
ones who just tried to kill you!” Xavier finished.
Glenda
took up the dufflebag of clothes from her apartment and they headed
for the door. Just short of it, Xavier dropped Bowen’s gun as
his legs turned to matchsticks. He braced his palm against the wall
to save himself from falling over.
“
Are
you going to throw up again?” Glenda asked.
“
If
I’m lucky,” Xavier answered, his bottom lip wobbly, as if
he were about to. “Grab the gun.”
Glenda
picked up the gun and then held her rescuer by his sides.
When
she saw the movement from over his shoulder, she swiftly pulled the
man aside without even thinking. Perry Jones had them lined up
perfectly and his intended shot would have likely skewered them both
had she not. Glenda then turned and let off a single shot from
Bowen's gun in Jones's direction. She did so, entirely certain she
would hit nothing, and even more certain Jones would make her regret
it. Instead, her single shot ended Jones, leaving him virtually
headless in the otherwise comfortable motel room.
****
Gabriel trotted outside to get a
clear view of the motel’s entrance.
Jones
should be moving by
now
, he thought.
What's wrong?
He
turned and slapped his briefcase onto the hood of a gold Cadillac
parked directly at his right side. He threw open the case, only to
see the word “IMMOBILIZED” screaming at him in bold blue
letters.
“
Motherfucker!”
he spat.
I
knew it! I knew it!
Gabriel
tucked the uplink under his arm
and moved around a corner, out of the motel's line of sight. Before
he could begin to imagine what had happened, he spied a small blue
sedan cutting a U-turn on an empty street across from the location.
It
couldn’t be
, he
thought.
But
it was. Glenda Jameson.
Her
car was zipping around the corner with a man Gabriel had never seen
before, wearing a blue shirt, or maybe jacket, behind the wheel.
“
Damn
it!” he said and looked in the direction of his car. It was
parked on the other side of the cafe. No way he would catch them. He
tapped intensely at his fliptop until he connected to the police
band's transmission. Shots had been fired, and officers were down,
according to dispatch. All available units were proceeding directly
to 2135 Stark Avenue. Right to him.
Washington, D.C., August 27,
8:03 p.m.
McCutcheon’s
throat felt like he'd swallowed a tennis ball.
I
should’ve pulled him out,
he thought as he zoomed
down the highway.
That kid was
too anxious to prove himself, more so than most. What was I thinking?
That
another MIT was going to happen at Case Western, that’s what.
Good lord
.
For
a moment, McCutcheon's worriedness distracted him from the road and a
fresh cluster of opposing cars caused him to swerve out of the median
at the last second. It made him snap-to and the feeling quickly
subsided. He went to engage the autodriver, and then thought better
of it. Driving was another constant lesson in awareness and
discipline; good agents kept their senses sharp no matter what their
bodies were doing.
Why am I
even reacting like this?
he asked himself. An agent
unexpectedly going off the grid was no reason to panic. Did he really
have such little faith in Bruckner?
No.
Not Bruckner.
Himself.
It
was
his
decision to
let Bruckner proceed. A decision that would follow McCutcheon the
rest of his career, that would influence the manner in which he made
future decisions about agents’ lives. And he wasn't sure he'd
made the right one. McCutcheon wanted Ross just as bad, if not worse
than Bruckner. He didn’t want to say it to the kid's face, but
once McCutcheon was told about the meeting in D.C., any disagreement
they had about making that train was effectively over. McCutcheon
couldn’t just replace Bruckner. A more experienced agent
would’ve been too old for the part. It would have taken another
six months or even longer to get as far, and who knows how many more
schools would’ve been blown to bits by then. McCutcheon banged
his fist against the dash.
But
was there another way?
Less
than five minutes off the highway, McCutcheon pulled into the lot of
a shabby, fly-by-night motor inn that was being combed by agents. It
was adjacent to an equally shabby roadside diner whose parking lot
was virtually empty, save for a rusty hummer that was also being
searched by agents and about to be loaded onto a towing bed. It had
been reported abandoned by the diner's manager. A bag of clothes and
personal phone equips had been found inside. This left the agents
with several kilometers to cover in any direction. It also made
hoping that someone had noticed something suspicious at one of the
motels their best bet. Perhaps they would get lucky and even find
some decent video surveillance. The problem, there, being truckers
and prostitutes of all ages and sexes made up a sizable chunk of
those off-ramp motels. Some of the owners wouldn’t consider it
good business to keep cameras probing about. Those were the spots
Ross would prefer.
A
study of the area put a total of fifteen motels within the target
vicinity. Agents were descending on every one of them. At least half
were owned and or operated by naturalized citizens. With the sight of
all those blue suits storming their front doors, many of them
panicked, thinking the Immigration and Naturalization Service was
staging a raid. One Iranian woman, crying and dressed in an
ankle-length frock, had fallen to her knees before an agent pleading
with him not to deport her. The agent simply helped her up and
realized it was going to be a long day.
McCutcheon’s
dashboard-com suddenly beeped and he answered it, snapping out of his
funk. “McCutcheon here, go ahead.”
“
Sir,
this is Brisby,” the com said. “I’m at an El Dorado
Motel off Highway 1, southwest corner. You better get over here,
quick.”
****
After another seven miles, the
towering, illuminated sign for the El Dorado crested above the
off-ramp against the darkening sky. It was one of the motels on the
list and being several hundred yards from a semi weigh-in station, it
was a frequent stop for horny truckers. Walking up to the entrance,
McCutcheon gagged at the sight of a discarded condom on the sidewalk.
Dusk was shifting into night and the streets were just beginning to
brew with transient women and young boys who looked like they hadn’t
slept in days. One of the younger women reminded McCutcheon of his
daughter. He was glad he wasn’t the local law enforcement. It
would break his heart to have to drag in one of these kids.
In
room seventeen of the El Dorado motel, Garrett Trineer lay dead of an
apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. A low velocity MAG shot from
flat against the temple. Blood and brain-matter had been dispersed
about the walls in a charred gluey horror. The El Dorado's
Trinidadian owner had discovered the body, by best estimates, about
an hour from the time of death. The man had been nothing but a pain
in the ass since then. By the time FBI had been notified, D.C. Metro
was more than happy to hand things off.
“
Damn
it, mon! Why da’ hell dis’ shit got to happen here?”
the owner complained.
He
became downright hostile when they discovered the second body fried
in the bathtub. As if somehow American murder victims had it in for
foreign motel owners. As it turned out, the El Dorado's electrical
system wasn't quite up to code—something Ross may have noticed
beforehand, thereby choosing electrocution as his method. Brisby must
have listened to the owner bitch and moan at the local cops for a
good twenty minutes before McCutcheon arrived.
“
Jesus,”
the ASAC groaned as he ran his eyes over Bruckner's stewed corpse.
Both Bruckner and Trineer were found in their underwear. An empty 3mm
MAG pistol lay just inches from Trineer's corpse. A type-written note
left on the bed spoke of a suicide pact between two homosexual lovers
seeking the refuge of the afterlife—Ross’s last minute
gift to the homophobic Trineer.
“
It’s
my fault,” McCutcheon said.
He'd
come to confer with Special Agent
Brisby from inside the owner/manager's office. They each occupied a
side of the single window that looked out over the motel's parking
lot. The office was a good thirty yards from the crime scene, but
still in direct line of sight. And it explained further why the owner
was being such an ass. He'd probably seen or heard something within
the proper timeline, but hadn't done a damn thing about it. He hadn't
even inspected the room for nearly an hour after Ross had checked out
and that was because he wanted to rent it to some trucker and his
sixteen-year-old male prostitute.
“
How
is it your fault?” Brisby asked.
“
I
sent him in without proper surveillance,” McCutcheon answered.
“
Come
on boss, you couldn't have given him anything Ross wouldn't have
found, inside or out. He would have detected it and killed him for
sure. Even the trackers were stripped of him before he got within ten
miles.” Brisby felt a dozen different kinds of silly
recapitulating tactics and procedure to a man with 3 times his
experience, but he knew damn well if it were
him
in McCutcheon's shoes, he
would certainly want somebody there to help keep things in
perspective. “The slipdisk wasn't just the
right
call it was the
only
call.”
“
How
did Ross know?” McCutcheon asked out the window. “How
could he have detected the bug in the software?”
“
I
hate to say it, boss, but maybe that wasn't it. The tracker was never
activated, which means it was likely never downloaded. Maybe Bruckner
did something that tipped him off.”
“
Or
maybe Ross caught the software and stopped it before it had a
chance.”
“
How?
The tech boys designed it to circumvent every commercial firewall
known to man.”
McCutcheon
glanced around the office as if it had ears. “D.O.J. designs
its own firewalls.”
Brisby
looked stunned. “You think Ross had an inside line on how to
detect it?”
McCutcheon
shrugged. “
Why Washington
D.C.? Why did Ross want the exchange to happen
here
?
There aren't any biotech firms worth hitting in D.C.? He wanted those
codes to hack into Case Western Reserve back in Cleveland.” He
paused. “Why was he really here? Why was he the only one who
got away from us a year ago?”
“
You
think somebody with bureau connections tipped him off at the last
second, somebody here?”
“
I
don't know what to think anymore.”
Brisby
tugged on his chin. He didn't have McCutcheon's years in the bureau,
but he knew the rotten apples were there. Still, he couldn't imagine
Ross actually being
protected
by one of their own. “Sounds like either way you look at it,
the only thing that would have saved Bruckner would have been if none
of us did our job.”
McCutcheon
sighed at his own reflection in the window. He knew Brisby was right,
but couldn’t say it out loud. When McCutcheon looked at him
with his plumb posture, full head of hair and teen-idol semblance, he
remembered that Brisby wasn’t yet thirty himself. He then
crimped under a spasm of guilt for letting the little snot in on
suspicions that not even McCutcheon was ready to acknowledge. The
ASAC nodded toward the scene of uniforms and cheap sport coats
bustling across the parking lot. “What does Metro think?”
“
They’re
buying it for now,” Brisby answered. “Just like Ross
wanted them to. You know how the locals like to keep it: simple and
clean.” Brisby didn't harbor any disrespect for local law
enforcement, like some agents, but looking too far beyond the veil
wasn’t exactly a metro strong suit.
“
Even
they won’t be fooled once they get the background on Trineer,”
McCutcheon said plainly. “They’ll assume it was a poorly
disguised revenge hit by his old gang—payback for rolling over
on them.”
“
Our
guy will just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Brisby
shook his head. “I'll never understand guys like Ross. Not why
they kill, but how they manage to always find the right people to
manipulate.”
“Belonging,
kid. It's a powerful human instinct.”
“Does
that explain guys like
Thaddeus
Maguire? That guy was born with a silver spoon coming out of both
ends. If I were him I would have been too busy enjoying my money to
sacrifice everything for 'the cause'.”