Last Chance to Die

“Let’s burgle.”

Grabbing a flashlight from the glove compartment, Vail led the way through the woods, which although heavily treed had little underbrush to navigate through. Ten minutes later they stood at the edge of a tree line looking at the back of the house. It was completely dark. The rear of the structure had no doors, but there were three identical windows. “Go knock on the door.”

“Of a Russian safe house. Shouldn’t I have a stack of Girl Scout cookies or be wearing a Brownie uniform?”

“This is no time for sexual fantasies. Tell them your car broke down and you need to call the auto club.”

“And why would someone as together as I am—discounting my shoes—not have a cell phone?” she asked. “Is that fantasy about me or Thin Mints?”

“Tell them it’s dead. You know, act like a ditz.”

“There are some subtle rewards to working with you, but I think my favorite part is the Taliban-level degradation.”

“I told you, save the dirty talk for later.”

Kate walked to the side door and knocked. When there was no answer, she pounded her fist on it loudly, glancing back at Vail. After a minute he stepped out of the cover of the trees and waved at her to come to the rear of the house. “Start trying all the windows. If he was going to leave the alarm off, maybe he left us a way in.”

The second window Kate tried slid open. “Over here.”

Vail came to her and lifted himself through the window. “Hold on while I look around.” She watched anxiously as the beam of his flashlight swept the room and then disappeared. When he came back, he offered her his hand. “All clear.”

Once inside, Kate asked, “What are we looking for?”

“Anything locked. Doors, cabinets, anything where Calculus could have secured whatever he left.”

“If he left anything. If we’re burglarizing the right place.”

Vail walked over to a window shade that was pulled down. He put his hand behind it and then stepped to the side so Kate could see. “One-way shades, just like at the observation post. We’re in the right place.”

“Then since we have only one flashlight, how about we pull all the shades down and turn on some lights?”

Vail flashed the beam around the room, trying to determine what kind of lighting the house was equipped with and if it could be seen from outside. He turned his flashlight up to the ceiling, examining the fixtures.

“What kind of bulbs are those?” Kate asked.

“Good question.” He pulled over a table and got up on it. He unscrewed the bulb. It was heavy and appeared to be filled with something black. He turned it upside down and felt the granules inside shift. He screwed it back in carefully.

When he got down, Kate said, “What is it?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think they were filled with gunpowder and then reassembled.”

“Gunpowder?”

“If you turn on the light switch, the electricity going through the element will set them off.”

“Why would they do that?”

“My guess is that Calculus did it.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. For now just stay close to me.”

Kate and Vail moved from room to room, and he scanned each section of the ceiling with his flashlight. “The Russians spent some money upgrading this house.” He pointed with the beam of the flashlight. “See, they’ve got a sprinkler-system head in every room. Probably because their embassy is so far away. They didn’t want someone to be able to come in here and burn it down.”

“Like an ‘accidental’ fire started by a rival agency?”

“Pretty silly, huh? Can you imagine being that paranoid?” Vail walked along a short hallway into a room that looked like it was furnished and set up for meetings. He examined one wall closely, slowly sweeping his light across it. “There,” he said. “Do you see it?”

Kate stepped closer. “A pinhole camera.”

Vail patted the wall the camera was embedded in. “Did you notice how thick this wall is?”

“No.”

He led the way back into the room on the other side, and Kate said, “Now I see what you mean. It’s got to be four feet wide.”

Vail started checking the narrow panels that covered it. He tapped along the wall, looking for an access point. Using both hands, he pushed against each panel. The third one clicked open an inch or so. Behind it was a four-by-six-foot room that had been soundproofed. On a shelf were a series of audio and video recorders.

He could now see the pinhole camera attached to the interior of the wall, a lead running to a video recorder and then to a small monitor, so that the asset being paid off could be carefully watched and recorded as the event was occurring.

On the sidewall was a circuit-breaker box for the entire house. Vail guessed that it had existed before they built the narrow room around it. He turned on the DVD recorder and pressed the Eject button, but the carousel was empty. On top of the monitor was a plastic kitchen bowl that seemed out of place. Inside it was a sealed paper packet. Directly above it was another sprinkler head, presumably to protect the equipment should anything happen. Instead of taking the packet out, Vail picked up the bowl and examined the paper envelope without touching it.

“What’s that?” Kate asked.

Handwritten in the bottom right corner was the name “Ariadne.” Vail bent closer to it and held the flashlight at an angle so he could see the paper around the writing. He looked up at the sprinkler head again. “It’s good news and bad news. See if you can find a plastic bag somewhere, something big enough to carry this packet in.”

Kate wanted to ask Vail what he thought was inside the envelope, but she also wanted to spend as little time as possible inside the house. She hurried to the back, and Vail could hear her opening and closing drawers. She returned and handed him a torn plastic grocery bag. “This is all I could find. What is that?”

He picked up the packet, using the bag to grip it. “Something I suspect I don’t want touching my skin.” He flexed the packet. “It feels like a disc packed in powder.”

“Do you think Calculus left it?”

“I know he did.”

“How?”

Just then they heard a car pull up next to the house. “Go see what that is,” he told her while he carefully wrapped the envelope in the bag. Cautiously, Kate went to the window and peeked outside. “This can’t be good,” she said in a strained whisper.

“Who is it?”

“Best guess is the Russian embassy’s SWAT team. Three guys in cheap suits and bad haircuts, pulling down ski masks and carrying large black automatics.”

Vail reached over to the circuit-breaker box and threw all the switches to the “off” position. “Quick, go turn on all the light switches.”

“What?” Kate asked in an incredulous whisper.

“I’ve cut the power. Go!”

Vail headed in the opposite direction, flipping up wall switches. Just as the house door opened, they both had made it back to the concealed room, and Vail closed the panel door quietly. Kate drew her weapon and eased back the slide far enough to confirm that a round was in the chamber.

Even though the small room was soundproofed, they could hear the three men moving roughly through the house, occasionally calling out to one another in a foreign language. Their footsteps eventually slowed, and they started talking in lower tones. It sounded like they were now just outside the hidden room. Kate knew that if they were from the embassy, they would be aware of the room and would check it before leaving. A set of footsteps started toward them, and Vail wrapped his arms around Kate, pulling her over to the wall where the circuit breakers were located. He held her a little tighter and then flipped all the circuit breakers as fast as he could.

Instantly there was a series of explosions, and fire flashed under the panel door briefly. The men screamed and ran for the front door. Still holding Kate, Vail punched open the panel entrance and said, “Out the back window.” Suddenly the overhead sprinklers kicked on and soaked both of them as they ran to the rear of the house.

Kate reached the window, pulled it open, and climbed out. Vail followed her and closed it behind them. They hurried into the cover of the woods. The night air seemed twice as cold now that their hair and clothing were wet. As soon as they got into the car, Vail started it, revving the engine to boost the temperature. He went to the trunk and retrieved Kate’s sweat suit and then waited outside while she changed. When he finally climbed back in, he was shaking. Kate said, “Tell me that part again about how nothing can go wrong.”

“They got there fifteen minutes after us, so they didn’t come from D.C. That leaves a distinct possibility that Calculus is talking. They must have come here to retrieve the disc.” Vail turned the car around and headed back toward the highway.

“Then why would they come with ski masks and guns drawn?” she asked.

“If Calculus talked, he had to tell them that he’d left a clue for us. Maybe they were just being overly cautious in case we were there.”

“Well, they’ll know we were there now that we tried to blow up the place.”

“Especially when they don’t find the disc,” Vail said. “That’s why we have to get this package processed as quickly as possible. I assume you can have someone from the lab meet us as soon as we get back.”

“What kind of examination are you talking about?”

“Chemical.”

They pulled onto the highway, and Kate adjusted the heater. “Okay, now that we have time, what’s with the packet? ‘Good news and bad.’ What did you mean? And how did you know that Calculus left it?”

“The first clue was the gunpowder in the lights. Since he’s an engineer, Calculus would have known that as an antipersonnel mine it would inflict just minor wounds, because the only projectiles would have been the bulb’s glass, which would have broken into very small fragments.”

“Then why would he rig them?”

“Besides the explosion and the flying glass, what else happened?”

“The fireball from the explosion, which would probably have caught some things on fire if it hadn’t been for the sprinklers.”

“Exactly, the sprinklers. That was his purpose. When I saw the bowl directly under the heads in that hidden room, it didn’t seem right. The ink on the outside of the packet had caused the paper to deteriorate slightly. I think it’s made of water-soluble paper, so when it got wet, it would expose whatever powder is inside to more water. I think his intention was for us to destroy the disc.”

“Why would he direct us to the disc and then want to destroy it?”

“If he was still here to work with us on the list, he would have told us about the booby-trapped lights and the powder. But he put them in place so if the Russians somehow got onto him, we would hopefully beat them to the disc and unwittingly destroy it so they would have no proof against him. And if the Russians got there first, and he didn’t tell them about the lights, they would destroy it.”

“How’s a plastic disc going to be destroyed by water?”

“There’s also the powder. Did you have high-school chemistry?”

“No.”

“I think it’s potassium, which when exposed to water has a violent chemical reaction. It would have turned the disc into liquid plastic. That was the bad news, but since we got it without any damage, that leaves the good news.”

“Which is?” she asked.

“That he wrote the name ‘Ariadne’ on it.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s from Greek mythology. She was the lover of Theseus, who volunteered to kill the Minotaur, a creature that was part man and part bull. It was kept in this complex maze from which it would have been impossible for Theseus to escape after killing it. So Ariadne gave him a golden cord to find his way out. In Logic, there’s a process referred to as Ariadne’s thread. It’s used to describe the solving of a problem that has a number of ways to proceed.”

“So that means what?”

“I’m hoping Calculus’s choice of ‘Ariadne’ means there’s a subtle set of clues for us to follow from mole to mole.”

“But he wanted to sell each name to us, one at a time. Why would he link them all together with the possibility of our being able to find them on our own?”

“Let’s not forget he tried to get us to destroy the first clue and any others that might have evolved from it so the Russians couldn’t retrieve them to use against him. We weren’t supposed to come out of that house with the disc unless he was controlling the situation. Again, it’s like the maze: Even if you killed the Minotaur, your punishment was that you’d never be able to find your way out. And as far as why he would provide a link from one to the others, he’s a smart guy, probably smarter than his pay grade.

“Most spies have one thing in common,” he continued. “They believe they’re underpromoted and underappreciated. They have contempt for everyone around them. Maybe he put the link in there to prove how much smarter he is than everyone else—the Russians because he’s selling their secrets under their noses and the FBI because we had the answer and didn’t realize it. Probably after he’d led us to the moles one by one, he would have exposed how they were all linked together, thereby proving how inept we are. It’s like some serial killers. They’re compelled to send solid but subtle clues to the newspaper and the authorities as to their real identity. And when they’re caught by some other means, the media will look at the clues and say, ‘How could the police not have figured it out?’ Then, even after they’re caught, they have eternal revenge against the legal system by letting everyone second-guess the cops’ inability to decode the ‘obvious.’ It’s all about control and ego.”

“Maybe he was hoping that if something went wrong and we were able to follow the string on our own, we’d do the honorable thing and send the money off to Chicago?” Kate said.

“Actually, that’s a more pragmatic analysis than mine. This is America—maybe he thought we would do the right thing.”

“So if there is a cord, not only will we have evidence on that disc of Pollock’s spying, there’ll also be a lead to the next mole.”

“Unless I’m wrong.”

She adjusted the heat vent so the air blew directly on her soaking hair and started running her fingers through it, trying to dry it. “Don’t be absurd. You, wrong? That hasn’t happened, for … what? Almost fifteen minutes?”

SIX

IT WAS ALMOST 11 P.M. BY THE TIME VAIL CHANGED CLOTHES, AND HE AND KATE drove back to FBI headquarters. At the lab Nate Wilhelm introduced himself as being from the Chemical Unit. Vail took out the plastic-bag-wrapped packet and handed it to him. “We think there’s a disc inside the envelope and that it’s covered with some water-catalyst powder, possibly potassium, meant to destroy it,” Kate said. “The envelope appears to be water-soluble, too.”

Wilhelm pulled on a pair of thick latex gloves. “Do you need to preserve the package for prints or handwriting?”

Vail looked at Kate. She said, “Just to be on the safe side, you’d better try.”

The examiner put on a pair of safety glasses and a dust mask. Then, with an X-Acto knife, he slit open the end of the envelope. Careful not to drag out any more powder than necessary, he used a pair of padded forceps to remove the disc from the paper container. He took the packet to another workstation and shook out all the powder he could. Then he put a small amount of it into a test tube. Using a pipette, he dripped a couple ounces of water into the tube. The powder bubbled furiously. “It looks like potassium, and it reacts to water like potassium.”

He pulled off the gloves and put on a fresh pair, going back to the disc. He dusted it off with a large fingerprint brush, then held it up to the light. “No latents.” Out of a box that dispensed them, he took a sterile cloth and wiped the disc off on both sides. He did it twice more with fresh cloths and then took off his mask, glasses, and gloves. “That should do it.”

Vail took it by the edges and touched his fingertip to the non-play side of the disc, testing it for any reaction to the moisture from his hand. There was none. He asked Wilhelm for a plastic protective sleeve and dropped it into his side jacket pocket.

Kate said, “Nate, we don’t want this to show up on any paperwork. Will that cause you any problems?”

“Less paperwork is never a problem, Kate.”

“Thanks.”

As Kate and Vail started toward the elevator, he said, “Should we wait until tomorrow to see what’s on this?”

“Like you could wait.”

He laughed. “I was just trying to see how tired you were.”

When the elevator door opened, the only passenger, a black man, said, “Steve Vail?”

It was Luke Bursaw, an agent Vail had worked with in Detroit more than five years earlier. “Luke,” Vail said, shaking hands with him. “What are you doing here?”

“I finally got my ‘office of preference’ transfer. I’m at the Washington Field Office now, working general criminal. Are you back with the Bureau?”

Vail looked at Kate. “I’m sorry. This is Kate Bannon. She’s—”

“Sure, I remember Kate from Detroit. And now she’s a deputy assistant director. We get most of the memos over at WFO. How are you, Kate?” He extended his hand.

Kate took it. She remembered him because he was the only agent Vail had worked with in Detroit, usually when a difficult arrest needed to be made. The most memorable one was where Vail and Bursaw came barging into the office with four bank robbers handcuffed together early one morning. One of them, also wanted for murder, had been on Michigan’s ten-most-wanted list. It happened shortly after she’d arrived in Detroit, and the thing that had always stuck with her was that no one seemed to think it was out of the ordinary, at least not for Vail.

Bursaw had gone to Penn on a wrestling scholarship and majored in philosophy. He’d gained a couple of pounds since she’d last seen him, but he still seemed to move with an athlete’s ease. “And I remember you, Luke. What brings a WFO agent here at this time of night?”

“I caught a couple of shifts as night supervisor that nobody wanted—you know, holiday pay. And I had some evidence to drop off at the lab on the way home.” Bursaw turned back to Vail. “One thing I do know about you, Steve, is how good you were at ducking questions. So what are you doing here?”

“Actually, I am back with the Bureau, sort of as an independent contractor, working with Kate.”

Bursaw glanced at him carefully, letting Vail know that there were still holes in his story that would be queried later. “Small world. Where are you staying?”

“Over on Sixteenth Street.”

“Any chance we could get together? Share some lies over a beer?”

“Sure. I’ll give you a call.”

“Actually, I’ve got a problem, and you’re the perfect person to run it by.”

“What kind of problem?”

“A woman from headquarters, an intelligence analyst, went missing a few months back, and I wound up with the case. So far I’m getting nowhere.”

Vail took the DVD out of his jacket and handed it to Kate. “Any reason this can’t wait until morning?” he asked her.

“It can wait. Besides, I am beat.”

“We’ll get a running start at it first thing tomorrow.”

“Sure.” The elevator opened onto the first floor, and the two men got out. “Nice seeing you, Luke.”

“You too, Kate.”

As they walked toward the street exit, Bursaw said, “Any idea how long you’re going to be here?”

“To tell you the truth, it’s starting to look like the minute I stepped off the plane, I’d already been here too long.”

VAIL AND BURSAW found a bar that wasn’t far from headquarters. Since it was relatively empty, they went to the far end and climbed onto a couple of stools. After the bartender had brought them beer, Bursaw asked, “So what could possibly have brought you back to the Bureau after the way they treated you?”

“You know you’re one of the few people I ever trusted.”

“I can’t really remember you trusting anyone. Sounds like you’re about to tell me that you can’t tell me.”

“If you knew what this was about, you’d thank me for not involving you, especially when they start hooking people up to the polygraph.”

“That serious?”

“I think you know I wouldn’t be keeping it from you if it weren’t.”

Bursaw nodded and then took a sip of beer. “You’re right, I don’t want to know. But how did you get involved in it?”

“I did some work for the director six months ago, in L.A.”

“That Pentad thing, that was you?”

“More Kate than me. I was just looking for a change of pace.”

“From the little I heard, you got it—and then some.” Bursaw looked at him for some reaction, but Vail just shrugged. “You never did like a lot of noise.” Bursaw chuckled salaciously. “But you and Kate, huh? That’s got to be a major factor in you being dragged back in.”

Vail snorted. “It was supposed to be, but unfortunately we don’t seem to be a good fit.”

“You know what Nietzsche said—‘Woman was God’s second blunder.’”

“Is that a shot at me or at Kate?”

Bursaw took a scholarly tone. “Philosophy is not a discipline of answers but one of contemplation.”

“Great, things aren’t surreal enough around here. Now I’ve got a black guy quoting Hitler’s favorite philosopher.”

“Whether it’s working or not, that’s still a good-looking woman,” Bursaw said.

“She is that,” Vail said. “But enough about my blundering celibacy. What’s the story on the missing employee?”

“Her name is Sundra Boston. She’s an intelligence analyst at headquarters, or at least she was. I didn’t know her. She disappeared about three months before I was transferred back here. I’ve got this cousin, Eden. Nice gal, but she married a loser. Actually, ‘drunk’ would be a more accurate description. They got a couple of kids, and he’s always going off on these drinking binges, leaving her with nothing to get by on. Anyway, she met Sundra at church, and they became friends. My cousin may have made a couple of bad choices in her life, but she’s not a complainer. When her husband takes off, she sucks it up and doesn’t say anything to anyone. I suppose it’s as much out of embarrassment as anything else. She said that somehow Sundra always seemed to know when she was going through those times, and she would show up unannounced at Eden’s with a carload of groceries. She’d been doing it for over a year. When I got back here, Eden pulled me aside at a family get-together and asked me if I could find out what happened to her. She thought Sundra had been transferred to some secret assignment or something.

“So I checked indices and found that we had a case on her disappearance, and that it was being handled on my squad. I’d been back in D.C. less than two weeks, knew nothing about the case, and I hadn’t caught on to my supervisor yet. So I went in and asked him about it.” Bursaw shook his head and took a long pull on his beer. “Steve, this guy is everything that is wrong with the new Bureau. He actually grew up in Beverly Hills—that’s right, my brother, 90210—and couldn’t get through an hour of the day without performing some affectation. He calls the bad guys ‘thugs’ and ‘hoodlums.’ When I asked him about Sundra, he gave me the rundown and told me that the investigation was at a standstill. Then he cocks his head to the side in thought and says, ‘You know, she’s an African-American, too. You could probably find her, because these people would talk to you.’ And you think the leadership was bad when you were in. Then he reassigns the case to me as if he had just had some sort of movie-of-the-week life-altering epiphany.”

“I take it you haven’t had any luck getting those African-Americans to tell you where she is?”

Bursaw grinned. “Don’t start,” he said. “So I pull the file and find out that very little had been done after the first thirty days. I made up my mind right there to jump on it with both feet.”

“Not to belittle your altruism, but what does she look like?”

“You’re right, she is good-looking. Which doesn’t hurt. But I figure with what she did for my cousin, she must be a good person and deserves to have someone searching for her for real.”