The Bricklayer

Although the Rubaco Pentad appeared to be a politically driven domestic terrorism group, its demand for a million dollars was still technically extortion. And extortion, he had been taught during new-agents training, is simply a crime of intimidation at an anonymous distance. The victim has to be scared enough by the criminal’s threat to do two things without question: part with the cash, and not contact the authorities. Each party has its own advantages. The extortionist has anonymity, while all law enforcement has to do is never lose contact with the money. Most cases wind up a draw: the criminal doesn’t get the money, and law enforcement is unable to identify him. The would-be extortionist keeps from going to jail, and the Bureau justifies, in part, its budget requests. When the occasional arrest is made, it’s because the extortionist thought he had come up with an original, foolproof gimmick to retrieve the money. ‘That’s all there is to extortion,’ the instructor had declared. ‘There are no variations. The Bureau’s been around for a century and no one has been able to figure out a way to do it differently.’

But the Rubaco Pentad changed everything. After murdering a former Hollywood reporter a month earlier, it had demanded one million dollars to prevent the next killing. What was different about the Pentad’s crime, other than the before-the-fact violence, was that the demand was made directly to the director of the FBI. In extortion or kidnapping drops, the Bureau always had at least some degree of surprise on its side, but the Pentad had taken that advantage away, leaving the agency unsure what to do next. The FBI was being told not only to come up with the money, but also to deliver it. Evidently the group felt its plan was so flawless that it could afford to humiliate the Bureau and still get away with the money.

The clear New Hampshire sky was full of stars; a halfmoon hung distantly in the northeast. West looked around for some indication of what he was supposed to do next. He checked the coordinates on the GPS again. They matched those in the instructions exactly. Maybe he was just supposed to wait. He put the bag down and reread a copy of the demand note.

FBI,

Only your unconditional compliance with the following two conditions will prevent the next murder:

1. Delivery of $1,000,000 in hundred-dollar bills at precisely 9:42 P.M. on August 14 at 43.072N 70.546W.

2. The public or media must not learn about the demand for money.

If either condition is violated, even by a ‘leak,’ the next person, a politician we have selected, will die. Although we doubt your ability to comply fully, we’re willing to let the world-famous FBI try to get it right the first time. If not, this war will get progressively more expensive in terms of lives as well as money. Neither of which are we necessarily opposed to.

If the FBI continues to violate the rights of this country’s citizens, the money will be used to finance much more drastic measures. More lives will be taken, and not one at a time. The FBI will be fully credited with the resulting mass destruction.

Make sure your delivery boy is a good swimmer. The Rubaco Pentad

West checked his watch. It was almost nine thirty. Time was getting short.

Of course, he thought, the water. They wanted a good swimmer. He picked up the bag and walked across the parking lot tarmac and around behind the club. There was a waist-high fence that separated the asphalt from the grassy slope that led to the Piscataqua River. He vaulted over it and walked down to the edge. Music from inside the club lilted softly behind him.

Twenty yards to his right, he could see a faint optic-green glow among a cluster of large shrubs. Under them was a black tarp with a glow-in-the-dark arrow painted on top. The Pentad would probably have left it during the day when the paint would not have luminesced and been noticeable. The arrow pointed to a building on an island in the river, which was dimly silhouetted by the moonlight. It was a large white structure that, because of the notched turrets at either end, looked like a medieval castle.

The tide appeared to be out, making West wonder if he was supposed to swim across the river, roughly two hundred yards. He spoke into the mike on his chest. ‘Can someone find out what time low tide is here?’ The entire operation was being monitored in the Boston office’s major-case room.

After a few minutes someone said, ‘Nine forty-two P.M.’ That answered West’s question about crossing the river. It was the exact time given in the instructions. Slack tide, the time of least current. Under the tarp were a scuba tank, fins, and a mask. At first glance the tank appeared old-fashioned, but it wasn’t the tank. It was the harness that held it. Modern tanks come with a zippered vest or at least padded straps that divers can get in and out of easily. This one was fitted with excessively long black nylon webbing, crisscrossed unnecessarily, using far too much strapping. Some of it had been doubled in places that weren’t necessary, and although it would be uncomfortable, it looked functional. Placed inside the mask was a wrist compass, which he strapped on. West explained over the radio what was going on. ‘Can you find out something about the building on the other side? It looks like that’s where I’m heading.’

West stripped down to his swimsuit. The ‘good swimmer’ portion of the demand letter had been interpreted as an attempt by the Pentad to neutralize any FBI electronic devices, so the office technical agent had put a waterproof bag with a neck strap in a side pocket of the larger money-bag. Next to it was an underwater flashlight. Also a waxsealed container had been jury-rigged by the head firearms instructor, who had placed a Smith & Wesson snubnose inside it.

It was now nine forty. As West started to slip on the fins provided, he found a folded piece of paper inside. ‘34°’ was the only thing written on it. He held up his wrist and checked the heading to the ‘castle.’ It was exactly thirty-four degrees.

‘Command, it looks like they want me to swim underwater straight to that building. Any idea what it is yet?’

‘We’ve got the head resident agent in Portsmouth on the line. He says it’s a hundred-year-old naval prison. Been closed for thirty years. That’s Seavey’s Island you’re heading to. It’s a secure naval shipyard now. We’ve got some of the surveillance units already at the main gate. They’ll be on your land side by the time you get across.’

‘Just make sure they don’t get me burned. That note sounds like these people would be just as happy if we screwed this up.’ He pulled the transmitter mike off his chest and packed everything into the water-tight bag. As he stepped into the water, he took another deep breath and said, ‘Well, tough guy, this is what you wanted.’

The water was cold, but the biggest problem was swimming underwater with the twenty-two-pound bag of fake money. The weight kept him deeper than he wanted to be. Some of the time he had to drag it along the bottom while keeping his eye on the compass. And the strange configuration of the harness webbing that was cutting into his waist and shoulders wasn’t helping. Halfway across, the tide started coming back in and the current began picking up. It took him more than a half hour to get across the river.

As he got closer to the other side, he could see more luminescent green light. He felt the river bottom sloping up, so he set the bag down on it. Keeping a foot through the carrying straps, he surfaced to confirm his location. He was close to the prison now. Maybe too close. It looked black in its own shadow. And silent, making him want to hold his breath as if the building were a wounded animal he had stumbled across, its only means of attack to lure in those who believed it was dead. The structure was no longer two-dimensional, but seemed to wrap around the end of the island, and at the same time around him. Its west end had wings that ran north and south for hundreds of additional feet and at its tallest point was at least six stories high. So much for making the drop and leaving everything else to the surveillance agents. It looked like he was on his own.

He dove down and gripped the bag and saw that the green lights were a couple of glowsticks that had been attached to the underwater wall of the castle. When he got within a couple of feet, he snapped on the flashlight and could see the sticks had been laced through the remains of a metal gridwork that had once secured some type of conduit, possibly sewage, since the prison had been built when the country’s rivers were considered nature’s refuse solution. The underwater passageway was narrow, but he could fit through it. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the moneybag into the opening and followed it in.

A few minutes later he broke through the surface and found himself standing in a large stone room, the floor of which was bedrock except for the large rectangular access opening that he was now standing in. There were water-marks on the walls that indicated seawater filled the room to three-quarters at high tide. Toward the top of one wall were three heavy metal rings anchored into the stone and concrete, the kind that prisoners might have been chained to. He wondered if the U.S. Navy of a hundred years ago hadn’t used the room for ‘retraining,’ taking the most uncooperative prisoners to the subterranean cell for an obedience lesson taught by two high tides a day and the flesh-nibbling crabs that rode in on them.

Pulling off the fins and mask, West shrugged out of the scuba tank and took out the snubnose. After turning on the transmitter, he spoke into the mike: ‘Any unit on this channel, can you hear me?’ Because of the hundreds of tons of steel and concrete surrounding him, it would have been a miracle to get any reception. ‘Anyone hear me?’ he tried once more. The only response was the hollow silence of the cavernous cell.

There didn’t appear to be a way out of the room, but then he noticed a trapdoor in the ceiling above the far wall. The height of the room was a good ten feet. How was he supposed to get up there?

He walked over to the wall directly underneath the trap-door and shined his light up for a closer look. Just beneath it was a thick, rusty L-shaped hook embedded in the wall. In shoes, he could just touch a basketball rim if he jumped, ten feet. Barefooted, he could probably get up to the hook, but it didn’t look like there was enough of it exposed for him to hold on to. He flashed the light around the room for anything that might help him reach it, but there was nothing except what he had brought with him.

Then it hit him – the webbing on the tank. That’s why it was so long. The extortionists had used an excess of nylon strapping to rig the tank so he could extricate himself from this cell. It was some sort of test that they hoped the FBI would fail.

After stripping the strap out of the tank’s frame, he quickly measured it using the nose-to-fingertip method. It was three lengths, about nine feet long. Great, he thought, nine feet to get me up ten feet and through the trapdoor. And with the moneybag. He let his sailor’s knowledge of knots run through his mind for a while before the answer came to him.

He laid the scuba tank against the wall, and because it was round, he jammed the two wedge-shaped fins underneath it to prevent it from rolling out as he stood on it, getting him a foot closer to the hook. After knotting a simple loop in the middle of the strap, he tied a large slipknot at one end and threw it over the hook. Pulling it down slowly, he tied the moneybag tightly at the bottom end of the webbing.

As West started climbing, he realized how much the swim had taken out of him physically. He began to wonder if part of the Pentad’s plan was to exhaust him. If it was, that meant a face-to-face confrontation could lie somewhere on the other side of the trapdoor.

Once he could stand in the knotted loop, he was able to straighten up and, with a full shove, push up on the door, causing it to rotate 180 degrees and slam against the floor in which it was hinged. West waited and listened. Still there was only silence.

The room he was climbing into was pitch black. He pulled himself up, drew his weapon, and got into a crouched firing position before turning on his light. It was some sort of holding room in a cellblock, about twenty feet by twenty feet. White paint was peeling off all the walls, and he could now smell it in the salty, damp air. Knowing how old the facility was and what the navy used for paint thirty years earlier, he was sure it was lead-based. An old dry-rotted ladder lay flat on the floor next to the trapdoor.

There was only one door in the room and he walked to it, turning off his light before opening it. He tried to do it carefully, but its rusted hinges echoed shrilly ahead of him. It opened to a narrow corridor. A hundred years ago the navy probably figured that whether on sea or land, a sailor needed only minimal width to move from compartment to compartment, so why waste money on aesthetics. At the far end of the corridor, he could see three more glowsticks fastened to a heavy stairwell door that had a small window of wired glass embedded in it. The sticks were shaped into an arrow pointing up. He went back to the trapdoor and pulled the moneybag up.

If he was going higher, maybe the transmitter would eventually work. He taped it to the small of his back and ran the mike up onto his chest, taping it in place. Then he put on his shirt to hide it. Jamming everything else into the bag, he headed for the glowstick arrow.

The stairwell was even narrower than the corridor. A metal railing ascended alongside the stairs. Peeling paint lined the deck and he could feel some of it sticking to the bottom of his feet. West turned off his flashlight. Of course they knew he was coming, but they didn’t need to know exactly where he was. In the dark he put his hand on the railing and started up. There was a landing between each floor, and he stopped on each one, snapping on his light to check the next set of stairs. Then he turned it off and listened for a few moments. He heard nothing, though he knew they were there. He continued on up the stairs.

On each floor he checked the metal door to determine if it was where he was supposed to enter the prison, but they were all locked. The window in each had been covered with paper on the opposite side so he couldn’t look through.

It took a few minutes to reach the top floor, the eighth if he had counted correctly. He tried the door and it opened. He turned on his flashlight and checked his weapon. He was now on a small landing with doors on either side. Shining a light through the glass windows, he could see they led off to different parts of the floor. Both were locked. Between them was a shoulder-width opening that looked down over an eight-story airshaft. All at once he could see the vastness of that part of the prison. Each floor was ringed with a catwalk accessing hundreds of cells. Underneath the railing at the edge where he stood was another glowing arrow, this time taped to the floor and pointing straight out. West leaned out through the opening without touching the ancient railing. On the deck one floor down was another arrow pointing back toward the stairwell. Was he supposed to rappel down to the next floor? He stepped back and tested the railing and, surprisingly, found it was rock solid. He leaned over again, trying to see what was on the landing below, but it was shadowed in darkness, and he couldn’t get enough of an angle to use his flashlight. Quietly he tried his transmitter once more, but there still was no answer. He turned off the light and listened. Suddenly he felt the damp coldness that surrounded him, and shivered involuntarily.

Rappelling without a harness was chancy, but it was only about eight feet to the floor below. The nine-foot webbing was going to leave his descent a little short because of the four-foot-high railing and the knots at both ends, so he untied the bag, looping the webbing through the handles. Then, leaning as far over the side as he could, he swung the bag back and forth toward the landing below. When he was sure it would clear the railing, he released one end of the strapping, and the bag landed softly on the concrete deck below.

He pulled the webbing back up and tied it to the railing. Slowly he started to lower himself. When he came to the end of the strap, he could just reach the railing on his tiptoes. He took a moment to gain his balance on it and then let go of the webbing. As soon as his full weight transferred to the seventh-floor railing, he heard the horrifying sound of metal tearing. Both uprights supporting the crosspiece had been almost completely sawed through. He tried to grab the strap but it was already out of reach.

As he started to fall, he felt adrenaline explode through him. He turned himself in the air as best he could, hoping to catch a railing of one of the six remaining floors. But he was accelerating; it wasn’t going to get any easier. He threw his hands at one of them, but because his body was askew, his right hand caught the railing before his left. With a sickening crack, his right shoulder dislocated as his left hand grabbed the railing, stopping his fall.

Blinding pain shot through the entire right side of his body, and he could hold on with only his left hand. Unable to pull himself up, he looked down, trying to count the railings below. The flashlight dangled from his useless arm as its beam swept the airshaft haphazardly. He was still three stories up. Something streaked by him and he thought it might have been the railing. Then he saw the cut and bundled magazine pages hit the ground and burst apart. The moneybag, now empty, floated by. Helplessly he watched his left hand, as if it belonged to someone else, come off the railing.

Dan West didn’t think he had been unconscious very long. The first thing he became aware of was foot-steps. Help had arrived.

But there was something wrong with the approaching steps; they were too slow. And they belonged to only one person. West tried to look around but the flashlight had come off his wrist and lay beyond his grasp, giving off only a small fan of light in the opposite direction. He was lying uselessly on his gun as his entire right side was all but paralyzed by the searing pain. Slowly so his movement wouldn’t be detected, he reached back with his left hand and pushed the body recorder’s button to the On position.

A man came up behind him and stood silently for a few seconds before walking around and standing in the flashlight’s beam. Enduring the pain, West looked up as well as he could but still wasn’t able to see his features in the shadows.

‘Did you want to see my face?’ he asked in a cold whisper that caused West to understand the consequences of being able to identify the individual. He picked up the flashlight and scanned the agent’s sweating face. ‘You are young. That would explain the lack of self-preservation.’ He then shrugged and turned the light on himself. ‘Here you go.’

West stared at the man’s face, memorizing it. It was unremarkable except for his eyes; they were a stony gray but beginning to widen with pleasure. The agent tried to bring his injured right hand to his holster, but the extortionist easily kicked it away. ‘And they say the old BU was tougher. That must have been very painful.’

Hoping the recorder wasn’t damaged, West grimaced and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’d want to tell me your name.’

‘What good would that do you now?’

‘One last bit of satisfaction.’ He laughed painfully. ‘It’s not like I’ve got much else to look forward to.’

‘And what’s in it for me?’

‘Come on. It’s the ultimate act of control. Completely exposing yourself and then completely taking it away. For someone like you, that has to be damn near sexual.’

The man’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Someone like me?’ the extortionist said, his voice amused but still in that hissing whisper. He then drew a black automatic. ‘I’m sorry, but we’d better move things along. I would imagine surveillance is getting close.’

‘I was hoping you’d stick around. Give them the opportunity to meet you and, with a little luck, shoot you to death.’

‘That’s the saddest thing about being young – you actually believe there is such a thing as hope.’ He raised his gun and fired one round that hit Dan West in the right temple. The shot echoed metallically for a few moments, and the killer closed his eyes as if trying to prolong its sound.

When it was completely quiet, he scanned the floor with the flashlight until he found the spent cartridge. He picked it up and slipped out a side door.

THREE

Robert Lasker knew that in Washington, D.C., the quickest way to have one’s public-service résumé reduced to a oneline obituary was to get caught lying to the White House, especially if that individual happened to be the director of the FBI. But that was what he had just done. Anyway, he wasn’t sure what the truth was, or whether he cared if, as director of the FBI, he ever found out. He told his driver that he needed to clear his head and would walk back to the office.

Pushing his hands deeper into his pockets as he walked along, he tried not to think about the meeting with the White House staffer who had summoned him because of the press the Bureau had been receiving about the Rubaco Pentad murders. ‘After three murders of well-known people, silence is not an option with the media. It looks like you’re hiding something. You have to make some sort of statement,’ the staffer had said.

Actually, they were hiding something, not only from the public, and now the White House, but from most of their own agents as well. Lasker, without giving any details, told him that the investigation was at a critical juncture and the smallest miscalculation could cause additional deaths. The fear of the administration being dragged into the circle of responsibility for more murders was enough for the aide to back off, at least for the time being.

In truth, the FBI had not developed a single lead as to who was responsible for the murders or how to stop the killers from striking again.

Twelve hours earlier, the Rubaco Pentad had claimed its third high-profile victim, Arthur Bellington, a nationally known defense attorney who took particular delight in preventing or overturning FBI convictions, which he often followed with a press conference detailing the Bureau’s ineptitude.

A month earlier, a former reporter had been murdered in her L.A. home. Within a couple of days, a million-dollar extortion demand was mailed to the FBI. When Agent Daniel West tried to deliver a dummy package of money to catch them, he too was shot to death. The Bureau had covered up the death, reporting it as a training accident, because of the Pentad’s demand for secrecy concerning all monetary aspects of the case.

A couple of weeks later, Nelson Lansing, a Utah state senator who had coauthored a book about Ruby Ridge concluding that the Bureau had methodically executed members of the Randy Weaver family, had been shot and killed by the Pentad as he was leaving his Salt Lake City home early in the morning. To no great surprise, a two-million-dollar demand arrived at the FBI within a week. What followed then was anything but predictable. The letter also named the agent who was to make the delivery, Stanley Bertok of the Los Angeles division.

As instructed, Bertok, this time with the entire two million dollars, flew to Phoenix, rented a car, and took off on a four-hour drive to Las Vegas. The Pentad had warned about using FBI aircraft, which, like so many things in this case, indicated an uncommon understanding of Bureau procedure. The prescribed route was desolate and relatively free of commercial airline traffic so any plane would be spotted easily. Also, the terrain was flat and the roads were straight. Any trailing vehicle could be seen for miles. So the Bureau left it up to electronics, hiding GPS devices in the car and in the bag containing the money. Bertok was also given a cell phone with additional Global Positioning System abilities. Two and a half hours into the trip, the car, according to all three GPSs, stopped dead. Fearing discovery, the agents monitoring Bertok’s movements waited almost another hour before closing in. When they arrived at the indicated location, the only thing they found was a fast-food bag on the shoulder of the road. Inside were the two GPS devices along with the cell phone. Bertok, the car, and the bag containing two million dollars were nowhere to be found. Twelve hours later, the rented vehicle was found at the Las Vegas airport.