Last Chance to Die

8



The tall, slender man with the splayed nose sat behind the wheel and watched as one of his men lowered himself carefully down a rope that hung from the roof of the burning building. A second man came from around the back of the building and stood underneath until the first man was safely on the ground. Once he was, the two of them looked up before casually walking back to the waiting black SUV. They got into the backseat without saying a word. One of them smelled of gasoline and smoke. Sitting next to the driver was the big man with the eyes that barely moved. “Was either of them shot?” he asked in a heavy accent.

“I’m not sure. Possibly,” answered the man who had come down the rope.

“Which means they weren’t,” the driver said, his voice both apologetic and angry.

The passenger shifted himself in the seat and watched the top of the building as smoke continued to pour out of it. “It will be more entertaining this way.”

“Then how did the guy we chased get off the roof?” Kate asked.

Vail saw what looked like a cable hanging over the side of the building. They both went over and examined it. It was about thirty feet long but was tied to a much longer rope. Both together were long enough to reach to within ten feet of the ground. “That’s how.” The end of the cable was anchored in a nearby water drain. Vail pulled on it, testing his weight against it. “Think you can make it?”

She looked back at the smoke billowing out of the door they had forced open. “You mean there’re other choices?”

Holding on to the cable, she was starting to climb over the low wall when he said, “Hang on a minute.” He went back and closed the door. The smoke started streaming out of the cracks around it and from the lock hole. He picked up the now-broken board that had been snapped in half when he and Kate forced open the door. It was a length of two-by-two that had been jammed against a short section of two-by-four nailed to the roof. The two-by-four had a notch cut into it to hold one end of the two-by-two in place. The other end had been notched also and jammed up under the door handle. “If they’d used a two-by-four, we’d still be in there.”

“Maybe they didn’t have any.”

“Two-by-fours are a lot easier to find than two-by-twos.”

“At the risk of sounding like I’m giving you an order, can we discuss this on the ground?”

Vail walked back to the braided cable and examined it more closely. He took out his lockback knife and opened it. “Are you still carrying that thing?” she asked.

Carefully, he cut into one of the strands and sniffed it. He looked at her soberly. “It’s det cord.”

“Det cord as in detonation cord?”

“I’ve seen it on demolition jobs. When it’s ignited at one end, it explodes so fast you can’t tell which end was set off.”

“Why would they use that?”

“That’s something we have to figure out before we go any further.” He got down on his knees next to the drain that the end of the cable disappeared into. “Let me have that flashlight.” He tried to pull the drain cover off. When it wouldn’t budge, he said, “It’s been spot-welded.” He got closer and used the light to peer down into the small crack surrounding the cable. After a few seconds, he stood up and snapped the light off with finality.

“What is it?”

Vail didn’t answer right away but instead looked over the side of the building and tugged easily on the braided cord.

“What is it?”

“There’s a device connected to the end. Det cord is set off with a blasting cap. There’s one of those in there, too. There’s also a battery and a large, heavy-duty spring. What happens is when there’s enough weight on the cable and rope, the metal spring lengthens and makes contact, closing the circuit between the battery and the blasting cap, which in turn sets off the det cord. If we’re both hanging on it ten stories up—poof. It’s gone, and so are we.”

“But whoever was shooting at us used it.”

“We never got a look at him. We don’t know how much he weighed. He could have been a hundred and thirty pounds for all we know.”

“How much do you weigh?” she asked.

“One-ninety. What are you, about one-eighty?”

“One-thirty-five, Vail.”

He got down on his knees again and turned on the flashlight. He took a few extra seconds looking into the thin opening before getting up. “You should be all right.”

“What about you?”

“They had to build some tolerance into it. I’m guessing that to open that spring up fully and set it off, both of us would have to be on it together. You go first. Once you’re down, I’ll get on it.”

In the distance Kate could hear the sirens now. “Maybe we should wait for the fire department.”

“They haven’t got anything that can reach ten floors.” He squatted down and put his hand flat on the deck. “It’s getting hot. We don’t have that much time.”

Kate went over to the side and grabbed the cable. Vail could see the uncertainty in her eyes. “I could be wrong about how much weight this can hold. Maybe you should take off your clothes just to be safe.”

She got a new grip on the cable. “Vail, I’d rather do a two-and-a-half into the concrete.” She slipped over the side and looped the cord around her foot as a brake to control the speed of her descent.

From the black vehicle, the four men watched Kate come over the side of the roof and wrap the cable over her foot. As she started down, all of them looked back anxiously at the roof to see where the second agent was.

Suddenly it seemed as if the sirens doubled in volume. The driver’s eyes darted over to his passenger, but he was still watching the roofline intently. The sirens grew even louder.

The driver started the engine as a plea to leave. The passenger snorted in disappointment and then turned forward in his seat and closed his eyes. The SUV made a U-turn and drove away just below the speed limit.

As soon as Kate let go of the rope and dropped the last few feet, Vail was over the side as fast as possible. Just as he reached the ground, a fire truck pulled up, and Vail told the crew about the explosive cord. “The fire shouldn’t detonate it, but if it does, I don’t think it’ll hurt anyone inside the building. It’s only the upper thirty feet or so.”

Kate and Vail went to their car to get out of the way. He started to say something, and she held up her hand. “Not a word until I call Bill Langston.”

“Okay, but I can tell you he’s—”

She thrust her hand at him to demand his silence as she dialed. Without supplying any details, she told the assistant director that they had identified Pollock and how they tracked him down, finding him dead. She told him about escaping from the burning building and that the fire department was there now trying to extinguish it. At last she said, “I’ll be here,” and hung up. “If you were planning to say he’s not going to be happy, congratulations on your extraordinary understanding of the human mind.”

“Just for that, next burning building you can stay home.”

“This isn’t funny, Steve. I’m not letting you talk me into anything like this again.”

“You act like it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to you. How about when I stole the three million dollars from your safe? And you didn’t know what I was doing and, even worse, where I was so you could yell at me.”

She finally smiled. “Okay, that was worse.”

“And what happened? You were a hero, even got invited to the Irish ambassador’s New Year’s party. Of course, I got the best night of my life out of it.”

She turned to him and searched his face for a moment. “I bet you say that to all the women you seduce with sculpture.”

“Less than half, I swear.”

Kate laughed. “You’d better let me handle Langston when he gets here.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve gotten all day.”

“Enjoy it, because that’s the only offer you’re going to get all day. And by ‘all day’ I mean ever again.”

“You say that now, but a few more dead bodies, another shoot-out or two, maybe an explosion, and you’ll be putty in my hands.”

Kate stared out the windshield for a moment. “I guess there’s no doubt now that the Russians have Calculus talking. But why kill Pollock? And why try to kill us?”

“Think about what would have happened if their plan had succeeded. The det cord would have exploded, leaving us dead on the ground with a rope that would have appeared to have come untied. For lack of a better explanation, it would have looked like we ineptly started a fire to destroy evidence. Inside was a murdered spy whose blood was all over both our shoes. Not only do the Russians no longer have to worry about what Pollock might tell us, but the Bureau gets a huge black eye out of it.”

Kate said, “That seems a little drastic, but maybe the Russians have decided to play hardball. Didn’t Calculus say something about how they were under orders not to get caught spying?”

“There’s only one reason they would have gone to all that trouble—it’s the disc. The way we snuck into the safe house, they probably figured the two of us were freelancing. And then again tonight it was just the two of us. If we’re sneaking around on the Bureau, they probably assumed—correctly—that no one else knows about the disc. If they got rid of us, they don’t have to worry about it. Which means there’s something else on it that leads to the next spy.”

“That’s a lot of supposition, Steve.”

“There’s one way to find out. We need to take another look at the DVD.”

Thirty minutes later Bill Langston pulled up next to their car; his deputy, John Kalix, was driving. Vail said to Kate, “We can’t let him know about the disc.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, since I’m not sure I believe it contains anything. We’ve already looked at it, remember?”

As Kate started to get out, Vail nodded toward the assistant director and said to her, “Boy, am I glad I’m not in your shoes. He looks mad.”

A few minutes later, Kate got back in the car. “He wants to talk to you.”

“You told him I was here?”

“We’ll see if you still have your sense of humor when you get back.”

Vail slid into the rear seat of the assistant director’s car. Langston turned around, and his look of displeasure was clear. “I thought you were instructed to keep me advised of any developments.”

“You don’t think this is a development?”

“I think this is at the end of a chain of developments.”

Without mentioning the possible lead to the next mole, Vail answered Langston’s questions. He laid out everything that had led them from Calculus’s text message to tracking Pollock to how he died. “You broke into a Russian safe house?” Langston thundered.

“That’s where the answer was,” Vail said, with a calm that was intended to contrast the assistant director’s anger.

“You can’t do that,” Langston said, his voice quieter now but still strained.

“Not the first time I’ve heard that this week,” Vail said. “To keep this civil, I’m going to pretend that you are going to accept what I’m about to say, although I seriously doubt you will. You and I come with two different sets of instructions. Where your methods end, mine begin. I wasn’t brought into this because I was likely to follow the agent handbook. And I’ll continue to do what I think is necessary until the director tells me to turn around and go home. Don’t take my tactics personally. What I do has only one purpose—to find the answer. It has nothing to do with you.”

“I’m not asking you to do things differently. I’m just asking you to keep me informed.”

Vail laughed. “Did you really want me to let you know I was going to break into property owned by the Russian embassy?”

It was at that moment Langston realized how foolish he was being. Of course Vail was right. He was taking all the chances, and although Langston wasn’t exactly in charge, his division’s major problem was being resolved. The time would come when Vail was no longer needed, a time when the assistant director could grab the reins of the investigation from him and claim its success. As though in response to Vail’s question, Langston laughed. “I didn’t say I wanted to be informed of everything.”

Vail was surprised at Langston’s apparent change of heart. “Good, because right now this is a race between us and the Russians, and they have Calculus, a distinct advantage.”

“Your argument is not without merit. But if you do identify any more spies, please let me know. Preferably before you kill them.”

Vail started to climb out of the car. “If not before, you’re the first one I’ll call from the lockup.”

Langston watched him get back into his car. He said to Kalix, “What do you think about all this?”

“In the plus column, there’s one less spy to deal with. However, he is dead, so there will be no intelligence to come out of it. And politically, because of the director, you have no choice but to give Vail his head. He may well find all these spies if you don’t try to control him. But you have to protect yourself if this blows up—which, given the way he operates, it most likely will.”

“From now on, John, your number-one priority is to make sure anything that Vail does is not traceable to me. That I had no knowledge of his activities beforehand. If we can manage that, he’s got a deputy assistant director at his side, and she’ll have to take the hit.”

An unmarked police car pulled up, and two detectives got out. Vail went over to them and introduced himself, giving them a brief explanation of what had happened.

“We’re going to be at the scene for a while. Can you come in and give us a statement tomorrow morning, say, nine o’clock?” one of them asked, handing Vail a card.

“I’ll be there.”

Kate and Vail had been driving for a few minutes before she said, “You know that when Langston reports to the director that you found the first name on the list, he’s going to try to turn it around and blowtorch you.”

“The next time you feel the need to ask me why I don’t come back to the Bureau, please remember that.”

“Believe me, I won’t bring it up again,” Kate said. “What do you want to do now?”

“Smelling all this smoke, I was thinking barbecue.”

Once they got into Washington, it didn’t take long to find a neighborhood barbecue restaurant. It was an old place, with sagging wooden floors and rickety Formica tables. The embossed-tin ceiling was stained brown from decades of cooking residue. When Kate and Vail walked in, the place was filled with regulars, who cautiously sized them up at a glance as cops. The house specialties were ribs and brisket. Kate watched the waitress deliver a plate full of meat and fries to an adjoining table and ordered a salad. Vail ordered the brisket.

“What makes you so sure that there’s something else on the disc?” she said.

“I can’t imagine Calculus leaving that Ariadne clue without there being anything to it. But if Pollock was supposed to supply the next step, we may be finished. Which, if nothing else, will make Langston happy. He’ll be able to lay it all off on me, and I’m not sure he’d be wrong.”

Kate laughed sarcastically. “Come on, Vail. Contrition? It doesn’t come in your size. And surrender? You? What are you planning that you’re not telling me about? You’re going to break into Pollock’s house, aren’t you?”

“You’re forgetting that I’m just passing through. And although I enjoy being shot at as much as the next guy, one of these fools might actually hit me.”

“You were passing through Los Angeles, too.”

“I was blinded by your charms.”

The waitress brought the food and asked Vail if he needed anything else. He tilted his head playfully and said, “Would you tell my sister here that you can’t live on salad?”

The waitress laughed agreeably, handed him the check, and went back to the kitchen.

“Cute,” Kate said.

“Sorry. I went weak in the knees from having a woman smile warmly at me.”

“It didn’t look like your knees from here, bricklayer.” She ate a forkful of salad, then said, “So that’s it? You can’t think of anything else to do?”

“How about we go back and take another look at everything, including the DVD.”

She watched as Vail started working his way through the mounds of smoked meat and potatoes. He’d been right about the waitress; she had kept eye contact with him a moment longer than necessary. Kate had seen other women look at him the same way. Although he wasn’t particularly handsome, women sensed something about him that was both primal and protective. She had noticed it as far back as Detroit. The night before, in that secret room with the gunmen closing in and Vail about to set off an explosion of unknown intensity, it had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t get her out. And it hadn’t been any different tonight on that rooftop. The tough times would never be the problem between them. It was the danger, she supposed, that kept them close. But without it, even the simplest date invariably turned contentious.