The Bricklayer

TWENTY-THREE

NORMALLY THE INDUSTRIAL STRETCH OF NINTH STREET WOULD HAVE been relatively deserted, but now the street, the ends of which were closed off by uniform cars, was crowded with LAPD and FBI vehicles. In the middle of the block was the object of the activity, a one-story brick building which had been built as a steam laundry almost a hundred years earlier. Presently, it was believed to contain Victor Radek’s cell phone. Several businesses had occupied the structure since its construction, the owner of the last one painting the exterior khaki green with red trim to match the color of its low tile roof. The glaring midday sun cut cool black rectangles and triangles into its recesses.
Located through tax records, the real estate agent stated that she had rented it to an individual who had taken a six-month lease on it. After being showed a copy of the search warrant, she identified Radek’s photo as the man who had rented it using the name William Thompson. The only other thing she could remember about him was that he had paid cash.
The bomb squad van sat thirty yards from the front of the building. Inside the vehicle, Sergeant Mike Henning sat watching a TV monitor as he guided a wheeled robot through the back door of the building. Standing behind him were Kate, Vail, Kaulcrick, and Tye Delson, who had been asked to come along in case the phone led to another location that needed legal access.
As Henning guided the robot with a joystick, the monitor showed four different pictures being transmitted from the device’s four cameras. Although each could be deployed in different directions at the same time, they were now all pointed straight ahead. The four streaming images were similar, but everyone who was watching shifted their eyes from image to image, hoping to spot something. There was scattered refuse on the floor inside the building, but on the worktables were power tools and what appeared to be board scraps. “When we get in there it’ll be interesting to see if any of that stuff could be from the punji boards you ran into at the tunnel, Steve,” Henning said.
The robot continued to slowly search the first floor of the building, turning through the walled-off workspaces, which were all connected through a series of doorways and short corridors. Most of them had worktables and stools bolted to the floor. Henning would crane one of the cameras up from the robot’s low position to inspect whatever material was on the table and then explore the debris on the floor. After almost a half hour the device was back at the door it had entered through, indicating it had gone full circle. “What are we looking for again?” Henning asked.
Vail said, “To start with, the cell phone we got the GPS reading from. It’s in there somewhere, probably plugged into an electrical outlet. I didn’t see it.”
“And let’s not forget about the money,” Kaulcrick added.
“Hold on a minute,” Vail said. He walked to the back door of the van and leaned out. “Even though there are no windows below the first floor, it looks like there could be a basement. That door you went by next to the men’s room, think the robot could open it?”
Henning spun the robot around 180 degrees and backtracked. It got to the door and did a sharp right turn. The bomb squad sergeant jockeyed it back and forth until the mechanical pincers on the arm closed around the doorknob. Everyone watched as the arm rotated. They could hear a click as the striker cleared the plate. Slowly Henning backed it up, pulling the door open. The robot then moved forward around the door, and Henning flipped a switch. A small spotlight came on. There was a narrow descending staircase. “It is a basement. But that’s too narrow for the robot to make the ninety-degree turn halfway down the stairs. And it may be too steep for the treads.”
Vail took out his cell phone. “Can you turn up the audio on the robot?” Henning twisted the volume control to its maximum level. Vail dialed the phone number that had led them there. Everyone listened, and after a few seconds the robot’s microphone picked up a faint ringing. “How much does your friend weigh, Mike?” Vail asked, closing his phone.
“That model is almost two hundred pounds. Are you thinking about carrying it down the stairs?”
“I’d have to tip it on end, but I should be able to get it down to the basement.” Vail picked up a flashlight that was sitting on a makeshift desk.
“Steve, I really think one of my people should do it,” Henning said.
“So do I, but do you have someone who’s used to wrestling that kind of weight?”
Henning nodded at the agent’s logic. Vail stood up and stripped off his suit jacket. “Let’s at least get you in a protective suit,” Henning offered.
Vail laughed. “If there is anything to trip over down there, me in one of those outfits will make sure that I do. But let me go see what’s what before we decide anything.”
Everyone sat in silence as Vail stepped down from the van and made his way around the back of the building. Tye Delson said, “I know I’m just a lawyer and don’t understand every little thing that you guys do, but why does Steve always get to volunteer?” Her voice seemed to have a slightly emotional edge to it.
Kaulcrick turned toward Kate and they exchanged questioning glances. Then he said to Tye, “Did you hear anyone ask him to go?”
She asked the assistant director, “Is that how you justify not going yourself?”
Kaulcrick turned around and stared at the monitor, holding back his anger. He reminded himself that the important thing right now was recovering the money.
Kate watched him and knew that he wouldn’t forget the slight. He never did.
Henning had reversed one of the robot’s cameras and it captured Vail walking into the building. He stepped around the device and became visible on the other three quadrants on the screen. The beam of his flashlight lit the stairs as he tested the first step with his weight before descending. Once he made the turn halfway down, the cameras lost sight of him. At the bottom, he found a light switch and turned it on.
Half the basement looked like the bowels of a hundred-year-old building, unpainted, dank, abandoned, but the other half was finished. The walls were paneled and half of the area was covered with thick rubber matting, the kind that is found in gyms to absorb the impact of dropped weights. Four folding chairs sat near a minifridge. In the corner was a card table; on it was a cell phone, its charger plugged into the wall. The matted area was covered with weight-lifting equipment, benches, bars, dumbbells, and large steel plates. Vail hit Redial on his cell and the phone on the table rang. He disconnected the call. He checked the refrigerator and there was only a single can of beer in it.
He stepped back and tried to imagine the group’s traffic through the area. Obviously, someone used it to lift weights. A lot of men become addicted to the intensity of it in prison. The equipment upstairs indicated that they used the place as a workshop for making the punji boards. The basement was probably where they sat around drinking beer and planning whatever came next. But Vail’s eye for construction told him that something was out of proportion. Then he saw what it was—the matting, almost as if it were meant to be a distraction.
Teeth, like dovetail joints on well-made furniture, held the two-foot squares together. Vail did a quick count along two adjoining edges, determining that there were sixty sections, far more than were needed for the amount of weight equipment present. He started walking across them, looking for any further indications that they might be hiding something. In the middle of the floor, he knelt down and tried to get his fingers in between the pieces to pull one up, but it was almost impossible to get any kind of grip. He thought that one of the criteria which Radek would have set for himself was immediate access for a getaway. Maybe one of the outer pieces.
Letting his eyes trace the edges as he moved over them, he noticed an inch or so of cloth sticking out from under a stack of four twenty-five-pound plates in the corner. Vail restacked the weights to one side, exposing a sturdy foot-long black strap sticking up between two of the squares. Slowly he pulled on it. It was anchored under the middle of one of the tiles, which popped up. Under it was plywood. Vail pulled up the adjoining pieces of matting until he exposed the entire piece of wood. It was covering a three-foot-square hole cut into the concrete.
Vail lay on his stomach and lowered his face as close to the edge of the board as possible. He turned on his flashlight and lifted the plywood slightly. Under it he saw a large metal box. Slowly he lifted the cover out of the way. Scattered around the steel container were a half-dozen handguns and two canisters of what appeared to be pyrotechnics. He couldn’t tell for sure because they were wedged behind the metal chest, which had a heavy padlock on the front of it. There were also a number of boxes of different-caliber ammunition stacked around it.
Vail walked back upstairs and asked the SWAT officer at the back door to get him the largest bolt cutters they had. He then went out to the bomb unit’s van and told them what he had found.
“Well, let’s get it open,” Kaulcrick said.
“If anything’s booby-trapped, it’s that box,” Henning said. “Think you can get the robot down those stairs, Steve?”
“I think so, but I’m going to have to cut that lock, unless R2 can.”
“Unfortunately, it can’t. But once you do, don’t open the box. That’s the robot’s job.”
A SWAT officer came up to the van with the bolt cutters. “Don’t worry,” Vail said, “I can still see that flamethrower.”
Vail went back down to the basement, and after cutting the lock and carefully removing it, he went back upstairs to the robot. “Mike,” he said into its microphone, “how about retracting the arm as much as possible.” Once Henning had, Vail stood it up on its back end and bear-hugged it up off the floor. With short, measured steps he walked the device down the stairs, squeezing past the turn and then all the way down onto the concrete floor. “Okay, we’re all set here. Fire it up.”
The robot came to life, its cameras adjusting forward and the spotlight turned on. The arm extended forward with a motorized whir. Vail got in front of it and pointed at the hole in the floor. The arm and its camera craned down toward the metal box. “All set?” Vail asked.
The arm gave a short up-and-down motion, and Vail headed for the stairs. Before leaving, he walked around the first floor looking at the tools and board scraps, trying to figure out whether this was the building used to make the punji boards. If it was staged, the gang members had done a good job, because there was sawdust on the floor where the boards would have been cut. In the corner was a plastic twenty-gallon trash container. He took the lid off, hoping to find the nails used with the boards or, more likely, the boxes they came in. Immediately the strong odor of garlic became obvious. It was as pungent as the night before in the building on Seventh Street. He put the lid back on and dragged it out the door.
In the van, everyone was even more closely gathered around the monitor, but Henning was waiting to make sure that Vail had cleared the building before going ahead. When he stepped back up into the van, Henning said, “Okay, here we go.”
He maneuvered the robot back and forth until it was at the edge of the hole and its arm was directly over the hasp from which Vail had cut the lock. With microscopic movements on the joystick, Henning closed the pincers around the hasp. He raised the lid a quarter of an inch and stopped, taking his hand completely off the joystick so he wouldn’t accidentally raise it any farther. He put his hand back on the control, raising it an inch, this time keeping hold of the stick. They still couldn’t see into the box. He raised it another two inches and then maneuvered the spotlight into a lower position. The lowest camera’s image on the screen became the most vivid with the increased light. Fully illuminated were the strongbox’s contents. It was filled to the top with strapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in the same heavy plastic and tape as the recovered three million dollars.
A small cheer went up inside the van. Henning continued raising the lid. Suddenly Kate said, “What’s that on the side, a wire?”
Henning tried to reverse the robot’s arm to close the lid but it was too late. The screen went blank. “What happened?” Tye asked.
The sergeant checked a gauge on the control panel. “That’s weird. It’s shorted out. Must have been wired to fry whoever opened it.”
“What do we do now?” Kaulcrick asked.
“I’ll have to suit up and go down there.”
Just then gunfire erupted from inside the building. The SWAT officers stationed around the perimeter pulled back and took cover where they could. “What’s that?” Kaulcrick said.
Henning said, “There’s no one in there. That electrical charge must have set off the pyrotechnics Steve saw around the metal box, heating up the ammunition.”
Everyone scrambled out of the van and watched the building. Dark gray smoke started escaping around the door and window frames. Henning tilted his head back slightly and sniffed the air. “Metallic. That might be thermite,” he said ominously.
“What’s that?” Kaulcrick demanded.
“Thermite grenades are used by the military to destroy enemy equipment in a hurry. They burn at two thousand plus degrees centigrade. It’ll burn right through a tank and melt everything around it.”
“The money!”
“If that is thermite, all you’re going to have is a pile of ashes.”
“Why would anyone store something like that next to money?” Kaulcrick said angrily.
“They probably had it in the cache ready to destroy the guns and ammunition in case they were raided. They put the box in there and electrified it, thinking if they had to get out in a hurry, all they had to do was shut off the juice, grab the box, and set off the thermite to destroy all the evidence. The electrical current must have set off the thermite unintentionally.”
“What do we do now?” Kaulcrick asked.
Tye Delson lit another cigarette and, her reserved composure regained, said, “Call the fire department.”