Counterfeit Road (12 page)

‘You tell me. I have no idea. Good night.’

TWENTY-ONE

E
ight months ago near the end of spring last year, Celeste told him, ‘I’m forty-eight. If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it.’

She had two hundred seventy-one thousand dollars saved over seventeen years for the sole purpose of opening a restaurant. But the tipping point was when her mother died about a year ago and Celeste inherited $185,000, and with that felt sure she had enough money. Her mother’s death also made life much more finite for Celeste. That started the summer of eating and looking at other restaurants and places for lease.

They had fun with it right up to the point where she signed a lease and the clock started. The second thoughts arrived then and the fear she was in over her head in a competitive city woke her at night. She planned to serve food at the bar but had last cooked professionally twenty-five years ago when she imagined a career as a chef before becoming a bartender and later a wine broker.

During the heatwave last September when city temperatures broke one hundred degrees for the fourth day in a row, she had an anxiety attack that almost derailed the project.

She wept and shook as she told him, ‘I’m wasting everything I inherited and all the money my mom saved on a vain idea. I’ll get panned in the first reviews and will never be able to compete.’

But by then she was committed to the lease and had already spent fifteen thousand on architectural drawings. She broke out in hives. She fought panic with manic focus on restaurant design and construction and by testing drink recipes at home. But the low point was yet to come. It arrived a month later as she got the first construction bids from two general contractors, both of whom had come highly recommended.

The bids were nearly double what her architect had estimated. She found a third contractor and got another bid, then two more before realizing that she needed to scale back her plans radically. She kept the idea that you could still eat at the bar or a bar table. Not a restaurant style meal, and very casual eating, with the idea there would be six to eight small plates and always pizzettas. You’d get paper napkins not cloth but food would be part of the draw. She focused on the mixology, on bartending, on a culture that would treat customers like friends.

She didn’t have to but she also focused on sustainable. She found recycled materials. She bought used bar equipment and chairs and tables. She refinished the tables with Raveneau’s help. She found a used pizza oven and the architect came up with a way to capture waste heat from the bar dishwasher, running plastic Pex lines embedded in the concrete bar top so if you rested your elbows on the bar top concrete they would stay warm.

She fought. She negotiated. The flue rebuild became yesterday’s problem. The Health and Building Departments signed off. A local advocate for handicap rights came by and measured the bathrooms. Then Bo Rutan pulled up in his old El Camino with Louisiana plates saying he had in fact trained in Rome not New Orleans. He was in chef whites making pizzas when Raveneau walked in tonight.

‘It’s really up to the bar,’ Celeste had kept saying. ‘The bar will make or break the place.’

There were twenty-five small tables and rattan chairs, a floor of reclaimed bamboo. The old beams of the ceiling were exposed, the walls white-painted and softly lit. He caught her eye now and she waved for him to come around the back. Her forehead was moist with heat from the oven, face flush, eyes lit with excitement and happiness. People looked happy and it felt right to Raveneau. She pulled him around the corner out of sight of the bar.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s going to work.’

‘You like the bar.’

‘Yeah, it’s got a good feel.’

‘I’ll come out in a few minutes. It’s been crowded like this since we opened the doors at five thirty. Kiss me and tell me some of these people will come back.’

‘They will.’

Raveneau saw la Rosa walk in. She spotted him immediately, looked at his clothes and asked, ‘Did you even go home?’

‘Never got a chance.’

‘How did it go?’

‘It’s all set up. It’s working.’

‘How long before the media gets it?’

‘My guess is a week at the most.’

‘I’ll bet it’s out in less than three days.’

‘Let’s get you a drink and then let me introduce you to someone.’

When Raveneau touched his shoulder Ryan Candel turned from his friends. He looked drunk. He looked puzzled. He asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘This is my partner, Inspector Elizabeth la Rosa.’

Candel waved one of the smooth rounded glasses Celeste had searched for months to find. It held a dark rum drink.

‘Hello, Inspector Elizabeth.’

The drink slipped through his fingers, almost fell, and one of his friends said, ‘That would have sucked.’

Candel gestured with his glass toward his friends. ‘These are my drinking friends.’ He turned and pointed with the glass at Raveneau. ‘This detective here is looking for my dad. Together we’re going to prove he was a murderer. Isn’t that right, Inspector? We’re hunting the fucker down.’ He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Dad. We’re coming for you.’

On his left la Rosa said, ‘The place is beautiful. Introduce me to Celeste. Let’s get away from these guys. I don’t need this tonight.’

TWENTY-TWO

R
aveneau was groggy as he answered the phone. He recognized Secret Service Brooks’ voice and looked at the time, 5:30 on a dark cold morning.

‘Hope I didn’t wake you up,’ Brooks said. ‘Special Agent Coe called me.’

‘Good.’

‘But why didn’t I hear from you?’

‘Why would you?’

‘Those weapons are for targeting vehicles. They were sent here for the President’s visit.’

‘You’re good at big leaps, Nate.’

‘I wish I was. It’s just a different business, Inspector. In yours you like to have a body to work with. Then you can sit around and try to figure out who killed the victim even if it takes twenty-two years. In ours the game is keeping everybody alive so that means we have to work a little harder.’

‘Sure, that’s why you brought two other agents to the meeting with me.’

‘Are you talking about the meeting where you went out for coffee in the middle of it?’

‘It was either that or watch you read. I’m still waiting by the way for a copy of your file on Alan Krueger. Remember, you were going to messenger it over the next day’

‘I want to meet with you this morning.’

‘So you’ll bring the personnel file with you. Is that what you’re saying? In that case, let’s meet. What’s convenient for you?’

He met a different Nate Brooks at ten that morning and by then he had also cooled down. Brooks alluded to the pressure on him and Raveneau wasn’t sure about himself. He was surprised he’d gotten into it with Brooks earlier this morning. Could be that the bomb casings troubled him on a lot of levels. He knew the investigation would go full-throated at Khan’s roots. Ortega told him this morning the FBI was forming a task force and sending two teams to Pakistan.

Brooks held his hands out in front of him, palms down, fingers spread wide.

‘I can feel it coming,’ he said. ‘I can feel something is going to happen. It’s getting closer and closer and I’m not getting anywhere. The only thing I’m getting is more worried. Let’s take a drive and I’ll show you what I worry about. Come on, let’s go. We’ll get coffee and I’ll show you.’

In the car Brooks wanted to hear about yesterday. ‘What did you think when you slid the piece of plywood off and saw them?’

‘I thought about San Francisco and how small it is and how powerful they looked. I figured no one would ship something like those casings without planning to assemble and use them here.’

‘Welcome to my world.’

‘Is that your world, Nate? Have you seen a lot of bombs go off?’

‘They are what I worry about most and look at all the people who hate us. I grew up in Baltimore. I learned to watch everything and everybody. That’s how I ended up in the Secret Service. But you’ve been in homicide a long time and I want your opinion. Why kill the employees and bring the TV vans and everything that comes with it? Did they know too much?’

‘Someone saw it as a lesser risk to take them out.’

‘That’s how you see it?’

‘It’s one possibility.’

‘Was it Khan’s decision?’

‘I don’t know but the plywood delivery was to him and the window of time he was gone and the employees murdered was so narrow it’s hard to believe it was coincidence.’

‘That he just happened to be gone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So, Raveneau, you think Khan is in on it.’

‘That’s not quite what I said.’

‘But you’re just dancing around it, and if he’s involved, he’s just one of others. Conspiracy, an organization that knows what it’s doing is my nightmare. Weapons like these can take out a motorcade without having to be perfectly placed, and they don’t have to get the President to change the country. Kill enough others and a motorcade will never be the same again. You hear that, right?’

‘If you’re about to start selling me on how you’re saving the country then drop me off at the next corner.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Why did you want to talk this morning?’

‘I want to talk because I’m scared of the kind of violence those weapons represent. I’m afraid we’re on the edge of this being the new normal. I want to talk because these cabinet shop murders are ground zero right now and you’re a homicide inspector and I want to know what you think.’

Brooks pointed in the distance at the Golden Gate Bridge.

‘We can close a bridge as the President’s motorcade crosses, but we can’t clear every corridor, particularly in a smaller city like this one. The Presidential limo is a battering ram but there’s a nightmare scenario where the motorcade enters a street without many side escape routes. Let’s say a vehicle rigged with an IED like these detonates ahead and pieces of motorcycle cops and fragments of vehicles go flying. At that point we’re just trying to get the President out any way we can with as much speed as possible.

‘Of course, the other side has thought about side streets too. They have a secondary plan. They’ve designed for overkill. I’m talking about something planned like a military operation.’

‘But you vary your routes. You take precautions.’

‘There’s only so much you can do in a smaller city.’

‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Once we have coffee I’m going to take you on one of the routes that could get used when the President is out on this next trip. He’s going to give a speech about the subway system San Francisco has started work on. I read they’re going to work eight years, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But you’re from here so how many years will it really take?’

‘Twelve.’

They picked up coffee and drove toward Union Square, Brooks at the wheel of a new government car.

‘Presidents are fatalists. They know the risks can be overwhelming, but it’s the tradeoff for an open society. The President is going to give a speech here in Union Square and then go down to Embarcadero and ride the light rail with the mayor and at least one senator.’

He pointed out tall buildings, alleys, bottlenecks the construction was going to cause, the places that worried him most. He doubled back and picked up Grant Street and started through Chinatown where the streets were narrow.

‘Bad street but many voters and it’ll make people feel good.’ He pointed at a car. ‘Say there is a bomb in that car but it doesn’t go off until the last car in the motorcade is through. It detonates simultaneously with one ahead of the motorcade.’

‘How many times are you going to blow us up out here today?’

‘As it goes off, we’re going to get him the hell away from here, right? What are we going to do? We turn down one of these steep narrow streets and now we’re really vulnerable.’

They followed it to the end, to where the President, the mayor, and the senator got on the light rail system built after the Embarcadero Freeway came down. Brooks pulled over and they watched the rail cars slowly go by and Raveneau knew in Brooks’ head the President was riding on it. He waited for what he guessed would come next.

But Brooks surprised him, pointing toward the Ferry Building and saying, ‘That’s where Krueger was shot, a little bit back from the near corner of the Ferry Building.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m going to tell you more about him. I’m going to tell you some things you don’t know that I’m now authorized to tell you.’

‘Why are you going to do that?’

‘Because your friend Coe at the FBI has convinced me that the problem is even worse than we thought.’

TWENTY-THREE

‘
F
irst off, we don’t know who killed Alan Krueger, and when he was killed he was working with us, but not for us. I know you probably still don’t believe that, but it’s the truth.’

‘Why wouldn’t I believe that?’

‘I don’t know why, but you seem to want to believe the Secret Service hid information from Inspectors Goya and Govich. Look, Krueger left us in 1985. He’d been outside for four years. In those four years he worked for other agencies as well. He had a pipeline in Hong Kong. He spoke Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Korean. He had an ear for language and a talent for making connections.’

‘What’s a pipeline in what he was doing?’

‘Good sources for the flow of people, money, and information about counterfeiting, what’s out there in the way of bills for sale, he was in that, he was a buyer.’

‘Were you bullshitting me when you said the supernotes he was carrying are now the first known?’

Brooks tugged on the cuffs of his shirt, a habit he seemed to have, that and pursing his lips.

‘You are the worst cynic I’ve ever met.’

‘No, I know you guys would never lie to me.’

‘We worked with Inspectors Govich and Goya. We tried hard to find who killed Krueger, in part because he was one of us for a dozen years, but also because he was chasing rumors for us and believed he was on to something. He had heard rumors of printing presses sold to North Korea and another of presses set up in a warehouse in Hong Kong. He was working on that.’