Dead End Deal (2 page)

He glanced into the office as he passed. Typical Gabe. Parked at his desk with stacks of paperwork. Always the last to leave but never the first to arrive. The only neurosurgeon in the department who no longer gowned up, leaving the younger partners with bigger case loads. In exchange, butt numbing meetings consumed Gabe’s days. Well, Gabe could have it. To Jon, administration held zero appeal. He waved. “Night, Gabe,” and continued out the door.

The elevator rattled and groaned down eight floors to the first basement level, jerked to a stop, hovered a moment before rising a half inch to be level with the hall floor. Third-world countries had better elevators than this. The door opened.

The car break-in was beginning to seep in now. There was nothing in the vehicle worth stealing, so the act itself was senseless and frustrating. And although the insurance company would pay to replace the broken window—assuming that’s how they got in—it couldn’t compensate for the inconvenience. More than that was the feeling of personal violation. As a student his apartment had been burglarized twice, giving this an all too familiar feel.

A left turn and a push through the metal security door took him into a tunnel to the parking lot, his footsteps echoing off bare cement. After passing through another fire door he could see his black Audi in the almost empty garage . . . but where was the security officer? Strange, but the car showed no signs of damage either. Puzzled, he circled the vehicle. No damage, no officer.

Just then a man appeared from behind a round concrete pillar and aimed a gun at him, his face distorted by what looked like pantyhose stretched tightly over his head, the sight so out of context that it didn’t register. The man said, “Got a message for you, baby killer. You listening?”

Speechless, Jon stared at him.

“Asked you a question.”

Jon raised both hands in surrender. “Whoa, there must be some mistake—”

“No mistake. You’re the bloke I’m after. And in case you aren’t listening, here’s the written version.” He dropped a folded paper on the Audi’s windshield. “No more baby killing. You and your little queer friend are done. Understand?”

“No, I—”

“Shut up. Simple enough. Stop work. Don’t, and we’ll kill you and Dobbs. See?”

A familiar voice called, “Jon? What’s going on?”

Jon glanced over his shoulder. Lippmann was exiting the tunnel, heading toward them. Jon shouted, “Run. Get out of here. Call 911.”

Lippmann stopped, looked at Jon’s face, then at the gunman, then back to Jon before something clicked and he started to turn. Motion slowed. Dumbfounded, Jon watched as another man calmly stepped from behind a car, raised a gun, and fired almost point blank into Lippmann’s chest. Lippmann stutter-stepped before going down into a heap.

Jon yelled, “Gabe!” and started toward him when a lightning bolt exploded his head, turning his world into a black void.

2

“F
UCK A DUCK!”
Nigel Feist slammed the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. The guard rails of the Alaskan Way Viaduct flew past, Elliot Bay in the distance, Feist putting as much distance as possible between them and the parking lot before the cops started to investigate.

Raymore Thompson said, “Dude, I’m telling you, we had no other choice. The hell we gonna do? Let that fucking geezer call the cops?”

We?
Out the corner of his eye, Feist could see the hayseed wedged between the seat and passenger door, streetlights flashing off his disgusting tobacco-stained teeth. Feist slammed the steering wheel again, just to keep from back-handing the ignorant bastard. Bad judgment, agreeing to use this shit-kicker tonight. He knew better than to do it. So why the hell had he? Fuck! Intimidate was the mission. Not kill anyone.

“Well?” Thompson asked.

Okay, he could argue the point, but to what end? Raymore was too stupid to understand. Raymore. Who the fuck named a kid Raymore? Sounded like some kind of Georgia Cracker name.

Feist saw the sign for the West Seattle and Harbor Island exits and tripped the turn signal, letting the car drift into the right lane, deciding he needed to tidy up this mess straightaway before Raymore took them both down.

Since resigning as an analyst for Australia’s Defense Intelligence Organization twenty years ago, Feist had grown his own consulting firm, a small company specializing in information gathering and disinformation. He never chose sides, simply provided services to anyone willing to cough up his high fees. Clients viewed his results as a godsend. Their targets leveled accusations of industrial sabotage, but nothing they could prove. His reputation included giving clients ultimate discretion. Never had one been exposed nor a project blown. Never had Feist or a client been forced to submit to questioning by a law enforcement agency. He attributed this exceptional record to following a strict set of rock-solid rules specifically engineered to keep him out of trouble. The most important of which was impeccable planning. A rule broken the moment he agreed to take Thompson on tonight’s job.
Fuck!

To make matters worse, Thompson probably couldn’t survive ten minutes of police interrogation without incriminating himself and Feist. Which meant Feist’s life was now at risk.

Feist asked Raymore, “What do you want to do when you quit working?” to distract him, get him thinking about something else.

“Huh?”

“Me, I want to retire after maybe a few more jobs, kick back, enjoy life. You like motorcycles?”

“Never much thought about them. Why?”

“Got me a collection of Harleys, I do. Plan to take a cross country Easy Rider road trip on me classic Flathead. Start out in LA, cruise through the south, on up the East Coast, circle back over I-90. Maybe even schedule it for a stop at Sturgis for the festival.” None of that would happen if he got nailed because of Raymore Fuckhead Thompson.

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

“Just making conversation, is all.”

Thompson whined, “The dude saw us, man, and he was going to run. The fuck was I supposed to do?”

Feist took the first of two adjacent exit ramps, the road angling down off the viaduct to Harbor Island to his right. Long loading docks, gigantic orange cranes, dented steel containers piled ten high in huge rows, a cruise ship’s looming black hull dry-docked three blocks further west, railroad tracks and warehouses in the shadows ahead. The blue Toyota slowed while he scanned the deserted area for the best spot.

Feist said, “Maybe you got a point there, mate.”

Thompson nodded. “Hell yeah, I got a point,” with a note of relief. Then muttered something Feist couldn’t make out.

Rather than ask him to repeat it, Feist just kept scanning the shadows. When he spotted a likely place up ahead, he nosed the rental off asphalt onto chip seal and gravel and slowed further, keenly alert for signs of another person in the area, but it appeared deserted. He pulled alongside a dark green SUV and cut the engine behind a squat, one-story, cinderblock building with sooty black windows and an oxidizing aluminum radio mast guyed to a flat roof. This would do.

“Get out.” Feist stepped out, into the smell of diesel and drying barnacles and the steady hum of tires from the West Seattle Bridge overhead. A boat horn echoed across the harbor. Nothing moved and no one came from the shadows to investigate. No dog bark, no approaching crunch of tires, just the stillness of an industrial area locked up for the night.

“What?” Raymore asked, staying glued to the passenger seat, the whites of his nervous squinty eyes flashing in the weak fluorescent light.

Feist put a hand on the car roof and leaned into the interior. “Out. We’re changing vehicles. That SUV there?” with a nod, “is what we’ll be using.” He walked over to the driver’s door and pretended to fumble a key from his pocket.

Raymore whined, “Dude, you didn’t say nothing about no change-up before now.”

“That’s right. I didn’t. A contingency plan is what it’s called. Not smart what you did, shooting that witness like that. Changes everything. Now fetch our gear and let’s be done with it.”

Thompson asked, “What gear?”

“Don’t hear too well, eh? I said to get the fucking gear and stop whining.” It took a supreme effort to rein in his anger.

Feist watched Thompson pop the trunk and hunch over, look this way and that like a fucking idiot. Before Thompson could straighten back up Feist tapped the gun to the back of his head and fired. Thompson went limp, half in the trunk, half out. Feist leaned in, nudged the barrel against his temple, and discharged an insurance round. Then, lifting Thompson’s legs, he rotated the body sideways, dumping him completely into the trunk, and slammed the lid. Standing still, he listened for the sound of feet or tires approaching, but heard nothing. Using an oily rag, he meticulously wiped down every spot he’d touched, including common areas he wasn’t sure of. After slipping on a pair of disposable exam gloves, he tossed the rag in a Dumpster and climbed back into the car.

Feist retraced his route onto the Alaskan Way viaduct, then south to the first Sea-Tac Airport exit. Drove US Highway 99 to a long-term airport parking lot, accepted a time-stamp ticket from a machine, cruised the lot for a spot as far from the pick-up point as possible. He nosed the car to within a foot of the cyclone perimeter fence, set the brake, and stepped out to look around. Only one other person waited at the pickup site. Feist tore up the ticket and stuffed the pieces in his pocket to dump later. Not much sense in letting anyone know your time of arrival.

Staying in the car shadow, he waited for the van to pick up the other customer. As soon as it drove out of the lot, Feist walked the street to an adjacent lot where he waited for the next van.

The courtesy van drove him to the airport departure zone, where he rode the escalator down to Arrivals/Baggage Claim. He bought a ticket for an Airport Express to the downtown Seattle Sheraton. Although the odds of a taxi driver remembering him were low, he figured it would be safer to blend in with a group of tired travelers on a van than to be a single fare in a taxi. Attention to details, regardless how insignificant, kept you from the jaws of the shark.

Forty minutes later, he dumped the keys to the rental car in a sidewalk waste bin two blocks from the hotel.

3

F
BI SPECIAL AGENT
Gary Fisher eased the black Explorer past a clot of reporters and looky-loos and stopped next to the narrow guard booth in the center of the road. It had a peaked metal roof and Dutch doors on both sides to handle vehicles in either direction. Fisher lowered the window and flashed his creds at the campus cop leaning out of the booth. “FBI.”

After a cursory glance and a nod, the officer pointed toward the large three-level parking garage ahead. “See where the road splits? Take the lower one down to the second level, go straight ahead. Can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.”

Ahead, the two-lane road divided, the left lanes slicing between the south side of the Health Sciences Building and the top floor of a subterranean parking garage. The right half curved away from the building before angling down into a cavernous cement garage. Following the cop’s directions, Fisher entered the second of three levels and immediately saw a mix of University and Seattle Police cruisers thrown haphazardly together, most with their blue lights still flashing, several with doors open, adding a touch of chaos to the image. So far, the campus cops seemed to be doing a good job of keeping TV reporters at bay, but Fisher knew this wouldn’t last much longer.

He parked on the periphery of the confusion and scanned the crowd of cops for Jim Lange, saw him talking to two uniformed campus police. He and Lange were assigned to the national task force hunting the Nuremberg Avengers, a group of militant anti-abortionists who claimed responsibility for blowing away two doctors and a nurse from three separate women’s clinics during the past six months. A group of grade-A shitheads, far as Fisher was concerned; an opinion Lange shared.

As he approached Lange, Fisher saw a body on the oil-stained cement. His gut knotted. A week ago the Avengers had posted Professor Jon Ritter’s profile on their website. But because those shitheads targeted so many individuals and institutions, it was impossible to access the level of threat to any one. He suspected that might be their strategy. Seeing a body on the concrete made apparent the difficulty of rooting out these guys.

Lange saw him approach, said, “Gary, like you to meet Lieutenant Helms and Officer Crawford, UWPD.” Then to the officers: “Special Agent, Gary Fisher. The one I told you about.”

Fisher shook hands and asked Lange, “What’ve you got?”

Lange nodded for Helms to answer; this was university jurisdiction. Although the campus was within Seattle city limits, the land remained state property with a sovereign police department. The FBI would take control only if this turned out to be Avengers related.

Helms said, “One homicide, one assault.”

Fisher’s gut knotted tighter. He asked Lange, “Ritter?”

Lange nodded. “Yeah, but he’s the assault. The corpse,” pointing at the body, “was just IDed as a university employee, name of Gabriel Lippmann. White male, sixty-seven. Apparently, Ritter’s boss.”

Fisher asked Helms, “How bad is Ritter?”

Helms shrugged. “No idea. Didn’t see him. Paramedics say he was banged up a bit when they transported him. Head wound. Probably a concussion.”

Fisher shifted his weight from one leg to the other and eyed Lange. “Who found them?”

“Guy’s over there, in my car.” Helms jutted his chin toward the blue Caprice police special.

The three men walked over. A man in his mid-forties was sitting in the back seat, door open, one foot dangling out. Helms introduced him to Fisher and Lange.

The witness explained that when he exited the tunnel from the research building he saw Lippmann lying in the middle of the entrance, so ran to him but on seeing Lippmann’s chest wound, realized he was dead so called 911 on his cell. Wasn’t until he was on the call that he noticed Ritter sprawled out several feet away. He didn’t remember seeing anyone else in the area but admitted to being too upset to look all that closely. Fisher thanked him and then he, Lange, and Fisher moved away several feet to talk.