Dead Game (21 page)

The FBI Sacramento Field Office
kept a SWAT team, but Weisson’s was big enough that they had probably asked for help from San Francisco, which had an Enhanced SWAT team, one whose training included hostage rescue. The Feds prided themselves on gathering and preparing and probably had a precise plan for the takedown. They’d have layout diagrams, blueprints of the building, the whole works. If there was going to be a dynamic entry, then it was likely to be on the front face. Their usual MO was to show up with overwhelming force, seal and contain, then call out the suspects, one team waiting on the back side, one on the front, an extrication team standing by.

And they had a predesignated location they were gathered at now, a staged location where the on-scene SWAT commander would run the bust from. Blacked-out Suburbans with their runners on were already lined up, stacked and ready by the time
Ehrmann had called him, and if they’d suspected him in any way, there was no chance the call from Ehrmann would have happened. He felt an odd relief in that.

Marquez waited now for the heavy steel gate to roll open. He’d heard the gate had cost eight hundred thousand dollars and could stop an eighteen-wheeler at fifty-five miles an hour. Ehrmann walked out as the gate opened and directed Marquez where to park. A few minutes later they left in Ehrmann’s car.

“How many are in the building?”

“Five and some bodyguards, and then there’s us.”

He smiled over at Marquez, but Ehrmann didn’t really have the demeanor of a field guy, and his joking lacked the feel of someone who’d been there. It made Marquez think of some of the new aspects of the Bureau. The weight had shifted from CID and criminal investigation into the still amorphous fight against terrorism. Taking on Eurasian criminal gangs required an international scope and understanding of elaborate computer crime and sophisticated networks overlapping countries. It took a different kind of breed. Ehrmann was probably very adept with a computer. He thought of what Anna had said yesterday about Karsov owning a yacht he kept in the Med and a house in Switzerland.

“Is Karsov here?”

“We hope he is, and we think we watched him arrive, though the vehicle’s windows were tinted.”

“What else do you expect to find in there?”

“Weapons that came in disguised as car parts.”

“Is that what this has always been about?”

“Yes.”

So it was all coming out now. Ehrmann was suddenly very upfront and nervous too. His hands moved constantly. A long investigation was coming down to a moment. Marquez listened to the back-and-forth radio chatter, listened to Ehrmann’s responses. Weisson’s had been color-coded by SWAT. The front was red, the back side black, the west end green, east blue, and the roof purple. The purple team would go in first and access the roof. A helicopter was on its way. They drove up to a drab building a good mile from Weisson’s, and Marquez saw a line of cars and several TV vans. He had thought they’d be as close as the on-scene SWAT commander, and Ehrmann guessed what he was thinking.

“This is as close as we get.”

“Is Douglas with the SWAT commander?”

“He is.”

“He’s been part of your investigation.”

Not really a question. He just wanted to confirm it.

“Since the start, he’s been part of this since day one. I’ll tell you something else, when we take Karsov into custody tonight, the world becomes just a little bit safer.”

“He’s that big a deal?”

“He is. You ready to go in?”

When they walked in Marquez saw the media being briefed in a room out front. A spokesman for the FBI pointed at the class picture, the faces of the suspects they hoped to arrest, pinned up on a wall. A few heads turned their direction as they moved past toward the back of the building. Marquez could feel Ehrmann’s pride as the FBI spokesman told the assembled press what was about to happen was “the most significant takedown of Eurasian
Organized Crime ever in the state of California, the culmination of an eighteen-month investigation spanning the West Coast.”

Now they entered a room with a table and banks of surveillance equipment. It looked like a war room. Ehrmann explained the equipment and introduced him. SWAT didn’t need to crawl up to a rolling door and snake a camera underneath to check out the interior ahead of the bust. It was all right here on the monitors.

“How many cameras have you got inside the building?” Marquez asked.

“Twelve. They’re all up in the roof trusses.”

They had audio, had bugs planted in the room where the meeting was under way right now. It was all a little amazing, but the Bureau was flush with cash. He guessed there was two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment in the room. Three TV monitors showed the face of the building from different angles. But it was camera angles inside, the on-screen views looking down and across the working bays at a glass-enclosed and lighted office, that really said it all. They were watching the meeting in progress inside the building, watching it and listening to it. Marquez read the shapes of five men, four seated, one walking around.

“That’s the meeting room,” Ehrmann said. “The man standing is Karsov. We just got a positive ID and he’s not here for caviar or cars. When the price gets high enough he can’t trust his guys and has to show up himself.”

Marquez looked around the room again. His eyes were drawn back to the shapes of the men in the meeting. An audio tech took off his earphones, and Ehrmann put them on. Looking at the setup here, it was pretty easy to understand the disdain the agents who’d picked him up out on the slough road had shown for the SOU operation.

“Are you going to tour the TV people through here?” Marquez asked, and Ehrmann shook his head.

A radio crackled to life. The helicopter was less than a minute away, and SWAT started to roll toward Weisson’s gate. Marquez heard the copter pass overhead and focused on the monitors that caught the front facade of Weisson’s. One camera looked through the fence and rows of wrecked cars at the Mercedes and minivan parked parallel to the building near the rolling doors. Though he wasn’t part of the bust, anticipation rose in him. The energy in the room was electric. Ehrmann couldn’t stop moving.

“Three, two, one,” someone counted, and the power went out along the front face.

“We have snipers on the roofs of two of these abandoned buildings,” Ehrmann said. “And we’re moving onto the roof of Weisson’s. They’ll go down the roof access door to the computers on the mezzanine level if the gentlemen inside don’t come out as soon as we call them.”

“Will they answer?”

“We think the individual we’re calling will answer. We’ve been a steady customer for him, and the number showing on his screen will read as out-of-state. Unless the power outage spooks him, I think he’ll answer.”

They could hear the cell ringing through the bugs in place in the meeting room. It rang six times and went to voice mail. They called it again.

“Come on, answer your phone,” Ehrmann said. But the phone abruptly shut off.

The SWAT commander decided to flash-bang a door and use bullhorns to call them out. Marquez watched onscreen as four of the SWAT moved between the old Mercedes and the minivan. He
could barely make out their shapes, and he overheard that the reason the door wasn’t being popped open with their “Peacekeeper” vehicle was that there wasn’t enough room to get between the Mercedes and minivan. He looked away from that monitor to one that was hooked to infrared cameras and recorded the heat images of the men who’d been in the meeting room moving past its screen.

“They’re out of the room,” Ehrmann said, and an audio tech said he could hear SWAT loud and clear calling them out with bullhorns. “No way they don’t hear that,” Ehrmann said. “No way.”

Then there was a rapid series of light flashes that the inside cameras caught and Marquez read as automatic fire. A shooter kept a steady stream of fire toward the door that had been breached, and then outside along the front there was a flash of light so brilliant the transmitting of it momentarily lit up the room here. There was a second bright flash and yelling and chaos as a fireball formed and rose where the Mercedes had been. It took a full second or two before they realized the cars parked out in front of Weisson’s had detonated.

“Omigod,” an agent to the left of Marquez said. “Oh, Jesus, no.”

The SWAT commander whose voice was broadcast live in the room was yelling as he aborted the bust and called everyone back, and the extrication team started forward with the Peacekeeper’s armored body leading. Then there was hesitation, fear of secondary explosions, and a couple of minutes lost before the Peacekeeper moved in through the fence. The helicopter’s searchlight showed the two vehicles burning and nothing moving. Six of the SWAT team had been inside the fence. The helicopter’s light swept the
pavement looking for them, and the pilot’s voice ended with the word “shit,” and there was a loud bang.

The SWAT commander kept his cool, reported, “The copter’s been hit. It’s going down.”

Then abruptly the helicopter showed on a monitor as it struck Weisson’s high along the east corner. It was in flames, and the tail section folded as it hit the ground.

Marquez watched the extrication team move in and around the burning vehicles, and the only voice in the room was the SWAT commander broadcasting through one of the speakers. There was a moment where no one said anything or moved.

“It’s all over CNN,”
Cairo told him about an hour later.

Marquez had moved outside. All visitors and nonessential personnel were out of the building, and he’d told Ehrmann he’d get one of the team to pick him up.

“Better come get me.”

He gave Cairo directions, and as he waited learned that Douglas had taken a ricochet gunshot wound to the head while helping get the injured out. Now Cairo called.

“I can’t get to you. They won’t let anyone within a mile. Can you get a ride out?”

“No, but I’ll walk.”

He tried to get more information on Douglas before leaving. Cairo drove him to the field office, and it was difficult retrieving his car. They had to get a hold of Ehrmann to release it. From the safehouse Marquez tried to find out where they’d taken the
wounded and gave up using the phone and listened to the TV, which seemed to be the best source of what was happening. CNN was calling it the worst loss of life during a raid in the history of the Bureau. Three suspects were at large. Karsov’s face along with several of his aliases were shown on screen, and Marquez couldn’t figure out how they got past the SWAT team along the back face. There were four or five FBI snipers back there, and if they’d fought their way out, then how could they escape by vehicle with all the helicopters in the air? An hour later CNN reported a tunnel had been found running from inside Weisson’s out to a large storm drain, and it was believed they’d escaped through the tunnel and used cell phones to call in people to pick them up. TV coverage of Weisson’s showed the carcasses of the vehicles that had exploded, an armored carrier on its side, the downed helicopter, the TV correspondent calling it a picture from a war zone, comparing it to images he’d seen in the Middle East.

“Seven confirmed dead,” a reporter said.

When the hospitals where the injured had been taken were named, Marquez drove to Mercy Hospital. He found the waiting room filled with the families of injured officers, then got asked if he was family and shook his head.

“Then go home.”

He drove back past Weisson’s, listening on both police band and regular radio where the FBI director was making a statement, speaking first to the loss of life, then to the manhunt under way for the three men whose faces were now being broadcast nationally. Klieg lights cast a glow in the sky. The streets were blocked off, and he couldn’t get to the command center where he hoped by passing a message to Ehrmann he could get word on Douglas. The
director described elements of Eurasian Organized Crime, Russian mob elements in California they’d first identified through contacts in Brighton Beach, New Jersey. He sketched arms deals tied to Karsov and returned to answering questions about the dead and wounded.

Marquez drove past Ludovna’s house. His headlights were stark on the bare trees, the dark lawns of the street. No lights were on in Ludovna’s house, and he didn’t see the BMW in the driveway. He drove back to the safehouse, brewed coffee, and called Katherine, who had gone to bed without knowing anything about a blown bust. She walked out and turned the TV on while she was on the phone with him.

“Why were you there?”

“It was a mix of things, some crossover of suspects I’m not clear about yet. Charles Douglas has been wounded.”

“Do you know how badly he’s hurt?”

“Not yet.”

He talked another hour with Katherine, and the TV was on in the background as Kath came up to speed. She’d met Douglas but hardly knew him. She liked him, but he was yet another law enforcement friend of Marquez’s, and she was more worried that he could have been shot himself.

When he hung up with Katherine he moved outside to the patio. There was nothing to do but wait, and periodically he went in and checked the TV. But he was outside at dawn watching the red-rimmed sky lighten and thinking about what was being speculated about on TV, that the cars were packed with C-4 or some similar explosive and that the criminal gang involved feared the FBI and had created the car bombs as a way to repel a SWAT team.
How anyone in the media had gotten this information Marquez had no idea. He couldn’t see the Feds releasing anything at this point. Shauf found him outside on the patio.

“They’ve gone national with Burdovsky’s face, and they’re saying she’s wanted for questioning in connection with last night,” Shauf said.

“What are they calling her?”

“A person of interest. The other three are still at large.”

“Is there more about that?”

“Some. They’re replaying it every few minutes. Come in and watch it, and let’s eat something. You look like you need it. I’ll scramble some eggs if you make coffee and toast.”

They put a breakfast together, and he sat with Shauf and drank several cups of coffee, thinking about torture killings he’d seen in the DEA. A snitch had his eyes removed and his testicles stuffed far enough down his throat for him to choke before he bled to death, but not before he was dotted with cigarette burns and his wife raped and killed in front of him. You found a way past those things by finding the explanation—the cartel wanted to make an example to frighten others. You never forgot the images but if you understood why they were killed, it was the first step to dealing with it.

He took a call from Chief Baird as they were cleaning up. It had been Marquez’s plan to return to the hospital and try to get word on Douglas. After that, he wasn’t sure. But now, Baird wanted him to come in.

On weekends Baird took his fourteen-year-old and twelve-yearold grandsons fishing on Buck’s Lake where he had a small cabin. He often said he’d like to live at Buck’s and forget about the rest of
the world. He wanted to live the rest of his life simply, but Baird was anything but simple and had the gift of seeing things in perspective sooner than others. Marquez drove to headquarters and answered the chief’s questions.

“Did they know it was the FBI?”

“They knew.”

“And they went ahead and detonated these car bombs and then shot at those trying to help the wounded?”

“Correct. The shooting was probably to cover Karsov’s escape.”

“And these are some of the same people you’ve been watching?”

“Probably not. We’ve watched caviar delivered to and shipped back out of the building, but we haven’t had any contact with anyone who was in that meeting room last night.”

“Are you sure? The FBI has only identified three, and you say there were five. Could one of the men in the room be an informer for the FBI?”

“From the audio and visual equipment they had set up, I don’t think they need an informer.” But Baird was asking if one of the unnamed men could have been Ludovna.

“No, Ehrmann would have told me.”

Baird pondered that and said, “I want you to go home. That’s an order.”

He called Katherine on the drive home. Now he looked at the fall light on the gravel beyond the front porch and walked through the house and out onto the deck. A cold wind blew in from the ocean, and he turned the idea that Katherine was right, it was time he turned in his badge. He’d be fifty in a couple of years, and watching that last night only brought home how precious life was.
Maria was almost grown, and they were getting older. Maybe he’d given his fair share to dealing with society’s misfits and the backwash of the gene pool.

There were drives Marquez remembered, coming back from somewhere or getting an early start, dawn along the north coast when the ocean was silver-blue and the steep coastal mountains still edged with night. Or a full moon rising over the Los Padres on a dusky June night, or the first snow as he crossed Tioga Pass in October, the fall light on the eastern slope as the aspens turned, the Kern River, the Eel, and wading into the Sacramento above Sweetwater to fish for trout, and a morning in March in the desert when the spring flowers bloomed. What he remembered best was the light and the feel of the land, the long dark velvet of the ocean, and Katherine was right, he didn’t have to give the rest of his life to chasing bad guys.

He was still sitting on the deck when Ehrmann called, and he knew two things as he heard his voice. Ehrmann was at an airport, which probably meant he was being summoned east, and two, Ehrmann had bad news to deliver. He’d heard the tone too many times before, heard Ehrmann sigh and explain, “I wanted to call you before it was public, because I know you were friends and they tell me you came by last night.”

“Aw, don’t tell me that, Ehrmann. Tell me something else.”

“Charles Douglas died this morning at dawn.”

Marquez laid the phone on the railing. He leaned on the railing and bowed his head into his hand.