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Rand Nickerson spent the morning doing some research based on the tip Mac had phoned in about the Burma drug suppliers coming down out of Vancouver. He reached out to all the agencies that would have a stake in this — two countries worth. You developed a high tolerance for paperwork when you worked for the Bureau, or you got out.
He’d been with the Bureau for nearly a decade. But he admitted he probably wouldn’t have made it if he’d been in D.C. like Stan had been. Noble’s easygoing management style made the job tolerable.
If he got out, where would he go? There weren’t too many jobs for a man with his skill set that wasn’t in some alphabet agency chasing bad guys — usually bad guys who sold drugs.
The Seattle FBI office had had its eye on a particular import distributor for some time. What interested the Seattle FBI was they were rumored to be a front for intelligence gathering within the Southeast Asian immigrant community, but they’d not been able to get a handle on it. Reports of intimidation, harassment, but no one wanted to make waves. That suggested that there was real clout behind it. So that car had been purchased by the import distributor — but it had embassy plates. Stupid, but they probably hadn’t thought anyone would check, and it prevented a lot of speeding tickets up and down I-5.
The DEA was also interested because they thought drugs were being moved in and out of the same company. Drugs coming in through the Port of Seattle and SeaTac airport. The Canadian connection was just a curiosity to them.
But Myanmar didn’t have a Seattle Consul. If you dealt with Myanmar here, you did it through Los Angeles or Vancouver.
Vancouver was closer.
Import distributors were probably as law abiding as any other business — or as criminal, if you wanted to look at it that way. But they were susceptible to being used as covers for the drug trade. For all of the stereotype of migrants coming across the border with drugs, most drugs were flown in, or brought in with trucks and boxcars, and import distributors had all the licenses needed to transport goods.
Sadly, it was much like the system Mac had discovered in Vallejo last spring. Rand shook his head. Mac Davis, son of a capo for one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico. The irony was he fit that description better than he did Mac Davis, reporter.
Especially cop reporter. He smiled briefly at that — everyone did.
So apparently not everyone had gotten the memo that Mac had rejected his Mexican family and returned home to Seattle to resume his life as a reporter. Near as Rand could tell, Mac had really done it.
Now, Mac’s cousin, Toby Rollings? That might be another story. Rand and Stan both were keeping an eye out there. Maybe Toby really wanted a new start... that seemed to be true. The California DEA said they believed him when he’d offered to turn state’s evidence in exchange for starting over. But Toby had walked away from that offer when Mac got sucked into the Del Toro cartel’s clean-up mission.
Rand thought the two cousins really did care about each other. Commendable, he supposed. Mac might have been better off if he had abandoned his cousin a long time ago. Still, Toby had protected Mac when they were young.
Face it, Rand told himself. You just don’t like the son of a bitch. Toby was too slick, too much of a glad-hander, too polished. He’d probably go far in marketing, now that he’s legit, Rand thought sourly. He preferred Mac’s rough edges. What you saw was what you got.
Beyond that, a drug dealer had a hard time going clean. The money was too good, too easy. Toby was in college, and so was his wife. They were living in a house not far from the one Mac was buying from Toby’s mother. A larger house — Toby and Keisha had two girls. Rand had met them all. They were likable people. But. There was always a but. It hurt no one to keep an eye on Toby.
Far as that goes, they kept an eye on Mac. Just because Mac walked away from the cartel, didn’t mean that the cartel wouldn’t come calling again. That was the other reason it was hard for a drug dealer to go clean. Cartels weren’t all that thrilled about high-level dealers who walked away.
Rand suspected the Del Toro cartel’s caution about Mac’s capacity for vengeance was keeping Toby alive. But this was a better fresh start than what the DEA could offer, he conceded. Toby got to keep his family, including his parents and cousin. He was in school, thanks to his mother, an art professor at UW.
The kids were in school and Keisha was in college too.
And the credits rolled on a happy ending.
He hoped. The problem with life was that it kept on going. A fresh start was great — but you were still you.
He would know, he thought sardonically.
Rand got an email back from a customs officer on the Canadian border. There was chatter, he was told. Something was going on, and the flow of drugs southward from the Southeast Asian cartels — the famed Golden Triangle of opium growers — had all but halted. No one was sure why. I wish we could take credit for it, the officer wrote. But it’s not anything we’re doing. We don’t get the resources up here. Everyone looks at the southern border. We try to tell them, but the powers that be just sneer. Canadians? What are they smuggling? Maple syrup?
Rand understood that. These days it wasn’t just opium — heroin — as much as it was a growing trade in the synthetics. Of course, the U.S. made its own too — something the Powers That Be, the media, and the public conveniently ignored.
A lot of drugs came in through the West Coast’s largest ports, and that included Vancouver, British Columbia. Seattle got a lot directly, but the U.S. threw more resources at Seattle than Canada had to invest in drug interdiction — especially if the drugs weren’t staying in the country but were heading to a more lucrative and larger market to the south.
Maple syrup indeed.
Rand reached out to more people, even tapping in to his old colleagues in the Philippines. Not too many of them left, but a few. What was going on?
So much of this kind of work was based on gossip and intuition, Rand thought with a shake of his head. A question occurred to him, and he sent a reply to the customs agent. When did the flow taper off? Recently, I assume.
Had to be recent, Rand thought. They would have heard about it if product on the streets was getting tight.
Started about eight months ago, the agent sent back. But it took a while to be noticed. A lot of product was already in the pipeline. But we’re beginning to hear things on the street — prices are going up. Some product is hard to come by. What about you?
Rand frowned. He hadn’t heard anything. But drugs weren’t really the FBI’s gig. There were other agencies for that — DEA, Customs, Seattle PD, the Port Authority. If it hadn’t been for that damned import company, they might not even be in the loop.
They probably weren’t in the loop, he thought with a grimace.
He called SPD, got a name for the narcotics unit, and gave them a call. The officer confirmed product seemed to be getting tighter. “Hard to tell which stream though,” he said. “We get flooding in here from so many sources. Why? You got something?”
“Maybe,” Rand said, keeping it vague as he usually did with SPD. He’d run the name through Nick Rodriguez if he decided to get specific. “We picked up an odd rumor on the Canadian border.”
“Oh,” the detective sounded disappointed. “Not a huge flow out of there to begin with.”
“There’s not?” Rand asked. “I’d gotten the impression that it was a major pipeline.”
“What? Opium growers in Canada are a thing now? Climate change hasn’t made that big of a difference,” the detective asked, sneering a bit. “Meth kitchens? They can set those up here — no need to chance the border.”
Rand thanked him for his time and hung up. Interesting — ignorant — but interesting, nonetheless.
By 2 p.m. he’d begun to get a picture that alarmed him. He pulled his boss and Stan Warren into a quick meeting. “Here’s what I think — can’t prove any of it, but the timeline works out,” Rand said. “Eight months ago, a missionary crosses the border into Myanmar because some of his church members have family who are in trouble. A couple of villages had been burned. He goes in to help them get out — apparently he’s done it before. A Christian underground railroad.”
Rand wanted to pace, but they were sitting in SAC William Noble’s office, and it wasn’t large enough. “Intentionally or not, he triggered something that’s slowed down the drug flow from the Burmese cartel. And he apparently has gone to ground, and they can’t find him. Must have been just a minor annoyance at first, because the Burmese cartels are quite ruthless when they want to be — they’d have no compunctions about burning down a couple of more villages to smoke him out.”
Noble nodded. “But it didn’t stay minor?”
Rand gestured his ambivalence with his hand. “I’m not sure. The SPD narcotics guy says there might be a bit of tightening, but he sneered at the idea of a pipeline coming down from Vancouver. We know there is one, how come he doesn’t?”
“Go on,” Noble said grimly.
“So Canadian border patrol says they’re hearing there’s less product,” Rand continued. “So maybe it’s just one cartel, and it’s the one that uses the Vancouver port. You know how it works. Somebody immigrated from there three generations ago, and it’s still the route that particular group uses.”
“You think Samuel Fairchild is alive, then?” Stan asked.
“There’s no reason the Burmese militia would be going after his daughter if he isn’t,” Rand pointed out. “From what Mac said, they had some kind of trigger on Samuel Fairchild’s name in the system. Probably have had it for years. And when Maiah Fairchild applied for citizenship, the flare went up.”
“And they want leverage,” Noble said thoughtfully. “They figure she knows something? Or just want her as a hostage — if that, why not while she was in Thailand? It would be easier to grab her in Mae La.”
“I think Samuel Fairchild played it smart this time,” Rand said. “I’m guessing he didn’t register his marriage with the authorities. Maybe had a religious ceremony, but no paperwork. No paperwork for his daughter. So those who might be interested didn’t know.”
“You said they were hostages, they just didn’t know it yet,” Stan said thoughtfully. “But the truth was the cartels — or the political militias — didn’t even know they existed.”
Rand nodded. “And it might well be that the militias have pressured the cartel into working for them on this. That makes sense actually — the militia, or the military, might have been the ones to flag Samuel Fairchild’s name in the system. And the cartel is being asked to do the dirty work — they’ve got the connections here, after all. If they don’t produce the girl, then the militia has ways of making the cartel’s profits go up in flames. Literally.”
“Joy,” William Noble said. “OK, so how do we fit in? Or our import company?”
Rand shrugged. “Depends on what we want to do, I guess. The import company is hosting the cartel members that came down. I traced the license plates I got. That implies a long-term relationship. But my guess is that the import company’s connection isn’t the drugs as much as it is running sleeper agents within the Myanmar refugee and immigrant communities. I think they’re Burmese agents, not ethnic Karen. So, informal informants in the Burma community, and intimidation in the Karen and other minority communities. But when it’s needed, the company also hosts cartel members, or maybe even stores some product. A courtesy. No proof of that, however.”
“Why do you think they’re running the sleeper agents?” Noble asked.
“The Thai restaurant owner’s reaction,” Rand said. “It wasn’t that of a cartel pressuring him. He’s Thai, and he’s established here. No, it was fear, and it smacked of fearing the government — formal or informal. He’s got family, he said more than once.”
Both men nodded. They understood that — the restaurant owner feared they would threaten his family — probably had family back in Thailand, too. And rightly so. Myanmar’s military and militias were some of the nastiest in the world — a country where genocide was national policy.
“It’s not an either/or situation,” Rand continued. “Government, military, militias, cartels — hard to tell them apart. Evidence? Those thugs were driving cars with embassy plates — they likely have diplomatic immunity. I was told they did.”
Noble blew out a long breath of air at that. “That could be nasty,” he admitted. “Obviously this isn’t an official government initiative, or they could have gone through channels and asked to question the girl. So it stands to reason that questioning isn’t what they’ve got in mind. They want to use her as a hostage.”
“That would be my guess,” Rand agreed. “Although I might talk to her a bit this afternoon. I’ve got guard duty. Mac’s doing a ride-along out of the north precinct, tonight.”
“He’s doing what?” Noble asked. “Does he have a death wish? Aren’t they gunning for him?”
Rand shrugged. “My sense is he’s getting impatient with the slow progress of the courts,” he said. “I think he’d welcome it if they came for him. And he’s probably not wrong — I’d place my money on Mac being able to take McBride if it came to a one-on-one fight.”
“McBride has a lot of men he could sic on Davis,” Noble objected. “And he won’t fight fair.”
“Yeah, but apparently, Mac set this up with Captain Abrams up there. And so far, Abrams hasn’t been implicated in any of the investigations,” Rand said. “Which brings up something I’ve been meaning to ask: When do we stop waiting on the SPD to do its internal investigation and step in? It’s been months.”
“You heard about the Judge and her lawsuit?” Stan asked.
Noble grunted. “Hard not to, all over the evening news,” he said. “Mac Davis is quite the cowboy — thank God, he’s not one of mine.”
Stan looked amused but didn’t comment. Rand looked at him suspiciously. Stan Warren was a devious son-of-a-bitch and he’d used Mac before as kind of an ad hoc agent before. Or agent provocateur. Was he up to something now?
“I’ve discussed it with the police chief,” Noble said grimly. “He wants to keep the investigation out of the jurisdiction of the oversight judge. ‘To demonstrate that SPD is capable of policing their own.’”
“If they were capable of that, Rourke and Malloy and all the others wouldn’t have been able to run things like they were,” Stan pointed out. “That wasn’t something that just got started. We need to open an investigation.”
“Of whom exactly?” Noble asked.
“Of the Seattle Police Union,” Stan said calmly as if that wasn’t a bomb large enough to take out the entire Puget Sound region. “I think we go to the federal oversight judge and present the need for a formal investigation — not just of the individuals involved, but the structural entities involved. It’s no different than what is happening in Baltimore — there it appears to be a special operations unit within the department. And that might be true here too.”
Noble pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he conceded. “I’ll give it some thought, although I'm guessing that we’d be told to wait until the September trial dates — see how things come out.”
“And if double jeopardy comes into play?” Stan countered.
“There’s that,” Noble conceded. “But if it’s structural, then it’s not the individuals we’re after. And none of this leaks to the press, you two hear me?”
Stan looked mildly insulted, but he didn’t protest. Rand was amused, mostly. Most of their tips came from the press, not to it.
Suddenly he thought he might be very interested in what Mac was really after in this ride-along — if Mac even knew. Mac seemed to operate by intuition most of the time, right up until things went boom.
“I’m leaving early,” Rand said. “I’m going to go over to the Fairchild House. That’s too easy of a target for skilled operatives. And that agent this morning broke into Mac’s house.”
“He had to take out the front door handle to do it,” Stan said with amusement. Rand looked at him suspiciously. Stan just grinned.
Son of a bitch, Rand thought. Had Stan once broken into Mac’s house without Mac knowing? Probably at the very beginning of Stan’s relationship with Mac.
“Well, the Fairchild House would be easy potatoes,” Rand said mildly.
Stan agreed. “Probably could just knock on the door and get an invite to supper.”
Rand thought dinner at the Fairchild House might just be a fine idea. He looked at what he was wearing — a dark gray suit, white shirt, and tie. Not as fine — or expensive — as what Stan Warren wore, but it was a good suit. He wore suits like this to work like everyone else in the FBI office, unless he was undercover up in the Cascades. He wished he was back on that gig.
Right, hang out with homicidal white supremacists so you don’t have to wear a business suit, he jeered to himself.
What he missed were the mountains. He’d never seen anything like them when he got to Seattle. He’d been raised in Iowa, enlisted, got sent to the Philippines when he showed an aptitude for undercover work. Hell, he didn’t know why they tapped him — maybe just saw him as a backwater rube who would do as he was told.
Undercover work was hard on a person. Every time you came back and resumed your ‘real’ life, you found you’d left pieces of yourself behind. And pretty soon you didn’t have many pieces left.
Not going to think about that, he reminded himself. Think about the Cascade mountains.
He’d gone hiking and backpacking every chance he got. He found the mountains healing. He’d said something like that to Ken Bryson, the tour operator of Wilderness Expeditions when he applied for the job there. Bryson had nodded. “The Vietnam vets came home and headed for these mountains,” Bryson said. “Probably some still out there. Veterans have been coming here ever since.”
“Must be in their 70s, at the minimum,” Rand had said.
“Probably,” Bryson agreed. “At this point they probably couldn’t go anywhere else. Jungle warfare, desert warfare. Vets still come here.”
Bryson was a veteran of Desert Storm, Rand knew. Rand had implied he’d been in Desert Shield.
“One fucked up war followed by another fucked up war,” Bryson said, and he’d hired him to run the kitchen on a couple of tours. Rand liked cooking on a campfire, and it became something of a mission to him — provide tours with really good food out in the mountains. Bryson let him do it.
Then Mac showed up, took a look around, and blew everything up — including Rand’s cover.
Bryson had been a bit sour about it, but he kept Rand on for weekend excursions. Rand thought that what Bryson really wanted was Angie Wilson — he was getting more women-only tours for some reason, to the amusement of everyone because Bryson was a gruff old bastard. Rand had somehow been deemed a safe partner for the young woman.
Fine by him. He liked Angie a lot.
He wished he had one of those gigs this weekend. He was restless, all but pacing with it.
He looked down at his suit again and shook his head. He wasn’t going to wear this to the Fairchilds. He was tired of being in a suit.
He avoided the thought that he wanted to impress Naomi Fairchild. He was very good at avoidance. After he returned to the States, the DoD had recommended he see a therapist to help with the transition back into civilian life — American civilian life. The therapist had told him avoidance and suppression weren’t particularly healthy. They’ll come back to haunt you, he warned. Better than living with his memories of Southeast Asia, Rand had countered. Hard to argue with that.
Besides, he could always suppress the memories and nightmares again, right? Just keep pushing them aside — batten down the hatches, and eventually they had to go away.
Right?
Been a decade, and they hadn’t gone away yet.
Rand shrugged and went home — a small one-bedroom apartment whose only redeeming quality was its view of Mount Rainier. Beige walls, beige carpet. A wall of bookshelves with a desk and computer. A big screen TV, because Rand did like Seattle sports teams. Especially women’s soccer. He was becoming a die-hard fan of women in tight shorts kicking a ball around.
The bedroom had a king-sized bed — and hadn’t that been a bitch to get in here? If he ever moved, he was going to leave the bed behind. More beige.
The kitchen, however, had all of the modern appliances. Cooking was a pleasure; you might as well get the best tools to do it.
He looked around the place, envisioning it through someone else’s eyes. It was shipshape and tidy. There was just him, after all. No family to make a mess of things.
Not going to think about that, he told himself.
Besides, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had someone here. Rand thought about that. No, he literally couldn’t remember every having had someone up here. He frowned.
He took a shower, shaved — for the second time that day — and got dressed in casual clothes. Nothing fancy, just some khaki trousers, a white Polo shirt. He didn’t think Naomi did fancy.... No, he wasn’t doing this for her, he reminded himself.
Right.
He added a light-weight natural linen jacket so that he could stash his weapon and shield in a pocket. It was too hot for a jacket, but he could hardly wear a shoulder harness with a weapon in public.
Well, he had seen a man in camo cargo shorts with an AR-15 in a back harness at the Albertson’s last week. People snickered openly. How embarrassing to be so ridiculous-looking that people laughed at you when you had an AR-15 at your disposal?
No, a good jacket, a snub-nosed revolver, and he was within agency policy to never go unarmed or without his badge.
Rand locked up and then hesitated. It felt wrong to go over there empty handed. This is not a date, he told himself. Besides, Naomi didn’t do wine, he was sure of that. And taking a store-bought dessert to a woman who made her brownies from scratch was insulting. Flowers? That really was too much like a date.
Not a date, he told himself firmly.
But he had to admit it had been a long time since he’d found a woman as appealing as Naomi Fairchild. She was probably in her mid-50s, maybe a bit older than he was, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was of medium height, with curves in the right places, and honey brown hair that she’d worn clasped at the back of her neck. She was just coming home from work, and she’d been wearing a calf-length blue skirt, and a sleeveless blouse that matched. No jewelry. No makeup. No perfume.
Pretty woman, he’d thought when he first saw her, but nothing special. But he found himself looking at her again and again to catch her amused smile as she listened to the people around her. And he’d been intrigued by her description of what it was like to be a woman in the evangelical church. He snickered as he remembered Mac taking the air out of Tim Brandt’s sails with his puzzled question about how Jesus treated the church. In spite of being Janet’s son, Tim was a real prick.
Well, being raised in the evangelical church — and he’d heard that Tim had been raised by Janet’s parents and they ran a Christian community, one of those paranoid enclaves that made his own family look like moderates.
He’d been raised in a Baptist church. Not much had stuck, he admitted. But he knew the lingo, and the basic precepts. Apparently, Mac had missed Sunday School. He snickered again.
An attractive, thoughtful woman who had managed to design a life to suit herself without giving up the church she obviously believed in, nor the independence she’d come to appreciate. A boarding house? Unexpected, in this day and age. But it gave her the companionship she evidently wanted, without requiring her to remarry.
And he could remember enough of his early training to know just how remarkable that was. He wondered what Rebecca Nesbitt would make of her. He should remember to tell Rebecca about her the next time they talked.
He drove slowly past the house looking for any sign that the Burmese agents had returned. He didn’t see them, but that didn’t mean much. His brain automatically catalogued a half-dozen spots he’d choose if he needed to surveil the place, and none of them were visible from within a car. Rand parked in the spot off the alley next to Naomi’s ancient Beetle. He wondered how often she actually used it — church on Sundays, and a trip to the grocery store? She obviously walked to work. Smart; parking at the university was expensive.
He went around to the front door. He wasn’t going to bang on the gate to be let in! He did make a mental note to check and make sure the gate was locked. He’d gotten the impression that security wasn’t a top priority here — in spite of recent events.