TWENTY-FIVE

My mind went blank. It could not be Kevin Finnerty, but it was.

No matter how impossibly absurd, the assistant director in charge of the bureau’s flagship field office was meeting with a professional killer. A red-hot flash of rage climbed up the back of my neck and exploded in the center of my brain. Before I could stop myself I went after them.

But two steps later the cell phone in my pocket began to vibrate.

Brodsky. Had to be. I wanted to keep going but I couldn’t.

The sheriff was there to watch my back, I couldn’t possibly ignore him. I sidestepped behind a huge yellow umbrella and retreated to the bamboo thicket, where Finnerty and his goon wouldn’t be able to see or hear me. I pulled the phone from my pocket, hit the call button.

“Get out of there,” Brodsky snapped. “We’ve got counter.”

“Two units,” the sheriff told me when we got back to his Buick in the parking lot. “Brown van to our right, light blue Ford sedan in the row ahead of us. Next to the black Range Rover.”

I saw the Ford sedan immediately, but it took me a moment to locate the van near the end of the row we were in. A drab brown commercial van with a magnetized sign sticking to the passenger door.

“Yankee Drain Cleaning?” I said. “That the one?”

He nodded.

“How’d you spot them?” FBI agents are trained to spot countersurveillance, but it takes a lot of practice. Even for an ex-L.A. cop, Brodsky had done well to pick them up. “Besides the sign on the door, I mean. We use the same thing on our own vans. Drain cleaners one day, roofers the next. You must’ve used them in the P.D.”

“Everybody does.”

He looked out the window, spoke without turning back to me.

“Two men left the Ford just after you followed Crown toward the gate. They didn’t look like tourists to me, so I checked around the lot for their mother ship. The drain-cleaning van caught my eye right away.”

“Except for the sign it looks pretty ordinary to me.”

“See the ladder? Strapped to the top?”

“Lots of trucks carry ladders.”

“Wired with antenna cable? Running from the rear of the ladder to a through-hole just above the back door?” He looked at me. “Not a lot of people would notice, but not a lot of people have rigged the same setup.”

“The ladder’s an antenna. Should have caught that myself.” I looked at the truck. “So who are they?”

“I guess that depends on who you saw inside with Jerry Crown.”

I told him. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

“That’s all I get? Did you understand what I just said?”

“I’m stunned. Is that what you’d like to hear?” Brodsky shook his head. “I’ve been on the job too long for that. Takes a lot more to surprise me these days.” He paused, looked at the truck, then at the Ford from which the two men had left to follow me inside. “You don’t recognize the vehicles.”

“No, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot. I haven’t been to our surveillance off-site for a year and a half, not since Finnerty made me a supervisor. I have no idea what the special operations group is driving these days.”

“How about the bureau radio in your car? Maybe you can catch them talking to each other.”

“Could have done that a few years ago, but it’s a lot different now. The SOG people use secure frequencies to keep away from crooks with scanners. They’ve got too many channels for me to sort through, and they’re very careful to stay off the air unless they absolutely have to communicate.”

“Maybe Finnerty’s out here working a case.”

“Jerry Crown’s a murderer, a torturer. The only business the bureau would have with him is taking him off the street.” I stared through the windshield at the rain that had suddenly gotten worse. “I didn’t get the feeling they were in there to arrange a surrender.”

Again we fell silent, and I used the pause to begin doubting myself. Already wondering if I could possibly have seen what I did. And detecting the countersurveillance didn’t help, either.

“Let’s give them a test,” I said. “I’ll go for a little drive and you can watch what happens.”

“The van’s an electronics base unit. It won’t follow you. And the Ford’s still empty.”

“Could be another unit out here, though, or more than one. At least a hundred vehicles in this lot. No telling who they might be.” I reached for the door handle. “Call me on your cell when I get to my car. We’ll keep the line open till we finish.”

He nodded. I got out of his Buick, walked back to my Caprice, climbed in, and started the engine. My cell phone vibrated before I could back out.

“Ready?” I asked him.

“Go.”

I backed out of my space, headed toward the exit out of the parking lot, paused when I got to the frontage road to give a watcher time to catch up, then turned left with the flow of traffic back out toward the zoo’s main entrance.

I watched my rearview mirror, saw three cars and a pickup truck make the same turn behind me. No help. Too many vehicles. Nobody’d send four units after one car in an enclosed situation like this. I checked for oncoming traffic, saw a gap, and flipped a sudden U-turn, started back toward Brodsky as I watched the drivers who’d been behind me as they passed. No professional would duplicate my change of direction, I didn’t even bother looking for that, but radios would be used. It wasn’t likely, but microphones might flash into view before disappearing just as quickly.

I caught nothing as I went by. If it happened, I didn’t see it. I wanted to be reassured, but knew better. Most FBI surveillance agents use microphones built into the visor above the windshield, and the ones who don’t are careful to keep their mikes below window level.

“I didn’t see anything,” Brodsky told me over our open phone connection.

“What about brake lights?” No matter how well trained you are, it’s easy to hit the brakes when your package does something sudden or unusual. A sure way to get yourself burned.

“Nothing.”

“You make a note of the cars?” In case the same ones came back to the parking lot while we were still there.

“Of course.”

“One more try, then. This time I’ll take the bridge back to Adams Mill Road, do another U-turn.”

“Roger.”

I slowed down to cover the few hundred yards to the small bridge across Rock Creek, then hit the gas and sped across the bridge. On the other side I slowed again. One car appeared behind me, then two. I let them catch up before accelerating. Just before I got to Adams Mill, I cut another U-turn, right in front of an oncoming red SUV. I heard the driver’s angry honk, saw in the mirror his uplifted finger. I noted the two cars that had been behind me across the bridge, a white Lexus coupe, a dark blue something-or-other sedan. Again I looked for microphones, again I saw nothing. I watched the cars until they disappeared from view on their way to Adams Mill Road. Then I went back to Brodsky, stayed in my car, and used the phone to talk to him.

“I’m not sure,” I told him, “but I didn’t see anything obvious.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Got any ideas?”

“Do you know what Finnerty drives?”

“Black Mercury Marquis, if he’s using his bucar. Big four-door. I don’t know about his POA, his personally owned car.” But I realized what Brodsky was suggesting. “I’ll cruise the lot to see if I can find the Marquis. We might as well sit on both of them, Crown and Finnerty. Follow the one the drain-cleaning van takes out of here.”

We kept the line open while I looked for Finnerty’s black Mercury. It didn’t take long to find it. The big sedan was only fifty yards away, in the very back row. I told Brodsky, then pulled my Caprice into a parking space where I could see the ADIC’s car in my rearview mirror. I turned the engine off and slouched in the seat. The rain had stopped for a change, but the temperature had dropped, cold enough now to snow. I reached up and adjusted the mirror to give me the best view of Finnerty’s car, then settled back to wait. It was my first chance to reflect on what I’d seen.

There had to be an explanation, one that made more sense than what it looked like: that Kevin Finnerty was out here working with a killer for hire. That the ADIC was seriously off the rails, sanctioning murder, like a real-life “M” in a James Bond movie.

But Brodsky’s suggestion that Finnerty might be legitimately working with Crown was a tempting one to entertain anyway, given the alternatives. Could it be their meeting had nothing whatsoever to do with Judge Brenda Thompson? I was shaking my head even before the question had time to register.

For starters, Kevin Finnerty didn’t work cases, hadn’t been on the street for thirty-five years. Not since the late sixties, at least, when J. Edgar Hoover singled him out of a herd of young fireballs and elevated him directly to headquarters, to direct important bureau programs at first, then back to the field to head up the most important field offices, and finally back to Washington to become an assistant director by the time he was thirty. In the years since then, Finnerty had made himself the second most powerful FBI man in history. The president may have appointed our director, but even the director understands who really runs the show.

I tried another scenario, just for size.

Say Brenda Thompson had gone on her own to the president. Say she told him about Crown, about some kind of dreadful problem she was having with Jerry Crown. Say the president had ordered Finnerty to take care of it secretly. That would make the two guys from the blue Ford the ADIC’s bodyguards, here to protect him in a dangerous mission. That would make the brown drain-cleaning van a bureau listening station, here for the sole purpose of recording the meeting.

Pretty damned improbable, I admitted, but certainly not impossible. Brodsky and I were here to catch Crown. Could it be possible that Finnerty was trying to do the same thing?

“Crown’s out,” the sheriff said over our open phone connection. “On the way to his car.” He paused. “Unlocking it. Behind the wheel. Backing out of his space.”

“The blue Ford?”

“Nothing. Nobody there yet.”

I swiveled my head to look at the brown van as Brodsky’s voice continued. “Crown’s leaving the lot. Want me to follow?”

“Only if the drain cleaners do.”

“Roger.”

But the brown van didn’t move. I watched Jerry Crown’s gray van turn left and follow the frontage road north toward the main entrance. Neither the blue Ford sedan nor the brown surveillance van made any effort to follow. It wasn’t Crown they were here for. Suddenly I saw Kevin Finnerty striding toward his car.

“There he is now,” I told Brodsky. “Eleven o’clock. Coming this way.”

I slouched deeper in my seat as the ADIC made his way to his Mercury Marquis, unlocked it, and climbed in.

“Brown van’s backing out,” Brodsky said. “Blue Ford, too.”

The blue Ford left the lot first, followed several cars later by Finnerty’s Marquis, then, two cars after that, by the drain cleaners. I had to admire the way they were doing it, whoever the hell they were. The ahead-and-behind technique is a good one, especially when you have a pretty good idea where the target’s going. A lot less likely for a watcher to get burned that way.

Brodsky trailed me out of the same lot, and the whole bunch of us rolled north on the frontage road, back toward the main entrance. The brown van followed Finnerty’s Marquis out of the zoo property and turned left on Adams Mill Road. We did the same thing. Suddenly I couldn’t see the blue Ford anymore.

“Ford must have turned right,” I told Brodsky. “You can catch it if you hurry.”

“Roger.”

On my own now, I concentrated on Finnerty and the drain cleaners.

Up ahead, the ADIC swung right onto Porter Street and followed it west toward Connecticut Avenue. The brown van dropped way back as it made the same move, in no obvious hurry to bumper-lock the ADIC. I pictured the intersection at Connecticut Avenue. The brown van had to know where Finnerty was going. If not, they were way too far back. This time of day the traffic on Connecticut was fierce. Miss the light, the van would never catch the ADIC again.

Maybe that’s where the blue Ford had gone, I told myself. The other way around on Adams Mill, to get in position to catch Finnerty if the van got stuck at the light. Again I had to admire the tradecraft. In a slipshod world, it was an unusual thing to see.

A few minutes later we were at the intersection of Porter and Connecticut. The light was red. Finnerty would turn left, of course, back toward WMFO, or toward his house in Kalorama Heights. Both were south of the intersection, and the brown van would follow.

The light changed to green. Finnerty’s Marquis was the third car through, turning left just as he should have. The van edged left to make the turn behind Finnerty but at the last moment veered to the right and whipped around the corner on Connecticut heading north. Directly away from Finnerty’s Marquis. I felt my stomach tighten as I recognized the most basic of antisurveillance techniques. They were dry-cleaning—in spook speak—and that meant they suspected someone to be following. Watching for someone to duplicate their reckless lane change. Leaving me no choice but to continue my turn in the wrong direction.

I did so, then took the first street to my right and stomped on the gas. Another right and I was paralleling the van, then a third right and a quick left back onto Connecticut. I searched the street ahead of me, but they were gone. Shit. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the van half a block behind me. I’d outrun them, encircled them too fast to stay behind the van. I swung into the curb lane and dawdled along until they went by. Now we would see how good they were.

The van continued up Connecticut for a mile or so until we approached the stoplight at Nebraska. The light was green as we got close, but the van slowed as if the driver were lost. Horns began to honk and I knew what was about to happen. I’d done the same sort of thing so often I might as well have been driving the van myself. The light turned yellow—the van at a complete stop now—but when the light turned red it shot through the intersection. More horns honked, a couple of angry shouts rang out. In the next instant the van was back in motion up Connecticut and I was stuck at the red light, with the same problem as before. If I blew through it I’d cause a commotion the van would see, would recognize me for what I was. Only this time it was worse. If I let them go this time, I wouldn’t ever catch them again.

I looked both ways to make sure I wouldn’t kill or be killed, then raced through the intersection. They’d probably made me already, when I showed up the second time on Connecticut. Now there was nothing left to do but bumper-lock them.

Half a minute later I was right on their tail.

If they’d made me, they would follow the book, take me all over hell, anywhere but back to their base. I glanced at my gas gauge, even though I knew it was full. No surveillance agent starts an operation without a full tank.

I settled in for the long haul.

Just before we got to the D.C. line at Chevy Chase, Maryland, the van turned right at Northhampton Street into the surrounding residential area. We passed a small library on our right before the van turned left on Chevy Chase drive and accelerated into all-out escape mode. By the time I made the same turn it was almost out of sight in the winding neighborhood. I floored the Caprice, relieved at least to know that at this time of day there was almost no one on the narrow streets.

Up ahead the van made a left. I shot after it, kept on its tail through a series of quick turns and squealing tires. I saw a school zone looming and to my relief the van turned down another street to keep away from it. By doing so they’d come closer to identifying themselves for me. Really bad guys don’t give a damn who they run over. Whoever these people were, they weren’t prepared to endanger little kids.

I’d lost track of street names by now, but at the next intersection I ran out of luck.

The van went through, but before I could get through behind them a red SUV blew the stop sign to my right. Suddenly it was right in front of me. I could see the wide-eyed driver trying to outrace me before I hit him. He almost made it but inexplicably skidded to a stop. I stomped the brake halfway through the firewall, but couldn’t stop before I hit him in the rear quarter-panel.

My airbag exploded in my face, then sagged away. I slumped against my seat. The damage from the collision was insignificant—I’d almost been stopped when I struck the SUV—but the drain-cleaning van was gone, and I’d be here at least an hour with the other driver.

The man was out of the car when I came around to talk to him. Dark hair, not very clean dark hair, long over his collar. Suit and tie, European cut with the thin shoulder line, narrow waist, and tighter-than-American trousers. A diplomat, maybe. This part of town was filled with them.

“Are you hurt?” he wanted to know.

I changed my mind about the diplomat part. He didn’t have any trace of an accent.

“Thank God you’re a good driver,” he continued. “I didn’t even see the stop sign.” He lifted the cell phone in his hand, showing me the reason he hadn’t.

“I’m okay,” I said, then looked at him, surprised at the flatness of his affect. I spent a lot of time with people under stress, and he didn’t look all that shook up.

“Guess we better trade info,” he said. “Get us both on our way.”

Together we examined the damage. My plastic bumper had flexed and retracted the way it was designed to do, and with the exception of a couple of insignificant scratches there was no damage to my Caprice. His Toyota Four-Runner wasn’t quite so lucky. The dent in his rear quarter-panel would have to be pounded back into shape and repainted.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t want to get my insurance company involved here.” He glanced back at the stop sign. “It was my fault. My car is the only one damaged.” He looked at my bumper. “Would a hundred bucks be enough to buff out those scratches?”

I shook my head. “I don’t need any money, but I do need your ID, your driver’s license and registration.”

The bureau was pretty strict about that. People have a way of coming back later with claims impossible to deny if you just walk away from these things.

“Of course,” he said. “Registration’s in my glove compartment.”

I followed him around to his car. He’d left the door open. He climbed in and reached across to the glove compartment. I glanced at the edge of his door, then looked closer at the maintenance sticker glued there. The sticker featured a drawing of a big goony service-station attendant holding a tire and smiling. I bent closer. Best Price Service, the sticker said. Tires and Batteries a Specialty. I felt myself frowning. I’d seen that guy before. As a matter of fact, I’d been at that very service station.

I backed away and bent to examine the front tire. A Michelin tire, but that wasn’t what started the tightening in my gut. Lots of people buy Michelin tires. I bent even closer, until I could read the imprinted code numbers stenciled in white above the small numbers designating the size of the tire. Stenciled white numbers I’d been told not long ago would appear on only a few very special Michelin tires in this country.

I straightened up, leaned into the car, right up into the driver’s face.

“Good job,” I told him. “I’ve got to give you that much.” I glanced up the street where I’d last seen the brown van before it disappeared. “You think they made it back to the barn yet?”

He stared at me. “What are you talking about? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means it’s time for you to shut up. It’s time for you to call Gerard Ziff and tell him we’re on our way.”