Working group MARJORIE DAW headquarters
The next day
A few hours of sleep, a shower, then back in to file reports, read the wires, scan the incoming reports, Nick on the phone with D.C., everyone busy.
They finally got together at 4.
“Hope you all appreciate the lie I told Mrs. McDowell yesterday. In fact, not picking up Juba at the mosque, alerting him and letting him fly the coop, was a total catastrophe. They are not happy in D.C. Don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around.”
“If you go, I go,” said Swagger.
“Appreciated, but not helpful,” said Nick. “Anyhow, in this room, we all understand that, but once it’s been acknowledged, we have to forget it and move on. So if anybody has any bitches—complaints, recriminations, bitterness—now’s the time to let fly, because after today it’s a closed file.”
Gold said, “It does no good to compare to Israeli methods. I feel, however, that psychologically your people—I don’t mean anyone in here, but more generally—have not made the kind of commitment that is necessary to deal with this sort of existential threat. I hope I am wrong.”
“You probably are not,” said Nick. “Passive-aggression haunts our every move, even in the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division. We haven’t committed as yet to the path of total destruction. Many still believe some sort of rapprochement is necessary.”
“Do you yourself, Agent Memphis?”
“Tough question, soft answer. I hope so. Deep down, however, nobody wants to go full theater. It’s not in our character. Look at our wars and how equivocal we’ve been, at least since 1945, and the two months immediately after nine/eleven.”
“Then your task will be harder.”
“I understand that. I will help in any way I can, as I have an intense investment in seeing Juba eliminated.”
“Anything else?” Nick said.
There were no murmurs.
“And we did gain,” said Nick. “A, we confirmed that he’s here. B, he’s supported by an expensive maintenance system of unknown provenance and sophisticated capabilities. C, he’s unsure of his ability to maneuver here in America. And, D, he’s with this Jared Akim, whom we can track. Now, Chandler, update us.”
“Got over a dozen responses from the wired picture of the Akim kid, but, in all cases, they’re outside the cone of possibility. He couldn’t have gotten there that fast by car. So I low-prioritize them. There are many reports of stolen cars, but nothing unusual in them, no way of knowing if one of them was taken by Juba and Akim. We have upgraded priorities on the license numbers of those taken after Imam el-Tariq put in his call to Akim and warned him of the spy. El-Tariq said that was about six p.m., and on his phone there indeed was a call to a number at six-oh-seven p.m. confirmed as Jared Akim’s.”
“And I’m guessing there’s no further intercept data on that phone. Surely Juba would be smart enough to destroy it.”
“That’s correct.”
“And there’s no intercept intelligence from the phones or emails to Akim’s parents or any of the seven friends we’ve identified?”
“Nothing, chief.”
“Mr. Gold, do you think he’ll split up from the kid? He’s used to operating alone.”
“He’s used to shooting alone. He’s used to escaping alone. But in all his operations, even going back to his housecleaning for Assam’s henchmen, he was serviced, transported, and sustained by an in-place network. He is used to having a chaperone. He is a star, in other words, and is used to people doing things for him. He’s the artist, he has to be free to create.”
“He sounds more like a director than a sniper,” said Nick, but ‘Director’ had a different meaning to the staff than to movie-crazed Nick, so nobody laughed.
“I believe he already has a new network in place and will work quickly to find it,” continued Gold. “This situation would be among the eventualities he planned for. As I see this, I think he has to go from network to network to keep advancing. Might I suggest you assign someone to find organizations capable of sustaining him over the next month or two, getting him what he needs, transporting him, assisting him in his movements and his logistical needs. I could guess, furthermore, that it will be a criminal organization, but it won’t be radically Islamic in tone or tendency.”
“Yeah, good,” said Nick. “And that’s also more indication of the money behind this op. If he’s got a criminal organization helping him, that kind of work doesn’t come cheap.”
Gold nodded.
“I’ll forward a memo to our gang intelligence people to be on the lookout for any kind of pattern of unusual activity.”
“I agree.”
“Meanwhile, we wait. But we have to anticipate. Mr. Swagger, what’re your thoughts?”
“Well, gun stuff, for one,” said Swagger. “I believe he’s prepping up a .338 Lapua Magnum shot. Those rifles are damned expensive, and they’re prized by people with passionate urges to shoot from a long way out. It’s a small community. Someone—me, I guess—ought to canvass it and see if anything has happened and left tracks in that community.
“I also—not sure of the legality here—but it’s a community serviced by just a few retail outfits, some mail order only, some brick-and-mortar, and the gear is very specific, very well made, very expensive, mostly from specialized machine shops. He—or somebody—would have to make some purchases to get him set up. Can we monitor or question those limited outlets, again looking for unusual patterns? Also, there’s a series of competitions where fellows shoot over a mile. I don’t think he’ll be competing, but those boys might have picked something up—rumors, odd patterns of purchase, questions coming in from an odd source, stuff like that. It could all lead us to Juba through a different route.”
“That’s good. Don’t you think that’s good, Mr. Gold?”
“I do, yes.”
“Other than that,” Swagger continued, “I remember that Mrs. McDowell said he was not a great one for improvising. So I think it’s fair to assume that now that he’s on the run, he’ll try to get back to his plan as quickly as possible. He only knows we know about him, but he has no idea the extent to which we’ve penetrated. He will get back on schedule.”
“Okay, lay out the schedule. As you see it.”
“I believe he has to find an area with at least a mile of clear space to get zeroed in. He has to work with his reloading program until he’s satisfied he’s found a load that will get him on target from the appropriate distance with the appropriate killing velocity still left in the bullet. He’s got to shoot and score five hundred times so he’s comfortable. I also think at a certain point he’ll move on to living targets. He’ll want to see what the bullet does. He might find an accurate load and bullet, but not be pleased with its penetration and expansion powers, and know, from that, that if he don’t hit heart or lung, the boy he’s shooting at will probably survive. So he’s got to have a bullet that deforms or mushrooms or bursts into splinters and cuts everything to ribbons. No point coming all this way, spending all this money, time, and energy, only to knock whoever-it-is down for a two-day stay in the hospital. He’s got to know he’s got a one-shot kill package. So he’ll shoot at something alive from this distance, and somehow we might be able to connect by finding such a site.”
“Satellite recon, as with Mr. Gold’s operation in Israel, would seem in order,” said Nick. “Unfortunately, the United States is a lot bigger than southern Syria, so we can’t just send the drones and satellites out. Can you put together for me a profile of what he’d need? Then we can task a recon satellite to look for it. Or maybe we have computer programs that can do such a thing.”
“Yep.”
“I’m going to hook you up with a Cyber Division hotshot we have named Jeff Neill. Lots of big-case experience. Maybe if you tell him what you need, he’ll be able to put something together that could facilitate finding it fast.”
“Now we’re perking,” said Swagger.
“Chandler?”
“Well, we’re not all drones and boy-genius hackers. Manhunt principles: flood the world with photos of quarry, run commo intercepts on likely allies, find a track, then raid. That’s how they’ve done it since Rome, and it’s worked before.”
“Sure, I agree, bu—”
Her phone rang.
“Detroit Metro, Homicide,” she said, looking at the dial.
“Take it,” said Nick.
The crime scene was indeed a crime scene: standard urban tragedy, case number 1,708,887. Bodies, blood in lakes and tributaries, the shooter’s progress written in the trail of shotgun shells he left as he took out all living things that crossed his path. Style points for the guy with the stick in his eye—the cops had never seen that and thought it was pretty funny—and the poor woman, so pulped her face looked like it had been taken over by malignancy. That, under the mashed and merged features, she still breathed lowered the score a bit, but a special bonus had to be awarded for the twisted false teeth in the blood.
“You’ve seen this shit before?” Nick asked the boss detective. “What are you getting?”
“Out-of-towners. No Detroit crew would hit this house. It’s a Black Pagans franchise, and the Pagans are the biggest, toughest gang in the city. They’ve got about eighty percent of the hard trade. Hard being Motownese for heroin. So if you hit them, they will go medieval on your ass and wipe out all the living generations of your family. If your parents are dead, they’ll dig them up and kill them all over again. Whoever did this didn’t give a shit about the Pagans.”
“What do you make of the shooting?” Bob asked the detective.
“It got the job done.”
“No, I mean as skill.”
“High-quality. The Pagans and their competitors, all four of them still alive, aren’t known for their finesse. That’s why so many innocent bystanders go down when they’re settling scores. But this shooter put all his blasts into kill zones. The first shot was about forty feet, dead center to the chest, and it had to be made fast. He came around the door low on Reggie, put one into his knee, to bring him under the table, then the other into his balls. A fourth shot, close-range, finished him. Muzzle distance: zero feet. Ejected shells were all twelve-gauge double-aught Remington. We also found an empty box of shells in Reggie’s room, so presumably one of the bad guys filled his pockets.”
“Anything on the gun?”
“Probably stolen. That’s where the Pagans strap up, mostly. By the spray pattern, I’d say a shorty, sixteen inches. As I say, well-shot. He hit what he was shooting at dead solid perfect. The guy knew what he was doing.”
“How much do you think they clipped?”
“Plenty. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five thousand, small bills. On a weekend, much bigger, so if the point was to hit a stash house, they would have waited till Saturday night. Hitting one on a weeknight doesn’t make any sense robbery-wise.”
“They needed the dough to get out of town,” said Nick. “Strictly travel money. What about the woman?”
“Different guy. Unarmed. Theola was a formidable woman; she’d been shot three times, and we believe she had at least four kills on her, two bare-handed, but nobody would think of snitching her out. Anyhow, this was amateur hour. He kicks her in the head after she fell down, jumps on her face like it’s a pogo stick. You can see his tracks in the blood. Size: about ten and a half. I’ve seen plenty of those tread marks, they’re Vans, a shoe suburban kids think is cool. It’s not a ghetto icon. The other guy was in size eleven cross-trainers, probably New Balance or Nike. So it’s an odd combo of a pro and someone suburban with zero experience.”
“But they knew where to hit. How’d they know where the stash was?”
“Followed the runner’s car, I’d guess. He’d been out servicing the street pushers.”
“So I think we’d like to talk to the street pushers. They might have something.”
“Sure, so would I, but I can’t do that right away. After something like this, they’ll all go to ground, because they don’t know how it’s going to come down from here. They don’t want to be standing on their corner when the retaliation starts turning the air blue.”
“Got it.”
“And one more thing. See that fat guy with his balls splattered on the wall? His name was Reggie ‘Candy’ Peppers. A legend in this town. Anyhow, he had a 2017 Mercedes S, jet-black, shiny as sin. His pride and joy. We found two cars out back registered to the two other vics, but Candy’s was missing. I’m thinking your boys not only ripped off money and guns and ammo but the car as well. We can put out a statewide on the license plate and a descript of the bad guys. Maybe tighten it up with street pusher info to be collected later.”
“Do that, please, Lieutenant. But as you say, the main guy is a pro, and he’ll be good at evasion. He may have dumped it for another car by this time. It’s been, what, twelve hours since all this occurred?”
“Get right on it, sir.”
“So they needed dough and a car to travel,” said Nick to Bob. “Best way to get each fast is to hit a place like this. That we’re on it so fast is a break for us, thanks to a cop’s sharp eyes. Still, they’re out and on the road.”
“Fuck,” said Bob.
“Yeah, and for someone who hates to improvise, he’s doing it pretty goddamned well.”
Next day, nothing, no reports of an abandoned Mercedes S, Michigan 4C55 409, jet-black. A few replies to Jared’s photo, but all useless. Another Assistant Director showed up to sit with Nick in his office. No comment on the subject of the chat. Bad news from latent prints: nothing for Juba. A few that presumably belonged to Jared Akim, but since he’d never been fingerprinted, that couldn’t be confirmed. Bob on the phone to the long-range retail shops of America, to the president of the Mile Benchrest Club in Pennsylvania, to MidwayUSA and Brownells, which owned Sinclair International. Nothing tangible. The .338 Lapua Magnum was mainstream enough that no unusual activity on behalf of its sustenance could be identified. A few hours for nap breaks, but nothing else.
The day after was going the same way, until Nick hung up his phone with a crack.
“Okay, let’s jump,” he said. “Get that State Police chopper over here, Chandler. Email intercept from Jared Akim to a pal, asking him to tell the folks he was all right, would be home soon—this was the coolest thing.”
“Did they get a locality on it?” Swagger asked.
“Yeah, the GPS record puts it at a Kmart in Germantown, Ohio. About one hundred and fifty miles south of here, right on the state line.”
“Let’s go to Ohio,” said Bob.