Persuader

"Wait," I said. "Make the next right. Something else I want to check first."

I directed him two blocks over and one up and we came to the parking garage where I had left Angel Doll in the trunk of his car. Villanueva waited on a hydrant and I slipped out. I walked down the vehicle entrance and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. Walked on until I came to the s.p.a.ce I had used. There was a car in it. But it wasn"t Angel Doll"s black Lincoln. It was a metallic green Subaru Legacy. It was the Outback version, with the roof rails and the big tires. It had a Stars and Stripes sticker in the back window. A patriotic driver. But not quite patriotic enough to buy an American automobile.

I walked the two adjacent aisles, just to make sure, although I already was. Not the Saab, but the Lincoln. Not the maid"s missing notes, but Angel Doll"s missing heartbeat. Now he knows all about you. I nodded to myself in the dark. n.o.body knows all about anybody. But I guessed now he knew more about me than I was totally comfortable with.

I walked back the way I had come. Up the entrance ramp and out into the daylight. It was cloudy and gray and dim and shadowed by tall buildings but it felt like a searchlight beam had hit me. I slid back into the Taurus and closed the door quietly.

"OK?" Duffy asked.

I didn"t answer. She turned around in her seat and faced me.

"OK?" she said again.

"We need to get Eliot out of there," I said.

"Why?"

"They found Angel Doll."

"Who did?"

"Quinn"s people."

"How?"

"I don"t know."

"Are you sure?" she said. "It could have been the Portland PD. A suspicious vehicle, parked too long?"

I shook my head. "They"d have opened the trunk. So now they"d be treating the whole garage as a crime scene. They"d have it taped off. There"d be cops all over the place."

She said nothing.

"It"s completely out of control now," I said. "So call Eliot. On his cell. Order him out of there. Tell him to take the Becks and the cook with him. In the Cadillac. Tell him to arrest them all at gunpoint if necessary. Tell him to find a different motel and hide out."

She dug in her purse for her Nokia. Hit a speed dial b.u.t.ton. Waited. I timed it out in my head. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings. Duffy glanced at me, anxious. Then Eliot answered. Duffy breathed out and gave him the instructions, loud and clear and urgent. Then she clicked off.

"OK?" I said.

She nodded. "He sounded very relieved."

I nodded back. He would be. No fun in crouching over the b.u.t.t end of a machine gun, your back to the sea, staring out at the gray landscape, not knowing what"s coming at you, or when.

"So let"s go," I said. "To the warehouse."

Villanueva moved off the curb again. He knew the way. He had watched the warehouse twice, with Eliot. Two long days. He threaded southeast through the city and approached the port from the northwest. We all sat quiet. There was no conversation. I tried to a.s.sess the damage. It was total. A disaster. But it was also a liberation. It clarified everything.

No more pretending. The scam had dissolved away to nothing. Now I was their enemy, plain and simple. And they were mine. It was a release.

Villanueva was a smart operator. He did everything right. He worked his way around the warehouse on a three-block radius. Covered all four sides. We were limited to brief glimpses down alleys and through gaps between buildings. Four pa.s.ses, four glimpses.

There were no cars there. The roller door was closed tight. No lights in the windows.

"Where are they all?" Duffy said. "This was supposed to be a big weekend."

"It is," I said. "I think it"s very big. And I think what they"re doing makes perfect sense."

"What are they doing?"

"Later," I said. "Let"s go take a look at the Persuaders. And let"s see what they"re getting in exchange."

Villanueva parked two buildings north and east, outside a door marked Brian"s Fine Imported Taxidermy. He locked the Taurus and we walked south and west and then looped around to come up on Beck"s place from the blind side where there were no windows. The personnel door into the warehouse office was locked. I looked in through the back office window and saw n.o.body. Rounded the corner and looked in at the secretarial area. n.o.body there. We arrived at the unpainted gray door and stopped. It was locked.

"How do we get in?" Villanueva asked.

"With these," I said.

I pulled out Angel Doll"s keys and unlocked the door. Opened it. The burglar alarm started beeping. I stepped in and flipped through the papers on the notice board and found the code and entered it. The red light changed to green and the beeping stopped and the building went silent.

"They"re not here," Duffy said. "We don"t have time to explore. We need to go find Teresa."

I could already smell gun oil. It was floating right there on top of the smell of the raw wool from the rugs.

"Five minutes," I said. "And then ATF will give you a medal."

"They should give you a medal," Kohl said.

She was calling me from a pay phone on the Georgetown University campus.

"Should they?"

"We"ve got him. We can stick a fork in him. The guy is totally done."

"So who was it?"

"The Iraqis," she said. "Can you believe that?"

"Makes sense, I guess," I said. "They just got their a.s.ses kicked and they want to be ready for the next time."

"Talk about audacious."

"How did it go down?"

"The same as we saw before. But with Samsonites, not Halliburtons. We got empty cases from a Lebanese guy and an Iranian. Then we hit the motherlode with the Iraqi guy. The actual blueprint."

"You sure?"

"Totally certain," she said. "I called Gorowski and he authenticated it by the drafting number in the bottom corner."

"Who witnessed the transfer?"

"Both of us. Me and Frasconi. Plus some students and faculty. They did it in a university coffee shop."

"What faculty?"

"We got a law professor."

"What did he see?"

"The whole thing. But he can"t swear to the actual transfer. They were real slick, like a sh.e.l.l game. The briefcases were identical. Is it enough?"

Questions I wish I had answered differently. It was possible Quinn could claim the Iraqi already had the blueprint, from sources unknown. Possible he could suggest the guy just liked to carry it around with him. Possible he could deny there was any exchange at all.

But then I thought about the Syrian, and the Lebanese guy, and the Iranian. And all the money in Quinn"s bank. The rip-off victims would be smarting. They might be willing to testify in closed session. The State Department might be able to offer them some kind of a quid pro quo. And Quinn"s fingerprints would be on the briefcase in the Iraqi"s possession. He wouldn"t have worn gloves to the rendezvous. Too suspicious. Altogether I thought we had enough. We had a clear pattern, we had inexplicable dollars in Quinn"s bank account, we had a top-secret U.S. Army blueprint in an Iraqi agent"s possession, and we had two MPs and a law professor to say how it got there, and we had fingerprints on a briefcase handle.

"It"s plenty," I said. "Go make the arrest."

"Where do I go?" Duffy said.

"I"ll show you," I said.

I moved past her through the open area. Into the back office. Through the door into the warehouse cubicle. Angel Doll"s computer was still there on the desk. His chair was still leaking its stuffing all over the place. I found the right switch and lit up the warehouse floor. I could see everything through the gla.s.s part.i.tion. The racks of carpets were still there. The forklift was still there. But in the middle of the floor were five head-high stacks of crates. They were piled into two groups. Farthest from the roller door were three piles of battered wooden boxes all stenciled with markings in unfamiliar foreign alphabets, mostly Cyrillic, overlaid with right-to-left scrawls in some kind of Arabic language. I guessed those were Bizarre Bazaar"s imports. Nearer the door were two piles of new crates printed in English: Mossberg Connecticut. Those would be the Xavier Export Company"s outgoing shipment. Import-export, barter at its purest. Fair exchange is no robbery, as Leon Garber might have said.

"It"s not huge, is it?" Duffy said. "I mean, five stacks of boxes? A hundred and forty thousand dollars? I thought it was supposed to be a big deal."

"I think it is big," I said. "In importance, maybe, rather than quant.i.ty."

"Let"s take a look," Villanueva said.

We moved out onto the warehouse floor. He and I lifted the top Mossberg crate down. It was heavy. My left arm was still a little weak. And the center of my chest still hurt. It made my smashed mouth feel like nothing at all.

Villanueva found a claw hammer on a table. Used it to pull the nails out of the crate"s lid.

Then he lifted the lid off and laid it on the floor. The crate was full of foam peanuts. I plunged my hands in and came out with a long gun wrapped in waxed paper. I tore the paper off. It was an M500 Persuader. It was the Cruiser model. No shoulder stock. Just a pistol grip. 12-gauge, eighteen-and-a-half inch barrel, three-inch chamber, six shot capacity, blued metal, black synthetic front grip, no sights. It was a nasty, brutal, close-up street weapon. I pumped the action, crunch crunch. It moved like silk on skin. I pulled the trigger. It clicked like a Nikon.

"See any ammunition?" I said.

"Here," Villanueva called. He had a box of Brenneke Magnum slugs in his hand. Behind him was an open carton full of dozens of identical packages. I broke open two boxes and loaded six sh.e.l.ls and jacked one into the chamber and loaded a seventh. Then I clicked the safety, because the Brennekes were not birdshot. They were one-ounce solid copper slugs that would leave the Persuader at nearly eleven hundred miles an hour. They would punch a hole in a cinder block wall big enough to crawl through. I put the weapon on the table and unwrapped another one. Loaded it and clicked the safety and laid it next to the first one. Caught Duffy looking right at me.

"It"s what they"re for," I said. "An empty gun is no good to anybody."

I put the empty Brenneke boxes back in the carton and closed the lid. Villanueva was looking at Bizarre Bazaar"s crates. He had paperwork in his hands.

"These look like carpets to you?" he said.

"Not a whole lot," I said.

"U.S. Customs thinks they do. Guy called Taylor signed off on them as handwoven rugs from Libya."

"That"ll help," I said. "You can give this Taylor guy to ATF. They can check his bank accounts. Might make you more popular."

"So what"s really in them?" Duffy said. "What do they make in Libya?"

"Nothing," I said. "They grow dates."

"This all is Russian stuff," Villanueva said. "It"s been through Odessa twice. Imported to Libya, turned right around, and exported here. In exchange for two hundred Persuaders.

Just because somebody wants to look tough on the streets of Tripoli."

"And they make a lot of stuff in Russia," Duffy said.

I nodded. "Let"s see what, exactly."

There were nine crates in three stacks. I lifted the top crate off the nearest stack and Villanueva got busy with his claw hammer. He pulled the lid off and I saw a bunch of AK-74s nested in wood shavings. Standard Kalashnikov a.s.sault rifles, well used. Boring as h.e.l.l, street value maybe two hundred bucks each, depending on where you were selling them. They weren"t fashion items. I couldn"t see any guys in North Face jackets trading in their beautiful matte-black H&Ks for them.

The second crate was smaller. It was full of wood shavings and AKSU-74 submachine guns. They"re AK-74 derivatives. Efficient, but clunky. They were used too, but well maintained. Not exciting. No better than a half-dozen Western equivalents. NATO hadn"t lain awake at night worrying about them.

The third crate was full of nine-millimeter Makarov pistols. Most of them were scratched and old. It"s a crude and lazy design, ripped off from the ancient Walther PP. The Soviet military was never much of a handgun culture. They thought using sidearms was right down there with throwing stones.

"This is all c.r.a.p," I said. "Best thing to do with this stuff would be melt it down and use it for boat anchors."

We started on the second stack, and found something much more interesting in the very first crate. It was full of VAL Silent Sniper rifles. They were secret until 1994, when the Pentagon captured one. They"re all black, all metal, with a skeleton stock. They fire special heavy nine-millimeter subsonic rounds. Tests showed they penetrated any body armor you chose to wear at a range of five hundred yards. I remember a fair amount of consternation at the time. There were twelve of them. The next crate held another twelve.

They were quality weapons. And they looked good. They would go really well with the North Face jackets. Especially the black ones with the silver linings.

"Are they expensive?" Villanueva asked.

I shrugged. "Hard to say. Depends on what a person is willing to pay, I guess. But an equivalent Vaime or SIG bought new in the U.S. could cost over five grand."

"Then that"s the whole invoice value right there."

I nodded. "They"re serious weapons. But not a lot of use in south-central LA. So their street value might be much less."

"We should go," Duffy said.

I stepped back to line up the view through the gla.s.s and out the back office window. It was mid-afternoon. Gloomy, but still light.

"Soon," I said.

Villanueva opened the last crate in the second stack.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" he said.

I stepped over. Saw a nest of wood shavings. And a slim black tube with a short wooden section to act as a shoulder rest. A bulbous missile loaded ready in the muzzle. I had to look twice before I was sure.

"It"s an RPG-7," I said. "It"s an anti-tank rocket launcher. An infantry weapon, shoulderfired."

"RPG means rocket propelled grenade," he said.