5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5 (22 page)

Chapter 42

Blake had not experienced anything approaching a hangover since his freshman year in college. Early Saturday morning he felt as though he’d spent the night at a fraternity party rather than the sheriff’s office. He shook his head, a thing he’d been doing since midnight, at the reaction of the parents to their children’s arrest in the raid at the Pit, or Cauldron, or whatever it was called. He naively believed that they would be grateful for having their kids snatched back from an event and behaviors that they would never have countenanced in their own youth.

He was wrong.

The complaints and threats leveled at the deputies, at Frank Sutherlin, and at him were shocking. What, he wondered, had happened to society when parents taught their children to distrust and disrespect authority? Schoolteachers, police and clergy were all experiencing the same phenomenon. He’d seen it before, but never as vituperative and open as last night.

He dropped an antacid in a glass of water and watched as it danced and fizzed in a glass. Oddly, it had been Barbara Starkey who, although she came into the station complaining and accusing everyone in sight at the top of her lungs, calmed down the earliest. Her daughter, Ashley, whose presence there seemed a mystery, refused to make eye contact and remained mute when he’d spoken to her. Blake had stayed until the last child had been trundled out the door. Beyerson, the English teacher, had been incarcerated for the night. What would become of him, he wondered. Frank had looked grim when he’d asked. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor is all he would say.

Blake moved to his tiny kitchen and began to fix breakfast, even though his stomach was still doing nip-ups and the thought of coffee made him cringe. He settled for a cup of tea and two pieces of toast. Saturday the church office was closed. If any parents were still on their high horse, they’d have to vent to the answering machine.

There was always the possibility that Barbara Starkey might call to apologize but he doubted it. He knew from past experience, she was as likely to ditch the church as call him. Sadly, he’d learned, people were reluctant to admit an error to their priest, particularly when it involved confrontation—a variation on the “blaming the victim” phenomenon. He guessed.

***

Ruth sat in her car and watched Ike’s airplane until it disappeared over the mountains. Her eyes were still sandy from sleep. She’d thrown a raincoat over her hastily donned pajamas, slipped into a pair of sneakers, and driven Ike to Hooper’s farm. She shivered against the early morning chill. Ike had filled her in on what he was up against, but only briefly. She didn’t think he was worried about a security breach. He just wanted to minimize the fright factor. He had failed. If she understood him correctly, he was flying into harm’s way. She felt the fear flutter in her stomach. She had so much to learn about this man who could alternately be charming, maddening, serious, and fey. This much she knew: he was fiercely loyal. Loyal to his friends, his family, and to his country.

That was the part that worried her. She came up through academe where cynicism about God and country were
de rigueur
. Ike was an anomaly, a throwback to another era and time.

“You’d kill?” She’d asked him at the beach. His eyes had turned to ice and he’d said, “I’d do whatever I had to do to keep us both alive.”

He’d do that for Charlie, and for all those people who’d treated him so badly in the past. Not because he had reconciled himself to what happened, but because he put duty and honor before personal resentment. She loved him for that and she hated him for it. Why hadn’t she fallen for a normal man? She smiled. What sort of normal male would dare hook up with her? No, it would have to be someone like Ike Schwartz. Still, she wondered if he wasn’t flying into a maelstrom, and if it might destroy him. She rummaged in her purse and extracted her phone. She was about to do something she’d never done before in her life.

***

Blake Fisher, his toast half-eaten, stared at the telephone. If the parents grew weary of listening to the service times and requests to leave a message from the church’s answering machine, they might soon begin calling him at home. He had just reached for the receiver to take it off the hook and render it inoperative, when it rang. He hesitated. Did he want to listen to another litany of complaints from some kid’s parents? He picked up.

“Dr. Fisher.” Ruth Harris happened to be the only person in town who acknowledged his doctor of ministry degree. “I have a request. Have you a minute?”

“Certainly.” Blake had not spoken with the president of Callend since sometime in the winter, at the Schwartz’s Hanukah/Christmas party. No, that wasn’t true. He’d said hello at the funeral service for Ike’s mother.

“I’m not much for church and praying, sorry about that, but I wonder if you could do some for me.”

He heard the anxiety in her voice. Many people who couldn’t fit themselves into church for one reason or another seemed singularly uncomfortable asking for help from that sector in times of stress.

“What can I do?”

“I need you, and anyone else who’s willing, to pray for the country and for Sheriff Schwartz.”

“Is there something special I should know? Is Ike ill or—”

“He’s fine now. I don’t know about tomorrow. I can’t talk, you understand. Oh, Lord, I feel like such a fool. Just put that in your prayer cycle, if that’s what it’s called. Ike may or may not tell you something about it later. Knowing him he’ll make a joke out of it.”

“I see.” Blake didn’t. Obviously something was afoot and Ike had a part in it. “I’d be happy to pray for Ike and the country. We always include the country in our Prayers for the People, anyway.”

“Right. Thank you. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother at all,” he said to a dial tone.

Chapter 43

Ike wheeled the Cessna onto the taxiway at Fort Belvoir. A vehicle with FOLLOW ME emblazoned in red on its bumper pulled in front of him. He followed it to a tie-down and cut the engine. While a ramp attendant secured his plane, two steely-eyed MPs escorted him to a waiting SUV. They watched him until he cleared the gate and turned north toward McLean and Langley. Flying in restricted air space had been slightly nerve-wracking. An Army helicopter had shadowed him the last several miles and through his approach. At least he thought it had him in view. He’d never know.

His driver was professionally taciturn. He didn’t speak and answered questions with grunts. Ike sat back and read the packet of information that either Charlie or the director had placed in the back seat for him. There wasn’t anything new. He studied satellite photos paper clipped to the bundle. They appeared to be some of the ones he’d looked at the week previous. He shoved the materials back in their envelope and stared at the passing northern Virginia countryside, if that’s what you called the built-up stretch of real estate in and around Route 1. He wondered what it must have looked like centuries before. George Washington would have ridden this way from Mount Vernon to Foggy Bottom, the future capital of the country.

Something in the pictures jogged his memory. Something he’d seen at the outset, but it hadn’t clicked. It still didn’t, but he knew there was something in them that he needed to think about. Something about the ships in the bay waiting for a pilot? The barge? He shook his head impatiently. He hated it when a thought nagged at him but would not surface. He knuckled his forehead and tried to concentrate.

***

It took ten minutes to clear security at Langley and for him to receive his visitor’s pass. The director waited for him in a small conference room. Charlie hovered in the background.

“Sit. You’ve read the summary?”

“Yes, sir, I have. There is nothing new here, I’m afraid. What exactly do you want me to do? And as a corollary to that, what can it be that any of a half-dozen others in the Agency couldn’t do, and do better?”

“You, whether you want to admit it or not, have the chops to make this thing work. If I pull anyone else in they will waste precious hours turning everything over in their mind. You can jump right in.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Director, but it may be misplaced, tragically misplaced, if this goes south. Look, at my best, I used to be good at this game, but I was ten years younger and I never had to deal with anything as threatening as this. None of us did. Dealing with massive terrorist plots is new to everyone, and certainly outside my abilities. Five days doesn’t leave much time, and I’ve been away. I don’t know the troops, the routine, or the limits.”

“You make your own rules. You always did before. What’s changed?”

“I’m older, slower, and happily settled in a life I enjoy. No, make that a life I love. Except for latent patriotism, and that grows weaker every time I pick up a newspaper, I am poorly motivated to do this.”

“I’ll put something in the pot to change that.” Ike waited. What could the director possibly offer him to energize him?

“I am aware, Ike, that during the years you were with us, you managed to accumulate substantial sums as a result of unused program funds. They are in your name and in various offshore accounts, and in Switzerland. We never asked for them back. Indeed, until we found a decent tracking system, we had no idea where they were, or how much they were worth. Now we do.”

“I’ve never spent a dime that wasn’t due me, or wasn’t directly related to the operation and never claimed the money, though, once or twice, I was tempted.”

“I know. In that, you may be unique. My proposal is this. We will delete those accounts from our files if you are successful.”

“You can’t bribe me.”

“Don’t be offended. You may be the only operative we ever had who either did not overspend his funds, or didn’t pay for at least a month in Aruba from them, usually with a spouse or significant other. We always let that slide, as it seemed a small way to compensate them for their efforts. Besides, if you fail, it won’t make any difference what we do.”

“I’ll do it without the bribe, Director.”

“Charlie said you’d say that. But we never squared the accounts, so to speak, when you left us. As far as I am concerned, we owe you.”

Ike swiveled around in his chair and studied the pictures on the wall, a collection of headshots of people he did not know. He spun back and shook his head.

“I hate this, I really do, but I don’t see a way out. I’ll give it a go, but remember when this blows up in your face, I told you so. What happens next?”

“It’s your op. You tell me.”

“Well, first we need to get on the property opposite where the satellite pictures show the ship off-loading the Sunburn. It has to be searched, but whoever lives there cannot know we’re doing it. Second, we need to figure out how many, and where, the other Sunburns are, if, in fact there are others. Third…I don’t know what’s third. I think we need to sit and do some serious thinking. There’s something in those photographs that’s bugging me and I can’t put my finger on it. I need someone to hear me talk it through.”

“Talk to Charlie. He’s a good listener.”

“Hah.”

“He’s all you have right now.” The director stood and left. At the door, he turned and faced the two men.

“I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake. Give me an update every hour, twenty-four-seven, I want to be in the loop all the way. We have to find those missiles.”

The two men sat in silence.

“We could send in a team to the property. Say they were health inspectors or…” Charlie’s voice trailed off. “I’m not too good at this.”

“We can’t do anything remotely suspicious. If they panic, they’ll just push the button early. That’s assuming there is a button on the property to push.”

“What then?”

“We need to look at pictures. Take me to wherever you do photo analysis of the satellite pictures.”

Three minutes later they sat in the dark as a projectionist ran through the series of pictures.

“Ask him to put up the pictures from the cell phone”

“Right. We were able to salvage and enhance three, all pretty much the same. The angles are slightly different. Nick must have been circling the ship. They’ve cleaned them up as much as they can.”

A series of images of an old freighter appeared. The photos were dim and blurry, but there could be no doubt what dangled at the end of the midships crane.

“Can you make out the name on the stern?”

“No, we tried. You have to remember, this was shot with a cell phone at night from a moving aircraft.”

“Hold that one and go back to the satellite pictures of the day before—the Fourth of July shot.” The view of the Chesapeake Bay filled the screen. “Okay, now the next day.” The picture changed marginally. “Look, do you see that?”

“See what?”

“There’s a ship off to the east of the cluster waiting for a Bay pilot. You see? It’s much smaller. On the fourth it is in one location. The next day it is in another. It moved during the night and it must be the one in Nick’s picture. Now we know where it went. Can you zoom in on that?”

The ship inflated before their eyes. The distortion was minimal. Soon they could make out the details of the deck and even a few crew members.

“Can you make out the name and registry of it?”

A voice, presumably from the projection booth replied. “It may take a while. We will have to go back to the original tape and work on it.”

“If you have trouble with this shot, that ship will be in the next day’s surveillance, too. It will be a bit farther east and at a better angle for reading the hull.”

“We’ll give it a go.”

While they waited, Ike turned over the previous week’s activities. There was the barge and there was the…what?

“We have it,” the voice in the dark announced. “It’s the
Saifullah
. Its registry, according to the markings on the stern, is Panama.”

“Put the cell-phone picture back up.”

Charlie looked at Ike. “Are you okay? What is it?”

“That ship is too close to the shore.”

“So?”

“It’s something Bunky Crispins said…about the dredging and trot lines.”

“About the dredging and trot…Sorry, I’m not with you. You asked me to look up that dredging contract, remember?”

“Yes?”

“I did, and it’s interesting.”