A Touch of Deceit (Nick Bracco Series #1) (5 page)

When Nick and Matt saw who sat in the worn-out chairs, they both stopped. Ed Tolliver, Carl Rutherford, Mel Downing and Dave Tanner sat at the far end of the bullpen in deep conversation. They were known simply as “The Team.” The four of them with Nick and Matt made up an elite counterterrorism squad of agents who specialized in significant foreign threats to the United States. The three two-man teams circled the globe in pursuit of foiling terrorist activity with American targets. The best of the best.

J. Edgar himself began the specialist trend in 1934 when he authorized a special squad of agents to capture John Dillinger. It was this philosophy that produced the group of specialists now gathered in the bullpen of the Baltimore field office. It also meant that each team was rarely on the same continent, never mind the same building. You didn’t have to be a seasoned veteran to know that something was amiss.

As Nick and Matt approached, Dave Tanner stood and extended his arm. He tapped fists with Nick, then Matt. A tacit congratulation for capturing someone on the top-ten list. Then he got a close look at Matt’s left ear.

“What happened, Deadeye?” Tanner smiled. “You finally hook a woman with too much spunk for you?”

Matt gingerly touched his taped earlobe. “Gee, Dave, that’s uncanny. I’m beginning to think you’re some kind of investigator or something.”

Tanner didn’t seem to hear him. He reexamined Matt’s ear. “Rashid didn’t go down without a fight, did he?”

“Would you expect him to?” Matt said, not answering the question directly, but close enough for two spies who understood the language.

“Probably not,” Tanner said. “Let’s just hope it sticks.”

Nick picked up on Tanner’s tone. Next to Nick, Tanner was the Team’s senior agent and he always had his ear to the ground whenever a big prisoner was being interrogated.

“What do we know, Dave?” Nick asked.

“Nothing yet.”

Nick looked at the elite group. Before he could ask the question, Matt beat him to the punch.

“What are we all doing here, Dave? I mean the last time we were all in the same room together . . .” he raised his eyebrows.

Tanner seemed to recognize the reference to a false intelligence report of a dirty bomb in Manhattan three years back. “I don’t know,” he said. “But Walt doesn’t call us all in without good cause.”

“The safe money is on Rashid,” Matt said. “What else could it be? I’m sure he hasn’t flipped, but I’ll bet we got something. Something that nets us Kharrazi, maybe?”

Tanner nodded vacantly, but if he knew something he wasn’t giving it away.

There was an edginess to the banter now in the bullpen as the Bureau’s finest minds spun their wheels in anticipation. A red ball meeting was urgent, so the hurry up and wait routine added to the anxiety.

Nick nodded toward the closed door at the end of the hallway. “Who’s he with?”

“No one,” Tanner said. “He’s on the phone. We’re waiting for him to call us in.”

From his chair, Ed Tolliver called out, “Hey, Matt, I hear that was the first time you were caught without your Glock since you were in the crib.”

This provoked a round of laughter that caused a few secretaries to look up and smile.

Matt gave a tight-lipped scowl and saluted Tolliver with his middle finger.

Another boisterous roar lit up the room.

“Knock it off,” a voice boomed from the end of the hallway. A broad-shouldered man with dark chocolate skin leaned out of his office with the door half-open.

“Bracco,” Walt Jackson said. “Get in here.”

Nick felt his stomach tighten as Jackson shut the door behind him. The big man disappeared and left an overt silence in his wake. Nick looked back at the team and saw something approaching compassion in their eyes. Matt seemed confused. He’d never been apart from his partner in a meeting before. Nick looked at Tanner and got an open-palmed shrug.

Finally, after a long moment, Matt said, “Better get in there and find out what’s going on.”

Nick moved toward Jackson’s office like he was walking to the gas chamber. It had to be Rashid, he thought. Maybe some attorney found a loophole in their arrest. Shit, they were being shot at like fish in a barrel. How do you squirm out of that? Never mind the other eighteen charges that were awaiting his apprehension.

Nick opened Jackson’s door and saw the immaculate desk he’d come to expect. What he didn’t expect was a chair in front of his desk. A lone chair that he’d never seen before. Not even for meetings about nuclear threats or assassination attempts. Jackson always preferred people use the sofa against the wall.

Jackson gestured toward the chair. “Sit.”

Walter Jackson was the Special Agent in Charge of the Baltimore field office. As SAC’s go, Jackson was regarded as a prince. He was a laconic man who asked only for competence and loyalty. In return he provided unending support and sanctuary from the brass at FBI headquarters just down the road in D.C. Baltimore was far enough away to stand on its own, yet close enough to draw comparisons. It was the main reason the Team was harbored there. Besides being Baltimore’s SAC, Jackson was also the Team leader and Nick was his point man.

Jackson sat behind his desk and leaned back to open a miniature refrigerator behind him. He pulled out a bottled water and tossed it to Nick.

Nick studied Jackson’s solemn expression as he took his seat and twisted open the water. “What’s going on, Walt?”

Jackson clicked his laser mouse and examined the flat screen computer monitor to his left. He tapped a couple of keys on his keypad and swiveled the screen around so Nick could see its content. At first the image was fuzzy, but Nick was familiar with the program. As the solid completion bar at the bottom of the screen moved to the right, the clarity sharpened. By the time it reached seventy per cent Nick could tell that the image came from a surveillance camera. Two men sat side-by-side at a green-felt table. At eighty per cent he knew it was a black jack table. When it was complete, Nick felt the room get warm. The man on the left side of the screen was his brother. The man on the right he couldn’t identify.

“Phil,” Nick muttered.

Jackson nodded. “Yes.”

Nick pointed to the man next to him. “Who . . .”

“Don’t recognize him yet?”

Nick shook his head.

“Keep watching.”

Nick studied the man’s face. He wore a beard, sunglasses and a wide brim hat you might see on a tourist, yet there was something familiar about his mannerisms. The way he carried himself, full of confidence and bravado.

Jackson punched a couple of keys on his keyboard and the figures came to life.

“This is seven hours ago,” Jackson said. “About two-thirty in the morning, Vegas time. It’s a surveillance recording from the Rio. I understand Phil frequents the place quite a bit.”

Nick’s eyes narrowed as he struggled to make the man next to his brother. There was no audio, but it was obvious the two men were having fun. Phil’s normally bloodshot eyes were in full bloom. The man elbowed his brother as if they were old buddies while Phil tossed back the last of his rum and coke with a flip of his wrist. The drink was so fresh it still had a full complement of ice cubes. It was his brother all right, Nick thought. He’d never seen Phil allow a drink to linger.

Now, Phil raised his hand to a cocktail waitress. The tourist pulled Phil’s arm down and raised his own hand, waving a wad of folded bills. Phil made a half-hearted attempt to decline the offer, but the tourist seemed determined to buy Phil a drink. By the way Phil swayed, it wasn’t the first drink he’d accepted.

Nick breathed a sigh of relief. Phil must have gotten swindled by a pro and Walt was offering to keep it confidential. Let the FBI handle it in house. It was something Walt would do. It made sense now why Nick was called in alone.

Except he was wrong. Dead wrong.

“There,” Jackson said, stopping the playback. In the frozen image the tourist had lowered his sunglasses and seemed to be looking directly at the camera. His expression transformed into a sinister glare. His eyes were like black holes and his smile was pure acid.

Nick’s tongue instantly dried up.

“Recognize him now?” Jackson said.

Water spewed from Nick’s plastic bottle as he clenched his fists. Sitting next to his brother was the face of death. Kemel Kharrazi. Nick stared so intently at the image that he tried to will himself into the scene, or better yet, suck Kharrazi out of the image and pummel him from head to toe.

“Nick, what exactly did Rashid say to you during the arrest?”

Nick noticed that Phil was wearing his lucky shirt. The Preakness Stakes shirt that he wore the day he hit the pick-six for fifty thousand. Nick never had the heart to remind him that he wore the same damn shirt every day for the next three months until he relinquished every last penny back to Pimlico.

Nick looked at up at Jackson and said, “He’s got four kids.”

Jackson nodded. “I know.”

The silence was filled with a heavy sigh from Jackson and the crumpling and uncrumpling of Nick’s water bottle.

“Rashid asked me if I knew who would come after me,” Nick finally answered.

“I see.”

Nick stared at the image. It was the most incongruous pairing he’d ever seen. Like Hitler next to a ballerina.

Nick tried to remove emotion from the equation and mine the analytical side of his brain. He sensed Jackson watching him and he was careful not to overreact. He didn’t want to give Jackson an excuse to keep him off the case. “Tell me about it, Walt. What does he want?”

“He wants to trade your brother for Rashid.”

Nick kept his voice even. “We’re going to trade an alcoholic gambler for a known assassin? That’s the deal?”

Jackson nodded deliberately, as if he were measuring Nick’s reaction before continuing the discussion.

“All right,” Nick said. “Exactly how many nanoseconds did you wait before you said no?”

Jackson frowned. “He’s still your brother, Nick.”

“He’s dead already and you know it.”

Jackson squeezed the back of his neck like he was juicing a grapefruit. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We just received the fax an hour ago. I’m still trying to assemble a strategy.”

Nick placed the deformed, half-empty water bottle on the corner of Jackson’s desk, leaned forward, and stared hard at his boss. “Now tell me what’s really going on here, Walt.”

Jackson stood and began a slow pace. He carried his large frame smoothly, like a cougar on the prowl. Back and forth he strode. Nick’s eyes followed him like match point at Wimbledon.

Jackson flipped off the overhead lights and pulled a remote control device from his pants pocket. When he clicked a button on the remote, an illuminated image was projected onto the white wall behind his desk. The faces of more than twenty Kurdish terrorists came to life. Some were grainy surveillance shots, while others were clear mug shots. Although their names were unknown to the American public, they were as familiar to Nick as Babe Ruth was to a Yankees fan. They belonged to a militant faction of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party known as the Kurdish Security Force. The name was a direct response to the Turkish Security Force, which had been tormenting the Kurds for more than two decades. They were better known as Kharrazi’s death squad. When President Merrick ordered troops to the area, his intention was to prevent Kharrazi and the KSF from dividing Turkey along ethnic lines.

Jackson passed a laser pointer over the medley of terrorists. “Langley has reported these soldiers missing from Kurdistan. More importantly, three of them have been sighted illegally entering the country. One was detained in a Miami airport. One spotted departing a cruise ship in San Diego. Plus, we already know about Rashid and Kharrazi. I suspect the cockroach theory might be applicable here. For every one we know about there are probably twenty more that have evaded our intelligence.”

Jackson clicked off the projector and turned on the lights. He sat down and kept a careful eye on Nick.

“I’m okay,” Nick said, clenching every muscle that was undetectable. “I need to know everything. Don’t skip a comma.”

Jackson hesitated, then lowered tired eyes. “The CIA had an agent infiltrate the KSF in Kurdistan a couple of months back. Ten days ago he arrived in Toronto with two groups of soldiers, including Kharrazi. He was with the lead group as they were about to enter the United States on horseback. Somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. The agent was with them up until 2 AM Tuesday morning. At that time they were five miles from the border. That’s when Langley lost communications. Kharrazi discovered the plant.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Thursday morning the agent’s family received a package. The agent’s six-year-old daughter anxiously opened the box she thought was a present from her daddy in Turkey.”

Nick held up his hand to prevent Jackson from finishing the story. He already knew the ending.

Jackson nodded. “That’s right. The agent’s severed head stared back at his little girl.”

Nick covered his face with his hands and took deep breaths. He imagined the look on his niece’s face as his brother’s head was delivered to their home.

“I’ve been going to too many funerals, Walt.”