Crashers (16 page)

“He needs to figure out how us dumb ground crews fucked up?” one of the men shouted back. The others rumbled, too.

“Yup,” Isaiah cut in mildly, and the honesty surprised everyone. Not looking up from his clipboard, he gave it two beats. “Maybe you did screw
up. Maybe you didn't. Maybe the pilot was stoned. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe the plane missed its last maintenance rotation. Maybe it didn't. Maybe a guy named Yousef was sitting at the end of the runway with a Stinger missile in the back of a Jeep Cherokee that he bought, cheap, in Uzbekistan.”

Isaiah clicked open a pen. Signed something. He still hadn't looked up. When he did, he said, “The Stinger, not the Cherokee. And maybe the guy's name was Jim Bob and he fired it to protest gay rights. What I'm saying is: we don't know what the hell happened yet. But we've got to figure it out, and you know I'm right. For good or bad. Okay?”

The crews weren't happy about it, but their crew chief stood up and crossed his arms across his barrel chest. “Listen up! We're gonna help this guy and get back to work. That's the plan. Got a problem with it, tough. Let's get busy.”

And they did.

From their sedan, Ray Calabrese and Lucas Bell called the federal building and got Assistant Director Henry Deits on the line. Deits turned it into a conference call, with all of his top brass.

“The bartender identified O'Meara and three known associates of the Red Fist of Ulster,” Lucas said into the handheld radio. “All four were in a bar down here, near the garment district, last night. One of them, John Padraic Riley, DOB nine four seventy-seven, made a bet at the bar. He said the top story on last night's news would be a major crash with lots of deaths.”

The agents could hear FBI brass mutter a couple of curses.

“Are you declaring this a terrorist incident, Agent Bell?” Deits asked.

Ray and Lucas exchanged glances. Ray took the handheld unit. “Sir, we have a correlation between known terrorists and the downing of an airliner in Oregon. Again, it's a correlation. We don't know for sure that they caused it, but one of them predicted it. We don't want to declare a known terrorist incident yet, but we want to bring these guys in as soon as humanly possible.”

“Agreed,” Deits said. “Liz is here. Liz, how many agents can you get down to the garment district?”

They heard the voice of the deputy assistant director in charge of terrorist activities, Liz Geddes. “I can have thirty-five people in your position in ten minutes, Ray. I'll have LAPD SWAT back them up.”

“Okay, here's the deal.” He told the brass about the bar, the corner grocery store, and the restaurant known as Mario's. He also described the general neighborhood and recommended that teams dress down in civilian clothes (“ditch all the navy blues and wingtips”) to begin canvassing the scene.

Everyone agreed. Ray and Lucas checked the ammunition in their 9-mm Glock automatics, then opened the trunk of their sedan. Ray also checked the small, matte black Kahr K9 clipped to his right ankle.

“Little somethin'-somethin' should the need arise?” Lucas asked.

“Something like that.” They doffed their neckties and suit coats and found a couple of blue microfiber jackets with Velcro-covered shoulder patches that covered the letters FBI. There also were Kevlar vests and riot guns, but they left those where they were. They left the walkie-talkies, too, relying on their cell phones. They checked the batteries to make sure they were charged. “I'll go east,” Lucas said. “You go west.”

Ray nodded and they headed off in opposite directions, to see what could be seen before the cavalry arrived.

 

When they ran out of beer, Donal O'Meara sent the wiry little Derry man, Feargal Kelly, to get some more from the grocery down on the corner.

 

Daria scrounged through her purse for the disposable Bic lighter, found it, and illuminated the basement she'd landed in. It stank of old garbage, human shit, and rats. Red eyes blinked around her when the flame appeared. She couldn't see more than five feet ahead of her and slowly scanned the room. It was musty. Someone had drawn outrageous graffiti all over the walls; not the creative, urban-message stuff, but obscenities and cartoons. A fine layer of soot and grease covered the graffiti, suggesting that it was at least a decade old. She walked into a spiderweb, felt something skitter through her hair. She stumbled backward over an old carton and almost lost the Bic, the flame going out. She thumbed the mechanism, got the pale yellow light back. She found a doorway with no door, blackness beyond. She edged that way and entered, with no idea what lay beyond.

Daria felt more alive than she had felt for three years.

NEITHER RAY CALABRESE NOR Lucas Bell found the first of the Irishmen. Instead, it was two FBI agents in an unmarked prowl car. They passed Feargal Kelly without slowing down or even appearing to look at him. Kelly took a key out of his pocket and ran up the three steps to an abandoned tenement building. Abandoned it might have been, but the key fit and the door opened. He disappeared inside. The two agents rounded a corner and immediately spotted Lucas trotting down the sidewalk. They pulled over.

“Got one of your perps,” said the driver, rolling down his window. “Round the corner on Twenty-eighth. Went into one of those abandoned apartment buildings, the big brick job on the right side.”

Lucas knelt. “Okay, good. Ray Calabrese is four blocks from here. Go get him and bring him back. I'll keep my eyes on this guy. Hey, in Ireland, these assholes regularly monitor emergency bands. You go eyeball Calabrese and tell him what you told me, but face-to-face.”

The driver said, “Got it. Watch your ass,” and pulled away.

Lucas crossed the street and hit the sidewalk, heading down Twenty-eighth. He checked his watch. He scanned the windows carefully, then jogged across the street and dug lock picks out of his wallet.

.   .   .

Daria made it up to the ground floor as quietly as she could and put the Bic back into her purse. This floor had been turned into a shooting gallery, each room littered with stained box springs, syringes, used condoms. It stank to hell. Maybe, she thought, it stank of hell.

In the gloom, Daria doffed her ruined coat, threw it into one of the rooms. She tossed her purse in, too. It contained no weapons, and she wanted her hands free. She was dressed entirely wrong for crawling through windows and skulking through drug dens—the four-inch heels would have to go, not that she hadn't been fully trained in how to move in the stilettos better than most people could in sneakers. Besides, her years in the Israeli army and Shin Bet had taught her to be nothing if not resourceful.

She heard noises above and crept up the first flight of stairs she found, stepping on the risers near the wall, not in the center of the stairs, where they were more likely to squeak. The noises from the supposedly abandoned apartment building were coming from the ground floor. Daria paused at the top of the stairs, noted that heavy foot traffic had scraped away a layer of dust and dirt. She was close enough to recognize the voices now. One of them was Jack's. She didn't know how much farther she could creep without being noticed. She glanced up. Much of the ceiling on the first floor had disintegrated, and she caught glimpses of light from the next floor up. The question was: go up to the second floor and try to listen to the conversations happening below, or try to get closer to them on this floor?

The decision was taken out of her hands. A key rattled in the ground-floor entryway and hinges squealed.

Daria bolted up the next flight a little faster than she should have. A length of handrail had fallen off. She stepped over it carefully, trying not to send it clattering down the stairs. Risers groaned ominously under her weight and a fine salt of dust floated down onto the landing where she'd been crouching.

She made it to the next landing and skidded to a stop—most of the floorboards were thoroughly rotted away and clearly wouldn't hold her weight. She teetered, almost falling through, and took the risk of planting one shoe on each of the only two floorboards that looked sound. Daria straddled a gaping hole leading to the floor below. She was fully exposed, should anyone choose to look up. She flattened herself against the cobwebbed wall as best she could.

Below her, someone clomped up to the second floor. Daria looked down between her feet through the gap in the floorboards. The man she
knew as Jack approached, a silver Colt Python in his hand; he spun around the corner, pointed the massive .357 revolver at the man ascending.

“Jay-sus!” the newcomer squawked.

“What are you playing at, ye fuck!” Jack boomed.

“Put that cannon away, you!”

Jack tucked his gun into a shoulder holster. “You made enough noise to raise the dead.”

“Pff. If isn't Donal himself O'Meara, acting like me mother. Don't piss yourself, you.”

The newcomer trudged the rest of the way up. As he passed below her, Daria saw that his grocery bag was filled with beer.

If either man looked up, they would have been treated to a very unladylike vision straight up Daria's short skirt.

Neither man looked up.

 

Daria was still standing there, thirty seconds later, when the scratch of lock picks reached her ears. The hinges squealed again.

She waited, pressed against the wall. A spider skittered across her shoulder and clavicle. She plucked it away.

Below her, through the holes in the floorboards, she saw a black man skulking up the stairs.

Now what?
she wondered.

Below her, directly beneath her patent-leather heels, Daria saw the stranger kneel. He gripped a matte black Glock in his left hand. With his right, he quietly peeled a Velcro-laden flap off the arm of his dark blue windbreaker.

Daria squinted. Beneath the flap were the letters FBI.

Still straddling the gap in the floor, the floorboard under her left shoe squeaking a little, she craned her neck, peering through the rotted floor. The space below had been a living room, once upon a time. She saw the four Irishmen there now. They'd set up a table and chairs and a couple of couches. They were pirating electricity from somewhere. Probably the next apartment building over. But they were being smart about it; electricity for space heaters and a hot plate and a small fridge, but not for lights.

As she watched, the man she knew as Jack held a finger to his lips. He gestured in the direction of the stairs. Two of Jack's men disappeared from Daria's line of sight, moving off to the left.

Daria mouthed the word
shit
in English and in Hebrew.

Where one FBI man is, can others be far away? She concentrated, listening hard. Where the hell was this man's backup? Where the hell was Ray Calabrese?

Jack and the biggest of his cronies had drawn their weapons in the room beyond. They were moving cautiously toward the second-story landing. Daria couldn't see, but she was sure the other two were circling around for the same destination.

Daria mouthed the word
shit
in Arabic and in Italian.

 

Ray Calabrese parked himself half a block and across the street from the building that the two agents in the prowl car had told him about. Ray's cell phone vibrated. He was sure it would be Lucas, but the alphanumeric code that appeared read
SWAT
, followed by a seven-digit number.

Ray dialed the number and was connected to the special-weapons commander, FBI. He was assured that three unmarked cars had just entered the field of play—a panel truck with the decals of the L.A. Department of Water and Power, a UPS delivery van, and a battered Ford Econoline. Ray could see all three and thought they blended nicely into the down-on-its-luck neighborhood.

His cell phone vibrated again. Again, he assumed it would be Lucas. And again, he was wrong. It was Assistant Director Henry Deits.

Ray told Deits that they had the place under visual surveillance and that the cavalry (mechanized, of course) had arrived.

Satisfied, Deits wished him good luck and rang off.

Ray went back to watching the building, assuming that Lucas had tucked himself into another doorway or alcove along the block.

 

Standing on the last two decent floorboards of the second-story landing, Daria Gibron made a decision.

 

Lucas Bell crouched. Since hitting the first-floor landing, all noises had died away. Lucas wasn't very happy about that.

Concentrate,
he told himself.
Do your job. Find O'Meara and the others and get your ass back down to the street.

.   .   .

Donal O'Meara and Johnser Riley approached from the bivouac they'd carved out of the abandoned apartment. They'd definitely heard something near the stairs. O'Meara had sent the other two around through a hole they'd found punched through a bathroom wall; a classic pincer trap.

They were on the verge of greatness. Now wasn't the time to fuck up.

 

Lucas Bell had just decided to push forward when a flash of flesh caught his eye at the very edge of his peripheral vision. He turned. The woman he recognized from Calabrese's files as Daria Gibron stood behind him with a length of handrail the size of a pool cue. Before he could react, the muscles of her shoulders bunched and she jammed the blunt end of the rail into Lucas's side, right above his kidney.

The pain was instantaneous and paralyzing. Every muscle in his body spasmed. He stiffened, couldn't inhale. He saw the rail spin like a bo staff, saw the other end swing down and around. It caught him under the chin. With a grunt, Lucas went sprawling, his Glock clattering to the floor.

 

Donal O'Meara stood, stunned. A black man slid into view only a few feet off the floor. He slammed into the far wall, all but unconscious, blood flowing from a split lip.

The next instant, another figure appeared over the fallen man. It was a woman in an absurdly short skirt and heels and a black shirt with blousy sleeves. She carried a length of wooden dowel, one end wet with a splatter of blood. O'Meara didn't recognize her at first. Then his eyes narrowed. “It's you!”