False Witness (47 page)

Isaiah called Jamie's number, but she didn't answer. He left an elated message, all the while watching his tax dollars at work. He had never been much of an FBI fan before, but even a cynic like him had to be a little impressed at this operation.

Within minutes, the place was crawling with law enforcement officers. They quickly secured the strip mall, as well as the historic estate located across the street from the mob headquarters. Though Isaiah couldn't see it, he assumed they had done the same with the residential neighborhood that abutted the back of the brick house and the row of houses on the other side.

In the midst of the law enforcement officers scurrying around, another black sedan pulled into the parking lot, and Stacie Hoffman got out of the backseat. Isaiah jogged toward her and called her name. She looked haggard, but her face lit up as Isaiah approached. She gave him a quick hug.

“Thank you so much, Isaiah. I'll never forget this.” She turned to the man next to her, who appeared to be in a fair amount of pain. “This is my husband, David,” Stacie said.

Even before David could express his thanks, one of the agents handed the Hoffmans bulletproof vests. “Put these on quickly,” he said, ignoring Isaiah. “We're taking you to that white van over there.” He pointed to a vehicle parked about seventy-five feet from the house. “It'll be just outside the perimeter. With binoculars, you should be able to ID anybody who comes out.

“Keep your heads down. Let's go.”

Before they hustled away, David turned to Isaiah and lowered his voice. “I knew we could trust you, Isaiah. We owe you our lives.”

“No problem,” Isaiah said. But he couldn't help feeling like a hero.

Isaiah stood in the parking lot, mesmerized by the beehive of activity swirling around him. Local police stopped and rerouted traffic; officers pushed pedestrians a few blocks away. SWAT teams and officers in bulletproof vests swooped in and blockaded the driveway of the brick house with federal sedans and what looked like armored trucks. Agent in Charge Parcelli stood behind one of the vehicles with a portable mike and speaker. He ordered the triad members to toss out their weapons and come out with their hands on their heads.

There must have been fifty rifles trained on the building. It seemed to Isaiah like the entire National Guard had suddenly converged on Roswell, Georgia.

Isaiah didn't exactly have a front-row seat, but he was inside the taped-off area, squatting behind a federal sedan, about a hundred yards from the building. He could see the front door through a stand of pine trees. He was so engrossed watching the house that he didn't realize Wellington had arrived. He felt a tap on his arm.

“How'd you get here?” Isaiah asked.

“The state police brought me here,” Wellington said. “I guess the feds called and said I might be needed for questioning.”

“You did good, my man,” Isaiah said. He could tell from the look on Casper's face that the kid had never felt so cool in his entire life. But that didn't mean he felt safe.

“Shouldn't we move back a little farther?” Wellington suggested.

80

The first few actual arrests went like clockwork, as far as Isaiah could tell. Watching it all go down, the culmination of a case on which he had risked his own life, made Isaiah's body hum with intensity. A few minutes after Parcelli started making demands on his mike, six members of the Manchurian Triad marched out of the brick building, one at a time, hands on their heads.

These were mob members, Isaiah reminded himself. Men who would snuff out a human life without remorse. But today, they had no options. They calmly left the building, heads held high, eyes focused straight in front of them. Federal agents swarmed the gang members, hustling them away from the building, handcuffing them, throwing them in the back of squad cars.

After the initial round of arrests, Parcelli got back on his microphone. He warned that anybody else inside should leave the building immediately. The entire scene grew disturbingly quiet. Isaiah had his eyes glued on Parcelli, who appeared ready to give the order for the agents to swarm the building. That's when Isaiah heard the sound of breaking glass and saw smoke pouring out of an upstairs window.

He thought at first that someone had fired a smoke bomb or tear gas into the building. But then he heard someone shout, “Fire!” and a nearby police radio crackled with a confirmation that the fire had been started on the inside, blowing out a window. “They're burning evidence,” somebody said.

Parcelli motioned forward, and dozens of agents stormed the building. Smoke still billowed from the upstairs window, but the fire didn't appear to be spreading. Sirens blared in the distance behind Isaiah, the sound of approaching fire trucks. Ever curious, Isaiah edged closer.

A few agents scrambled out of the building with another Chinese man handcuffed between them. A few seconds later, two more agents appeared with a man in custody, hands cuffed behind his back, and Isaiah had to shake his head to make sure he wasn't seeing things.

Walter Snead. Hunched over. Pulled along by two feds. He stumbled, but the agents had a tight grip on his arms and kept him upright, dragging him toward the vehicles until the professor gained his footing again. He was wearing dress pants, a white shirt, a yellow tie—it was Snead dressed for class in everything but his sports coat. The man's gray hair was disheveled, his face contorted in a trademark Snead scowl.

What was
he
doing here?

The men had pulled Snead about twenty feet from the building when Isaiah heard a pop that seemed to come from the second or third floor. Snead lurched forward, his body going limp, the agents keeping him from doing a face-plant on the concrete. A bright red spot appeared in the middle of his shoulder blades, spreading like a starburst on his back.

Isaiah ducked behind a car, watching the building through the glass windshield. Chaos erupted. He heard somebody yell, “Gun, upstairs right!” He heard other gunshots, tried to get his bearings, watching while trying to keep his body shielded, focused on the mob headquarters.

The explosion that rocked his world came from a totally unexpected direction.

81

They were still about two hours from Atlanta when Lester's phone rang again. Jamie kept her eyes closed but listened carefully. Lester kept his remarks vague and cryptic. After a few minutes of listening, he asked, “Where do you want me to bring her?” and Jamie knew she was headed in for more questioning. He signed off, and Drew started in with the questions.

“What's the word?”

“You might want to wake up Ms. Brock,” Lester said.

Drew reached back and touched Jamie's knee. She pretended to wake up, stretch a little, open groggy eyes. “What's up?” she asked.

“Lester just got a call from the FBI team in Atlanta,” Drew said.

Jamie sat up straighter. She checked out Lester's face in the rearview mirror and could tell that something was terribly wrong. She braced herself for the news.

“We located the triad's headquarters,” Lester said, his eyes on the road. “We made some clean initial arrests, six members of the triad's leadership including the granddaddy, a guy named Li Gwah. The AIC gave one additional warning and sent the SWAT team in.”

Lester hesitated for a moment, and Jamie sensed an uncertainty as to how much he wanted to share. She waited him out, and eventually he continued. “There were three other men still in the building. They apprehended one without incident. The second was Walter Snead—”

“Professor Snead?” Jamie couldn't hide her shock. She couldn't begin to wrap her mind around this. What was
he
doing
there
?

“They apprehended Snead, but he claimed that he had been kidnapped by the mob. Thing is, since he wasn't restrained in any way when they found him, the agents treated him like a suspect. They had him about twenty or thirty feet away from the building when one of the gang members shot him from an upstairs window. The agents now think that Snead might have been a victim after all and that this sniper was left behind to burn evidence and eliminate anybody who might be able to provide eyewitness testimony. Snead was DOA at the hospital.”

Jamie felt her systems shutting down. Snead dead. It could have been her.

“It gets worse,” Lester said, but Jamie couldn't imagine how.

“Before the agents could reach this gang member, he apparently detonated an explosive device that killed two other witnesses and a federal agent stationed with them in a van.”

“Who?” Jamie asked. “Who were the witnesses?” She knew the answer, but she had to hear it anyway.

“David and Stacie Hoffman.”

“How? How could that possibly happen?” The incompetence of the feds astonished Jamie. Angered her. How could the mob murder witnesses already in federal custody?

“Some members of the triad captured David Hoffman last night,” Lester explained. “Hoffman obviously knew these men were after him, and somewhere in the process he had managed to ingest a GPS device so his movements could be tracked by his wife. His wife realized he had been captured but didn't report it to the FBI.”

To Jamie, the last statement sounded defensive, the spin doctors at work.

“Anyway, the mob apparently implanted a device in Hoffman's neck that acted as a jammer, obfuscating any GPS signal. When Hoffman was freed, nobody realized that this chip might also be an explosive device, one that could be detonated by remote control. Apparently the last man in the headquarters, before he was apprehended, detonated the explosive device and took out the Hoffmans.”

The car fell quiet as Jamie struggled to take it all in. Witnesses dead. Evidence destroyed. Things weren't supposed to end this way. She felt an overwhelming sadness, a melancholy. She had only been with David Hoffman on a few occasions, but she had been struck by his zeal for life. She had believed passionately in his innocence. The system had failed him in so many ways.

“So four people are dead,” Jamie said. “And none of them are members of the triad.”

“That's correct,” Lester admitted. “Depending on how you categorize Walter Snead. I think the jury might still be out on him.”

“Hardly the FBI's finest moment,” Jamie said. She knew it wasn't Lester's fault, but she just couldn't believe this could happen.

“The collateral casualties are tragic,” Lester said, and Jamie resisted the urge to add,
No kidding.
“But on the other hand, this raid broke the back of the U.S. operations for one of China's most powerful triads. We apprehended their top leadership. Our agents were able to extinguish the house fire quickly and preserve most of the evidence. We'll have everything we need to put these men away for life.”

“A rousing success,” Jamie said.

Wisely, Lester picked up on the sarcastic tone and decided not to answer.

Three hours after the explosion, Wellington still had not made sense of everything he had seen. For nearly an hour, locked in a sterile interview room in the federal building in downtown Atlanta, he answered every question that two somber FBI agents threw at him. They made him feel like a felon, not a hero who had helped them nail the mob.

He was already bone weary when Sam Parcelli walked into the room. Wellington recognized him from the hearing in federal court.

He took a seat directly opposite Wellington and stared vacantly for a few seconds. The man's eyes were sunken and bloodshot, with large dark circles underscoring them. He unnerved Wellington.

“I understand you're not willing to tell us about conversations you might have had with Ms. Hoffman,” Parcelli said flatly.

“I think they might be covered by attorney-client privilege,” Wellington said, his quavering voice trumpeting his uncertainty. “I just wanted to research the issue first.”

“What year are you in law school, son?”

“I'm a 2L.”

“Can 2Ls practice law?”

“No.” Wellington rubbed his hands over his face. He forced himself to meet Parcelli's gaze. “But I was providing assistance to somebody who was practicing law. Therefore, I think the conversations might be covered.”