The Bricklayer (24 page)

A small spotlight snapped on, illuminating what housed the green point of light. It was a motion detector, the kind used in home security systems, and its green light had changed to red, indicating it was now armed. He froze. Illuminating it meant that Radek now had him trapped and wanted him to know.

He was standing on a two-foot square of plywood, which had been painted flat black to make it unnoticeable. He suspected that the click heard under it might have done more than turn on the light. Vail turned his attention back to the sensor. Ordering himself not to move his head, he used eye movement only. A snarl of wiring surrounded the monitor. It was hooked into a larger cable, which ran up the wall and then overhead toward him, finally disappearing behind a large black void above his head.

Imperceptibly, Vail moved his head upward slightly to determine exactly what was above him. It was not a void at all, but a huge steel plate hanging ten feet over his head. His mason’s eye estimated it to be approximately sixteen feet
square, and he was at its dead center. Printed in large chalked letters on its underside was a note:

That’s what the hum was, an electromagnetic crane used to move stock around. And it was double primed. Two systems to make sure he couldn’t move. Either the sensor or the pressure-release switch he was standing on would shut it off and drop the steel on him. He couldn’t see how thick the plate was, but the thinnest he was aware of was three-sixteenths of an inch. A sixteen-square-foot piece of that thickness had to be close to two thousand pounds.

An urge to laugh at his own insolence started to rise up in him. He would gladly have given in to it to relieve some of the tension if he hadn’t feared it would set off the motion detector. His contempt for anything meant to control him, even if it was concocted by Radek, was about to take his life. Insolence had always been a trusted, if expensive, ally, but never this costly.

His self-recrimination was interrupted by another burst from the wooden box, now only twenty feet away. It reminded him that more than his life was at stake. He had to find a way out. Trying to gauge the speed needed, he doubted that he could make it beyond the edge of the steel plate before it crushed him. However, it would be close. The eight feet to the edge looked like a hundred.

Then he remembered that he was still holding the Halligan tool in his left hand, a possible solution to the ton of impending death hanging over him. The pry bar was three and a half feet long and the shaft was one-inch-thick steel alloy. Primarily it was manufactured for fire departments, so its strength had to be exceptional.

Running and diving straight forward was the best chance, since turning in any other direction would add an additional split second. Once he took that first step, he would have to flatten out as horizontally as possible and at the same time move the bar behind him, turning it vertical with the claw downward. That way, if he didn’t make it to the edge in time, the Halligan would stick upright in the wooden floor and absorb the initial blow of the steel. He hoped. If he ever needed to take a deep breath it was now, but that pinpoint of red light reminded him that if he did, it would probably be his last.

He closed his eyes and could feel his heartbeat pounding against his eyelids. He forced himself to slow his breathing. Inside his head, he visualized what he had to do: flatten out and at the same time move the bar into position and behind him. He waited until he could no longer hear his heart. One more time he closed his eyes and watched himself perform the intricacies of the long eight-foot dash.

He exploded forward. At the exact same instant, the hum of the electromagnet crane above him stopped. Everything became slow motion, and the last thing Vail remembered was the first gray light of dawn coming in the small, slotted window.

A
S KATE BANNON RODE UP IN THE ELEVATOR, SHE TOOK A SIP OF HER
coffee. It was too hot but she took a mouthful anyway, hoping the sting might bring her to life a little more quickly than just waiting for her system to metabolize the caffeine. Again she had not slept much, if at all. The night balanced at the tipping point between suspected sleep and dreamlike wakefulness.

She was the only person in the elevator and tried to distract herself by listing out loud the things she had to do today. After a few items, her thoughts returned to Vail and how awful their dinner had been last night. The night at the Italian restaurant had been the most fun she had had in years, until the call from Tye Delson. She had been wrong to let it come between them. Even though she had apologized to Vail, he seemed to understand her behavior better than she did and accepted it as the only way things could be between them.

The elevator doors opened and she stepped off. After punching in the security code, she pushed open the door and
headed to her office. Two agents were sitting across from her desk. The older one was overweight and his suit was worn and ill-fitting. The younger one didn’t seem old enough to be an agent. He was thin and wore wire-rimmed glasses. His suit was new but too heavy for the Southern California climate, giving her the impression he was just out of training school. They both stood and introduced themselves as being from the accounting squad. “We’re finally here to take the three million dollars off your hands,” the older one said with a certain amount of boredom.

“Believe it or not, with everything going on, I forgot it was here.” She pulled open her desk drawer and took out the safe combination, handing it to him. While he bent over the dial, she opened another drawer and handed a sheaf of papers to the younger one. “This is a list of the serial numbers from the third drop. We’d like to verify that they are the same.”

He took it from her and adjusted his glasses as his eyes slid quickly down the list.

The older agent pulled the drawer open and said, “Which drawers is it in?”

Kate jumped up. She looked down into the empty drawer and then started opening the other three. They were all empty. How could she have been so stupid to leave the combination in her desk and the office door unlocked? She grabbed the phone on her desk and ordered the two accountants away from the safe so as to not further contaminate any physical evidence that it might hold.

“Don, the three million’s gone.”

VAIL DIDN’T KNOW
how long he had been out, but the first thing he heard was a woman’s sobs. Back over his shoulder he could see the silver Halligan holding up one corner of the two-thousand-pound steel plate. It was bent, and the claw had been driven into the floor three or four inches, but it was holding. His legs were still under the plate but they weren’t pinned. He pulled himself forward until he was clear. Standing up, he felt pain in his right shoulder blade. The plate must have caught him there just as he was diving to its edge, slamming his head into the floor and knocking him out. He touched his aching cheekbone. It was scraped raw.

He looked around for something to pry open the box. The voice became louder now that she could hear him moving around. He found a claw hammer on the floor behind it. “Hold on, Tye.” There were a dozen nails on both sides, and he sank the claw between the top and side, working the hammer along the seam until he could get his fingers in between. The crying became louder with relief. With one great pull he tore the lid up.

The woman inside sat up immediately. It was not Tye Delson.

DON KAULCRICK
stared down at the empty drawers. “When’s the last time you saw the money in here?”

Kate said, “The day Vail put it in there. The day the safe was delivered. Actually, I never saw it in there. I was late for a meeting and had him secure it.”

“Who else knew the combination?”

“Tom Demick changed it before bringing it down, so just
him, Vail, and me. But,” she continued, her voice anxious, “foolishly I left the combination in my desk drawer.”

Kaulcrick turned to the SAC. “I want a list of everybody who hasn’t been to work in the last couple of days.”

“I assume you’ll want to talk to Demick, too,” Hildebrand said.

“Yes.” He looked at Kate. “Where’s Vail?”

“I haven’t seen him today.”

“Get him in here now.”

VAIL WAS ABLE TO CUT AWAY
the flex-cuffs that bound the woman’s hands and feet without much trouble, but the duct tape wound around her mouth and head took more time because of her hair. When she was finally free, she told him that she had been coming out of work late and was in the building parking garage when she was abducted at gunpoint. She was brought to this factory, bound, and gagged and placed in the box. Vail showed her a picture of Radek and she said he was the individual who had kidnapped her. “Who are you?”

“I’m with the FBI.”

“Why are you alone?”

“You’re safe now, that’s all that’s important.”

“How’d you find me?”

“I paid three million dollars.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You were supposed to be someone else.”

She noticed his cheek for the first time. “Are you all right?”

“Other than being short one assistant United States attorney and some hundred-dollar bills, I’m fine.” Vail’s cell rang. It was Kate. “Hello.”

“Steve, where are you?” she asked in a tone edged with panic.

“Sounds like something is wrong.”

“Somebody took the three million dollars from my safe.”

Radek still had Tye. He had told Vail that no one could know about it, and he wasn’t sure that just because the money had been delivered, he could tell anyone. Maybe Radek wanted to hold on to her until he got away completely. “I’m sorry, Kate,” Vail said, and hung up, turning off his phone.

“Something wrong?” the woman asked.

“Let’s get out of here.” He led the woman up the stairs. On the second floor, he walked over to a window that was marked as a fire route and opened it. He helped her out onto the fire escape and followed her.

Once they were in his car, Vail said, “I’m going to take you to the nearest police station. I want you to tell them what happened.” He wrote down the address of the factory and Radek’s full name and handed her the paper. “Tell them there’s a large bomb at the front door that’s been disarmed, but they should still go in through the second-floor window we came out of just in case.”

“Aren’t you going with me?”

“I’m going to be straight with you. There’s another woman’s life at stake, and it’s better that no one know about her or me until I can find her. So if you don’t give them a good
description of me or tell them I’m an FBI agent, it would buy me some time.”

“Are you really with the FBI?”

“Yes.” He showed her his credentials. “But not for much longer.”

“THAT’S IT,
he’s sorry,
” Kaulcrick said. “I guess we don’t have to look any further.”

They were in Kate’s office. “There’s got to be a reason,” she offered.

“Yes, there is. He wanted three million dollars.”

“You know he’d never do that.”

“Then why didn’t he give you an explanation?”

Mark Hildebrand recognized the charged tone and knocked on the door frame as a formality before entering. “Don, the United States attorney just called me. He’s been trying to get ahold of Tye Delson since that article came out, and they can’t locate her.”

Kaulcrick looked at Kate angrily. “Maybe we just found his motive. Quite a coincidence, the two of them and the three million all disappearing at the same time. Mark, get the entire office on this. We need to find both of them. Two separate investigations. Call the USA back and get a warrant for Vail. Theft of government property. See if he can’t find a way to get one for Delson too. Go!”

A
FTER WALKING THE WOMAN INTO THE STATION AND POINTING OUT
the desk sergeant, Vail turned to leave. She started to thank him, but he held a finger up to his lips, and she understood the only thanks he needed was her promise to keep him as anonymous as possible.

There was only one thing that mattered for Vail now—finding Tye Delson. Back in the car, he started driving. There was one unexplored possibility. And it was a long shot. When Vail had asked Radek who had been killed in the elevator, he had said “Benny,” from prison. And they had all been at Benny’s apartment before he sent his crew to kill Vail and Kate. Maybe that’s where he was holed up. It wasn’t likely Radek would give away any information that would help, but then he expected Vail to be dead by now.

When Kate and he had identified Radek through prison records, there was a report being assembled on his associates
from the Bureau of Prisons. It was supposed to be e-mailed to him and Kate. But he never checked, because they had identified Radek and immediately began focusing on finding him.

The problem was that Vail’s laptop was still in his room at the hotel, and by now it was likely that the entire Los Angeles division of the FBI was hunting him. That meant, in all probability, there were agents waiting for him in his room. But he had no choice. Making a U-turn, he headed for the hotel.

When he arrived there, he drove around the block at a normal speed looking for Bureau undercover cars. He couldn’t see anything that indicated any type of outside surveillance, probably because they were afraid he would spot it. Ahead, across the street from the hotel, was a ten-theater cineplex. Perfect, he thought.

After parking in the lot, he went up to the ticket seller. When he told her it didn’t matter which movie, she gave him a strange look. “Don’t tell me you’ve never had people come in to hide out for a few hours.” She replied that if they did, they never discussed it with her. Vail was now sure she’d remember him and the open abrasion under his eye, which made his performance a little more sinister. The model for what would happen within the hour had been played out at the Biograph Theater in Chicago sixty-five years earlier when the G-men had to surround the neighborhood movie house to wait out John Dillinger rather than risking a shoot-out and endangering innocent civilians.

Vail had read the undisclosed but accurate accounts of the termination of the bank robber’s life one night after he had spent three days locked down in the bowels of the Uni
versity of Chicago’s archives while finishing his master’s thesis, a period he found as dreary as one of the Russian gulags he had repeatedly read about. The special agent in charge of the FBI office, after missing Dillinger during a shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin which left three civilians and an agent dead, didn’t want any further embarrassment. So that night at the theater he went to the ticket office to see what time the movie ended. While they waited, he nervously made several more trips back to the box office with the same question to reverify the time. The ticket seller became so worried about a robbery that she called the Chicago police, who had been intentionally omitted from the case because it was feared that they couldn’t be trusted.

Vail knew that as soon as the FBI traced his cell phone call, someone would go up to the cashier and show her his picture. She would remember him and tell them about his “hiding out” comment. Hopefully, like with Dillinger, that would draw in all available agents, including those at the hotel.

Inside the theater, he found a hallway away from the mainstream and turned on his cell phone. He checked the GPS function and it displayed all zeros. The office had been “pinging” his phone trying to determine its location, which is why he had it turned off immediately after talking to Kate. It was how they had found Radek’s two-million-dollar cache. He dialed the hotel number and asked for the manager.

“This is Tom Mallon. I’m the manager, how can I help you?”

“Tom, this is Mark Hildebrand. I’m the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI. How are you?”

“Fine, Agent Hildebrand.”

“Some of my agents are over at your hotel on a surveillance, and we’re not sure which rooms they’re in. I need to talk to them on a landline. Could you tell me where they’re located? We want to make sure they’re in place before we go ahead with another part of the operation. I appreciate your continuing discretion in this matter.”

“One moment, sir.” The manager came back on the line. “Agent Hildebrand, that’s room 431. I’m told there were three of them. Would you like me to connect you?”

“Thank you, no. I’ll have someone call them on one of our security phones.” Vail hoped the manager would be distracted enough by the wonder of what kind of technology could do that, that he wouldn’t have any afterthoughts about whom he had actually talked to. Vail walked down the corridor until he found a large trash can outside one of the theaters, and dialed the weather. As soon as he was connected, he dropped the phone in the receptacle and walked out to the parking lot.

Vail judged he had at least a few minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, before they pinged his phone and reacted. He parked his car in a private garage across the street behind the hotel. In the trunk, he opened his briefcase, took out his handcuffs, and ripped off a couple of Post-its from their small yellow pad and put both items in his pocket. He used the rear entrance of the hotel and walked through to the lobby. He found a chair that was out of the foot-traffic area so he wouldn’t be noticed by anyone rushing out of the building. He settled down and waited.

Vail’s room was 432. Three men in the room across the
hall was fairly standard. They would take turns watching his door through their peephole, a task that Vail knew from experience could be done effectively for only fifteen to twenty minutes before eyestrain and stress set in. The others would watch TV in between. If Vail did enter his own room, two of the agents would step into the hallway to intercept him while the third called for backup.

He also knew that because of proximity, these agents would be called first to respond to the theater until reinforcements could arrive.

Vail figured he needed no more than thirty seconds in his room, enough time to retrieve his handgun, hidden on top of the TV cabinet, and the laptop.

Not twenty minutes later, the elevator doors opened and two agents came hurrying through the lobby, not taking the time to maintain their anonymity. Vail got up and went to the house phone and dialed the operator, asking for room 431. “Hello,” the voice answered inquisitively; Vail could hear the television on in the background.

“Yes, sir. This is room service. The manager has instructed me to call you and offer you a complimentary lunch. We have a very nice chicken parmigiana today on a bed of angel-hair pasta.”

Of the thousands of rules in the FBI, there was only one that had yet to be violated: Never turn down a free meal. “Sure, that would be great.”

Vail wanted to make sure he had the head count right. “How many orders?”

“The other two guys had to run out for a while. Can they get something when they come back?”

“The chicken is very good, but not when it’s cold. I’ll put two orders aside. Call when they’re back. Anything to drink?”

“A Coke?”

“Yes, sir. It’ll be about a half hour.”

Vail hung up and headed to the stairwell. He stopped at the second floor looking for a maid’s cart. On the third floor, he spotted one. She was busy in the room’s bathroom. He took two hand towels, two bath towels, and a steel-handled dust mop and disappeared back into the stairwell.

Before entering the fourth floor he tied each of the bath towels around the ends of the steel shaft. Out of his pocket he took out the Post-its and peeled off the top one. Quietly he moved to room 431. First he stuck the yellow tab across the peephole so the agent would have to come out to discover him there. Chances were that with Vail being “located” at the multiplex, the remaining agent’s vigilance would be intermittent, leaving him watching television more than the peephole.

Vail then slipped one of the hand towels around the door handle. He took out his handcuffs and hooked them around the handle and squeezed the strands tightly against the cloth. Raising the mop handle horizontally, he adjusted the positions of the bath towels so each rested against one side of the doorjamb. He wrapped the last hand towel thickly around the middle of the steel bar and tightened the other cuff to it. Now the door could not be pulled open.

Immediately he turned and used his key card to open the door to his room. The Do Not Disturb sign was still hanging from the knob. He reached up to the recessed top of the
TV cabinet—his automatic was gone. They had already searched the room. The laptop, however, was still in place. If he came back, they probably wanted him to have the initial impression that no one had been there. He unplugged the computer and, as he wrapped the cord around it, opened his door. As he started to close it quietly, he saw his handcuffs on the door across the hall strain against the mop’s shaft. The agent inside was trying to get out.

Vail ran to the stairwell and down to the first floor, exiting through the back of the hotel. Just as he walked into the garage’s first floor, he saw a Bureau car come slicing around the corner behind him. Then another. Fortunately, they hadn’t seen him. He was going to have to hole up for a while.

He had parked on the third level in an end spot. Hopefully, once the search at the theater was abandoned, they wouldn’t think to look for him so close by. He turned on the Bureau laptop that was equipped with an internal wireless Internet card, but because of the garage’s construction, he couldn’t get a signal. It would have to wait.

Suddenly he realized he had not slept in thirty-six hours, the night after his first dinner with Kate, and then not very well. He crawled into the backseat and was asleep in minutes.