Trey returned to the table and saw the two grinning. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” said Jake. “Junior here might make a pretty good undercover agent. He’s got the gift of deceit.”
Trey shook his head. “I’m not ready to handle two practiced liars.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As three o’clock neared, the two Korean operatives staked out the pier seeking to locate the attorney and the cowboy. The warm June sunshine made for a pleasant assignment. With school out, parents and their children and teenagers on bikes, Rollerblades, and skateboards dominated the crowd.
The homeless man trudged up and down the pier, occasionally begging for change, just to appear authentic. The other man, garbed in casual attire, covered all the attractions: the carousel and old-fashioned soda fountain, the arcade and food court, even the Heal the Bay aquarium and science center. Both predators struck out in finding their prey.
Park had given the order and wanted the lawyer disposed of but wanted nothing coming back to him or his daughter. The men seeking Reid were professional killers and valuable members of Park’s entourage. They could easily strike at any time, duplicating a Hollywood-like Mafia contract killing with a suppressed, subsonic .22 round to the head, a mysterious residential explosion and fire, or even the communists’ preferred assassination technique: a sudden stop after a long fall from a great height.
The assassins could have waited outside Reid’s office and attacked him as he walked to his car in the parking garage, but that manner of death might be too easily caught on a surveillance camera. Park wanted to make sure the killing didn’t come back to him or his organization. The men were hoping to find Reid at the pier and follow him to where they could make the homicide appear to be a common street crime or perhaps a carjacking, not the work of a disgruntled client.
H. Daniel Reid didn’t know it, but he was a dead man walking. The two men dispatched to eliminate him were unaware of all the particulars, but they didn’t need to know. Mr. Park had simply ordered the lawyer killed. If someone else got in the way — like the guy in the cowboy boots, with whom Reid met the day before — so be it.
The homeless man and his companion had no idea who the guy with the ostrich boots really was. They didn’t know his strengths or his record. And they didn’t care. They would take out the cowboy, too, if he got in the way. Mr. Park’s mission in the United States was far too important to allow interference from these bourgeois interlopers.
After searching the pier for nearly an hour, the two returned to a concrete table near the beachfront coffee stand.
Speaking in Korean, the homeless man said, “I don’t think we missed them.”
“We didn’t. I don’t think they came.”
“But why? Do you think we were detected yesterday?” asked the homeless man.
“I don’t see how.”
The homeless man reached into the pocket of his ragged, urine-stained trousers, pulled out an iPhone 5, and said, “I will call his office.”
In seconds the smartphone found the number and dialed the law offices of H. Daniel Reid. After speaking with the receptionist in perfect English, he ended the call and said to his colleague in Korean, “Reid is in court all afternoon.”
The older man smiled. The deed would be completed another day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jake was driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 101 Freeway when his cell phone rang. He spied the caller ID and turned down the volume on Charlie Daniels blasting from the speakers.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“You were right,” said Trey Bennett.
“About what?”
“The front office hit the roof when they learned the killing was to take place in Vegas. They accused you of setting up the entire episode for a weeklong boondoggle in Sin City. I was ordered to produce copies of the recordings to verify you did this on purpose. OPR even came up in the conversation. I’m not sure your marriage to management is going to last.”
“We’re like fire and kerosene.”
A sense of perverse pride washed across Jake’s face; he knew he was viewed as a bureaucratic liability by those cloistered in the corner offices of the federal building; so quick to exploit his successes but so unwilling to chance failure. Any good undercover agent ruffled a few feathers in the front office, and Jake more often than not upset the entire henhouse. He loved these little episodes because they guaranteed he would never be assigned to a management position in the FBI. He also knew the recordings would exonerate him of any wrongdoing.
“Tell the turd sniffers at OPR if I wanted a boondoggle, I would have set it up in Maui.”
Trey laughed. “That’s what I told them… and then I spoke with Adriana Corbet at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She says we have both jurisdiction and venue. She doesn’t see a problem and said she and her husband would gladly accompany us on the trip to Vegas to make sure all the legal issues are resolved.”
“I bet she did.” You could hear the smile in Jake’s voice. “A couple of years ago she worked a human trafficking case for us involving L.A., Vegas, and San Francisco. On the trips to Vegas we had to pry her away from the tables with a crowbar. What was even more amazing, she won big every night.”
“As she pointed out, we’ll arrest Reid when he’s in L.A., not Vegas, so it won’t even become an issue.”
“I love it when the feather merchants get their collective panties in a bunch. I’m so glad to stir the pot.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Jake squeezed the Range Rover into a parking spot on Ventura Boulevard and spied Brian Carter waiting in front of Three Amigos, Jake’s favorite Mexican fast-food spot in the Valley.
“Nice ride,” said Brian. “I meant to ask when we met yesterday. Is that your personal car?”
“Hardly. You probably thought everyone in the FBI drove a Malibu or Ford Fusion.”
Brian nodded.
Jake smiled. “This is why you get into the undercover program, the few, the proud, the ugly: better cars, no ties, and an adrenaline rush hard to beat. We’re blessed on the West Coast with some truly stupid criminals with exotic tastes. When they take a fall we build up our war chests. While you were still at Quantico, this Rover belonged to a Mexican meth dealer with strong cartel ties who’s now doing twenty at the supermax in Florence, Colorado.”
The two agents entered the tiny restaurant and Jake grabbed a table in the back before ordering his standard fare, the Steak Burrito Supreme. Carter followed the experienced agent’s recommendation and soon both were chowing down.
Brian spent the next few minutes discussing his eight years on active duty, including three deployments to Afghanistan, where amenities such as running water and electricity were luxuries. IEDs and gunfights were the norm. In his last tour he was part of a village stabilization project assisting the ALP, the Afghan Local Police. That too consisted of almost daily patrols preparing the Afghan people to stand on their own as the United States transitioned to a support role. Though he was doing what he trained to do, he soon realized the toll his frequent deployments were taking on his new wife.
“Unless you’ve been through it, no one understands the impact a combat deployment has on a marriage,” said Brian. “We were lucky. We didn’t have children. I don’t know how those moms did it, repeatedly playing the single-parent role for months, sometimes up to a year or more at a time.”
Before taking another bite, Jake said, “You’re right. I think it’s much harder on the family. We’re out runnin’ and gunnin’ doing what we signed up to do while those who love us wait at home, fearful every time the phone rings, praying a Marine in ‘Dress Blues’ and a chaplain never ring the doorbell.”