He realized he was staring when he suddenly became aware of the warmth of someone’s body standing beside him.
“A guy looks hard-up when he stands in front of a storefront staring at lady’s lingerie.”
Garza’s voice was like an alarm clock blaring at five AM.
“I wasn’t… I’m not—” Uzi turned and saw that Garza was sporting a large grin. Uzi relaxed and smiled as well. They turned away from the window and fell into step with the mass of travelers scurrying along the walkway.
“I’ve been thinking about Bishop,” Garza said. His head bobbed from side to side as he shoved his hands into his suit pant pockets.
Uzi watched Garza go through his gyrations and figured he was performing casual surveillance of his surroundings, ensuring no one had followed either of them. His movements made Uzi suddenly paranoid.
“I was trying to make sense of his murder,” Garza continued. “I mean, on the surface, it seems obvious someone affiliated with that organization he was tracking was responsible.” His head rotated some more, glancing from left to right and then back behind them. “But things don’t add up. I was wondering if you were involved somehow.”
Uzi slowed his pace, causing Garza to take a few steps forward before matching Uzi’s smaller strides. “You called me here to ask if I was involved in Bishop’s murder?”
“No, no,” Garza said, motioning with his hands for Uzi to keep it down. “I mean, did anyone else on your team know what Bishop was looking into?”
“Just Agent Koh, you spoke to her a few days ago—”
“Other than Agent Koh.”
Uzi continued striding in silence. He couldn’t think of anyone else he had told about Bishop. Had he mentioned Bishop to DeSantos before the night they went to meet him? He couldn’t remember. “Why would you assume I’m the link? There could be a shitload of other people Bishop had told. Colleagues, employees—”
“He had no employees, and he was a paranoid shit who didn’t trust his mother. If he talked to you about it, he must’ve felt he needed some help.” Garza stopped in front of an ice cream stand and glanced into the display case. “Rum Raisin,” he said to the vendor.
Uzi was thinking about what Garza had said when he noticed the man looking at him, waiting for his order. “Uh, mocha chip. Small.”
While the man went to work digging his scoop into the tub of ice cream, Uzi turned his back to the glass counter and watched the commuters shuffle past. Across the way, a crowd of school kids was being corralled by their teacher, who was using her arms to herd them against the far wall. The girls cooperated, but a group of boys preferred to continue goofing off, grabbing each other’s gloves and hoods. The teacher dropped her arms, tilted her head in anger, and moved into the epicenter of her frustration to separate the boys.
“My informant tells me he overheard something,” Garza said. “I don’t have any specifics, but I thought you should know your name came up.”
“My name?”
“This person doesn’t know you, probably doesn’t even know you exist. Said he heard the name ‘Uzi,’ and I got to thinking, there aren’t too many people with that name.”
“In case you didn’t realize it, there’s a very popular submachine gun—”
“It was in the context of a person — an agent, not a weapon.”
Uzi took the cones from the vendor and faced Garza. “Your contact?”
“Someone on the inside. That’s all I can say.”
Uzi licked away a dollop of mocha chip perched on the cone’s edge. “On the inside? Inside of what? What the hell does that mean?”
Garza took a bite of his ice cream.
“You’re supposed to lick it,” Uzi said.
“I bite mine, you mind?” Garza took another mouthful as they moved off into the crowd again. The teacher had gotten her group sorted out and was moving them off in single file.
“Anyway,” Garza said, “I just thought you should be aware of things, people around you. People close to you.”
Is Garza trying to tell me something? People close to me. Shepard? With the weird things going on, with what DeSantos and Knox had asked of him, his relationship with Shepard felt strained. But his friend, mixed up in a plot to assassinate citizens? On the other hand, Knox and his cadre…
He became aware of Garza again doing his surveillance scans of the area as they neared a bookstore at the end of the station. Could DeSantos be involved in an assassination plot? He had participated in numerous black ops for just that purpose. But all were carefully orchestrated missions on foreign turf to take out rogue leaders, dictators, or terrorists — people who had designs on killing others, or whose purpose was to harm America, her citizens, or allies. Carrying out targeted hits on US soil was unheard of, even for his group of operatives.
That aside, why would DeSantos want Bishop dead? And how did the NFA/Rathbone/Knox connection figure into this? How much could he tell Garza, and how far could he trust him?
“I need to know more about your contact,” Uzi said.
“Can’t. Not without jeopardizing his life and others around him.”
Uzi’s cone had begun to melt, so he lopped off a coagulating hunk with his teeth.
“I thought you’re not supposed to bite ice cream.”
“You’re not giving me much to go on. How can I take this seriously when I don’t know the source? You’re passing on unconfirmed hearsay and expecting me to accept it as fact.”
“Hearsay?” Garza said. He stopped walking. Uzi faced him. “This isn’t a court of law, Uzi. We’re talking a series of murders here, carried out by someone who could be entrenched in our own infrastructure.” His eyes danced around the area. “You hear what I’m saying?”
“Yesterday you wanted to ram your fist down my throat for ratting out your buddy Osborn. Now you’re passing me info you say you got from a confidential informant. Info you say will supposedly help me out. But things have to make sense to me, Garza. If they don’t, I tend to go fucking crazy. It eats at me, so I get out my shovel and dig as deep as I have to dig to get at the truth. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I shouldn’t have brought Jake into this. That was personal, and we’ve got a job to do. I’m sorry, it was unprofessional. I’m better than that.”
Uzi looked him over, trying to assess Garza’s intentions.
“I was wrong, Uzi, okay? You may still be a type-A, constipated, by-the-book bureaucrat with his finger up his ass, but I need to trust someone on this. And you’re it.”
Uzi looked away. “I’m not type-A.”
Garza laughed. “That still doesn’t excuse what you did to Jake, but you and I can deal with that when this case is over. Right now we’ve got some bad shit that needs our attention.”
“But you still won’t tell me who this insider is.”
Garza tossed his nearly finished cone in the garbage pail to his left. “Keep me in the loop. I promise to do the same for you.”
Yeah, in the loop. A loop with so many knots it was impossible to tell which strings tightened the noose and which ones loosened it. Uzi licked at his melting cone, watching with overt disinterest as Garza headed off into the crowd. But inside, his mind was churning.
Following a briefing at Homeland Security, Uzi emerged from the parking garage as the longer shadows and yellow-tinted hue of afternoon daylight began the lazy transition to dusk. He needed to meet DeSantos in ninety minutes for pre-op planning.