“Do you remember where they got off?” Her fingers tapped the tip of the pen on her notebook. Come on. Please.
“Sure do. Olympic and Vermont. One of the guys walked funny, like his back was hurt.” He laughed sympathetically. “I popped an L4-L5 disk myself, so I know the way it looks and feels.”
“South side of the street?”
“Yeah. Nearside before Vermont.”
“Did you issue a transfer?”
One eye cocked at that suggestion. “This time of night? No way.”
“Remember which way they went?” Frankie waited while he thought back.
His head shook apologetically. “Nah, I don’t. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.”
The driver closed the door as soon as the agents were off his empty bus. He was already thirty minutes late getting back to division, but it hadn’t been all a waste. The lady cop was a looker, after all.
“What do you think?” Frankie asked, facing her partner. His eyes were focused to the side of her, his mind in high gear. It was a face she had come to know and respect.
“No car. They take the bus to Olympic and Vermont.” Art’s eyes finally met Frankie’s, his head shaking the barest bit. “Not a great area,” Art commented. “One of them sounds like that collision might have messed him up.”
“I doubt they were walking too far,” Frankie said. “This obviously wasn’t the way they planned this to happen, so they probably were just trying to get back to their hole. Especially if one of ‘em’s injured.”
“A lot of motels along Vermont right there, aren’t there?”
“You mean rent-a-sheets?” Frankie answered cynically. She had been in the City of Angels long enough to learn that its holy moniker was no guarantee of saintly behavior. “Tons.”
“All right, we set up an OP,” Art said, the preliminaries of a plan forming in his mind. An observation post was a necessity to watch for the shooters in the area they’d last been seen in. “I want Rob Deans and Hal Lightman on it. Hal’s an eagle eye.”
“Okay.” Frankie was noting the assignments to be called in.
“I want it set so they can monitor foot traffic up and down Vermont from Olympic. Then I want a listing of every motel or hotel in a twelve-block area.”
She mentally recoiled at the size of that area to cover. “How are we going to keep an eye on that from one OP?”
“One team at the OP,” Art said. “We’ve got plenty others to use as rovers.”
“Yeah, but with that much presence the suspects are sure to know we’re out there?”
Art smiled. “Exactly. I want them seen. I want our shooters to know we’re out there. I want them scared.”
“But if they know there’s a net out there for them, they’ll stay put,” Frankie observed, not seeing the fullness of her partner’s plan.
“That’s what I want.”
“What?”
Art had learned not only the limits of prudence in his line of work, but also the value of it. “We’re taking these guys on our terms, when we want them, and how we want them. They have to be in that area, probably in one of those motels.”
“But we have to find them, and I thought the operative word was ‘fast’.”
“We will,” Art assured her, his surety motivated by determination. “We just have to do it right.”
“How?”
Art turned and headed back to the car, accepting the fact that cautious behavior didn’t always lend itself to easy answers. “I’m working on it.” No screw-ups this time.
And that meant for his partner either. “I’ll get it set up while you go catch some sleep.”
What? “But…”
“No buts,” Art said sternly. “If you want in on this, then you need sleep. It’s been a rough past few days, and I know what can happen to someone when they push it too far. Remember me — super Art? You’re not going to end up like me, so consider yourself off duty until seven A.M. Go home, get a few hours shuteye, and kiss Cassie. Once for me, too. Tell your mom I said hi.”
There was no arguing with her partner. He was right, and she hated it. She had a little girl who needed to see her once in a while, something she had worked her life around. Until the past couple of days. And she still hadn’t told her that Uncle Thom was…was… “Drop me back at the garage?”
“Sure will. Then you go get some sleep.”
That she could do with little problem. It was what came after that that scared her.
Greg Drummond cleared his desk and laid the map of the area surrounding Cienfuegos flat on it. Mike Healy weighted the corners with assorted items just removed from the DDI’s work surface. The map was one of the plethora produced by the Defense Mapping Agency, using geological and satellite surveys to create representations of the land and its features that were the most highly detailed available on earth. This one, of startling detail, was not even one of the newer digitally produced maps that the DMA had started to turn out. Everything was going to computers, even the fine old art of cartography.
In addition to topography, the map had been prepared with the notable facilities denoted as blocks of dark gray. A corresponding notebook or computer database gave precise information on any and all of the man-made landmarks. This particular map had been produced for the Agency’s survey of Cuba’s industrial capacity, giving it a heavy emphasis on that type of structure. Cuba had developed quite an industrial base in its heyday as a member of COMECON, the economic bloc headed by the former Soviet Union with the goal of fostering development and trade among its signatories and outside countries. Chief among these industries were sugar production, various light industries, and, as a home-grown necessity, oil refining. The refineries at Cienfuegos and Los Guaos were denoted on the map by small, crisp blocks and dots of gray that signified the various buildings, cracking towers, and holding tanks. That was on the east side of the bay. On the western shore were three small manufacturing plants — all closed — and one of Castro’s follies, the never-completed nuclear-power plant that COMECON had financed. When the subsidies from the now-dead East bloc dried up, the huge complex had simply been abandoned, just two years shy of completion, despite an offer of funding from the People’s Republic of China. It was just one in a string of failed ventures that Castro had attempted over the decades to bring his island nation into the technological twentieth century.
But the symbols on the map also pointed out the daunting task that the two Agency executives had before them. Finding buildings was easy. Finding a missile was not.
“So Vishkov is supposed to be here,” the DDO said, pointing at the southwestemmost tip of the Bay of Cienfuegos from his upside-down vantage point. Drummond slid to the side, motioning for him to come around.
“Castillo de Jagua.” The DDI recalled the few visuals he’d seen of the eighteenth-century fortress that had once guarded the narrow opening to the bay. “It appears that Castro wanted Vishkov isolated as well as incarcerated. Have you ever seen it?”
Healy shook his head.
“I think the word is imposing. Lots of stone. Lots and lots of it. It looks like it belongs somewhere along the Thames.”
The thought had occurred to them that Vishkov might be valuable to snatch. He would likely know the precise location of the missile. But any attempt to wrest him from his fortress prison would require a battalion of troops at least, and would blow the secrecy that was vital to finding and securing the weapon. Besides, as Castro had proved through the years, he had little need for those whose usefulness had been exhausted.
“So he’s there.” Healy leaned over the desk, both fists resting on the map. “Now where’s the missile?”