“Mommy, are you okay?”
Frankie laughed through her tears at the question. “Yes, sweetie, I’m okay.” Her eyes apologized for what she had just done to her daughter, but the responding look told her that none was necessary. “I’m really okay.” She looked again at the face, wondering why the expression had changed. “Really, I am.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ARRIVALS
The scene was reminiscent of a team meeting before the big game, but the players here were wearing suits and carrying guns. They also outnumbered their opponents by fifty to one. Yet they were at a distinct disadvantage, a fact well understood by the de facto coach and his players.
“Remember, these guys don’t have to play by the rules,” Art told the sea of agents arrayed around him. “We do.”
The senior agent seemed remarkably controlled in his approach to the situation, much different than some of his fellow agents had come to expect from past experience. The past was the past, they figured, happy to have Art Jefferson running this one with a cool head and measured determination.
“Is LAPD going to step up patrols?” Special Agent Shelley Murdock asked.
“Yeah, Shel. Metro is putting out four uniformed Adam cars to basically do runs around our perimeter-search area.” The LAPD’s Metropolitan Division was the elite of the department that provided specialized units for use throughout the city. In this instance it would back up the Bureau by increasing the department’s presence around the area to be checked. Within the area unmarked but obviously official FBI cars — government cars looked too plain to be anything other than official — would fill the twelve-square-block section around Olympic and Vermont. “If they see anything, they’ll call us in. We make the move.”
The agents took a last look at their assignments. There were sixty-seven motels or cheap hotels in the area to be covered, though no contact would be made with the individual businesses just yet. That part of the operation was yet to be planned.
“Okay, hit it.” Art hopped down from the chair he had used as a riser to address the gathering on the fourth floor. Omar Espinosa was the only one of the agents to remain, and coming through the stream of those heading for the basement garage was the partner Art had sent off to her room some hours before.
“How’s everything going?”
Art saw that the chance for sleep had not done much for Frankie. “Everything here is going fine. How about with you?”
She didn’t look up from the assignment list on her desk, prompting a worried look between Art and Omar. “Good. I slept a little.”
“How much?”
Frankie raised her eyes. “Enough. Now what’s the plan?”
So she was still pumped up, Art recognized. Maybe a little too much. He knew he’d still have to keep a close eye on her, for her own good. “Hal and Rob got the OP up and running about four hours ago. So far nothing from them. The teams are heading out to keep our friends’ heads down, if they’re where we hope.”
Frankie sat down. Art did so also, and Omar slid a chair over from an adjoining cubicle.
“Now we have to figure out how to find them,” Art said.
Frankie saw the report from the rental agency. It included two photocopied driver’s licenses. The pictures on each matched closely the composite sketches of the murderers. Suspected murderers, she corrected herself, falling back upon the proper method of classifying suspects. “The DLs check out?”
Art’s head shook. “No record of any Juan Quintana or Flavio Alicante with those numbers in Florida’s computers.”
“Some good counterfeiting,” Espinosa observed. The photocopies betrayed no telltale signs of illicit manufacture, something the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles was mighty disturbed to hear of. “Someone has some good resource people behind them.”
“More Florida connections,” Frankie said. “Still, this doesn’t give us much. The names are obviously aliases, maybe onetime identities if this is really something international. Maybe even if they’re just hired guns.” She looked at the faces closely for a moment. “At least we know our ‘puters can put out good sketches.”
That was an understatement, Art thought. They were actually photo-representations, mimicking the look of actual pictures. But those would do little good now unless they could come up with a way to use what they had to locate the men pictured.
“We can’t just do the rounds with these,” Art said, pointing to the color composites. “If we show these to a desk clerk who’s been paid to give a warning, then we may cause a mess. I want that avoided at all costs.”
“What about calling?” Omar wondered. “What if they used the same names to check in at one of the places? It’s possible.”
“Yeah, I guess it is, but we’d be taking the same risk of tipping them off.” The morning was young, and already the frustration was mounting. “Any ideas, partner?”
None that are legal, Frankie answered for herself. “Unless we get lucky and spot them without them knowing it, then we’re going to have to do some kind of approach. That means the desk clerk at every place, or a cleaning person. And it has to be in some way that won’t spook them, something that won’t set off alarm bells.”
“There’s the ten-thousand-dollar outline,” Art commented. “Now all we need is the ten-cent answer to make it fly.” He snatched up the photocopy of the licenses. “Almost as good as our boys could put out.” It was a little-known and infrequently used skill that the Bureau’s TS Section had mastered: producing counterfeit documents. Sometimes it was necessary to provide an undercover agent with documentation to prove his cover story. With the cooperation of agencies in all fifty states and several foreign jurisdictions, the Bureau had compiled a collection of authentic materials from which the required papers and IDs could be put together. Art studied the fine detail work. “Jacobs would appreciate work like this.”
“He’d say he could do better,” Omar joked.
“I bet he could,” Art concurred, the spark flashing in his brain without warning. His eyes drifted away from the photocopy, the thoughts piling one atop another as they fought for dominance in the plan that was forming in the senior agent’s mind.
Omar caught the intensity in Art’s demeanor before Frankie. “You got something, Art?”
“I think we might.”
Frankie’s attention level shot up at the positive tone in her partner’s words. “What? How?”
“We’re waiting,” Omar implored.
“I think with a little help from Jacobs we can pull this off,” Art said, without explaining what “this” was.
“Pull what off?” Frankie asked.
Art picked up the phone and dialed down to TS. “We’re going to play a little ‘lost and found.’ “
“What kind of game is that?” Espinosa asked, playing along with Art’s crypticism.
“The most satisfying. We’re the finders, and our perps are the losers.”
“You’ll want to buckle up now,” the Air Force lieutenant informed his five passengers. The Gulfstream would be landing on Andrews’ east-west runway in a few minutes.
“Give me something, Dick,” the Post reporter begged. “I go all the way down there with you, hang back in the shadows like a good little reporter, and don’t look where I shouldn’t. What do I have from that? Nothing.”
Congressman Richard Vorhees, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, laughed at the childlike begging and guilt projection Chick Hill was shooting his way. As the Post’s military-affairs correspondent, an assignment with fewer potential stories in the “days of downsizing,” he had been invited to accompany the congressman on a short inspection of several special operations facilities. His access had been understandably limited to nonsecure areas of the three bases, which had frustrated him to no end. The congressman had enjoyed every minute of it. The media hated to be told, with no chance for argument, that they couldn’t go somewhere or see something. “Childlike” might have been an improper characterization, Vorhees realized; “infantile” was more descriptive.