“You still there, Rourke?” he said into the phone.
“What was that supposed to mean? How do I know what’s going on there when you people don’t call in like you’re supposed to? And you with the veiled references all the time. Bosch, I don’t get you.”
“Let me ask you something. Did you really put people down at the tunnel exits, or was that blueprint and your pointer and the SWAT guy all for show?”
“Put Wish on the line. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Sorry, she can’t come to the phone at the moment.”
“Bosch, I’m calling you in. Something is wrong. You’ve been out all night on this. I think you should-no, I’ll get a couple of fresh people out there. I’m going to have to call your lieutenant and-”
“You knew Meadows.”
“What?”
“What I said. You knew him. I have his file, man. Hiscomplete file. Not the edited version you gave Wish to give me. You were his CO at the embassy in Saigon. I know.”
More silence. Then, “I was CO to a lot of people, Bosch. I didn’t know them all.”
Bosch shook his head.
“That’s weak, Lieutenant Rourke. Really weak. That was worse than just admitting it. I tell you what, I’ll see you around.”
Bosch hung up the phone and went into Darling’s, where he ordered two coffees and two mineral waters. He stood by the cash register, waiting for the girl to put the order together, and looking out the window. He was thinking only of Rourke.
The girl came up to the cash register with the order in a cardboard carry-out box. He paid and tipped her and went back out to the pay phone.
Bosch called Rourke’s number again with no plan other than to see if he was on the phone or had left. He hung up after ten rings. Then he called the LAPD dispatch center and told an operator to call FBI dispatch and ask if they had a SWAT callout working in the Wilshire area in or near Beverly Hills and if they needed any help. While he waited he tried to put his mind inside Rourke’s caper. He opened up one of the coffees and sipped it.
The dispatcher came back on the line with a confirmation that FBI did have a SWAT surveillance in the Wilshire district. No backup was requested. Bosch thanked her and hung up. Now he thought he knew what Rourke was doing. It had to be that there were no men about to break into the vault. The setup on the vault was just that, a setup. The vault was a decoy. Bosch thought about how he had let Tran go his way after following him to the vault. What he had done was flush the second captain out, with his diamonds, so Rourke could have at him. Bosch had simply played into his hands.
When Bosch got back to the car he saw that Eleanor was looking through Meadows’s files. She hadn’t gotten to the congressman’s letter yet.
“Where have you been?” she said good-naturedly.
“Rourke had a lot of questions.” He took the Meadows file out of her hands and said, “There is something I want you to see here. Where did you get the file on Meadows that you showed me?”
“I don’t know. Rourke got it. Why?”
He found the letter and handed it to her without saying anything.
“What is this? Nineteen seventy-three?”
“Read it. This is Meadows’s file, the one I had copied and sent from St. Louis. There is no letter like this one in the file Rourke gave you to give me. He sanitized it. Read, you’ll see why.”
He glanced over at the vault door. Nothing was happening and he didn’t expect anything to be. Then he watched her as she read. She raised an eyebrow as she scanned both pages, not seeing the name.
“Yes, so he was some kind of a hero, it says. I don’t-” Her eyes widened as she got to the bottom. “Copied to Lieutenant John Rourke.”
“Uh huh. You also missed the first reference.”
He pointed to the sentence that named Rourke as Meadows’s CO.
“The inside man. What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know. Are you sure? This doesn’t prove anything.”
“If it was a coincidence, he should have said he knew the guy, cleared it up. Like me. I came in. He didn’t because he didn’t want the connection known. I called him on it when we were on the phone. He lied. He didn’t know we had this.”
“Now he knows you know?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what he thinks I know. I hung up on him. The question is, what do we do about it? We’re probably spinning our wheels here. The whole thing’s a charade. Nobody’s going into that vault. They probably took Tran down after he checked his diamonds out and left. We led him right to slaughter.”
Then he realized that maybe the white LTD belonged to the robbers, not Lewis and Clarke. They had followed Bosch and Wish to Tran.
“Wait a minute,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know. What about the alarms all week? The fire hydrant and the arson? It has to be happening like we thought.”
“I don’t know. Nothing is making sense right now. Maybe Rourke is leading his people into a trap. Or a slaughter.”
They both stared ahead at the vault. The rain had slacked off, the sun was completely up now and it set the steel door aglow. Eleanor finally spoke.
“I think we have to get some help. We have Hanlon and Houck sitting on the other side of the bank, and SWAT, unless that was part of Rourke’s charade.”
Bosch told her he had checked on the SWAT surveillance and learned that it actually was in place.
“Then what is Rourke doing?” she said.
“Pushing all the buttons.”
They kicked it around for a few minutes and decided to call Orozco at Beverly Hills police. First, Eleanor checked in with Hanlon and Houck. Bosch wanted to keep them in place.
“You guys awake over there?” she said into the Motorola.
“That’s a ten-four, barely. I feel like that guy stuck in his car in the overpass after the earthquake up in Oakland. What’s up, anything?”
“No, just checking. How’s the front door?”
“Not a knock all night.”
She signed off and there was a moment of silence before Bosch turned to get out of the car, to call Orozco. He stopped and looked back at her.
“You know, he died,” he said.
“Who died?”
“The guy that was in that overpass.”
Just then there was a thump that slightly shook the car. Not as much a sound as a vibration, an impact, not unlike the first jolt of an earthquake. There was no following vibration. But after one or two seconds an alarm sounded. The ringing came loud and clear from the Beverly Hills Safe & Lock Company. Bosch sat bolt upright, staring into the vault room. There was no visible sign of intrusion. Almost immediately, the radio crackled with Hanlon’s voice.
“We’ve got a bell. What’s our plan of action?”