Cold Hit

Chapter 26

The offices of California Homeland Security were located on the top three floors of the old Tishman Building on Wilshire Boulevard. The Tishman was a monument to the concept of temporary architecture-a cheaply constructed twenty-story high-rise that was built in the '60s. The L. A. Times had recently reported it was already under discussion as a possible teardown.

The three gray sedans swept into the underground garage to the bottom parking level, and pulled up next to a single secure elevator with a red sign on a metal stand that read: U. S. GOVERNMENT USE ONLY. The car doors swung open as Rowdy and Snitch were pulled roughly out of separate sedans. I was yanked out of a third and pushed toward the elevator.

The agent in charge, a narrow dweeb named Kersey Nix, put his hand on a glass panel for a fingerprint scan. The doors yawned wide immediately and we were pushed into the elevator.

When the elevator opened on the top floor, a few more guys with identical haircuts were waiting. They led us down a corridor and put us in three separate lock-downs where the decor was half dungeon, half dental office; windowless, ten-foot square rooms with peach pastel walls, Berber carpet, and Barry Manilow wafting through a Muzak system. There was a thick metal door with an electronic lock. Before he left, my musclebound federal escort confiscated my wallet, cell phone, and watch. My gun had been confiscated back at the site of our arrest.

"You gonna tell me what this is about?" I asked. "National security."

The door closed. The lock zapped. Barry Manilow crooned. There was no place to sit, no furniture, no shelves. Nothing. I was trapped in a musically bland, peach-colored environment.

I took off my jacket, sat on the carpeted floor, and tried to shake off my anger at these agents who felt they had such an overpowering mandate that they could treat three LAPD officers like criminals. I wanted to hit somebody. My rage flared so suddenly it surprised me.

When I was going through Marine Corps training, I remember once watching a videotape of an Army psychology program run at Fort Bliss using military police officers. The psychologists divided all the guards working one of our military prisons into two groups. One group of officers was assigned the role of temporary inmates; the others remained prison guards. The real reason for this test was not revealed.

What army psychiatrists were actually attempting to determine was how the act of granting complete power to one group over another might escalate both groups toward extreme violence. The MPs who were to remain guards were only told that the military was evaluating escape possibilities in Super-Max and to be especially vigilant. The guards pretending to be inmates were told to resist authority and look for any possible way to break out.

What transpired was amazing. The guards assigned to the role of prisoners didn't like being inmates. They had done nothing wrong. But their old friends were now hazing them, walking down the prison tiers ringing their batons across the bars, keeping them awake all night so they would be too tired to attempt anything. The men under lockdown became angrier, the captor guards more aggressive. After a week, sporadic incidents of violence broke out between men who had only a few days before, been close friends. In the second week, the army called off the test because a violent fight broke out between the two groups, which almost resulted in the death of a guard.

The lesson of this video was that absolute power without oversight can quickly morph into murderous rage. By the same token, complete loss of power, without appeal, can escalate behavior to exactly the same place.

If I was going to make the best of this, I would have to stay cool. I couldn't let indignation and self-righteousness turn to rage. Whatever was going on here, I was being tested. Anger would only result in failure.

So I waited. How long did I sit there? I have no idea. At first I tried to keep track of time by counting the Muzak songs. Figuring each at three to four minutes long, I sang along, counting on my fingers. By the time I'd heard "Mandy" four times, my brain stalled and I lost count.

Next, I tried to pass the time by concentrating on the Andrazack case, trying to come up with something fresh. Several things festered. I knew Broadway and Perry suspected somebody in the foreign intelligence community of bugging embassy computers. Broadway said he thought there might even be bugs or computer scans inside the LAPD's Counter-Terrorist Bureau. Forgetting for the moment how that could be accomplished, it raised an interesting possibility. If some foreign power was stealing information from inside CTB, had they also found a way to penetrate the LAPD mainframe?

The media was making a big deal of the Fingertip case and everybody in L. A. knew the basics of those crime scenes. But Zack and I had withheld the symbol carved on each victim's chest. If some foreign agent had hacked into our crime data bank or more to the point, the medical examiner's computer, it would explain how they knew to carve that symbol on Andrazack before dumping him in the river under the Barham Boulevard Bridge.

Further, if Davide Andrazack wasn't one of the serial killings, but a political assassination, all of the ritual evidence surrounding that hit was just staging. That meant most of the theories I had on it were no longer operative.

I started over and reevaluated. Maybe there wasn't just one killer. Maybe two guys threw Andrazack off the bridge into the water, which explained how they could shot-put a two-hundred-pound man thirty feet out into the wash. A bullet to the head doesn't always produce instant death. Maybe Rico was right and Andrazack's heart was still beating when he hit the concrete levee and that's why his right ribcage was bruised. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to hang together.

Time clicked off a big, invisible game clock while Barry Manilow messed with my mind. Finally, I curled up and tried to sleep. As soon as I laid down, a voice came over a hidden speaker. "Don't do that," a man commanded.

I stood and looked up at the air-conditioning grate. The camera and speaker had to be in there, but it was too high up to get to. I was beginning to fume.

I needed to go to the bathroom, so I yelled that out. Nobody answered. In defiance, I unzipped and wrote my name on the tan Berber carpet in urine. Foolish, I know, but I have a childish streak.

"Don't do that either," the voice commanded again.

"Come on in here, asshole. We'll talk about it." Nobody answered, so I moved away from my yellow signature, sat down, closed my eyes, and waited.

It might have been four or five hours. It might have been ten. I completely lost track of time.

Finally the door opened. Kersey Nix was standing in the threshold.

"Is it recess?" I said, trying to sound faintly amused, even though underneath, I wanted to rip his throat out.

I noticed he was wearing a different suit. So while I'd been doing sing-alongs with Barry Manilow and writing my name on the carpet, this jerk-off had been at home resting up.

"I will give you some advice," Agent Nix said in a reasonable, but bland voice. "Tell us everything you know. Hold nothing back. You are at the beginning of a dangerous adventure. How it ends is going to be entirely up to you." Then he favored me with a sleepy-eyed half smile.

"I really need to go to the can," I said.

"Come on."

He turned and I had a weak moment where I was tempted to kick his skinny butt up between his ears. But I held off. It was a good thing I did, because two identically shaped androids were waiting in the hall just out of sight.

The four of us marched down the corridor toward the men's room. I saw a window. It was dark outside. We'd been picked up at 9 A. M. and sunset was four-thirty, so doing the math, I'd been here a minimum of eight hours.

After I used the facilities and washed up, I followed Agent Nix to a large set of double doors on the east end of the building. He led me inside a huge office, with an acre of snow-white, cut-pile carpet under expensive antique mahogany furniture. The U. S. and California State flags flanked each side of a Victorian desk big enough to play Ping-Pong on.

I'd seen the man standing in the center of the room waiting for me before, but only on television. He was in his late fifties, tall and handsome, with silver hair and a patrician bearing. He was flanked by two assistants-gray men with pinched faces. Everyone wore crisp white shirts, and a blue or a red tie. Patriotism.

"I'm Robert Allen Virtue, head of California Homeland Security," the tall, handsome man said. "I hope this hasn't inconvenienced you too much."

"Only if you don't like Barry Manilow," I replied.