Heat Lightning

23

SHRAKE WAS on a date and nobody knew where, and Jenkins said that he never took a cell phone with him because somebody might call him on it. Jenkins had been in a sushi bar, eating octopus and drinking martinis out of a flask, though he said he was totally sober and could be there in ten minutes. Del ’s wife was pregnant and going to bed early, so Del had no problem and could be there in fifteen.

Two extra guys, Virgil thought, should be enough. They agreed to meet at the Pomegranate, a once-trendy salad-and-dessert place seven blocks from the Sinclairs’ condo. Virgil had forgotten to eat, and suddenly realized that he was starving. He got an apple salad and a piece of carrot cake and wolfed them down, saw Jenkins go by in his Crown Vic, looking for a parking place, and then Del in his state Chevy.

They arrived together. Jenkins got a chocolate mousse and Del said he wasn’t hungry, and Del asked, “What’re we doing?”

“We need one guy on the back, by the porch. I can point it out from the back side of the house-the condo’s an old house, and it’s got porches on the ground floor. It’s almost like a bunch of town houses. The other two of us go to the front door. The back-door guy is whichever one of you can run fastest.”

Del looked at Jenkins and said, “You’re pretty quick on your feet.”

“Yeah, I can do it.”

Virgil said, “There’s a possibility that these guys are involved in the lemon killings… a good possibility. They at least know something about them. So we gotta take care. Know where your weapon is; somebody’s a professional killer. Stay on your toes.”

“You think…” Del ’s eyebrows were up. “Maybe some armor?”

“If you want, but I don’t think it’s necessary,” Virgil said. “It’d be weird if there were any shooting right there. I mean, this guy is semi-famous.”

“But the daughter is an impostor,” Jenkins said. “Maybe she’s another Clara Rinker.” Clara Rinker had been a professional killer working for a St. Louis mobster, who’d been taken down by Davenport ’s team a few years earlier. She was believed to have killed thirty people.

“Look-do what you’re comfortable with,” Virgil said, gobbling down the last of the carrot cake. “My sense is, we won’t be doing any shooting. But know where your weapon is. If we go in, and there are a couple of Vietnamese guys there… then take care. Take care.”

THEY CIRCLED Sinclair’s block and Virgil pointed out the back of the condo, the porch where Sinclair was working. “There’s somebody in there,” Jenkins said.

Virgil dug out his binoculars and put them on the lighted porch.

Sinclair was there, bent over a laptop. “That’s him,” Virgil said. As Virgil watched, Sinclair sat up and stared straight out into the night for three seconds, five seconds, and then went back to the laptop.

The house that backed onto the condo was also lit. Jenkins said, “I’m gonna knock on the door there, tell them what’s up, so they won’t be yelling at me and calling St. Paul when I sneak through their yard.”

“All right. Call me when you’re set,” Virgil said.

Del followed Virgil around the block and they parked, facing in opposite directions in case they had to move quickly, and they met at the walk going up to the condo, waited, and Virgil took the call from Jenkins: “I’m crossing the fence now. I’ll be in position in ten seconds. Sinclair is still in the window.”

Virgil looked at the names on the mailboxes outside the apartment, picked another one on the first floor, and buzzed. No answer. He waited ten seconds, then buzzed a second one, labeled “Williams.” A moment later, a woman answered: “Yes? Who is it?”

“Virgil Flowers and Del Capslock. We’re agents of the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Could we speak to you for a minute?”

“What’s happened?” she asked, a streak of fear in her voice. “Did something happen to Laurie?”

“We just need to speak to you for a minute, ma’am,” Virgil said.

She buzzed them and Virgil pushed through, and a moment later a door opened to their right and a woman looked out. Virgil put his finger to his lips, showed her his ID, and said, “We’re here for another apartment. If you could go back inside, please. Everything should be okay.”

The woman’s eyes flicked to Del. Del had taken his pistol out and was holding it along his pant leg. “You’re sure…” and she was backing away.

Virgil put his finger to his lips again, breathed “Shhh…,” and he and Del moved down the hall as the woman closed the door.

“You want to take the door, or do you want to try knocking?” Del asked.

“Knock first. If he doesn’t answer, I’ll kick it,” Virgil said.

Del knocked, and they both stepped back sideways from the door. They heard steps inside, and Del ticked his finger at the door, and Virgil put his hand on his pistol at the small of his back.

The door opened, and Sinclair looked out. “Took you long enough,” he said. “Come on in.”

SINCLAIR WAS dressed in faded blue jeans, a soft white shirt, and sneakers, the gold tennis bracelet still rattling around his wrist. Virgil followed him into the apartment as Sinclair backed away. Virgil said to Del, “Get Jenkins in here. Clear the place.”

“She’s gone, Hoa is gone,” Sinclair said. “I don’t think she’s coming back-you spooked her.”

“Hoa?”

“It means ‘flower,’” Sinclair said. “Mai means ‘cherry blossom.’ Quite the coincidence, huh?”

Jenkins came in through a back door in the kitchen, and he and Del did a quick run-through of the apartment. Sinclair said to Virgil, “Come on the porch and we can figure out what we’re gonna do. Your friends can sit in.”

“I know what I’m going to do,” Virgil said. “I’m taking your ass down to jail and I’m charging you with murder.”

“That’s not a bad idea, except that you’ve got nothing to convict me with,” Sinclair said. He pointed at the circle of chairs on the porch, where his laptop sat in a circle of light. “And there would be some serious fallout that I’m not sure you’d want to deal with. But: If you are willing to deal with the fallout, it’s an option, and we should talk about it.”

DEL HEARD the last bit of the conversation, and he said to Virgil, “Apartment’s clear,” and then to Sinclair, “What’s up with you? You’re pretty calm for a guy who’s looking at thirty years without parole.”

“Never do thirty years,” Sinclair said. “My family’s programmed to die at eighty-five. I wouldn’t do more than twenty.”

Jenkins said to Del, “The man’s got a point.”

“If anybody wants a beer, we got some Leinenkugels in the refrigerator,” Sinclair said. To Virgil: “You want to sit down?”

Virgil sat. “What the hell is going on?”

Sinclair said to Jenkins, “If you’re gonna get a beer, could you get me one?” He said to Virgil, “This is complicated. But one thing that’s going to happen, if it hasn’t already, is that this Warren guy is probably gonna get killed tonight.”

“ Warren ’s at a big political party,” Virgil said.

“Blowing him up at a big political party would just about make Hoa’s day,” Sinclair said. Jenkins handed him a beer, and he said thanks and took a sip.

“Blowing him up?” Virgil said. He was digging his cell phone out of his pocket. “They’ve got a bomb? Jesus…”

“No, no, not literally. They’re going to shoot him,” Sinclair said. “I don’t know any details, but I believe they’re going to shoot him. The shooter, who’s the guy you met named Phem, doesn’t do bombs. But I’m told he’s a marvelous shot. Olympic quality. And Tai, who’s a researcher, an intelligence operator, an interrogator, doesn’t do assassination. He might tear you apart with a pair of pliers, but he won’t try to snipe you. He doesn’t have that cold temperament-he gets all excited when he’s killing somebody. That’s what I’m told.”

“What about Mai?”

“Hoa-she’s the coordinator. She’s the one who can pass as American. Got all the right American accents. You oughta hear her Valley Girl.”

VIRGIL WAS on the phone, and Davenport answered: “What’d you get?”

“There are three Vietnamese, two men and a woman, and they’re planning to kill Warren. I’m told that nothing would make them happier than killing him at your party. To do it in public. They got a shooter with them. I don’t think it’s a suicide run.”

“It won’t be-no suicide,” Sinclair interjected.

“I’m told it’s not a suicide, so they’ve got to get in close or do him with a rifle,” Virgil said. “You better tell his security to get tight.”

“I’m on it and Warren ’s here,” Davenport said. “This place is crawling with security-I’ll light them up. Can I tell Warren?”

“Yeah, yeah, he has nothing to do with the lemon killings,” Virgil said. “It’s a Vietnamese hit squad, going back to the war days. That whole murder thing.”

“Where are you?” Davenport asked.

“At Sinclair’s. He’s telling us a story. It’s complicated, man.”

“You better get over here. I’ll get St. Paul SWAT, but that’s gonna take a while. They’re probably up on the golf course looking down at us… If we can get SWAT around the edges of the course, we might chase them out.”

“What about Sinclair?” Virgil asked.

“Whatever you think-I’ll get with Warren, call me when you’re close.”

VIRGIL RANG OFF and said to Del and Jenkins, “We’re going. My truck is bugged, Sinclair and I will ride with Jenkins. We’re gonna bring in SWAT and see if we can corner them on the golf course.”

“They’ve got night-vision gear.” Sinclair said. “They’ll see you coming.”

“Ah, shit.” Virgil got Davenport back on the line.

“What?”

“Sinclair said they’ve got night-vision gear…”

“And a starlight scope,” Sinclair added.

“And a starlight scope,” Virgil said. “Maybe it’s better to put the guys out on the perimeter of the golf course, keep bringing people in until it’s completely blocked, and wait for daylight.”

“Let me think about it,” Davenport said. “Get down here.”

“We’re coming.”

IN THE CAR, Virgil took out his cuffs and cuffed Sinclair’s hand to a loop of the safety belt in the backseat. They were five minutes from the golf course, running without lights.

“Tell me,” he said to Sinclair, and Jenkins’s eyes flicked up in the rear-view mirror. Storytelling time.

A LONG TIME AGO, Sinclair said, when college kids thought they were the spearhead of a revolution, when fifty-five thousand Americans were dying in Vietnam, when ghettos were burning in most of the major American cities, when women started burning their bras and hippies were dropping out and turning on, he’d been a student in American studies at the University of Michigan.

“I loved this country. My grandparents were immigrants, my father and all my uncles fought in the Second World War, and I wanted to do something for the country,” Sinclair said. “My history prof knew that, the jolly old elf that he was, and knew just what to do: he put me in touch with the CIA. He said there was no point in going to Vietnam and dying as a second lieutenant. Anyone could do that.”

So Sinclair took some tests, went to Langley, was trained, and then dropped right back into his most natural environment: the University of Michigan.

“I was there when the Students for a Democratic Society got going, I knew all of the early Weathermen… You know about the town house explosion in Manhattan? No? Never mind. Anyway, I started going to Vietnam,” he said. “I dodged the draft with the help of the Agency, made a lot of contacts with Vietnamese who were moving up in the government over there.”

By the time the war ended, he said, he had radical contacts everywhere in Asia and Europe. He did the last interview with Ulrike Meinhof in April 1976, a few weeks before Meinhof either hanged herself or was murdered in her German jail cell.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Virgil said.

“I suppose not. You’d have been a baby at the time… Ulrike was the coleader of the Baader-Meinhof Group, one of the so-called Red Army groups, the Rote Armee Fraktion,” Sinclair said, sputtering through the German with an academic’s enthusiasm. “Big radical deal at one time.”

“So you were hot.”

“Yup. But like all good things, the nonsense stopped, and there I was. I’d gotten my PhD, and to tell you the truth, I’d been in academia for so long that I had pretty much adopted the points of view of a lot of people I’d opposed at the start. That the Vietnam War was a waste of time and blood, a tragedy-”

“Yeah, yeah, so much for old home week,” Virgil said. “What about these assholes? What about Mai, or whatever her name is?”

“Hey-let me tell it. So I told the Agency what I was thinking. You know, that I was tired and, worse than that, a liberal. And they just let it go… quite a few liberals in the Agency, actually. I retired. I was doing pretty well as a teacher and a writer, I still had contacts in Vietnam-I’d married my Vietnamese woman, though I met her here, in the States-and I started doing some work on trade deals and so on. I’d still get a call from the CIA guys every once in a while, and I was happy enough to talk to them. Then Chester Utecht got drunk and told everybody in sight about stealing bulldozers in Vietnam.”

Vietnamese intelligence picked it up. In the way of the world, the father of the woman raped and murdered that day in Da Nang was now an eighty-five-year-old first-tier government official in the misty realm where intelligence and the military overlapped. He heard the story.

He could have his revenge, his peers agreed, as long as it didn’t upset the trade apple cart.

As it happened, Vietnamese intelligence had also picked up a line on an al-Qaeda plot that came out of Indonesia. Whether it was real or not, they got in touch with somebody at Homeland Security and suggested that the information was available. In return, they wanted the relevant layers of U.S. intelligence agencies to look in the other direction during a short, violent operation in Minnesota.

The people who would die were all known killers and rapists. The people who would die on the West Coast-and there would be many more of them, if al-Qaeda had its way-were innocents.

A deal was cut-and a deniable contact was needed between Washington and Hanoi.

“You,” Virgil said. They were on Cretin Avenue, headed north toward the golf course, just a few blocks away now.

“Me. I speak Vietnamese, have contacts in both places-though the Viets were a trifled surprised about the CIA,” Sinclair said with a grin. “I talked to an old friend over there who thought it was hilarious-turns out he was a member of their intelligence service, and he’d been playing me. One thing about the Vietnamese-they got a pretty goddamn good sense of humor.”

What wasn’t so funny, he said, was what happened when he tried to turn them down. The people from Homeland Security pressed on him the urgency of the case, and said something to the effect that the Vietnamese had already researched him… and knew where his daughter was.

“It was a threat,” Sinclair said. “I didn’t really believe they’d do anything to her-family is pretty important in Vietnam. But I wasn’t sure. So here I am.”

“You set me up to see Tai and Phem,” Virgil said.

“Of course; and they were seriously pissed. I’ll tell you what-the real Tai and Phem would be astonished to hear about it. They’re in town all the time, you know. Don’t stay at the Hilton. But if you’d called somebody at Larson to check their bona fides, they would have told you that Tai and Phem were outstanding citizens and enthusiastic followers of the capitalist road.”

JENKINS TURNED the corner on Marshall, headed down the hill toward the clubhouse at the Town and Country Club. The place was lit like a Christmas tree, people all over the entry and parking lot.

“Do you have any idea of exactly what Hoa’s doing?” Virgil asked.

“No. But I believe it’s a gun, I believe it’s Warren. All I get is what seeps through from phone calls that Hoa makes. I’ve also got the feeling that they may have a line on the last man. One thing I didn’t tell you-they’ve got a direct connect, I think, with somebody in Washington. I don’t know where. Homeland Security, probably. They have access to every record you can think of. I got Hoa’s laptop password, not without a lot of trouble, I can tell you, and signed on when she was gone with you. If you get your hands on it, you’ll find documents that you won’t believe. The U.S. government vectored them right in on Utecht and Sanderson.”

“So why tell me now?”

“Because we’re at the end of this,” Sinclair said. “My daughter will be okay-the Viets will have what they want, so they’ll be done with us. I just might be able to fuck with the people who did this to me, the guys over here. Depending on what you want to do.”

A guy in a black tuxedo, accessorized with a Beretta 93R with the twenty-round mag, was flagging them down and Jenkins slowed and held up his ID. Davenport called, “That guy’s okay,” and they went through. Sinclair said, “I wonder if that’s his dress gun?”

DAVENPORT MET Virgil in the street: “We’ve got people coming in on the corners: they’ll do it all at once, when they isolate the streets.” He looked at Sinclair, still cuffed in the backseat, then asked Virgil, “What’s the deal?”

“I’m not exactly clear on that,” Virgil said. “But Professor Sinclair has been talking up a storm. Things have gotten a little out of my pay grade.”

“So maybe I should hear his story,” Davenport said.

“Little out of your pay grade, too. And Rose Marie’s,” Virgil said.

“So whose pay grade are we talking about?” Davenport asked.

“Dunno-maybe the president.”

Rose Marie Roux was walking toward them in a political orange dress the size of an army tent.

“Got to be quite a story,” Davenport said to Sinclair.

“Oh, it is,” he said. He nodded across the room at a cluster of men in front of a fireplace. “Is that the governor? I’m sure he’d be fascinated.”

THEY TOOK Sinclair into the women’s locker room. Davenport spoke quietly with Rose Marie, who got another glass of something and tagged along.

“First piece of business,” she said to Sinclair. “We’re not talking about a machine gun or a rocket or a bomb?”

Sinclair shook his head. “They’re operating under pretty strict guidelines: nobody dies except the people involved in the original rape and murder. There were actually five killed back then: the woman, her two young children, three and two years of age, the woman’s grandfather, and a housekeeper. These people, Hoa and her team, messed up when they killed Wigge’s bodyguard. That wasn’t supposed to happen. That was a lapse. The cop up in Red Lake was an even bigger lapse, but I think by that time they didn’t care so much. They were making the final run.”

“My God,” Rose Marie said. She looked at Virgil. “You knew this?”

“Not the details-the outline,” Virgil said. “I was getting pieces.”

Rose Marie said to Jenkins, “Go get Warren.”

When Jenkins had gone, Davenport asked Sinclair, “How many more people are on their list?”

“Warren and one more. Six altogether, or seven, if you count Chester Utecht. The last guy-I don’t know the name-lives on a lake somewhere. They were having a hard time tracking him down, exactly, but I think their… outside… contacts came through on that.”

“He means Homeland Security,” Virgil said to Davenport and Rose Marie. “The guy they were looking for is Carl Knox.”

WARREN WALKED IN a minute later, followed by Jenkins and a security man. Rose Marie said, “We’ve identified the people who are trying to kill you. Agent Flowers has information that they will attempt to shoot you, probably with a rifle. We’re putting officers around the golf course, where we think they are. If you wish, you could go out the back unseen.”

Warren bobbed his head. “I’ll do that. I’ll be at home. I’ve got some serious protection there. Call me when you get them.” He glanced at Virgil, his upper lip rippled, and he left, followed by his security man.

Sinclair said, “There goes the worst man in this whole episode, dressed in a tuxedo and patent-leather shoes, untouched by human hands.”

Davenport said to Sinclair, “All right-we’ve got ten minutes before we drop the net around the golf course. Tell the rest of us what happened.”

At that moment, the governor walked in, shadowed by Neil Mitford, his personal weasel. The governor smiled at everybody, said, “Ah, that fuckin’ Flowers. How are you, Virgil?” He shook Virgil’s hand. “Love the cowboy boots. I just bought a pair myself. What’s up with all you people? Are we going to be assassinated, or what?”

Rose Marie said, “Governor, I’m not sure you want to be here.”

“That’s what I said,” Mitford muttered.

“Better than making small talk with a guy who wants more ethanol subsidies.” He looked around. “I haven’t been in a women’s locker room since my junior year at Princeton.” He chuckled. “Anna Sweat, I swear to God she had… Never mind.” He peered at Sinclair. “So-let’s hear it.”