Long Road to Mercy

Chapter 61

The inner door was hit so hard, it fell off its hinges. Into the breech charged a dozen heavily armored personnel with combat helmets and carrying either M4s or M16s.

With his free hand Dobbs immediately held up his badge and barked, “Federal agents, weapons down.”

Not a single combat weapon was lowered. The armored men formed a wall across the width of the room, shoulder to shoulder, their long guns pointed at the FBI contingent across from them.

“FBI!” barked Dobbs again. “I said weapons down.”

Still, not a single weapon was lowered.

“Who are you with?” demanded Dobbs as his men nervously fingered their pistols.

Twelve auto assault rifles wielded by armored shooters against seven semiauto pistols held by agents in suits in a confined space would not be much of a fight.

Suddenly, the middle of their ranks parted and a man in his fifties, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, striped tie, and scuffed wingtips, stepped through this void.

He appeared to be in charge of the assault team.

Dobbs focused on him and barked, “We are the FBI, so unless you put your weapons down now, you’re going to be in a world of trouble.”

The man said, “I was about to tell you the very same thing.”

There was a commotion in the other room. The next moment, five ICE agents carrying AR-15s burst into the room and pointed their weapons at the armored men and the man in the suit.

Half the armored men pointed their guns at the ICE agents while the other half-dozen kept their guns trained on Dobbs and his agents.

“Federal agents,” cried out the ICE point man. “Weapons down. Now!”

The three groups of armed people seemed to be in a standoff.

Dobbs stared triumphantly at the man in the suit. “Okay, we’ve got you surrounded. So now you’re going to put your weapons down.”

The man said calmly, “No, we’re not. We’re here to collect these two women.” He pointed at Pine and Blum.

Dobbs said, “For what?”

“Treason against the United States.”

One of the ICE agents stepped forward and looked at Pine.

“Bullshit. Atlee Pine is no traitor. Now who the hell are you?”

The man drew out a phone, punched in a number, and spoke into it in a low voice.

He held the phone out to the ICE agent. “Your director wants to speak to you.”

The man blinked. “The director?”

“Harold Sykes? Director of DHS? Yes, he’s on the line.”

The agent took the phone. “Who is this?” He snapped to attention after no doubt recognizing the voice of the head of Homeland Security.

“Yes, sir. What? No. I mean. But she’s an FBI agent. I know her. No, I’m not saying... But a traitor. I... no sir... Yes, sir, right away, sir.”

Looking thoroughly beaten down, he handed the phone back to the man and looked over at Pine with a helpless expression. “I’m sorry, Atlee.”

“It’s okay, Doug, we’ll get this figured out.”

Doug slowly turned to his men. “Okay, let’s move out.”

“Sir?” said one of them.

“I said let’s move out!” barked Doug.

In a few seconds, ICE had vacated the field of battle, leaving the men in armor and the FBI agents.

The man in the suit turned to Dobbs.

Dobbs pulled his phone from his jacket and said, “Okay, I’m calling my director right now, asshole.”

The man smiled. “Better yet, how about I call his boss, the attorney general, and have him order you to turn these women over to us?”

Dobbs glanced at Pine. “There is no way in hell that Pine or Blum are traitors.”

“Your opinion on the subject is absolutely irrelevant.”

Dobbs gathered his composure and began speaking in a calm tone. “Fine. You show me the appropriately signed off indictments issued by a U.S. attorney, and we’ll arrest them right here, read them their rights, take them to a federal holding cell, and then we can move forward through the court system.”

The man had started shaking his head halfway through. “This is national security, not a court matter.”

Dobbs exploded. “I don’t give a shit if it’s jaywalking.” He pointed to Pine and Blum. “These women are American citizens. Innocent until proven guilty. Right to due process. I’m sure these things are familiar to you, that is, if you are an American, which, frankly, I’m beginning to doubt.”

“Okay, we’re done here. Lower your weapons.”

“No!” barked Dobbs. “Go to hell.”

“I can call the AG right now and he can order you to do it.”

“You can call the fucking president and my answer would be the same.”

“You’re way out of line,” barked the man.

“I’m out of line?” exclaimed Dobbs. “We’re federal agents!”

“I said we’re done here. Lower your weapons or they will open fire. Last chance.”

The FBI agents were nervously glancing at each other. They knew, to a man, that this would be a slaughter. Yet they held their line and did not lower their weapons.

“Very well,” said the man, shaking his head, as he stepped back behind the wall of armor. “You can’t say I didn’t give you the opportunity.”

Now Pine stepped forward. “Okay, I think this testosterone show has gone on long enough. We need to begin the negotiations.”

The man looked incredulous. “Negotiations? You have nothing to negotiate with.”

In response, Pine walked over to the closet door and opened it, revealing the nuke. “I have this.”

The man snapped, “How the hell did that get here?”

“Some people decided to do the right thing.”

The man gazed at her with contempt. “Who? David Roth?”

“I won’t get into specifics.”

“You’re all traitors,” barked the man.

“Or patriots, at least from my point of view.”

The man glanced at Dobbs. “Now do you understand why we need to take them? They’ve got a nuclear bomb.”

“How did you know it was a nuclear bomb?” said Pine. “From here it looks like just a metal box.”

The man blanched and glanced at Dobbs, who was staring at him grimly.

“Yeah, how did you know it was a bomb? I didn’t until Pine told me it was a nuke.”

“A Russian nuke,” said Pine.

“Russian!” exclaimed Dobbs, glancing sharply at her before looking back at the man. “Are they Russians?”

“No, they’re Americans working with the Russians. I actually knocked two Russians out who were snooping around Ben Priest’s home.” Pine gazed at the man in the suit. “And you guys got stung by Moscow. Really badly.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” exclaimed the man.

Pine put the bag she’d brought with her on her desk and pulled out the surveillance devices and dropped them on the wood. “Your Russian friends included multiple cameras and listening devices inside the nuke.”

A few moments of silence so profound passed that Pine thought she could hear every smack of her heart as well as those of the agents on either side of her.

The man said, “How do I know you’re not lying?”

Pine tossed him one of the devices. “You must have had blind faith in your Moscow buddies.” She also tossed him one of the panel pieces that Roth had cut out. “I bet old Putin is smiling somewhere right now.”

The man took the device and the metal piece, walked over to the nuke, and placed the device inside a hole in the enclosure. Then he placed the piece of metal into the hole.

A perfect fit.

He looked at the other sides and noted the same holes in the metal.

Pine thought she heard him say, “Fuck.”

The man turned around. “So the Russians have proof we placed a nuclear weapon in the Canyon. Where does that leave us? Isn’t it game over?”

“No, because our side hasn’t ‘discovered’ the nuke yet and made the case to go to war with North Korea.”

“Why does that matter?” asked the man.

“Not starting a war and killing millions of people on bogus evidence that you trumpeted to the world is a helluva lot better than actually doing so. And that also means the Russians’ blackmail scheme just got a lot weaker.”

Blum stepped forward. “And it gives you the opportunity to craft a plausible explanation.”

The man stared skeptically at her. “Such as?”

“Such as you placed a nonoperating nuclear device in a cave in a canyon because you were exploring alternative methods of storage and were checking environmental factors.”

“Come again?” said the man.

Blum continued, “I used to do that with my old pennies when I was a child. In holes I dug in my backyard. Come to think, it’s far more plausible than trusting the Russians with the goal of blowing up North Korea. I mean, who would believe we would actually be that stupid?”

The man looked at her dully but said nothing.

“Or you can claim all the evidence they had was fake,” added Blum. “That seems to be a pretty popular tactic these days.”

The man shook his head. “No, that’s not going to work.” He looked pointedly at the armed men he had brought with him. “All of you are coming with us until we can sort this out. Now!”

“There’s something else you need to know,” Pine said. “We have electronic documentation of everything you’ve said tonight.”

The man flinched and looked around. “What?”

“My office is wired for video and sound.”

“And why do you have that feature in your office?” asked the man incredulously.

“I put it in after some goon attacked me. After I kicked his ass, he said I attacked him. So it’s to make sure it doesn’t ever again come down to she-said-he-said. It’s already been uploaded to a secure cloud.”

“How do I know you’re not bluffing?”

“That’s the beauty of it. You don’t.”

Blum stepped forward. “And just so you know, I’ve worked closely with Agent Pine for quite a while now. And never, not once, have I known her to bluff.”

The man shifted his gaze from Blum to Pine. “And your point?”

“If anything happens to me, Ms. Blum, David Roth, anyone connected to this case, or anyone else in this room, I’m talking everything from a hangnail to a job demotion to murder, your involvement in all of this will come out.”

The man stared at her for several long moments. He looked down at the surveillance device he still held in his hand and then over at the bomb. Finally, he glanced up at Pine and his features took on a resigned look.

Reading his expression, she added, “It’s the only way any of us get out of this. I think you’re plenty smart enough to see that.”

Another few seconds of silence passed, while everyone held their collective breaths.

The man said, “All right. Anything else?”

“Ben and Ed Priest?” she said.

The man licked his lips nervously and said quickly, “What do you want?”

“They sure as hell better be alive. Or else all of you are going down.”

He hesitated for a moment. “They’re alive.”

“Then I want them back safe and sound and with appropriate compensation for the shit you put them through. And I’ll check on that, so don’t screw with me.”

“Done. So long as they won’t breach any, uh, confidences.”

“You’re also going to owe a lot of money to Oscar Fabrikant’s family. And while you’re at it, throw a ton of cash to the Society for Good. I think we need more, not less, good. And we know about Fred Wormsley. So, his family will be receiving substantial financial support for his patriotic service to his country.”

“All right, anything else?” the man said tightly.

Her features turned somber. “There are three bodies in a cave in the Grand Canyon. Three of your guys.”

“You killed three of our men?” said the man incredulously.

“Well, I didn’t have much choice, considering they were trying to kill me. But I want their bodies retrieved and turned over to their families. And if they were military, I want their families to be taken care of. And their service records will not reflect any of this. They go out clean with full honors.”

“How magnanimous of you,” he said sarcastically.

“They were killed following orders, probably your orders. My beef wasn’t with them. I would have much preferred to have shot you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said testily. “In case you and I run across each other again.”

She looked at him, a smile playing over her lips. “You could have taken me along with the Priest brothers. Or you just could have killed me. But you didn’t.”

“Well, all I can say is, I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

She studied him. “You wanted me to keep working the investigation.”

Dobbs said, “But, Pine, why would they want that?”

“Because they needed help to find Roth and the bomb.”

“We could have just captured you and made you tell us where Roth was.”

“Later on, you made attempts to do just that at the airport and at the apartment where I was staying but failed. What you did know was that a nuke was in a cave in the Grand Canyon. Only it was no longer in the cave where your people had originally put it. So, you thought you’d enlist me, however unwittingly, to find it for you. You just expected your men to capture me when I got to the bomb. Only they didn’t.”

The man’s face had lost its sneer and he looked at her with grudging admiration. “Maybe I hope our paths don’t cross again.”

She hooked a finger in the direction of the closet. “And you’ll need to take that thing. I don’t think the Bureau has a nuclear weapons rider on its liability insurance.”

“I already had that on my to-do list,” he replied sarcastically. “Anything else?”

“One more thing. Maybe the most important of all.”

“What?”

Pine gathered herself and blurted out, “Stop trusting the freaking Russians. They are not our friend.”

The man looked at her strangely for a moment and then turned to his men, pointed to the closet, and said, “Get that thing and then let’s go.”

The personnel instantly lowered their weapons. Four of them hustled over to the closet and lifted up the bomb. They all filed out of the room.

The suit was the last to leave.

He looked directly at Pine. “You’ve done irreparable damage to this country.”

“No, I think I actually just saved it. Along with a few million lives. My only regret is that you and every other idiot behind this won’t be going to prison for the rest of your lives. Now get out of my office!”

The man stormed out, leaving six FBI agents and one FBI secretary exhaling long, relieved breaths. They all lowered their weapons, their arms collectively shaking from holding their weapons in a firing stance for so long.

A pale-faced Dobbs looked at Pine and barked, “What in the living hell was that, Pine?”

“Basically, Americans behaving really badly, sir.”

Blum stepped over to face Dobbs. “While we’re asking for things, we’ll need the doors replaced. And Agent Pine needs a new chair.”

Dobbs snorted but then looked at Pine. “You weren’t bluffing that asshole, were you? About your office being wired and all?”

Pine opened her desk drawer, revealing a small metal box inside. She hit a button and a tray slid out. She took out the DVD inside the tray and handed it to Dobbs.

“FBI agents don’t bluff, sir. At least not when it really matters.”

He looked down at the DVD and then glanced up at her.

She said, “I would respectfully suggest that you use that to full advantage.”

Dobbs nodded again, pocketed the DVD, and then glanced around the room before looking at Blum.

“Hell, buy all-new stuff for this place, Carol. Your office included. And send me the bill.”

“Thank you, SAIC Dobbs.”

Dobbs and his men left.

Now it was just Pine and Blum.

Pine sat in her rickety chair while Blum perched on the edge of the desk.

“Well, thank God that’s over,” remarked Blum.

“Is it over, Carol?”

“Well, for tonight it is.”

“I’ll take that,” said Pine. “And by the way, you can’t retire. I need you.”

Blum smiled sweetly. “Oh, I’m not retiring, Agent Pine. Unlike you, I was just bluffing.”