The Prince of Risk

21

There was a knock on the door and a head poked around the corner. “Boss,” came a squeaky voice. “Got a sec?”

Alex looked up from her paperwork. “Get in here, Mintz.”

Special Agent Barry Mintz shuffled into the office. He was forty going on fourteen. Tall, gangly, with thinning red hair, trusting blue eyes, and an Adam’s apple to rival Ichabod Crane’s, Mintz was the lone holdover from her predecessor’s team at CT-26. Those who hadn’t transferred out voluntarily, she’d pushed out herself. All except Mintz. He wasn’t brash, bold, or confident, which was how she liked her agents on the threat response squad. In manner and bearing, he was the opposite. He was quiet, self-effacing, and polite. Mintz was the guy in the corner no one noticed. And yet Mintz got things done. He was a six-foot-three-inch package of administrative whup-ass. When he entered the room asking if she had “a sec,” Alex knew enough to put down whatever she was working on and pay attention.

“Got a call from Windermere,” said Mintz. “Guys found something at the scene.”

Alex tapped her pen impatiently. “Yeah?”

“There’s not just machine guns under the floor,” Mintz continued. “Looks like they turned up a lot more.”

“How much more?”

“Don’t know. But I think he used the words ‘a fuckin’ arsenal.’”

Alex dropped the pen. A second later she was up, throwing on her blazer, and coming around her desk. “Mind if I drive?”

“Sure…um…do you have to?”

“Attaboy.” Alex patted Mintz on the shoulder and led the charge to the elevators.

She remembered that there was only one thing that she didn’t like about Mintz. On the shooting range, he qualified last among all her charges on every occasion. His nickname was Deadeye.

In recent years, events in the Bureau’s history had come to have their own names, one- or two-word monikers that not only brought to mind the crime but somehow encapsulated the entire event: the criminal act, the investigation, and the aftereffect on the Bureau. WTC referred to the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in ’93. Oklahoma City, to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by the homegrown radicals Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Waco referred to the bloody and botched standoff between the federal authorities and the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh. There was Ruby Ridge and Flight 800 and the Cole and of course 9/11. With three officers killed in the space of a few minutes, Windermere was set to join that black pantheon.

It was this thought that filled Alex’s mind as she drove the Charger across Manhattan. She was under no illusions. Her career was history. There would be no formal reprimand. No mention of fault would be scribbled into her personnel file. Nonetheless, she was done. Within a month she would receive a transfer to a less visible and less important post. Or maybe a letter from headquarters offering early retirement, with a coyly worded suggestion that she would be wise to accept. They might even throw in free airfare to the retirees’ job fair held every January and June in D.C. But never again would she receive a promotion. Alex Forza had topped out at supervisory special agent, and all her privately held dreams of one day serving as the Bureau’s first female deputy director had been killed as dead as Jimmy Malloy.

Still, she refused to be sad. She was allergic to self-pity. She was pissed. Somebody was going to pay.

Windermere Street was cordoned off at both ends of the block. Alex flashed her badge to get through the line. Police vehicles clogged the street. She double-parked next to a blue-and-white and slipped her badge into an ID pocket and hung it around her neck.

The shooting was classified as a multiple homicide. The crime scene belonged to the NYPD. Normally a detective first grade would run the scene, but the deaths of three federal agents bumped things up the chain of command. She introduced herself to the lieutenant running the show, then passed under the police tape and entered the house.

Inside, the forensics teams were finishing up. A half-dozen men and women in white Tyvek “bunny suits” passed her on their way out. No one had cleaned up the spot where Jimmy Malloy had died, and the blood had coagulated into a crusty black pool as thick as mud. She halted, unable to keep herself from staring.

“Um, boss.” Mintz tapped her on the shoulder.

“Yeah, sorry.” Alex skirted the hole in the floor where Shepherd had fallen, ducking her head so no one would see her wipe away a tear. “Who’s running things for us?”

“I am,” said Bill Barnes from the top of the stairs. “Come on up. I want to show you something.”

Barnes was the ASAC for intel, and nominally Alex’s boss. He was a TV agent: tall, fit, a little too good-looking, hair too perfect, with a groomed mustache and twinkling brown eyes. He was wearing jeans and a white polo shirt with the New York CT logo on the breast pocket.

Alex hustled up the stairs and shook Barnes’s hand. “Hello, Bill.”

“Knew you’d be back,” said Barnes, not happily.

“For once, you were right.” Alex looked over the railing. “I thought all the stuff was downstairs.”

“We’ll take a look in a second. I think you’ll want to see this first.”

Barnes walked to the end of the corridor and gestured toward the last room on the left. Alex looked inside. Six cots sat at right angles to the wall, three to each side, in the manner of a very small dormitory. Each cot was fitted with a top sheet and a gray woolen blanket. Each was made to perfection.

Barnes took a quarter from his pocket and bounced it on the nearest cot. The quarter rebounded and he snatched it out of the air. “Mommy doesn’t teach you how to make a bed like that.”

“Looks like Mr. Shepherd was expecting guests.”

“Looks that way,” agreed Barnes.

The three FBI agents descended the stairs and made their way through the kitchen and into the garage.

“We found a passage cut into the drywall behind a filing cabinet,” said Barnes.

“Mintz said something about an arsenal.”

Barnes tossed her a Maglite. “See for yourself. And keep your head down. Especially you, Deadeye.”

Alex followed Barnes into the passage, turning on the Maglite as she entered. A set of tracks laid into the ground allowed a trolley to roll back and forth, she guessed, to facilitate moving the heavy crates. Ten steps in, the ground fell away to either side, excavated to create rectangular moats 4 feet deep, 20 feet long, and 10 feet wide. Crates stacked as neatly as in any armory-some the same olive drab as those that held the machine guns, others plain pine or painted black-filled the depressions.

“Done an inventory?” asked Alex.

“Preliminary,” said Barnes. “It’ll scare the shit out of you.”

He hopped off the raised dirt path into the storage pit to his left. Light shone from the hole in the floor where the assailant had fallen onto the crates of machine guns. Alex jumped down, then turned and offered a hand to help Mintz. The three walked among the wooden boxes. The first markings read Antipersonnel Grenades.

Oh yeah, thought Alex, she had put her foot in it.

For the next two hours she helped Barnes, Mintz, and several members of the JTTF haul the weaponry out of the garage so it could be tagged as evidence and examined. The tally included two crates of AK-47s, count 8; two crates of 7.62mm ammunition, count 1,000 rounds; one crate of antipersonnel grenades, count 20; one crate of white phosphorus grenades, count 20; one crate of Sig Sauer 9mm pistols, count 8; and four rocket-propelled grenade launchers with sixteen grenades.

“There’s enough here to start a war,” said Alex when they’d cleared everything out.

“A small war,” said Barnes.

“War doesn’t need an adjective in front of it.”

Four unmarked crates remained to be opened. Alex slipped a crowbar under the lid of the first and pried it open. Communications equipment. Kneeling, she removed a transparent bag holding one complete multiband radio set-receiver, headset, lithium batteries, and belt pack. The items had been removed from their original packaging, assembled as a unit, and repackaged.

“Eight sets total,” she said, handing one bag to Mintz. “I want a trace on all these items. Someone bought them somewhere. I want to know where and when.”

By now Barnes was working on the next crate. With a crack, the wood splintered and the cover fell to the ground. “Vests,” he said, removing a navy-blue protective vest.

“Why not?” said Alex. “They have everything else.” She picked up a vest. It carried two 4-pound plates in front and an 8-pound plate in the back. “Twenty pounds before your commo gear, your ammo, your rifle, and your helmet.”

“Whoever wears one of these had better be in shape if he wants to keep moving for more than ten minutes,” remarked Barnes.

“Someone who makes a bed you can bounce a quarter off.” Alex noted a slim band of white plastic peeking from a breast pocket. Deftly she slid out a folded rectangular booklet. The title on the cover read Walker’s Map of Manhattan. The numeral 1 was written in royal-blue Sharpie on the top corner. She showed it to Barnes and Mintz. “Check and see if all the vests have one of these.”

“Roger that,” said Barnes, as one after another the maps were discovered.

Alex looked at Mintz. “How many vests?”

“Eight.”

“All with maps?”

“Yes.”

“All numbered?”

“Yes.”

“So we’re looking for eight shooters,” said Barnes.

Alex gathered the maps and read the numbers from each corner. What had been a bad day got considerably worse. “We’re not looking for eight,” she said.

“What do you mean?” said Barnes.

“Take a look.” Alex handed him maps numbered 1-4.

“Yeah-so?”

And then she handed him maps numbered 21-24. “We’re looking for twenty-four.”

Barnes held the maps, saying nothing. Mintz winced and said, “But…”

“Hey, boss,” shouted one of the uniformed policemen who had been helping them remove all the crates. “Found one more. Almost didn’t see it way in the back.”

The policeman dropped the crate at Alex’s feet. It was small and slim, no more than 3 feet by 2 feet and as thick as a phone book. The markings on it were Cyrillic with numerals scattered here and there.

Alex took up the crowbar and pried open the box. Inside was a single metal tube, drab green, looking like nothing more than a plumbing fixture. She knew better. Gripping the tube at one end, she gave a yank and it telescoped to twice its length. Lifting it to her shoulder, she unlatched the vertical sight and put her eye to the crosshairs.

“That what I think it is?” asked Mintz, with equal measures fright and disbelief.

Alex spun and pointed the TOW antitank weapon directly at him. “Ka-boom.”