Michael Prescott: Next Victim

Was that so much to ask?

"Do we tell the AD?" Jarvis asked.

"Not yet."

"I thought he wanted to be informed-"

"We’ll inform Andrus later. Right now we’ve got higher priorities."

Nobody contradicted him, which was just as well. Jack Tennant wasn’t used to being contradicted.

Tennant was sixty years old, three years past the bureau’s ostensibly mandatory retirement age. He was tall and thick-muscled and bull-necked, and with his buzz-cut gray hair he looked like an aging drill instructor. In point of fact, he had been a drill instructor in the Marines during the Vietnam War, preparing the troops on Parris Island, and he still knew how to fire off an order in his gruff bulldog bark.

Restlessly he paced an office in the FBI’s resident agency at LA International Airport. Seven faces were arrayed before him-two agents he’d brought with him from DC, and five more who were among the twenty supplied by the field office in Portland, most of whom were out canvassing all hotels within a two-mile radius of LAX.

Last night, when Amanda Pierce had stopped at a motel in Salem, Oregon, after four hours on the road, she had received a call on her cell phone. The phone was a black-market model equipped with powerful encryption features, and the signal could not be tapped. But a long-range microphone aimed at Pierce’s motel room had picked up scattered words of her end of the conversation. It appeared that her contact in LA had called to change the details of their scheduled rendezvous. The microphone had caught Pierce saying, "…meet you at the hotel…"

The next words had been lost in the drone of ambient noise from freeway traffic and buzzing air conditioners. There was no way to know what hotel it was, but possibly it was near the airport.

The squad members from Portland were on the telephone, using either their secure cell phones or the office landlines, talking quietly and rapidly and taking notes. Five taxi companies handled nearly all pickup and delivery of passengers at LAX-America’s Best, Checker Cab, South Bay, United Independent, and Yellow Cab. The squad was putting in calls to all of them, requesting information on a pickup of a Caucasian female, thirty-eight years old, from the departures area thirty minutes earlier.

The remaining two agents, Tennant’s own men, were consulting blueprints of the LAX terminal and comparing them with single-frame images captured from airport security tapes.

But every one of them was looking at Tennant either directly or surreptitiously, and every one of them wanted to know what the hell Tennant was going to do now.

Tennant wished he knew.

His cell phone buzzed. It was Kidder, checking in from the hospital. Her preliminary examination showed no sign of injury, but she would be held overnight for observation-"just in case I was, you know, exposed," she said.

"You’d have experienced symptoms by now."

"Not if I had only cutaneous contact. In that case, symptoms can take hours to develop. And there’s no telling what that bitch might have done while I was unconscious. How are things at your end?"

"We’ve got everything under control." Bullshit we do, he thought. But there was no point in worrying a pregnant woman who’d been held at knifepoint only half an hour earlier.

Laura Kidder was the only other agent from DC that Tennant had brought with him. He’d thought the woman’s condition might be an asset-a pregnant lady was less likely to be pegged as part of a surveillance op. Great thinking on his part. He’d nearly gotten Kidder and her baby killed.

"Hey," Tennant said, "we didn’t have much time to talk earlier. You were in direct contact with Pierce. Give me a seat-of-the-pants psych evaluation."

"Hostile. Desperate." Kidder thought for a moment. "Ruthless. It’s all about survival for her now. She knows she’s been made, and there’s no going back."

"Kill or be killed."

"That’s my impression."

"Okay, Laura. Take care of yourself and that baby of yours."

He ended the call and turned to Kidder’s colleagues from the DC office, Jarvis and Bickerstaff, or J amp;B, as they were called. "You map out her route?"

Jarvis looked up from the blueprints and security camera freeze-frames. "She went straight to this exit"-he tapped a spot on the blueprints-" on the departures level and caught the taxi."

"Which, by the way, is against airport regs," Bickerstaff added in a voice like a sigh. The voice matched the agent’s rumpled suit and his still more rumpled face, a face that sagged with the impress of every frown it had ever known. "Passengers aren’t supposed to be picked up on that level. It’s for drop-offs only." He nodded toward the Portland agents working the phones. "So even if we do get through to the cab company, we may not be able to get them to admit they took the fare."

"We’ll threaten to subpoena their records. They’ll talk." Tennant looked more closely at the freeze-frames. He knew the camera wasn’t sharp enough to show the license plate, but at least they ought to be able to tell what kind of cab it was. "You can’t see the taxi logo at all?"

"Camera coverage is spotty outside," Bickerstaff said. "We can only see the wheels. Rest of the vehicle is out of frame."

"Another angle-"

"There are no other angles, sir. Spotty coverage, like we said."

"Okay." Tennant wagged a finger at them. "Come with me."

He led J and B onto the concourse, where they could have a private conversation. The agents requisitioned from Portland knew only the bare minimum about the case-that Pierce was a security officer with a government contractor, that she’d gone rogue, and that tonight she was planning to meet in LA with a representative of a black-market arms dealer.

That was all they had been told. They knew nothing about the purpose of the meeting-or the contents of Pierce’s suitcase.

J amp;B knew. Tennant could speak freely with them.

"This never should’ve happened," he began, though of course they already knew that.

"It’s not your fault," Jarvis said.

"Like hell it isn’t. I’m the one who fucked this up. I should’ve snatched her out of the motel in Salem last night. I was too concerned about catching her with the contact, getting a two-for-one deal. I should have prioritized differently."

The last words out of his mouth irritated him. Prioritized differently-had he really said that? After thirty years with the bureau, had he finally learned the jargon that every SAC used to cover his ass?

Bickerstaff tried to be optimistic. "We’ve got her credit card companies ready to red-flag transactions on any of her plastic in real time, under her real name or her alias. The minute they get a hit, we’ll know her whereabouts."

Tennant would not be cheered up. "Suppose she uses cash. Or suppose she’s got an extra set of ID and plastic we don’t know about."

"We only need to reacquire her before she completes the transaction, and we’re golden."

"And if we don’t reacquire her," Tennant said sourly, "we’re shit. Hell, she might be completing the deal right now."

"Even if she does move the merchandise," Bickerstaff said, "there’s no immediate threat. She’s a salesman dealing with a middleman. It’s not like either one of them is gonna actually use the stuff."

Tennant sighed. "We don’t know what Pierce might do if she’s feeling"-what was the word Kidder had used? — "desperate."

"That kind of raises an issue." Jarvis looked at Tennant. "I know you want to hold off on telling the AD, but, uh, don’t you think it might be time to bring the local recruits up to speed? They don’t understand the urgency."

"They understand their orders."

"Yes, sir." Jarvis didn’t sound convinced.