Kirk Russell - Dead Game

“We’re stacked and nearly ready to go. You and I won’t go to the on-scene command post, but we’ve got a building we monitor from and afterwards you’ll get a look at the suspects. We’d like you to listen in to the initial interrogations. With these Eurasian gangs we get a lot of partial answers, things alluded to but not said, and you may hear something said about sturgeon poaching and be able to help us with the next question. We’re going to separate them and try to work a couple against each other. Some of these guys will get charged with enough to put them away for life.”

“All right, I’m on my way.”

He wheeled the truck around and accelerated. At this hour he’d probably get there in under ten minutes.

The FBI Sacramento Field Office kept a SWAT team, but Weisson’s was big enough that they had probably asked for help from San Francisco, which had an Enhanced SWAT team, one whose training included hostage rescue. The Feds prided themselves on gathering and preparing and probably had a precise plan for the takedown. They’d have layout diagrams, blueprints of the building, the whole works. If there was going to be a dynamic entry, then it was likely to be on the front face. Their usual MO was to show up with overwhelming force, seal and contain, then call out the suspects, one team waiting on the back side, one on the front, an extrication team standing by.

And they had a predesignated location they were gathered at now, a staged location where the on-scene SWAT commander would run the bust from. Blacked-out Suburbans with their runners on were already lined up, stacked and ready by the time Ehrmann had called him, and if they’d suspected him in any way, there was no chance the call from Ehrmann would have happened. He felt an odd relief in that.

Marquez waited now for the heavy steel gate to roll open. He’d heard the gate had cost eight hundred thousand dollars and could stop an eighteen-wheeler at fifty-five miles an hour. Ehrmann walked out as the gate opened and directed Marquez where to park. A few minutes later they left in Ehrmann’s car.

“How many are in the building?”

“Five and some bodyguards, and then there’s us.”

He smiled over at Marquez, but Ehrmann didn’t really have the demeanor of a field guy, and his joking lacked the feel of someone who’d been there. It made Marquez think of some of the new aspects of the Bureau. The weight had shifted from CID and criminal investigation into the still amorphous fight against terrorism. Taking on Eurasian criminal gangs required an international scope and understanding of elaborate computer crime and sophisticated networks overlapping countries. It took a different kind of breed. Ehrmann was probably very adept with a computer. He thought of what Anna had said yesterday about Karsov owning a yacht he kept in the Med and a house in Switzerland.

“Is Karsov here?”

“We hope he is, and we think we watched him arrive, though the vehicle’s windows were tinted.”

“What else do you expect to find in there?”

“Weapons that came in disguised as car parts.”

“Is that what this has always been about?”

“Yes.”

So it was all coming out now. Ehrmann was suddenly very upfront and nervous too. His hands moved constantly. A long investigation was coming down to a moment. Marquez listened to the back-and-forth radio chatter, listened to Ehrmann’s responses. Weisson’s had been color-coded by SWAT. The front was red, the back side black, the west end green, east blue, and the roof purple. The purple team would go in first and access the roof. A helicopter was on its way. They drove up to a drab building a good mile from Weisson’s, and Marquez saw a line of cars and several TV vans. He had thought they’d be as close as the on-scene SWAT commander, and Ehrmann guessed what he was thinking.

“This is as close as we get.”

“Is Douglas with the SWAT commander?”

“He is.”

“He’s been part of your investigation.”

Not really a question. He just wanted to confirm it.

“Since the start, he’s been part of this since day one. I’ll tell you something else, when we take Karsov into custody tonight, the world becomes just a little bit safer.”

“He’s that big a deal?”

“He is. You ready to go in?”

When they walked in Marquez saw the media being briefed in a room out front. A spokesman for the FBI pointed at the class picture, the faces of the suspects they hoped to arrest, pinned up on a wall. A few heads turned their direction as they moved past toward the back of the building. Marquez could feel Ehrmann’s pride as the FBI spokesman told the assembled press what was about to happen was “the most significant takedown of Eurasian Organized Crime ever in the state of California, the culmination of an eighteen-month investigation spanning the West Coast.”

Now they entered a room with a table and banks of surveillance equipment. It looked like a war room. Ehrmann explained the equipment and introduced him. SWAT didn’t need to crawl up to a rolling door and snake a camera underneath to check out the interior ahead of the bust. It was all right here on the monitors.

“How many cameras have you got inside the building?” Marquez asked.

“Twelve. They’re all up in the roof trusses.”

They had audio, had bugs planted in the room where the meeting was under way right now. It was all a little amazing, but the Bureau was flush with cash. He guessed there was two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment in the room. Three TV monitors showed the face of the building from different angles. But it was camera angles inside, the on-screen views looking down and across the working bays at a glass-enclosed and lighted office, that really said it all. They were watching the meeting in progress inside the building, watching it and listening to it. Marquez read the shapes of five men, four seated, one walking around.

“That’s the meeting room,” Ehrmann said. “The man standing is Karsov. We just got a positive ID and he’s not here for caviar or cars. When the price gets high enough he can’t trust his guys and has to show up himself.”

Marquez looked around the room again. His eyes were drawn back to the shapes of the men in the meeting. An audio tech took off his earphones, and Ehrmann put them on. Looking at the setup here, it was pretty easy to understand the disdain the agents who’d picked him up out on the slough road had shown for the SOU operation.

“Are you going to tour the TV people through here?” Marquez asked, and Ehrmann shook his head.

A radio crackled to life. The helicopter was less than a minute away, and SWAT started to roll toward Weisson’s gate. Marquez heard the copter pass overhead and focused on the monitors that caught the front facade of Weisson’s. One camera looked through the fence and rows of wrecked cars at the Mercedes and minivan parked parallel to the building near the rolling doors. Though he wasn’t part of the bust, anticipation rose in him. The energy in the room was electric. Ehrmann couldn’t stop moving.

“Three, two, one,” someone counted, and the power went out along the front face.

“We have snipers on the roofs of two of these abandoned buildings,” Ehrmann said. “And we’re moving onto the roof of Weisson’s. They’ll go down the roof access door to the computers on the mezzanine level if the gentlemen inside don’t come out as soon as we call them.”

“Will they answer?”

“We think the individual we’re calling will answer. We’ve been a steady customer for him, and the number showing on his screen will read as out-of-state. Unless the power outage spooks him, I think he’ll answer.”

They could hear the cell ringing through the bugs in place in the meeting room. It rang six times and went to voice mail. They called it again.