Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“No, thanks.”

Douglas went to get the other agent, introducing her as he brought her in. Elaine Hempel. She had a firm dry handshake.

“Elaine knows tech like you wouldn’t believe.” He felt Douglas studying his face as he prepared to continue. “We’re at a point where it’s going to make more sense to coordinate our efforts. We’ve talked to your chiefs about this.”

Marquez watched Hempel open a box and lay out telelocators on the desk. She handed him one. He knew the model, made by a Canadian company. He’d looked at them several times with the hope of buying sets for his team. They’d even got a couple as demos to try out, but they hadn’t had the money to buy this year. Telelocators went for two grand each, were an inch by an inch and a half in size. You carried one and you could be tracked real-time anywhere.

“These are a gift,” Douglas said. “Not a loan. We appreciate what you’re up against. There are ten, so that covers your whole team, right?”

Marquez nodded. Easier than trying to watch us, he thought. He hid his bitterness and picked up one of the telelocators, turned the black plastic in his hand, liking the small size.

“You let us know your operational intents on a daily basis and we’ll respond to the viability,” Douglas said. “We’ll handle overall coordination and risk assessment. We’ll determine what contact is made with Kline’s organization. At the end of the day they’ll all go down, Marquez. Kline will go down.”

“What do you mean let you know our operational intents?”

“You can shut down the individual divers all day long without a problem, but we’ll handle Kline and Molina. You don’t touch or make contact with anyone in his organization without clearing it with me first.”

“There’s the Bureau I know and love.”

“Everything I’m telling you, I’ve talked out with your Chief Baird.”

“Do you mind if I call him?”

“Be my guest.”

Marquez got Baird on the line and Douglas put him on speaker-phone and made a point of saying he and Marquez had been to lunch and gotten things figured out. They were just now handing over the telelocators, and Lieutenant Marquez had a few points of clarification he thought his chief would want to listen in on.

“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Baird said.

“Do I take direction from the FBI, sir?”

“Only if your operation is overlapping.”

“And how will we know?”

“Agent Douglas will coordinate.”

Douglas held up a telelocator, and said, “the locators,” so Baird understood.

“You know, sir, how remote the locations can be.”

“You’ll e-mail your daily report to the FBI, as well.”

“Is that right, sir?”

“That’s what we’ve agreed to for the duration of this operation.”

Marquez didn’t know what to say. “Any more questions for me?” Baird asked, breaking the silence that followed, and when there weren’t any, said he was late to a meeting.

Douglas killed the speakerphone with a finger, and said, “We worked well together once before.”

Agent Hempel handed Marquez the telelocators and briefed him quickly and efficiently on how they worked, how to get them up and running. She gave him her card in case he needed more help. But the word “together” didn’t belong here. The Bureau had figured out how to use his team as another set of eyes. They’d done the army one better and come up with a new-age dog tag. They didn’t care one way or the other about abalone and would share informa-tion only on their terms. Marquez picked up the box of telelocators and thanked Hempel for the demonstration.

“I guess we’ll be talking,” he said to Douglas and turned toward the door, his gut in his throat, his thinking clouded by surprise and anger.

When he left the meeting with the FBI he met with the team in a Home Depot parking lot off the frontage road in San Rafael. Their pickups and battered vans blended easily with the carpenter and contractor crowd and no one really paid them any attention as they parked off to one side, away from the rolling carts and foot traffic coming and going through the front doors. The parking lot was windy and vast and the faces of his wardens looked somehow more weathered and tired than yesterday. They wore their sunglasses and kept their distance, their postures quiet, an edge of wariness radiating from them as they waited for him to explain away their confusion and mistrust. He distributed the tele-locators as he talked, watched Roberts quickly drop hers on the driver’s seat of her van as though she didn’t want it touching her flesh. Alvarez turned his in his right hand while his eyes burned with the intensity and indignation of a man who’d just been robbed.

“What gives, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Are they going to tell us where to go and what to do?”

“They’re not going to direct our days, but whatever Kline has planned they don’t want us to get in the middle of. They’ll let us know if they have a conflict with our location, or who we’re following.”

“Do we need to get their approval for a bust or surveillance?”

“Or even who we build a case against,” Shauf threw in, and Marquez glanced at her, hands in the pockets of her jacket, wind ruffling blonde hair at her temples. He turned back to Alvarez.

“They’re planning to take down Eugene Kline, but they don’t know where he is and they’re concerned we’re going to inadver-tently blow it for them. That’s all I really know and my orders are to distribute these.”

It was the fourth time he’d said it. He felt the same way as Alvarez, but he’d stepped back into his patrol lieutenant shoes. He’d deal with it a different way.

“We may as well all go home,” Alvarez said.

“We’re not going to quit, but we are going to stand down for a day while we get it figured out.”

He heard the bite in his voice, felt his face tighten. They defi-nitely weren’t going to quit or let up. They’d improvise, adjust, find out what the FBI had going. He looked from Alvarez’s skepticism to Petersen’s quiet watchfulness, to the earnest face of Shauf, to Cairo’s bemused eyes, Roberts’s angry focused intelligence. The team had been larger three months ago. He probably missed Peter Chee most, for his clear reasoning.

“First they call off the pursuit of the Emily Jane and now we’re reporting to them.” Alvarez shook his head.

“They’ve got the money and the tech tools, maybe it’ll help us.”

“Right.”

“And we’ll adjust to it.”

“They’re pulling the strings. We’re puppets now.”

“Carry the telelocators and we’ll see what the Bureau can do for us. We’ll work the lead from Li, we’ll stay on Bailey, and we’ve got tips to follow up on.”

“Come on, Lieutenant, they just put a leash on us. By the time they get through analyzing each situation it’ll be too late. They don’t care about what we’re doing; it’s just shellfish to them. They’re busy saving the world.”

He could come down on Alvarez, tell him to get over it and forget the Feds, and he was close to it, but checked himself. Let them think it over tonight and they’d start focusing on the fish broker, Billy Mauro, tomorrow. He understood and felt the same frustration.

“We’ll start working on Mauro and stay close on Bailey.”

“Hey, maybe Bailey is working for them,” Cairo said, “and that’s how come he ran. He knew the Feds were there watching him. He could have gotten a ride out of there in a Fed car. Maybe that’s how he disappeared.”

“Bailey isn’t working for them. They don’t know much about Bailey other than his criminal history. They don’t think he links to Kline. I asked.”