Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

cc: U.S. Army, Records Division, Washington, D.C. Lt. John H. Rourke, U.S. Embassy, Saigon, V.N. The Daily Iberian; attention news editor

Bosch stared at the second page for a long time without moving or breathing. He actually thought he felt the beginning sensation of nausea and wiped his hand across his forehead. He tried to think if he had ever heard Rourke’s middle name or initial. He couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter. There was no doubt. No coincidences.

Eleanor’s pager sounded, startling them both like a shot. She sat forward and began fumbling with her purse until she found the pager and shut off the noise.

“Oh, God, what time is it?” she said, still disoriented.

He said it was six-twenty and only then remembered that they were supposed to have checked in with Rourke on a landline twenty minutes earlier. He slid the letter back into the stack of papers and put them back in the envelope. He threw it back on the backseat.

“I’ve got to call in,” Wish said.

“Hey, take a couple of minutes to wake up,” Bosch replied quickly. “I’ll call in. I’ve got to find a restroom anyway, and I’ll get some coffee and water.”

He opened the door and stepped out before she could protest the plan. She said, “Harry, why did you let me sleep?”

“I don’t know. What’s his number?”

“I should call him.”

“Let me. Give me the number.”

She gave it to him and Bosch walked around the corner and a short distance to the twenty-four-hour diner called Darling’s. He was in a daze the whole way, ignoring the panhandlers who had come out with the sun, trying to fathom that it was Rourke who was the inside man. What was he doing? There was a part of this that was missing and Bosch couldn’t figure it. If Rourke was the insider, then why would he allow them to set up surveillance on the vault? Did he want his people caught? He saw the pay phones out front of the restaurant.

“You’re late,” Rourke said after picking up on half a ring.

“We forgot.”

“Bosch? Where’s Wish? She’s supposed to make the call.”

“Don’t worry about it, Rourke. She’s watching the vault like she’s supposed to. What are you doing?”

“I’ve been waiting to hear from you people before I headed in. Did you two fall asleep or what? What is happening there?”

“Nothing is happening. But you already know that, don’t you?”

There was a silence during which an old panhandler walked up to the booth and asked Bosch for money. Bosch put his hand on the man’s chest and firmly pushed him away.

“You still there, Rourke?” he said into the phone.

“What was that supposed to mean? How do I know what’s going on there when you people don’t call in like you’re supposed to? And you with the veiled references all the time. Bosch, I don’t get you.”

“Let me ask you something. Did you really put people down at the tunnel exits, or was that blueprint and your pointer and the SWAT guy all for show?”

“Put Wish on the line. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Sorry, she can’t come to the phone at the moment.”

“Bosch, I’m calling you in. Something is wrong. You’ve been out all night on this. I think you should-no, I’ll get a couple of fresh people out there. I’m going to have to call your lieutenant and-”

“You knew Meadows.”

“What?”

“What I said. You knew him. I have his file, man. His complete file. Not the edited version you gave Wish to give me. You were his CO at the embassy in Saigon. I know.”

More silence. Then, “I was CO to a lot of people, Bosch. I didn’t know them all.”

Bosch shook his head.

“That’s weak, Lieutenant Rourke. Really weak. That was worse than just admitting it. I tell you what, I’ll see you around.”

Bosch hung up the phone and went into Darling’s, where he ordered two coffees and two mineral waters. He stood by the cash register, waiting for the girl to put the order together, and looking out the window. He was thinking only of Rourke.

The girl came up to the cash register with the order in a cardboard carry-out box. He paid and tipped her and went back out to the pay phone.

Bosch called Rourke’s number again with no plan other than to see if he was on the phone or had left. He hung up after ten rings. Then he called the LAPD dispatch center and told an operator to call FBI dispatch and ask if they had a SWAT callout working in the Wilshire area in or near Beverly Hills and if they needed any help. While he waited he tried to put his mind inside Rourke’s caper. He opened up one of the coffees and sipped it.

The dispatcher came back on the line with a confirmation that FBI did have a SWAT surveillance in the Wilshire district. No backup was requested. Bosch thanked her and hung up. Now he thought he knew what Rourke was doing. It had to be that there were no men about to break into the vault. The setup on the vault was just that, a setup. The vault was a decoy. Bosch thought about how he had let Tran go his way after following him to the vault. What he had done was flush the second captain out, with his diamonds, so Rourke could have at him. Bosch had simply played into his hands.

When Bosch got back to the car he saw that Eleanor was looking through Meadows’s files. She hadn’t gotten to the congressman’s letter yet.

“Where have you been?” she said good-naturedly.

“Rourke had a lot of questions.” He took the Meadows file out of her hands and said, “There is something I want you to see here. Where did you get the file on Meadows that you showed me?”

“I don’t know. Rourke got it. Why?”

He found the letter and handed it to her without saying anything.

“What is this? Nineteen seventy-three?”

“Read it. This is Meadows’s file, the one I had copied and sent from St. Louis. There is no letter like this one in the file Rourke gave you to give me. He sanitized it. Read, you’ll see why.”

He glanced over at the vault door. Nothing was happening and he didn’t expect anything to be. Then he watched her as she read. She raised an eyebrow as she scanned both pages, not seeing the name.

“Yes, so he was some kind of a hero, it says. I don’t-” Her eyes widened as she got to the bottom. “Copied to Lieutenant John Rourke.”

“Uh huh. You also missed the first reference.”

He pointed to the sentence that named Rourke as Meadows’s CO.

“The inside man. What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know. Are you sure? This doesn’t prove anything.”

“If it was a coincidence, he should have said he knew the guy, cleared it up. Like me. I came in. He didn’t because he didn’t want the connection known. I called him on it when we were on the phone. He lied. He didn’t know we had this.”

“Now he knows you know?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what he thinks I know. I hung up on him. The question is, what do we do about it? We’re probably spinning our wheels here. The whole thing’s a charade. Nobody’s going into that vault. They probably took Tran down after he checked his diamonds out and left. We led him right to slaughter.”

Then he realized that maybe the white LTD belonged to the robbers, not Lewis and Clarke. They had followed Bosch and Wish to Tran.

“Wait a minute,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know. What about the alarms all week? The fire hydrant and the arson? It has to be happening like we thought.”

“I don’t know. Nothing is making sense right now. Maybe Rourke is leading his people into a trap. Or a slaughter.”

They both stared ahead at the vault. The rain had slacked off, the sun was completely up now and it set the steel door aglow. Eleanor finally spoke.

“I think we have to get some help. We have Hanlon and Houck sitting on the other side of the bank, and SWAT, unless that was part of Rourke’s charade.”