John Sandford - Silken Prey

“That’s what you think , but not what you know ,” Bradley said. “I’m not so much worried about you. If he shoots you in the coffee shop . . . then he’d have to kill the witnesses. And he could do that. He’s essentially already done it once.”

Lucas hadn’t considered that, and said, “Huh.”

“You’d be better off with a couple more guns in the shop,” Bradley said. “Probably Jane and me. He doesn’t sound like the type to be looking at women as potential combatants: he’d be too macho for that.”

Jane was the other female agent, Jane Stack.

Lucas said, “Let me think about it.”

Shrake said, “Sarah’s exactly right. The rest of us look too much like cops, except Del, and he’d recognize Del. Let’s put Sarah and Jane in.”

Lucas eventually agreed, and divided the group in two. “I don’t know when I’ll be talking to him, but I expect it’ll be late afternoon or evening. As soon as I find out, the first shift sets up. We’ll monitor the meeting—I’ll be wearing a wire—and then we’ll take him all the way through the day, until he goes to bed. This could be a very long night, with the election. As soon as we’re sure that the night’s over, Bob and his guys will pick him up, take him all day tomorrow, and then the first shift picks him up again tomorrow evening. We’re all clear on overtime. As soon as we leave here, the first shift should go on home, or wherever, get your shopping done, get something to eat . . .”

When the bureaucratic details were handled, they broke up. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins followed him back to his office, where they talked some more about the surveillance aspects. A tech would put a tracking bug on Carver’s vehicle, and Del would try to get one on Dannon’s, if he could do it without being seen.

“The big question is: Is he gonna talk, or is he gonna stonewall, or is he gonna shoot, or is he gonna run?” Jenkins said.

“That’s four questions,” Shrake said. “It irritates me that you can’t count.”

• • •

THEY WERE STILL AT IT when Flowers called from Albuquerque. Lucas put him on the speaker phone.

“I talked to Rodriguez, and he seems like a pretty straight guy. He’s going to school here, he’s got a wife and a couple of kids. He’s willing to make a formal statement if we need it. It’s about what we thought, with a couple of other things . . .”

“Do tell,” Jenkins said.

Rodriguez told Flowers that military intelligence sources had pinpointed what they thought would be a meeting between two rival Taliban chieftains in a border village. How that intelligence was developed, Rodriguez didn’t know for sure, but he suspected the original tip came from a paid Afghani source in the village, and that had been backed up by electronic intelligence—the army had been monitoring the relevant Taliban cell phones.

In any case, Carver’s unit, which included Rodriguez, and was basically made up of a couple of officers and a bunch of NCOs, had been dropped five kilometers from the meeting site. The soldiers had followed a little-used ridge path into the village. The house where the meeting was to take place had been spotted by the informant, who’d placed a tiny multi-mirrored reflector, similar to those used on golf course pins, on the roof of the place.

When the attack team had gotten close enough, they’d illuminated the village—which was made up of forty or so houses built on the edge of an intermittent stream—with infrared light, and had spotted the sparkle of the reflector.

They’d entered the house at three o’clock in the morning, in a raid pretty much like any police raid. They’d found the Taliban asleep on an assortment of beds and air mattresses and on the floor.

One of the men had tried to resist and was shot and killed. The others had not resisted and were frisked and cuffed at both the hands and the feet and made to lie facedown on the floor, Rodriguez said.

When they’d launched the raid, they’d simultaneously called for helicopter support, which was waiting. But within minutes after the men in the house had been subdued, the raiders began taking heavy fire from neighboring houses.

“The choppers included a gunship, and Rodriguez said that from the air, they could see what looked like muzzle flashes from dozens of weapons,” Flowers said. “That was not supposed to happen. They realized pretty quickly that they weren’t going to be able to haul a bunch of bound prisoners out of there, so they decided to run for it.”

The attacking team did a hopscotch retreat back along the ridge, to where they could be picked up by the Blackhawk transport helicopters, with the gunships keeping the Taliban shooters out of their hair.

“Rodriguez and Carver were supposed to be the last men out of the house,” Flowers said. “Carver carried a SAW—that’s a light machine gun—and he went last because he could really lay down a big volume of covering fire. Rodriguez went, but then he heard smaller-arms firing from the house, and ran back because he thought some of the Taliban had gotten inside and Carver would need help. What he found was, Carver had executed the prisoners, shooting them in the head with his personal sidearm, a nine-millimeter Beretta. Rodriguez didn’t have time to investigate, or anything, this all happened in a few seconds, and then they were running for their lives. When they got back to their base, he reported what he’d seen. He was kinda freaked out. Carver denied it, said that some Taliban had broken through the back of the house, and if any prisoners were dead, they were killed in the firefight. Rodriguez said that the gunships had video, and the video didn’t show an attack on the back of the house, but it could have happened. Eventually . . . well, you know what happened. The army got rid of Carver and Rodriguez both.”

Rodriguez could have stayed in, Flowers said, but after reporting Carver’s action, thought he’d never be trusted again by the special ops people. “That’s all Rodriguez was interested in—special ops. He didn’t want to be in a regular outfit. But he said that he’d heard other things about Carver—that Carver had always been the first to shoot, that there was at least one other incident—Rodriguez called it an incident—in which civilians had been killed, and nobody had done anything about it. Rodriguez says that Carver was a killer, and that a lot of other people knew it, and that quite a few of them didn’t like it. So, they got rid of him.”

“Covered it up,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, that’s what it amounted to, although I don’t know what kind of investigation could have been done, given the situation,” Flowers said. “Still, I think you might be able to threaten Carver with exposure, tell him that he’ll wind up in Leavenworth, and he might believe you. I’m not sure that there’s any possibility of a real follow-through on that. At least, not in time to do any good in your case.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “You recorded all of this?”

“Yeah, of course. If you want me to, I could stay here, transcribe it, and get Rodriguez to sign it.”

“Do that,” Lucas said. “But try to get back tonight or tomorrow morning. We might need to stick the document up Carver’s nose.”

“Probably gonna be tomorrow morning,” Flowers said. “I don’t think I’ll get the docs done in time to catch the afternoon plane.”

“Then get the docs,” Lucas said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

• • •

DEL, SHRAKE, AND JENKINS watched Lucas make notes, and five minutes later call Carver. Carver came up on the phone almost instantly. He said, “Yeah.”

“This is Davenport, the cop that’s been following you around.”

“How’d you get this number?”