“Steve, where are you?” she asked in a tone edged with panic.
“Sounds like something is wrong.”
“Somebody took the three million dollars from my safe.”
Radek still had Tye. He had told Vail that no one could know about it, and he wasn’t sure that just because the money had been delivered, he could tell anyone. Maybe Radek wanted to hold on to her until he got away completely. “I’m sorry, Kate,” Vail said, and hung up, turning off his phone.
“Something wrong?” the woman asked.
“Let’s get out of here.” He led the woman up the stairs. On the second floor, he walked over to a window that was marked as a fire route and opened it. He helped her out onto the fire escape and followed her.
Once they were in his car, Vail said, “I’m going to take you to the nearest police station. I want you to tell them what happened.” He wrote down the address of the factory and Radek’s full name and handed her the paper. “Tell them there’s a large bomb at the front door that’s been disarmed, but they should still go in through the second-floor window we came out of just in case.”
“Aren’t you going with me?”
“I’m going to be straight with you. There’s another woman’s life at stake, and it’s better that no one know about her or me until I can find her. So if you don’t give them a good description of me or tell them I’m an FBI agent, it would buy me some time.”
“Are you really with the FBI?”
“Yes.” He showed her his credentials. “But not for much longer.”
“THAT’S IT, he’s sorry,” Kaulcrick said. “I guess we don’t have to look any further.”
They were in Kate’s office. “There’s got to be a reason,” she offered.
“Yes, there is. He wanted three million dollars.”
“You know he’d never do that.”
“Then why didn’t he give you an explanation?”
Mark Hildebrand recognized the charged tone and knocked on the door frame as a formality before entering. “Don, the United States attorney just called me. He’s been trying to get ahold of Tye Delson since that article came out, and they can’t locate her.”
Kaulcrick looked at Kate angrily. “Maybe we just found his motive. Quite a coincidence, the two of them and the three million all disappearing at the same time. Mark, get the entire office on this. We need to find both of them. Two separate investigations. Call the USA back and get a warrant for Vail. Theft of government property. See if he can’t find a way to get one for Delson too. Go!”
THIRTY-ONE
AFTER WALKING THE WOMAN INTO THE STATION AND POINTING OUT the desk sergeant, Vail turned to leave. She started to thank him, but he held a finger up to his lips, and she understood the only thanks he needed was her promise to keep him as anonymous as possible.
There was only one thing that mattered for Vail now—finding Tye Delson. Back in the car, he started driving. There was one unexplored possibility. And it was a long shot. When Vail had asked Radek who had been killed in the elevator, he had said “Benny,” from prison. And they had all been at Benny’s apartment before he sent his crew to kill Vail and Kate. Maybe that’s where he was holed up. It wasn’t likely Radek would give away any information that would help, but then he expected Vail to be dead by now.
When Kate and he had identified Radek through prison records, there was a report being assembled on his associates from the Bureau of Prisons. It was supposed to be e-mailed to him and Kate. But he never checked, because they had identified Radek and immediately began focusing on finding him.
The problem was that Vail’s laptop was still in his room at the hotel, and by now it was likely that the entire Los Angeles division of the FBI was hunting him. That meant, in all probability, there were agents waiting for him in his room. But he had no choice. Making a U-turn, he headed for the hotel.
When he arrived there, he drove around the block at a normal speed looking for Bureau undercover cars. He couldn’t see anything that indicated any type of outside surveillance, probably because they were afraid he would spot it. Ahead, across the street from the hotel, was a ten-theater cineplex. Perfect, he thought.
After parking in the lot, he went up to the ticket seller. When he told her it didn’t matter which movie, she gave him a strange look. “Don’t tell me you’ve never had people come in to hide out for a few hours.” She replied that if they did, they never discussed it with her. Vail was now sure she’d remember him and the open abrasion under his eye, which made his performance a little more sinister. The model for what would happen within the hour had been played out at the Biograph Theater in Chicago sixty-five years earlier when the G-men had to surround the neighborhood movie house to wait out John Dillinger rather than risking a shoot-out and endangering innocent civilians.
Vail had read the undisclosed but accurate accounts of the termination of the bank robber’s life one night after he had spent three days locked down in the bowels of the University of Chicago’s archives while finishing his master’s thesis, a period he found as dreary as one of the Russian gulags he had repeatedly read about. The special agent in charge of the FBI office, after missing Dillinger during a shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin which left three civilians and an agent dead, didn’t want any further embarrassment. So that night at the theater he went to the ticket office to see what time the movie ended. While they waited, he nervously made several more trips back to the box office with the same question to reverify the time. The ticket seller became so worried about a robbery that she called the Chicago police, who had been intentionally omitted from the case because it was feared that they couldn’t be trusted.
Vail knew that as soon as the FBI traced his cell phone call, someone would go up to the cashier and show her his picture. She would remember him and tell them about his “hiding out” comment. Hopefully, like with Dillinger, that would draw in all available agents, including those at the hotel.
Inside the theater, he found a hallway away from the mainstream and turned on his cell phone. He checked the GPS function and it displayed all zeros. The office had been “pinging” his phone trying to determine its location, which is why he had it turned off immediately after talking to Kate. It was how they had found Radek’s two-million-dollar cache. He dialed the hotel number and asked for the manager.
“This is Tom Mallon. I’m the manager, how can I help you?”
“Tom, this is Mark Hildebrand. I’m the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI. How are you?”
“Fine, Agent Hildebrand.”
“Some of my agents are over at your hotel on a surveillance, and we’re not sure which rooms they’re in. I need to talk to them on a landline. Could you tell me where they’re located? We want to make sure they’re in place before we go ahead with another part of the operation. I appreciate your continuing discretion in this matter.”
“One moment, sir.” The manager came back on the line. “Agent Hildebrand, that’s room 431. I’m told there were three of them. Would you like me to connect you?”
“Thank you, no. I’ll have someone call them on one of our security phones.” Vail hoped the manager would be distracted enough by the wonder of what kind of technology could do that, that he wouldn’t have any afterthoughts about whom he had actually talked to. Vail walked down the corridor until he found a large trash can outside one of the theaters, and dialed the weather. As soon as he was connected, he dropped the phone in the receptacle and walked out to the parking lot.
Vail judged he had at least a few minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, before they pinged his phone and reacted. He parked his car in a private garage across the street behind the hotel. In the trunk, he opened his briefcase, took out his handcuffs, and ripped off a couple of Post-its from their small yellow pad and put both items in his pocket. He used the rear entrance of the hotel and walked through to the lobby. He found a chair that was out of the foot-traffic area so he wouldn’t be noticed by anyone rushing out of the building. He settled down and waited.