Top Secret Twenty-One

I knocked once, opened the door, and Briggs came forward, surrounded by prancing dogs.

  “Groceries,” I said.

  “What’s with the armed guards? You win the lottery?”

  “Ranger thinks I need security.”

  Briggs stood on a small step stool and emptied the bags.

  “A book?” he asked.

  “Yeah, remember before television and computers we used to do this thing called reading?”

  The dogs were milling around in the kitchen, watching Briggs.

  “How’s it going with the minions?” I asked him.

  “Most of them have the leash figured out. Gracie is hopeless. She always wants to run. I have to find a dog park for her. Bernie should be a circus dog. He can walk on his back legs forever. The bony one with the white tip on her tail is a real picky eater, but if I put a little cheese in with her food she gobbles it. Give me a couple days and I’ll have her fattened up.”

  “You like them!”

  “Except for Blinky. He bit me in the ankle. I think he has trust issues.”

  “I was going to help you walk them.”

  “That would be great! Maybe you can run a little with Gracie. I can’t keep up with her.”

  We got Gracie and three of the others hooked up and took them outside. Me, Briggs, four teeny-tiny dogs, and two heavily armed men. A new black Porsche 911 Turbo was parked next to the two Rangeman SUVs, and Ranger was standing beside it talking to his men.

  “What’s up?” I asked Ranger.

  “It’s a nice day. I thought I’d go to Atlantic City.”

  “You weren’t going to sneak off without me, were you?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “Can I talk to you in private?”

  I handed the dogs off to a Rangeman guy, and Ranger and I walked a short distance away.

  “A sick psychopathic freak broke into Morelli’s house and left his gruesome message on the kitchen counter,” I said to Ranger. “I don’t like it. I don’t like that he wants to kill me. I don’t like that he wants to kill you. And I don’t like that Morelli is now involved. I want this creep found and eliminated. I’m in. I know what he looks like and what he sounds like and what he smells like.”

  “What does he smell like?” Ranger asked.

  “Burning sulfur.”

  “I understand your emotion, but you’d serve no purpose today. You’d be a liability.”

  “Gee, that’s so flattering. Let me get this straight. You only have me tag along when I serve some useful purpose, like being a dumb bimbo in a bar.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are such a jerk.”

  “Babe.”

  I was pretty sure this time “Babe” meant I was giving him a cramp in his sphincter.

  He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to his car. “She’s coming with me,” he said to his men. “Jose and Rodriguez, follow me. Stay a quarter mile back. Keep channel 1 open. Roger and Mario, help Briggs walk the dogs and then return to Rangeman.”

  “I need my messenger bag,” I said to Ranger.

  “Why?”

  “Identification, lipstick, cellphone, and Morelli’s gun, which has bullets in it.”

  “Get it.”

  It takes about an hour and a half to get from Trenton to Atlantic City. For the most part it’s open highway, so if you’re riding in Ranger’s Porsche and he has his radar detector and laser scrambler up and running, you can make it in just over an hour.

  We were flying low today, with Ranger in his zone, driving in silence. The Porsche had paddle shifters, but Ranger rarely used them. Not even Ranger could shift as efficiently as the Porsche computer.

  I assumed that we were going to check on Viktor Volkov. I also assumed that Ranger had a full report on the trade show and that at some time in the near future he’d share that information with me. For the moment I wasn’t messing with his Zen by asking questions.

  He turned off Route 30 onto Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard and then left onto Fairview, into a neighborhood that was upper class if you were using ghetto standards.

  Viktor Volkov lived in a small cinderblock bungalow stuck between two other small cinderblock bungalows. Across the street was a two-floor cinderblock motel that rented rooms by the hour. Viktor’s house was painted a bright turquoise, his windows had iron security bars cemented into place, and a rusted-out junker car of indeterminate paint color was abandoned half on the road and half on what would have been, in a better part of town, a lawn. In this part of town it was hardscrabble yellow dirt.

  Ranger parked at the end of the block, and we sat watching the Volkov house and its surroundings for a half hour. One car pulled into the motel. That was it for traffic. No activity around any of the houses. No cats. No dogs. No kids. No gunshots.

  “According to my information,” Ranger said, “Volkov has a van that he uses for his business. I don’t see it here, so he probably isn’t home.”

  We left the Porsche and walked to Volkov’s house. The front door and back door were both locked. No answer to our knocking. No answer when we called his cellphone. Ranger used a pick on the front door lock and had it open in thirty seconds.

  The house was dark inside. Living room, eat-in kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. Shabby furniture that you would expect in this level rental. Black heavy-duty plastic body bag in the second bedroom. Looked like there was a body in the bag.

  “I have a box of disposable gloves in the car,” Ranger said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  “No way. You stay here. I’ll get the gloves.”

  I returned with the gloves and stood back while Ranger unzipped the bag. I saw that the body was covered with lime, but even with a thick layer of lime it didn’t smell great. I inched my way out of the bedroom and across the living room to the front door. I mean, someone has to guard the door, right?

  Ranger came out after a couple minutes, snapped his gloves off, and bagged them.

  “Male. Partially decomposed, but I could see enough to guess that it’s Volkov,” he said. “The corpse is clearly missing a heart, so that’s one mystery solved.”

  He pulled on new gloves and went room by room, opening drawers and looking in closets. He bagged the gloves with the first pair when he was done, and we left the house, closing the door behind us.

  “No way to lock up,” he said. “There weren’t any keys in the house. No house keys and no car keys.”

  “Vlatko wanted the van.”

  “And the identity. If you don’t have a stooge to bring airborne poison into a building, you might come in as an HVAC tech. I’m sure Vlatko learned from Rangeman. He’ll be smarter if he attempts to use the polonium again.”

  “Are you going to call this in to the police?”

  “I’ll have someone make an anonymous call from a phone card. I don’t want to be involved.”

  We walked the short distance to the Porsche, Ranger made a U-turn back to Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard, and we headed for the beach.

  “The trade show is at the Roland Atlantic Hotel,” Ranger said. “It gets a lot of the smaller conventions. There are seven hundred attending this one. Approximately half are from overseas. There’s a large bloc from Eastern Europe. I combed through the registration list and came up with several possible targets for Vlatko. He could also be here to take out someone who looks benign but is secretly an enemy of the state.”

  “The eye patch puts him at a disadvantage,” I said. “There aren’t a lot of men walking around who look like they’re seventeen and only have one eye. I doubt the woman in the consulate would have remembered him if he hadn’t had the eye patch. Maybe you should be working with the police to find him.”

  “If the police arrest him he’s inaccessible to me,” Ranger said, “and I don’t trust the system to permanently lock him away. It will be hard to tie him to the Rangeman incident, since the only witness is dead. If they catch him with the polonium he could be charged as a terrorist, especially if I testify against him. For ob
vious reasons, I’d prefer not to do that. I’d rather not have my black ops history made public. If they suspect him of murdering Volkov but can’t prove it, he’ll have his visa revoked and he’ll come back under a new identity to kill me and everyone associated with me.”

  “So we’re on our own.”

  “More or less. I have an FBI contact I trust. He’ll be working with me. And I have Rangeman.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE ROLAND ATLANTIC was toward the end of the vast Atlantic City boardwalk. It was an older hotel that had been expanded, given a fresh coat of badly applied stucco, and painted to resemble a birthday cake. The interior décor was also birthday cake with a splash of Easter basket.

  Ranger parked in the ten-tier garage that was attached to the hotel by a pedestrian bridge on the third floor and a covered walkway going directly into the ground-floor casino. He called Jose and Rodriguez and told them to find him in the garage. Minutes later, they parked beside him. Jose and Rodriguez stayed in the garage, and Ranger and I took the elevator and entered the hotel directly into the casino. It was almost noon on a Monday, and the gaming area was packed. Most of the people were senior citizens. More women than men. The younger crowd would come out at night.

  The noise from the slots was deafening, the flashing lights were seizure-inducing, and the amount of fat ass hanging over the chairs attached to the slot machines was horrifying. Because smoking was now prohibited, the overriding smell was that of whiskey slopped onto the Pepto-Bismol pink, Gulden’s mustard gold, and poison green carpet.

  “Unzipping that body bag didn’t bother me,” Ranger said, “but I’m going to have nightmares over this casino.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Nothing special. I wanted to see the space.”

  We moved from the slots to the tables, mentally cataloging exits, making note of the bars and dining areas. We took the escalator to the second-floor lobby. Check-in desk. Concierge station. More slots. Another bar. A restaurant advertising an all-day breakfast buffet and Bingo. The ballroom, conference meeting rooms, and a pedestrian bridge to the conference center were on the mezzanine level. The ballroom was empty of people but filled with round tables and chairs. It was set for a wedding party. White tablecloths with huge pink bows and pink and white artificial flower centerpieces, a two-foot riser with a long decorated table for the bridal party, a smaller round table next to the riser. The smaller table supported a massive wedding cake that was being cooled by a standing fan.

  “This is so romantic,” I said to Ranger. “Does it give you ideas?”

  He wrapped an arm around me, dragged me close against him, and kissed me on the forehead. “Yes, it gives me ideas, but not about marriage. Mostly about setting fire to this atrocity.”

  “It’s not that bad. It’s sort of growing on me.”

  What was really growing on me was hunger. I hadn’t had any lunch, and I was ready to kill for a chunk of the wedding cake.

  “I want to see the meeting rooms and the conference center,” Ranger said. “And then we need to look at the mechanicals.”

  “I’m thinking what we need is the all-day breakfast buffet.”

  Ranger glanced at his watch. “You have thirty minutes.”

  I went for the good stuff first. Waffles, bacon, sausage, home fries, scrambled eggs, slices of ham, and a sticky bun. Ranger went with fresh fruit and a whole-wheat bagel with smoked salmon.

  I cleaned my plate and pushed back from the table.

  “You still have ten minutes,” Ranger said.

  “I’m stuffed. I can’t eat any more.”

  “Then let’s move. I have a lot of ground to cover.”

  I tagged after Ranger, up the escalator to the mezzanine. He looked in every meeting room and crossed the bridge to the convention center.

  “Why do we need to see all this?” I asked him.

  “The trade show opens tomorrow at eight o’clock and ends Thursday at five o’clock. We think Vlatko is going to attempt to kill someone at the trade show. My best chance to catch Vlatko will be when he’s in this building occupied with his assignment. I have blueprints of the building, but I need to see some of the public area for myself.”

  “This is a big building. How are you going to find him if he’s in an air duct somewhere?”

  “Assassins only crawl around in air ducts in the movies. He’d be making a lot of noise and he wouldn’t fit. And after he dropped the polonium, there’d be the risk of self-contamination if he couldn’t get out fast enough. He’s going to use his disguise to get into a room or to gain access to the air handler that services the room. That’s assuming he’s going with the airborne polonium again.”

  “I get the value of polonium at Rangeman. He wanted to infect everyone who worked for you. Why the polonium here? Why doesn’t he just shoot his target?”

  “There are advantages to something like polonium. It kills slowly, so there’s not likely to be an immediate investigation. In fact, the death might not even be ruled a homicide. And if polonium is suspected as the agent of death, it sends a terrifying message to whoever else is involved.”

  We pushed through the double doors leading to the convention center and walked out into what looked like a food court with slot machines. The food vendors were shuttered. The slot machines were open for business. We took the escalator down to the cavernous first level and saw that hotel employees were setting up partitions and folding tables in numbered stall areas. Cases of booze were being wheeled around on hand trucks and deposited in stalls.

  “Hard to believe this room would be involved,” I said to Ranger. “It’s so big. Vlatko would have to have a ton of polonium to do the whole space, and I don’t see how he’d be able to target just one stall.”

  “I’ve been told that Gardi carried enough polonium to infect all of Rangeman and everyone in it, if it had been properly disseminated. The total volume of this room plus the second-level food court is more than the total volume of Rangeman, but Vlatko could probably dump enough contaminant into the system to make a lot of people sick.”

  “Do you think that’s his goal? To make people sick?”

  “No. I think he needs to eliminate someone.”

  We left the convention center, and I recognized one of Ranger’s men loafing against the side of the building. He was dressed in tan shorts and a powder blue three-button knit shirt, and he looked like a rhinoceros dressed up for a golf date.

  “Clever disguise,” I said to Ranger.

  “It gets better. I have a man on every exit, and I think Ramon is wearing a hotdog suit, handing out coupons to Good Dogs.”

  We walked the boardwalk to the casino entrance, cruised past more slots, and Ranger steered me to the bank of elevators going to guest rooms.

  “I’m told I have a room on the seventh floor,” he said.

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  He pointed to the earbud in his ear. “I can hear, but I’m not sending right now. Tank is at Rangeman coordinating efforts with my FBI contact. Hal is in the room, coordinating here at the hotel.”

  “Is your FBI contact onsite?”

  “No, but he has men here. They’re working their way through the hotel, floor by floor, checking all the air handlers.”

  “This is a big operation.”

  “Bigger than I would like it to be, but public safety is involved.”

  “Out of morbid curiosity, what happens if the FBI does the takedown on Vlatko?”

  “They talk to him, and then they accidentally turn him over to me for safekeeping.”

  “And he’ll escape from you, never to be seen again.”

  “This isn’t going to help my karma,” Ranger said.

  We took the elevator to the seventh floor, walked to the room at the end of the hall, and Ranger rapped twice on the door. Hal opened the door, and we stepped into a one-bedroom suite decorated in the same birthday cake style as the rest of the hotel. Pink and green wallpaper. White and gold furniture.
Pictures of big pink flowers on the walls. Pink sateen bedspread that would discourage an erection from the most manly of men.

  A dining room table seating six was positioned in front of the wet bar. On the table were stacks of files, a MacBook Air, a small printer, and rolls of blueprints.

  A slim Hispanic guy in jeans and a T-shirt was at the Air.

  “Ryan hacked into the hotel’s system,” he said, handing a paper to Ranger. “I have the room numbers you wanted.”

  Ranger took the paper, selected a file from the stack, and went to the couch. “Has Viktor Volkov registered yet?”

  “No, but he has a room reserved.”

  “With the help of the FBI we’ve designated seven men as being possible targets,” Ranger said to me. “All but General Semov have checked in.”

  “Is he the guy getting the white glove treatment from the consulate?”

  “Yes. He has the entire tenth floor. High security.”

  “Why is he so special?”

  “He went to soccer camp with the Russian president. He’s powerful. He’s rich. He’s ruthless. Some say he’s too ambitious.”

  “Who would want him dead?”

  “The list is long, and it includes his best friend, the president. It’s whispered that the president is worried about job security.”

  “So is Semov at the top of our list?”

  “He’s at the top for motivation but near the bottom for being realistic. He’s constantly surrounded by his military aides. It’s like Fort Knox on the tenth floor.”

  “What about the ventilation system?”

  “Every floor has a mechanical room with air handlers, and the polonium would have to get placed in the air handler for that floor. It’s not difficult to do. You can accomplish it with a screwdriver. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem, but as of a couple days ago, the tenth floor has been sealed. An HVAC tech would have to be thoroughly vetted and then have a guard with him. I don’t think Vlatko’s cover would stand up to that kind of scrutiny.”

  “Why is Semov here?”

  “He’s been invited to give the keynote speech at lunch tomorrow. He owns a distillery in Moscow.”