Private L.A. Read online

  “I could go for a burger,” Hernandez admitted. “Though what I’d really like is a prime New York steak.”

  “No big spending in the next few weeks,” Cobb cautioned.

  “I’ll pass on the burger, start getting my gear together,” Nickerson said.

  “Double cheese with bacon with a large order of onion rings sounds like the right thing before packing up,” Kelleher said.

  “You three go ahead,” Watson said. “I want to get the account numbers to you as quickly as possible. Look for them on your phone. I’ll be along right after.”

  Cobb gazed at him for a long moment, then nodded. “We’ll save you a seat,” he said. “Outstanding job, Mr. Watson. Absolutely outstanding.”

  Chapter 105

  “THE GOVERNOR IS going to fire me for gross incompetence,” moaned the state treasury secretary. “A hundred and sixty million? Are you kidding? That money was just transferred in here from the Franchise Tax Board!”

  Mo-bot was white as a sheet. “How did they do that?”

  The ladies from Cal Poly looked at each other as if communicating telepathically. Then Goldberg said, “The only thing we can come up with is the rest of the metadata on the file. The stuff that came from the state to us.”

  “Translate, ladies,” I said, feeling more and more eyes on me. Private had assured them the ten million would be recoverable, which it still was. But a hundred and fifty million had been taken from the state with no tick attached. They were looking for a scapegoat. I was looking very good for the role.

  Hollings said, “The passwords and access codes must have been referenced in the metadata that went along with the original transfer. Someone bright had to have recognized it, copied it, and then used it to go back into the account while it was sitting there, in effect, open.”

  “I’m fucked,” Watts said, growing red. “Fucked!”

  He began to slam his fist on his desk. “They used my password. Fucked!”

  “Any chance it went through our software?” I asked.

  Clarkson shook her head. “Bypassed us.”

  “Are you saying this is the perfect crime?” the sheriff demanded. “There’s no way to track it at all?”

  “No, I—” Goldberg began.

  “Wait a second,” Hollings called out. “The ten million. The first ten million. It’s moving again.”

  You couldn’t tell up on the Google Earth map until the computer scientist gave her machine an order and new colored lines appeared. They all looked like they were heading back to the United States, to Southern California. But not quite. The lines converged south of the Mexican border.

  “Banco Santander México,” Goldberg said. “Ensenada.”

  “Call that bank,” I said. “Find out who owns that account.”

  Special Agent Townsend said, “I know someone at the consulate here.”

  Ten minutes later, she hung up her cell phone. She was grinning.

  “The account holder is Edward Gonzalez. Mexican national. Claims to live in Tijuana, but does virtually all of his banking online.”

  “They have records of his user name, password, and IP address?” Hollings demanded.

  “They did,” Townsend said, handing her a sheet of paper.

  The ladies from Cal Poly were joined by Mo-bot, all of them feeding the information through various tracking systems too esoteric for me to grasp.

  Five minutes later, however, Mo-bot threw up her fist and said, “We’ve got them! They’re in the City of Commerce. That computer is live and online from a light-industrial complex east of South Atlantic Boulevard. The place is leased to a company doing business as L.A. Standard Demolition.”

  Chapter 106

  AND SUDDENLY THERE was not much Private could do.

  FBI, LAPD, and L.A. Sheriff’s SWAT commanders took control of the situation. If Cobb and his men were as dangerous as Carpenter had described, it was going to take a whole lot of firepower to corral and subdue them.

  By eleven that morning, teams were secretly staging in the Hobart Railyard a mile west of the address Mo-bot and the ladies from Cal Poly had given us. FBI snipers had already moved into the area around the building that housed the demolition company. They’d used infrared scopes on the exterior roll-up door and had seen evidence of two men inside.

  Were there others? Or had this been a three-man show that with the death of the drag-queen skater was now reduced to two?

  Had they flown? Or were they just out somewhere?

  Special Agent Townsend, in consultation with her hostage rescue leader, decided to wait to see if more conspirators returned to the garage, a confined space where they could be surrounded and taken without civilian injury.

  It made sense. From the high ground the FBI snipers had already taken up on the roofs, Cobb and his men would be sitting ducks if they tried to resist. It was a waiting game now.

  I yawned, realized I’d been up since three thirty. My stomach began to growl. I’d eaten nothing since the beer and popcorn the evening before. Well, if you didn’t count five cups of coffee and the stale doughnut I’d salvaged from a plate in the mayor’s office. In any case, I was ravenous. Townsend said there was food on the way, but that it would be at least another half hour. She added that I was good to take off in search of a quick meal. Unless something drastic happened, her teams were unlikely to assault the garage in the next couple of hours. She said she’d text me if the situation changed.

  I hesitated but then nodded, got the Suburban, and drove toward the east entrance to the railyard, listening to my phone messages. There were several from our overseas offices. Mattie Engel had nailed the embezzler in Berlin, caught him red-handed on tape. Good news, I thought as I cut across Telegraph Road onto Atlantic Boulevard and drove north. The light-industrial area was to my immediate west now. A few blocks away, members of No Prisoners were being hunted, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to help.

  The next phone message was from Peter Knight in London. He’d managed to extricate a very important client from the sex scandal sweeping through Parliament. Our client had nothing to do with it, only a tangential link at best. But she was young and a royal of some note. While the British tabloids are notoriously carnivorous when it comes to political sex scandals, even the whiff of a royal political sex scandal would have provoked a feeding frenzy that would likely have tainted her reputation for life.

  “Well done, Peter,” I said, leaving a message on his phone at work. Knight was also the man who’d stopped the maniac who’d stalked the summer Olympics in London last year.

  I crossed Whittier Boulevard thinking that Knight deserved another pay raise, and so did Mattie Engel. I also wondered if I might be able to convince Knight to transfer to our New York or Los Angeles offices. The widowed father of two was carrying on a long-distance relationship with Hunter Pierce, the American doctor and diver who’d so dramatically won the ten-meter platform gold medal at the …

  I passed the Robby Eden Café, the first decent restaurant I’d seen since leaving the railyard. I’d eaten there several times and fondly remembered the “Bobby’s Best” sandwich, a hot pastrami and melted provolone cheese on toasted pumpernickel rye that came with a side order of perfectly crisp onion rings. My stomach growled loudly in approval of a repeat visit, and I parallel parked a block to the north of the strip mall that Bobby’s called home.

  It was pushing noon by that point, and not surprisingly the café’s booths were jammed. But I spotted an open stool at the counter, and the hostess said by all means. I took a seat, my eyes burning and my ears buzzing from fatigue.

  A waitress named Alice came over, and I gave her my order along with a request for a bottomless cup of coffee. She said it all would be right up and walked away.

  I yawned again, pulled out my phone, checked for text messages, found one from Justine alerting me to the fact she had a doctor’s appointment and would be unavailable between four and five that afternoon. At first I was annoyed. Why did I need to know …
?

  Wait, was Justine sick? Was that why she’d been acting so strange lately?

  A handful of horrible diagnoses tumbled through my brain, and the hunger gnawing in my stomach disappeared, replaced by a sickening feeling. What could she have …?

  “Thanks, Alice,” a man said somewhere behind me and well to my left. His voice was hoarse and hinted at a midwestern accent.

  “You be in tomorrow, boys?” the waitress asked.

  “Nope,” the man said. “Got a job in Phoenix to take care of.”

  For some reason, I glanced across the counter at the mirror on the wall facing me. Three men in green work clothes were paying up in the second-farthest booth by the window. Two of them I could see only from behind, a burly Hispanic fellow and a taller Caucasian with wild red hair.

  The third man was quartering to my position, however, offering me a look at the right side of his face and chest. Gaunt, with iron-gray hair, he was busy putting cash on the table and laughing at something the other men had said. I almost looked away, but then one of them, the Latino, began to hum that old Doors tune “Peace Frog.”

  The guy sitting opposite him swung his attention away from the table, looking directly to his right, looking for the waitress, who’d gone into the kitchen.

  There was something wrong with the left side of his face. Unnatural. As if he were wearing a skin prosthesis or heavy makeup, or both. I stared into the mirror at the patch on the chest of the green jacket he was wearing: “N-O-I-T-I-L-O-M-E-D.”

  I flipped the letters in my mind. DEMOLITION.

  Chapter 107

  MY HEART BEGAN to slam in my chest.

  Cobb and two of his cold-blooded killers, whom I now recognized as Hernandez and Kelleher, were not twenty feet from me, eating at the restaurant closest to the garage. Wearing urban camouflage. Hiding in the wide, wide open.

  I looked away. For a moment I was unsure what to do. Robby Eden’s was crowded and they had to be armed. Any shooting in here could easily kill an innocent bystander, like the young mom and two kids sitting in the booth right behind the killers.

  I’d have to wait until they left, call Townsend to warn—

  The decision was made for me.

  Cobb began to slide from the booth. Hernandez beat him to it, getting to his feet, blocking my view of Cobb for a second and then stepping left to allow Kelleher to exit.

  When he did, I could see Cobb clearly. He was staring in the mirror, locked on my reflection, and then broke his attention away fast and in alarm. He’d recognized me somehow.

  It all went instinctual at that point, no choice of action but one.

  I went for the Glock in my shoulder holster, got it in one motion, spinning on the counter stool toward the No Prisoners conspirators, meaning to shout and threaten the killers onto the floor, fingers laced behind their heads.

  But Hernandez and Kelleher must have seen the warning in Cobb’s eyes. They ducked and twisted toward me, hands clawing for weapons.

  My first shot caught Kelleher in the side of the neck, blew him back onto the table. My second shot glanced off Hernandez’s rising gun, severed the tritium bead, and entered his skull through the right eye socket.

  Ignoring their bodies falling, ignoring the jerky movements of chaos rising all around me, the screams of panic and the muzzle blast ringing in my ears, I felt as if my gun sought Cobb of its own accord, as if I were nothing but a part of the weapon and not its controller at all.

  Cobb stood facing me next to the last booth in the restaurant before a hallway. A terrified young family cowered in the booth beside him. He grinned at me. A thin metal ring and post hung from his teeth.

  He held grenades.

  Two of them.

  “Drop the gun, Mr. Morgan,” he said, around the pin that locked the flip trigger on the explosive. “Or many, many people will die.”

  Chapter 108

  AT A GLANCE I could tell the grenades were not US made, but Russian, old Soviet F1s, the kind the Taliban used to lob at patrols in the high country north of Kandahar when they were really hard up for weapons.

  I knew this because fellow pilots liked to talk, and we’d hear from the patrols we were ferrying in and out of enemy terrain. The F1 is distinctive, with a long stainless spoon and a pin safety system exactly like the one dangling from Cobb’s teeth. The F1 is also obsolete, no longer manufactured, even back then, which meant that Cobb’s explosives were old, probably thirty, maybe forty years old. Another thing I’d learned about F1s in Afghanistan? The older they got, the higher the chance of a malfunction. That was why the Taliban hated using them. They much preferred the M10s we gave them back in the eighties when the Taliban was called the Mujahideen.

  So I put the laser sight right in the middle of his forehead. Cobb spat out the pin, said, “You shoot me, you take out Mommy here and the two kids and forty other people. So put it down, chopper boy.”

  “Not a chance, atrocity boy,” I said.

  “These little lemons throw shrapnel for two hundred meters,” Cobb said, yanking the second pin with his teeth, spitting it out. “Know how I know that?”

  “Because you’ve got the scars to prove it,” I said.

  “I do,” Cobb said. “So I’m not afraid to go this way. I’ve been here before.”

  Cobb looked beyond me. He roared at the terrified patrons and waitstaff. “Anyone makes a move for their cell phone, and I will lob this right into your lap.”

  He began to back up, and I realized there was an emergency exit in the hall behind him. I took a step for every one of his, moving past the dead bodies of his men, oblivious to the crying and terror all around me, intent on keeping the red dot of the laser sight slightly above and between his eyes.

  “How do you know who I am?” Cobb asked as he moved fully into the hallway. “They erased me. They erased all of us.”

  “A ghost named Carpenter told us who you were, what you did.”

  He recognized that name, turned bitter. “How’d you find us?”

  I stepped into the hall after him, released one hand from the pistol and waved it behind me, telling the patrons to get the hell out of the restaurant. The whole time I kept talking: “One of your men got greedy, transferred the ten million we were tracking into his personal account in Mexico. We were able to track that account to a computer with an IPO address in the garage where you set up the phony demolition company.”

  Cobb’s face tightened. “Fucking Watson. Fucking greedy little—”

  “He’s dead,” I lied. “Both your men at the garage are dead. Your two men here are dead. And Johnson’s on ice in a morgue locker. You’re the sole survivor, Captain Cobb.”

  Cobb’s back was to the emergency exit now. Behind me I could hear people gathering courage and fleeing. “Give it up,” I said, wanting his undivided attention. “You go out that door, you’re dying like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

  “How’s that?” Cobb asked.

  “FBI, LAPD, Sheriff’s snipers are waiting for you to step outside.”

  He hesitated and then grinned at me the way recon scouts used to aboard my helicopter as I landed them in a fire zone, smirking in the face of death.

  “I think you’re full of shit,” Cobb said. “There’s no one out there. If there was, it wouldn’t have been you they sent inside.”

  He pressed his butt against the lever. The door clicked, opened two inches. Light poured in. Cobb shifted his head to look outside, opened the door farther. His face was silhouetted now. The laser sight trembled on his temple.

  Chapter 109

  MY FINGER TIGHTENED on the trigger as my mind whirled with thoughts, options, and dire consequences.

  If I shot Cobb just as he was going out the door and I was lucky, he’d pitch forward and drop the grenades. What was outside? An alley? A parking lot? I had no idea.

  In any case, it had to be better than the bombs going off in here. If I was really lucky, the door would shut behind Cobb before they blew. If I was unlucky,
he’d crumple backward at the shot and drop the grenades, and I’d be shredded.

  If they went off.

  Cobb made the decision for me. He swiveled his head back at me and then made a quick jerking motion with his right hand, suggesting that he was going to throw the grenade at me. He sold the pump fake as well any NFL quarterback. I couldn’t help it. I cringed, shrank, just for a moment. But it was enough for the laser sight to slide off his head and for him to shoulder open the door and dart outside.

  I fired at the last of him. The round struck the steel door right behind his back. The door started to swing shut. Without thinking, I took four big leaps, heard a clanking noise, and kicked open the door.

  The second I saw the Dumpster directly across the alley from me I knew what Cobb had done and I threw myself sideways and down. The grenade defied time and blew with extraordinary force. I felt it like a giant hand slapping me, boxing my ears, deafening me, and dazing me.

  But I wasn’t cut. The grenade had landed in the near-empty Dumpster. The heavy-gauge steel walls had contained the explosion, forced the shrapnel upward like a deadly geyser. Knowing that what goes up must eventually come down, I threw my arms over my head and struggled to my feet.

  By the time I got oriented and turned, Cobb had exited the alley and was running diagonally across East Sixth Street. He disappeared from view. I felt slightly off-balance as I tried to sprint after him.

  Where was Cobb going? Anywhere but here? Or to a car?

  I got my answer when I reached the end of the alley and saw him running into a used-car lot on the north side of Sixth. I tried to aim but had no clear shot.

  I ran out into traffic. I still couldn’t hear much, but then caught over the din in my ears the honking of horns and the screeching of tires as cars tried to avoid hitting me. Were those sirens?

  My eyes were scanning back and forth from Cobb to the area around him. I reached the sidewalk just as he vaulted a fence and landed in a second used-car dealership. I crouched and scurried over to Atlantic, hearing shouts as I turned north, really hurrying now.