Storm Front vf-7, page 11
part #7 of Virgil Flowers Series
Then he went home.
Unable to help himself, he checked his phone, and found that Davenport had called at 10:14, and had left a message. He turned the phone back off. His best response to Davenport would be to call him in the morning, at about seven o’clock. Davenport never got up before nine, but Virgil did.
Virgil got in bed, and thought about the day: and thought, uneasily, that he should have checked out the campsites mentioned by Sugarman, the lawn-mowing guy. If he could only get hold of Jones and the stone, then everybody else, with all their motives, money, and impulses, became irrelevant. They’d go home, and leave him alone to investigate Ma.
He considered getting up and going out, but then he thought about driving down a dirt track at midnight, coming up on somebody about whom he knew only one thing for sure: he was willing to shoot people.
He thought, Screw it, and went to sleep.
* * *
Virgil woke the next morning at six-thirty, did his usual twenty-minute shave and cleanup, microwaved some instant coffee and poured it into one of several stolen paper cups from Starbucks, and called Yael-2. “I am awake,” she announced.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. We’ll find a place to get breakfast, and plan the day. I have a couple of places we need to check.”
“I will wait,” she said.
Virgil got his bag and carried it out to the truck and fired everything up. He sat in the driveway and checked the GPS tracker tablet, which showed Awad’s car still at the apartment complex. Virgil backed out of his driveway and headed east toward the Holiday Inn Express, checked the time—6:59—and called Davenport.
Davenport answered on the fifth ring, groaning, “This better be important.”
“Hey, you called me in the middle of the night,” Virgil said, as brightly as he could manage. “I didn’t get it, but I figured it must be critical.”
“Fuck you,” Davenport said, and hung up.
As Virgil had expected, Davenport had called to rag on him about the TV interview. The whole episode cheered him up, and he was whistling when he pulled in at the Holiday Inn Express.
Yael was ready to go. Virgil asked, “Are you carrying a gun?”
“Good God no,” she said. “Why would I do that?”
“Atta girl,” Virgil said. “Let’s go get some bacon ’n’ eggs.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “I prefer not to burn in Jewish hell. I would like a nice morning salad, with some olives.”
“That’ll be a Mankato first,” Virgil said.
* * *
They had just ordered breakfast at a downtown café—Virgil told her about the GPS tacking unit on Awad’s car, and about the two places that Jones could possibly be hiding — when Awad called. He said, “This is Raj. I need to speak with you on the telephone.”
“Well, you are,” Virgil said.
“Yes, good. I now drive to the airport,” Awad said.
“You need some flying advice?”
A moment of silence. “No, no, I wish to speak to you confidentially.”
“That’s my middle name,” Virgil said. “Confidential.”
Another moment of silence, then Raj said, “I doubt this. For many people, this would be an unusual name. For you, it would be ridiculous.”
“So what do you want to talk about?” Virgil asked.
“I have a big problem which I have considered all night, and I finally have decided to put my life into your hands.”
“Hang on a second, my pancakes just got here,” Virgil said. Raj hung on, and when the food was delivered, Virgil started soaking it in maple syrup with one hand, and went back to the phone with the other.
“What’s up?” he asked. “You know where Jones is?”
“No. But I tell you this with great confidentiality, that an important figure in Hezbollah will arrive this afternoon in Minneapolis, and will take a car, and will come here to stay in my apartment, and then I am supposed to meet him with Jones. This frightens me, and I have decided that the only way I may survive this is to become an informant. So, this is what I do.”
“Very, very smart,” Virgil said. “What’s this guy’s name?” To Yael, “Pass me the pepper.”
Awad said, “What? Pepper?”
“I was talking to somebody else,” Virgil said.
“I don’t know this name, but I am told he is important, and will call me,” Awad said.
“All right, I will tell you what,” Virgil said. “You’re now my official informant, and I will do everything I can to protect you. If any of this ever comes to court and you are implicated somehow, I will protect you.”
“This is good,” Awad said. “How should we proceed?”
“Whenever you learn anything, call me on the telephone. I will listen for you all day and all night.”
“I will do this,” he said. “Do not shoot me.”
“I won’t,” Virgil said.
“This other figure, you may shoot him.”
“I’ll try to avoid that, as well,” Virgil said. “He will have to call you to make arrangements to meet. Call me as soon as you hear.”
“I will. I thank you, and my father would thank you, if he was here to do that.”
Virgil rang off, pleased with himself, and Yael asked, “What was that?”
“A man put his life in my hands,” Virgil said. “That’s always good.”
* * *
The bigger of the two Turks, the one with the knife, whose name was Timur Kaya, looked at the face of his cell phone, then pressed the “answer” bar and said, “Mr. Kennedy.”
Kennedy, a rental car clerk, said, “I have a location for you.”
“That is excellent. This comes through the hijack mechanism?”
“LoJack,” Kennedy said. “He shouldn’t be running from the cops in one of our cars, anyway.”
“You are quite correct,” said Kaya. He thought it was interesting how people who took bribes usually found a way to justify them as the right thing to do.
The location, which they got from Kennedy and spotted on their iPad, was at a nearby lake. By zooming in on Google Earth, they could see a cabin; by switching to the map view they could get an exact route to the place.
“This Google, I love this Google,” said the smaller Turk.
“When we are in the car, I will tell you my famous Google story,” the big Turk said.
They both had guns, and checked them before they went out to the Benz. “This time, this snake shot will not stop us,” Kaya said.
“Americans have a lot of very interesting sporting equipment,” the smaller Turk said. “Guns, everywhere.”
* * *
On the way out to Jones’s location, the smaller Turk said, “So tell me this famous Google story.”
Kaya said, “In 2008, I was sent to Iraq in coordination with the American Air Force. To Balad Air Force Base to observe operations. While I am there, I find that some of the Americans call this air base ‘Mortar-ita-ville,’ because, you see, the resistance fighters hide in the farm fields around the base, with a mortar dug in the ground, and they drop in a shell and walk away. So, five, ten times a day, a mortar shell lands on the base. Since the Arabs don’t shoot so well, nothing happens, except that the Americans make an announcement of the event on the loudspeaker. I don’t know why, but this is what happens — a woman makes this announcement. The people on the air base call her ‘the Big Voice.’ While I am there, an American sergeant shows me his laptop, with his Google Earth. He calls up Balad. You can see everything — buildings, runways, even individual helicopters parked on the flight lines. He shows me that you can find an intersection outside the base — a canal crossing, a deviation in a road, a group of palm trees. Then, using a Google measuring stick, on the Google Earth, you can get the distance to your target in precise meters, and the precise direction. So this, with a mortar, should be like shooting a paper target. But, the Arabs fail to do this. Why? I don’t know.”
“Lucky for you, they don’t,” the smaller Turk said.
“Yes. But I wonder. Does this Google work with the American government, with the CIA, to change distances and directions? Is this why the mortars never hit? Is something to think about.”
“I don’t have to think about it,” the smaller man said. “Of course they do. The CIA is everywhere.”
* * *
The rural landscape in Turkey and the rural landscape in Minnesota differed in one fundamental way: the roads in Turkey followed the contours of the land and connected specific places to each other. The Minnesota roads — the smaller roads, anyway — were built on a grid, with little regard for the movement of the land. The Turks found this disorienting. In Turkey, if you wanted to go somewhere, a road usually led directly to it. In Minnesota, you could often see your objective, but getting there was another matter, and often meant a series of zigzag turns until you found the road that went through that place.
In the case of Jones’s cabin, they could see where they wanted to go, but couldn’t get there in the car, without giving themselves away. They wound up leaving the car in a roadside pull-off, and after consulting with their iPad, walking through swampy ground around the south end of the lake where Jones was hiding. Their iPad didn’t show the minor vagaries of the route: on the way, they pushed through some stinging plants, which left little white dots on their hands and arms that itched like fire; and they stepped on patches of what looked like solid ground, only to find themselves up to their knees in muck. The smaller Turk momentarily lost an Italian loafer in the stuff, and when he managed to retrieve it, it smelled like rotten eggs.
And it was hot. Turkey could get hot, but this was hot and humid, and in crossing through the woods, sweating, they stirred up clouds of mosquitoes, which attacked like hawks. Pursued by mosquitoes, stung by nettles, ruining their shoes and slacks, they became annoyed, to the extent of about a nine on a one-to-ten scale, where eight was “murderous.”
And they were not quiet.
They didn’t know exactly where they were going, and they kept detouring around fallen timber, and crunching through some kind of heavy reed that grew in swampy areas. Then they were there.
They knew they were there because Jones shouted, “Who is that? Who’s there?”
As luck would have it, Jones’s car was parked thirty meters from the front of the small wooden cabin, and they’d emerged halfway between them. They could see Jones standing in the doorway, looking toward the area where they were standing. He had what looked like a pistol in his hand.
The smaller Turk said, “He has a gun.”
Kaya said, “A warning shot.” He lifted his pistol and fired a shot over the roof of the cabin.
Jones threw himself sideways, and Kaya was about to call to him, when glass broke in a window left of the door, and Kaya saw what appeared to be the barrel of a gun, and BOOM, from the muzzle flash, the blast, and the sound of a falling tree limb, he knew he was no longer dealing with snake shot. He dropped and rolled into the roadside weeds, which he would later discover were called “poison ivy,” and from there scrambled back into the trees.
“Go away,” Jones shouted.
The smaller Turk fired two shots into the cabin, and Jones fired back, a shot right through the wall of the cabin, spraying wood splinters up the driveway, but missing the Turks by a good measure.
Kaya said, “I will move closer to talk to him. You cover—”
The smaller Turk fired two shots into the cabin roof, moved sideways, fired another one, moved again.
Kaya was getting closer, and did a peek from behind a tree, saw a fallen log that looked like a good place to negotiate from. He dropped to his knees and crawled toward it, shook a sapling as he passed. That was one sapling too many and Jones fired at it, low, and Kaya felt the stinging impact in his buttocks. He rolled and scrambled deeper in the woods, and reached back, to touch the wound. His hand came back bloody. He called to the smaller Turk, “This donkey’s asshole has shot me.”
The smaller Turk, well covered by a burr oak, emptied his pistol at the cabin and then ran through the deeper woods, in a semicircular path, until he came back to Kaya. He knelt next to the big man and asked, “How bad?”
“In the back. Can’t see it…”
“Roll over.”
The smaller Turk looked at the bigger Turk’s butt and said, “Not bad, but it will hurt.”
“Did it go through?”
“It didn’t go in. It’s a trough. A bad cut.”
“Then a bandage will work. We should go.”
“Yes.”
“Before we do that…” The big Turk pushed himself up, braced against a tree, and emptied his pistol at the cabin. “God-damn him,” he said. He limped away, through the nettles and poison ivy, through the cattails and alders and prickly gooseberry bushes. They were coming up to the Mercedes, muddy nearly to their knees, the big Turk limping and cursing, bunching his trousers against the wound, staunching the blood, when the smaller Turk said, “Listen.”
In the distance, they could hear a siren.
“Now we are in a hurry,” the smaller Turk said.
* * *
Virgil was just finishing the pancakes and had asked the waitress for one last cup of coffee, when the phone rang again. Ellen — Jones’s daughter. He said to Yael, “Jones’s daughter. Could be something.”
He said, “Hello?”
Ellen started screaming at him.
Virgil couldn’t make out what she was screaming but pinned the phone to his shoulder with his ear and stood up and dug out a twenty and threw it at the table and headed for the door with Yael trotting behind, and on the sidewalk he started shouting, “Slow down, I can’t understand you, slow down—”
“My father,” she screamed. “Somebody’s trying to shoot my father. I’m going there, I’m going there—”
“Where is he? Where is he?” Virgil piled into the 4Runner and fired it up, barely noticed Yael belting herself into the passenger seat.
“A cabin — he’s in a cabin off County Road 18, West Elysian Lake Road, north of Janesville.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Virgil groaned. The cabin that Sugarman had told him about, that he’d spotted the night before. “I know exactly where it is,” he shouted into the phone, as he swung through a U-turn. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”
“I’m still west of town, I’m coming, but I’m way behind you. My dad just called three minutes ago, said somebody was shooting at him, he’s shooting back. He doesn’t think he can hold out.”
“I’m going,” Virgil shouted, and clicked the phone off and hit the truck’s sirens and flashers. When they’d made the big turn on Highway 14 and were rolling, he called 911 and told the dispatcher where they were and what was happening. “Are there any sheriff’s cars in the area?”
“Let me check, Virgil,” the dispatcher shouted at him. “Goldarnit, this is more exciting than string-cheese night at Lambeau Field.”
“What?”
“We got Frank Martin is about, mmm, fifteen or twenty miles south of you, but he’s not in his car, can’t get there for a couple minutes. We got Fred Jackson. He’s over to the west.”
“Get them started and anybody else you can find.”
“On the way.”
* * *
Virgil had been out to Elysian Lake a few times, caught a few bass and pike, and more carp than he’d admit to, so he knew the area: they were about twelve miles out. If Jones was being shot at, it had to be either the Turks or Yael, because he knew where Awad and Sewickey were.
He just finished thinking that when Yael said, “I find it very suspicious that this Arab called you just before the shooting started. He said he was driving to the airport and the GPS says his car is going to the airport… so he has this alibi that you provide.”
Virgil thought about that for a second, and said, “I couldn’t live with that kind of paranoia.”
“This is because the Hezbollah is not trying to fly a missile into your window every minute.”
“All right. I’ll put Awad back on the suspect list,” Virgil said.
“I think this is a good idea.”
“But I think it’s either Yael-1 or the Turks.”
“Let us hope it’s this katsa, and not the Turks. I don’t think she would kill us. The Turks… I don’t know.”
“Katsa? That’s her name? How—”
“Not her name. It’s her type. Spy… or agent. I ask you this: Why do you use your bell? They will hear us.”
“I hope so,” Virgil said. “We’re still eight or nine minutes away, that’s forever in a gunfight. Most gunfights last a few seconds. If he’s holed up inside this place, maybe it’ll take longer, maybe whoever is shooting will hear the siren and run.”
“Good analysis,” she said. “We want the stone, not the shooters.”
“I want the shooters, too,” Virgil said. “But mostly, I want to keep anybody from being killed.”
* * *
Seven or eight minutes after they left town, Virgil threw them off Highway 14 and onto 390th Street to West Elysian Lake Road, and then north, and then they were coming up on the side road that took them into the stand of timber that hid the cabin, and a couple of deer stands that overlooked a cornfield.
With the siren still wailing, Virgil took the truck to within a hundred yards of the trees, then stopped, killed the siren, jumped out of the truck, shouted at Yael to “stay there!”, got his vest and his M16 out of the lockbox in the back, slapped a magazine into the gun and put another under his belt line, ran into the roadside ditch and then started running through the weeds toward the trees.
The ditch was wet, so he moved left, and ran along the slope of it. He heard no shooting, nothing but the siren still wailing behind him.
Fifty yards from the tree line, he slowed down, looking for any kind of movement; saw nothing. He dropped into a crouch and moved forward, stopping, listening, although his hearing hadn’t yet recovered from the screaming siren.
