Dangerous Games (38 page)

“I don’t want you wearing a heavy jacket. I want to be able to see your hands.”

He held them up, manacled at the wrists. “Get a good look.”

Michaelson was on his cell phone, speaking softly and urgently. When he clicked off, he gestured to Tess. She joined him, away from the others.

“Abby Hollister has disappeared,” he said. His jaw was working as he ground his teeth.

“I thought we knew that already.”

“We knew she left the field office. Now she’s disappeared entirely. I sent three agents to her address. They got the landlord to open up. He says she’s hardly ever there. The apartment is furnished, but there’s no sign of recent occupancy. And there was a break-in, but no obvious theft or damage.”

“So?”

“So it doesn’t make sense. Then they ran a credit check and found her paper trail goes back only so far. You know what that suggests?”

“Phony ID.”

“Phony ID, phony apartment, an unreported B-and-E—something is not right with this woman. I think she’s a ghost, like Kolb said.”

“And what do you want me to do about it?”

“Kolb also said she was working with you.”

“We’re not going over that again, are we?”

“This is your last chance to come clean.”

“I’ve got nothing to come clean about,” she said staunchly.

Michaelson glared at her. “When I find Hollister, I’ll learn what you’ve been up to. If it turns out you’ve been pursuing your own agenda, I’ll have your ass.”

She forced a smile. “My ass? I don’t think so. I’m way out of your league.”

“Keep it up, McCallum. I’m on the case. I’ve caught the scent.”

“Well, I guess that’s why they call you the Nose.”

He went pale. “Who calls me that?”

“Everybody. Didn’t you know?” She walked away, hoping Abby was as good at disappearing as she claimed.

Crandall and Larkin, both wearing DWP jackets, met her at the tunnel entrance. “I guess we’re ready,” Larkin said. “Unless you want to wait for LAPD. They’re sending a SWAT team, but it could take another ten minutes.”

The rain was picking up. “We don’t have another ten minutes,” Tess said. “Anyway, more people will only slow us down.”

“Then I guess”—Crandall coughed—“I guess we go in.”

She gave him a hard look, testing his resolve. He glanced away and said nothing.

“All right,” she said with a clap of her hands. “Mason and I lead the way. Kolb’s in the middle. Crandall and Larkin take up the rear.”

“Will your cell phones work down there?” Michaelson asked Mason.

“Not necessarily. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You can’t count on it.”

“How about the radios?” The feds were carrying Bureau-issued Handy-Talkies clipped to their belts.

“Same answer.”

“If we need help,” Tess said, “we’ll find a way to get the message out. Everybody have a flashlight?”

“Not me.” That was Kolb.

“You don’t get one. You won’t be going off on your own.”

“Tess, I’m beginning to think you don’t like me.”

She turned her back on him and spoke to Michaelson. “My cell will be on. If the weather deteriorates rapidly, call and let me know.”

“If I can get through,” Michaelson said.

“Right.” She said a silent prayer that the worst of the rain would hold off a little longer. “Okay—let’s go.”

42

Abby was a block away from Below Ground when she saw a lighted sign against the starless sky. A storage yard.

She thought of the padlock key. Although Kolb could have rented storage space anywhere in the city, most likely he would choose a familiar neighborhood. The area near his apartment would be too obvious. But who would ever think to look here?

It was a long shot, but what the hell. All she had so far was a generic description of a businessman who liked Ol’ Blue Eyes.

She pulled up to the gate, which was locked and could be opened only by entering an access code into a keypad. A sign claimed there was a storage manager on duty twenty-four hours a day.

She honked her horn approximately a million times until the guy showed up, trotting out of the shadows between the sheds. “What’s the problem?” he shouted from behind the gate.

Abby lowered her window and showed him the FBI tag. “I’m Special Agent McCallum of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I have a few questions for you.”

This guy, unlike the cop outside Kolb’s apartment and the bartender at Below Ground, actually tried taking a close look at her ID, but since he had to peer through the gate in the dark, he wasn’t able to see that the photo failed to match the bearer.

Abby didn’t want him looking for long. “You going to open up or what?”

“Okay, okay, give me a minute.”

He punched in a code on his side of the fence. The gate rolled open, and Abby pulled into the lot. She thrust Kolb’s photo out the window, where it was immediately speckled by raindrops. “Do you rent a storage unit to this man?”

“I don’t know every guy who rents here.”

“Do you know
this
guy?”

The storage manager took the photo and held it under the cone of illumination from a security light mounted on the fence. “Yeah, I’ve seen him around.”

“You know his name?”

“If you’re so interested in him, shouldn’t
you
know his name?”

“We have a feeling”—she used the plural to remind him that she represented the greater power of the Bureau—“this individual didn’t use his real name.”

“I don’t know it off the top of my head. Lemme look at the registry. When I see it on the list, I’ll remember.”

He stepped inside a tollbooth-size hut and spent some time hunched over a computer monitor. When he emerged, the rain was falling harder.

“William Johnson. That’s the name he gave. He pays in cash every month—which is unusual, obviously.”

“He gives you a name like Johnson and pays in cash, and it doesn’t occur to you that something funny is going on?”

“Hey, get off my case, Agent Scully. I just work here.”

Abby frowned at him, but secretly she enjoyed the Agent Scully quip. She would have to remember to use that one on Tess. “Just show me his unit,” she said in her most authoritative tone.

The storage manager jogged across the storage yard while she followed in her car at three miles an hour. He came to a corner unit and rapped on the metal roll-up door.

“This is it. But I don’t have a key. That’s our official policy. The customer keeps both keys. The only way we can get this baby open is to call a locksmith.”

“Not quite.” Abby produced the key she’d cut from the key blank, which she’d been prescient enough to carry in her purse. “I come prepared.”

She was one of the few people who actually kept gloves in the glove compartment, and she pulled them on before leaving the car. It seemed like the sort of thing an FBI agent would do. As the storage manager watched, she tried the key in the padlock. The copy wasn’t perfect, and she had to jiggle it a little, but she got the lock to open. She raised the door and turned on the overhead light.

Behind her, the storage manager thought of something. “Hey, you got a search warrant?”

“I don’t need a search warrant. Exigent circumstances.” In police work there really was such a thing as exigent circumstances, but Abby was pretty sure the current situation would not qualify, mainly because she was not, in fact, a law-enforcement officer.

“I thought you people always needed a search warrant,” the guy persisted.

“I thought
you
just worked here. Now I’d like to thank you for your cooperation. Leave me alone.”

The guy grumbled, considered putting up a fight, reconsidered in light of the fact that he didn’t give a shit, and walked away.

Abby explored the locker. The first thing she noticed was the carpet on the floor—cheap, short-nap, burnt orange. Now she knew where the fibers in Angela Morris’s car had come from.

There were shelves on the walls. On one of them rested a laptop computer, plugged into an outlet to keep its battery charged. Probably the hard drive contained useful information, but it would take time to defeat whatever security measures Kolb had installed—time she didn’t have, with the rain coming down. She needed some solid information, fast.

She looked through a couple of outfits obviously intended as disguises. Nothing helpful there. Stored near the clothes were false beards and other Halloween getups. She almost ignored them, then noticed a Ziploc plastic bag at the bottom of the pile. She pulled it out and instantly recognized its contents. False paper. Documents purchased on the black market that would allow a person to change his identity. She’d bought a few packets of fake ID herself, though nowadays she preferred to prepare her aliases personally.

She opened the bag and dumped its contents onto the floor, then knelt and rummaged through them. A pair of passport holders caught her eye. She flipped open the first one and saw a photo of an unsmiling William Kolb, identified as William Allen. It was smart of him not to use the William Johnson identity, which might have been tracked down before he could get out of the city. Smart also to keep using the first name William. It was always best to retain your own first name when assuming a new identity. A person had an instinctive response to hearing his name, which was hard to fake. That was why she was always Abby somebody—Abby Hollister, Abby Gallagher, whatever.

But what really interested her was the second passport. She opened it and saw the man who was Kolb’s partner. He was identified as Edward Ringer. In his photo he, unlike Kolb, was smiling—a nervous, self-conscious smile.

She’d seen that smile before. She’d seen it in the FBI field office earlier tonight, when this man had been the only person to congratulate Tess on Kolb’s capture.

The DWP liaison.

Mason. That was his name.

43

Tess and Mason stepped into the tunnel, followed by Kolb, then Crandall and Larkin. The Bureau sedan’s high beams cast the team’s elongated shadows down the pipeline. Tess caught a glimmer of movement near her feet and looked down to see small silvery shapes.

“Drain minnows,” Mason said. “There’s lots of aquatic life in here. Watch out for the eels.”

Tess wasn’t sure if he was joking. She preferred not to know.

They proceeded down the passage, shining their flashlights into the dark. Gang graffiti and taggers’ marks crawled like fungus over the round concrete walls. “I’m surprised the taggers come in here,” Tess said.

“They go all over. Not just taggers. Drainers, mostly.” Mason answered her questioning glance. “People who explore the drainage system. They have all kinds of names for themselves—drainers, creepers, infiltrators. They like to mark their territory.”

“Dangerous hobby.”

“Especially if you run into the mole people.”

From his tone, she knew this was no joke. “Let me guess—tunnel squatters.”

Mason shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta live somewhere.”

She thought of the vagrant she and Crandall had run into. Movement distracted her. A scurrying crowd of small reddish spiders, skittering higher on the walls, away from the flashlights’ beams.

The floor was slick with a coat of slime. Tess had to plant each foot carefully to avoid slipping. She braced herself against the wall with her free hand.

Behind her, Kolb went down on one knee. “Fuck.”

“Stop clowning around,” Crandall snapped, his voice cracking like a boy’s.

Kolb climbed awkwardly to his feet. “You try negotiating this shit in handcuffs.”

“Just move.”

Two steps later, Kolb fell again.

“This isn’t going to work,” Tess said. “He can’t keep his balance unless he can grab on to the walls.”

“What can we do about that?” Larkin asked.

Tess hesitated. “Uncuff him.”

Nobody moved.

“You think that’s a good idea?” Mason said slowly.

“We’ll never make good time if we have to stop every thirty seconds to help him up. And if he sprains an ankle, we may not be able to continue at all.”

“And if he makes a run for it?” Larkin asked.

“He can’t. Not in this slop.” To Crandall she said, “Unhook him.”

Crandall fished in his trousers for the key. “You’re the boss.”

He freed Kolb’s hands and pocketed the cuffs.

“He could have hidden a gun in here,” Larkin said. “Unhooking him might be what he’s counting on us to do.”

Tess knew it. “That’s why you’re going to watch him so closely he can’t get a jump on you. Right?”

Reluctantly Larkin nodded.

Kolb massaged his wrists. “Good going, Tess,” he said. “I knew you weren’t a total bitch.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Let’s move. We haven’t got much time.”

The water streaming into the tunnel from outside was rising higher and running faster even as she spoke.

For the third consecutive time, Abby got Tess’s voice mail.

“Damn.” She ended the call and stuck her cell phone back into her purse. Either Tess had turned off her phone or she was already underground, where the signal couldn’t reach her. If she was underground, Mason would be with her. He was the tunnel expert, after all.

Their plan was obvious now. They hadn’t been stupid enough to think Kolb would be set free. All they’d wanted was to manipulate the feds into taking Kolb into the tunnels, with Mason at his side. Mason would wait until the rescue party was deep inside the drain system, then slip Kolb a gun and stand back as his partner opened fire.

Massacre in the tunnels. By the time anyone found the bodies and figured out what had happened, Mason and Kolb would have collected their passports and vanished.

She let out a moan of frustration. Calling Tess hadn’t worked. Calling the Bureau field office would do no good—nobody would believe her, at least not in time. If she could track down Tess and the others in the tunnels…But she had no idea where they’d gone in. The drainage system was huge, covering the whole of LA. They could be anywhere.

“Damn,” she said again, for emphasis.

Still, there were always options. She was standing in Kolb’s private sanctum, surrounded by his secrets. There must be something here she could use.