Dead or Alive (88 page)

Ibrahim shook his head.

To Hadi: “How about you? Give us what we’re looking for and we won’t take you back with us.”

Ibrahim rasped, “Don’t, Shasif ...”

Dominic walked over and knelt beside Chavez, gesturing
I’m okay
with his palm. “Hadi,” he said. “Let me put this together for you: Did anyone see you during the refinery job?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“So who knew what you looked like? Who could have leaked the sketch? Either Ibrahim or someone higher up. No one else.”

“But why?”

“Loose ends. Maybe somebody thought you were unreliable. Think about it. Ibrahim gets the order from the higher-ups to kill you; the sketch and message gets you to run. Ibrahim uses that to convince the other two to join the hunt. Otherwise, Ibrahim has to convince them to kill their friend for no good reason. Which is easier?”

Hadi considered this for a few moments, then glanced sideways at Ibrahim, who was shaking his head. Saliva leaked from the corners of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. “It’s not true.”

Dominic said, “Hadi, he betrayed you, and now he’s sitting right here beside you, lying about it. Doesn’t that piss you off?”

Hadi nodded.

“I know it really pisses me off.”

Dominic jerked his gun up, extended it toward Ibrahim, and shot him in the eye. Blood and brain matter sprayed over the wall. Ibrahim slumped sideways and went still, save his left arm, which twitched and flopped for ten seconds before stopping.

Chavez slapped Dominic’s arm up and away. “Christ almighty! What the fuck!”

Dominic stood up and backed away a few feet. Hadi curled himself into the fetal position and started whimpering. Dominic took two strides to him and pressed his gun to Hadi’s temple.

Chavez shouted, “Don’t! Not an inch, Dom.”

Dominic glanced sideways. Chavez had his own gun half raised in the direction of Dominic, who just shook his head and returned his attention to Hadi.

“Dom, don’t do it. ...”

Dominic leaned down and said to Hadi, “Unless you’ve got something to tell us, shithead, I’m done with you. I’m going to put a bullet in your ear. When I say go, you either nod or you die.”

J
ACK AND CLARK made it to Virginia Beach in twenty minutes and found some public parking a block from the beach. All of the purchases the Salim kids had made were within three blocks.

“So what’re you thinking?” Jack asked as they got out.

“They checked in at one of the hotels around here using a new card but did some shopping on the old one. We play marshal and deputy again, and show their photos around.”

For the next hour, they walked from hotel to hotel, checking them off Jack’s list as they went. They were walking into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn at Atlantic and 28th when Jack said, “They’re here.”

“Yeah, where?”

“Swimming pool. Two loungers near the diving board.”

“I see ’em. Keep walking.”

They stepped into the lobby. Clark stopped, pursed his lips. “Remember that flower shop we passed on Twenty-seventh? Go back there, buy some daisies or something. And one of those card envelopes, too.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll explain. Don’t come back the same way. Meet me in the rear parking lot.”

 

 

J
ack was back in fifteen minutes. He found Clark in the rear parking lot, standing beside a Dumpster. “They’re checked in under the same first names, last name Pasaribu. Their room is on the north side, facing away from the pool.”

“So we pick the door, go in.”

“Maids are up there. Flowers will work better.”

 

 

J
ack went up first, carrying the daisies. Clark went up the opposite stairwell and stopped at the top, out of view around the corner. When Jack reached the Salims’ room door, he stopped and knocked, waited for ten seconds, then knocked again. Four doors down, a maid came out of another room and grabbed some towels off her cart. “Excuse me, miss,” Jack said.

“Yes, sir?”

“I got these flowers for my girlfriend. I have to get back to the base, but I wanted to leave them for her. Problem is, I already turned in my card key. Think you could pop open the door? I’ll put the flowers on the bed and be out in five seconds.”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“In and out in five seconds.”

A pause. “Well, okay.”

She opened the door and stepped aside.

“Thanks,” Jack said.

Clark took his cue and came around the corner. “Miss, hey, miss ...”

“Yes, sir?”

“I need some towels.” Clark walked up to the cart and began pawing through the supplies, knocking soap bars and shampoo bottles on the ground. The maid walked over. “Let me, sir.”

Inside the Salims’ room, Jack dropped the flowers on the bed and looked around. Card key, card key ... He spotted it lying on the ashtray, snatched it up, and headed for the door. Back outside, he called, “Thanks,” and headed for the stairs. Clark got his towels and headed in the opposite direction, circling back to Jack’s stairs, where they met at the top. They waited until the maid stepped into the room she was cleaning, then walked to the Salims’ door, swept the card, and slipped inside.

“How’d you know about the card?” Jack asked.

“They always offer couples two cards, and most people take both with them—but not to the pool.”

“What’re we looking for?”

“Credit cards and IDs. Past that, anything that catches your eye.”

They were out in three minutes. Clark dialed The Campus as they walked back to their car. “They’ve got four more credit cards and three passports each,” he told Rick Bell. “E-mailing the details to you now.”

 

 

 

A
side from their new hotel in Virginia Beach and yet more meals from McDonald’s and Frappuccinos from Starbucks, the Salims had only one other charge: a rental car from Budget. Jack and Clark drove back to the Holiday Inn and found the platinum Intrepid in the rear parking lot.

“Now we wait,” Clark said.

 

 

S
hortly before two p.m., Citra and Purnoma came down the hotel’s back stairway and got into the Intrepid.

From Virginia Beach they got on the 264 heading east, through Norfolk, then into Portsmouth on the 460 before turning north and taking the tunnel across Hampton Roads Bay. On the far side, they got off at Terminal Avenue then Jefferson to King Lincoln Park at the southern tip of Newport News Point. Clark followed them into the parking lot and watched the Salims climb out and head into the park. They gave the Salims a hundred-yard head start, then got out, separated, and followed.

The park was only a quarter-mile long. At the halfway point, Clark and Jack met back up at the basketball courts, where a shirts-skins pickup game was going on.

“Where the hell are they going?” Jack asked. The park was bracketed on two sides by water. “They just traded the sun and surf capital of Virginia for this.”

“Doesn’t feel right,” Clark agreed.

The Salims reached the far edge of the park where it formed an arrowhead between the beach and Jefferson Avenue. As they watched, the girl got out a camera and started taking pictures—not of the ocean but across the highway.

“The cargo terminal,” Clark muttered.

 

 

 

T
hey’re doing reconnaissance,” Clark told Hendley and the others over the phone an hour later. They’d just followed the Salims’ Intrepid back to the hotel; now they sat on Atlantic Avenue, a block away, where they could see every car coming and going. “The Newport News Marine Terminal. What exactly they’re interested in, we don’t know, but they took dozens of pictures.”

“Any military ships berthed there? Chemicals, fuel depot?”

“Nothing,” Clark said. “Already checked. Mostly box ships with dry cargo. We’ve been on them since this morning. Aside from the pool and the terminal, they haven’t gone anywhere, and no one’s come up to their room.”

“If they’re scoping out targets,” Granger said, “this could go on for weeks. We’re not really set up for extended stakeouts. I say we tip the FBI and let them have it.”

“Give us another day,” Clark said. “If nothing pans out, we’ll pull the plug and come home.”

A
t the Claridge Inn in Saint George, Utah, Frank Weaver was showering off a day’s worth of grime and looking forward to a
Law & Order
mini-marathon on TNT when he heard a knock on his door. He wrapped himself in a towel and padded across the room. “Who is it?”

“Front desk, Mr. Weaver. We have a problem with your credit card.”

Weaver unlatched the door and opened it a crack. The door flew open and banged against the wall. Two men stepped inside, one shutting the door, the other taking two quick strides at Weaver, who began backpedaling across the room but not fast enough. He felt something hard pressed against his solar plexus, then felt a hammer blow, then another. He felt himself falling backward. He bounced once on the edge of the bed, then rolled to the floor on his back. He lifted his head and looked down at his chest. Just below his sternum, two pencil eraser-sized holes were bubbling blood. The man who shot him walked forward and stood over him, one leg on either side of his chest. Frank Weaver saw the gun’s muzzle lowering toward his face, and he shut his eyes.

T
HE SALIM SIBLINGS left the hotel at nine p.m., and almost immediately Jack and Clark realized they were retracing their earlier route to the Newport News Marine Terminal. In Portsmouth they turned off the highway and drove to a U-Haul Storage on Butler Street. Clark kept going past the entrance, turned onto Conrad, shut off the headlights, then did a U-turn and pulled to a stop ten feet short of the intersection.

Down the block, the Intrepid had pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside the first row of storage units. Citra Salim climbed out and trotted up to a unit, which she opened with a key.

“Don’t like this,” Jack said. “What do two kids on vacation need with a storage unit?”

“No good reason,” Clark replied.

Citra was back out. She closed and locked the unit, then returned to the Intrepid. She was carrying two small canvas backpacks.

 

 

W
ithin minutes they were back on the highway and headed into the bay tunnel. Once through to the other side, the Intrepid continued to retrace the afternoon route, ending up once more at King Lincoln Park. They didn’t pull into the parking lot, however, but drove past it, then turned right onto Jefferson and headed back in the same direction.

“Think they made us?” Jack asked.

“No. They’re just careful. We’re okay.”

They were in an industrial-park area: trucking companies, gravel suppliers, scrap yards, and boat repair shops. The Intrepid took another right.