Cold Hit Read online

  “I understand,” I said softly.

  “But I want you to know I respect where you’re coming from. What I treasure most are your complexities.”

  25

  The next morning I drove down Abbot Kinney Boulevard heading toward IHOP for a stack of cakes and some coffee, before going into the office. As I pulled into a parking space in the adjoining lot, a tan Fairlane that looked like it had been painted with spray cans from the drugstore, screeched into the space next to me. The doors flew open and Rowdy and Snitch got out.

  “This is nice down here,” Broadway said. “Smell the ocean and everything.”

  “I’m assuming this ambush is because your lieutenant signed off on me,” I replied.

  “You buy the grits; we’ll see how it goes,” Emdee said and turned to lock the door of the car. It had to be force of habit, because there was nothing worth stealing on that wreck. It didn’t even have hubcaps.

  The IHOP was strangely quiet for 7 A.M.Wefounda booth in the back and settled in. Broadway and I ordered pancakes, bacon, and coffee. Emdee Perry had what he called a hillbilly breakfast. Pork sausage, oatmeal, and Red Bull.

  “Alright,” I said, taking out my spiral pad and pen.

  “No notes,” Broadway said.

  “Why not?”

  “In this game we don’t put stuff on paper. Nobody wants t’ face a bunch a subpoenaed notes we can’t explain in federal court.”

  I put the pad away.

  Emdee said, “We done some background checking and it seems you’re okay, but we also found out Detective Farrell’s bread ain’t quite out of the oven. Frankly, you bein’ hooked up with him makes us wonder how loose your shit is. The Loot says you been in some tight scrapes and didn’t leak, but what we’re gonna tell you’s gotta stay with you. You can’t go blabbin’ none a this to the task force, or yer partner, or anybody else and that includes your wife.”

  Roger Broadway leaned forward. “Most a this shit won’t stand up under a policy review. That’s why we need your word.”

  “You got it.”

  The food came and everybody dug in.

  “Okay,” I said between bites. “Why don’t you start by telling me why half the L.A. intelligence community was at Andrazack’s funeral?”

  “That wasn’t half,” Roger Broadway said. “That was just Russians, Jews, CIA, us, and two guys from the French embassy. You didn’t get no pictures, so you musta clean missed the Frogs. They were up on the roof of the main building.”

  “I can’t believe this dead Mossad agent was that popular.”

  “Classified information is getting out,” Emdee Perry said. “Even our shop is leaking. The embassy players in town are freaking. All we got in this business is our secrets, and all of a sudden, it’s like nobody’s data is secure. We think Davide Andrazack was over here to help the Israelis find out who and how.” He pushed his plate away. “We’re getting fucked worse than sheep at an Appalachian barn dance.”

  “Andrazack must have found out something,” Broadway added. “We think whoever is bugging these embassies caught Andrazack and whacked him to keep it quiet.”

  “So who’s planting the bugs?” I asked. “Russians or Israelis?”

  “Them two ain’t the ones doin’ it,” Emdee said.

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Behavior indicates result,” Roger explained.

  “I love when Joe Bob talks pretty like that,” Emdee drawled. “But he’s right. If they’s the ones planting bugs, they wouldn’t be running around like their hair’s on fire.”

  “Andrazack had Cyrillic symbols tattooed on his eyelids,” I said. “Translation: ‘Don’t wake up.’ I got a call from a friend on the Russian gang squad this morning. He says that’s a Ukranian hitman’s curse. Sounds like Andrazack was more a Russian than a Jew.”

  “He was both,” Broadway said. “Russian Jew. He repatriated from Moscow to Israel when he was nine. Joined the Israeli Army when he turned nineteen, then he joined the Mossad. He was fluent in Balkan dialects, so they sent the boy back to Moscow when he was twenty-five. His specialty was assassinations. Close kills behind the Iron Curtain. In the early eighties he botched a hit in Moscow and was sentenced to twenty years in Lefortovo Prison. Since Andrazack’s criminal specialty was murder, he used his skills on the inside to stay alive. He was whackin’ enemies of the Odessa mob for smokes. Ended up being the most feared killer in that prison. That’s why he had the Russian tatts on his eyelids. After the Soviet Union fell, somebody in the Mossad paid off a Russian commissar and he got released, went back to Israel. By then he was almost blind and became a computer geek.”

  “With a history like that, sounds to me like he would’ve had a lot of Russian enemies,” I said.

  “Bam-Bam Stan wouldn’t have been at that funeral if his Black Ops guys did the hit,” Broadway answered.

  “Who the hell is Bam-Bam Stan?”

  “The whale wearing the burlap tent. Stanislov Bambarak. Ex-KGB. ’Course nobody cops to being a KGB agent anymore. Stan says he works for the Russian ballet and symphony, but according to our intelligence file he wouldn’t know an oboe from a skin flute. He went to the Russian language and culture schools in the Balkans in the early sixties. He came out and mostly worked infiltrating MI-5 until they moved him back to Moscow. Guy speaks English like a Saville Row faggot. Putting the cultural stuff aside, the fact is, he’s still a frontline Kremlin operator. Back in the eighties, before his ankles started swelling, that bad boy was a fire-breathing sack of trouble. Still wouldn’t want to go up against him.”

  “And the guy from the Israeli Embassy?” I asked.

  “Jeez, you sure want a lot for a crummy stack of cakes,” Broadway complained. “Maybe you got something to tell us about the Andrazack murder first.”

  I gave it a moment’s thought. “Okay. The bullet we dug out of Andrazack’s head was a five-forty-five caliber. We think it came from a PSM Automatic.”

  “The best damn piece ever for close kills,” Emdee said. “You get a ballistics match?”

  “Still waiting. I’ll let you know if the slug ties up to any old cases.”

  They both nodded.

  “This gun was issued to KGB agents, but you still say the Reds didn’t pop him?”

  “Theoretically, anything’s possible,” Roger conceded. “But Bambarak was at that funeral to make sure Andrazack was really on the Ark. He’s too hands-on for one of his agents to have done it and him not know.”

  “So who’s the Israeli with the bald head who left in their embassy car?”

  “The guy ain’t no Israeli,” Emdee said. “He’s a U.S. citizen of the Jewish persuasion—a retired LAPD sergeant named Eddie Ringerman. Worked Homicide before nine-eleven. He pulled the pin two years ago. Now he’s a consultant for the Israelis. Helps them get favors and information out of the Glass House. Not a bad guy. He just forgot which flag he’s supposed to salute.”

  “I think we need to talk to Ringerman and Bambarak,” I said. “Can you get them to open up?”

  “We’re tricky bastards who have good relations all over town,” Emdee said. “In the spy business, a guy does you a favor, you owe him. Reds, Ruskies, CIA, Frogs, Germans, us—everybody keeps track of old debts and pays off. The people who owe us will pay us back. We’ll get something.”

  He looked at Roger. “Only people you gotta stay clear of is the FBI. The feebs will take everything you got and hand you a shit sandwich for your trouble. Nobody trades with those pricks.”

  “How about the CIA?”

  “They’re cool,” Broadway said. “You can do business with them. The chilly fox in the designer threads who showed up at your funeral is CIA. Special Agent in Charge Bimini Wright.

  “We should take a meeting with the gorgeous Ms. Wright,” Emdee suggested. “Give us something to look forward to.”

  “Sounds like it’s going to be a full day,” I said, and paid the bill.

  We walked out into the parking lot and then I followe
d their rusting Fairlane out of Venice. We had decided to start by talking with Eddie Ringerman at the Israeli Embassy in Beverly Hills, but we didn’t quite make it.

  Two blocks after we exited the freeway in West L.A., three gray sedans rushed us from behind, running both our cars to the curb. Half a dozen guys who looked like ads for genetic engineering piled out and waved badges in our faces. A few pulled guns.

  “FBI!” one of them yelled. “Stay where you are.”

  “Hands on the hood of your car and nobody gets hurt,” another screamed.

  “We’re LAPD,” I shouted.

  “Not anymore,” Broadway growled. “I think we’re now federal detainees.”

  26

  The offices of California Homeland Security were located on the top three floors of the old Tishman Building on Wilshire Boulevard. The Tishman was a monument to the concept of temporary architecture—a cheaply constructed twenty-story high-rise that was built in the ’60s. The L.A. Times had recently reported it was already under discussion as a possible teardown.

  The three gray sedans swept into the underground garage to the bottom parking level, and pulled up next to a single secure elevator with a red sign on a metal stand that read: U.S. GOVERNMENT USE ONLY. The car doors swung open as Rowdy and Snitch were pulled roughly out of separate sedans. I was yanked out of a third and pushed toward the elevator.

  The agent in charge, a narrow dweeb named Kersey Nix, put his hand on a glass panel for a fingerprint scan. The doors yawned wide immediately and we were pushed into the elevator.

  When the elevator opened on the top floor, a few more guys with identical haircuts were waiting. They led us down a corridor and put us in three separate lockdowns where the decor was half dungeon, half dental office; windowless, ten-foot square rooms with peach pastel walls, Berber carpet, and Barry Manilow wafting through a Muzak system. There was a thick metal door with an electronic lock. Before he left, my muscle-bound federal escort confiscated my wallet, cell phone, and watch. My gun had been confiscated back at the site of our arrest.

  “You gonna tell me what this is about?” I asked.

  “National security.”

  The door closed. The lock zapped. Barry Manilow crooned. There was no place to sit, no furniture, no shelves. Nothing. I was trapped in a musically bland, peach-colored environment.

  I took off my jacket, sat on the carpeted floor, and tried to shake off my anger at these agents who felt they had such an overpowering mandate that they could treat three LAPD officers like criminals. I wanted to hit somebody. My rage flared so suddenly it surprised me.

  When I was going through Marine Corps training, I remember once watching a videotape of an Army psychology program run at Fort Bliss using military police officers. The psychologists divided all the guards working one of our military prisons into two groups. One group of officers was assigned the role of temporary inmates; the others remained prison guards. The real reason for this test was not revealed.

  What army psychiatrists were actually attempting to determine was how the act of granting complete power to one group over another might escalate both groups toward extreme violence. The MPs who were to remain guards were only told that the military was evaluating escape possibilities in Super-Max and to be especially vigilant. The guards pretending to be inmates were told to resist authority and look for any possible way to break out.

  What transpired was amazing. The guards assigned to the role of prisoners didn’t like being inmates. They had done nothing wrong. But their old friends were now hazing them, walking down the prison tiers ringing their batons across the bars, keeping them awake all night so they would be too tired to attempt anything. The men under lockdown became angrier, the captor guards more aggressive. After a week, sporadic incidents of violence broke out between men who had only a few days before, been close friends. In the second week, the army called off the test because a violent fight broke out between the two groups, which almost resulted in the death of a guard.

  The lesson of this video was that absolute power without oversight can quickly morph into murderous rage. By the same token, complete loss of power, without appeal, can escalate behavior to exactly the same place.

  If I was going to make the best of this, I would have to stay cool. I couldn’t let indignation and self-righteousness turn to rage. Whatever was going on here, I was being tested. Anger would only result in failure.

  So I waited. How long did I sit there? I have no idea. At first I tried to keep track of time by counting the Muzak songs. Figuring each at three to four minutes long, I sang along, counting on my fingers. By the time I’d heard “Mandy” four times, my brain stalled and I lost count.

  Next, I tried to pass the time by concentrating on the Andrazack case, trying to come up with something fresh. Several things festered. I knew Broadway and Perry suspected somebody in the foreign intelligence community of bugging embassy computers. Broadway said he thought there might even be bugs or computer scans inside the LAPD’s Counter Terrorism Bureau. Forgetting for the moment how that could be accomplished, it raised an interesting possibility. If some foreign power was stealing information from inside CTB, had they also found a way to penetrate the LAPD mainframe?

  The media was making a big deal of the Fingertip case and everybody in L.A. knew the basics of those crime scenes. But Zack and I had withheld the symbol carved on each victim’s chest. If some foreign agent had hacked into our crime data bank or, more to the point, the medical examiner’s computer, it would explain how they knew to carve that symbol on Andrazack before dumping him in the river under the Barham Boulevard Bridge.

  Further, if Davide Andrazack wasn’t one of the serial killings, but a political assassination, all of the ritual evidence surrounding that hit was just staging. That meant most of the theories I had on it were no longer operative.

  I started over and reevaluated. Maybe there wasn’t just one killer. Maybe two guys threw Andrazack off the bridge into the water, which explained how they could shot-put a two-hundred-pound man thirty feet out into the wash. A bullet to the head doesn’t always produce instant death. Maybe Rico was right and Andrazack’s heart was still beating when he hit the concrete levee and that’s why his right rib cage was bruised. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to hang together.

  Time clicked off a big, invisible game clock while Barry Manilow messed with my mind. Finally, I curled up and tried to sleep. As soon as I laid down, a voice came over a hidden speaker. “Don’t do that,” a man commanded.

  I stood and looked up at the air-conditioning grate. The camera and speaker had to be in there, but it was too high up to get to. I was beginning to fume.

  I needed to go to the bathroom, so I yelled that out. Nobody answered. In defiance, I unzipped and wrote my name on the tan Berber carpet in urine. Foolish, I know, but I have a childish streak.

  “Don’t do that either,” the voice commanded again.

  “Come on in here, asshole. We’ll talk about it.” Nobody answered, so I moved away from my yellow signature, sat down, closed my eyes, and waited.

  It might have been four or five hours. It might have been ten. I completely lost track of time.

  Finally the door opened. Kersey Nix was standing in the threshold.

  “Is it recess?” I said, trying to sound faintly amused, even though underneath, I wanted to rip his throat out.

  I noticed he was wearing a different suit. So while I’d been doing sing-alongs with Barry Manilow and writing my name on the carpet, this jerk-off had been at home resting up.

  “I will give you some advice,” Agent Nix said in a reasonable, but bland voice. “Tell us everything you know. Hold nothing back. You are at the beginning of a dangerous adventure. How it ends is going to be entirely up to you.” Then he favored me with a sleepy-eyed half smile.

  “I really need to go to the can,” I said.

  “Come on.”

  He turned and I had a weak moment where I was tempted to kick his skinny
butt up between his ears. But I held off. It was a good thing I did, because two identically shaped androids were waiting in the hall just out of sight.

  The four of us marched down the corridor toward the men’s room. I saw a window. It was dark outside. We’d been picked up at 9 A.M. and sunset was four-thirty, so doing the math, I’d been here a minimum of eight hours.

  After I used the facilities and washed up, I followed Agent Nix to a large set of double doors on the east end of the building. He led me inside a huge office, with an acre of snow-white, cut-pile carpet under expensive antique mahogany furniture. The U.S. and California State flags flanked each side of a Victorian desk big enough to play Ping-Pong on.

  I’d seen the man standing in the center of the room waiting for me before, but only on television. He was in his late fifties, tall and handsome, with silver hair and a patrician bearing. He was flanked by two assistants—gray men with pinched faces. Everyone wore crisp white shirts, and a blue or a red tie. Patriotism.

  “I’m Robert Allen Virtue, head of California Homeland Security,” the tall, handsome man said. “I hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you too much.”

  “Only if you don’t like Barry Manilow,” I replied.

  27

  I waited a few feet inside the plush office and tried to work out a good strategy to use on this guy.

  Robert Allen Virtue was a political heavyweight who was chosen by the governor of the state of California and anointed by the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. He had a law degree from Yale Law School and dangerous connections in the political community.

  I, on the other hand, was a Detective III in a city police department with a junior college education. My only dangerous connections were a sorry bunch of dirt bags I’d put in jail. Adding to my dilemma was a pile of anger I didn’t quite know what to do with. Survival instincts told me Robert Virtue was not a profitable adversary for me. He could sink me with one torpedo.

  “I’m sorry for the long wait,” he said, equitably. “I was in Sacramento and couldn’t get down here before now.”

  He pointed to a chair that had a black briefcase on it. “Just move that case and have a seat,” he said.