“How many are in the building?”
“Five and some bodyguards, and then there’s us.”
He smiled over at Marquez, but Ehrmann didn’t really have the demeanor of a field guy, and his joking lacked the feel of someone who’d been there. It made Marquez think of some of the new aspects of the Bureau. The weight had shifted from CID and criminal investigation into the still amorphous fight against terrorism. Taking on Eurasian criminal gangs required an international scope and understanding of elaborate computer crime and sophisticated networks overlapping countries. It took a different kind of breed. Ehrmann was probably very adept with a computer. He thought of what Anna had said yesterday about Karsov owning a yacht he kept in the Med and a house in Switzerland.
“Is Karsov here?”
“We hope he is, and we think we watched him arrive, though the vehicle’s windows were tinted.”
“What else do you expect to find in there?”
“Weapons that came in disguised as car parts.”
“Is that what this has always been about?”
“Yes.”
So it was all coming out now. Ehrmann was suddenly very upfront and nervous too. His hands moved constantly. A long investigation was coming down to a moment. Marquez listened to the back-and-forth radio chatter, listened to Ehrmann’s responses. Weisson’s had been color-coded by SWAT. The front was red, the back side black, the west end green, east blue, and the roof purple. The purple team would go in first and access the roof. A helicopter was on its way. They drove up to a drab building a good mile from Weisson’s, and Marquez saw a line of cars and several TV vans. He had thought they’d be as close as the on-scene SWAT commander, and Ehrmann guessed what he was thinking.
“This is as close as we get.”
“Is Douglas with the SWAT commander?”
“He is.”
“He’s been part of your investigation.”
Not really a question. He just wanted to confirm it.
“Since the start, he’s been part of this since day one. I’ll tell you something else, when we take Karsov into custody tonight, the world becomes just a little bit safer.”
“He’s that big a deal?”
“He is. You ready to go in?”
When they walked in Marquez saw the media being briefed in a room out front. A spokesman for the FBI pointed at the class picture, the faces of the suspects they hoped to arrest, pinned up on a wall. A few heads turned their direction as they moved past toward the back of the building. Marquez could feel Ehrmann’s pride as the FBI spokesman told the assembled press what was about to happen was “the most significant takedown of Eurasian Organized Crime ever in the state of California, the culmination of an eighteen-month investigation spanning the West Coast.”
Now they entered a room with a table and banks of surveillance equipment. It looked like a war room. Ehrmann explained the equipment and introduced him. SWAT didn’t need to crawl up to a rolling door and snake a camera underneath to check out the interior ahead of the bust. It was all right here on the monitors.
“How many cameras have you got inside the building?” Marquez asked.
“Twelve. They’re all up in the roof trusses.”
They had audio, had bugs planted in the room where the meeting was under way right now. It was all a little amazing, but the Bureau was flush with cash. He guessed there was two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment in the room. Three TV monitors showed the face of the building from different angles. But it was camera angles inside, the on-screen views looking down and across the working bays at a glass-enclosed and lighted office, that really said it all. They were watching the meeting in progress inside the building, watching it and listening to it. Marquez read the shapes of five men, four seated, one walking around.
“That’s the meeting room,” Ehrmann said. “The man standing is Karsov. We just got a positive ID and he’s not here for caviar or cars. When the price gets high enough he can’t trust his guys and has to show up himself.”
Marquez looked around the room again. His eyes were drawn back to the shapes of the men in the meeting. An audio tech took off his earphones, and Ehrmann put them on. Looking at the setup here, it was pretty easy to understand the disdain the agents who’d picked him up out on the slough road had shown for the SOU operation.
“Are you going to tour the TV people through here?” Marquez asked, and Ehrmann shook his head.
A radio crackled to life. The helicopter was less than a minute away, and SWAT started to roll toward Weisson’s gate. Marquez heard the copter pass overhead and focused on the monitors that caught the front facade of Weisson’s. One camera looked through the fence and rows of wrecked cars at the Mercedes and minivan parked parallel to the building near the rolling doors. Though he wasn’t part of the bust, anticipation rose in him. The energy in the room was electric. Ehrmann couldn’t stop moving.
“Three, two, one,” someone counted, and the power went out along the front face.
“We have snipers on the roofs of two of these abandoned buildings,” Ehrmann said. “And we’re moving onto the roof of Weisson’s. They’ll go down the roof access door to the computers on the mezzanine level if the gentlemen inside don’t come out as soon as we call them.”
“Will they answer?”
“We think the individual we’re calling will answer. We’ve been a steady customer for him, and the number showing on his screen will read as out-of-state. Unless the power outage spooks him, I think he’ll answer.”
They could hear the cell ringing through the bugs in place in the meeting room. It rang six times and went to voice mail. They called it again.
“Come on, answer your phone,” Ehrmann said. But the phone abruptly shut off.
The SWAT commander decided to flash-bang a door and use bullhorns to call them out. Marquez watched onscreen as four of the SWAT moved between the old Mercedes and the minivan. He could barely make out their shapes, and he overheard that the reason the door wasn’t being popped open with their “Peacekeeper” vehicle was that there wasn’t enough room to get between the Mercedes and minivan. He looked away from that monitor to one that was hooked to infrared cameras and recorded the heat images of the men who’d been in the meeting room moving past its screen.
“They’re out of the room,” Ehrmann said, and an audio tech said he could hear SWAT loud and clear calling them out with bullhorns. “No way they don’t hear that,” Ehrmann said. “No way.”
Then there was a rapid series of light flashes that the inside cameras caught and Marquez read as automatic fire. A shooter kept a steady stream of fire toward the door that had been breached, and then outside along the front there was a flash of light so brilliant the transmitting of it momentarily lit up the room here. There was a second bright flash and yelling and chaos as a fireball formed and rose where the Mercedes had been. It took a full second or two before they realized the cars parked out in front of Weisson’s had detonated.
“Omigod,” an agent to the left of Marquez said. “Oh, Jesus, no.”
The SWAT commander whose voice was broadcast live in the room was yelling as he aborted the bust and called everyone back, and the extrication team started forward with the Peacekeeper’s armored body leading. Then there was hesitation, fear of secondary explosions, and a couple of minutes lost before the Peacekeeper moved in through the fence. The helicopter’s searchlight showed the two vehicles burning and nothing moving. Six of the SWAT team had been inside the fence. The helicopter’s light swept the pavement looking for them, and the pilot’s voice ended with the word “shit,” and there was a loud bang.
The SWAT commander kept his cool, reported, “The copter’s been hit. It’s going down.”
Then abruptly the helicopter showed on a monitor as it struck Weisson’s high along the east corner. It was in flames, and the tail section folded as it hit the ground.