She kept her eyes on him, the planes of her cheeks sharp, acne scars in the hollows of her cheeks, eyes bloodshot, nose too narrow for her face. She didn’t seem to realize how deep she was in now. He looked around. The Feds couldn’t land one of their helicopters here and wouldn’t know how to get up the slough.
“We’ll bring you out,” he said. “Then we’ll turn you over and you’re going to need to get yourself a lawyer.”
“I don’t know anything about what happened. What I told you last time was the truth.”
Shauf used the kayak, and Anna rode in the skiff with him. He figured it was the last opportunity to ask her what she knew about the sturgeon poaching, but he didn’t ask anything. She didn’t have much credibility with him anymore. As they reached the Zodiac it started to shower again, and he covered the phone as he punched in Ehrmann’s cell. When he got voice mail he hung up and redialed. Same thing happened and he did it again. On the fourth try Ehrmann answered. “I’m in Washington, Marquez. I can’t talk to you.”
“Then tell me who to call. I have Anna Burdovsky with me.”
“Where are you?”
“Coming out of a slough in the delta. I’ll give you coordinates.”
He read them off and gave Ehrmann the boat landing they were headed to.
“You’ll get a call in a few minutes.”
Marquez turned and asked her as he waited for the call, “When did you get into Razor Slough?”
“I had to paddle out into the river to get away and waited for dark, and even then they almost found me. Then I paddled all night. I had food stowed in the kayak, enough for a week.”
“How did Karsov know the raid was coming?”
“They’re always on guard. They got raided in LA a couple of times. They look for buildings they can defend. I told the FBI to watch out because they’re always talking about what they’ll do to anyone that comes after them.”
“Did they ever talk about car bombs?”
“Never with me.”
They turned from the slough into the river, and Marquez kept the speed slow so he could hear her answers. She’d stowed a kayak and mountain bike, and she had used scuba gear to swim out of the slough. She told him how she got away and that she’d stashed the equipment in case the FBI showed up.
“Seems like you knew the bust was going to go down,” Marquez said.
“How would I possibly have known? That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re up a slough hiding when the bombs go off.”
“I was hiding because I knew they were using me like bait. I was afraid I was going to get killed, so I figured out a way to hide, and I didn’t lie to you. I was going to tell you everything, but now after what’s happened I don’t want to say anything until I talk to a lawyer.”
Another shower raked the water, and the heavy rain ended all conversation. Marquez pulled a hood over his head, and the Zodiac plowed through the waves. When the rain lightened they were in view of the boat landing and there was no more time to talk.
“Look at them all,” Anna said, and one agent looked like he was ready to wade into the river.
“Anna Burdovsky, you are under arrest.”
Marquez listened as she was read her rights and handcuffed. She looked small and scared as they took her away. She looked back at him once as though he might help her, and then she was gone, and once more the Feds were asking him what she’d told him and why she’d contacted him. They had a lot of questions, and they wanted him to come in.
41
Marquez cinched down the straps holding the Zodiac to the boat trailer, then checked to make sure there was nothing in the boat that would catch in the wind and blow out after they got on the road. The FBI was gone, the lot had emptied, and the rain had stopped. It was just Cairo, Shauf, and him. He cleaned mud from his boots and waited for Shauf to get off the phone. She’d drifted out into the middle of the lot. Cairo was near him, one foot on the boat trailer. Roberts was back in the Region IV office until either they resumed the operation or it was declared over, which was what everyone assumed would happen. Alvarez had gone home though he wasn’t back in uniform yet.
The New York Times, citing sources high in the FBI, ran a frontpage story this morning indicating that top brass saw the blown bust as a “failure of high-risk warrant service protocol.” Translated to English, that meant they were going to blame Ehrmann. It struck Marquez that the cowardice of leaking information to the press first as a way of testing public reaction, a habit common to presidential administrations, was particularly unfitting for law enforcement. It had a permanent self-serving sleaze quality to it. TV pundits, including a retired FBI expert that Marquez had watched last night, said more patience was all that had been required. Ehrmann should have waited for the suspects to come out of the building. It was that simple, and it was always that simple. He should have run instead of passing on third down. And now these high-ranking officials on the east coast, guys who picked up their Starbucks lattes on the way into headquarters every morning, they were going to pass judgment on how the bust went down.
The subtext of their leaked message was that we have nothing new to fear. This was just a failure of protocol. The same as 9/11, right? We could stop it all from happening if we were just careful enough. Seal our borders and stick to the protocols. It didn’t make sense that a guy as serious about law enforcement as Ehrmann was being set up for a transfer to North Dakota or the Middle East, or wherever the Bureau saw fit to banish him.
“You okay?” Cairo asked.
“Just thinking about things.”
“What happens to her now?”
“They’ll work her pretty hard unless they find Karsov first. She’s lied to too many people.” “Where do you think we fit in?”
It wasn’t fair to say, but Cairo’s tone was almost one of curiosity, as if expressing interest, but with the understanding the interest wouldn’t be pursued. At the last SOU dinner together at the safehouse Cairo’s enthusiasm for dry farming tomatoes had lit up his face. He had one foot in the future, had accepted what Marquez couldn’t yet.
“I think it was August who sent her to make contact with us. But it’s possible the FBI knew she was living with August, in fact, it’s likely, and it’s likely they told her what she could and couldn’t say to me. When she started to wobble on them, when it looked like the deal with her son might fall through and they were wondering what came next with her, they may have worried she’d pass on information that could compromise their operation. They didn’t pick her up and bring her in because they were hoping she’d lead them to Karsov or someone that would get them closer. When she contacted me they were afraid she was going to tell me too much. At least, that’s my guess.”
And they’d question her now about the weapons they hadn’t found in Weisson’s. They’d question her for hours about those.
He put the boots in the truck and saw Shauf was off the phone. The FBI had requested that he come in this afternoon, and he’d agreed. But the question was where they were going now. Was Cairo flying to San Diego, then driving out to the desert to look at greenhouses, and was Shauf going early to spend more time with her nieces and nephews? They were at a cusp, and as Shauf walked back over, Marquez decided to put it to a vote.
“There’s a news report they may have caught one of the three that got away,” Shauf said.
“Which one and where?”
“Munoz. In LA.”
Carlos Munoz, wanted for conspiracy trafficking of cocaine, money laundering, murder. According to Ehrmann, Munoz operated out of LA. So it was believable.
When they made the ride out to the command center Ehrmann had ticked off details on Karsov as well. The passports he carried, aliases, fluency in language, a big plus for the modern-day criminal, black hair, blue eyes, Ukrainian national, six foot two, one hundred eighty pounds, kept himself fit. Karsov was wanted for arms trafficking, conspiracy murder, drug trafficking, grand theft, money laundering, RICO violations, a long, long list, Ehrmann said.