Boldt grimaced and returned the novel. He didn’t need a chatty-Cathy.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” the woman fired off quickly, as Boldt returned the novel to the rack.
“No, no.” Boldt glanced around looking for a way out. The newsstand’s layout floor plan trapped him. A suit by the newsstand caught his eye, one of Flemming’s?
“This is a good read as well,” she said, indicating a legal thriller.
“Is it?” Boldt said, trying to sound as uninterested as possible. The suit at the front of the store spent a little too much time studying the pedestrians. Flemming had his people checking for SPD operatives. A chess game.
In his ear he heard, “Two minutes.”
Again, a series of clicks filled his head as operatives acknowledged. Two minutes until the plane reached the gate and the jetway beyond where Teibold waited at the bottom of the steps. Like Boldt’s, each handheld radio transmitted a digital identification slug. Logged by computer in the command vehicle, the Incident Command Officer-Mulwright-could immediately identify who was transmitting and speaking without any name or code ever being uttered. The computer also kept a running count for the ICO, who, on that night, expected twenty hits for each acknowledgment.
“LA,” the woman next to Boldt said, unprovoked. “Just for the night. Business. How about you?”
“Actually, I’m meeting someone,” Boldt said.
“Lucky her.” She added, “Is it a her?”
He didn’t want any small talk, and yet perhaps it made him less conspicuous. He glanced over her head into a convex mirror that produced a distorted, fish-eye view of the newsstand, keeping his eye on the man out front and willing him to go away. His woman friend chose that moment to tussle her hair. In the process she exposed a tiny clear wire leading up her neck and into her hair. Boldt’s chest knotted tightly.
Flemming’s people had IDed him.
He took a step forward to pass by her, but she was too quick. She seized his forearm with considerable strength and in an all-business voice said, “The S-A-C would like to have a few words with you, Lieutenant.” Controlled, professional. “Now,” she added.
Boldt needed a clear view of the concourse to run both SPD’s team and his own team. He didn’t have time for a visit.
In his ear, “One minute.” Boldt did not acknowledge, hoping Mulwright would interpret his lack of a signal as indicating that he had problems.
Again, Boldt eyed both the woman and the agent out front. Would they risk a scene one minute before the suspect’s arrival? “I’ll take a rain check,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You two are going to manhandle me out of here? You want to check with the S-A-C about that?”
She asked, “You’re going to put this surveillance at risk?”
“Oh, very good,” Boldt said. “You’re very good.”
“Thirty seconds,” the voice in his ear announced. After a series of clicks the dispatcher called, “Bravo One, report please.” Boldt’s call sign. He did not report.
Boldt stepped back from the woman and called out loudly, “Hey! You can’t put that book in your purse! You have to pay for it!”
She stiffened and offered him a confused look.
In the convex mirror Boldt saw the clerk turn the register key, pocket it and step out from behind the counter-smoothly and quickly; he had done this before. The clerk’s actions blocked the outside agent from Boldt’s aisle. Boldt knocked loose the woman’s grip, spun her around and gently shoved her toward the approaching clerk. “That’s shoplifting!” he said.
Boldt cut around a rack, took two steps toward the front agent, seized a hardback off the shelf, and said loudly, “Have you read this one?” He delivered the book into the side of the agent’s face, driving the man’s flesh-colored earpiece in deeply and bending him over in pain. Boldt hurried down the concourse knowing that Flemming could not afford a scene.
Defiant, and charged with adrenaline, Boldt spotted a mirrored panel in the suspended ceiling and knew that it hid a security camera. He offered the panel his middle finger, immediately thinking about LaMoia. He felt better than he had in ages.
CHAPTER 74
As passengers disembarked from gate 11 Boldt stood at a bank of pay phones, reminded of Dunkin Hale. Holding the phone’s receiver, his eyes trained not on the gate but on the person in front of him, Boldt listened to the commentary through his earpiece. Bravo Five, a plainclothes Narco cop, sat facing gate 11, a hot dog in one hand, the sports page open on his lap like a giant napkin. Atop the sports page was a Camcorder aimed directly toward gate 11. A well-hidden wire ran from the Camcorder into a small duffel bag in the adjacent chair. The duffel bag contained a transmitter. In the control van, Mulwright had a view of the gate.
A husband-and-wife team cheered as camera flashes strobed blindingly into the mix of arriving passengers-Flemming’s people, without a doubt.
Behind him the two agents from the newsstand stood waiting for phones by the bathrooms, their attention divided between Boldt and the arriving passengers. Flemming’s presence was formidable. Boldt had expected nothing less.
BRAVO 5: “The Toyota is just leaving.” Teibold was the Toyota.
COMMAND: “Command copies.”
BRAVO 5: “Toyota is heading toward Bravo One.”
Boldt reported in with a single click.
BRAVO 5: “I’ve got a vehicle approaching the Toyota.”
Bravo Five believed an undercover FBI agent had taken the bait and was focusing his or her attention onto Teibold instead of Crowley. Another of SPD’s team reported, “Two more vehicles.”
BRAVO 5: “Okay. I’m looking right into the headlights of the truck.” The truck was Crowley.
BRAVO 7: “I copy that. I’ve got the taillights.”
Bravo Seven, a woman police officer in plainclothes, was in the throng directly behind Crowley.
COMMAND: “Toyota and the truck have hit the street. All report.”
The frequency sparked with two dozen quick clicks. All of the SPD team knew that Teibold and Crowley had left the jetway and that at least a few of Flemming’s people had picked up the wrong scent.
Anger filled Boldt-how dare he be put into a position to protect this woman who had kidnapped his child! His stomach twisted.
BRAVO 5: “Toyota is rolling.”
Teibold, wearing a brown scarf and sunglasses, passed within a few feet of Boldt.
COMMAND: “Bravo Five: rotate left please.” (Pause.) “Your other left.”
From within the Special Ops command van, Mulwright and the others watched the video shot from Bravo Five’s lap. The camera’s images were SPD’s only look at the situation, unlike Flemming, who had all the airport’s security cameras at his disposal.
BRAVO 5: “I’ve got the truck’s taillights.”
Boldt spotted Crowley then: She wore a wig of short blonde hair, a bandanna around her forehead covering her wound, a brightly colored African skullcap on top. She had used eye shadow to blacken both eyes, giving her a haunting, brooding look-urban sheik mixed with biker girl. The blue bag doubled as a backpack, and she wore it as such. A different woman.
Boldt feigned annoyance with the caller in front of him-all an act for Flemming’s cameras. He turned and glanced down the hall following Crowley, who kept pace with other passengers.
Teibold dropped her purse, bent to retrieve it, and stepped out of the surging pedestrian traffic. She dealt with a shoelace as she appraised her surroundings, doing a convincing job of playing a paranoid person looking for tails.
The male agent from the newsstand, halfway down the concourse, took notice of Teibold and entered the men’s room, out of sight. Boldt marveled at the professionalism of the FBI undercover unit. He had spotted the couple with the flash camera, now headed toward baggage claim. But other than those two, and the two agents from the newsstand, he couldn’t identify any others. Flemming was probably relying on the security cameras for gate area surveillance and saving his manpower for the street.