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“I will.” Cartwright looked through the dirt-spotted window at the semi-trailer backed up to the loading dock across the street. Like Letty, she was average height and dancer-slender. Her blond hair was pulled back in a short efficient ponytail. Like Letty, she was wearing jeans, but with a khaki overshirt to hide her pistol. She was seven years older than Letty, but they might have been sisters.
“Got a good spot here; how long does it take to get across the street?”
“From here, standing start, eleven seconds to get across theroom, down the fire stairs, to the exit, which is right below us,” Letty said. “They’ll see us coming.”
“You think they could be trouble?”
“Don’t know. I interviewed Dupree. You should have gotten a transcript.”
“I did. Sounded fake-cooperative,” Cartwright said.
“Exactly. But, I got him jumpy, with the urge to move. When I saw him, he wasn’t carrying. On the other hand, he’s an office worker in a government building. Bogard and Holsum are the reddest of necks and they’re freelance. Even if they’re not carrying, I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a few guns around.”
“And this will go off around six o’clock?”
“Yes. Most of the employees get out around four-thirty. I think they’ll wait until it’s quiet. Give it an hour or so.”
The FBI agents had given up on the ping-pong and come over to meet Cartwright. One of them said, “An hour or so if it happens at all.”
“It will,” Letty said. “They want to move it fast, before I have more time to dig around in there.”
Letty had a CI, a confidential informant, inside the FEMA warehouse. The CI said Dupree, Bogard, and Holsum were planning to steal eight forklifts from the FEMA warehouse; the CI also wanted Dupree’s job, so there was that.
The three-and-a-half-ton-capacity, rough-terrain, four-wheel-drive forklifts were valued at $12,500 each, making eight of them worth $100,000 if sold in Charlotte.
If sold in Chancay, Peru, to JuFen Industries, a Chinese company working on the construction of a spanking-new Pacific Ocean port, they’d go for twice that price, less the $1,200 apiece that it cost to ship them.
Small potatoes compared to the $1,500,000 they’d gotten for the five hundred FEMA army-style field tents they’d sold to the same Chinese company to shelter the families of its Peruvian workers. Still, two hundred grand is two hundred grand, especially when it was tax-free.
Cartwright had spotted the tents while doing research in Chancay for an Unspecified Agency of the U.S. government. Her research had included cutting serial number labels off several of the tents, which had later been identified as FEMA property. That vandalism, when discovered by a Chinese security officer, had led to a brief chase across the desert and then an unscheduled swim in the Rio Chancay, followed by a hitchhiking trip to Lima in clothing stolen off a clothesline.
After Cartwright arrived in Miami, the Unspecified Agency had dropped a note to the powers that be at the Department of Homeland Security, and Letty had been sent to Charlotte to investigate the status of the tents.
In the warehouse where they should have been, she’d found an empty space. Dupree had explained that the tents had been shipped to Africa to shelter children at a free school, that all the paperwork had been perfect, and he hoped the kids appreciated their new homes.
Nope.
Cartwright, as it happened,wasn’t a great ping-pong player, but she was better than any of the feds. After they’d chatted for a while, to bring her up to the minute on their plan and determine her relationship status, she held the table for six consecutive games, until Letty called, “We got Bogard and Holsum.”
The two had just arrived at the parking lot across the street in Holsum’s pimped-out red Chevy Camaro, and Holsum was talking on his cell phone as he got out of the driver’s side. Letty was watching them through a pair of Leica binoculars. When Bogard got out of the passenger side of the car, he did a hitch-up to his pants and Cartwright asked, “You get that?” and Letty said, “Yeah,” and one of the feds asked, “What?” and Letty said, “Bogard’s carrying.”
Another of the feds said, “Let’s gear it up,” and the three agents began pulling on armor.
Dupree opened a door, and Bogard and Holsum disappeared inside. Two minutes later, the overhead door at a loading dock rolled up, and Letty said, “Let ’em load, let ’em load.”
A minute after that, the first of the forklifts rolled through the loading door, across the dock, and into the semi-trailer, with Holsum driving, Dupree keeping watch, and Bogard sucking on a Tootsie Pop.
“Go,” Letty said, and the three feds headed for the stairway fire door at a trot.
Fifteen seconds later, as Letty and Cartwright watched, the three agents were running across the street, guns in hand. Dupree saw them coming, apparently shouted a warning to the others, and turned and ran into the warehouse.
Bogard, who’d been watching from the other side of the semitrailer, jumped off the dock and began running to the far side of the warehouse. The feds didn’t see him because their line of sight was blocked by the truck.
Letty headed for the door, her 938 in her hand.
Cartwright, following: “What?”
“Bogard can’t get out that way. The chain-link fence hooks on to the next warehouse. He’ll have to run down an alley at the other end of the building... He’ll be coming back to us.”
