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“Here’s the problem,” Nowak said. “We still need you on the ground there, undercover, working on Ordinary People. But you shot a man in the leg, as I understand it. You will have to go to FBI headquarters for interviews and to make statements and they will want to take your weapon as evidence...”
“Ah, jeez...”
“That’s not a problem. They will needthatparticular weapon, a Sig 938, I’m told, but you’ll get an identical one, new, at the FBI headquarters. I’ve been told that it will have been fired for accuracy.”
“Not the same...”
“I know, but it’s unavoidable. One of the downsides of living in a democracy with a functioning legal system,” Nowak said. “Also, should you wish for a different weapon, that would be provided, at no cost to you. Your own gun will be returned to you at some point in the future, but when, it’s difficult to say.”
“But I...”
“We don’t want you riding with the FBI or talking with FBI agents at the scene. I’ve talked to Jackson about this and Baxter will pick you up at the back door of the delicatessen. He will drive you to FBI headquarters, which is not far away, in the Hertz car. Once there, you’ll be handled as a confidential informant. You’ll not have contact with any more than the minimum of agents. We hope to have you out of there in a couple of hours.”
“I was...”
“There are no options. Get off the roof and meet Baxter. He’s behind the deli.”
“How’d you know I was still on the roof?” Letty asked. “How do you know Baxter is behind the deli?”
“Move,” Nowak said.
“One more thing: how much should I tell the feds?”
After a moment of silence, Nowak said, “You can tell them that you met with Barron and Wolfe at a location you can’t disclose and if they have a problem with that, they should call me. You should not disclose what you and Baxter were doing. Start with tracking Barron through the Los Angeles cameras, seeing the killers arrive, your discovery of the bodies, and tracking the killers to the garage. You can give them all the details for that, but don’t give them any information on your cover IDs or the continuing operation. Tell them that information is classified as top secret and compartmented. Remember thecompartmented.”
“But they know from when they tried to bust us...”
“Yes, they know that, but they don’t know what we’re doing now, or who we’ve been talking to. Don’t tell them. Now go.”
Letty went. Down the ladder, down the stairs, and out the back, where Baxter was waiting in the Equinox. Fifty feet away, FBI agents in tactical gear were looking at two bodies. Letty walked up to the driver’s side of the Equinox and said to Baxter, “Delores told me not to do it, but I gotta see what happened here.”
“Fine with me. I’m kinda curious myself,” Baxter said. “What the hell did you do?”
“Tell you about it later.”
Letty walked down to the group around the bodies. As she came up, the oldest of the agents, a tall, weathered man with tracesof gray in his otherwise dark hair, said, “I’m Jackson. You’d be Letty?”
“Yeah. I want to look at the dead guys, see if they’re the shooters we saw at Barron’s place.”
“Good. Take a look.”
Both men had been rolled onto their backs, to see if they needed ambulances. Neither one did. Letty said, “I have to go back to the car for a minute...”
She walked back to the car and got the camera. Baxter said, “If you’re gonna be a while, I might hit the deli.”
“Go for it,” she said. “Get me a chicken sandwich with something spicy on it, and a root beer if they have it. We’re gonna be stuck at FBI headquarters for a while.”
She walked back to the bodies with the camera, called up the photos on the view screen, and with Jackson and another agent looking over her shoulder, said, “One of them is right. The other one isn’t and the guy on the roof wasn’t, either. So one of the shooters wasn’t here.”
“We’ll talk to the guy we got, but I kinda think this might be the low end of whatever organization they’re with,” Jackson said. “The garage is set up as a barracks. There’s beds and a small kitchen and a bathroom on the second floor, the loft. Space for six. They’ve all got California ID, but I’ll kiss Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ass in Saks’ front window if they aren’t Russians. Or Ukrainians. Or Serbians. Someplace in there.”
“Russians? You talked to our NSA contact, right? She filled you in?”
“Some.”
“There could be Russian involvement in a really big ransomware hack and counter-hack that the NSA knows all about and thatBarron and his girlfriend might have been involved in,” Letty said. “You should talk to her about why you think these guys are Russians.”
“I’ll do that. You’re going over to our headquarters...”
