Page 38 of Wrong Way

"Everyone upstairs?" Miles said.

"Out. Or getting there. Kowalski and some local officers are covering it."

He nodded. He looked down at Gallagher and then at the panel behind him and then at the wire still trailing across the wet floor, now inert, its connection to the bus bar apparently broken when Miles had worked the breakers. He looked at all of it with the steady and slightly removed attention of a man on the near side of something he had not yet fully processed.

She knew the feeling. She'd had it herself, on other nights in other buildings at the end of other cases that had moved faster than anyone had planned for.

"How close was it?" she said.

Miles looked at her for a moment. "Close," he said.

She didn't ask him to be more specific and he didn't offer it. They had worked together long enough that she understood when he had reached the edge of what he was willing to put into words in a given moment, and this appeared to be that edge. There would be a report, and a debrief, and eventually a conversation. Not here, not now, with Gallagher on the floor between them and the burned smell of tripped circuits still in the air.

She looked at the panel, at the wet floor, at the mop bucket on its side in the corner by the utility sink. They were all pieces to a story she badly wanted to hear, but she knew now was not the time. She understood, looking at it, roughly what had happened down here, and she understood how many things would have had to go differently for Miles not to be standing at the far side of that floor, still alive.

It was a thought she put away quickly, because it was not a useful thought and she had learned to identify those on sight.

"I'll call for backup and a medic," she said.

"Yeah." He looked at Gallagher again. The man had stopped moving, his breathing slower now, his eyes closed. He was not unconscious, Vic thought. He was simply done. "He needs to be looked at, too. The cheekbone."

"I see it."

She made the calls from the doorway, keeping her light on the room while she talked. When she was done, she stood for a moment and looked at Miles, still crouched over Gallagher on the wet floor of the basement. They had come out on top. They nearly always came out on top. She was aware of this, and she was aware that it was not something she could count on indefinitely, and she was aware that one of these nights the math was going to change on them and they would not be standing at the end of it the way they were standing now.

Sooner or later, she feared, their luck would simply run out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The cruiser carrying Jennifer Parsons pulled out of the waterfront lot at 5:42 in the evening, and Hahn watched it go from the open bay door of the warehouse. Two Portsmouth PD officers flanked him on either side, and a third was inside finishing the scene documentation. The lot smelled of brine and cold asphalt, and the weird variety of chemical smells that came from the waterfront structures in this part of the city.

For now, the charge against Parsons would be assault on a federal agent. That was what had been written on the arrest paperwork, and that was what would move her through booking. It was a solid charge backed by a federal witness and a stun gun collected from the pavement where Parsons had dropped it. It would hold while the rest of the case was built around it. But assault on a federal agent was not why Tim Hahn had come to Portsmouth, and everyone in the lot understood that.

The cruiser's brake lights came on briefly at the lot exit and then turned onto the waterfront road and were gone. As Hahn watched it, he was aware of a uniformed officer approaching. Her name was Correa; she had taken Hahn’s statement while others had handled the formal arrest. Correa came across the lot toward him at a brisk pace. She had been on her radio for the last ten minutes while the scene was being processed, and she currently had the look of someone delivering good news they had been waiting to deliver.

"You've got the go-ahead on the storage unit," she said. "The warrant came through about five minutes ago in light of what happened here. Your office called ours and it was cleared at the federal level."

Hahn nodded. He had been watching the empty road where the cruiser had turned out of sight. "Good," he said. "Thank you.”

He stood there for another moment after Correa walked away, looking at the waterfront and the flat gray sky above it. For just a moment, he let himself bask in sharp satisfaction of having been right. He had identified a genuine threat and developed it from a single tip without task force resources or institutional support. While it would need verification, it seemed that he had put an active Kane disciple in handcuffs before she had been activated by her mastermind. He had done it in under three days with no backup, at a warehouse on a waterfront in a city he'd never worked before.

He was twenty-nine years old and he was damned good at this job, and he had just proved it in a way that would forever stay in his file.

That mattered to him. He was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that it mattered considerably. The Kane task force was the highest-profile operation in the bureau right now, and what happened inside it would define careers. Sterling and Stone were already established and were more or less the rock stars. Meanwhile, he was still the rookie with the undercover background and the occasionally irregular methods. He had understood from the beginning that the margin for error assigned to him was thinner than it was for the others. The way you closed that margin was by producing results that were difficult to argue with.

He thought about what Ortega would say in the debrief, and what Hayes would say after that. He took one last deep breath, feeling certain that this was all the start of something very big for him, and then made his way to his car.

***

The sky had gone the flat gray-orange of a New England dusk by the time he pulled into the facility lot. The manager was waiting for him at the office entrance, her reading glasses down on her nose now rather than pushed up, which somehow made her look more official than she had that morning. She had his warrant confirmation on her phone screen, and she checked it against his badge before she said anything.

"Unit thirty-four," she said. "Back row, east side."

She walked him there herself, which he did not discourage. The facility was quiet at this hour, the rows of corrugated metal units running in their orderly parallel lines under the orange-gray sky. Unit thirty-four was the second from the end of the back row, indistinguishable from the units on either side of it. The manager produced a bolt cutter from a cart she'd brought along and handed it to Hahn without being asked. The lock on the unit was not the facility's standard issue, which she noted with a slight compression of her lips. Hahn cut it off, set it aside, and gripped the handle of the rolling door.

He slid it open and stared inside. The unit was ten feet wide and eight feet deep, and it was not empty.

Along the right wall, a metal utility shelving unit held twelve sealed containers arranged in two rows of six. They were cylindrical, roughly the size of large paint cans, each one labeled with chemical supplier markings and lot numbers. Between the containers, a handheld radiation detection meter sat in a molded foam case alongside a box of nitrile gloves and two disposable Tyvek suits, still in their packaging. A separate shelf below held two sealed drums of a different compound, marked with a biohazard placard and a handling instruction label that listed restricted use. Hahn recognized cesium chloride from the compound names on two of the canisters. The others he would need a chemist to identify, but their physical placement alongside the dosimetry equipment suggested they were not unrelated to it.