Fidelity (2 page)

2

T
HEY DID
not have public tours of the FBI's Baltimore Field Office in Woodlawn, which was just as well, not only for basic notions of operational security but also because it was quite tremendously ugly, and all things considered it would likely kill off some of the Bureau's mystique if the citizens whom Kay had sworn to protect ever got a look at it. Functional, you might have called it. Utilitarian, if you were being very kind. Kay had been ready for the long hours, the work that alternated between deathly dull and eye-achingly sad, the strange looks she got when she told people what she did for a living. Ready for all of it. But at the very least she had imagined the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world would be capable of providing her with a decent computer.

Kay dropped her coat over the chair and herself down into it.

“Our boy in attendance?” Torres asked her from across the desk.

“He's still there,” Kay confirmed.

Torres had been her partner for eighteen months now, and it had taken much of that period for them to get to liking each other. If he had seen, at first glance, a callow, overeducated greenhorn, she had taken one look at his never-polished shoes and his ill-fitting suit and written him off as past his expiration date. But
first impressions aren't everything, and it spoke praise for both of them that they'd been able to get past theirs. Torres had been chasing criminals for nearly as long as Kay had been alive, and he was clever enough to have learned a few things along the way, which not everyone else could claim. He was utterly unflappable: the building next to him could explode while he was shaving and he'd come out of the bathroom without a nick. He knew everything there was to know about Baltimore—which Kay had taken several months to learn was pronounced
Bawl-moor
, swallowing the
t
and mangling the middle portion. He knew where to get the best crab cakes, and which bars you could still smoke at, and who Little Melvin's top lieutenant had been back when he had sold ninety percent of the heroin in the city.

Also, Torres was about as big as a Mack truck, and when you were a five-foot-seven woman with less than thirty years to your credit, it was an asset being able to walk up to a suspect with him standing behind you, a mountain of Pig Town gristle that hadn't taken shit from anyone in so long, he had trouble remembering the smell. “Not for very much longer,” Torres said happily. “Cold enough for you out there, Ivy?”

In a bit of foolishness that she had spent a year and a half kicking herself over, Kay had come in the first day with a Prince­ton coffee mug and immediately caught a raft of mockery for it. In fact, it had been Kay's only coffee mug, and she had actually been using it to drink coffee, and she hadn't even liked Princeton particularly—certainly did not take any excessive pride in having matriculated from there; but of course none of these truths had been enough to stop the office from heaving “Ivy” on as her tag. This long into it she didn't even mind. Everyone got made fun of for something. Maybe the women got it a little worse, and certainly the newer Agents did; but to Kay's thinking, anyone who let that sort of thing bother her was no better than a child.
At least Torres meant it endearingly, which was more than could be said for some of her other colleagues.

“I'm an FBI Agent,” Kay said, leaning back and stretching out her legs. You wouldn't think sitting in a car and staring at a stoop would be so damn exhausting, but then again you'd be wrong. “I'm trained not to feel cold.”

“I must have missed that day in Quantico,” Torres said, standing and gesturing for Kay to do the same. “We're getting the rundown in the conference room in about two minutes.”

Kay sighed, stood, followed Torres into the conference room. Most of the rest of the team was already inside: fifteen or so Agents, all more experienced than Kay, some even more competent. The Williams bust would be one of the year's largest, a joint effort between the FBI, the DEA and local police, and in honor of which they were graced with the presence not only of the Assistant Special Agent in Charge but of the Special Agent in Charge as well, neither of whom generally had much involvement in the day-to-day running of the case. This was primarily handled by Supervisory Special Agent James Dickson, who, on any given morning, would be handing out assignments and coordinating tasks.

Dickson wasted little time in getting the meeting started, projecting a PowerPoint presentation onto the back wall. “This is James Rashid Williams,” he said, nodding towards the picture that had long become ingrained in Kay's memory. “Born Baltimore City. Had a couple of busts as a juvenile, but nothing since. Which means?”

“That he's an altar boy?” Torres joked.

“That he's smart,” Kay muttered.

“Indeed he is,” Dickson continued, shooting Torres a nasty look. SSA Dickson did not find Torres amusing. It was Kay's sense that Dickson, generally speaking, found very little amusing.
He would have been a very bad audience member at a comedy club, but he was thoroughly competent to oversee a criminal investigation. “Two years ago he came up on our radar as an East Baltimore up-and-comer. Since then he's well and truly arrived. So far as we can tell, he's the man at the top of the pyramid for all the corners running from Patterson Park to Broadway. A man doesn't get that much real estate without dropping a few corpses,” Dickson said, then clicked ahead to display a number of these: corpses on front stoops, corpses in bullet-ridden cars, corpses on the floors of crack houses, and finally the corpses of two adolescents lying prone on good old-fashioned Baltimore asphalt.

“Those last two were Deyron and Ai'don Thomas, two brothers with the audacity to try and visit the corner store when some of Mr. Williams's underlings were firing handguns at some men who
used to be
Mr. Williams's underlings.”

The room got a little less friendly. It was hard to get worked up about murderers murdering each other; it wasn't the sort of thing you could just overlook. They were the FBI, after all, but neither did Kay find herself weeping into her pillow late at night at the thought of there being one less gun hand scuttling through the city's byways. Civilians were a different matter, and not just civilians but children, two little plots of land out in Mount Auburn Cemetery, grandmothers weeping over coffins. Kay realized that she was gritting her teeth, then stopped before she gave herself a headache.

“Yes, it's been a bloody run for Mr. Williams, one which we'll bring to an abrupt end tomorrow at five a.m. We'll be serving indictments against Williams and seven other individuals, lieutenants and top-ranking enforcers. We'll have the assigned Assistant United States Attorney standing by in case we need to write paper for additional warrants. If my little photo presentation did not
convince you, then let me remind everyone outright that these are very dangerous men, and it would not at all be out of character for them to decide they'd prefer to see a pine box than a jail cell, and would be even happier if they had a few members of law enforcement as company. It's mandatory for everyone to wear body armor and raid jackets, and make sure your radio is coded before you head out today. We go in fast, we go in hard and we make sure everyone comes out safe.” Dickson then began to go through each specific target, which Agents would be assigned to which location. Kay held her breath as he went through each suspect, lieutenants and minor members of Williams's crew, waiting to hear her name called. It was foolish to get emotionally invested in a case, Kay knew, and this personal antagonism she had been cultivating against Williams had no place in an investigation.

All the same, it stung to discover she wouldn't get to slap the cuffs on him. “Malloy,” Dickson said, “you'll be assisting Torres, Marcus and Chapman when they make the bust on Williams.”

Kay worked carefully to keep the frown off her face, listened as Dickson finished reading the assignments, then dismissed the room. She already had a reputation amongst some of the criminal squads as something of a prima donna, owing more to the fact that she was good at her job and came from a privileged background than to anything else, she thought privately. But still there was no good to come from displaying disappointment; the mission came first, after all. The mission always comes first.

Torres, of course, wasn't fooled. “Don't look so cross, Ivy,” he said as they walked out of the meeting. “You think James Rashid Williams is going to be the last person ever who tries to get rich in Baltimore selling crack cocaine? Or just the last one the FBI is ever going to arrest? Believe me, the final shot in the War on Drugs will not be fired tomorrow morning. You'll get to take out James Rashid Williams 2.0 in another six months, or
in six months after that. One upside to the whole thing: there's always more bad guys.”

Torres made it sound simpler than it was. Williams was clever and Williams was careful, and it had taken the better part of a year for the FBI, with all the technology and resources at their disposal, to finally land themselves this shot at him. But Torres wasn't altogether wrong, either. In the street they talked a lot about “the game,” epitaphs stolen from hip-hop songs, the usual distorted warrior-creed horseshit. They never seemed to realize that the game was stacked, that the best any corner kingpin could hope for was to slide under their radar awhile and avoid drawing down the wrath of law enforcement, which was belated, erratic and inevitable. Or one of their own people would put them in the ground, or—and this happened with astonishing frequency—they would find some way to ruin it themselves by getting drunk and wrapping their car around a telephone pole or finding themselves stabbed in a bar fight with a random stranger. There were upsides to being a drug dealer, Kay supposed: the money, the neighborhood fame or infamy, perhaps the excitement. But longevity was not generally one of its virtues.

A fact that they would be reminding James Rashid Williams of early the next morning.

3

K
AY SLEPT
three hours that night, woke with the moon still heavy against her curtains, jumped out of bed sharp as a stropped razor. She dressed in less time than it took her coffee machine to brew up a pot, dumped that in a thermos and moved swiftly to her car. As she drove out to meet the rest of the squad, she ran through in her mind the morning to come, savoring the anticipation. She would not get to go in through the door—fine, fine, that was disappointing but ultimately irrelevant. Tonight, this morning, they would take James Rashid Williams off the streets, put him in a cage where he would spend the rest of his life, or the vast majority of it. There was such a thing as right and wrong—there was such a thing as justice—and Williams would learn that soon. Learn that there were consequences to evil, that the righteous did not sit idly by and allow themselves to be poisoned, abused and dominated.

“You all right there, Ivy?” Torres asked, sipping from a mug of coffee the size of half her torso. “You know we're just here to arrest the man; you don't get to eat him.”

“I just wish I got to haul him in,” Kay said.

Torres put a hand on her shoulder. It was a rare moment of affection, and Kay did not miss it. “Forget about who gets to kick
in the door,” he said. “This is as much your collar as anybody's, and more than most. Dickson knows that, and so do I.”

Kay tried not to blush. The only other time Torres had offered a compliment, it was regarding Kay's ability to down cans of Natty Boh without stumbling, and whatever his feelings on the matter, she felt that was not altogether a thing of which to be proud.

Torres winked and guzzled the rest of his coffee, then set the cup aside and forced himself into his armored vest. A standard precaution, although in this instance almost certainly unnecessary. This was a priority location, and so Torres and the rest of the squad would be following SWAT—special weapons and ­tactics—into the building. Being an FBI Agent very little resembled the popular perception of the job, but SWAT was part of that very little. There were many people in the world who thought of themselves as hard, who liked to walk with a swagger and brag about their gun collections. Some of them even were tough, so far as it goes, even frightening or dangerous. And all of them, every one, were rank amateurs when compared to SWAT. These were professionals in the field of human violence, and watching them take down a door was like watching an NFL team play pickup football against a group of schoolchildren.

No, this was it for James Rashid Williams. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind . . .

“Ivy—look alive, for Christ's sake,” Torres said. “Dickson is here.”

Kay snapped to it. Kay didn't particularly like Dickson, but she had to admit he was an asset in this sort of situation. He seemed cool and collected as ever, unruffled by the moment ahead of them. A last-minute check to make sure everything was in place, and then Kay slid quietly through the side alleyway, stopping finally at the eastern exit to the alley that ran behind
Williams's stash house. “Malloy in position,” she said quietly into her walkie-talkie.

She stood next to a broken-down fence: Was it really a fence if it was broken down? Wasn't the point of a fence that it marked a boundary between two spaces? What was a thing that did not deliver on its essential purpose? Idle questions to be asked as the morning began to creep out over the night as the first rays of sunlight broke slowly onto the city.

A flash of movement brought her back to her senses, reminding her of how foolish it was to be distracted, even for a moment. She might not be on the entry team, but nor was she browsing through a bookstore. “FBI,” Kay said, firmly but not too loudly. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

The man coming down the back stoop from one of the houses a few blocks down from Williams's turned his coat up over his throat, looking tired and cold, like anyone would look very early on a freezing morning in February. There were a few naked inches of skin between the heavy ski cap he wore and his upturned collar. “I gotta get to work,” he said dully, unimpressed with her announcement or with the FBI raid jacket she was wearing over her body armor. Kay supposed this was the kind of neighborhood where the occasional intervention of law enforcement was not a subject to get particularly thrilled over—one of the many scarred battlegrounds over which the cops and the crooks fought their nightly battles, like half the city.

“This is police business, sir,” Kay said. “I'm going to have to ask you to return to your home.”

The man sucked his teeth, pulled his cap farther down over his head, looked back warily at the way he'd come. “Boss gonna fire me if I don't get in on time,” he said unhappily, like he already knew what Kay's answer would be. “Boss ain't gonna be interested in any police business.”

“As I said, sir, we're in the middle of an operation. For your own safety, I'm going to have to ask you again to return to your home.”

“You gonna sign me a note?” he joked bitterly. “I don't go to work, I can't pay my bills; I can't pay my bills, they gonna take the house. Come on, lady, I been late twice this month 'cause the bus never comes in on time. Third strike and—”

There was a sharp sudden noise from the stash house, Torres and the rest going in fast and hard, as they'd been trained, overwhelming anyone inside with speed, with numbers, with the sheer intimidating force of authority. Another twinge of regret that she wasn't amongst them.

“All right,” Kay said, shrugging, “but hurry up and keep your head down.”

He thanked her and brushed past, heavy eyes still on the day's labor. Kay's own were keenly trained on the back door of the stash house, the sound of the action from inside bringing her senses back in hyperawareness. If Williams or one of his peons tried to make a sprint for it, she promised herself, they'd better be going west down the alleyway. Kay felt like a set trap, a grinning wolf, a cat ready to pounce.

But when the back door finally opened, it was only Torres, looking puzzled and annoyed and waving for her to enter. Inside was a beat-to-heck couch facing a gigantic flat-screen television that had not been properly affixed to the wall, a rough hundred thousand dollars in heroin on the scarred wooden coffee table, three young black males cuffed and kneeling next to it, looking furious and a little bit scared. None of them, it did not take Kay long to note, was James Rashid Williams.

“Where is he?” Torres asked one of them.

Staring up at Torres and twenty years in prison, he shrugged and smiled nastily. “Who you talking about?”

“Dickson,” an Agent shouted from the kitchen, “you need to come take a look at this!”

Which he did then, and rapidly, with Torres and Kay following in his train. The kitchen had not been used to cook anything but crack in years and years. Stacks of empty pizza boxes rivaled empty beer cans in height and depth. The door to the adjoining storage room was open. Inside was a hole and a ladder leading down below the building. Two Agents had already gone to take a look at where it led, and one of them had come back and poked his head up to spread the info. “It heads down to another house half a block away,” he said.

“Motherfucker,” Torres said.

Dickson looked hard at Kay. “Anyone slip past you, maybe from one of the adjoining buildings?”

“Motherfucker,” Kay agreed.