In the Barren Ground (24 page)

CHAPTER 29

They sat in Crash’s workshop on two small stools, facing each other. It was where he kept his little red AeroStar, adjacent to his meat shed. He’d closed the garage door behind them, and put on a bar heater. It glowed orange and warm near their feet. Outside, snow thudded as it slid off the roof.

“My wife’s name was Leah,” he said, then smiled in a way that looked sad. “Still is. Ex-wife. My daughter’s Gracie. I imagine she prefers Grace now. She’s twelve. Like I said, we’re estranged.” He dragged his hand through his wet hair, making it stick up, which lent him an oddly vulnerable air. He flashed a deeper grin, a glimmer of the old Crash in his eyes. The one who wore a crazy World War II flight suit, and whose plane was probably just as old. And as Tana listened, she was learning him. He hid behind that smile and all that bravado-badassery, but she understood broken men, and this man was that, too.

“Because of the complexity, the breadth of the operation, the links to international terrorism, rules were bent. I was allowed to go in deeper and for far longer than usual. And the deeper I infiltrated, the more my isolation increased, because the more there was to lose if I was pegged as a cop. My trips home grew less frequent by necessity. The line between my identities began to blur. I grew my hair, acquired the tats, met the tests. I learned how to survive in that other world, formed relationships there.”

“Is Cam O’Halloran your real name?”

His eyes tunneled into hers and he was silent a moment.

“Partly.”

Shit. Tana got up, paced in front of the small chopper, turned to face him. “You’re still playing the game, aren’t you? You still think you’re undercover, but you’ve gone rogue. That’s why you’re messing with illegal liquor, and dope and whatever else.” That’s why she could find nothing when she searched the Internet for him. “What’s your real name?”

He swallowed. “Dave O’Halloran. Sergeant Dave O’Halloran—you’ll find a record.”

She stared at him, brain spinning.

“You don’t look like a Dave.”

The one side of his mouth twisted up in a rueful grin. “Use Crash. I’ve been called Crash since I was a kid. Bit of a wild child.”

Slowly, she reseated herself opposite him, leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees, her eyes boring into his. “So, when you were shot by the VPD cops, you went into the hospital with a coma as who?”

“Sten Bauer, member of the Devil’s Angels.”

“And what did everyone on the street think happened to you?”

“It was leaked out that I’d become a vegetable. That I was being moved into an institution where I’d probably live out the rest of my life drooling in a wheelchair and sucking food through a straw.”

“How did you earn the Devil’s Angels’ trident tattoo—I was told you need to kill someone to wear one of those?”

“It was a setup. A low-level drug dealer who’d been messing on the Angels’ turf had been shot dead by UC cops involved in another operation around 2:00 a.m. that day, no next of kin. He was placed in an alley where I shot him again before 4:00 a.m., took the credit.”

Tana rubbed her chin, trying to process.

“By that time Leah was having an affair with a banker named Kev Simms. When I found out, she gave me an ultimatum—quit the UC work and go into rehab for the heroin, and she’d leave Kev. We’d try and start over from scratch. I couldn’t. Rehab had to wait—I was managing the heroin addiction, or so I thought, and the big deal was about to go down. I had a haul of rough blood diamonds from West Africa that had been secured by the FBI and Interpol—stones that had been chemically marked by the FBI lab with a brand-new technology. I was to meet with a guy from Europe, and pay with these diamonds for a shipment of women and weapons. He said he had a way of laundering the rough stones. I’d been infiltrating this group for four years, Tana, and if I didn’t show with the stones, they’d smell a ruse. People would die. The whole fucking operation would fall apart. So I asked Leah to wait. She said no go. Gracie needed a father, and Kev was offering relocation to New York where he had a new job. She was going to take Gracie and start a new life.”

Tana held his gaze. She saw sincerity in his eyes. She heard it in his voice. Pain, too. It cut her. She felt for him, and his wife and daughter. If there was one thing she’d learned from her own messed-up life it was that bad shit happened to good people. They became things they didn’t want to be.

She broke his gaze, looked at her hands, because suddenly the connection with him was too intimate. “So . . . those blood diamonds from the FBI were going to be tracked, via the chemical trace, once they went into the system?”

“Yeah. Somehow the rough stones out of Africa were coming north, here to the territories, and going into the system. They were coming out the other end cut and polished with nice little polar bears or maple leaves lasered onto them.”

“Plus a certificate that stated they were conflict free—pure Canadian diamonds.”

“Correct. With far more value on the international market compared to stones coming out of conflict zones in Africa and other places around the world. And clean Canadian diamonds are infinitely more attractive to the world of high-end organized crime and terrorism.”

“What happened? What went wrong with the deal?”

“A jurisdictional clusterfuck is what happened. A Vancouver PD officer was told by a small-level snitch that some big gang deal was about to go down. I was on my own. That had been made clear to me from the start. The VPD was not aware of our joint op, or that I was undercover, and they organized a raid.”

“Your task force wasn’t watching?”

“Nearby, but not so close as to give wind to the European dealers. It was a supersensitive operation at that point. And the idea was to
not
bust them, but to let the deal go through, get the marked stones into the system from where they could be tracked far beyond these guys. We knew who
they
were. We wanted to get in even deeper, all the way back to the syndicate running the show. Bottom line is, the VPD Emergency Response Team moved in as I was handing over the gems. The joint force was alerted to the fuckup, and moved in on top of them, trying to contain the fallout at the last moment. A gun battle ensued. I fled, as per my cover, with the haul of stones. I was shot by VPD cops waiting in the back alley. One bullet to the shoulder. One in the head. I went into surgery, and was in a coma for almost two weeks. Then I was moved back to Edmonton where I went into all kinds of rehab and was put on long-term disability leave.”

He rubbed his brow. It was warm in the little shed. They were cocooned from the world in here. “The Vancouver chapter of the Devil’s Angels went down—we managed to secure convictions on numerous charges including human trafficking. The two European dealers were killed in the gunfight. But beyond that, after all those years, all that effort, we got nowhere close to the syndicate, and who was behind it. The syndicate cut ties with their Vancouver connections, and pulled up the drawbridges, going under again. We also never found the connection to whoever was running the conflict stones through the production system in the Northwest Territories.”

“How did this low-level snitch in Vancouver know there was a deal going down?”

“Don’t know. He was found floating in the Burrard. The leak could have come from a weak link in the Angels, or even via a dirty cop. As a guy in the Angels once told me, one of the most valuable assets to their organized crime operation was a turned policeman. He said undercover works both ways. At the time I thought he was testing me, fishing. But he might have been referring to someone high up in the RCMP. It would make sense if there was a dirty cop or two in the system. It could explain how a blind eye might have been turned to blood stones entering the production system in the Northwest Territories.”

Tana studied O’Halloran’s face carefully, and she believed him. Yeah, maybe he was a sociopath, a brilliant liar—you’d have to be a little bit of both, perhaps, to go deep cover like he had, and to live a lie by your wits. No backup.

“And because of all this, because you said you fucked up
your
life, you felt you had a right to lay into me about my pregnancy and my own past?”

He inhaled deeply and looked away for a moment, and Tana knew then he was still keeping something big from her.

“What is it?” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

He turned back to face her. “After Leah and Gracie left, I got involved with a young hooker who’d first introduced me to members of the Devil’s Angels. We were both doing heroin at the time.” He swallowed. “Her name was Lara. She was a good person, Tana. She’d had a rough start in life, like so many others who end up on the street. And it’s a one-way track from there. That’s the thing about UC. You get to know these people as human beings. Yeah, these guys are operating on the wrong side of the law, but how they get there . . . it’s gray. No little boy sits on his dad’s lap and says, ‘I want to be a drug dealer when I grow up. I want to get addicted and hurt people.’ No three-year-old daughter tells her mom, ‘I want to be a sex trade worker.’”

Tana swallowed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I thought I could keep her safe from herself. Or from the Angels, by making her mine . . .” His voice caught. He cleared his throat. “But there came that ultimate test, before I could ‘earn’ the trident and skulls, when the chapter leader took me to meet a member who’d two-timed him. Lara was with me. On the spot, he handed me his gun, told me to shoot the guy in the skull. I was a cop. I tried quick-talking my way around it. He didn’t give me half a chance. He took another gun from his holster, and blew Lara’s brains out all over me.”

Wind gusted and the shed creaked. Crash’s eyes gleamed. His features were twisted into something tight, and Tana’s chest hurt.

“What . . . what happened then?” she whispered.

“He turned his weapon on me, and said, ‘What are you, a cop?’ I said, ‘Whoa, no fucking way. You want me to kill someone, I will.’ And I brought him that dead low-level dealer who’d been messing on his turf—the setup.”

“But . . . Lara.”

He scrubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Yeah. Lara. I actually loved her—I cared. And then I found out she’d been five months pregnant with our baby daughter.”

Tana blanched. Her breathing became light. She lurched up from her stool and went to the tiny shed window that was plastered with snow. She stared blankly at the frosted panes. “That’s why,” she whispered. “That’s why you flipped at TwoDove’s place. That’s why you dumped the take-out soup on my desk and fled when you heard Addy and me talking. That’s why you came down on me, for being like Mindy when I was a kid.” She hesitated. “Because you know. You know what can go wrong. And does.”

Silence.

She turned. And the look on his face cracked her heart. It made her think of Jim. And how she wished Jim had spoken to her. How she’d told Jim she didn’t want his kid, not yet. And then it was too late and now she was carrying some asshole’s kid. And here was this man, this broken man, trying to save her where he’d not been able to save Lara and his own unborn child from being shot to death.

When she spoke, her voice was thick. “What happened to that Devil’s Angels chapter leader?”

“I killed him.”

She held his eyes.

“How?”

“In that shootout. In the confusion. I shot him dead before I fled. The delay cost me. If I’d tried to get out right away, I might not have gotten shot in the head myself.”

“And you were never charged.”

“Justice can be gray.”

“And what brought you
here
?”

“Alan Sturmann-Taylor and his world-class hunting lodge.”

A buzz started in Tana’s brain. “You think
Sturmann-Taylor
, the lodge owner, is behind the syndicate?” She watched Crash’s face, his eyes, trying to find signs of madness, obsession, instability.

“I think he could
be
the syndicate, Tana. He bought that lodge just over five years ago, around the same time Harry Blundt found the kimberlite pipes beneath Ice Lake and laid claim to the area. And he started with his high-end renovations, hunting trips—flying in international clients, low key, to this remote and private location from around the world. Big businessmen. Connected people. Entertainment and drugs and toys for them. Then I read an industry article about Blundt hiring a man named Markus Van Bleek. I knew from the UC work I’d done that Van Bleek had managed security—basically private armies—for African diamond outfits, and that he was considered something of a shady, international hit man.”

“And you came out here to check the links for yourself?”

He gave a half shrug. “Those raw stones out of Africa will need another place to enter the system. This is something Van Bleek is capable of orchestrating, especially if he’s involved from ground-level planning in a brand new and potentially massive diamond op. I know,” he said, “I could be chasing shadows. I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if I am nuts—if the bullet and heroin have rewired my brain. Maybe they have. But sometimes, when you’ve been through hell, when you’ve made bad decisions about life and people, and you feel like shit, and you don’t know how to go on, you just mechanically do something because you know how to do it, and you do it, putting one foot in front of the other as a way of moving forward. It becomes something that gets you out of bed each day. So I kept looking. Maybe I’m still just that old dog who won’t give up on that scent.” He hesitated. “Yeah, maybe I
am
that conspiracy-theory dude hunkered in his room with papers all over his wall and red lines linking everything. But I think Sturmann-Taylor is the genuine article. And both Van Bleek and Blundt hunt with him, spend time at Tchliko. And one of his subsidiaries has put serious financing into WestMin.”

“What will you do if you find proof?”

He pushed to his feet, turned up the bar heater. “The original plan was to hear him confess, and then kill him. Payback. For Lara. Our kid.”

She stared up at him, cleared her throat. “And the plan now?”

“Not sure.”