The Operative (41 page)

The bars were still open and traffic was light and although he was the only pedestrian in sight it wasn’t an ungodly hour to be walking through a neighbourhood.

He turned a corner onto a street where houses lined one side and a large warehouse behind a chain fence occupied the other. A large floodlit sign on the side of the building declared that it was the Avion Corporation. Below it another sign warned of security alarms and armed response. Avion’s advertisement in the
Yellow Pages
described it as the largest model-kit warehouse in
California, specialising in model aircraft and spare parts. The street was intermittently lit where the houses were but beyond them it was relatively dark.

Stratton stopped in the darkest patch and checked around. Then he quickly scaled the fence, dropped over the other side and moved into the shadows.

After waiting for several minutes to watch the road and the houses for any sign of movement he made his way along the edge of the warehouse to a collection of dumpsters against its side. Another quick scan around showed that the coast was clear. He climbed onto a dumpster, reached for the edge of the roof and pulled himself up. It was as difficult as he had anticipated with the weight on his back but after a struggle he got a leg up on the gutter and hauled himself onto the gently sloping roof.

Stratton kept on his belly to avoid being silhouetted, removed his pack and the bottle of acid inside and pulled on the rubber gloves. The outer layer of the roof was made of bitumen sheeting and using his knife he cut out a man-size square to expose the next layer, which was made of a heavy-duty composite. A weakness of most commercial premises was the roof since security companies usually only fitted the doors and windows with alarms. Motion detectors inside were also generally unpopular in warehouses because most such buildings had rodents of some sort in them and the animals could knock things off shelves. Also, birds often wandered inside, and that rendered the cheaper systems useless, sometimes for weeks until the creature eventually escaped or died. But since ordin ary burglars rarely gained entry through the roof because of the degree of difficulty it was not a major issue.

Stratton unscrewed the bottle cap and carefully began to pour the powerful acid onto the composite. It reacted immediately and within a few seconds he was able to poke through the softened material with his knife to form the same size of hole as he had cut in the bitumen. Below the composite lay thick fibre insulation
and the remaining acid quickly ate through it and through the thin ceiling sheeting below that.

Stratton pushed the eroded mess through into the warehouse, took out his small flashlight and shone it inside. He was directly above a stack of shelving, which was not a coincidence. The advertisement picture of the inside of the warehouse showed it crowded with rows of shelving the length of the building on both sides.

He dropped his pack onto the top shelf and lowered himself through the hole to land beside it. The shelves were sturdy enough to support several tons and he grabbed his pack, let it drop a good twenty feet to the floor and scurried down the supports.

Stratton’s flashlight soon located the model-aircraft section and from there a more detailed search produced what he was looking for: a stack of four-channel radio receivers, each the size of a penny. They were advertised at $14.99 apiece. If he’d had enough money he would have bought them but he’d been left a little short after all the other purchases. Two shelves above there were several unopened boxes containing fifty receivers each. Stratton helped himself to two and placed them in his backpack. Further down the aisle was a selection of transmitters and he helped himself to the most expensive one. Next on the list were batteries. These he found two aisles down, along with some wire-strippers and a box of electrical tape. A couple of minutes later he was scaling the shelving back towards the hole in the roof.

The roads were quiet on the way back and as Stratton passed the now familiar Bakersfield industrial estate where he had made purchases the day before he questioned the wisdom of this next burglary at such a late hour. There was no traffic around in the estate so he’d be conspicuous in the old truck and there were bound to be security patrols. He was going to have to take a bit of a walk.

He parked in a residential street across from the estate’s perimeter and emptied his backpack. Then he got a pickaxe he had taken
from the mine’s tool shed and moved across the road and into the estate.

He broke into a jog, keeping close to the buildings and avoiding well-lit areas until he arrived at Alan’s Chemicals.

A chain secured the large hangar doors at the front of the warehouse and although it was poorly lit Stratton made his way round to the back to play it as safe as possible. As he slipped into the shadows a pair of headlights slowly rounded a corner and headed up the road towards him. Stratton watched as they drew closer to see that it was a security patrol. The car maintained a slow speed, cruised past and continued up the road and out of sight.

Stratton continued round to the back of the building and to a door with a heavy padlock on it. The place was completely dark and run-down. The rear looked even shabbier than the front, with junk and empty containers strewn all over the place. As soon as he had realised that he could not afford the amount of mercury that he needed, he had looked at the warehouse with a view to breaking into it. Considering the condition it was in, he’d had a hunch that there wouldn’t be much in the way of security. An inspection of the rear door showed that it was old and loose and pulled out a good two inches against the padlock, making a functioning alarm pad impossible – any movement such as one caused by a gust of wind would set it off and an alarm company would have insisted that the door would have to be replaced with a sturdy one.

Stratton placed the pick behind the padlock latch and heaved it up. The old wood gave way easily and the entire latch dropped to the ground. Stratton put down the pickaxe, opened the door and quickly checked around the frame for an alarm pad, just in case. But as he’d suspected there was none.

He closed the door behind him and moved quickly, walking past the shelving and searching with his flashlight as he went. Halfway along the first set of untidy shelves he found an open
box containing a dozen or so small bottles labelled ‘Mercury Metal’. He pocketed half a dozen and was about to head back when he saw a can of latex. It was something that he had considered at the outset and then changed his mind about since it was on the non-essential list. But now that it was here in front of him he took it.

As he reached the back door to leave he saw a couple of emergency gas masks hanging from a hook, something that he had overlooked during the initial procurement stage but which the acid fumes had reminded him of. He helped himself to one.

Once outside, Stratton took a moment to shove everything into his pack. Then he made his way back along the side of the warehouse, retracing his footsteps to the pick-up. Half an hour later he was following the Caliente River once again, heading back to Twin Oaks.

On arrival at the hairpin junction he killed his lights and slowly followed the track by moonlight back to the mine. As he parked back inside the barn he decided to grab a few hours’ sleep since, if all went well, he would complete his preparations by late afternoon the following day and be ready to make the move back to LA. Skender’s official building opening was scheduled for two days ahead. Stratton aimed to be there to make his contribution to the ceremony.

Hobart sat in a comfortable leather recliner in the cramped cabin of a six-seat Falcon 10 jet aircraft. One other person shared the chartered flight with him, a businessman seated at the back and working on a laptop computer. Hobart had not exchanged a word with him.

Early that morning Hobart had been awoken by Hendrickson with two pieces of information that had been important enough for him to get out of bed, get authorisation to charter an immediate flight and head to Burbank Airport. The first news was that the CIA had responded to the second APB that the Bureau had sent out regarding one John Stratton who was wanted in connection with two homicides in LA. It was a brief note from a department chief, simply stating that after consulting with the Brits they were available to assist the FBI with their inquiries but with the predictable condition that they needed more information on the case. Hobart was the one who needed information and he knew from his previous experience of working alongside the Central Intelligence Agency on more than one occasion that the best way to get it was to sit down in front of them and lay his cards on the table – some of them, at least.

The Bureau and the Agency had a decades-long history of contempt for each other, something that Hobart regretted because of the obstacles that it created. They generally regarded each other as incompetent bunglers, empire builders and mandate expanders. This often resulted in duplication of effort and failures of communication
on both sides, thus damaging attempts at inter-departmental cooperation and threatening national security. The conflict between the two organisations irritated the strongly patriotic Hobart but it seemed to be impossible, given their respective histories, to resolve easily. Even many of his new, young agents who had not yet had dealings with the Agency bore grudges that could only have been handed down from older operatives.

The Bureau itself was going through a period of great disadvantage in the mud-slinging stakes because of the recent and highly damaging criticisms thrown up by the 9/11 Commission Report. Its autopsy of the Bureau left its body parts open to the vultures. Some scathingly vitriolic senatorial arguments about whether it should be left at the helm of national intelligence gathering hadn’t helped. One of the FBI’s responses, which did nothing to help soothe the conflict, was that it had at least admitted to having major flaws whereas the CIA remained tight-lipped about their own massive shortcomings.

There was also too much dead wood in both communities, too many old agents who would resist any changes because of ingrained suspicion or simply natural stubbornness. To many it seemed that both outfits were as bad as each other and Hobart accepted that if a change for the better was ever to happen it would not be during his time.

The second piece of information that Hendrickson gave Hobart originated from a keyword arrest system that the Bureau had installed in the interstate police-report network program that had been set up a couple of decades earlier to aid in tracking criminals who moved from state to state. Two of the trigger keywords that Hendrickson had fed into the system were ‘explosives’ and ‘Englishman’ and both had come up on a single Bakersfield police report.

An initial investigation produced a description of the Englishman that matched those which the FBI already had from various sources
including the waitress at the restaurant where Ardian had been killed, the manager of the Santa Monica apartment complex, and a social worker in charge of administration at the child-protection centre where Sally Penton’s son had been held. This was enough to convince Hobart that Stratton had stayed in California with the intention of going on the offensive against Skender.

‘We’ll be landing in Dulles in twenty minutes,’ the stewardess said to Hobart, snapping him out of his reverie as he looked out of the window.

‘Thanks,’ he said and checked the time as she squeezed past his seat to inform the other passenger. Hobart thought about adjusting his watch to local time, which was three hours ahead of West Coast time, but then decided to leave it alone. He wanted to keep his consciousness on a California schedule and besides, this was literally a flying visit. He aimed to be back in LA that night.

Half an hour later Hobart walked through the gate into the arrivals lounge. It was empty except for a man in a suit sitting across the room and reading a magazine. He put it down on seeing Hobart and got to his feet.

Forty minutes later they drove past a sign for CIA Langley and shortly after turned through one of the heavily guarded entrances on the perimeter of the vast complex. They stopped to present their ID cards to an armed sentry. The pole barrier went up after a heavy steel vehicle dam behind it powered slowly into its slot in the road and they drove in, round the back of one of the large office blocks and into an underground car park.

The driver, who had not said a word since asking Hobart for his ID at the airport arrivals gate, led the way into an elevator which ascended to the third floor. Hobart followed him along a pristine corridor to one of a dozen matching doors spread evenly along it. The driver opened the door and stood back for Hobart to enter a room that was windowless and sterile but for a conference table surrounded by half a dozen chairs.

‘Can I get you anything: water, coffee?’ the driver asked, remaining in the doorway.

‘No, thanks,’ Hobart replied as he put his briefcase on the table.

‘Someone’ll be with you in a couple minutes,’ the driver said before closing the door.

Hobart removed his jacket, placing it on the back of a chair, straightened his tie and sat down. The room was so quiet and still that he could feel his pulse beating away in his body. It seemed a little fast to him and he thought about how long it had been since his last medical check-up. Then he remembered that it had been on the day of his wife’s birthday: the tests had taken longer than he’d expected and he’d almost been late for their celebratory dinner. She had raised a glass to wish them both a long and happy life, a sentiment uncommon for her, and as a result he remembered being suddenly worried since the results from his tests were not yet ready. He’d read more than he should have into the coincidence of the toast. As it had turned out he was as fit as a fiddle but the dinner had been a quiet one because of his concerns.