The Zarrabian Incident Page 9

  “They set their own compound on fire, didn’t they?” he asked. “Tried to burn everyone in it. It’s unimaginable, burning their own kids.”

  “The Sons of Joe torched the place, but the FBI got the blame. Everybody, from the president right down to some freshman congressman from Nome, Alaska, was playing armchair quarterback. ‘He should have waited,’ and the next guy, ‘He should have moved faster.’ A situation like that, the guy in charge is screwed on the day he gets the assignment. It’s not going to end well; someone’s going to get crucified. And that somebody was McCaig.”

  He shook his head. “That sucks. The guy does his best and still gets screwed.”

  “And if that wasn’t enough, his wife left him two months later. Court documents hint that she’d been screwing around for a long time.”

  “Wow. You’ve been doing your research.”

  “Somehow, McCaig managed to survive. The director stood by him, fended off Congress, and took a lot of the heat from the press. McCaig kept his job, but he’s been low profile ever since—mostly desk stuff. McCaig’s reputation inside the FBI is pretty much in the toilet. Everyone knows it wasn’t his fault, but nobody wants him on their team.”

  “So how’d he get this assignment?” he asked.

  “Good question.”

  Betrayal

  It was a rare summer morning, one without a trace of fog. Christine pulled the mainsheet just a bit tighter as her boat broke free of the marina. The boat heeled over in the brisk summer breeze and sprang to life, accelerating over the smooth, sheltered waters along San Francisco’s waterfront.

  McCaig looked slightly alarmed as the boat leaned over. “This is normal, right? This tipping business?”

  “Oh, we’re just getting started. There’s a lot more wind under the bridge, and waves too. This flat stuff won’t last.”

  “And you’re pretty good at this?”

  “I don’t sail in races, Mr. McCaig. I win them.”

  He looked her up and down. “Alright then.”

  “So why are we here? You asked me to take you out on my sailboat as part of your investigation. It’s an odd request.”

  “Odd? Why?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Mr. McCaig. I’m a reporter, and I don’t normally cooperate this directly with law enforcement. But today I’ll be a victim cooperating with the FBI. So why are we here?”

  “I’d like you to walk me through it, so to speak,” he replied. “I want to be where it happened, on the same boat. There’s probably nothing out there, just water. But this is how I work. I have to live a case, retrace what happened, get inside the bad guy’s head. It’s hard to explain. It’s just what I do.”

  “And that works for you?”

  “Sometimes. Either way, I can’t lose today.”

  “Can’t lose? Lose what?” she asked.

  “The day. Worst that can happen is I get my first ride on a sailboat on a beautiful day.” He turned back to watch the shore as they glided past piers, buildings, and tourists.

  A brisk gust made the boat accelerate and heel over even more. Spray began to fly from the bow, and their foamy wake widened. McCaig stretched one leg across the cockpit to brace himself against the leeward seat.

  Christine was impressed. Most landlubbers gripped anything they could the first time they felt a boat heel over, afraid of being tipped into the briny deep. McCaig’s shoulders were relaxed. His arm was draped casually around the winch. She could see his muscles moving under his shirt in rhythm with boat’s motions. He was quite fit.

  It was the first time she’d seen him without his FBI “uniform.” He’d traded the gray suit and dark tie for a close-fitting long-sleeved gray T-shirt and black denim jeans. He’d also brought a heavy sweater and waterproof jacket, but she’d told him they wouldn’t need those for a while.

  As they continued north, the massive Bay Bridge loomed overhead. Cars and trucks rumbled across its decks, their roar briefly overwhelming the sound of the wind and sea. Then it was behind them and the rumbling receded.

  The wind stayed brisk and steady as they sailed north past pier after pier—the remnants of San Francisco’s heyday as a shipping and fishing center. Most of the piers had been converted into warehouses, parking garages, or, in the case of the famous Pier 39, into a tourist mecca of shops and restaurants. The era of ships, cargo, and longshoremen was a distant memory along San Francisco’s waterfront.

  They sailed in a companionable silence. Christine loved this part of the trip. They were sailors on the ocean, but the city waterfront was so close that huge skyscrapers towered above them. The sounds of truck and bus engines, taxi horns, a police whistle, tourists talking, and children shouting drifted across the water, yet they were completely separate from the city. They were gliding in their own world of water, wind, and spray.

  As the coastline turned west, Christine held her course north. The shore grew distant, and there it was: the two towers of the fallen Golden Gate Bridge stood like desolate sentinels guarding a gaping emptiness. The huge cables that had once arced gracefully across the Golden Gate now drooped forlornly into the sea.

  The channel between the towers was crowded with a flotilla of barges, tugboats, police boats, a Coast Guard cutter, a huge marine crane, and various industrial-looking floating barges. On shore, the roads to the bridge were marked by flashing red, yellow, and blue lights atop various police cars, fire trucks, construction equipment, and ambulances.

  “Damn,” said McCaig, breaking the silence.

  Christine said nothing for a moment. She felt a lump in her throat and didn’t want to reveal her emotions to this man yet. She was a reporter, used to keeping her emotions in check. And yet, this one was getting to her. The icon of her home, California. It was . . . she shook it off.

  “So this is your show, TJ,” she said. “Where to? What are we doing?”

  He turned back in her direction. She was surprised to see emotion in his face too and wondered how often he revealed anything beyond the seriousness he maintained so carefully. Probably not often. It didn’t last long though—his face quickly returned to its FBI persona.

  “Can we sail out to the scene of the crime? Where Zarrabian fell and you picked him up?”

  “I doubt we can get to that very spot.” She gestured toward the flotilla of ships, barges, and police boats. “I checked the Coast Guard's Notices to Mariners this morning, and the south and center of the channel is restricted. All traffic has to use the north side of the channel. Small craft—that’s us—have to yield to ships even if we’d normally have right-of-way. Special rules, since the channel is so restricted.”

  “Yeah, makes sense. Well, do what you can.”

  By the time they had tacked past the fallen bridge and out of the bay, Christine’s respect for McCaig was growing. Just a word here and there—the right way to coil a line, how to work the winches and cleats, when to release and when to crank, and when to stay out of the way—and he was a competent crewman. She never had to explain twice.

  The water went from flat to rough as they left the bay’s confines. They’d both put on sweaters and waterproofs as soon as the wind had picked up. The boat leapt over each wave and plunged into the next trough, spray flying from the bow.

  Most first-time sailors had a white-knuckled grip on the handrails in conditions like these, but McCaig was relaxed, moving with the boat like he’d been sailing all his life. He even let out a couple whoops of glee as particularly big waves crashed over the foredeck and stung their cheeks with salty spray.

  A mile past the fallen bridge, she finally eased off the sheets and fell away from the wind, turning back east toward the bay.

  “This is more or less where it started,” she said. “I was racing and made a rash choice of sails right about here.”

  “You mean that big, colored sail that was floating in the water near your boat?”

  “Right. It’s called a spinnaker. It was a close race, and Kerry—he’s a sailing buddy and my nemesis—h
e had me blanketed.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “See how we’re going downwind right now? The wind’s behind us?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Imagine you’re in a race, and you’re behind me. What would you do?”

  “I suppose I’d try to get right upwind of you. Block some of your wind.”

  “Exactly. That’s what he was doing, and we could've easily ended up in a tactics match, zigging and zagging around, him trying to steal my wind and me trying to get out from under his wind shadow. I might have fended him off in the end, but with all that maneuvering, someone else could have just sailed on by us in a straight line and stolen the race from both of us.”

  “So you decided to put up Big Bertha.”

  “Big Bertha? Nobody’s ever called my spinnaker that before! But yeah, that’s what I did. It’s really tricky single-handed, and doubly so in a brisk wind. Pretty foolish, really.”

  “Foolishness and courage are hard to tell apart until later.”

  She laughed at that. “Sure. If you win, you’re brave. If you crash and burn, you’re a fool.”

  “Exactly. So now you’ve got the big sail up, the . . .”

  “Spinnaker.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it turned out to be foolish. My sheet parted.”

  “The sheet? You mean the sail ripped?”

  “No, the sheet. You landlubbers call it a rope. The sheet is the rope that trims the leeward side of the sail. Not only did the sheet part, but when I tried to lower the spinnaker, I discovered I’d tangled up the halyard—that’s the rope that pulls the sail up to the top of the mast—and couldn’t get the sail down.”

  They were getting closer to the flotilla of barges and boats anchored in the channel. A line of warning buoys a few hundred yards ahead marked the restricted area. She pushed the tiller to leeward and brought the boat around almost into the wind, luffing the sails to spill most of the wind. The boat slowed and nearly stopped.

  “So there I was with a huge, flapping sail that I couldn’t lower. I turned to luff, like I am right now, so I was barely moving. The rest of the racing fleet zipped by me. Really pissed me off. And then a war broke out overhead and a body fell out of the sky.”

  McCaig looked around at ocean, waves, and wind. “The waves are pretty rough out here. Must have been quite a trick to pick him up out of the water. What did you call it? A man-overboard triangle?”

  “It was even choppier that day. You want see how it’s done?” Without waiting for a reply, she grabbed her newly replaced man-overboard flag and heaved it into the water. “Man overboard!” she yelled, then pulled the tiller over. The boat turned downwind and began to accelerate. “You never get any warning. Just like this.”

  She repeated the maneuver she’d executed to rescue Zarrabian: downwind, turn, port tack, come about to starboard, then headed up into the wind just as the man-overboard flag came abeam.

  “Grab it! It’s brand new. I just had to replace that sucker!”

  McCaig leaned over and retrieved the bobbing flag. “Nicely done,” he said. “You make it look easy.”

  “Trust me, it took me hundreds of tries. My Pop was a harsh taskmaster when it came to safety. He told me the man-overboard flag was going to come out of my allowance if I didn’t get it back. I never knew when Pop was going to throw that sucker overboard. A calm day, a raging near-gale . . . he even did it once in the marina where there was no room to maneuver. I got it every time, but sometimes it took a few go-arounds.”

  She stowed the flag-buoy back in its holder along the backstay, then let the boat fall off to catch the brisk wind again. Christine eased the mainsheet, and noticed that McCaig eased the jib sheets to match without her saying a word. The boat surged forward on the new course and started catching the waves.

  “So. What now?” she asked. “You got what you needed out here?”

  “Maybe. I never know. It’s one of those subconscious things. I go to the crime scene and soak it in, read reports, arrest records—whatever I can find about the perp, victims and crime. Then I let it simmer on the back burner of my brain.”

  “And that works?”

  “Sometimes.”

  They sailed for a while in silence. The wind eased off to a fresh breeze. Christine leaned back, one hand on the tiller lightly guiding the boat’s course. The beautiful cliffs of the Marin Headlands slid by on the north side, a stark contrast to the forlorn bridge towers and the flotilla of barges, tugs, cranes, and police boats in the center of the channel.

  They reached the calmer waters of the inner bay and turned south.

  “I have a feeling this isn’t going to do much for your career,” Christine said.

  “My career? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m a reporter, remember? We do human-interest stories.”

  “Don’t do that one. It’s boring.”

  “Why do I get the feeling they’ve put you in another no-win situation?”

  “Happy endings don’t interest me. I catch bad guys. That’s all.”

  “And you take the fall when things go wrong. You’re the perfect agent for that.”

  “You seem to think this is going to go badly.”

  “Your suspect already escaped, and you’re having trouble catching him.”

  “Yeah? Seems to me when things go wrong, one fall guy’s as good as the next.”

  “Like Cordo?”

  “I just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. I did my job, saved most of those kids and women. That’s all I care about. And that’s what I’m going to do on this case.”

  “That’s why you’re the guy to take a fall. You are a profoundly unpolitical man.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “It is if you’re Special Agent TJ McCaig. You’re so gung-ho on solving crimes that you’re blind to the political forces swirling around you. Someone says, ‘There’s a crime in that swamp!’ so you dive into the swamp, and by God, you solve the crime. But when you’re done, you’re covered in all the stinking muck you raked up, and you wonder why nobody wants to sit by you.”

  “You think being political is something to brag about?”

  “Pretending you don’t care about office politics is stupid.”

  He smiled. “You don’t pull your punches, do you?”

  A sound brought Zarrabian out of a light sleep. He shook his head to clear it. The cabin was dark; only a single shaft of moonlight lit a dim patch of floor under the front window. What had awakened him? He replayed the sound in his mind—it was the distant sound of a branch snapping.

  He quietly rolled off the cot and onto the floor. In these mountains, a deer, coyote, or even a cougar might be nearby. But he had an uneasy feeling.

  His hand found the duffel bag under the cot. He slowly unzipped it and felt inside for the gun, silencer, and video camera. He screwed the silencer onto the gun’s barrel and then thrust it into his belt.

  Earlier, he’d made sure the camera was set to its ultra night-vision mode. For just a few hundred dollars, any shopper could buy a video camera with night-vision capabilities that would have been the envy of the military a few short years ago. He put the viewfinder to his eye, and suddenly the cabin’s interior was visible as a stark green-and-white picture.

  Zarrabian crawled to the rear window, lifted his head slowly, and scanned the woods with the video camera. A movement caught his attention. He zoomed in on it—it was a deer. It grazed here and there, moving slowly through the moon shadows cast by the trees. He watched for a minute, enjoying the peaceful serenity.

  Suddenly the deer startled and stiffened. It looked back into the forest briefly, then bolted straight toward the cabin, bounding across the small clearing. At the last moment, it turned and skirted the side of the cabin. Zarrabian heard its hooves clatter across the gravel driveway, the sound fading as it crossed the clearing in front of the cabin and fled into the woods below.

  McCaig stood
at the edge of the redwood forest behind the smoldering remains of a cabin. A fireman circled the debris, occasionally stopping to douse a hot spot.

  The heavy morning fog covered the mountains, its gray walls narrowing the world to just this small hole in the forest. McCaig wondered what the view might be like on a clear day. Probably spectacular.

  The smoking remains of the cabin were punctuated at one end by a cast-iron stove, overturned and half-buried in ash. A few other recognizable items protruded here and there: a porcelain kitchen sink, some cast-iron pots and pans, a doorknob, and the steel frame of an old army cot.

  One large, charred lump stuck out of the ashes near where the door had once been. It was a human body, mostly reduced to a skeleton.

  Two fire trucks, a couple of FBI SUVs, several local sheriff’s cars, a state trooper, and a couple of unmarked cars were parked haphazardly in the clearing. McCaig wondered how on Earth the huge fire trucks had negotiated the tiny dirt road.

  A text message sent from Christine Garrett’s cell phone had triggered a massive manhunt in the area the day before, but it had taken a several hours to connect this cabin fire to Zarrabian. The local volunteer firemen were startled when the last few bursts of water from their hoses revealed the unmistakable shape of a shotgun, a rifle, and several handguns, all partly concealed by a charred skeleton. Within minutes of their phone call, a swarm of FBI agents had descended on the smoldering cabin.

  McCaig could see Bashir interviewing the medical examiner and the arson expert, using the hood of an SUV as an improvised desk. His fingers flew over the keyboard of his laptop as they talked. Typical of the kid, thought McCaig. Collect enough data and you’ll find the answer.

  But McCaig knew the answer wasn’t in the data. It was here on the ground. He just hadn’t found it yet. Something didn’t feel right. This was too simple.