Designated Target - Chapter 13

“What a clusterfuck,” Dayoub said as agents and local cops began shutting down the street.

The running gunfight meant the crime scene stretched across two blocks, through a restaurant and a clothing store, and the alley between them. That didn’t count the empty office Chelsea had used as her shooting perch or the conference room where the shot landed.

Every available agent in Trenton and dozens of Trenton PD cops were swarming everywhere, taking witness statements and reports for non-serious injuries and property damage, and keeping crowds back and the scenes as intact as possible for the techs, who were already arriving to collect evidence.

“It was a long shot. There was no way to cover every potential spot she might shoot from. We had good coverage and even a man by the door, but she’s survived this long for a reason. How’s he doing?”

“I think he’ll live. We had medics staged in the underground garage, so there was assistance pretty close by. He was awake and talking when they put him in the ambulance.”

“Good. He did a good job and even got the jump on her, but she was damn fast. He never stood a chance, not really.”

“Hopefully we’ll get something usable off this. A print or something, because Finney’s real court appearance is next week, and he’ll have to be there in person. The judge shot down Hill’s petition for remote testimony yesterday.”

“Have you talked to Hill? I haven’t talked to him since the shooting?”

“He’s shaken, but okay. I don’t think he’s thrilled with you putting him in a room that was going to be shot up, but he’ll live.”

“I told him what I was planning.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t believe you. None of us thought this was going to work, honestly. I’m shocked she went for it.”

“She’s cocky and sure of herself, or she’d never have called me like she did. She didn’t slack too much though. I don’t think we’re going to get much in the way of prints. She was definitely wearing gloves. I clipped her going out the window, I’m pretty sure, so we might get DNA, but there’s a much better chance her prints are on file somewhere than her DNA is.”

“We have her gun,” he said.

“Have the techs take it apart I guess, but I’m not holding my breath. This whole part of police work isn’t really my thing. I’m going to go back to the offices and make some calls. I’m sure Solomon has already heard your report and is going to want to rip me a new one over this.”

“I haven’t made a report yet. There’s too much to cover here, but yeah, he’s probably heard about it,” Dayoub said, pointing at a news truck down the block.

There were several set up on the block he and Taylor were standing on, and probably more on the other side by the clothing store. There was no way to keep this under wraps and that kind of chase was going too juicy for them to ignore. Taylor was just happy it was so short that there weren’t news copters or anything getting video of it. There might be someone with a cell camera, although they’d been on this street for seconds at best and then through the Chinese place and on to the other block. The whole thing had lasted less than five minutes from the time she hit the street to when she stole the bike and took off.

“Try and keep my name out of it when you start answering questions.”

“You know you’re recognizable by the general public these days, right? Enough people saw you that it’s almost certainly gotten back to Solomon by now.”

“Shit. Fine. Let me know how things go down here.”

“Sure,” Taylor said, and headed back to the federal building.

Taylor made his way back up the street, waving off a couple of reporters hanging out near the police tape, dodging under their camera, and past security where he didn’t have to worry about being followed. Once up in a small cubicle they’d set aside for him to use, Taylor called Solomon.

“‘What’s the worst that can happen,’” Solomon said as soon as Taylor called back, quoting his own words back at him.

“Fine, it got out of hand. She set up a damn good spot and we were spread too thin covering a multi-block swath. I almost got her.”

“Which is another way of saying she got away.”

“Yes.”

“And in return we got an agent down, a dead motorist, and three injured bystanders. And you’rein the center of it.”

“It was worth the shot. This woman has a body count that would make some serial killers blush.”

“I know, which is why I approved it, but you usually get your man, or woman. You cause havoc and leave a wreck behind you, but you get them. If I had a killer for hire to show for it, I at least would have had something to say when the attorney general called wanting to know what the fuck we were up to.”

“He saw a news report already?” Taylor said.

He knew this would go higher, but he’d hoped he’d have a little time to wrap up the case, or at least get something more to show on it, before the politicians started calling.

“No, but Hill called his boss, who called the AG about the madman I sent down who almost got one of their up-and-coming AUSAs shot down.”

“He was never in any danger,” Taylor said.

“That’s not how he told it. The way I heard it, their people crawled out of the rubble that remained of the obliterated conference room.”

“Come on. She fired once. Into a dummy.”

“Okay, but the dead civilian isn’t going to be as easy to explain.”

“Collateral damage. I know that’s not a popular word these days, and I did everything I could do to keep her from hurting anyone, but the other option would be to just let her go and not chase her. We could just let her go on murdering people for money. I’m sure the public wouldn’t care about that.”

“This job is more than just chasing the bad guys. Agents have to think about more than just catching the bad guys.”

“I never wanted to be an agent. You guys asked me to come help you on the tough cases. Hell, before I stepped in, no one had a clue this woman was even out there, even though she’s smoked at least a half dozen federal witnesses over twenty years that I can find, not to mention well over a hundred criminals who hadn’t turned state’s evidence. If you want me to come back to D.C. and put me on the bench, I’d be more than happy to spend the last month before the baby comes with Whitaker instead of being out here getting shot at.”

“Don’t be a prima donna. It’s not your style. You know I’m not saying that. I knew what I was getting when I asked you to come work for us. I just wanted to point out we needed to keep the bigger picture in mind.”

“Maybe remind the attorney general that when they needed me to put a stop to murders that were threatening to derail budget talks, I did it. Hell, I stopped the sale of a major defense system without even being asked to. I think I’ve got enough in the plus columns for them to get off my ass.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it, although I’ll probably use a little more tact.”

“You want tact, get a tactician.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Yeah, me either. I had a lieutenant who used to say that.”

“Did we get anything out of this?”

“I’ve seen her, and we know for a fact she’s real and the person that’s been calling me. Other than that, not yet. The techs just started going over everything.”

“Fine. Let me know if you find anything.”

“I’ll call once I catch her. Whitaker always handled the reports.”

“Yeah, I know. Fine. Catch her then.”

Taylor hung up and couldn’t help but fume. He didn’t really blame Solomon, since he knew the director was going to do his best to cover him, but politicians really chaffed Taylor sometimes. They had the memory of a goldfish when it came to taking into account past deeds and were about as loyal as rattlesnakes. Caldwell was an exception, but every other politician he’d met over the last several years had reinforced that he didn’t really want to meet any others.

He was still fuming an hour later as he tried to think of how he was going to get Chelsea if they got nothing from this, when Dayoub showed up at the edge of the cubicle. Taylor was happy for the distraction. This really had been his last shot, and working the problem over again and again, as he’d been trained to do, wasn’t helping him this time. Chelsea was in the wind.

“Did we get the crime scene wrapped up?”

“Mostly. We’ve cleared all of the ones on the ground and the coroner has taken the body of the motorcyclist. News vans are still mucking things up, but now that there aren’t a lot of cops all over and police tape up, there’s not as much to see, so they’ll lose their interest pretty soon. We’ll have to deal with the restaurant and clothes place or they’ll end up on the news yelling about the feds destroying their businesses, but other than that, the drama will run its course in a few days.”

“Unless someone in congress decides they want to haul Solomon up before a committee to answer about ‘overzealous policing,’” Taylor said, flashing back to his several trips to the hill to answer questions on operations he’d been involved with since contracting with the FBI. “What about the empty office?”

“We’re still working on it. You’re right, no prints anywhere in the room, or in any of the areas you ran through.”

“She didn’t touch anything while I was chasing her, at least that I saw. The doors swung out and it looked like she shouldered them open, and the front door to the Chinese place and back door to the clothing place were already opened. Plus, I could see she was wearing gloves that didn’t look that thick but covered her fingertips, so she wouldn’t have left any. What about on the gun she left behind?”

“That’s why I was calling. The gun itself was clear, including the bullets and the magazine, but the scope had an adjustable ring at the end for changing focus depth, and it looks like it might have gotten stuck or something, because we found a set of smeared prints along where she touched it to make some adjustment. She probably meant to wipe it down after she took her shot, but panicked when she realized it was a trap.”

“Smears don’t do us much good,” Taylor pointed out.

“No, but the fat thumbprint at the end of the smear does.”

“Tell me you found something,” Taylor said, sitting up excitedly.

“We found something. She applied for a passport under the identity she’s using a couple of months ago, so she’s in the database. She’s been using the name Nadine Sutton for what looks like almost twenty years.”

“She was able to get a passport under a fake name?”

“Yep. She has a social security number and everything, and everything I could see looks on the up and up. Had I not known that she was using a fake name, I’d have just assumed this was her actual identity, which is surprising. There are checks on top of checks that makes anything beyond a fake ID next to impossible, and that doesn’t even mention getting a real alternate identity like this setup. The only people I’ve seen do that successfully was the Marshalls when they set someone up for witness protection.”

“Things were different in the nineties when she set up this ID. It took the agencies a while to figure out how to secure their stuff and have everything properly cross-checked to make it hard to get a new identity set up. Back then, if she could manage to get an old identity recycled and wipe the identity of the dead person who had it before, they wouldn’t have been able to spot it and their system recognizing it as a real, issued number would have convinced all the other systems it was real.”

In his research the last several days trying to track down Chelsea/Nadine, Taylor had read up a lot on how someone in the late nineties would have managed to get a fake ID. It hadn’t been completely comprehensive, but if she had an alias that was able to fool the federal databases, he was pretty comfortable guessing that was how she did it.

“I guess.”

“Where does she live?”

“Her home address is listed as Jersey City, although she’s got several rental properties scattered around the country, including one right here in Trenton. I was already working on getting a tac team set up and a judge has already signed off on a search warrant for the property. If she’s confident we don’t have her identity, she probably would have gone there to regroup and figure out her next plan.”

“I think she’s pretty confident. By now, she will have figured out how I was able to trick her into this trap, and it didn’t require me knowing her identity. It’s been hours, though. She knows we’re looking for her, so if she’s there now, it won’t last very much longer.”

Taylor knew she was desperate to find Finney, but she’d managed to stay out of jail and on one identity for twenty years, so he doubted she’d stick with the job if she thought she was about to get busted. She knew Finney still had to get to his testimony venue, so all she really needed to do was watch the trail and wait for him there. It was riskier, since she’d have one chance to get him before it was too late, but if Taylor was in her place, he would have gone for the option that narrowed the margin of success but made sure he was free to keep trying.

“I want to go in with them,” Taylor said.

“Yeah, I figured. She’s in one of the suburbs. The team is loading up here and we’re going to be loading up in the garage in an hour.”

“Why so long? Didn’t we have the guys needed here already? I thought we had your sharpshooters on some of the roofs looking for before.”

“We pulled some of the team for this op, but the rest were out on a training assignment and considering the nature of your plan, we didn’t think you’d need the rest of the team other than the sharpshooters and Director Solomon agreed. We don’t have enough of our ready response team here and the ones we have I’m not comfortable with taking a house.”

“You understand we’re on a clock, right? She’s had hours to clear out already, and if she even thinks she might be compromised she’ll just vanish. There’s a solid chance this isn’t her only identity. We’ve gotten close to her and she knows it. If she'd been smart, she would have walked away from the Sutton identity the moment she knew she wasn’t being followed, but I think she won’t, at least not right away. She’s been living as Nadine Sutton for twenty years. It’s hard for someone to drop something they’ve lived with for that long, even if they know it’s the right thing to do. We can’t rely on that hesitancy to last long, though. We may not have five minutes, let alone an hour.”

“I’ve already had an agent shot today. I’m not going to jump the gun and get any more of my men injured. We’re waiting the hour.”

“Then I’m going on my own. You guys can follow up as soon as you’ve gotten everyone you need together.”

“Not going to happen. You’re the one who keeps telling us how good she is, and now you want to go blazing over there on your own? If you let her get past you again, or if she kills you, we’ll have lost her. We do things by the book here.”

“I don’t care how you do things here. I’m not under your command. I was assigned this case directly by the director and I’ll do whatever I feel is best to protect the witness I was assigned to protect, which in this case means getting rid of the woman trying to kill him. I mean, you were the one who said I was overreacting when I got Finney out of here and that I had imagined the hit man I was looking for.”

“So now I’m on board, and you’re the one ignoring the reality of the situation. Maybe we’ll call the Director. I don’t care whose ass you’ve kissed on previous assignments, he’s …”

“Not going to do a damned thing. Do you think this is the first time I’ve broken procedure? Hell, the Director makes a comment about me going against the rules almost every time I see him. He knows I’m not following your procedures. Do you know why I’m still doing this? Because I get the job done. You’re also not the first person to get in my way, and it didn’t work out well for any of them. You’re welcome to try it though,” Taylor said, pushing his way out of the cubicle, leaving Dayoub behind him.