Designated Target - Chapter 12

It was late, and Taylor had been going pretty much straight since being assigned this case three days before. Besides a very short night’s sleep in L.A. and sleeping on planes, he’d been awake since leaving D.C., and could feel the exhaustion catching up to him. He was at that point of the investigation where he’d turned everything over to the techs and all he could do was sit and wait for them to find something, so he had an agent drop him off at a local hotel so he could get a few hours sleep while they worked on the vehicles.

What seemed like ten minutes after he’d fallen asleep, although the lying clock next to the bed said it had been almost six hours, Taylor was woken up by another call from Whitaker.

“Yeah,” he said groggily.

“Sorry to wake you up, but I knew you’d want to hear this right away.”

“You found something?” He said, pushing himself up, suddenly more awake.

“Multiple somethings. As you suspected, there was a GPS on your car here. I just talked to the auto techs. It’s not that sophisticated and they said it looks homemade, but they dusted everything and didn’t find any prints. The parts were all off-the-shelf stuff from hardware stores or parts from a dismantled cell phone. The guys who went over it said it was very well done, and they doubt this was her first design.”

“I don’t doubt it. What about the explosive?”

“The C4 itself was from a pallet that disappeared a year and a half ago from an army warehouse in Kabul. The guy who stole it is already in Leavenworth and they’ve found stuff off that pallet in ten different countries. She probably bought it off the black market, which makes it a dead end, since there’s no way to tell how many middlemen would have handled it before it got to her.”

“Yeah, I figured it would be something like that. Anything else in the device?”

“No. Again, most the parts are either basic off-the-shelf stuff or repurposed internal workings from consumer electronics. Again, she did a good job of keeping everything clean. No DNA, no fingerprints anywhere in the device.”

“Again, not surprising given what we know about her professional history, but we had to check. So far, I’m not hearing what I should be excited about.”

“I’m getting to it, be patient,” Whitaker said. “The SUV you drove in L.A. wasn’t reassigned yet and was untouched. They checked and sure enough, there was an almost identical GPS tracker under the rear bumper, just like the one you had in Jersey.”

“Let me guess, no prints.”

“Yep. In their sweep, though, they found something else. Inside the car, under the dash, she installed some kind of listening device. They said it looks like it draws a decent amount of power, since it’s sending a full audio stream and not burst coordinates like the GPS, which explains why she wired it into the electrical system for the radio. Like the GPS’s, they were disabled and not sending any kind of signal anymore, so there was no way of tracking it back to her, but it’s a good bet she heard every word you said inside the car.”

“That explains how she was on top of us so well and knew what we were doing. I wondered how she was able to get set up for the shot on Randazzo so fast. I knew she must have been tailing us, but she wouldn’t have known where we were going before we got there, and ten minutes to find a good spot to shoot from is pretty tight. Hearing us talking about it in the car, though, she would have been able to get there ahead of us, since we weren’t exactly pushing it.”

“Since she’s still chasing you, I’m guessing you didn’t say anything about where you stashed Finnely when you were in the car.”

“No, although I did when I was on the phone to you yesterday, before I went to her mother’s.”

“Where’d you park when you were at the offices up there?”

“The secure garage.”

“So maybe she didn’t have access. You were in a garage she couldn’t access and then at Mrs. Beacham. Hard to pull off that kind of thing in broad daylight of a suburban street.”

“It was pretty run down. Good chance no one would have seen it, or cared if they had.”

“Yeah, but she couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t look out the window at the wrong moment or how long you’d be inside. She might be a risk taker, but she hasn’t gone unnoticed this long to get caught doing something like that. She’d want darkness and a fairly set amount of time, just to be sure. The GPS tracker she could walk by, pop it under the bummer, and keep going. In and out in seconds. Breaking into a car and wiring it into the car would take time and she’d be conspicuous as hell.”

“The night we got to L.A., it was late and we went straight to a nearby hotel. We were there for about six hours before heading to the justice department offices. She could have done it then. Middle of the night, poorly lit parking lot. Still a risk, but a calculated one.”

“And you’ve been going since you hit the ground in Jersey,” Whitaker said.

“Yep. What are the odds there’s one of these in my car right now?”

After leaving Chelsea’s mother’s house, Taylor had caught a ride back to the local offices and picked up another SUV while the one he borrowed was being gone over. He’d drive it out to the motel he was currently in, leaving the SUV out in the parking lot like normal.

“Pretty good. If she needs to find Finley, she’s going to want to do more than just follow you around. She knows you’re investigating her which means not going back to wherever you stashed him. That might be part of the reason she’s trying to intimidate you into backing off, so you’ll have no choice but to just go back and guard him until it’s time for trial.”

“Is there any way to know the car is bugged without tipping her off?”

“Yes. There’s a small handled detector that can sweep for both GPS and wireless transmissions. It only works when the device is sending, but if she’s just added it and you’re somewhere she might find notable, she’ll be listening, so it’ll be sending. I haven’t checked, but I’m betting the office up there has one somewhere.”

“I’ll check with them. I haven’t used one of these. Will she be able to tell if I’m using it or if I found the bug?”

“I don’t think so. It was covered in a training I did forever ago, so I don’t remember the specifics, but I think it’ll just be feedback, which the car will give off from time to time anyway, so as long as the car is running, it’ll be hard to tell one from the other.”

“Okay.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Something proactive, finally. I’m tired of chasing after her. I want to bring her to me.”

“Good luck,” Whitaker said, and hung up.

It was still the early morning, and there wouldn’t be anyone in the offices yet even if we went up there, so he went back to sleep for a few hours. Besides not being able to go anywhere yet, he didn’t want to do anything that might tip Chelsea off if she had planted the bug, and if she hadn’t, he wanted her to feel comfortable enough to do it now.

Contrary to Whitaker’s assertion, the Jersey City offices didn’t have the detector he was looking for. It wasn’t that surprising, since they were a small office and New York, which had one of the largest offices outside of D.C. itself, wasn’t that far away, but it meant he had to take a drive across the Hudson.

The detector itself was small, not much bigger than his cell phone. After having the tech run him through how to use it, Taylor made his way out to the car and slid it as stealthily out of his pocket as he could. He was parked in a secure garage, which hopefully meant Chelsea couldn’t see inside, but Taylor didn’t want to chance it.

As soon as the device turned on, it sprang to life. Something within a few feet of him was sending a large amount of data. He’d asked the techs about anything that might cause a false positive, and they’d given him a pretty large list, but none of those seemed to apply. His cell phone was able to generate that kind of data and, encrypted or not, the detector would have picked up the cellular signal but, according to the tech’s instructions, the volume he was seeing now would mean streaming video or audio, neither of which he was doing. He didn’t really see how the device could tell the difference, but between the tech’s assurances and his own conviction that she would have placed another one, he figured it was still a safe bet. If he was wrong, he’d only be embarrassed when nothing happened, which he could live with.

After sending out several text messages, Taylor called Lopez.

“How’s Finley,” He asked when the kid answered.

He’d given Lopez a secure cell phone, but he’d avoided calling him since leaving the two at Fort Dix. While he hadn’t even considered Chelsea could be listening to him making calls from the car, he’d had OpSec drilled into his head long enough that he’d done it out of habit. While it was doubtful she could have broken the Bureau’s encryption, army training had been heavy on paranoia when it came to signal counterintelligence, and old habits die hard.

“Restless. He’s demanding we move him to better accommodations.”

“Suggest to him he can always stay in the same room Bartolini used.”

“I told him if he didn’t like it I could drop him in the middle of Manhattan and we could see how long he lasted on his own, and he quieted down. I gotta say, if this is what private contracting is like, it might not be for me.”

“Be happy for the quiet moments. The other times are the ones that make it not worth it.”

“I remember,” he said, and Taylor could almost feel the phantom pains the kid must be experiencing.

Getting shot up wasn’t something Lopez would forget, although he couldn’t fault the kid for hating the boredom.

“Well, you should be happy now. We’re going to have a little change of scenery. The DA called me this morning and said they need to move up the deposition. He wants us to bring Finley to the DOJ office in Trenton by three this afternoon. I’m heading out now and should beat you there.”

“Do I need to arrange for an escort?”

“No. You’re safer traveling in one car mixing with the traffic than having a convoy that someone will notice. Right now, anonymity is our best protection. We’re meeting in the third-floor conference room I think, but check with security when you get there.”

“Will do. See you then,” he said, hanging up.

Taylor took a moment to go over the plan once more in his head before pulling out of the parking garage, hoping Chelsea was on his tail.

***

Trenton, New Jersey

Chelsea didn’t wait to follow Taylor to Trenton. She was annoyed it had taken this long, and traveling all the way across the country and back, to find Finney. She’d dealt with tracking people protected by the feds before, but they’d never been as slippery as this guy. Dealing with cops was always harder than dealing with crooks, since the crooks tended to not think about security at all, making calls off burner cell phones, thinking that gave them some kind of anonymity. It was rare that she found one wise guy who realized cell phone scanners had been a thing for twenty years and maybe they should think twice before making calls on them.

Okay, so most of their security measures were built around not going to jail, which meant talking in code and not discussing crimes outright over the phone, but she wasn’t looking for evidence. If she was tracking someone, she was listening to calls to find out where her target was. Half the time, these guys knew there was a hit on them, and still discussed where they were going to be over the phone. Bunch of amateurs.

Cops were generally harder, although they made up for their actually caring about security with their arrogance. They all thought, because they were cops, no one was going to try to whack a guy they were standing next to. They’d go to all this trouble to hide someone’s identity, not making direct calls and cutting the witness off from contacting anyone in their life, just to walk them slowly up the steps of a courthouse like there was some kind of magical barrier protecting them.

For a while, she thought Taylor might be different. He hadn’t contacted whoever he had sitting on Finney and when he talked about them to his wife or partner, at least before she’d shot him, he’d made no reference to where Finney was stashed. It was coming up time for the deposition and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to get to her target in time, which had only ever happened once before. Thankfully, for all his precautions, he was as foolish as any other cop. She still had no idea where he’d stashed Finney, but knowing where he’d be was enough.

She knew the Justice Department offices in Trenton had an underground secure parking garage, which meant she wasn’t going to be able to get Finney on the way from the car to the door. She also knew the rest of the building, having thoroughly studied it in preparation for trying to get Finney the first time, before they brought Taylor in. The third-floor conference room was on a corner of the building, with a ton of windows along it. It was the middle of the day, so a thermal scope would be no good if they kept the windows closed, but these guys loved their views.

She was in an empty office building one down and across the street from the justice building with a good line of sight to the conference room windows. The actual shooting angle wasn’t great, since she’d basically have to set up in the corner of the room and look down and out the window, giving her a narrow arc to shoot from, but she’d made harder shots. At least everything was going to be stationary.

It had taken some doing to find an empty office with the right view, but she’d found one. Luckily, the building didn’t have security and it was mid-afternoon meaning there wasn’t a steady flow of people coming and going, so she didn’t have to bribe or kill anyone to get into the empty rooms. These old buildings had the cheapest locks imaginable, so it took seconds to pick the lock and get out of sight. There might have been some cameras, but she kept her head down the whole time and had a baseball cap on that did a good job of hiding her face, so she shouldn’t be picked up.

The hardest part was the wait, something she wasn’t great at. For someone who struggled with the quiet still moments, when she had too much time on her hands to think, she’d chosen a profession that often-required hours of sitting still, waiting for a trap to spring. Thankfully, cops were somewhat punctual, as opposed to criminals, who’d sometimes be three or four hours late for a sit-down. One minute after four, people started to arrive. For a second, she worried that someone was going to close the shades, as one of the guys stood in front of the window facing her, blocking off her view from the street. She was just starting to go over backup plans when the guy moved over just slightly.

He must have been a cop, because he was just hanging back, standing by the windows, while two other men sat at the long conference table. One was in a nicely tailored suit with slicked back hair that must have taken a gallon of produce to get to look exactly right. The other guy she couldn’t see directly. He was facing away from her, kind of hunched over looking at some papers on the desk in front of him, wearing a hoody with the hood pulled up. He was fidgety. Every few seconds, the chair would turn and then turn back, like a guy swiveling to burn off excess energy. She couldn’t see him, but the build was close and the hoody made sense for someone in hiding. Even coming in through the secure garage, Taylor was paranoid enough about security to have wanted to keep his face obscured while walking through the building.

The lawyer was speaking animatedly, pointing at papers in front of him. It wasn’t until she saw Taylor lean in for a second to say something to the witness that she knew it was him. For a second, before he pulled back out of view, she considered taking a shot at Taylor. He’d been a massive pain in the ass, and he’d gotten a lot closer to her identity than she’d thought was possible. When she’d realized he was going to her mother’s house, she almost did him right then, but managed to control herself. She’d cut off her current life from her old one completely. It was disconcerting they’d made the connection, but it couldn’t track back to her. Her remaining calm paid off, since he’d finally led her to Finney.

For a moment she considered waiting to see if he’d turn around and show his face, just to make sure, but the way the room was laid out and her limited view of the windows, she didn’t want to risk it. Better to do this guy now and hope for the best. If it wasn’t Finney, she’d still be in the same place, but she’d kick herself if it was him and she wasted the shot.

Slowing her breathing to time with heartbeats she waited, counting, letting the crosshairs settle on the back of the guy’s head. Breathing out, she gently squeezed the trigger. The weapon kicked into her shoulder and she leaned into it to keep the scope on target.

For a second, she thought she might have missed. The body jumped and fell to the side as everyone panicked, dropping under the table, but that heavy of a slug should have scattered brain and blood across the room. That didn’t happen. She paused, probably for much too long, before she realized she’d screwed up. That wasn’t Finney. It wasn’t a person at all.

It was a trap.

***

Taylor didn’t wait for the dummy to hit the floor before he was out of the room, hitting the stairwell at a sprint. He had an earpiece in and was listening to the counter snipers he’d had in place, as they identified where the shot had come from. He’d hoped they would have gotten her before she got the shot off, but he’d set them out in a way to keep them from being observable, since the key for this to work was for her to not realize she’d been suckered. This trick was only going to work once, so he had to make sure he didn’t give away the game.

Even with one of the agents blocking one window and the AUSA blocking another window, Taylor was a little worried Chelsea might see them roll in the dummy they’d tied to the chair into position. He thought having the AUSA nudge the chair back and forth with his feet, giving it a sense that the person was moving, was a nice touch right up to the moment it started to come undone from its bindings. Taylor had to rush to keep him from falling out of his chair and getting him reset.

Thankfully, this wasn’t his first time setting up a hair-brained scheme like this. The dummy was new, but he’d set up fake scenes to give an enemy the impression that what they were looking at was something else several times before. He’d actually copied it off of some Russian Spetsnaz he’d worked with years ago when he’d been seconded to them as part of an officer exchange. They called it maskirovka, and would tell you at the drop of a hat about its long history of use in warfare going back to the Great War.

It sounded like bullshit the first time they told him about a crazy scheme to set up a fake weapon buy for a group of Chechen separatists, with all the gimmicks they’d used like they were a Hollywood props department or something, except it worked. The thing he’d come to learn, and then use multiple times afterward, was that people came into a situation with preconceived notions, and were very good at convincing themselves that what they were looking at was what they came in thinking it was. It could seem absurd from the outside, but if you set it up right, you could make it convincing for your target.

It was actually useful in the reverse, since he’d managed to avoid several ambushes over the years by being able to assess if he was seeing what he wanted to see and then stopping and trying to see the situation for what it was, outside of his preconceived notions.

It was a gamble, but one he thought could work if she took the bait at all. Of course, from Whitaker and Joe Solomon’s perspective, he was taking wild gambles that was going to make everyone involved look like an idiot. It had taken a lot of calls back and forth while he was still inside the, hopefully, safe confines of the Jersey City Bureau offices to convince them to go along with his plan.

Now that it had, Taylor thought he might have undershot his prep, since no one had seen her before she took the shot, despite dozens of eyes watching anywhere a shooter might set up. She was good, no doubt. Worse, he only had one agent near that building to try and cut her off, and two more that were marginally closer than he was.

He passed one of those agents as he burst through a side emergency door and vaulted into the street, barely missing a car that hadn’t had any warning before he suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The agent who should have been right on his heels paused, looking for a better opening. While prudent, it also put that man out of the chase. They were already going to have to push to catch her, since she was almost certainly going to run away from the building she just shot at and not towards it, and there was no way that guy was going to catch up after waiting for a safe gap in traffic.

Taylor had gotten the jump on her by a few seconds, based on when he heard an agent calling out her location and that she was on the run, but he’d also known it was a trap and started running the second the bullet punched into the dummy. Even being a professional, she would have needed a few seconds for her brain to process seeing the dummy get hit and fall over, realize something was wrong, and get into motion. Taylor had also known, or at least hoped, there was going to be a chase and made sure he could get through all the doors without a delay. There must have been a less direct path to the door she took, because she hit the street just as he barely dodged a car. Unfortunately, the agent that had been closest to her hadn’t expected her to pop out of a door when she did, and wasn’t up to her speed.

She was fast. Not the fastest Taylor had seen, but damn close. The agent had just reached for his weapon, pulling it out of its holster, when she cleared her weapon and fired, dropping him. She looked past him just as Taylor vaulted over a car, which is probably what saved him from getting hit as well, the trajectory causing the bullet to sail harmlessly over his angled body. She must have noticed the other agents bursting out of doors around her, because instead of taking another shot, she turned and sprinted away. The man was wearing a vest like he was supposed to, but Taylor left help to the agents following after him and stayed on the shooter.

She was very much like the picture he’d seen. A little older and, it seemed from this distance, more weathered, but she kept herself in shape. She was fast, although Taylor thought he might be faster, since he thought he might be closing ground. She must have thought so too, because as she passed a Chinese takeout place, she dodged left, into its front door. Back up was maybe thirty seconds behind him, but he couldn’t wait for them to catch up. This woman had shown time and again she was a professional, and if they gave her a chance to get away, she’d take it.

Taylor had his gun out and slowed only briefly before he cleared the door metal door to get a brief glance before dodging back. It was a good thing he did, because she’d stopped halfway into the kitchen and turned to take a shot over him, the round pinging off the metal security bars of the door. Taylor whipped back around, slightly crouched, with his gun out, but she’d already taken her shot and was off again, headed towards the back of the restaurant.

Taylor wasn’t surprised to find a doorway to an alley in the back. She must have scoped out an exit route before getting in position. He would have, and there was no way someone with her skills would chance getting caught in the back of a store with no exit. He leaned out into the alley gun first, just in time to see her back leg disappear through another door on the other side of the alley. Taylor was losing ground having to slow through each doorway, which was probably the actual purpose of that first shot. She probably had tried to hit him, but she needed to slow pursuers down, and that would have been a good side benefit.

This shop turned out to be some kind of clothing place, with this door leading through a changing area into a front showroom. He doubted it was just luck that found the back door unlocked and open for her. She’d either noticed it wasn’t locked when she checked the area out before or, more likely, she’d done something to disable the lock, since she wouldn’t have wanted to chance an employee getting proactive and suddenly deciding to lock it.

Taylor slowed again at the sound of another shot, jumping into a changing room behind a startled woman trying to push herself into jeans she had no business trying to wear. Taylor ignored her screams and leaned back out, gun first. The shot had been Chelsea shooting out the front window of the shop before smashing through it, ignoring trying to find and use the door. Just as she leapt through the window, Taylor took a shot.

He didn’t know if she tripped or he got her, because her leap turned into a tumble as she dropped out of sight, before popping up and limping out of view. Taylor ran after her, hoping whatever injury she suffered was going to keep her from running much further.

Unfortunately, she’d decided on a different strategy. Just as Taylor came through the window, he saw her tear away from the curb on a motorcycle, the guy who owned it lying in the street, not moving.

Taylor cursed. He wasn’t above commandeering a vehicle to go after her, but with the traffic, he’d need a bike himself, and there wasn’t another one nearby. In the movies, he would have pulled a citizen out of their car and taken off in pursuit, but trying to chase a motorcycle through heavy traffic in a sedan wasn’t realistic.

Taylor cursed himself. He’d thought about having a chopper on standby, but there was no telling how long it would take for her to take the shot and he hadn’t wanted one circling above, waiting on her, because she would have sense it and suspected a trap.

“Suspect has fled on a motorcycle northbound on Market,” he said into the radio, but knew it was going to be pointless.

The offices were a block and a half from the intersection of two freeways. By the time they got air up, she’d be who knows where. He added the description of the motorcycle and what she was wearing, hoping a local cop or state trooper happened to see her, but Taylor doubted he’d be that lucky.

He was pretty sure he got a piece of her, but she’d gotten away. This had been a risky op, but it was also his only shot and catching her. He still didn’t know her current identity, and she’d gotten away.