Once a Spy by Keith Thomson Read Free Book Online Page A

a purse snatching?”
    Beckman smoothed his tie. “The thing you gotta understand is, even on a slow night like this, we’re gonna have half a dozen complaints where somebody’s actually been shot. What the department would need to sink its teeth into yours is the why. Why would a sixty-four-year-old appliance salesman, even one who’s surprisingly good with his fists, have professional hit men after him?”
    All Charlie could come up with was, “That’s the question of the night.”
    With an outstretched palm, Beckman put it to Drummond.
    Drummond raised his shoulders.
    Beckman massaged the bags under his eyes. “The best thing’d be if you fellas come back tomorrow when the flip-chart lady’s here so she can sketch composites of your guys. They match anything in the system, we’re off to the races.”
    “What do we do in the meantime?” Charlie asked.
    “I’ll put the write-up into play on the double. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the name Kermit Smith, even if it’s fake—or Smith in some combination with MacKenzie—will click somewhere in the system. Or, you never know, maybe a call will come in from an old lady on Prospect Place who was up late watching the Shopping Channel, saw two young male Caucasians in business suits pile into a car, thought it was suspicious that one of them had a bloody nose or a gun , and wrote down the tag number.” Beckman plucked an ornately monogrammed leather card holder from his top drawer and dealt a pair of business cards across the desk. “Till then, if anything comes up, or if there’s anything else I can do—”
    The bulky dot-matrix printer on the stand behind him sputtered type onto tractor-fed paper, giving him pause and halting the activities of the other detectives.
    “I’ll get it in a sec,” he told them. He was also telling Charlie and Drummond that their interview was over.
    Charlie saw no remaining choice but to plead. “What if MacKenzie used the taxi’s tag number to track us here? Or what if Smith followed us in his own car—like that new BMW, which, come to think of it, no one in his right mind would have left on the street overnight?”
    Beside the printer stand was a window with a view of the street in front of the precinct house. With a tilt of the head that way, Beckman said, “Be my guest.”
    Approaching the glass, Charlie was irked by the reflection: The detective was rolling his eyes. All Charlie saw outside that he hadn’t before was a Daily News truck delivering tomorrow’s copies to the sidewalk vending machines. Nothing else even moved. Beckman’s reaction no longer seemed unwarranted.
    What the hell were you expecting? Charlie asked himself. MacKenzie lying in wait with a sniper’s rifle? Smith revving the black BMW in preparation to mow you down?
    As he stepped away from the glass, the message on the tractor-fed paper grabbed his attention.
12/26/09@23:58:04
*.TXT SENT VIA NATIONAL LAW ENFORCEMENT TELECOMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM*
TO: NEW YORK PD 107 STATIONS
FROM: DC FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION 100037870
CHARLES CLARK, 30, AND DRUMMOND CLARK, 64, SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING BY FBI RE: TONIGHT’S (12/26/09, AT APPROX 2330) ARMED ROBBERY/HOMICIDE OF TAXI DRIVER WALLID, IBRAHIM ELSAYED, 43, IN THE MACY’S PKG LOT ON FLATBUSH AVENUE IN BKLYN, NY. MULTIPLE EYEWITNESSES SAW CLARKS FLEEING SCENE.

14
    Charlie grabbed the printer stand to steady himself, then looked over the message again, to find the words that in his harried state he must have misread.
    He saw he’d misread nothing.
    Poor Wallid, he suspected, had merely stumbled into the same dark pit he had. He wanted to study the message further, in hope at least of deriving some idea of what to do now, but he didn’t want to risk drawing the detectives’ attention. He was certain of just one thing: Staying here in the precinct house meant submitting to arrest, which would only make life easier for Smith and MacKenzie. If they—or whoever sent them—could either fake an FBI bulletin