Gavin Holder Series

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

“So, let's review what we have here,” said Emily Alvin, also known as Antie Em, the Special Agent in Charge of our task force. Duffy and I were standing awkwardly at attention in front of her desk at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC. It had taken us the rest of the day to deal with the mess at the motel, including all the reporters who had slithered in after the smell of blood. Then there was getting Huhn booked and getting debriefed about the shooting, and crawling home to my apartment and falling instantly and very deeply unconscious. Back at the Bureau the next morning there had been more debriefing, conversations about my mental state after having killed a man, and so on. At long last we'd been called in to talk to our boss, the Special Agent in Charge.

She had an open folder in front of her and was staring at the contents with some distaste. I don't know if people called her “Antie Em” because she looked something like the character from Wizard of Oz, or because she gave the first impression of being a respectable matron. First impressions can be dangerous.

“One dead suspect, one dead informant. One destroyed motel room, although that couldn't have been worth much in the first place. More important than the simple fact that our informant is dead, there is also the fact that we can't get any more information out of him. We can't find out what he really knows. But more about that in a moment. First I'd like to hear if there is something resembling an explanation for all this.”

I tried to swallow before answering, but my throat felt too dry. The fact is, you wouldn't want to be on this woman's bad side. Emily Alvin looked like a late-middle-aged housewife with a hairstyle that could not possibly have been popular within the past few decades, but there was something intimidating about her. She had a way of c*****g her head when she asked a question, like she was a hungry bird and you were something little and crunchy.

I finally managed to swallow, but before I could say anything Duffy intervened.

“We didn't have any other choice, ma'am. They were torturing our CI, we had to intervene.”

“To save the CI,” she said. “Who is now dead despite your efforts.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Duffy. “We should have moved in sooner than we did, but we had no way of knowing what was going on.”

“So what made you decide to intervene when you did?”

“Holder just had a feeling,” he said. “And that feeling was right.”

“The music was too loud,” I added. “It just seemed to me that they might have turned it up for a reason.”

“Which was certainly the case. Still, the reality of the matter is that you did not intervene soon enough. If you had done so, there is a strong chance Robert Hitchcock would still be alive. And Jeffrey Schroeder as well. The man you shot. There will be an inquiry into that of course, although I expect nothing much will come of it. The death of the CI is a much graver matter. If we can't keep our informants safe, they have no reason to trust us. They have no reason to tell us anything at all. But enough of that for now.”

She picked up the papers in front of her, struck them sharply against the desk as if to slap some sense into them, and dropped them back into their folder. “We now know that his story was at least partially true. Ultima Thule exists, and they are dangerous. But that doesn't mean he was telling us the whole truth.”

“So what did he leave out?” I asked.

“I can't claim to be certain.” Alvin was famous for her ability to spot underlying patterns from extremely limited information. Her main claim to fame in the FBI was that she had single-handedly uncovered a Soviet mole back in the Cold War. According to the story as I heard it, she found his coffee-break account of what he did on his vacation unconvincing for some reason, so she asked him a few innocent-sounding questions. When he went home for the night she checked up on his answers, and found out that his old Navy unit had not in fact held a reunion that weekend at all. She brought the issue up with her supervisor, but the man was unconvinced. So she drove out to the bar where he claimed the reunion had happened, looked for the spots she would have used herself, and found his dead drop. The guy had been so flustered by her questions that he had actually given himself away. The rest was legend. Some years later, she had managed to make an Assistant Director very angry for reasons that were still not public knowledge although there were many rumors. That's when she got assigned to run our task force. We waited for her to continue, and she sighed a little, as if the whole thing made her sad somehow.

“Hitchcock's account of the money situation doesn't seem to add up. We checked with the banks and some of their other targets, and the totals for the jobs he claims they did are consistently higher than what he told us. The agent who originally had the case thought there might have been other jobs, including a few home invasions against major Boston-area drug dealers.”

“What are you saying?” asked Duffy.

“There might be a stash somewhere. A large amount of cash and drugs, maybe some jewelry. Either the victims of their robberies were inflating their losses for insurance reasons, or he was lying to us about how much they got. If it's the latter, it could still be out there. I think the UT has been building up a huge cash reserve to finance an armed uprising against the United States government. I was hoping he could tell us where that stash might be. But now he's dead.”

From the way she was looking at us, you would think we had killed Bobby Bullet ourselves just to inconvenience her. She stared at us just long enough to make us truly uncomfortable before opening her mouth again.

“How do you propose we move on from here?” she asked us.

“At least we have Huhn.” said Duffy.

“So we do.” She nodded. “I'll need you two to question him as soon as possible. If he is willing to talk, we'll find out whether there's anything to this hypothesis or not. And if there isn't, we can at least find out what their next plans are. Or what it is they hope to accomplish.”

“What about the inquiry?” I asked.

“You'll find out more when I know more,” she said. “That's all I can tell you. For now, the best thing you can really do is not think about it too much. Just do your job to the best of your ability and let the chips fall wherever they fall. Now get to it.”