Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (12 page)

Alan spent another half hour interrogating Graham McKay. When he was finished, two uniformed officers took McKay into custody. He would be placed on a 72 hour hold, in which time the prosecutor would have to decide if he was going to file formal charges. There was no denying that McKay was involved in illegal activities, but Alan didn’t believe that intent was present. The most likely scenario would be for McKay to testify in front of a grand jury in exchange for a plea deal. That’s what Alan’s recommendation would be. Whether he was charged or not, Alan thought McKay might have trouble finding employment anytime in the near future. He almost felt sorry for him. Whatever the end game was, whoever was behind it, they didn’t seem to have any qualms with using innocent people as pawns. McKay was one of them. Doris Browning was another. Along with all of the civilians that had been killed or injured in the other bombings.

You’re forgetting about Howard Sitka,
Alan thought.

All of them pawns.

Alan was on his way to his rental car when Knowles approached him saying, “I’ve got news on those two guys that quit around the same time McKay did.”

“That was fast.”

“Yeah, well, something tells me that Guy would have wanted me to pull out all the stops.”

“I’ll tell him he isn’t paying you enough.”

Knowles uttered a brief chuckle before his face grew somber again. “Anyway, they’re not going to be of much help to you.”

“Dead?”

“Yep. Looks like both of them signed long-term leases in the dirt.”

“Shit.”

“You can say that again. Wanna grab a drink somewhere?” Knowles checked his watch. “I’d say we’ve got a good forty-five minutes to get our drunk on before last call.”

“I’ll take a raincheck. Besides, I’m a lightweight.”

“I hear ya. If you don’t need me, I’d be more than happy to extricate myself from this particular situation. I’ve got a wife that’s six months pregnant at home.”

“Go be with your wife.” Alan extended his hand and Knowles shook it. “Thanks again. I’d probably be signing a dirt lease myself if it wasn’t for you.”

“Well, next time you’re in town, you’re buying. That’ll even us up.”

“You’ve got it.”

They parted ways. Alan slid in behind the wheel of the rental car and started the engine. He sat there for a moment, hands gripping the wheel, and took a deep breath. It felt like the first real breath he had taken in hours.

Chapter 14

Alan was thankful
for small favors. As far as he was aware, no one had yet figured out that the series of crimes taking place across the county were connected. No one had made the deductive leap that they were all linked by small but significant pieces of evidence, like puzzle pieces in some enormous, crazy jigsaw puzzle. Even Alan himself didn’t yet know how they all interconnected; he couldn’t yet determine what the final image would be once all the pieces were fitted into place.

As far as he knew, only the GCB was privy to enough of the facts to realize they were all slices of the same pie.

Well, maybe Darrow knows,
Alan thought.
But who the hell knows who he works for.

Alan remained convinced that Darrow was a spook for the CIA, NSA, or some other branch of the government that spent normal business hours lurking in the shadows. Whatever agency Darrow belonged to, they weren’t represented that morning as what could only be described as a circus of law enforcement personnel gathered collectively two blocks from a vast warehouse not far from San Francisco’s business district.

What do you call a gathering of crows? A murder.

What do you call a gathering of law enforcement officers? A clusterfuck.

There were beat cops from the SF PD, deputies from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, agents from the local ATF and FBI field offices, as well as enough top brass to make Alan a little nervous about what would happen if things went badly. It was the type of high-spectacle operation that guaranteed casualties, perhaps literally, but most assuredly figuratively. If mistakes were made, there would be a lot of people calling for a public crucifixion. The fact that the GCB was playing lead dog meant Alan was in the hot seat. Front and center.

A radius consisting of at least a dozen city blocks had been cordoned off as everything was assembled. A parade of squad cars waited in formation to both the east and the west, all ready to converge on the warehouse when they received the signal.

Alan had contacted Gant earlier that morning. He had finally come clean, and filled Gant in on everything. He had started with Marvin Davis’s theory about the cloning and then laid out all the evidence to support it.

Afteward, there had been a long silence on the line as Gant, most likely seated behind his desk as he drank bad coffee from a Styrofoam cup, had processed the information. The pause had lasted long enough for Alan to ask if Gant was still there.

“I’m here,” Gant had said. “I’m just trying to decide if you’re putting me on. I don’t suppose you would. Not with something like this.”

“Now you can understand why I played it close to the vest,” Alan said. “You would have thought I was crazy.”

“Believe me, I still do. You’re sure about this?”

Alan didn’t need to think it over, but he took a minute to do just that. He was putting all of his eggs in one basket and he knew it. Gant was no doubt thinking about what the repercussions would be if Alan was wrong. But there were precious few eggs and only one basket.

“I’m sure. As outrageous as that sounds. McKay basically confirmed it.”

“Which might not be saying much.”

“It’s the best we’ve got.”

After another long silence, Gant said, “What the hell. If it doesn’t pan out, early retirement might not be the worst thing in the world. I’ll make the calls. There’s going to be a lot of swinging dicks at this party, so keep it tight.”

“I will.”

“And Alan?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t fuck this up.”

It was the closest thing to a pep talk Gant had ever given him.

That had been three hours ago.

Presently, it was going on ten o’ clock. The sky was cloudy and it looked as though it could start raining any minute now.

Alan was wearing a bulletproof tactical vest with G.C.B. printed in crisp yellow letters on the back. He had been prepared for the heat and worn a black polo shirt and blue jeans. It was only in the mid-seventies at this time of the morning, but beneath the vest, his shirt was soaked.

He was seated in the passenger seat of an unmarked sedan. Brent Matthews, one of the special agents from the ATF, sat behind the wheel. He was wearing expensive wrap-around sunglasses, and his badge dangled from a lanyard around his neck. His face was a tense piece of deeply tanned granite, lips pursed, as he gazed out the windshield with the realization that he might be about to enter a combat zone.

Alan said, “You know the drill, right?”

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” Matthews said, and Alan thought he caught a hint of a southern accent in the man’s voice.

And that’s good enough for me
, Alan thought.

“Is S.W.A.T. in position?”

Matthews cocked his head and spoke into the two-way radio secured to his tactical vest. “Alpha Two for Sierra One, over.”

“Go for Sierra One.”

“What’s your status?”

“We’re in position. Awaiting the greenlight.”

Matthews looked up at Alan. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Sierra One, you have a greenlight,” Matthews said into the radio and shifted the sedan into drive, put foot to pedal, and then they were hauling ass, blowing by two blocks worth of industrial-looking buildings until they swept around a corner and squealed to a halt in front of a massive concrete building lined with windows which were all blacked out.

The front door to the warehouse was already open, the S.W.A.T. unit was already making entry. The same thing was happening at the rear of the building which was where the second and only other entrance/exit point was located.

Alan hopped out of the car, Glock drawn, coming in behind Matthews as they approached the front entrance on foot.

Matthews waved a hand behind him, signaling for Alan to wait.

Alan waited. His pulse quickened, sweat broke out on his forehead.

After the events of the previous night, the arrival of the two armed hit men at McKay’s residence, Alan had expected anything other than the quiet scene that unfolded. It was so quiet that he could feel his heart beating in his ears. He had expected the sound of gunfire, had expected screams or shouting or…anything.

But there was nothing. Matthews had his gun raised, covering the door. He looked like a statue standing there.

Alan had his own gun raised, feeling the sweat running down his temples, hoping it wouldn’t run into his eyes.

Over the radio, he heard: “This is Sierra One. We’re all clear.”

An entire two minutes had passed.

Matthews started moving again, motioning Alan forward as he entered the warehouse.

Alan was unprepared for the darkness.

The image his mind had conjured beforehand had been of a well-lit, sterile-looking facility teeming with shiny laboratory equipment that would appear entirely foreign to him; hulking metal artifacts from some futuristic alien world.

Instead, there was only darkness, lit occasionally by the crisscrossing beams of light cast by a dozen assault rifles as the S.W.A.T. team moved to secure the building.

He removed the heavy flashlight fastened to his tactical vest and switched it on, aiming the beam through the darkness in order to get a better idea of what they were dealing with. The warehouse’s interior was vast and open. On the far side of the building, Alan could see a series of grilled stairs leading up to a large platform.

As he moved through the building, he had to watch his step as he navigated around a complex labyrinth of medical equipment. Some of it he recognized, most of it he didn’t.

Banks of monitors were stacked against the wall to his left.

To his right, almost out of range of the flashlight’s beam, he saw towering pieces of equipment lined with buttons and LED screens.

Alan weaved his way through the maze, approaching the back wall. A dozen circular platforms were bolted into the concrete floor, thick corrugated tubes snaked their way out of them toward a large glass tank the size of a moderately-sized swimming pool. The tank was partially filled with a clear liquid that at first appeared to be water, but upon closer inspection turned out to be a thick gel with the consistency of hand sanitizer.

Transparent cylinders large enough to house a man sat atop the metal bases. To Alan, they looked an awful lot like the cylindrical capsules they sent through the pneumatic tubes at a drive-up bank, only much larger.

That’s where they grew the clones,
Alan thought.
The surrogate chambers or whatever McKay had called them.

Matthews tapped him on the shoulder and pointed skyward. At first, Alan wasn’t sure what the man was pointing at, but then he saw a security camera mounted to one of the overhead beams. A red LED blinked on and off below the camera’s eye in five second intervals.

“Smile for the camera,” Matthews said.

Alan remembered McKay saying that he had never met his employer face to face, that they had corresponded strictly through email and phone calls.

Are you watching us now, Morrie Arti?
Alan wondered.

After another ten minutes, the members of the S.W.A.T. team converged near the rear exit. The team leader (whose radio call sign was Sierra One) was a man named Tom Cowell. He was an older man, in his late forties or early fifties. He removed his helmet and wiped sweat from his forehead with a gloved hand. His M-4 was slung across his back.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” Cowell said. “Guess they were expecting company.”

To Alan, Matthews said, “You think your guy McKay might have tipped them off?”

Alan shook his head. “Don’t see how he could have. We brought him last night. He’s been in custody.”

“Could have made a phone call from the county jail.”

“We gave them strict orders that he wasn’t to have any communication to or from the outside world.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Matthews said.

“Either way,” Cowell said, “it looks like they knew we were coming and cleared out. Place is abandoned. What now?”

Alan played the beam of his flashlight around the warehouse, hovering over various pieces of equipment. “Everything in here is evidence. We’ll need to take it all with us.”

Matthews gaped at him. “All of it? We’ll need an aircraft carrier to move it all.”

Alan tried to ignore his disappointment. Morrie Arti, whoever he was, had proven to be a resourceful man. And well funded, too. So far, he had been pulling all the strings, had led them where he wanted them to go, and seemed to always be one step ahead of them.

There was no two ways about it. The man was in control.

Alan shined his light around the room, taking in the multitude of equipment that seemed to go on forever. He wondered if they had come this far only to find themselves at yet another dead end. This game of cat and mouse was getting tiresome. Unfortunately, their enemy was turning out to be one hell of a smart mouse.

“Gonna cost a pretty penny to haul all of this away,” Matthews said.

Alan looked at him and said, “Bill me.”

Chapter 15

“It’s overrated.”

That was Alan’s response to Lucy after she asked him if he had gotten any sleep lately.

He had caught a flight back to Omaha late the night before, driven back to the Patriot Inn and tried to sleep after that, but as weary as he was, sleep had refused him entry to the dream world.

He had laid awake for hours, turning the case over in his mind. He had started from the beginning, combing over every detail his tired brain could recall (surprisingly, he thought he remembered most of them), trying to pinpoint anything they might have overlooked.

Alan refused to believe that they were at someone else’s mercy; refused to concede that the rulebook for this particular game had already been written and all they could do was play it until the game’s master threw them the next bone.

They always made a mistake sooner or later.

But in Morrie Arti’s case, it was shaping up to be the latter.

Morrie Arti.

What did he know about the man?

Nothing really. Only what Graham McKay had told him, but all that amounted to was that he was allegedly the man in charge. The mastermind of this elaborate game.

He was wealthy. Alan knew that much. He was either knowledgeable about biology or at least had an interest in it. Alan wasn’t sure which. It was like the old paradox regarding the chicken and the egg. Which came first? Was Arti a brilliant scientist that was endeavoring to make his mark on the scientific world, or was he simply a rich entrepreneur that saw his opportunity to multiply his fortunes? Either of those possibilities could be motive.

A man with that kind of wealth couldn’t fly under the radar; he would be known by someone, would be a part of some exclusive circle comprised of other rich men.

But it didn’t fit. If the man was already rich or if he was trying to make the next great scientific breakthrough, why was he wasting the fruit of his efforts committing crimes?

Alan could almost understand the robberies since they seemed to support the theory that Arti might be looking to increase his wealth, but the bombings were a different story. Murdering innocent people accomplished nothing.

Or does it,
Alan thought.

Without knowing the man’s endgame, it was impossible to say what his motive was, or if there was any rhyme or reason to the madness.

Arti wasn’t a serial killer, but Alan recalled something about serial killings that he had learned during his training at Quantico. In those investigations, two terms came up often when it came to trying to identify who the killer might be: modus operandi and signature. M.O. was the killer’s method. The way he committed the murders; a well-established routine. It could be dynamic, changing as the killer became more sophisticated, but usually remaining similar enough to link a string of cases.
Signature,
on the other hand, was a distinctive calling card left by the killer. It was similar to M.O. in that it was present at all the crime scenes, but differed in the respect that it was an unnecessary element to the crime.

It could be an object left behind at the crime scene, or a way all the bodies were posed in a certain way. It was something uniquely characteristic of a particular series of murders. Unlike M.O., signature didn’t aid in the commission of the crime. Alan had once investigated a string of robberies in which the thief, after stealing all the electronics and jewelry in a house, stopped what he was doing long enough to take a shit on the kitchen floor before he left. Not in the living room or the bathroom or in one of the bedrooms. Always in the kitchen. The act of shitting on the kitchen floor wasn’t M.O., it was his signature.

Alan had considered M.O. and signature as he had lain in bed, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. The M.O. in all the cases was that a clone was used to commit all of the crimes. At first, Alan wasn’t sure if there was a signature, but the more he thought about it, his mind kept returning to the fingerprint and DNA evidence left at all the crime scenes. He had looked at this as clues left behind for them to follow, the proverbial trail of breadcrumbs, but perhaps he was looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe the presence of the evidence at every case was Morrie Arti’s signature. Left there as a way to fulfill some aspect of the fantasy that he had created.

It doesn’t matter,
Alan thought.
Not really.
Whether it’s his signature or just him fucking with us, it’s the same difference.

And it wasn’t much to go on. All this time, ever since Marvin Davis had proffered the theory that someone was cloning individuals and using them to commit the crimes, they had been pursuing it from that angle, and although that hunch had paid off, it still left them at another dead end. They had established that cloning was involved, but it didn’t put them any closer to catching their man.

All they had was a name:
Morrie Arti
.

After sleep had eluded him, Alan had driven to the office and used one of the computer terminals to run a search for Morrie Arti through NCIC. This had turned up nothing, and he had pounded a fist against the top of his desk, having known full well that that would have been much too easy. There was luck in the world, and roughly eighty percent of the time it played a part in helping them catch a suspect, but lately, luck seemed to have taken a holiday.

When the usual databases turned up nothing, he resorted to a Google search of Morrie Arti, which also amounted to a hill of beans. The man didn’t exist. At least not publically. He didn’t have a criminal record, didn’t show up in any of the State DMV records, and had also managed to somehow keep himself from showing up on the Internet.

Either McKay was lying,
Alan thought,
or Morrie Arti was a fake name. An alias.

Alan hadn’t gotten the impression that McKay was lying. If it was an alias, then they were at more of a dead end than he had previously thought. What little hope he had crumbled away.

Lucy showed up at the office around 6:15 that morning. That had been when she had asked him if he had gotten any sleep lately. Alan had gone on to tell her about the events that had taken place in San Francisco.

“So Marvin really was right,” Lucy said. “I almost can’t believe it.”

“You and me both.”

“The name sounds familiar for some reason. Morrie Arti. I don’t know, but it seems like I’ve heard it somewhere before. You didn’t turn up anything? Maybe I’ll try. Might have better luck.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Did you see my email?”

“I havent’ checked.”

“You got a message yesterday afternoon from one of the computer geeks in San Francisco. Said he was sending all the data they pulled from the drives you confiscated from the warehouse. I think Leland should have it by now. You should go see him.”

Alan thought about telling her that it would probably just be another dead end in a long series of them. He wasn’t feeling especially optimistic that morning, perhaps due to prior experience with the case or from lack of sleep, or maybe both. Gant hadn’t shown up yet, but that was another eventuality that caused his heart to sink farther into despair. The only good news so far was that they hadn’t received any new cases. It wasn’t much, but at this point, Alan took what little luck he could get the way a starving man might devour a day old scrap of bread he had recently scavenged from a dumpster.

“I’ll run over and see him sometime this morning,” Alan said, doing his best to curb the depression that had settled over him.

“Did you contact my psychic friend yet?”

“Haven’t had the chance.”

“Of course you haven’t,” Lucy said. “I guess I didn’t expect you to. I don’t know why I waste my breath.”

Outside his office and across the bullpen, Alan heard the familiar ding as the elevator doors slid open. Gant stepped out and walked to his office. For a brief moment, they made eye contact, and then Alan pretended to be busy typing away at his laptop.

“Subtle,” Lucy said.

“What?”

“
That.
You can’t avoid him forever you know.”

“Maybe this would be a good time to run over and see Leland.”

“And if Gant asks where you’re at?”

“Tell him the truth,” Alan said. “I’m working the case.”

“Aren’t you the sly one.”

Alan rose from his desk and was walking out of his office when he paused in the doorway. He turned to face Lucy and watched her as she concentrated on the computer screen in front of her.

“Hey Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to go to dinner with me?”

He would never be sure what compelled him to ask Lucy out on a date. The thought hadn’t occurred to him until that exact moment. Maybe it was because everything was going wrong lately; maybe he was just looking for a little light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe it was because he had suddenly decided to take a little bit of the advice that everyone seemed so keen on giving him lately.

Lucy glanced up from her screen to look at him.

Probably trying to decide if I’m pulling her leg or not,
Alan thought.

“I’d love to…” she said.

“Great.”

“…but I can’t.”

“Oh.”

“It’s just that Marvin asked me out yesterday,” Lucy said. “And I said yes. Any other time, I would have loved to go.”

She said it in a way that Alan understood was meant to inflict the least amount of damage to his feelings, which only served to make him feel worse.

“No problem,” Alan said. “It was just a spur of the moment thing.”

“Maybe if things don’t work out with Marvin…”

“Sure.”

And then he was off, making his way for the elevator, trying not to feel like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.