The Arena: The Awakening (1) (6 page)

Using his updated system access, he logged onto the city’s security camera system and looked at the street the hotel was on at the time of Laura’s checkout. Although not the greatest or clearest system he could see her leave the building pulling her case. He followed her through the city flicking between cameras, trying to get a clear picture of her but still couldn’t get a good one. He followed her for about thirty minutes and then lost her as she disappeared into the side door of a building.

He looked on his building's database again and saw that it was a parking garage. Hank flicked to the camera at the front of the building and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing on the screen. After about five minutes, a black Mercedes pulled out of the parking lot and drove off down the road. From the camera, he was certain that it was Laura Richards driving it. He managed to get the licence plate of the car as it pulled out but it wasn’t the same as the Mercedes he was looking at before; at this point, that didn’t matter to him. He logged on to the traffic camera system again for Boston and tracked the car. It headed south towards New York and New Jersey. As he followed the car through the systems of each state, the car got to the turn off for Newark International Airport on the Turnpike, when it disappeared.

“
Wow,”
thought Hank.
“That’s too much of a coincidence. I was right, the car is the key.”

By the time Hank had printed everything off and stolen a folder to put it in off someone else’s desk, it was daylight outside and others in the field office had started to arrive for work. The investigating officer who was dealing with the assassination arrived not long after and Hank asked him to forward all details of the crime to his office in Morristown. He instructed the officer to carry on as usual with the investigation but Hank wanted access to all reports that were created. Hank also asked him who the victim actually was. It tuned out that the victim was a Russian billionaire who had made his fortune through the pharmaceutical industry. That ticked another box in Hank’s mind so he informed the officers around him to take a closer look at the hotel room he had discovered and forward all details to him at Morristown.

His parting instruction
s
to the officer were to get the plane ready for departure to take him back to New Jersey; he was now on a mission to find the Mercedes.

Chapter 9

Newark Surprise

The flight back to Morristown only took a couple of hours and, thankfully, this trip wasn’t as horrific as the last. The sun was shining and the plane didn’t suffer any turbulence. As the plane taxied back to the hangar, Hank was happy to see that
Laura
was just where he left her. He jumped into her and headed to the office to pick up a few bits. It only took a few minutes to get there from the airport and before long, Hank was sitting at his desk looking at his computer screen. During the flight back from Boston he remembered that he hadn’t updated the boss on developments. To keep things straight with him, Hank started to put an email together. The problem was, he would have to mention the name Laura Richards. This could cause a few issues as the boss might think Hank was cracking up. At this stage, it didn’t matter. It was only a name, after all, and he couldn’t really link it to his wife. After about thirty minutes or so, he finished and headed out the door towards the Newark area. Newark was quite a mean town and, being honest, Hank was a bit dubious about taking
Laura
into such a place. It would really upset him if anything happened to her. Without too much trouble, he found the last traffic camera the Mercedes hit on the turnpike and he started to look around the area. After a few minutes, he opened up a map he had taken from the office to see what was around the area. To the rear of the airport, there were several lockups and warehouses as well as export yards and garages. Hank headed in that direction. He drove around the area for about an hour but was having no luck. He really didn’t know what he was looking for but what he did know was that he was
really
hungry. At the end of one of the industrial units, he spotted a fast food outlet. He pulled in and parked up.

The place was empty, which was odd, but he went inside anyway. He sat in a window bay looking out at
Laura
in the car park thinking about what he was actually doing. After he had finished his burger, he was sipping his coffee when a waitress came over to clear his wrappers away. As she did this, Hank smiled at her and she looked down at him. As she did this, she spotted the FBI badge attached to his belt.

“Are you here about the murders?” she asked.

Hank nearly spat his coffee out. “What murders?” he spluttered.

“The murders the other night of the two hoods in the parking lot” she replied.

“No I’m not, but what happened?” he enquired.

“No one really knows. Two guys were found dead in the parking lot late the other night. Both beaten to death. No one saw anything and this place is open 24/7. We just found them lying out there,” she said with a slight quiver in her voice.

“Well you can relax” replied Hank. “I’m just here to have a quick bite to eat.”

She nodded and then walked off to clean the other tables. Hank finished his coffee and went outside to have a look around the parking lot. From what he could see, there was no CCTV for the restaurant and none on the adjacent buildings. Hank got back into
Laura
and headed off for one last look around the estate. His perseverance didn’t pay off. He still couldn’t work out where the Mercedes had gone once it came into the area. He decided that enough was enough and headed back to the office to investigate the report of the double murder to see if it could shed any light on what he was looking into. 

Due to heavy traffic, it took Hank a good hour to get back to Morristown. It was worth the trip though. He read the report into the double killing and, although it didn’t connect at all with the cold cases and Boston killing, there was something about it that didn't seem right to him. Both of the victims only had prior offences for grand theft auto which, in the grand scheme of things, was nothing. The report from the coroner stated that there was minimal bruising on both victims, as if the blows were calculated and not a random beating. As he turned the next page and read on, he noted that a knife was found close to one of the victims that had a small trace of blood on the edge. Although he had no real involvement with this case, he emailed the Newark based investigating office and authorised the blood to be DNA tested to see if there were any matches. 

Hank was sure he was still on the right track with regards to the Mercedes. He punched the car details into the traffic camera system again but came across a blank after it left the Airport junction. Not to be defeated, he punched in the car details without the licence plate to see what came back. Expecting an abundance of results, he only found one. A black Mercedes C63 AMG re-entered the New Jersey Turnpike at that junction thirty minutes after his initial search vehicle disappeared. What was more interesting was that it entered the Turnpike less than five minutes after the bodies were discovered in the fast food outlet parking lot. 

“
We’re on!”
thought Hank.

Using the traffic camera system he managed to track the vehicle all the way down past Philadelphia and into the Centre of Washington DC. Thankfully DC is one of the most camera-heavy cities in the world, so it was a pleasure to work with. He tracked the car all the way through the city but lost it just behind the J. Edgar Hoover building on 9
th
Street.

“Where the hell did it go?” Hank muttered to himself.

He looked on the mapping system and found that where the cameras had lost it, there was a turning for an underground parking lot. Hank took a deep breath, sat back in his chair and folded his arms. The question running through his mind was, how was he going to explain to the boss that the assassin he was looking for, parked in a parking lot behind the FBI Headquarters?! In a moment of genius, Hank jumped back onto his computer and sent another email to the investigating officer of the double murder at the fast food joint. He told him to send the sample down to the forensics lab at the Hoover building ASAP. He followed that with an email to the boss saying he needed to head down there to speak to the lab about the bullet analysis for the Boston shooting.

“That should keep him off my back for a little while”
he thought to himself. 

It was going to be another long day as DC was a good three to four hour drive from Morristown. Hank didn’t want to put that amount of mileage on
Laura
so he grabbed one of the pool cars. It was a black Crown Victoria but it was extremely comfortable. Prior to leaving the office, he had printed off a map of the exact route the black Mercedes took on the way down. That, hopefully, would make the drive a little more interesting.  

It didn’t. There was nothing jumping out at Hank at all. He enjoyed the trip though. It was nice to see the scenery of Philadelphia as he trundled over the flyover, but before too long he was deep in the traffic of central DC. He found himself going off the track of the pre-planned route and decided just to dump the car at the Hoover Building and walk the rest of it. He finally made it onto Pennsylvania Avenue and into the underground structure of the building. Before heading out on foot to look for the Mercedes, Hank went into the main building and up to the Forensics lab. They couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know about the bullets that were used. Well, nothing Fitz hadn’t already told him. They also said it was going to take a couple of days to run the DNA profile through from the blood on the knife. To be honest, he wasn’t worried about all of that now. He was itching to go out and find the vehicle he had been tracking.

After a quick coffee and exchanging pleasantries with a few others in the building, Hank wandered out into the city. He walked directly towards the multi-storey parking lot he had found on mapping. On approaching, Hank discovered a side door with a staircase leading down. He looked at a quick diagram on the wall and it showed that it went down four floors. He figured that it was best to start at the top and go down from there. The parking lot car-park itself was actually quite big. Hank scanned each floor as he went down. No Mercedes! That was until he got to the third floor. He scanned the floor and was about to proceed to the next when out of the corner of his eye, he saw a black Mercedes parked at the far end of the parking spaces in a poorly lit area of the floor. As he approached it, he could see that the number plate matched the one he had been tracing all the way from Newark.

“
Excellent”
he thought.

His hunch being right was the best feeling he'd had in a long time. He looked through the slightly smoked-glass windows with his pocket torch. The vehicle inside was immaculate. There was nothing lying around at all. Hank walked around to the front windscreen of the vehicle and looked at the chassis number. Using his cell phone, he called the FBI operator and checked it out. It came back as no trace on any system! With that, he asked for it to be recovered for a detailed examination.  

Hank waited with the vehicle for some FBI uniformed officers to arrive and once they were there, he left them waiting for the recovery truck. He was walking back to the FBI building when his cell phone rang. Caller ID showed it was the boss. Hank took a deep breath and answered it with an upbeat “Hello.”

“
Conference room 16 in the Hoover Building please Hank. We need to have a sit-down.”

Unknown to him, the boss was in DC as well. He wanted a full update on what Hank had been up to and why he was spending his department’s money on DNA reports from murders they weren’t dealing with and why he was recovering a car for forensic examination. 

Chapter 10

The Aftermath

“
Well, I’ve had worse meetings with him,”
Hank thought to himself.

He had been in the meeting with the boss for over an hour explaining what he was doing and why. He didn’t dwell on it too much as he had other things to be getting on with. He was waiting for a DNA report and a forensic report on the Mercedes. Hank had his heart set on one of those giving him a lead to chase up. For now though, his time in DC was up and he was back on the road heading for the office in Morristown. It was another tedious drive back. The flyover at Philadelphia was jammed solid and the turnpike was its usual mayhem. The day had ticked on past finishing time so he thought that he could do with clearing his head and decided to go visit Fitz. A social visit this time, and nothing to do with work. It wasn’t too far away from where he was and it didn’t take long before he was turning into the driveway and pulling up outside the green doors of the garages.

He found Fitz where he left him the other day. He was underneath the beaten old Cadillac, grinding away at something and making a serious mess into the bargain. As he waited for the noise to stop so he could say hello, Hank remembered that there was a beat-up old beer fridge in the corner, so he grabbed a couple of cold ones and had one ready for Fitz as soon as he had finished.

The grinder came to a stuttering halt and Hank announced that he was there, so as not to scare the bejesus out of him. Fitz lived alone and had done so for many years. He wasn’t that used to people turning up at his place to see him either.