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She recalled Lou’s instructions vividly: Clutch the briefcase to her chest, turn toward the center of the revolving door, and compress herself, taking tiny footsteps, careful not to jam the door’s motion.
No one had warned her how confined this space would feel, how it would shrink around her, removing all the air. Two steps into it, she sagged, and thought she might pass out.
As a Crimes Against Persons lieutenant, Boldt’s participation in this, or any Special Ops surveillance, even one involving his wife, was strictly in an advisory role. Boldt was ready for undercover street work if necessary, dressed in blue jeans, a black sweatshirt advertising a Paris jazz club, and a British driving cap pulled down low on his brow. The disguise was finished off with a pair of black-framed fashion glasses. He looked nerdy by design-a forty-year-old loner who sat on park benches feeding the pigeons.
In the front of his thoughts lay the possibility that the money drop was nothing more than a clever cover for the opportunity to abduct his wife. Never mind the Special Ops switch-Malone for Liz-Boldt was not going to have any abduction on his conscience.
Pahwan Riz, a thirty-five-year-old Malaysian American whose mother was a full-blooded Englishwoman, had skin the color of a leather couch, mercurial green eyes that squinted naturally in a constant suspicion, and a lilting, singsong voice that belied his intensity. Riz commanded this special operation, and ran his unit like a military man. Under normal circumstances Boldt celebrated Riz’s formalities, admired a man who had fought racial prejudice in order to reach the coveted position of commander of a twenty-five-person team that was regularly at high risk. S.O. offered officers the likelihood of live ammunition combat and, as such, drew its water from a dark well. Because it was made up of those willing, even eager, to put themselves into the line of fire, S.O.’s direction of the operation came as a mixed blessing.
Boldt occupied the cracked vinyl passenger seat of a former steam-cleaning van confiscated years before in a drug bust. It served as the communications command vehicle, mobile headquarters for Riz and his black-clad squad of commandos.
With the van parked on the third level of a parking garage across the street from the bank, both Boldt and the wheel man, a guy named Travis, brandished binoculars, trained onto the bank building’s exterior. Behind them, on the other side of a black curtain, where a bank of television monitors flickered in the dim light, came the sputtering and spitting sound of radio traffic orchestrated by a dull-voiced, unexcitable woman dispatcher who sat next to Riz.
“Reece!” Boldt called out using the universally accepted but incorrect pronunciation of the commander’s last name as the bank’s revolving door moved for the first time.
“We saw it,” Riz confirmed.
The revolving door spun like a giant paddle wheel. Riz called out commands and the dispatcher repeated them. A big guy on the sidewalk sucked on a cigarette and turned toward the revolving doors just as a woman wearing a black raincoat and carrying an aluminum briefcase stepped out from those doors and into pedestrian traffic. Even knowing what to look for, Boldt missed the switch, never saw his wife’s black raincoat tucked into the apex of that spi
“Phase two,” Riz said calmly.
A woman dressed as Liz Boldt, looking like Liz Boldt, and carrying an aluminum briefcase like the one Liz Boldt was supposed to be carrying, headed down the sidewalk as instructed. Boldt hoisted the binoculars. Even under magnification Malone passed for Liz.
Boldt popped open his door and said, “I’m on cha
“Lieutenant!” Riz complained, too loudly for the small confines of the panel van. He stopped Boldt. “I remind you: We have an operation in place. You ca
“I know that, Reece.” The guy made it sound like Boldt had never been on a surveillance. He eased the van’s door shut, inexplicably drawn to protect this woman pretending to be his wife.
Once out on the street, Boldt quickly spotted the woman in the black raincoat walking west down the hill on Madison.
Boldt wore a cell phone ear bud in his right ear-a common sight on the streets now and one that made such clandestine surveillance easier than before. In Boldt’s case, the ear bud wire was plugged into a portable police-band radio tucked under his jacket.
In his ear, the dispatcher’s voice inquired, “LTB?” Boldt’s radio handle. He acknowledged. The dispatcher then rattled off a request that Boldt switch sides of the street. Riz didn’t want anyone from the team directly behind Malone. Boldt obeyed the request, crossing with a group of southbound pedestrians, tension surging through him in long waves. He was thinking that Malone’s walk was all wrong, lacking both Liz’s elegance and the subtle but stirring sway of her hips. Malone’s efficient stride was all about training, athleticism, and preparation. At a moment’s notice, Malone was ready to either drop to the sidewalk like a sack of cement or sprint in the opposite direction. Under that controlled movement was a body like a cat’s.
Malone continued west on Madison, down toward the waterfront now directly ahead of her. The street’s dead end into the north/south sidewalk that fronted Elliott Bay would somewhat contain her, and Boldt thought Hayes too smart to corner himself like that. So what the hell was he up to? Then he realized that Riz was being forced to reduce the number of perso
Boldt understood Riz’s reluctance to accept that Hayes would make things easy for them by directing “Liz” to a ferry or a boat-fully contained and so easily tracked and followed-a criminal’s nightmare. But with the middle stretch of waterfront buildings soon to be under the umbrella of Riz’s well-orchestrated team, Boldt played the contrarian. Riz did finally direct a few of his people toward the ferry docks, but by the time he thought to do so, Boldt was already several hundred yards ahead of not only the closest operative but Malone as well, for she had stopped and stared out to sea for seven long minutes, presumably under the direction of Hayes, as she now carried Liz’s cell phone. Her pause caused a momentary paralysis for Special Ops, finding themselves unable to predict her next move.
Boldt, by playing against the grain, ended up at the ferries well ahead of the mark, and ahead of Special Ops also, the only one already in place when Malone made her unexpected move south.
South, to the ferries.
The Washington State Department of Transportation-WSDOT-operates the busiest ferry system in North America, handling nearly seventy thousand passengers per day. Piers 50 and 52 of the Seattle Terminal, a sprawling landscape of parking lots and docks, present managers with a logistical challenge similar to that of ru