Villanueva parked two buildings north and east, outside a door marked Brian's Fine Imported Taxidermy. He locked the Taurus and we walked south and west and then looped around to come up on Beck's place from the blind side where there were no windows. The personnel door into the warehouse office was locked. I looked in through the back office window and saw nobody. Rounded the corner and looked in at the secretarial area. Nobody there. We arrived at the unpainted gray door and stopped. It was locked.
"How do we get in?" Villanueva asked.
"With these," I said.
I pulled out Angel Doll's keys and unlocked the door. Opened it. The burglar alarm started beeping. I stepped in and flipped through the papers on the notice board and found the code and entered it. The red light changed to green and the beeping stopped and the building went silent.
"They're not here," Duffy said. "We don't have time to explore. We need to go find Teresa."
I could already smell gun oil. It was floating right there on top of the smell of the raw wool from the rugs.
"Five minutes," I said. "And then ATF will give you a medal."
"They should give you a medal," Kohl said.
She was calling me from a pay phone on the Georgetown University campus.
"Should they?"
"We've got him. We can stick a fork in him. The guy is totally done."
"So who was it?"
"The Iraqis," she said. "Can you believe that?"
"Makes sense, I guess," I said. "They just got their asses kicked and they want to be ready for the next time."
"Talk about audacious."
"How did it go down?"
"The same as we saw before. But with Samsonites, not Halliburtons. We got empty cases from a Lebanese guy and an Iranian. Then we hit the motherlode with the Iraqi guy. The actual blueprint."
"You sure?"
"Totally certain," she said. "I called Gorowski and he authenticated it by the drafting number in the bottom corner."
"Who witnessed the transfer?"
"Both of us. Me and Frasconi. Plus some students and faculty. They did it in a university coffee shop."
"What faculty?"
"We got a law professor."
"What did he see?"
"The whole thing. But he can't swear to the actual transfer. They were real slick, like a shell game. The briefcases were identical. Is it enough?"
Questions I wish I had answered differently. It was possible Quinn could claim the Iraqi already had the blueprint, from sources unknown. Possible he could suggest the guy just liked to carry it around with him. Possible he could deny there was any exchange at all. But then I thought about the Syrian, and the Lebanese guy, and the Iranian. And all the money in Quinn's bank. The rip-off victims would be smarting. They might be willing to testify in closed session. The State Department might be able to offer them some kind of a quid pro quo. And Quinn's fingerprints would be on the briefcase in the Iraqi's possession. He wouldn't have worn gloves to the rendezvous. Too suspicious. Altogether I thought we had enough. We had a clear pattern, we had inexplicable dollars in Quinn's bank account, we had a top-secret U.S. Army blueprint in an Iraqi agent's possession, and we had two MPs and a law professor to say how it got there, and we had fingerprints on a briefcase handle.
"It's plenty," I said. "Go make the arrest."
"Where do I go?" Duffy said.
"I'll show you," I said.
I moved past her through the open area. Into the back office. Through the door into the warehouse cubicle. Angel Doll's computer was still there on the desk. His chair was still leaking its stuffing all over the place. I found the right switch and lit up the warehouse floor. I could see everything through the glass partition. The racks of carpets were still there. The forklift was still there. But in the middle of the floor were five head-high stacks of crates. They were piled into two groups. Farthest from the roller door were three piles of battered wooden boxes all stenciled with markings in unfamiliar foreign alphabets, mostly Cyrillic, overlaid with right-to-left scrawls in some kind of Arabic language. I guessed those were Bizarre Bazaar's imports. Nearer the door were two piles of new crates printed in English: Mossberg Connecticut. Those would be the Xavier Export Company's outgoing shipment. Import-export, barter at its purest. Fair exchange is no robbery, as Leon Garber might have said.
"It's not huge, is it?" Duffy said. "I mean, five stacks of boxes? A hundred and forty thousand dollars? I thought it was supposed to be a big deal."
"I think it is big," I said. "In importance, maybe, rather than quantity."
"Let's take a look," Villanueva said.
We moved out onto the warehouse floor. He and I lifted the top Mossberg crate down. It was heavy. My left arm was still a little weak. And the center of my chest still hurt. It made my smashed mouth feel like nothing at all.
Villanueva found a claw hammer on a table. Used it to pull the nails out of the crate's lid. Then he lifted the lid off and laid it on the floor. The crate was full of foam peanuts. I plunged my hands in and came out with a long gun wrapped in waxed paper. I tore the paper off. It was an M500 Persuader. It was the Cruiser model. No shoulder stock. Just a pistol grip. 12-gauge, eighteen-and-a-half-inch barrel, three-inch chamber, six shot capacity, blued metal, black synthetic front grip, no sights. It was a nasty, brutal, close-up street weapon. I pumped the action, crunch crunch. It moved like silk on skin. I pulled the trigger. It clicked like a Nikon.
"See any ammunition?" I said.
"Here," Villanueva called. He had a box of Brenneke Magnum slugs in his hand. Behind him was an open carton full of dozens of identical packages. I broke open two boxes and loaded six shells and jacked one into the chamber and loaded a seventh. Then I clicked the safety, because the Brennekes were not birdshot. They were one-ounce solid copper slugs that would leave the Persuader at nearly eleven hundred miles an hour. They would punch a hole in a cinder block wall big enough to crawl through. I put the weapon on the table and unwrapped another one. Loaded it and clicked the safety and laid it next to the first one. Caught Duffy looking right at me.
"It's what they're for," I said. "An empty gun is no good to anybody."
I put the empty Brenneke boxes back in the carton and closed the lid. Villanueva was looking at Bizarre Bazaar's crates. He had paperwork in his hands.
"These look like carpets to you?" he said.
"Not a whole lot," I said.
"U.S. Customs thinks they do. Guy called Taylor signed off on them as handwoven rugs from Libya."
"That'll help," I said. "You can give this Taylor guy to ATF. They can check his bank accounts. Might make you more popular."
"So what's really in them?" Duffy said. "What do they make in Libya?"
"Nothing," I said. "They grow dates."
"This all is Russian stuff," Villanueva said. "It's been through Odessa twice. Imported to Libya, turned right around, and exported here. In exchange for two hundred Persuaders. Just because somebody wants to look tough on the streets of Tripoli."
"And they make a lot of stuff in Russia," Duffy said.
I nodded. "Let's see what, exactly."
There were nine crates in three stacks. I lifted the top crate off the nearest stack and Villanueva got busy with his claw hammer. He pulled the lid off and I saw a bunch of AK-74s nested in wood shavings. Standard Kalashnikov assault rifles, well used. Boring as hell, street value maybe two hundred bucks each, depending on where you were selling them. They weren't fashion items. I couldn't see any guys in North Face jackets trading in their beautiful matte-black H amp;Ks for them.