Power and Empire

Special Agent Olson was quick on the keyboard for a hunt-and-peck typist. Callahan actually used all her fingers, which made her fast, but Caruso was even faster. Both agents sat at the desks on either side of Callahan’s, consulting small notepads as they typed. The Old Man had made it clear that Callahan and her people were to glue their asses to the chair until they’d completed their paperwork — even if it was the weekend.

Dallas was a large field office and normally the special agent in charge left the day-to-day oversight of investigations to the various squad supervisors. This case had drawn enough national attention for someone to drop Dominic Caruso on top of them. That had the Old Man feeling antsy, and when the Old Man felt antsy, he got down in the weeds. He focused his wrath on the supervisors, and they, in turn, made the lives of working agents like Callahan a living hell. She needed to be out doing interviews, finding the trafficked kids, not in the hangar doing reports.

The FBI Form 302, or record of a witness interview, got a lot of press, mostly from people who felt their words had been twisted by the time they got to court. From Callahan’s point of view it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that the Bureau was fueled by the damned things — and paperwork in general. New agents learned quickly to plan on three hours of paperwork for every one hour in the field. So much for the intrepid gumshoe detective. Sometimes she felt like a typist with a Glock.

The time spent on paperwork did, however, give her the opportunity to accomplish at least one little bit of actual detective work. She’d already filled Caruso’s coffee mug three times, hoping that he’d get up and go to the bathroom. She’d seen him drop his cell phone into the pocket of his blazer, which now hung over the back of his chair. With any luck, the coffee would give him a morning “push” and he’d have to spend a couple minutes in the bathroom. Olson had said two minutes would be better, but a minute might be enough.

Finally, Caruso stopped typing and pushed back from the desk.

It looked like he was going to grab his phone, but Callahan said, “You done? We need to get on the road.”

Caruso said he had two 302s left, but that he would hurry — and scurried off to the bathroom in the back corner of the hangar.

Callahan waited for the door to close and then fished out the phone and passed it to Olson, who was waiting with a cord that he used to attach the phone to his laptop.

“We should probably get a warrant for this,” he said, working feverishly at the keyboard. “Don’t let him shoot me if he comes out.”

“It takes at least a minute to pee,” she said.

“This is some serious government-level encryption,” Olson said. “I’ll try and clone it, but the rest will take some time.”

“Can you get call logs?”

“Maybe.” Olson detached the phone and handed it back to Callahan. “What exactly are you hoping to find?”

Twenty feet away, the toilet flushed behind the bathroom door.

Callahan dropped Caruso’s phone back into his jacket and flopped back down at her desk, feeling more than a little guilty. “Find me all the numbers he’s called in the last forty-eight hours,” she said. “Specifically during the time we were making the arrests at Naldo Cantu’s place. I’m really interested in any of his contacts that go by the name John.”

• • •

Clark took a short nap parked among half a dozen class-A motorhomes in a Walmart parking lot in West Fort Worth. No one bothered him while he waited for the store to open, and he slept deeply, his activities of the past six hours notwithstanding.

Purchasing a handgun in a state where he wasn’t a resident posed a problem, so he’d have to make do with the Glock 19 and the Wilson Combat .45. It was, however, no problem at all to purchase extra magazines and ammunition. He wore a baseball cap against the dozens of security cameras inside the store and made sure to keep it pulled down over his eyes as he chatted with the young man behind the sporting-goods counter. No one appeared to give a second thought to the old dude stocking up for a trip to the shooting range. He bought more ammunition along with three extra magazines for the Glock 19 and two more for the Wilson, giving him five and four respectively — and a total loadout of 109 rounds carried on his person. He threw in a bottle of brake fluid, along with a couple energy bars and a twenty-ounce bottle of water — name brand, with a heavy-duty container, not the generic stuff.

He stopped by a swimming-pool supply store for a bag of chlorine granules. The Internet was rife with people using the stuff for purposes other than intended, but Clark was just another old dude buying shock treatment for his pool. He didn’t get a second look.