“Okay, you can’t tell anyone. That is to protect you and your family. We’re talking about some very dangerous people here.”
“Okay, man.” Newton looked at the table for a moment. “You mean we got people running around with machine guns, killing people — here? Not in Lebanon and like that, but here?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Hey, man, I didn’t spend a year in the Nam so we could have that shit where I live.”
Several floors downstairs, two weapons experts had already detail-stripped the Uzi. A small vacuum cleaner was applied to every part in the hope there might be cloth fibers that matched those taken from the van. A final careful look was taken at the parts. The damage from water immersion had done no good to the stampings, made mostly of mild steel. The stronger, corrosion-resistant ballistic steel of the barrel and bolt were in somewhat better shape. The lab chief reassembled the gun himself, just to show his technicians that he still knew how. He took his time, oiling the pieces with care, finally working the action to make sure it functioned properly.
“Okay,” he said to himself. He left the weapon on the table, its bolt closed on an empty chamber. Next he pulled an Uzi magazine from a cabinet and loaded twenty 9-millimeter rounds. This he stuck in his pocket.
It always struck visitors as somewhat incongruous. The technicians usually wore white laboratory coats, like doctors, when they fired the guns. The man donned his ear protectors, stuck the muzzle into the slot, and fired a single round to make certain that the gun really worked. It did. Then he held the trigger down, emptying the magazine in a brief span of seconds. He pulled out the magazine, checked that the weapon was safe, and handed it to his assistant.
“I’m going to wash my hands. Let’s get those bullets checked out.” The chief ballistics technician was a fastidious person.
By the time he was finished drying his hands, he had a collection of twenty spent bullets. The metal jacket on each showed the characteristic marks made by the rifling of the machine gun’s barrel. The marks were roughly the same on each bullet, but slightly different, since the gun barrel expanded when it got hot.
He took a small box from the evidence case. This bullet had gone completely through the body of a police officer, he remembered. It seemed such a puny thing to have taken a life, he thought, not even an ounce of lead and steel, hardly deformed at all from its deadly passage. It was hard not to dwell on such thoughts. He placed it on one side of the comparison microscope and took another from the set he’d just fired. Then he removed his glasses and bent down to the eyepieces. The bullets were . . . close. They’d definitely been fired by the same kind of gun . . . He switched samples. Closer. The third bullet was closer still. He carefully rotated the sample, comparing it with the round that was kept in the evidence case, and it . . .
“We got a match.” He backed away from the ‘scope and another technician bent down to check.
“Yeah, that’s a match. One hundred percent,” the man agreed. The boss ordered his men to check other rounds and walked to the phone.
“Shaw.”
“It’s the same gun. One-hundred-percent sure. I have a match on the round that killed the trooper. They’re checking the ones from the Porsche now.”
“Good work, Paul!”
“You bet. I’ll be back to you in a little while.”
Shaw replaced the phone and looked at his people. “Gentlemen, we just had a break in the Ryan case.”
Chapter 22
Procedures
Robert Newton took the agents to the quarry that night. By dawn the next day a full team of forensic experts was sifting through every speck of dirt at the site. A pair of divers went into the murky water, and ten agents were posted in the woods to watch for company. Another team located and interviewed Newton’s fellow woodcutters. More spoke with the residents of the farms near the road leading back into the woods. Dirt samples were taken to be matched with those vacuumed from the van. The tracks were photographed for later analysis.
The ballistics people had already made further tests on the Uzi. The ejected cartridge cases were compared with those recovered from the van and the crime scene, and showed perfect matches in extractor marks and firing pin penetrations. The match of the gun with the crime and the van was now better than one hundred percent. The serial number had been confirmed with the factory in Singapore, and records were being checked to determine where the gun had been shipped. The name of every arms dealer in the world was in the Bureau’s computer.
The whole purpose of the FBI’s institutional expertise was to take a single piece of information and develop it into a complete criminal case. What it could not entirely prevent was having someone see them. Alex Dobbens drove past the quarry road on his way to work every day. He saw a pair of vehicles pulling out onto the highway from the dirt and gravel path. Though both the car and van from the FBI laboratory were unmarked, they had federal license plates, and that was all he needed to see.
Dobbens was not an excitable man. His professional training permitted him to look at the world as a collection of small, discrete problems, each of which had a solution; and if you solved enough of the small ones, then the large ones would similarly be solved, one at a time. He was also a meticulous person. Everything he did was part of a larger plan, both part of, and isolated from, the next planned step. It was not something that his people had easily come to understand, but it was hard to argue with success, and everything Dobbens did was successful. This had earned him respect and obedience from people who had once been too passionate for what Alex deemed their mission in life.
It was unusual, Dobbens thought, for two cars at once to come out of that road. It was out of the ordinary realm of probability that both should have government license plates. Therefore he had to assume that somehow the feds had learned that he’d used the quarry for weapons training. How had it been blown? he wondered. A hunter, perhaps, one of the rustics who went in there after squirrels and birds? Or one of the people who chopped wood, maybe? Or some kid from a nearby farm? How big a problem was this?
He’d taken his people to shoot there only four times, the most recent being when the Irish had come over. Hmm, what does that tell me? he asked the road in front of his car. That was weeks ago. Each time, they’d done all the shooting during rush hour, mostly in the morning. Even this far from D.C., there were a lot of cars and trucks on the road in the morning and late afternoon, enough to add quite a bit of noise to the environment. It was therefore unlikely that anyone had heard them. Okay.
Every time they had shot there, Alex had been assiduous about picking up the brass, and he was certain that they’d left nothing behind, not even a cigarette butt, to prove that they’d been there. They could not avoid leaving tire marks, but one of the reasons he’d picked the place was that kids went back there to park on weekends — there were plenty of tire marks.
They had dumped the gun there, he remembered, but who could have discovered that? The water in the quarry was over eighty feet deep — he’d checked — and looked about as uninviting as a rice paddy, murky from dirt that washed in, and whatever kind of scum it was that formed on the surface. Not a place to go swimming. They had dumped only the gun that had been fired, but as unlikely as it seemed, he had to assume they’d found it. How that had happened didn’t matter for the moment. Well, we have to dispose of the others too, now, Alex told himself. You can always get new guns.
What is the most the cops can learn? he asked himself. He was well versed on police procedures. It seemed only reasonable that he should know his enemy, and Alex owned a number of texts on investigative techniques, the books used to train cops in their various academies, like Snyder’s Homicide Investigation and the Law Enforcement Bible. He and his people studied them as carefully as the would-be cops with their shiny young faces . . .
There could be no fingerprints on the gun. After being in water, the skin oil that makes the marks would long since have been gone. Alex had handled and cleaned it, but he didn’t need to worry about that.