the street from the hotel, was a ten-theater cineplex. Perfect, he thought.
After parking in the lot, he went up to the ticket seller. When he told her it didn’t matter which movie, she gave him a strange look. “Don’t tell me you’ve never had people come in to hide out for a few hours.” She replied that if they did, they never discussed it with her. Vail was now sure she’d remember him and the open abrasion under his eye, which made his performance a little more sinister. The model for what would happen within the hour had been played out at the Biograph Theater in Chicago sixty-five years earlier when the G-men had to surround the neighborhood movie house to wait out John Dillinger rather than risking a shoot-out and endangering innocent civilians.
Vail had read the undisclosed but accurate accounts of the termination of the bank robber’s life one night after he had spent three days locked down in the bowels of the University of Chicago’s archives while finishing his master’s thesis, a period he found as dreary as one of the Russian gulags he had repeatedly read about. The special agent in charge of the FBI office, after missing Dillinger during a shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin which left three civilians and an agent dead, didn’t want any further embarrassment. So that night at the theater he went to the ticket office to see what time the movie ended. While they waited, he nervously made several more trips back to the box office with the same question to reverify the time. The ticket seller became so worried about a robbery that she called the Chicago police, who had been intentionally omitted from the case because it was feared that they couldn’t be trusted.
Vail knew that as soon as the FBI traced his cell phone call, someone would go up to the cashier and show her his picture. She would remember him and tell them about his “hiding out” comment. Hopefully, like with Dillinger, that would draw in all available agents, including those at the hotel.
Inside the theater, he found a hallway away from the mainstream and turned on his cell phone. He checked the GPS function and it displayed all zeros. The office had been “pinging” his phone trying to determine its location, which is why he had it turned off immediately after talking to Kate. It was how they had found Radek’s two-million-dollar cache. He dialed the hotel number and asked for the manager.
“This is Tom Mallon. I’m the manager, how can I help you?”
“Tom, this is Mark Hildebrand. I’m the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI. How are you?”
“Fine, Agent Hildebrand.”
“Some of my agents are over at your hotel on a surveillance, and we’re not sure which rooms they’re in. I need to talk to them on a landline. Could you tell me where they’re located? We want to make sure they’re in place before we go ahead with another part of the operation. I appreciate your continuing discretion in this matter.”
“One moment, sir.” The manager came back on the line. “Agent Hildebrand, that’s room 431. I’m told there were three of them. Would you like me to connect you?”
“Thank you, no. I’ll have someone call them on one of our security phones.” Vail hoped the manager would be distracted enough by the wonder of what kind of technology could do that, that he wouldn’t have any afterthoughts about whom he had actually talked to. Vail walked down the corridor until he found a large trash can outside one of the theaters, and dialed the weather. As soon as he was connected, he dropped the phone in the receptacle and walked out to the parking lot.
Vail judged he had at least a few minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, before they pinged his phone and reacted. He parked his car in a private garage across the street behind the hotel. In the trunk, he opened his briefcase, took out his handcuffs, and ripped off a couple of Post-its from their small yellow pad and put both items in his pocket. He used the rear entrance of the hotel and walked through to the lobby. He found a chair that was out of the foot-traffic area so he wouldn’t be noticed by anyone rushing out of the building. He settled down and waited.
Vail’s room was 432. Three men in the room across the hall was fairly standard. They