Undercover Protector

“So where is Gomez?” Maggie asked. If he was in that apartment, he was as good as dead; however, a certain gleam in Curtis’s eyes indicated that wasn’t the case.

“Summerland, California.” Curtis turned and smiled at her while he advanced onto a photo of a stucco house behind high hedges. “He’s renting a house in the foothills.”

Curtis set down the remote and turned on the light behind him. Maggie could feel the electric hum of excitement radiating off him. It filled the air and she breathed it in with relish.

This was a gift. A break. A possible crack in an uncrackable case.

Now, if only it didn’t require her to go undercover again, then things would really be looking up. But she didn’t get called into this kind of briefing to do surveillance or research.

She was undercover. And she was supposed to love it.

He lifted the three files from the corner of Walters’s desk and handed two of them to Gordon and Maggie. The third he handed to Walters.

“What’s our angle?” she asked.

“Well, Delgado is going to find out he’s got his two dogs standing outside an empty apartment in New York City and start looking elsewhere.” He arched an eye-brow. “And we know it won’t take Delgado long to find him.”

“So Gomez as bait? We just wait for Delgado to find him? Send some guys to kill him and hope we can implicate Delgado?” She hated even saying the word bait. Putting an innocent man in grave danger was an ugly way to break a case. And the odds of its success weren’t high. Delgado’s men wouldn’t roll on Delgado.

“That’s one option.” Curtis nodded.

“What’s the other?” Gordon asked.

“We find out what Delgado is clearly ready to kill Gomez to keep hidden.”

“Does that mean going undercover?” Gordon grinned like a kid being taken to Walt Disney World.

Maggie felt an inevitable tide at work here and she tried not to fight it. Tried to get excited about her role, her job. She looked down at her hands.

One more time, she told herself. For your brother. You can go undercover one more time.

For Patrick she would do anything.

She would sell off a little bit more of her soul.

“That’s the plan. Gomez has called a housecleaning service and is interviewing candidates today. We’re sending in two decoys and then we’re sending in Fitzgerald.” Curtis tapped her folder.

“Why two decoys?” Gordon asked.

“To make Fitzgerald irresistible.”

“Thanks a lot,” Maggie groused.

“In any case, you get in and during the interview, you plant three surveillance bugs. Hopefully you also get the job, allowing us broader access to Gomez.”

She nodded and bit her lip against a satisfied smile. Finally, finally she was getting close to nailing the man responsible for her brother’s death.

“Sounds good.”

Walters leaned back and ran his hands over his thick brown hair and laughed, though the sound was not funny. Maggie’s satisfaction dimmed and Gordon’s smug smile fled.

Walters was going to give them a reality check.

“Before you kids start thinking you’ve cracked this case, let’s look at what you are up against.” He took a deep breath through his nose and it seemed to Maggie that he sucked all the air out of the room.

“Three years ago,” Walters continued, “in the span of a week, Delgado takes down every drug dealer, racketeer, arms dealer and money launderer in Los Angeles who poses any kind of threat to him. He murders Hernandez and takes over his syndicate, has every Latin King from here to San Diego bowing to him.”

He paused as if waiting for confirmation and Maggie, Gordon and Curtis all nodded.

“And now, thanks to this journalist, we’ve got two options. One, baiting a trap with Caleb Gomez in the hopes of maybe, possibly catching Delgado.

Or two, finding out what information Gomez has that Delgado is ready to kill for then somehow using it to bring him down.”

“That sounds about right,” Curtis said. “It’s the biggest break we’ve had in the case in a year.”

“What do we know about Gomez?” Walters asked and Maggie could have sworn Curtis got red under the collar.

“Not much,” he admitted. “He was brought in for questioning regarding a burglary ring about six years ago. He’d gotten some information from one of the men for a story he was doing on the federal penitentiary system. When the Bureau tried to subpoena him, he raised such a stink he was labeled uncooperative and that the whole thing was dropped.”

That’s not good, Maggie thought.

“What kind of stink?” Gordon asked.

“Op-ed pieces in every major U.S. paper regarding the FBI and the swiftly diminishing civil rights of Americans.” Curtis cleared his throat. “It wasn’t good.”

“That’s our guy?” Gordon asked, almost laughing. “He’s going to love us going undercover in his house.”

“Well, that’s why I brought in Fitzgerald.” Curtis nodded, though the director seemed very unconvinced. “She’s good.”

“She better be or he’ll be dead and we’ll be no closer to catching Delgado.”

“Yes, sir,” Curtis said and Maggie and Gordon stood.

“You have one week,” Walters said, “to turn up anything that proves this isn’t a wild-goose chase and then I’m pulling the undercover operation. After that, we’ll plant some protection outside his house.”

“We’ve tried that, sir, and it doesn’t work. Six months ago the female witness was killed in the safe house with two armed guards right outside her door,” Curtis said. “The assailants had killed one guard and disabled the other and slit the witness’s throat. The Bureau, the LAPD and ATF had huge mud on their faces for that one. We ended up with more bodies and no evidence. There’s every likelihood that the Gomez case would end the same way.”

“Or not. Either way you’ve got the Bureau out on a limb going into this guy’s house. He’s a public figure right now, a public figure with no respect for the necessary investigative measures the Bureau takes. This has the potential to go bad in a big way. You got me?”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

Before she turned toward the door, Walters’s brown eyes bored into hers and she felt like a bug under glass, skewered and exposed. “Fitzgerald?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your brother was the cop—”

“Yes, sir.” Maggie interrupted before he could finish. As always it was on the tip of her tongue to explain Patrick had been set up, but she’d screamed her throat raw trying to get people to believe that without proof.