pointing across the room to the wall of monitors. He wasn’t sure of the power differential here, but he assumed Crane was in charge, so he aimed his next words in her direction. “The truth is that you have no idea what Mason’s stockpiling, right? Isn’t that why you wanted the HRT?”
She looked uncertain, and he knew that he’d gotten it right. “Listen, you have to call this off. If you send men in without knowing what they’re up against, you’re-”
“I already told you there’s nothing I can do,” Crane snapped defensively. “Besides, what makes you such an expert? How do you know so much about my case?”
“Because I found the link between Mason and Arshad Kassem,” Kealey shot back in a low voice. Recognition sparked in her eyes; Harper had clearly briefed her earlier. “Agent Crane, Mason didn’t receive that kind of money for small arms. The insurgency has all the assault rifles it can carry, and it would have been costly and dangerous to set up an international link. The only reason to take the risk would be to get something better than what they had, and what they had was pretty damned good. I’m talking about RPGs, prepackaged explosives, and heavy machine guns.” He paused to let that sink in. “I’m telling you, this raid is a bad idea.”
“We never found a link between Mason and the Iraqis,” Foster protested. “In fact…”
He trailed off when Samantha Crane shot him a stern look. She turned back to Kealey and said, “I understand your concern, but it’s out of my hands. Like I said, we’ve been on this guy for three months with nothing to show for it. When this fell into our laps, Headquarters saw it as a chance to make up for lost time.” She dropped her defiant pose, letting her arms fall to her sides. Suddenly, she looked overwhelmed. “Besides, our provisional warrants expire tomorrow. We have to move now or show cause to get them renewed.”
“So get them renewed. It’s better than getting your people killed.”
Crane shrugged helplessly, catching the eye of another agent, who was frantically gesturing in her direction. “Like I said, it’s out of my hands.” She moved off a moment later, Foster trailing a few steps behind like an obedient pet.
“She knows this is wrong,” Kealey said quietly. “I can’t believe they’re going forward with it.”
“It’s a mistake,” Harper agreed. “You’d think they would have learned after Ruby Ridge and Waco, especially since the ATF has a hand in it.”
“Apparently not.” Agents were already beginning to cluster around the wall of monitors, and the room had grown quiet. “It looks like it’s about to start.”
CHAPTER 14
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Inside the warehouse on Duke Street, Anthony Mason stood off to the side and studied the scene with rising impatience. The other two men were struggling to move one of the black plastic cases scattered over the concrete floor. At 3? feet in length and 2? feet in width, each case was not particularly bulky, but at more than 100 pounds each, they did become difficult to move after a while. The men were loading the cases onto flat wooden pallets, after which they were strapped down for the two-hour drive to Richmond. The vehicle that would be used to move them, a twenty-foot Isuzu NPR box truck, was parked a dozen feet away. Also parked on the first floor was a small Gerlinger forklift, which was sitting next to the metal stairwell. Although the Isuzu was equipped with a hydraulic lift, the pallets, once loaded, were too heavy to shift with a hand truck, making the forklift a necessity.
Mason glanced at his watch for the fourth time in as many minutes. The container ship was scheduled to depart at 8 PM, and they were running late. “How many is that, Ronnie?”
The other man paused to wipe the sweat from his face, glancing round in the process. “Thirty. That’s thirty fully prepped, once we strap this down.”
“Well, hurry the fuck up, will you? We’ve got to get moving.”
Ronnie Powell instantly picked up the pace, as did Lewis Barnes, although the younger man had not been addressed. Mason noticed this with a hint of a smile. It was the smile of a man who was used to getting his way, the smile of a man who, when he took the time to size up his own accomplishments, was inclined to indulge just a little too much.
Mason knew how far he had come since the early eighties, when his activities had been largely confined to the Lower Manhattan area. He’d done well for himself in those early years, selling recreational drugs to bored, wealthy students at Marymount and Columbia. By the end of the decade, his customer base began to spread into the neighboring boroughs, leading to conflict with some of the city’s more established dealers. Despite repeated threats, Mason refused to back down. The standoff came to a head outside a Staten Island nightclub in 1991, when he was confronted by one of his leading rivals. The man accused him of encroaching on his territory. The argument reached the boiling point; shots were exchanged, the rival was killed, and Mason was arrested a few hours later, caught trying to sneak into his girlfriend’s apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street.
Unfortunately, there were a number of witnesses to the incident outside the club. The trial moved forward rapidly, and the jury returned the expected verdict. Convicted of second-degree murder, Mason was sentenced to thirty years in the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, he immediately appealed the conviction and set to work. In the end, it was remarkably easy; he bribed two guards to smuggle in a cell phone and charger. Then he began to spread the word. When the hearing took place at the New York Court of Appeals the following spring, three of the witnesses for the prosecution recanted their testimony. Mason was immediately accused of using his contacts in the city to intimidate them, but no proof could be found to support that claim. Furthermore, the weapon used in the murder had since disappeared from a police evidence room. The conviction was overturned, and a new trial ordered, but a second arraignment never took place; by the following year, the DA had moved on to easier targets. Anthony Mason was a free man.
Unfortunately, the entire affair earned him a certain notoriety, which resulted in round-the-clock police surveillance. Eventually, the pressure caught up to him. A second conviction in 1993 — this one for assaulting a police officer — sent him back to Attica for a three-year stint. After his first month inside, Mason swore that he’d never again return to prison. By 1973, New York’s Rockefeller laws had imposed lengthy sentences for even minor drug-related offenses. Mason had lost his desire to test the limits of those laws, even though he’d never actually been charged under them. By the time he was released in ’96 — two months early for good behavior — he had turned his attention to a booming new business with less risk and plenty of room for expansion: the black-market sale of Class III weapons.
Anthony Mason fell easily into this new enterprise. He had plenty of capital stashed away, tens of thousands in offshore accounts, and numerous contacts throughout the city. His operation expanded at a frenetic pace during the explosion of U.S. gang violence in the early nineties, but for a number of reasons, he never quite made it into the international markets. He knew what was out there: unlimited access to the tons of small arms and ammunition moving out of Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the demand for Eastern bloc weapons in Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa, as well as the insatiable appetites of the Middle East’s various terrorist groups, the most prominent of which was the PFLP — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But for Mason, all of that remained just out of reach. He just didn’t have the necessary connections to step into the world arena.
All of that had changed just six months earlier. His link to the Iraqis had been arranged through Robert Boderon, a shadowy international figure Mason knew only by reputation. At Boderon’s request, a meeting was set up through a mutual contact. The offer put forth at that first meeting was simple but very enticing: movement of not less than $150,000 worth of weapons a month, with Mason receiving 50 percent of the profits for transportation alone. Boderon was responsible for acquiring the weapons themselves.
He had been reluctant at first: it seemed too good to be true, and the bargain required that he take a more hands-on approach, which was dangerous for obvious reasons. Eventually, though, his greed overcame his concerns. Now, as he stared at the rows of matte black plastic, he thought about what this one transaction would mean for his reputation as well as his bank account: more than $450,000 in profit alone, once Boderon took his cut. Some of that would be needed to set up a new base of operations — he’d been moving weapons out of this particular warehouse for nearly a month, and he knew it was time to move — but even after expenses, he’d still walk away with plenty of purchasing power. Boderon had access to some new weaponry that the Arabs would love to get their hands on, and Mason was more than willing to meet their needs — as long as they continued to meet his price.
