Papa Jack Chapter 61
It's after midnight when, while loitering under the windows of the SRO, Jack hears the bear's roar. There's no mistaking it or its origin. It's coming from the second floor. With some mental mapping, Jack figures that it's from a rental midway through the stretch of units facing the street. That should make the place easy enough to find and search once Gerkov leaves. Jack has no idea when that might be, but he's hoping for the earlier hours of the morning. He'd love to break in clean and fast, check for bomb-making materials, and go home and sleep. As the snores continue, he feels sorry for Gerkov's neighbors.
"Katie!" Jim Beckett snaps as Kate reaches for her suitcase. "I'll get that. You're not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds."
Sighing, Kate rolls her eyes. "As a patrol officer, I had thirty pounds of equipment around my waist through my whole shift."
"But you hadn't been shot. Anyway, you're a detective now. You don't have to haul around that load. So, be a good girl and follow doctor's orders, and I'll buy you an ice cream cone."
"Da-ad! I'm not eight. And I like strawberry shakes now."
"Sure. When you were eight, you got into a lot less trouble. So, behave yourself, and we can stop to get you a shake on the way back to the city."
Suppressing a wince, Kate reaches for her tote bag. "At least I can carry this."
Shaking his head, Jim Beckett grabs their suitcases and walks out to his car.
Gerkov's snores stopped rattling the SRO's windows at around seven am. Still, a man matching his description doesn't exit the building until almost two hours later. Careful to remain unseen, Jack enters, quickly taking the stairs up to Gerkov's unit. He examines the lock and the frame for any tells Gerkov left that the door was tampered with. He finds a barely visible wire that would have broken when he opened the door. "Used that little trick when I was in Belarus," he murmurs to himself, loosening one end to keep the filament intact. After checking for any other giveaways or booby traps, Jack rapidly picks the lock and goes inside.
Gerkov's hideaway is sparsely furnished with a sagging bed, a table, and a hotplate. A door opens into a small bathroom with an ancient linoleum floor and worn fixtures. Jack checks the toilet tank for any hidden treasures but finds none.
An assortment of tools and equipment lies on the table. Jack doesn't see any explosives and figures they must be in the warehouse. They'd be the last thing added to a bomb. He does, however, recognize several detonators as well as parts for a transmitter that could set them off. Some metal casings on the table could be used to hold hard drives or other computer components. They could also be readily employed to contain bombs. Gerkov might even disguise the bombs as electronic equipment. The devices could be delivered to and stored in a venue like Loftview without question. Jack suspects that's precisely how Anatoly expects to exploit Gerkov's handiwork.
Jack could lay in wait and take Gerkov out when he returns to his makeshift workshop, but that would give Anatoly a chance to recruit someone else to complete his plan. Jack decides to keep an eye on Gerkov but allow the plan to go forward – to a point. If he plays his cards right, he can take out Anatoly, Gerkov, and Nekras without ruining Richard and Martha's fundraiser. Martha has no idea just how much of a family affair the event will be.
"We should be right on time," Jim Beckett declares, pulling into the spot Richard reserved for him in the loft's underground parking. Walking around the car, he opens Kate's passenger door.
"Dad, you don't have to do that. I can get out by myself."
"I know you can. But I'm old, and my father trained me to be polite. I even opened car doors for your mother when she wasn't in too much of a rush to let me." Sadness deepens the folds in Jim's face. "You can be so much like her sometimes, Katie. And I couldn't bear to lose you too."
Kate extends her hand to allow her father to help her out. "I know, Dad, but I'm not going anywhere – except upstairs to eat Castle's lasagna."
Jim nods. "He said the elevator comes all the way down here, so you won't have to climb stairs."
Kate suppresses the urge to roll her eyes again and walks with her father to the call button.
The timer Richard set for the lasagna's rest time after baking is ticking down to its last five minutes when his doorbell rings. With a sudden unease in his gut, he opens the door. "Hey! Beckett and Beckett! Come in! Beckett, um, Kate Beckett, do you need any help with your coat or anything?"
"I'm fine, Castle. I know where everything goes. And calling both Dad and me Beckett is weird. When we're not at the precinct, you can call me Kate."
"And calling me Jim should clear up any further confusion," the senior Beckett chimes in.
Richard rubs his hands together. "All right, fine. I guess we're set then. The lasagna will be ready to serve any minute. There's an antipasto on the table. And there's water, freshly filtered. Do you want anything else? Coffee, maybe?"
Kate puts a hand on Richard's arm. "Hey, relax, Castle. The water will be great, and we can have coffee later."
"Yeah, right, sure, OK," Richard agrees. "Let's sit down."
Jack blearily eyes the clock at his bedside. It's six-thirty pm, not am. Sometimes, life would be a lot less confusing if American clocks would just run on military time. Then, he wouldn't have to be fully awake to figure out the time of day. But at least he's caught up from his night of eavesdropping on Gerkov's wall-shaking snores. It's a good thing for the bomb builder that explosives aren't set off by soundwaves. If they were, Gerkov could have blown himself to hell by now.
While there's nothing more that Jack needs to do about Gerkov at that moment, he does need to catch up on the latest intelligence. Not everything of concern in the world or even in New York City has to do with rogue Russian cells.
Raking his still thick, if rapidly whitening, hair out of his face, Jack heads for his kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. While it's brewing, he checks the secure feed on his satellite phone. The Houthi insurgency in Yemen is kicking up, supported by Iran and North Korea. That's a nasty mix, worth watching, but as yet, no threat to the U.S., despite its support of the Saudis. The U.S. is also supporting vigilantes in Paraguay, but the company has a separate unit on that one. Then there's the ongoing mess in the Niger Delta. Still, as far as Jack is concerned, any expertise he can lend is more useful in his own backyard. That situation is hardly comforting, but it is convenient. He can go right on keeping an eye on Gerkov, Anatoly, and Nekra, both for his son's and Martha's sake, as well as that of his country. And of all his missions, this is the one he's most desperate not to screw up.