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Bosch crawled through the opening and closed the door behind him. Once on his feet, he bent down to brush dirt and dust off his pants. As he headed down the hall, he heard Novak calling his name and pleading for him to come back.

Bosch didn’t stop.

48

BOSCH STOPPED AT the house at the end of Lakeridge Drive, found a garage remote in the glove compartment of the white van, then drove north into the Valley on the 170. The San Gabriel Mountains stretched across the northern horizon and he was halfway to them when he heard a buzzing sound and realized it was Novak’s satellite phone. He pulled it from the pocket of his jacket. There was an incoming call. On the screen was only the number of the caller, a long sequence beginning with +380. Bosch hit a green button with the word Talk on it.

“Yes?” he said.

“Nikolai?” a male voice said.

Bosch detected an accent. Maybe Russian, maybe Czech.

“Uh, no,” he said. “Nick is sort of tied up. Can I give him a message?”

“Tell him to call me back,” the man said.

“Who is this?”

“Fedir.”

“Oh, Fedir. He wanted to know if you’ve made the arrangements.”

“I will tell him only.”

The line went dead.

“Who are you, Fedir?” Bosch said to himself.

Bosch came to the Sheldon Street exit and left the freeway. While stopped at the traffic light at the end of the exit loop, he pulled up Google on his phone and tapped the audio button.

“What phone code is plus three eighty?” he said.

The answer printed quickly on the screen: The phone code +380 is the international calling code for Ukraine.

Bosch thought about this. Novak had apparently been telling the truth when he said he talked to someone from Ukraine that morning. Bosch began to wonder how this fit with Novak’s seemingly contradictory statements about where the stolen weapons were headed. At first he said they were gifts for Putin, then he said they were going to be used against Putin’s fleet, which Bosch took to mean the warships in the Black Sea.

A long blast of a horn came from behind him and Bosch looked up and saw that the traffic light was green. He punched the accelerator and waved an apology as he turned left onto Sheldon.

Five minutes later he turned onto San Fernando Road. It was an industrial area lined with side-by-side autobody shops and small manufacturing businesses. B and D Brakes was located in a standalone warehouse surrounded by a razor-wire-topped security fence. The parking area inside the fence was empty and the business looked shuttered.

The remote had two buttons, one marked GATE and the other GARAGE. Bosch opened the security gate and drove through. The gate automatically closed behind the Mercedes.

Now came the moment when he would know whether he had played Novak or Novak had played him. He exited the car and stood in front of the double-wide garage door. He pushed the second button on the remote and watched as the corrugated aluminum door cranked upward.

The interior of the warehouse was dark, but Bosch was not going to risk turning on the overhead lights. He wanted to avoid an electronic pulse of any kind. If Novak was telling the truth about the cargo container not being rigged to explode, then the federal agents had detonated the weapons through a misstep that he didn’t want to repeat.

Bosch walked into the warehouse and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust. Light was coming in through the open garage door, but it wasn’t enough to penetrate to the far end of the structure.

The front of the warehouse was crowded with manufacturing and packaging machinery. Bosch walked through, looking for containers large enough to hold Hellfire missiles. He came to a forklift that held a pallet of long wooden crates, as though it had just been unloaded from a truck when time stopped. Stenciled on the boxes was PARACHUTES: DO NOT USE. Bosch knew from documents Steve Shear had let him review that the stolen missiles had been stored at the Joint Forces Training Base in crates marked as PARACHUTES to help disguise them.

The crates were screwed closed. Bosch tested the weight of the top crate by trying to lift one end and it was heavy. But Bosch wanted to confirm that it held a missile.

He went to a wheeled toolbox he had passed earlier and opened drawers until he found one containing a Phillips head screwdriver. Five minutes later he was working the last screw out of the top crate on the forklift.

Without hesitation, Bosch opened it — and there, lying in wooden braces, was a Hellfire missile.

A charge went through Bosch’s chest. He leaned the wooden top to the crate against the forklift. There were four crates on the lift and four missing Hellfires. Now he had to find the rest of the weapons.