by Steven James
“I don’t either.”
“And that makes me angry.” Ralph tightened his jaw. “And you know how Buddhists say you’re not supposed to lose your temper? That anger shows you haven’t yet reached enlightenment? Well, that’s me right now.”
“But you’re not a Buddhist.”
“No, I am not. I’m something else.”
I took the bait. “What are you?”
“A Ralphist.”
“And what exactly are the tenets of Ralphism?”
“There’s five of ’em. Courage. Honor. Justice. Action. Anger.”
“Anger?”
“If you don’t get angry about injustice, you won’t act, and if you don’t act, evil will win. Don’t be a coward, treat people with honor, and do what’s right regardless of whose feelings get hurt. The road to enlightenment is paved with well-directed anger, not denial.”
Although he made some good points, I wasn’t quite ready to become a Ralphist.
I checked the time and realized that if we were going to get to the Field Office for a sit-down with Senator Murray, we needed to get moving.
Ralph offered to stay here and keep an eye on Sabian’s place until we could get a team on-site. “I’ll hitch a ride with an NYPD car, meet up with you at the Field Office,” he told me.
* * *
+++
Christie notified her boss, Brian Stokoe, that she was slipping out.
“A friend of the family is in the hospital. I’m going to swing by and see how he’s doing, then grab lunch. I should be back around two or so, but I can stay later this afternoon to make up the time.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I just hope your friend is okay.”
“Thank you, Mr. Stokoe. So do I.”
* * *
+++
Timothy Sabian’s father—the avid killer, the man who was watching him—shook his head in disbelief.
Throughout the morning, he’d been monitoring the video feed from his son’s house, and there’d been an awful lot of activity there. First Blake Neeson, then the men who’d removed Julianne’s body, and at last, two FBI agents: Agent Hawkins and Agent Bowers.
Yes, he knew them both.
And here they were, working so diligently to see justice done.
Too diligently, perhaps.
He’d been wondering how to wrap things up with Timothy in a satisfactory and climactic manner. Making the ending a little more personal for one of those two agents might just do the trick.
But it might also draw undue attention to himself and to the pastime he’d had for the last twenty years.
Originally, he’d planned on setting his son up for everything. Now, he decided that he should be prepared to disappear in case that fell through. He began making the arrangements, and then thought again of the end of the story.
Hawkins was from out of town, so if it was going to be a member of his family, that would be more difficult to pull off.
But Bowers was not. A little checking confirmed that he had a wife and stepdaughter here in the city.
Yes. Either of those two would work.
He put a call through to have Christie Ellis’s phone traced.
67
In the wake of Sasha’s death last night, a solemn heaviness weighed on everyone at the Field Office.
We gathered in DeYoung’s conference room.
Word was, Senator Murray was on his way over but was running a little late and might not arrive until closer to eleven thirty.
“Let’s see what we can cover before he gets here,” DeYoung said.
In addition to the assistant director and me, Thurman was there, as were three other agents who were working behind the scenes on the case. Apparently, with Greer on mandatory administrative leave, Thurman was being asked to play a bigger role in the investigation.
We took our seats.
“Alright.” DeYoung’s voice was heavy. “Before we get started, I want to offer a moment of silence for Agent MacIntyre. She didn’t deserve this. It’s up to us to finish what she started and bring Blake in.”
* * *
+++
“Tessa, are you still with us?”
Tessa blinked and shifted her gaze to the front of the classroom. “What?”
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable on a couch. Would you like me to have a couch brought in here for you?”
A few snickers from around the room.
She hadn’t been dozing. She’d been deep in thought, but still, her teacher’s question deserved a reply.
“No thanks. Your teaching is soporific enough. Oh wait, you went to a government school, didn’t you? You probably don’t know what that means. Soporific: sleep-inducing. It’s from the Latin.”
“I’m proud of my public-school education. And you should be thankful for yours.”
“There’s no such thing as a public school.”
“Really?” He was smirking.
“‘Public’ simply means ‘government-run.’ It’s just that it plays better to say ‘public’ instead. People don’t like being reminded who’s behind our failing education system—after all, we all know how efficient and effective government employees, like you, are at—”
“That’s enough.”
“Really? ’Cause I can keep going.”
“In the hall, young lady.” His eyes were ice. “I’ll be out to speak with you in a moment.”
She collected her things.
Oh well.
No, this wasn’t her first time getting kicked out of class. She knew the routine: she was supposed to wait in the hallway and then talk with him, but today she didn’t feel like doing either of those things, and she figured she could deal with the consequences for leaving school later.
Go to Sabian’s place. Deliver the journal. Get your book signed. It works out better this way anyhow.
* * *
+++
Ralph was still en route, so I brought everyone up to speed on what we’d found out this morning at Julianne’s place and at Sabian’s house.
“Sabian lied about the gun?” Thurman said reflectively.
“Yes.”
“Are you thinking he’s working with Julianne?”
“He told Ralph that she contacted him because she was looking for a partner. When Ralph pressed him about that, Sabian claimed that she meant a financial one, but we already know that she visited Blake looking for someone to kill with. In either case, she’s still missing, and Sabian has a clear connection to her.”
“Which means he has a connection to Blake,” DeYoung concluded.
“Yes. Also, he seemed to indicate by his word choice that he believed Julianne was no longer running her website.”
“And we have surveillance on him—on Sabian, I mean?”
“Ralph set it up. There’s a team stationed outside his place. They know to follow him wherever he goes. Ralph’s on his way back here.”
DeYoung nodded agreeably. “What else do we know?”
One of the agents I’d only been introduced to this morning said, “We’ve been investigating how they’re getting the Selzucaine around the country. Looks like a trucking company called Transit Corp. I’m studying their routes and their drivers’ backgrounds.”
“Good.”
I said, “Last summer when I was tracking Blake in Detroit, we pinpointed one of the shipping companies that was bringing the mannequins over from Russia. Let’s take a look at connections between the two companies.”
DeYoung checked his phone. “Yes, yes, yes. And this might be just what we’re looking for. Reese—the chemist from Phoenix—is talking. He’s scared, wants his family protected.”
“What’d he have to say?” I asked.
“Well, he’s at the Phoenix Field Office now. I’ll see if we can get patched t
hrough for a conference call.”
While we waited for his receptionist, Annalise, to set it up, he again addressed the question of how the Matchmaker was getting the suicide victims to engage in such gruesome deaths.
“The Selzucaine?” one of the team members suggested.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not convinced that’s the only thing involved. Earlier we were looking into who might benefit from the person’s death, but what if it’s not a person?”
“Not a person?” DeYoung said with some confusion. “Then who?”
“Or what. Something Sabian mentioned when we were at his place: charities. If the people who died made large donations to charities or nonprofits before their deaths or had anonymous gifts given in their names around the times of their deaths, then that might be a way to trace back who the observer was.”
Thurman agreed to look into it.
Annalise returned and announced that everything was ready. DeYoung put the conference call on speakerphone and conferred briefly with the agent in charge in Phoenix, then Reese came on.
“They’re going to be shipping out the drugs today,” he told us.
“When?” I asked.
“They would have treated them when they arrived this morning. They’ll send them out this afternoon. Based on everything I know, I’d say two o’clock your time, at the latest.”
“Where are they now?” DeYoung said.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out?”
“No. They’ve always contacted me. I’ve never reached out to them.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Thurman interjected. “If you want immunity or witness protection for you and your family, we’re going to need specifics.”
There was a pause on the line.
“Are you still there, Mr. Reese?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “I do have a number, but I’m not sure what’ll happen if I call it. I need to know that my family will be safe first.”
“The Bureau will do all that’s necessary to protect you,” DeYoung assured him. “But we need anything you have so we can move on it. And we need it now to stop those mannequins from being shipped out.”
“Mannequins? What do you mean?”
“The drugs,” DeYoung clarified.
“You said mannequins?”
“Yes.”
I found it informative that Reese apparently wasn’t aware of how the Selzucaine was being shipped.
“Before he makes the call,” I said to DeYoung, “let’s see if Cyber can trace the number or locate the other party when they pick up.”
“Right.” Then DeYoung directed his words to Reese again. “We’re the FBI. If we want someone to disappear, he’ll disappear. We can give people a new start, erase the past. We have the resources—all we need is the motivation to use them to your advantage.”
Then Reese told us about the Tranadyl and the effects it would have on anyone who snorted it while it was mixed with Selzucaine.
He confirmed that shipments of Selzucaine had been coming in for the last six months, so the supply chain was in place—all the distributors, the buyers—and now all they needed was for one final shipment to go out, one that was tainted and would enter the stream the same as the others had.
“Only this one isn’t the same,” he told us. “It’ll get powdered, packaged, and sent out, and anyone who uses it will be snorting themselves into a coma or a casket.”
We had to stop this.
We wrapped things up with him, with the agents in Phoenix waiting for word from Angela at Cyber before having him make the call to his contact, a man he knew only by the name Ibrahim.
Sasha had mentioned that name to us earlier as well. DeYoung assigned one of the new agents to find out all he could about any Ibrahims in Blake’s network.
Reese had mentioned two o’clock, so we had a deadline, but we didn’t have a location.
It was a start.
* * *
+++
Blake looked over his silent ladies, all treated and now drying in preparation for being shipped.
He’d never really liked the term “fall guy,” but in this case, it was probably the best description of the role Ibrahim was going to play.
The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword was an organization that the original Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir had founded nearly four years ago. Over time, numerous men had taken on the identity of the terrorist—Blake doing so himself after he removed his predecessor from the role with a blade to the throat.
The Brigade was responsible for over a dozen terrorist acts, including the bioweapons attack last summer in Detroit that had resulted in the CDC shutting down and quarantining a two-block section of the city.
Now, this week, the next attack would undoubtedly result in expanded efforts to quell the rise of extremism both domestically and, because of Ibrahim’s ties to Syrian extremists, internationally.
The president had campaigned on the promise of being tough on terror, but once he was elected, things had shifted toward reductions in the military with a new strategy of using private security firms whenever possible in a bid to “trim excessive spending” and keep the military “lean and agile.”
Which worked out perfectly for Blake.
Some people say they want to own a piece of the pie.
Blake didn’t want a piece of the pie.
And he didn’t want the whole thing.
He wanted to own the bakery.
And he was on his way to making that happen.
68
11:02 A.M.
3 hours left
We waited while Reese tried Ibrahim’s number, but no one picked up, and Angela wasn’t able to trace the call or locate the man’s cell. Apparently, but not surprisingly, whoever was using that number had either chosen a burner phone or was using high-level end-to-end encryption.
“To take us closer to Blake we need to nail down this novelist’s relationship to Julianne Springman,” DeYoung told us. Then he assigned Thurman the task of uncovering the connection. “Springman’s a former cop. She wouldn’t likely give up her gun to a stranger. Maybe they have a past together.”
Senator Murray showed up, and while DeYoung went to speak with him for a few minutes, Ralph, who’d finally arrived, joined us.
“That was an interesting idea about looking into charities,” Thurman observed to me. “What made you think of that?”
“Just trying to cover all the bases. Listen, you specialize in working with confidential informants. From your experience, do you think it’s possible we could turn Mannie?”
“I suppose it is.” He looked past me thoughtfully. “I really couldn’t say without knowing more of his background. We’d need to find out what’s motivating him first.”
Motives. Great.
I recalled what Ralph had told me about the legislation on the senator’s desk, and I considered the timing of what was happening in this case. “Quantum encryption research?”
“I’m not sure I know what that is.”
“I’ll forward you the files,” Ralph said.
One of the other agents, a petite woman named Patricia, said to me, “After I got word about Sabian earlier this morning before the briefing, I started looking into his background. Turns out this novelist of ours has quite a past.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“When he was a boy, his dad was suspected of five murders but disappeared. Timothy’s mom was sent to prison for her involvement with the crimes, spent more than a decade behind bars, and then, only a couple weeks after she was released, she was found dead in a bathtub, wrists slit.”
“That’s enough to send anyone off the deep end,” Thurman noted.
Patricia went on. “According to the files, Timothy was the one who made the original 911 call to the Cin
cinnati cops back when he was a kid. Turns out he saw what his dad was doing with a hammer to the people in their basement.”
I tried to take all of that in. “And his dad was never found? Never arrested?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“Post the notes to the online case files,” Thurman said. “This might explain why Julianne contacted Sabian.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“Maybe he wasn’t the partner she was looking for. Maybe it was his father.”
* * *
+++
DeYoung was still speaking with Senator Murray, so I decided to work in my office until they were done.
Though I wanted to ask the senator about the gambling debts and the Internet encryption legislation, perhaps the biggest question I needed answered was also the most obvious and the most potentially offensive: if he was the one who’d stood by and watched his son commit suicide.
It was probably out of the question that the senator was in some way involved, but I couldn’t afford to discount any possibilities. As Calvin had noted earlier, if we assume nothing and test everything, eventually the truth will rear its head.
The suicides occurred in three different states, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to compare the senator’s travel schedule with the times and locations of the deaths to see if he could’ve possibly been present when those other people took their own lives.
It seemed self-evident to note this, but the observer would’ve had to travel to those locations and then leave by some means.
The man’s face wasn’t fully visible in any of the videos, but his frame matched and, based on the analysis that Angela was able to do regarding the left-handed mannerisms I’d noted, there was a seventy-two percent probability that it was the same person.
However, back at my desk, it didn’t take long to verify that the senator couldn’t have been present at two of the suicides because of a public function that he was attending on the night of the first and a Senate vote that he made on the night of the second.
