“Sounds serious.”
“Can’t breach it. Ain’t never seen nothing like it and neither has number one geek here.”
“Hey, c’mon with that,” Hiccock said in protest.
“It’s okay,” Hansen said. “I am the number one geek because I de-tangled his algorithm and nailed his URL to the wall.”
“Is that how they caught you, Kronos?” Janice asked as innocently as she could manage.
“Ahh, so!” Hiccock said, borrowing from a famous stereotype. “Number one geek smarter than you, Mr. Number One Genius Ego.”
“Eat crap and die. I was sleepwalking when I wrote that friggin’ code!” Kronos stuffed the last of the donut into his mouth.
Hiccock turned to Hansen. “You ever see a firewall like this?”
“No. I create them for the bureau and every other gov.net function, but it’s beyond me.”
“Is there anyone else who might know more?”
“Hey, you got the best in the country right here,” Kronos said, then patted Hansen’s shoulder, “and the geek that caught him. Ain’t no one else.”
Hiccock rolled his eyes and then held his finger up. “There might be one other person.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Black Tie, Red-Handed
THE WALDORF-ASTORIA has legendary security and means of egress. It has been a favorite of presidents since it opened back in the thirties. FDR’s private armored train car would be shunted under the hotel in the vast underground rail network that comprises New York’s Grand Central Station. Roosevelt’s custom-made Pierce-Arrow was off-loaded onto a specially constructed secret elevator right under the Waldorf and opened onto the street. It was the safest way to enter New York City. Of course, that level of protection was only afforded to heads of state. Tonight, the security of the main ballroom was in the hands of the normal hotel dicks and whatever odd security men came with the participants.
Dennis had reviewed the venue for two days. Three of his men were on detail this evening. He wasn’t pleased with the hotel’s refusal to install metal detectors. They felt the nature of the festivities, tied to the price of a ticket, made it unlikely that anyone in the crowd would pose a problem. Dennis was there as another set of eyes. Cynthia had been taking treatments well. The biggest and most dangerous was scheduled for tomorrow. Having a job to keep him occupied tonight helped him fight off the sense of helplessness a mere man is prone to feel in the face of an act of God. So there he stood, his particular brand of therapy being to scan the crowd for the author of the poison inkjet letter.
His “cop’s sense” bristled—out of a sea of faces in attendance to honor Taggert for the benefit of the Work with Pride Foundation, one man stood out. His appearance was just unkempt enough to tell the ex-detective that $250-a-plate dinners were not this guy’s normal social activity. He also didn’t seem to be with anyone at the table.
Speaker after speaker respectfully stood and awaited their turn at the dais to praise not only the foundation’s efforts to help homeless people attain and maintain good, steady jobs, but also the merits, generosity, and overall good fellowship of Miles Taggert. Miles could run for Pope after this, Dennis thought, as he observed his bearded suspect and a few others. Dennis walked over to Harvey Davis, one of the ex-cops he wrangled to be on Taggert’s detail. Harv was a photographer of sorts, and Dennis had him get a press pass.
“Hey, Harv, snap a few of the beard at table fifteen in the back. I got a feeling.”
“Yeah, I noticed him, too. Wonder who’s watching the farm while he’s here?”
Harvey stepped away, shooting toward the stage, disconnecting any attention to the beard with the interaction he and Dennis just displayed. A minute later, he casually turned and snapped the shot with a long telephoto lens from across the room. No one even noticed at the beard’s table.
As the event came to a close, Miles Taggert was barraged by do-gooders and well wishers wanting to connect with the man of the hour and bask in his glow. Dennis and his three men formed a Secret Service–style perimeter around Taggert. People were shaking his hand or speaking to Miles over, under, or through his or his men’s outstretched arms. As they proceeded toward the door, the people at table fifteen approached to congratulate Taggert. Dennis noticed the beard moving closer. He spent half his attention on him but continued to scan the rest of the crowd. After all, the cost of being wrong about the beard could be a dead Miles Taggert.
When the beard moved in a little too close for comfort, Dennis applied his considerable weight and muscle behind his request. “Do you want to step back, please?” As he placed his hand on the beard’s torso to accentuate his command, he detected something hard. He immediately called out to Benton and Davis, “He’s packing!” The two bodyguards immediately formed a barrier between him and Taggert. Harv proceeded to usher Miles out unceremoniously, a move the rest of the partygoers and admirers considered downright rude.
Dennis looked the beard in the eyes. He sensed a coldness and distance that gave him more impetus to further invade the man’s space. “Keep your hands at your side. Step to the rear of the room please.”
The beard stood frozen with a look of confusion on his face; his body stance hinted at the desire to run, but the combined girth of Mallory and Benton effectively sealed the tiny opening between tables in which he would have to pass. Their cop’s sixth sense, turning on all eight cyclinders, they moved on the beard as one. The man’s one second of hesitation was not tolerated well by the former cop who was used to having his wishes granted—one-way or the other. He chose the other. Benton got hold of the beard’s arm. Swinging him around, he grabbed the collar of his shirt as Dennis reached behind his rumpled sport coat only to find … a Blackberry. Steered by Benton’s hand on his belt and collar, the beard was thrust up against a column as Dennis continued patting him down, and then spun him around announcing, “He’s clean.” Dennis handed him back his digital palm-thingy and asked to see his identification.
“Are you cops?” the beard asked.
“Don’t worry about us, pal, worry about your situation,” Benton said.
“You aren’t cops, and you have no right to search me. I am leaving now and if you try to stop me I will have you brought up on charges.” With that, the beard adjusted his wrinkled and frayed sport coat. He tucked his checkered shirt into his faded, black jeans. Those second-hand-store Levis didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, go with the old, brown dirt-caked walking shoes that had seen better days. Definitely not the ensemble one wears to a high-society shindig.
∞§∞
That night, Tom (aka the beard, aka Voyeurger) went home and got online. The scuffle with Taggert’s security guards made a choice he had been agonizing over for the past week easier. The path of least resistance was the key to success. Those bonehead security jerks had proven a little too resistant to his plan to strike out for the cause.
Voyeurger: My primary target is too well protected. I had to abort.
SABOT: That is a shame.
Voyeurger: I will move on to target two.
SABOT: Keep me informed.
Voyeurger: Will do.
∞§∞
A day later, Dennis received a call from the Waldorf’s head of security. A .25 caliber Saturday night special was found taped under a table in the ballroom. Table fifteen.
“Son of a bitch!” was Harv’s reaction as he fished out six pictures of the beard from his desk drawer and headed to the scanner.
∞§∞
The bitmapped printout of the beard was forwarded to Joe Palumbo’s desk from the New York office. His decision to help out a cop who helped him one July day fifteen years ago was an idea that was starting to look better and better.
At Joe’s direction, the bureau immediately input the picture into their image recognition system. There it was compared and cross-checked with millions of National Crime Information Center pictures, as well as hundreds of thousands more from other world police organizations. Unfort
unately, the NCIC computers didn’t make a high-confidence match. Joey knew that if every state department of motor vehicles had digitized photographs for every driver’s license in their database, the search would have been almost foolproof. But, that was a political issue. Although the mood of the nation was in favor of tightening up a little on personal liberties since 9/11, state DMVs fell under the issue of state’s rights, a thorny constitutional issue in the best of times.
∞§∞
At his office at GlobalSync, Dennis Mallory conducted a meeting of his team. He had already handed out six different computer projections of the beard—without his beard, with different hair colors, with and without glasses, and other options.
Benton spoke for the team. “Dennis, go home. We know how to do all this. You should be home, waiting for word, or at the hospital.”
“I know, but I can’t do nothing there but just sit around feeling helpless. Normally they do this while you’re awake—it’s amazing. But Cynthia is claustrophobic. The machine they’re using is more intimidating than an MRI, and she can’t last ten seconds in one of those. So they sedated her, she should be up in a few hours. So I figured …”
“You figured you’d break our balls a little. Listen, Miles will chopper straight to the house in the Hamptons tonight. Harv gets there an hour ahead. I am in the copter with him and then he’s nestled tight for the weekend. So forget about this and go be there when Cynthia comes out of it. Send her all our love, too.”
“Thanks. I hate feeling useless. This whole thing is just … well, thanks guys, if anything shakes call me.”
Alone in the elevator, Dennis started reviewing the events of the last few weeks. Miles had proven to be a man of, and beyond, his word. He took up Cynthia’s cause as though she was his own mother. Today, three of the world’s top radiotherapists were at her side, employing a technique the Detective Endowment Association medical plan wouldn’t cover. They used 201 beams of deadly radiation. Each beam’s dose was a minute fraction of the strength that healthy tissue would find lethal. By using computers and other gizmos, the beams would then converge somewhere within her head. At that intersection, their strengths would combine and affect only the targeted blood vessels that made up her AVM. That made this “gamma knife” technique a kind of sharpshooter picking off the dangerously abnormal blood vessels in crowds of healthy ones. The process was very expensive and not an easy list to get on. Once again, were it not for Miles Taggert’s substantial weight as a benefactor to the university and his subsequent clout with the directors, doctors, and companies responsible for the Stereotactic thingamajig, they would not be involved with this level of medicine at all.
From Dennis’s side of the bargain, the guys had all been doing a good job. With the big exception of letting the beard slip through their fingers, their police work was flawless. Now, if Cynthia had a good outcome with this procedure, she will have avoided the invasive brain surgery that, with her other conditions, would almost certainly be fatal, and all this would have been worth it.
When he arrived at NYU Medical Center, he bought some blue flowers in the lobby. He headed up to the floor where his wife, his love, his partner for the last thirty-eight years was recuperating. The instant he entered the room and caught sight of her lying there, a shapeless lump under the sheets, wired to the electronic equipment all around her, his eyes welled up. She was so brave. He had been shot three times in the line of duty. He had received five department commendations for bravery, three awarded by three of the four mayors that had spanned his career. He was brave by accident. Each time was a surprise; he had not expected to get shot that day. Cynthia, on the other hand, faced her dragon, looked it right in the eye, and went forward fearlessly.
No, that’s not true. She experienced fear, but she was brave enough to not let it stop her.
Dennis didn’t know if he would have had the grit to look into the maw of eternity with the dignity and calm she exhibited. Unlike him, she quietly steeled herself, without anger, agitation, or any of the male testosterone-laced peer pressure that always diluted his initial instinct to run and hide under the covers. As he tiptoed over to her, she appeared as if she were about twelve years old and in the middle of a sweet dream. He caressed her hair with gentleness out of character with his big, meaty mitts. At that moment, she was his little girl and he was her daddy. This was as vulnerable as he’d ever seen his wife and it brought up feelings that he’d only known with his Kelly when she was much younger. He wanted her to have no pain, no fears, no worries—all the unreasonable requests a father would make to God as he sits marveling at a sleeping daughter.
She began to stir. Dennis withdrew his hand, fearing he had brought her back to this reality, with all its pain and scary, grown-up consequences. He placed his palm on her pale hand and focused on it, trying to direct into her any life energy and other stuff he never believed in ’til now. Her eyes opened and he was glad that he was there. He liked being the first thing she saw.
“Hi, baby. You did great!” This was the same thing he’d said to Cynthia’s opening eyes back when Kelly was born and she awakened after her caesarean delivery. He kissed Cynthia on the forehead. She felt warm and smelled of some kind of ointment. She managed a smile. He placed his head next to hers and stayed bent over like that, in silence, for more than thirty minutes.
Within an hour, Cynthia was talking. Even though the test results wouldn’t be known for a week, they dangerously entertained the notion of a European holiday, perhaps a house in Italy, possibly sharing it with her sister and brother-in-law. She and her sister were the only two left in their family. It would be good for them to spend time together, now that they realized how precious time was.
And so the night progressed. Eventually she fell off into a restful sleep. After a while, he stopped hearing the soft beep of her heart monitor. He slept in the chair that he had moved close to her bed, awaking whenever he shifted only to realize he wasn’t in their own bed. Cynthia awoke around 4 AM. Automatically, as happens after years of sleeping together, Dennis slowly awoke looking right at her.
She had a look of contentment as she lay there and just looked at him for a long time, then smiled. “Hey, handsome, I’m hungry. What does a girl have to do to get bacon and eggs around here?”
Appetite being one of the best signs of recovery, he determined a little thank-you prayer to God was appropriate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Hard Way
IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since Cynthia’s procedure and the news was looking good. Although the doctors made the usual disclaimers about being vigilant against any recurrences, it was as clean a bill of health as anyone given her history could expect. Dennis wanted to shake the hand of every doctor and nurse involved. Instead, he wrote a check for two thousand dollars to the National Institute for Neurologic Disorders and Stroke.
In keeping with that good news, there came another break in the case. Benton had shown several photographs of the beard to the office workers of the Work with Pride Foundation. The staff didn’t recognize him as anyone who purchased a ticket. Dennis experienced an inspiration only bestowed on a cop who has had his antenna fine-tuned to crime as long as he had. Did anyone report losing a ticket? Indeed, someone did recall a man who claimed to have lost his ticket. His name was Enrico Hernandez of the Bronx.
Dennis went to Enrico’s Body Shop at 2935 Southern Boulevard. There he found Enrico screaming at a guy who was having difficulty smoothing the Bondo on a hammered-out fender of an ’87 Impala with a sanding wheel. The man was making a mess of the compound filler. Eventually, Dennis got Enrico to focus on the missing ticket.
“Yeah, I lost the ticket, but the girl at the table outside remembered me and let me go in.”
“Why did you go to the dinner?”
“You see this neighborhood? The homeless people here were coming out of the woodwork. This Work with Pride thing really helped them. Two of their guys work across the street. I might hire one myself next month. S
o, yeah, I wanted to go and support them.” He then gave an exasperated gasp as he yelled to the worker, “Hey pendejo, large slow circles, por favor!” He waved his hand in big round motions to emphasize his point to the hard-of-Spanglish. Dennis tried to get him back on track.
“Did you know Mr. Taggert?”
“Who?”
“The man that was being honored that evening.”
“Oh, him. No. I was there because they give Jimmy an award.”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
“One of the guys from across the street. I chased him away a few times. I mean every day he was here with his hand out. After a while it got to be too much, you know?”
“Tell me about it.”
“Then one day I don’t see him come around anymore. I figured he’s dead. Then he shows up one day working across the street for Julio. Now, he brings me coffee most mornings, says it makes him feel good to hand me a cup, instead of the other way around.”
“Yeah, I remember that guy. They gave him that plaque.”
“You were there?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were a cop!” Enrico said with a laugh.
“You’re good. No, I retired three years ago.”
“So why you asking me all these questions?”
Dennis pulled out the picture of the beard. “You ever see this man?”
“No.”
“We have reason to believe he was in the office when you went to purchase your ticket.”
“Let me see that again. Yeah, now that you mention it, he looks like the guy that was hanging out while I was there. I remember thinking he looked too clean to be homeless, but not by much. I thought he must have been a new program member.”
“When did you lose your ticket?”
The Eighth Day Page 21
