Deadly Heat

by Richard Castle

  Rook said, “Maybe it’s not ideological.”

  “Then what?” asked the bow tie, the professor not sounding so eager to hear theories from a hack with a visitor’s badge.

  Undaunted, Rook replied, “In my work I’ve met war criminals in The Hague, guerrilla fighters, cat burglars, even a former governor with a fetish for over-the-calf socks. People who go out of bounds do it for a lot of reasons. Subtracting zealotry, their motives usually go to revenge, ego, or profit. My ex-KGB friend always says, ‘First, follow the money.’ Now, he stole that from Woodward and Bernstein, but you get the idea.”

  “With all due respect,” said the professor, “I don’t buy stateless terror. This has to be a government-sponsored plot. With all the logistics and expensive players like Tyler Wynn and his crew, who else would have the financial wherewithal to fund it? My intel points to the Syrians.”

  Callan tossed his pen on his blotter. “So after all this, we’re still three, maybe four days out, and have nothing to go on.”

  “Perhaps we can go at this a different way,” said Yardley Bell, addressing Cooper McMains, the head of the NYPD counterterrorism unit. “Commander, can you run down your top targets of opportunity?”

  “Certainly. For this type of strike, the high-value targets are population-rich, symbolic venues. So, in no particular order: Times Square, the Empire State Building, Grand Central, Penn Station, Union Square, SoHo… and, of course the ballparks. And, since we’re talking about Saturday or Sunday, I’d add Central Park. Weather’s supposed to be good, it’s going to be packed.”

  “Thank you,” said Bell. She got up and went to the LED board at the head of the table and stood beside the list of targets, which had been bulleted on the screen as Commander McMains spoke.

  “Detective Heat, you have a special connection to this case, we all know that. And this includes some persons of interest you developed from subjects your mother had under surveillance years ago.” An odd sensation passed through Nikki. The acknowledgment of her efforts felt supportive, yet laced with a mild wariness that the recognition came from Yardley Bell. “Maybe instead of sitting here dead in the water, listening to the clock tick, we could examine some leads you developed. Tell us about a Jamaican immigrant by the name of Algernon Barrett.”

  “Barrett was on my short list of murder suspects before I determined who my mother’s real killer was. However, I’ve revisited him in the past few days and he doesn’t add up for me as part of this terror plot.”

  “Interesting.” Agent Bell strolled back to her place at the table, walking the room like a TV lawyer making a summary to the jury. She put a hand on Rook’s forearm and said, “ ’Scuse me, would you?” and she tugged a gray file from under his elbow. “He’s in the food business, right?”

  “Jamaican jerk chicken. He retails spices and has some food trucks.”

  “Right, Do the Jerk, I’ve seen them. But our foreigner is making some changes to his business model all of a sudden.” Bell opened the gray file and cited notes as she prowled back to the head of the room. “He told you about his—what are they called now?—‘pop-up’ stores?” Nikki’s mild wariness had gone full-bore, and it must have shown. “Don’t worry, I haven’t been tapping you. Rook told me.”

  Heat turned to him. His expression resembled that of a dog who’d just dookied the new rug.

  “You zeroing in on something, here, Agent Bell?” asked Callan, growing impatient.

  “I am. For those who don’t know what they are—they probably don’t have a lot of pop-up stores in Atlanta…”

  “Mom-and-pop’s about it,” said Dr. Rose.

  “… Pop-up stores are short-term retail or food spots that ‘pop up’ overnight, in vacant store fronts, do business with groovy, social media–connected millennials for about a week, and then move on. Very hip, very happening, and maybe, very deadly.

  “Here’s the list of where Algernon Barrett’s jerk chicken stores are popping up this weekend.” She positioned herself to stand beside the bulleted list of Targets of Opportunity on the LED, and recited from the file, “Times Square. Across from the Empire State Building. Grand Central’s Eastern Passage. Penn Station. Next to Barnes & Noble in Union Square.” She scanned the target list with her forefinger. “Huh. Seems we covered most of them, except for SoHo and the parks.”

  Heat said it felt like conjecture, but her words couldn’t fight the hard silence that filled the Situation Room as Yardley Bell returned to her seat. At last, Agent Callan scanned the faces of his task force and said, “Sounds to me like we should pop up at Algernon Barrett’s.”

  From there things happened quickly. The search warrant. The plan. The unchaining of the hounds. Homeland drilled for moments like this, and in Domino’s delivery time, Heat found herself riding shotgun in Special Agent Callan’s black SUV in a siren-and-lights convoy smoking uptown. He heard something he liked in his silicone earpiece and said to Nikki, “Bell says her advance team is in place and confirm Barrett at the location.” She didn’t reply, just sat chewing on her misgivings about this operation and how it had steamrolled so rapidly from a speculative mention in the Situation Room.

  Bart Callan concentrated on keeping pace as the motorcade snaked a turn onto First Avenue. Once he rotated the wheel into the straightaway, he flicked a glance in the rearview to Rook in the backseat. “Never thought I’d say this, but glad you’re around, after all.”

  “Yeah?” muttered Rook. His response came muted, not just from the backhanded compliment, but he’d been maintaining a low profile in the aftermath of Yardley Bell naming him as the source of her intel on the Jamaican. He knew this would be a discussion later with Nikki, and hunkering became his defensive strategy. But the man behind the wheel seemed to have a different agenda—and worked it—masking his digs inside praise, all for Nikki’s ears.

  “I’m serious. Without your special relationship with Yardley Bell, we’d never have this lead.” Separately, Heat and Rook reacted with discomfort. They both wanted out of that car, but doing fifty in a Code Three wouldn’t be the place. And Bart continued, sounding innocent even as he made one last pick at the scab. “You and Yardley must be good friends to have ended a romance and still be this close.” Rook didn’t answer that. Heat wanted to turn in her seat and eyeball him; wished for one moment of privacy so she could unload. That would wait.

  “Know what this bridge is?” asked Callan as they crossed the Harlem River on the Willis Avenue span. “The twenty-mile-mark of the New York City Marathon. Know what we call this bridge? The Wall.”

  “Because this is where you hit it?” asked Rook.

  “No.” Callan scoffed. “Because this is where the lesser runners do.”

  An officer in black fatigues waved them into the staging area, the parking lot of the US Postal Service’s Bronx sorting facility off Brown Place, around the corner and out of sight of Barrett’s Do the Jerk warehouse. Callan scoped the blacktop, which was filled with hazmat vans, FDNY trucks, ambulances, and a pair of daunting, black military-style armored personnel carriers with battering rams. In a far corner, a portable hazardous materials scrub-shower area was being set up beside a medical DRASH tent. “Handy to have this USPS property here in the neighborhood,” said Heat.

  The agent nodded. “This is federal synergy at its finest.” He sounded tongue-in-cheek, but his face meant every word. When they heard the click of Rook unbuckling his seat belt, Callan found him in the rearview mirror. He spoke softly but with the tone of a drill instructor. “You will remain in the vehicle.” Rook folded his hands in his lap to wait.

  Yardley Bell met them mid-block on 132nd, on their walk-up to the deployment zone, and recited the briefing. “Streets are cordoned, all exits blocked, neighboring properties… a shipping fulfillment center and a scaffolding business… have been cleared out. Quarantine team’s ready and we have air support.” She twisted to the sky. “We also attracted a couple of TV news choppers. I had FAA push them back one mile, and our public informatio
n officer is calling the stations to inform them of the readiness exercises we are conducting this week.” Nikki listened to Yardley, so in-charge. She heard the competency and the confidence, and felt a little bad she couldn’t admire her.

  “Got your warrant, Agent Bell.” Callan handed her the paper.

  She gave it a quick glance and said, “Let’s light the fuse.”

  They approached the front gate using one of the box trucks borrowed from the US Mail, the driver announcing a delivery for Algernon Barrett. The fence rolled back, admitting Mr. Barrett’s delivery: a dozen armed federal agents Trojan Horsed in the cargo hold. The personnel carriers, Crown Vics, and half a dozen white vans marked with the blue vertical Homeland Security stripe drafted in behind it.

  Bell went in first with a SWAT team, her badge and the warrant lofted above her head. She announced herself and ordered everyone to stay as they were, showing their hands. Detective Heat entered in the second wave, along with cooperating law enforcement and a platoon of biotechnicians lugging portable aerosol sniffers and other sensory gear. Once past Reception and the front offices, the rest of the facility appeared laid out, open plan, in one story under a corrugated roof. With no resistance and nobody fleeing, agents easily corralled the thirty startled employees near the loading dock while the DHS techies dispersed to sample air and inspect equipment and storage containers.

  Because of her firsthand knowledge of the layout, Heat led Bell to Algernon Barrett’s office. The Jamaican was gone, but the betting line for the upcoming Kentucky Derby blared from his big-screen TV and a pungent wisp curled up from a fatty in the ashtray. Both of them poised their hands on their holsters and cleared the private bathroom. The other door in the office gave onto a back hallway leading to the warehouse. Outside a door marked as the spice supply room, they took ready positions and entered. “Looky here,” said Yardley Bell as Barrett emerged from between stacked cartons of Scotch bonnets and cloves with his hands up. “I found the secret jerk ingredient.”

  They searched him and took him back up the hall to his office. Nikki had warned them before they left Varick Street about Barrett’s lawyer, so they were eager to get some interrogation happening before Helen Miksit complicated matters.

  “Why did you hide?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Bart Callan, special agent in charge, Department of Homeland Security. Just one of the people in this room who can make your life hell. Now, answer my question. Why did you hide from us?”

  “Habit, I guess. Doors get busted, man’s got to run.”

  “You expect us to believe that?”

  “Believe what you like, mon.” Algernon turned from him and surveyed Nikki, who stood off in the corner, still wearing her Homeland hoodie. “So, Detective, this is what I get for cooperating?”

  Nikki said, “Mr. Barrett, this will all go more smoothly if you continue to do so.”

  “Yeah?” He folded his arms and leaned back on the couch. “I’m not saying anything. I want my lawyer.”

  An hour later, after Callan and Bell did their best to brace him both head-on and sideways about his participation in a terror plot, they lost him to the Bulldog, who advised her client to say absolutely nothing. Her statement, she said, would suffice. “My client is a United States citizen and taxpayer. He operates a successful, legitimate business purveying spice rubs and chicken dishes to a loyal public. Any inference that he is involved in some sort of diabolical plot based on his foreign origin is wild speculation, offensive, and slanderous.”

  “What about his sudden expansion at key targets of opportunity?” asked Bell.

  “They are targets of opportunity,” said Helen Miksit. “For profit. So unless you have evidence or a charge to file, why don’t you suck it?” If nothing else came out of this raid, Nikki thought that, just maybe, she could get to like Helen Miksit after all.

  Out in the warehouse, while the forensic technicians continued their search for evidence of viral or bacterial agents in marination canisters, drums of spices, and refrigerators, Heat took Callan aside. “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to bag this and get back to my precinct.”

  “I so was hopeful this would give us traction.” He surveyed the activity, ending with a head shake. “Heat, we need a break.”

  “We do. I just never felt like it was here.”

  “Is that an I-told-you-so?” Yardley Bell, from ten feet away, handed the company’s shipments manifest back to an agent and came over to join them. “See, Detective, here is the fundamental difference between us: You’re ready to bag it because it didn’t just land in our laps; I am ready to double down.” She turned to Callan. “Pull me some more warrants, Agent. I want to toss Barrett’s house, I want to toss the houses of his friends, his dealers, his hookers, his fucking pastor. I am ready to rattle some cages.” She walked away backward, saying to Nikki, “And then, if we survive to Monday, I can be an I-told-you-so.”

  Callan arranged for an agent to shuttle Heat and Rook back to the Twentieth, which only further postponed the conversation looming over them about Rook’s loose lips. He filled the trip mostly by complaining about his Callan-forced SUV time-out. “I hated that. I felt like I was sitting in the penalty box, having to watch a power play. Anyway, I made use of the hour and a half getting my mother out of the city.”

  “Rook.”

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her why. I’m much sneakier than that.”

  “I know.”

  He sidestepped that and explained, “I called in an IOU from a colleague of mine at the State University of New York and arranged for Margaret Rook, Broadway’s diva’s diva, to receive the first annual Stage Door Prize at the SUNY Oswego Drama Festival. It’s short notice, but Mom’s thrilled.”

  “What is the Stage Door Prize?”

  “Haven’t figured that out yet. All I know is it’s going to cost me ten grand plus luxury accommodations. But it gets Mom out of harm’s way. Just in case… you know.”

  She turned away and stared out the window as they turned off Lenox Avenue, remembering for a moment when she caught a glimpse of foliage at the north end of Central Park that it was spring. Her brief interlude with nature got interrupted by a text. “Weird,” she said after reading it. “From Callan. Test results of the bioagent traces on my blazer came back. It wasn’t ricin.” She held out her phone to Rook.

  “Smallpox?” His face turned ashen. “Didn’t Dr. Doom from CDC call that one of the bad boys?” She nodded. “And all you can say is, ‘weird’? Oh, excuse me, just a spot of bother. I seem to have picked up a bit of smallpox on my coat sleeve. No biggie.”

  “It is a biggie, I know it’s a biggie. Apparently it’s a marker, not enough to cause worry, but a medic is coming to give me a shot.” She finished reading and said, “What’s weird to me is that it’s not ricin, so that means I didn’t pick it up from Ari Weiss’s corpse.”

  “So where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a silence. Then the driver lowered his window. “Don’t blame you, buddy,” said Rook. “Stick your head out and breathe, if you like.”

  As soon as the DHS car dropped them on 82nd, Rook smiled and said, “So. We good?”

  “That’s it? That’s what you call dealing with this? Shrug it off and say ‘We good’?” She mocked him by brushing her palms as if dusting them clean. “God, you are such a boy.”

  “I am not…” He mimicked her palm brushing. “I just think we should be good because you know very well that I would never compromise you by sharing secrets.”

  “Then what do you call it?”

  Sharon Hinesburg passed by with a take-out bag, and they held their conversation. When she went inside the precinct, Rook said, “First of all, before I can keep a secret, I have to know it’s a secret. I thought we were all kind of working on the same team here, trying to stop the bad guys from unleashing a plague.”

  “Being on the same team is one thing, Rook, but that doesn’t mean you can go report
ing to other people. Especially Yardley Bell.”

  “You don’t like her.”

  “It’s not about liking her.”

  “You’re still jealous because we have a history.”

  “It’s not that, either. I just don’t trust her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nothing I can pinpoint. It’s an instinct.”

  “Hey, I’m the one with hunches and instincts, and you hate that.”

  “Well now it’s my turn. And as irrational as it may seem, I want you to respect that.” They regarded each other a moment, and in spite of the argument, all the good feelings held fast. Maybe that’s what a relationship was, she thought. She reached out and he took her hand. “Look, you know what I’m juggling. All I’m saying is, with everything else I have to look over my shoulder about, I don’t want you to be another one.”

  He reached out his other hand and she took that, and they faced each other. He smiled. “So. We good?”

  Heat regarded him and knew that, above all else, Jameson Rook was a good man she could trust. Nothing else mattered. “We are good.” She squeezed both his hands and they walked in together.

  While Nikki received her shot of an antiviral, she thought through her day for any clue where she might have picked up that smallpox marker. A disturbing notion came to her. After quick calls to Benigno DeJesus and Bart Callan, the orange string Rainbow left on the pillow got priority-messengered to the DHS lab for testing. A certain conspiracy-hungry boyfriend would be quite proud of her.

  One thing Heat did know for certain: There was no way in hell she would spend another minute in sweats at the cop shop. She opened her bottom file drawer where she kept what she called her emergency wear: backup apparel for those days she spilled coffee or got blood on her clothes.

  After a quick change and a review of the Murder Boards, she decided it was time to hit the phones again. That was how an investigation worked. You got a new scrap of information and followed it up by talking to someone about it. Sometimes you got another scrap that moved you forward, sometimes not. But you kept making rounds, occasionally feeling like a tethered pony walking a circle at a kids’ zoo, but you just continued plodding until something shook loose.