by Drew Chapman
The old woman squinted slightly in the midday sun. “Lose her baby.”
“She had a miscarriage?”
The old woman shook her head. “No, she had a baby. But they took it away. Because she was a drug addict. They took it out of the country.”
Celeste blinked in surprise. “Who did? Who took it away?” She realized immediately that she had raised her voice too quickly and spoken too fast. The old woman ducked her head and dove back into peeling bok choy.
Celeste took a long breath, then tried again, slowly, respectfully. “Could you tell me, maybe, where the baby went? Please.”
The old woman said nothing. Celeste waited. The sun beat down on her. She measured her breaths. If she had learned anything from her time in China, it was patience, always patience. Finally, after a full two minutes of silent peeling, the old woman made the slightest of head gestures, nodding back across Hunts Point Avenue. If Celeste hadn’t been watching closely, she would have missed it, but she didn’t. She turned and looked. The old woman had nodded to a Medicare clinic a block away. Celeste hadn’t thought to look in there.
“Xièxiè, xièxiè.” Thank you, thank you. Celeste hurried back across Hunts Point Avenue and walked to the front door of the clinic. The place looked like a thousand other storefront medical offices across the country. A laminated placard in the window said WE ACCEPT MEDICARE AND MEDICAID and SE HABLA ESPAÑOL. She opened the front door, walked inside, and knew immediately that she had hit the jackpot.
Half a dozen black and Latino patients were spread out across chairs in the front room. One woman rocked a crying baby. Another man cradled his bandaged elbow in his hand. But that wasn’t the revelation. The revelation was that everyone behind the counter in the clinic—the two nurses, the clerk working the phone, and the doctor who poked his head in from the hallway—was speaking Russian.
Ten minutes later, walking toward the subway stop at Longwood Avenue, Celeste called Garrett one last time. “I know how they got her to do it.”
“Yeah?”
“She had a baby. They took it back to Russia. My guess is—held it ransom.”
“No shit.” There was a long silence. “I guess that would do it.”
Celeste agreed, then got on the subway, and all the way back to Manhattan, then out to New Jersey on the PATH train, she felt the barest hint of inner satisfaction. There had been a puzzle, and she had solved it. Done and done.
She was back.
ROCK CREEK PARK, WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 19, 12:15 P.M.
Alexis watched as General Kline stepped out from a stand of trees at the edge of the park, a hundred yards from the lot off Military Road, and into the glare of the noon sun. The wash of sunlight allowed her to make out her boss’s face, and he was not happy. But then, neither was Alexis; she was tired, having just driven all the way from Newark to DC in four straight hours, and hungry and scared.
“Have you lost your mind?” Kline roared. “After everything we talked about?”
Over the phone, at six in the morning—after the Ascendant team had had their makeshift staff meeting—she’d hinted to Kline in the most oblique language possible as to whom she’d been with during the last few days, and what they’d been doing. Kline had clearly gotten the point. He told her where to meet him and hung up without another word. She’d driven the rest of the morning near tears. Now, in the park, standing face-to-face with him, Alexis felt even worse, like a wayward child who’d just disappointed her loving parent.
She told him, in a low, rapid whisper, about Markov, the passports, and his background, about how Garrett had predicted it, and what Garrett thought might be about to happen, but Kline cut her off before she could finish.
“This is not our fight. He is not a member of the program. Anyway, it doesn’t matter—he’s wanted on a murder charge. You cannot protect him from that.”
“He’s being set up for that exact reason. So that he won’t help track down Markov.”
“You are aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice.”
“Sir, it’s more complicated than that. I believe time is of the essence, and the FBI doesn’t understand that yet—”
Kline waved his hand in the air, as if swatting away her arguments. “You want my help? You want the DIA back in on this?”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to stop Markov without more sophisticated technology. We need real-time tracking, access to corporate networks. Things that you and I know DIA can get.”
“For a paranoid fantasy?”
Alexis had to take a moment after Kline said that. Bingo’s words, his description of Garrett talking to himself in the empty office, echoed in her head. She pushed on. “The man is a terrorist. He is set on taking down the American financial system.”
“And which man are we talking about? This Russian? Or Garrett Reilly?”
Down a trail, she heard a pair of joggers chatting to each other as they ran, but she couldn’t see them. She hoped they couldn’t see her as well.
“How do you know Reilly’s not playing you? Using you to achieve his own ends? It would certainly make sense, given that he paid someone to kill a federal banker.”
“I know you are angry with Reilly for what he did to Ascendant, but—”
“Do not psychoanalyze me, Truffant.”
“He’s been spot-on about everything having to do with Markov so far. I see no reason to stop believing him now.” That was a lie. She did see reasons to stop believing Garrett. But she would ignore those reasons for the time being.
Kline shook his head in blur of motion. “No, no, and no. I don’t buy it. Not for a second. And anyway, it’s way past our authority now.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and held it out to Alexis. “Call the FBI. Tell them everything. Your involvement, Reilly’s whereabouts. The whole nine yards. If Reilly’s telling the truth, then the FBI will discover that and go after this Russian. If he’s lying, then at least you turned him in.”
Alexis took a long breath. “No,” she managed to say.
Kline’s face flashed disappointment. He gave a quick nod, as if he expected her response, then turned the phone around and started to dial. “Then you leave me no choice but to call them myself and report you all.”
“I’ll take you down with me,” Alexis said.
Kline froze. Alexis could feel her entire life rushing at her; everything she’d worked for, all the orders she’d followed, all the rules she’d upheld—she was about to explode it all. She could barely make her mouth function, or her voice come out of her throat. She had lived within the guidelines of the military, or within a family that was deeply enmeshed in the military, for almost all of her twenty-eight years. The Truffants were American patriots and did what they were told, when they were told to do it. And now she was blackmailing her superior officer.
Alexis wanted to climb out of her skin. She wanted to run away as fast as she could, anything not to see the hurt and betrayal on her mentor’s face.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Kline managed to say.
Alexis simply nodded. She would. She would absolutely dare.
“You realize this ends our relationship. Everything we’ve ever done together?”
Again, she nodded. Yes, she realized; she knew only too well. She was fully in Garrett Reilly’s boat, and that boat would either float her to success or sink her into unfathomable failure and disgrace.
They stood in silence in the growing heat of the day, the birds singing, distant traffic echoing through the trees. Alexis waited for some sign from her boss, some inkling of emotion, or a clue as to what he would do or say.
Finally, Kline pocketed his phone. “So be it,” he said, and walked away.
LOWER MANHATTAN, JUNE 19, 1:58 P.M.
Sitting on the couch in Garrett Reilly’s apartment, Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry tried to let the frustration and exhaustion of the
case run off her shoulders. She tried to meditate, as her father had once taught her to do in her childhood home back in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but it didn’t help. Meditation, as far as she could tell, was a whole lot of Indian-themed bullshit.
So much of the story of Phillip Steinkamp’s murder was escaping her grasp, and the pressure to find his killer was skyrocketing. They were calling from the Hoover Building in DC every few hours, mostly executive assistant directors, but the last call had come from the deputy director himself, and it had not been fun. He had been terse, and expectant, and not particularly supportive of the job she was doing. Add in the constant media speculation and the energy drain of daily press conferences, and Chaudry was wiped out. Plus, she had barely slept.
Her brief attempt at transcendence ruined by the onrushing thoughts in her head, Chaudry picked herself up and took one more spin around Reilly’s apartment. She had gone through the place once, five days ago, when the FBI had first battered down his door, but at the time she had let the forensics team do most of the investigating. They had written up their findings in four different reports, and Chaudry had read them, every single word, but she still felt she was missing something. The place was telling her something about Reilly, but what?
Walking from room to room, the space was much as Chaudry remembered it: a Spartan bachelor pad with a few pieces of furniture, some nice suits, and stacks of books on statistics and finance. Beyond Reilly’s security obsession—the FBI techs had found six online cameras, two motion detectors, and bolt locks on every window—a couple of things stood out for her.
One was the inordinate number of prescription drugs secreted about the place. There were bottles in his bathroom cabinet, three by his bed, and half a dozen more in the kitchen. Reilly seemed to have pain issues, and if he wasn’t already an addict, he certainly was well on his way to becoming one. Some of the prescriptions were obviously black-market fakes, but others were legit. An agent at the field office had already started an investigation into which local doctors had so casually prescribed him meds.
Two, Reilly had money, but he didn’t seem interested in spending it. Agents had found multiple account statements in his desk, from brokerage houses all over the world. Reilly was nearly a millionaire, and the guy was still three years shy of thirty. He had more money than Chaudry’s entire family, yet his apartment was sparsely furnished, and the furniture was a level below IKEA quality: a beater La-Z-Boy, a couch that looked as if it had been found on a street corner, and a TV that was five years old at a minimum. Only his computer technology seemed current, and even that was limited to a pair of sleek laptops, three LED monitors, and a laser printer. If he was proving himself by becoming rich, it wasn’t to the world at large—no conspicuous consumption was involved. Chaudry thought that perhaps he was proving himself . . . to himself. As if to say, I can do this. I really can. That was odd, but she also kind of liked it.
And finally, Reilly was a man obsessed, but he wasn’t obsessed with Phillip Steinkamp. Of his two laptops, the first was password protected and basically uncrackable. They’d sent it to DC, to the tech lab, but the hard drive had erased itself once they got close to decrypting it. But his second laptop, which he seemed to use exclusively for e-mail and was unprotected, was full of references to the many people who were stalking him on the Web. He had links to endless chat rooms and bulletin boards dedicated to discovering who made up the Ascendant team. Possible members were listed—brokers, mathematicians, programmers, and finance professors—and Reilly’s name was on a few of them. In one file he saved hate mail—easily five hundred pieces of it, most of them laced with death threats. None of them had been sent exclusively to him—they were group hate blasts—but they were alarming nonetheless.
Ascendant r Nazis. Find them, kill them. Slit their throats, read one. Die fuckheads die was another popular e-mail header. A handheld video, blurry and taken at night from Reilly’s living-room window, showed a group of young men standing on the street corner and pointing up at the camera, laughing and shouting obscenities. Chaudry couldn’t make out if the harassment was aimed at Reilly or was just drunken revelry, but either way, the cameras and the window locks suddenly made a lot of sense. No one seemed to have zeroed in on Reilly as a leader of Ascendant, but people were certainly getting close.
However, there were no references, anywhere in Reilly’s apartment, to Steinkamp or Anna Bachev or the New York Fed. Not a link, not a newspaper clipping, not a Web-browser history reference. Nothing. The FBI tech said Reilly might have erased them all, but Chaudry somehow doubted it. You could scrub your life of most evidence of your crime, but eventually, somewhere, somehow, the FBI found a trace of it: a fingerprint, an e-mail, a thrice-removed connection to a handgun, a killer, or a payment to that killer.
Chaudry walked into the kitchen and tapped her fingernails on the cheap, faux-Formica counter. She poured herself a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and surveyed the living space. It was like any other New York living room, and yet—what was it? It was different. Reilly was different. She still believed that he wanted to reach out to her and would continue to want to, but maybe she had missed his overtures. They could be right in front of her face, and she was simply blind to them. She moved to the window and admired the gradations in the colors of the sign of the nail salon—Pinkie’s—across the street: glowing red melted into a deep orange, which tapered into the softest pink.
Then it hit her. Patterns.
The nail-salon sign was patterned. Reilly’s apartment was a series of patterns. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She snapped away from the window and reexamined the room. Nothing was haphazard. The furniture, beat-up as it was, started black in one corner, and tall, and then the pieces got lighter in color and shorter as you crossed the room. The books that looked scattered along the wall were actually perfectly alphabetized by author, A to Z. She rushed into the kitchen to inspect the glasses: each stacked according to height and width, high and skinny to low and fat. She jumped back to the living room: the brokerage accounts were arranged according to the amount of money they contained, lowest to highest. The closer she looked, the more the patterns jumped out at her. The locks on the front door: one bolt to five, top to bottom; the suits: by country of origin, US to Europe to Asia; the drugs: strongest dosage by his bed, midlevel in the kitchen, weakest by the door.
The apartment wasn’t orderly, it was a mess, but everywhere you looked, if you tried, you could discern a pattern. Reilly was compelled to arrange his life so that it made sense, but the only thing that made sense to him were patterns. They were how he saw absolutely everything.
Chaudry dropped back onto the couch, bathed in waves of satisfaction. She’d cracked him, not completely, but some, and every piece helped. But now, how to apply that knowledge? She was about to start in on that task when her phone rang. It was the Manhattan field office.
“Agent Chaudry here.”
“We got a hit on the Rodriguez woman.” Agent Murray’s gruff voice crackled on the line. “PATH cameras got her entering the train at World Trade Center. Film is from yesterday.”
“Any exit video?”
“Not yet. Still checking.”
“Send someone to check all the exit stations.”
“On it.” Murray hung up.
So Mitty Rodriguez took the PATH train? Chaudry knew the train well—she’d grown up south of Newark—and there weren’t a lot of stops, just a handful in Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark. Was Garrett Reilly near one of them, somewhere in New Jersey? And if so, why there? Her eyes tracked across the mostly empty room, and she smiled because she already knew the answer.
Wherever he was, however he reached out to her, she would use the patterns that he created to find him. Because Reilly seemed incapable of leading his life in any other way.
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 19, 4:42 P.M.
His burner cell phone rang, and Garrett checked the caller ID. It was a
pay phone, 202 area code, Washington, DC.
He answered immediately. “Tell me.”
“We’re in,” Alexis said quickly, and hung up.
• • •
Garrett gathered the team—three of them, at least; Celeste hadn’t returned from the Bronx yet—and told them the plan. They would be pulling the passenger manifest for Lufthansa flight number 462 on June 15. They were to pose as airline-employed telemarketers, phoning to ask recent passengers about their experience on Lufthansa’s transatlantic coach service.
“It’s a customer-satisfaction survey,” Garrett said. “If they don’t want to talk to you, tell them we’re offering flight vouchers for their time.”
Patmore looked up warily. “We have flight vouchers to give them?”
“We’re lying, Patmore,” Garrett said. “We’re not telemarketers either.”
Patmore nodded, as if that thought hadn’t yet occurred to him.
“Ask about the flight, the service, then ask about their seating companions. Did they like them? Talk to them? Explain that we’re thinking of instituting a new protocol—you can choose your seatmate from a master list. Would you chose that person again? Get them to open up—describe their seatmate—what was he or she like?”
The manifest came in ten minutes later, and Garrett broke the passenger list into sections, with each Ascendant team member getting a handful of names. No one had any luck. None of the passengers who’d been seated around Ilya Markov’s seat—27H in coach—had any recollection of a young man seated near them, Russian or otherwise. Patmore and Bingo carefully modulated their voices to sound like poorly paid call-center employees, and people were cooperative, for the most part—one man cursed them and hung up, but he was the exception. Garrett felt a twinge of guilt promising them flight vouchers that would never materialize, but he wasn’t robbing them of anything more than a few minutes. Anyway, it was for a good cause. That’s what he kept telling himself: everything in his life was for a good cause now. That was a load of shit, but it kept him going.
