by Jim DeFelice
“One is bad enough,” Rose complained. “But both? It shuts me down.”
Rose was the sort of woman who had begun tinting her black hair blond thirty years before and still did it now that the roots were coming in gray. She had a naturally indignant chin, and though she came up to about Fisher’s chest, she had shoulders a linebacker would spend thousands on supplements to get.
Fisher let the officer continue the interview. Rose thought that the vans must have been stolen by a competitor and gave the men a half-dozen leads.
“I didn’t realize the flower business was so cutthroat,” said Fisher when the cop was done.
“You’d be surprised,” said Rose.
“So they were here last night and they’re missing this morning,” said Fisher. “You’re sure they were here last night?”
“Mira said so, yes. She’s the manager.”
“I met her. You have an employee named Harry Spageas, right?”
“A damn good question,” said Rose. “He didn’t show up Friday.”
“Where does Harry live?” asked Fisher.
* * *
Harry Spaneas — not Spageas, but Greek enough — lived four blocks away from the florist shop on the bottom floor of a three-story row house across from the entrance ramp to the Triborough Bridge.
He didn’t answer his door, or his phone, which Fisher tried from his cell phone. Fisher leaned on the other bells, hoping they would bring some little old busybody out who would know exactly where Harry was. But no one appeared.
“Let’s go look in the windows,” Fisher told the patrolman. “Guy lives on the ground floor, right?”
The ground floor was actually about six feet above street level, and Fisher found it necessary to borrow a garbage can to look through the windows.
“I don’t know about this, if it’s kosher,” said the patrolman. “I better check with my sergeant.”
“Tell him there’s a guy lying on the floor in the hallway that looks a lot like the subject,” said Fisher, pressing his face against the glass. “Tell him there’s a pool of blood around his head.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I only wish I was,” said Fisher, jumping down from the garbage can.
* * *
Harry Spaneas had been killed either by a pair of .22-caliber bullets to the face or a similar bullet fired point-blank into his skull from behind. Given that he was lying facedown when they found him, Fisher figured that the bullet in the back of the head had been for insurance or good luck, but he’d leave it to the medical examiner to make the final call.
“Does this connect to Faud or not?” asked Macklin when Fisher called him from Spaneas’s kitchen to tell him what he’d found.
“I don’t know,” said Fisher. “NYPD’s going through the apartment now.”
“How cold was he?”
“Yesterday’s coffee cold,” said Fisher. “But not much of an odor. I’m figuring he was killed sometime yesterday, before the florist trucks disappeared. But maybe not.”
“So they stole the trucks?”
“Could be.”
“Come on, Andy. Of course they stole the trucks, right?”
“Michael, if you already know the answer, don’t ask the question.”
“I don’t. I’m asking. You’re connecting the murder with the trucks?”
“Why not?”
“Well, lack of evidence, for one.”
“He had a spare set of keys, which are not around anywhere,” said Fisher.
Macklin chewed on it for a second, processing the information slowly. “Well, let’s get some bulletins out on them,” he said finally.
“NYPD already has,” said Fisher. “You find anything from the neighbors of that apartment?”
“Nothing.”
Fisher pushed back in the chair. He’d already checked Spaneas’s name against the database of possible terrorists and come up blank, but that wasn’t definitive proof of anything. He wondered if it was possible that Spaneas had let Faud stay with him. There was no evidence that he had: A single coffee cup sat on the washboard, along with one knife and fork and plate. But anyone who took the time to think about what they were doing could set that up to make it look as if only one person, Spaneas, had been there.
E-bombs, night goggles, and nail bombs. Hired killers. Flower trucks.
Kind of a jumble, actually. One half of the operation was very sophisticated; the other half, not so much.
Which argued that he was looking at two different operations.
“Hey, Fisher, are you there or what?” said Macklin.
“I’m here,” he told Macklin. “Is the Washington Heights apartment still sealed?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you get somebody to let me in?”
“Why?”
“I’m running out of straws,” said Fisher.
Chapter 18
When Howe told McIntyre what had happened, his new vice president for government affairs told him he sounded as if he were making a sales pitch for the Advanced Military Vision radar. And his offer to lend the device and the aircraft that were currently outfitted with it made it seem even worse.
“Why?” Howe asked him.
“Because nobody does anything for nothing in this town,” said McIntyre. “Probably not in the whole country.”
“Isn’t it our duty to do something?” asked Howe.
McIntyre sighed. “I like you, Colonel, and I owe you a lot, but boy, do you have a lot to learn.”
“Other people have a lot to learn,” said Howe.
McIntyre looked as though he were about to launch into an extended lecture about the facts of life when the telephone cut him off. It was from Nelson; Howe told McIntyre to wait and then picked up the phone.
“Colonel, what are we doing with this UAV business?” asked Nelson as soon as he got on the phone.
Howe explained the situation briefly. Nelson was already well informed enough to point out the NSC objection: The UAVs they’d found in Korea had no engines.
“An engine could be supplied,” said Howe.
“Just follow channels on it,” urged Nelson. “All right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Howe. He hung up.
“Nelson gave you flak?” said McIntyre.
“More or less.”
“Well, this isn’t the military,” said McIntyre. “You don’t work for him.”
“He’s head of the board.”
McIntyre shrugged. “The person you have to worry about is the President. Besides, right now they need you a heck of a lot more than you need them.”
“So they all think I’m trying to sell the AMV radar system?” said Howe.
“Yeah.”
“But I’m not.”
“You have to take a step back.” McIntyre’s hand jangled a little, a twitch Howe had never noticed before. “People are a little scared of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah. It’d be like a four-star general calling up out of the blue and saying, ‘Hey, this a problem.’ ”
“A general would have his calls returned.”
“You’d be surprised,” said McIntyre.
“So I should just sit here and do nothing?”
“Yup.”
“I can’t, Mac. It’s way too threatening.”
“Then you have your staff do it,” said McIntyre. “Have them talk to the military people, government agencies. They get the ball rolling.”
“That will take way the hell too long,” said Howe. “I can’t just hang back.”
“Sometimes you have to if you want to get things done,” said McIntyre.
Chapter 19
“So, what did it mean that the three slimebag terrorists who’d live in the Washington Heights apartment had actually lived there, with stuff and everything, unlike the apartment Faud had blown up?”
“Jesus, Andy, that’s a real question?” asked Macklin as Fisher sat down on the couch in the living room. “It means they lived
here.”
“So Faud must have another place to stay? Besides his apartment.”
“That a question or a conclusion?”
“Both.”
“Maybe you should talk to them yourself. They’re at the new Special Prisoner Holding Area on Plum Island.”
“What are they going to tell me?”
“Jeez, if I knew that, you wouldn’t have to talk to them.”
Fisher got up and went to the kitchen, where Macklin had left the inventory of the items they’d removed. The DIA techies had managed to retrieve most of the files from the hard drive; the inventory included a rundown. It appeared that the three students were running a term-paper Internet site from the apartment. It brought in about six or seven hundred bucks a week, barely enough to support the rent and other expenses.
“What sort of tickets did they have?” Fisher asked Macklin, looking at the inventory. “Parking tickets? They have a car?”
“No. Bastards had tickets to the NCAAs. They even have four tickets to tonight’s finals. Four of ’em. Those suckers are so valuable, I had to take custody of them myself.”
Fisher gave him an odd look.
“I’m just kidding, Andy.”
“Where are they being held?” asked Fisher, grabbing his coat.
The Special Prisoner Holding Area had been constructed off the shore of a secure testing area controlled by Homeland Security at the tip of Long Island. It consisted of two large barges that had once been leased by New York City as temporary jail facilities. The water around the barges was filled with coiled razor wire; there were two posts with machine guns on land and a pair of small patrol craft, also armed with machine guns, patrolling in the water. Fisher had to run a gamut of high-tech sensors to get onto the barge where the three men were held; he was wanded twice and had to turn over his cell phone, all of his weapons, and most importantly his cigarettes before being allowed inside. Even Macklin, who was head of the task force and had been there several times before, was carefully searched before being cleared. The doors were all operated by remote control; none of the guards had keys of any kind.
The first man had given his name as Ali Muhammad, which was a little like calling himself James Smith. Immigration had just identified him as an Egyptian student named Ali al Saad, which was also probably an alias, though Fisher was not particularly interested in his specific identity and said nothing when Macklin quizzed him on it.
“ Syracuse or Kentucky?” Fisher asked the prisoner.
Ali gave him a blank stare.
“Thanks,” said Fisher.
“That’s it?” said Macklin.
“That’s it,” said Fisher. “Bring in the next one.”
Chapter 20
Howe tried to follow McIntyre’s advice and hang back, but when one of the generals he’d contacted earlier got back to him and offered to forward the preliminary report, Howe couldn’t stop himself from saying yes. The report wasn’t much more than what he’d already seen — it was a field briefing forwarded from the scene to a CIA reviewing team — but it did include a set of digital photographs. The shots were a bit grainy, but one thing that caught Howe’s attention were two large arrangements of tubes at one corner. At the center of each one was a large, elongated tube that looked like the cans used on dairy farms to collect milk. Around them were clusters of smaller cans or pipes, like coffee cans soldered on. They looked somewhat like rocket motors, though Dalton pointed out they were too large to fit in the rear of the UAVs.
“Besides, if they’re rockets — and I’m not saying they are — they’d be solid fuel boosters,” added the scientist. “If you used them to propel the plane, you couldn’t shut it off. You’d have the rocket ignite, boost you to altitude maybe, then glide back?”
“Why not?” asked Howe.
Dalton shrugged. He leaned over, trying to get a better look at the photos. “Not enough detail to know what’s going on.”
“I know the guy who took the photos and wrote the report,” said Howe. “Maybe he can tell us something more.”
“Can’t hurt.”
It took Howe’s secretary only a half hour to run down Major Tyler in Korea — one more measure of the power and reach of NADT. It was a little past midnight there, and Tyler sounded as if he’d dragged himself from bed.
Which, he told Howe, was the case.
“Only for you, Colonel.”
“I appreciate it. I’m looking at some pictures you took at the UAV base. There’s some tubes and things on the side of the hangar. Would you mind if one of my technical people went over it with you?”
“Tell you the truth, Colonel, I haven’t a clue what any of that stuff is. I took a whole set of pictures just because of that. I’m lucky I knew which one was the UAV.”
“There are only three pictures attached here, and only one of the hangar.”
“Yeah, probably all they forwarded because of the bandwidth. I have the flash card.”
“Can we get it?”
“I think we can e-mail it over a secure network.”
“Let me see about the arrangements.”
* * *
An hour later Dalton went over the images with Howe.
“My guess is that it’s some sort of booster system. This here, this is definitely part of a solid fuel rocket system: The design looks pretty basic, something you’d see around 1960, 1965, but it looks sound.”
Dalton slapped the keys, bringing up a photo of the underside of the robot plane. “It would elevate the aircraft: It would be like something you’d use for a takeoff. I’m not a propulsion expert, but I know rocket-assist packs have been used to help heavy bombers off airfields. This might be something similar, except that my feeling is this aircraft could take off from a really short field as it is.”
“So why would you need them for a UAV?” said Howe.
“I don’t think that you would. Maybe for a really quick takeoff, but this can use a short field as it is.” Dalton shrugged. “Until we have that UAV here, it’s impossible to say if they’re related.”
“How much of an airstrip would those aircraft need to take off?” asked Howe.
“Have to have the engineers do the numbers once they have the aircraft and can model it, but I’d guess not much. Any military field in North Korea would have been more than adequate. I think they could come off a road. Maybe even my driveway.”
“Could the boosters lift them straight up?”
“Not straight up. You’d need a bit of an open area to climb out and get altitude, but not much. I don’t see why you’d need it, to be honest. You have the airfield, so this is a lot of trouble for nothing.”
“I’m guessing there’s a reason,” said Howe. “We just haven’t figured it out yet.”
Chapter 21
Dr. Blitz eased away from the Philippine ambassador, squeezing into the press of UN delegates in the center of the reception. The President’s speech had gone reasonably well, though a final assessment on audience reaction wouldn’t be possible until later in the day, after the delegates began cabling home with their true reactions.
A new era for Asia. Or more precisely, the foundation of a new era for Asia.
Japan could now safely remain on the pacifist course America had steered for it at the end of World War II. That in turn reduced the pressure on China to expand its military capacity, at least in the short term. Naturally the President had not put it so baldly, speaking only of peace and economic opportunity.
Those were the ultimate goals, and they were achievable as long as America retained its power in the region. There were many in this hall — too many — who did not understand or fully appreciate that; they looked at America ’s military and economic might as potentially evil things. They did not completely understand the U.S, its historic perspective and foundation. But then, they could hardly be blamed for that: Many of the people in Congress didn’t understand it.
History wasn’t taught in the schools anymore, Blitz lamented to himself as he s
miled his way past several African delegates. Kids didn’t even know the dates of the American Revolution, let alone the Korean War.
A waitress passed nearby, offering a plate of Thai shrimp. Blitz declined: Spicy food at receptions always gave him heartburn.
A buzz at the other end of the hall indicated that the President had changed his mind and decided to attend after all. Blitz took a step toward him but found his way blocked by the Chinese representative to the UN. Xi Hiang was too important to duck; Blitz bowed his head and greeted the man properly.
“Peace, then?” asked Xi.
“Peace, yes,” said Blitz.
“ Korea is an interesting country,” said Xi, still speaking like a sphinx. Much like Blitz, Xi had an academic as well as government background, and the national security advisor waited for the lecture about history or at least a remark in that direction. But Xi said nothing else, and Blitz was moved to ask if his country was afraid of peace, aware that he was being provocative.
“Afraid?” Xi spoke English as well as Blitz but he said the word as if he did not understand the meaning.
“Afraid of the future?” prompted Blitz, trimming back the question slightly. “The uncertainty.”
“One should never be afraid of the future,” said Xi. “For it comes of its own. As for peace…”
An aide tapped the UN representative on the arm, and Xi turned before finishing. Blitz, too, was interrupted: France ’s UN representative told him she thought the President had done very well.
