“That would be bad?”
“On the contrary, Brendon, that would be awesome, because a new strata of rock may be revealed for us to investigate. We’ll see.”
Brendon stuck his finger in his mouth and feigned a quiet gag response. Susan slapped him playfully on his shoulder.
The van pulled through the weathered gates of the old quarry past the long-rusting machines and through the notch into the bottom of the man-made bowl.
Mr. Herns got out of the school van and immediately spun around, looking for where the landslide had occurred. “That’s funny . . . Maybe it was a mini-quake after all. These walls don’t look like they have been disturbed in years.”
“A real mini of a quake; if it was only a point two-five on the Richter scale,” Susan said.
Then Mr. Herns looked at the floor of the quarry. He walked about fifty yards in a circle. The he stopped and bent down. He gathered up a handful of the newly loosened dirt and smelled it.
“Look, Sue, he’s eating the dirt. What a dipthoid,” Brendon said.
“Don’t be a child. I am sure he has a good reason.” Then she yelled over, “Mr. Herns, what are you doing?”
“Come over here . . .”
The club came to where Herns was crouching. He held up his dirt-filled hand. “Smell that?”
“Oooo, eek, that’s bad.”
“Yeah, but that sweet smell mixed in there, that’s glycerin.”
“Like sugar?”
“No, it’s what’s left after you explode nitroglycerin.”
“How do you know that?” Brendon said, trying to wrestle Susie’s attention back from the rock geek.
“We used it in the search for oil.”
“That’s dumb, blowing up oil.” Brendon grunted when he laughed.
“Brendon, we’d place dynamite at specific intervals and read the seismic wave the shock that the detonation produced. Knowing how kinetic energy travels through certain substances, we could determine what was under out feet.”
“So it was like a sonic x-ray of the crust, Mr. Herns?”
“Exactly, Susan.”
Brendon made a sour face and walked off.
“So that means they used dynamite here years ago?”
“They most certainly had to. It’s how they cleaved the rim and brought down the rock to be excavated out by truck through the cut where we came in.”
Brendon walked around the quarry, kicking the dirt and watching the wind take the plumes. He looked back and saw Susan enraptured with Mr. Herns. “Stupid rock lover,” he said.
Then he hit something. He tapped it with his foot. It was tin or metal. First he scraped away the dirt with his foot. The he bent down and retrieved a license plate.
It was an Ohio plate. He smacked it on his open hand as he continued walking. Eventually he got bored and walked back over to the gaggle of nerds.
.G.
“Are you guys done yet?”
“Brendon, whatcha got there?” Mr. Herns said.
“Some old license plate. From Ohio. I think it’s a good sign; a scout from Ohio State gave me a good write up. I might get a scholarship to go there.”
The thought that the term “scholar,” even in the word scholarship, was used in relation to this particular teen bristled the educator within Michael Herns. This kid, Brendon, had as much academic drive as the dead pigskin of the football. His ability to throw the ball, however, ensured that his four-year college career would be paid for lock, stock, and barrel. Meanwhile, a true academic like Susan would probably wind up in a two-year community college for lack of funds. He repressed the urge to say something snotty to the kid and instead said, “Cool. Can I see it?”
Brendon handed it over.
“Ohio . . . trailer . . .” He flicked away some more dirt with his thumb. “This registration stamp is good till next year. Brendon, where did you find this?”
“Over there.” He pointed to where he found it. “Just under the dirt.”
“What is it, Mr. Herns?” Susan said.
“Odd. How would a current plate from Ohio get buried here?”
“Ah, who cares? I want it. I am going to put it over my locker.” Brendon took back his new good luck charm.
Chapter 31
The Floater
“Well, well, only three fingers on the left hand! Given the apparent time the body was in the water, I would have said getting a positive ID was going to be difficult but the scarring here tells me these digits were surgically removed, or at least attended too some time ago, so there must be a record,” the New York City Medical examiner opined as he assessed the waterlogged body before him.
“That’s a break,” Detective Rolland Harris said as he leaned over, looking at the body retrieved by NYPD divers that was now on the deck of the Harbor Unit, Launch #4.
The ME continued as he pulled back the pant legs a little more with blue rubber gloves on his hands. “And from the looks of this non-bloated part of the leg here—you see, just above the sever point—I’d say he was being held down at the bottom, probably by leg shackle tied to a great weight, which also created a weak spot here, just above the ankle. The abrasion around the cuff, brought on by the river currents, probably caused the leg to detach at this joint, freeing the body to rise to the surface.”
“Okay, we’ll search all missing persons for three fingers on the left hand. Anything else, Doc?” Harris asked while jotting down notes in his flipbook.
“Appears there was a tattoo on the upper forearm, but it is dilated by bloating and shedding skin. We might be able to shrink the skin and do a sub-dermatological penetration x-ray to read it under the exposed layer of skin.”
“That’ll help.”
Back at the Midtown North precinct, an hour later, Harris answered the phone on the first ring. “Squad, Harris.”
“Rolland, I got a hit on your floater,” Joan McCabe, from the missing persons bureau, said over the phone.
“Great, Joan, who was he?”
“If it’s him, he’s Raleigh Dickson. Age fifty-three. Of 1334 Palmer Court, New Rochelle. He’s got a wife and three grown kids. They reported him missing two weeks ago.”
“Any mental condition or reason he’d just skip out on them?”
“No. He just never came home from work.”
“What did he do?”
“He was in construction. Actually, demolition . . . Wait a minute; something else just came up in the search. He is a federal explosive licensee.”
“Okay, that means ATF&E has got to have a file on him. Good work, Joan.”
“Hey, don’t you want to know about the fingers?”
“Let me guess, he lost them in a blast?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. But no, he was hurt during the recovery operation at Ground Zero after 9/11.”
“Ahhh hell, a guy like that winds up fish food. There is no justice in the world, Joan.”
“At least he’ll get a military funeral.”
“Why?”
“He was a sergeant in the marines . . . explosive ordinance disposal.”
“This gets worse and worse.”
.G.
In three hours, Harris had Dickson’s ATF&E file and military record. The latter probably explained the tattoo on the man’s arm. His wife and his kids didn’t know of anybody who wanted to do harm to Dickson. And he wasn’t a gambler or, as far as they knew, into any drugs or anything illegal. That clean profile made the hairs on Harris’s neck stand up, because it could mean Dickson was dead because of what he did—explosives. So, he was now on the way to Empire City Demolition where Dickson worked.
At Empire, they were all concerned about Dickson. The news that he was dead shocked everyone. Harris asked that his desk be cordoned off until detectives could go through the contents to try and see if anyth
ing could shed light on his disappearance or, more importantly, why anyone would want to kill him.
“Is this the only place he worked?”
“Here and in the locker.”
“What’s the locker?”
“The ordinance locker, where we keep the charges.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.”
They went to a bunker out back. It was a solid steel building buried into the ground. Inside were wooden crates, lots of them.
“How much do you have here?”
“The feds limit us to thirty boxes of TNT shots.”
“There are more than thirty boxes here.”
“On the right, those are plastique.”
“Why do you have plastic?”
“Plastique. We use it as cutting charges.”
There was a pause and Harris finally said, “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”
“Sorry, we make cutting charges when we are taking down a building. We shape the charge like a rope and adhere it to a main building girder at a forty-five-degree angle. When it detonates, it slices the girder, and the column slides apart down the slant.” He swept his tilted flat hand from upper left to lower right to show the angle.
“So the plastique is like clay?”
“It’s malleable, so we can make all kinds of different shaped charges for all kinds of different jobs. A shape or directed charge can be a hundred times more effective than just an omni-directional blast.”
“You mean more than just an explosion?”
“Yes. Getting a detonation to do work, that’s all in the shape and the timing of the shots. We don’t so much blow up a building as we ring its bell and have the harmonics collapse the structure.”
“Can I see this stuff?”
“What?”
“The moldable charges.”
“Really?”
“Humor me.”
The foreman went to the first box and was about to hump it over to a little table.
“Uh, no, from the back, please,” Harris said.
“Why?”
“We’re still humoring me, right?”
“Geez,” he said as he slid between the crates. He got the last crate from the top of the ones by the back wall. He humped it over to the cop and placed it on the table. He took out a pair of wire snips and clipped the two nylon wire ties that sealed the box. He opened it without looking into it.
“So plastique is like sand?”
“What? Holy fuck!” the foreman said, looking down at the sand in the box that held no explosives.
An hour later, with the bomb squad observing, the men of Empire confirmed that of the fifty crates of C4-like plastique explosives, twenty had their contents missing.
The owner of Empire Demolition, Charles Manning, was waiting for his lawyer; Harris knew his whole business and everything he owned could be lost to federal, state, and city fines. He didn’t even want to consider the prison term the man was facing.
“What made you think to look?” the borough commander who showed up at the scene asked Harris.
“Sir, I had the guy in charge of these explosives come up a floater in the Hudson. He was clean, but someone deep-sixed him. This was my nightmare hunch. And I figured, if I had taken some explosives it wouldn’t be from the front of the stockpile where they’d be discovered sooner than those in the back.
“Are we sure the stuff disappeared from here?”
“Each case is unsealed, inspected, and resealed right here at the point of delivery. These boxes came into this locker full of explosives.”
.G.
The afternoon bell rang at Waterloo High. Susan had history. Brendon had to continue his failing effort at algebra. Before they parted he said, “Friday night after practice we are going to Todd’s house. His mom and dad are away. You wanna go?”
“I’ll have to see if Judy can cover for me. I’ll tell my mom we’re going to go to the movies and get Chinese food. That usually gets me home at midnight.”
“Sweet,” Brendon said as he leaned over to give her a kiss before class.
“Brendon!”
He jumped as the principal called his name. He closed his eyes in annoyance. When he opened them, the principal, Mr. Herns, and a tough-looking, six-foot-four, two-hundred-plus-pound New York State Trooper were standing there.
Herns pointed up to the Ohio plate that Brendon had taped over his locker earlier in the morning. “That’s it.”
“The trooper reached up and, using a box cutter, sliced the tape and pulled the plate away from the locker’s face. Then holding the plate only by the edges he slid it into a plastic evidence bag. He nodded to the principal who held out a clipboard. “Sign here, Brendon. The plate will be returned to you if it is not part of a crime.”
“You eighteen, boy?” the trooper said.
“In two months, sir.”
“Then your principal will have to co-sign as temporary guardian.”
“What’s this all about?” Brendon asked.
“Probably nothing,” the trooper said as he tore off the top page of the duplicate form and handed it to Brendon.
.G.
Forty-five hundred miles east of Waterloo High, at Sheremetyevo Airport, the man in the tenth row aisle seat of the Air Canada plane opened his smart phone. He ignored the fact that he was in strict violation of the flight attendant’s warning to shut off all electronic devices once the forward cabin door was closed. He cradled his hand around its screen. A photo of Bridge just taken with a long lens in Red Square came up. Then he swiped his finger and the next image was of Prescott. The last was a fuzzy surveillance shot of Alisa, taken at the event at Borishenko’s house. He looked forward and deduced the likeness was close enough to the woman sitting across the aisle from the two men. He reached down into his carry-on and screwed the silencer into the barrel of the small .22 caliber pistol. The weapon that had been waiting for him in a water-tight plastic bag in the third stall’s toilet tank in the airport’s men’s room. The one that was just beyond the security check point.
With one last twist, the muffler was in place. His plan was to shoot them before the plane took off. This way they’d be able to turn right around. He’d be handed over to the authorities and in an hour Borishenko’s lawyers would have him out.
“Sir, sir you must sit down! We are on an active runway . . . Please get back to your seat,” the cabin attendant yelled to the man who suddenly rose and headed to the front of the plane with his right hand under his Pravda magazine.
Bridge looked up in time to see the other man who was seated in their row, next to Alisa, get up and quickly intercept the man just as he got to the second row. The guy from their row simply shoved an ice pick into the man’s shoulder. From under the magazine, a small-caliber gun fell to the floor as the would-be attacker cried out in agony, clutching his shoulder.
Passengers screamed. The man who came from their row then held up his ID. “I am GUVD. This man is my prisoner.” He turned to the stunned cabin crew. “Tell the captain to turn this plane around.” Then he turned back to the passengers in the main cabin as he handcuffed the guy. “I am sorry passengers, but we’ll be off the plane fast and you’ll be on your way.” Then he bent down and picked up the little PSM “pistolet,” a favorite of the old KGB. He turned and caught Bridge’s eyes. He nodded with the smallest perceptible wink, and then escorted his prisoner to the back of the plane.
Alisa looked at Bridge and made a face like she was very impressed.
“I am amazed what two good seats at the ball park can get you these days,” Bridge said as he continued reading his magazine.
Forty-five minutes later, the plane lifted off.
Chapter 32
Cowboys of the Night
The drone lifted off with a loud buzzing that sounded like
a swarm of mosquitoes up close. Major Hanes, the Air Force pilot who’d flown Brooke’s team down to Grenada, worked the controls. They were enough like the standard-looking R/C controller, although this had a good-sized screen and two red buttons. The major was quickly doing some maneuvers and rapidly learning how to fly the three-foot-wide aircraft and how it responded.
Brooke looked up as he made the drone go straight up. “The sound?”
“Let me get it to five hundred feet and see how much we hear.”
Brooke looked down at the screen and watched as the image of herself and the major receded on the screen, getting smaller as the drone took its high-resolution night vision camera high up overhead.
“I can hardly hear it . . . good. You ready?” Brooke said.
“I think I got the hang of it.”
They watched the screen as the drone angled and moved east over the Prescott estate. It was three o’clock in the morning so he switched to infrared. The only heat signatures were coming from the air-conditioning unit and a light fog of heat coming from what was designated on the floor plan map as the security system for the estate.
“So those glows must be from the heat of the TVs and surveillance equipment in the office. I don’t see anyone on perimeter defense,” Brooke said.
“I’ll turn up the sensitivity and do one more pass to check.”
Brooke hit her comm. “George, no sentries. All’s quiet. Got four heat signs in one area. Looks like the middle of the house. We have two more, one each in the east and northeast bedrooms. Marked Jennifer and Chet on the map. I am going to assume they are the guards.
“Walters, you take Jennifer’s bedroom; George you take Chet’s. I’ll secure the family. We go on signal as soon as we are positioned. The doors and windows are alarmed so we got three seconds max before they react, if they are sleeping. Major, you keep an eye out for any surprises. Two clicks when you are in position, then on my three clicks we go.”
.G.
George was about to ask how come she took the easy room, but then realized, she could just as easily be walking into four guards in the room and not the family.
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