MANNING
Where are you going?
ME
To confront Rachel.
MANNING
The fuck you are.
Ben-David joins our group. I’m getting that metallic taste on my tongue that tells me my blood sugar is approaching zero. I have to get Manning home. He needs sleep. So do I. But when I turn toward him to speak, I can tell by the way he cocks his shoulder that he will rebuff any well-intentioned intervention.
MANNING
(to young rabbi)
Is there a “hell” in the Jewish religion?
YOUNG RABBI
It’s called Gei-Hinnom.
MANNING
Like Gehenna?
YOUNG RABBI
Same thing.
ME
Like the dig? The archaeological site where Rachel met Instancer.
I’m cursing myself for not following up on the name. I should have put these together. I see on Manning’s face that he’s doing this just now.
BEN-DAVID
The site is quite famous, actually. It’s almost a tourist attraction. I’ve worked on it myself.
Ben-David tells Manning that after he emigrated to Israel he volunteered for two summers. It was he, he says, who suggested to Rachel that she apply to work on the dig herself.
YOUNG RABBI
(to Manning)
For centuries the “portal to hell” was thought to be a specific cleft in the earth north of Jerusalem. But about twenty years ago the Gehenna site was discovered. It’s near Megiddo—Armageddon of the Bible. The Gehenna site seems more hellish than the old one. There’s a geothermal field directly beneath it.
Manning absorbs this.
MANNING
Is there a devil in the Jewish faith?
YOUNG RABBI
The Adversary. HaSatan.
MANNING
Could this devil just materialize? I mean walk out of hell and catch a cab into the city?
The young rabbi smiles.
YOUNG RABBI
According to the Talmud, an unholy entity must be “conducted” into the physical world by a mortal being. It needs someone to escort it. In the literature this “conductor” is often a female. A mother figure, a sister . . . frequently unwitting.
Manning is interrupted by a follow-up call from Uribe. It comes in over my phone; I take it for him. Our ME is heading home, he says, after this long, grim day. The final item of intel Uribe imparts is that he has, just five minutes earlier, received a message from the Queens impound lot, where Rachel’s Hi-Top van was being held.
URIBE
Your girl’s vehicle has been released per Gleason’s order. Someone picked it up. Every item we had impounded as evidence has been replaced aboard. The van itself is back in Brownsville now, “under the steel.”
I relay this to Manning. Ben-David moves off to the rear of the room, takes a seat beside his sister. The young rabbi is called away to other duties.
I’m standing beside Manning with the Icelandic video on my phone and Uribe’s message about Rachel’s van echoing in my ears.
My right hand, seemingly acting under its own direction, catches Manning’s sleeve. From my mouth I hear the following:
ME
The Hi-Top. Let’s toss it.
21
UNDER THE STEEL
A “DIRT-BOX” is a police cell interceptor. It’s like a wiretap but for cell phones, illegal as hell without a warrant. I’ve got one in our car’s equipment compartment, along with a password randomizer and other homemade and off-the-shelf hacking gear. With these, we can pick off any incoming calls and crack (I hope) any security protecting Rachel’s drop phones or laptops.
We go.
It’s fun.
Our Maglites have blue filters. Their beams can’t be seen by an observer unless they shine straight into his eyes. With them Manning and I scour the innards of Rachel’s home on wheels.
Her Uzi has been confiscated for mandatory destruction. It’s not here. But I find handwritten journals and trip diaries. Rachel wasn’t lying about traveling to Dusseldorf and São Paulo, not to mention two dozen other overseas cities.
Her journals are in Hebrew. I photograph the first three pages of four notebooks and dispatch them to DivSix’s professional translation software. They come back fast—ninety seconds—but as mathematical gobbledygook, a pigpen code like the Freemasons used. I see the trick. Rachel is using the principles of gematria. I ask the software, “How long to crack?” Answer: “3–4 wks.”
I order the computer to break the files down by the first five most frequently used words, figuring that one of them might be “Instancer,” from which I might to able to extrapolate integers and get a start on decryption. But this too comes back as a jumble.
Meanwhile, DivSix’s super-randomizer is attempting to hack the pass codes on Rachel’s three laptops. The machine’s AI brain can generate a billion terms a second, learning and narrowing its search as it goes. Rachel apparently has prepared for this. We’re stumped. All I can find that’s intelligible is letterhead correspondence between Rachel and some two dozen professors, scientists, and activists around the world—apparently Righteous Men she was trying to warn of danger.
At least this reinforces Rachel’s claim of hunting Instancer, not helping him.
Rachel’s primary laptop is protected by four passwords in chaos-code sequence. The randomizer cracks the first three. I enter “Gehenna,” then “Megiddo,” twenty more.
On “Tz@dikim99,” the machine opens.
Again, every entry is in Hebrew.
ME
Fuck!
At least this time Rachel’s stuff is not in cipher. I enter “Reykjavik” in the search box. Up come hotel records, travel docs, surveillance logs.
MANNING
What the hell is this?
ME
Iceland. On five dollars a day.
At the Academy Annex in College Point we were taught the rudiments of hacking and blackout operations on the net. Rachel is light-years beyond this. She can code. She’s a master of encryption and decryption. Did she learn this in Israel, in IDF Intelligence? She knows how to generate dummy identities and use them to hop on a flight to anywhere, pay for everything once she gets there, then sail the bill into the cyber shitcan. Passports are child’s play for her. She has cranked out eleven e-versions that I can find without strenuous searching—five USA, two UK, one Danish, and three Israeli—all “liberated” from real people, with Rachel’s retinal, facial, and digital signatures stripped in. She can breeze through customs anywhere on the planet and leave no record that can be traced back to her. Money? It grows on trees for Rachel. She can hack into bank accounts, crack ATM codes, create credit card identities for herself, or steal an account outright. She knows how to use trapdoors, spider holes, crossovers, double-backs, and all kinds of masking, cloaking, and identity-snatch techniques. She employs these, as best I can decipher, to perform “drive-bys,” i.e., isolated EEs (“episodes of encroachment”) into the confidential personal and professional information of an organization or individual, and the targeted entities never even know their data has been compromised.
ME
This is how she travels. How she pays for everything.
Manning has pored through every drawer and compartment in the vehicle. He’s beyond exhausted. He flops down beside me on the banquette, staring in frustration at Rachel’s laptop screen.
MANNING
Find me something that puts her with Instancer at one of these murders.
I’m trying.
Mail?
Nothing.
Files? Sanitized or firewalled.
I bang through folder after folder. I can’t pull up texts, photos, videos. Even Rachel’s trash is indecipherable.
Manning rubs his eyes. He looks like his head is about to split open.
ME
Okay. Enough.
I’m just clicking SHUT DOWN when the mail sound beeps and a mini-win
dow opens in the upper right corner of the third of Rachel’s screens.
Source: UNKNOWN.
Message:
THIS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR?
A link.
I click it.
Up comes a video.
A smartphone selfie with a time and date code from four years ago.
The video is of a man and a woman in a shower.
Soap on the lens.
Man and woman laughing.
The woman’s in front, close to the lens, facing it. Giggling continues. The woman wipes the lens.
It’s Rachel.
A man’s soapy hands cup her breasts from behind.
Rachel responds erotically.
The man nuzzles her neck.
It’s Instancer.
MANNING
Sonofabitch.
Rachel, her hair wet and shampoo-y, turns back within Instancer’s arms.
They kiss, deep and passionate.
Rachel’s arms wrap around Instancer’s neck.
ME
What the fuck?
A new message comes in. More links.
I click the first.
Rachel and Instancer humping on some beach.
The second: Rachel and Instancer in desert shorts and hats on an archaeological dig.
The rest: more of the same.
I’m backtracing frantically, though I know the sending source is another burner.
MANNING
Stop.
He signs to me to button up the vehicle.
We kill our Maglites.
We dismount.
MANNING
Gimme your phone.
Manning takes it, punches a number.
Someone answers.
Manning speaks for fifteen seconds, then closes the call and tosses me the phone.
MANNING
You hungry?
Twenty minutes later Manning is ordering espressos and plates of angel wings in a window booth at an all-night dive called Café Dacha under the El in Little Russia. Time is 0330.
Across from Manning sits Yoo-hoo Petracek.
One of Manning’s mantras is:
Ask the question that’s so obvious no one thinks to ask it.
MANNING
(to Yoo-hoo)
You were in Moscow the night Alexsandr Golokoff was murdered. But you didn’t do it. Who did?
Scary and creepy as the Bratva assassin is, I must confess I have a soft spot for him. He has no bullshit. He is what he is, and it’s all out front.
YOO-HOO
Gleason burned you?
MANNING
Not officially. Not yet.
YOO-HOO
But you’re toast.
MANNING
Crisp on both sides.
Our espressos and pastries arrive. Café Dacha is the only place on Brighton Beach Avenue open despite the flooding. The counter and half the tables are occupied by fire and emergency crews. Yoo-hoo waits till the waiter, who appears to be the owner as well, chats for a moment and moves off.
YOO-HOO
I never knew the target’s name. I had the address and a photo and the security code.
Yoo-hoo glances to a pair of patrol officers entering, then turns back to Manning.
YOO-HOO
Your buddy Gleason wasn’t wrong.
Yoo-hoo confirms that he flew to Moscow to “perform a professional service.” He proceeded to the victim’s residence. He gained entrance. He was advancing upon the prey.
YOO-HOO
But somebody else got in before me.
Yoo-hoo describes a man of about thirty, tall, broad shoulders. . .
Manning displays a police sketch of Instancer.
Yoo-hoo nods.
YOO-HOO
He did the job before I could.
MANNING
You saw him?
YOO-HOO
He crushed the dude’s throat. One hand. No gloves. No booties. No hairnet. I was as close to him as I am to that door over there.
MANNING
He see you?
YOO-HOO
If he did, he didn’t give a shit. He walked out the front door like the place belonged to him.
I’m recording and taking notes at the same time. I’m thinking, Ask the obvious question.
ME
Anything else? Did you see anything else?
YOO-HOO
A car got him.
ME
A car? A self-driver?
YOO-HOO
A real car. It pulled up to the curb.
ME
Could you see the driver?
YOO-HOO
Not enough to recognize her.
MANNING
Her? It was a woman?
Manning turns to me. I pull up a pic of Rachel on my phone. I hold the phone out to Yoo-hoo.
YOO-HOO
Bingo.
22
INSIDE A MIGRAINE
MANNING DOESN’T SAY a word all the way back to Manhattan.
He takes the passenger seat and turns the car over to me. His eyes are the color of coal. I’m afraid, not just for him but of him. His skull is splitting, I know. He takes one shot of Imitrex and has me detour to the only open Walgreens in the city (according to the POI on our dash), on Atlantic Avenue in Bed-Stuy, to pick up two more kits.
ME
What do you want me to do about Rachel?
It occurs to me that Manning might take matters into his own hands. I know he feels suckered. I know he feels played.
But he offers no answer.
He just wants me to get him home.
In the two and a half hours since we left the scene of Ellie Landau’s murder, the weather has made a screeching one-eighty. It has gone from Noah’s Ark inundation to a blistering-dry desert sirocco. Gusts of fifty and more, according to WPIX-FM, howl down a Flatbush Avenue whose low spots look like the Mississippi River, with cars and buses marooned in midstream. Our AV zigs and zags along frontage roads and side streets, high-pointing around flooded intersections and downed power transformers. Flatbush Avenue is blocked at Tillary Street by a blown-over tractor-trailer. The Manhattan Bridge is the only span still functioning, though its EZ-Pass toll plaza is half a foot deep, dark, and empty.
Temp on the dash reads 106.7 with an up arrow.
Time is 0410 when our car breasts the streambed that Central Park West has become between Sixty-Eighth and Seventy-Second. The iron gate outside the Midtown Athletic Club is chained and padlocked. Manning’s grunt says, Take me around to the kitchen. He’s in too much pain to speak.
I drop Manning off (he refuses my hand to steady him) and watch him trudge, one shoe-splat at a time, up the unlit, flotsam-strewn alley to enter the club via his customary rear ingress. For the first time since I’ve known him, Manning looks old to me.
Rachel and Ben-David are waiting outside my loft. They look as hollow-eyed as Manning.
ME
What are you doing here? How’d you even get my address?
They’re scared.
I’m thinking, Indicate nothing about where you’ve been tonight since Ellie Landau’s murder and say zip about what you’ve learned.
ME
I hope you like Asian food, ’cause that’s all I got.
I tell the car where to park (Howard Street, amazingly, is dry; there are actual spaces) and lead Rachel and Ben-David up the stairs and inside.
Ben-David asks about Manning. Clearly he and Rachel had hoped to find him with me and still on the job. I tell them Manning’s down with a migraine.
Ben-David says he and Rachel have been trying for the past two hours to get a flight out to Israel. But JFK and LGA are shut down with the gale. No planes are taking off as far south as Charlotte and as far north as New Brunswick.
I ask why they left the memorial room at Beth Shalom.
BEN-DAVID
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I tell him to sit. I’ll whip up some eggs and coffee.
I’m trying to remember everything that’s happened to Ben-David tonight. He’s been attacked on a subway platform (the bruise marks are still visible on his throat), he has leapt onto the tracks in front of a train, experienced the murder of his friend Ellie—and the killer is still out there, probably searching for him right now to finish the job.
ME
How does it feel being a Righteous Man?
BEN-DAVID
It’s the kind of attention I can do without.
I indicate the bathroom. Clean up, I tell him. Take a shower. I offer Rachel and Ben-David dry clothes. From the Lo. My father’s stuff.
ME
Here. For what good it’ll do.
Ben-David showers. He takes cargo pants and a tee. Rachel wants nothing. She towel-dries her hair and uses her fingers to work out the tangles. When I hand her a hot coffee, she meets my eye, something she’s never done. “Thank you,” she says.
ME
For what?
RACHEL
For that night in the hospital.
I scramble eggs with bean sprouts and snow peas. I have to close the windows against the gale. The interior is sweltering. We park ourselves on the floor, the three of us with our plates, in the dark away from the door and the windows.
RACHEL
Where’s Manning now?
I describe his location. The feed from his GPS locator displays on my phone. His lapel camera records automatically.
36 Righteous Men Page 15
