Lincoln Rhyme 10 - The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver

  These were all obvious considerations but Metzger had the need inside his gut and, accordingly, was free of the Smoke.

  He absolutely didn’t want this relief, this sense of comfort, of freedom, to go away.

  “And if we don’t take him out, you know what Rashid’s got planned for Texas or Oklahoma.”

  “We could call Langley and arrange a rendition.”

  “Kidnap him? And do what? We don’t need information from him, Spencer. All we need from Rashid is no more Rashid.”

  Boston yielded. “All right. But what about the collateral damage risk? Firing a Hellfire into a residence with no visual reference?”

  Metzger scrolled down the intel assessment until he found the surveillance report. Current as of ten minutes ago. “Safe house is empty, except for Rashid. The place’s been under DEA and Mexican Federales surveillance for a week for suspected mules. Nobody’s gone inside until Rashid this morning. According to the intel, he’ll be meeting the cartel man anytime now. Once that guy leaves, we’ll blow the place to hell.”

  CHAPTER 63

  AL-BARANI RASHID LOOKED OVER his shoulder a great deal.

  Figuratively and literally.

  The tall, balding forty-year-old, with a precise goatee, knew he was in danger—from the Mossad, the CIA and that New York–based security outfit, NIOS. Probably some people in China too.

  Not to mention more than a few fellow Muslims. He was on record as condemning the fundamentalists of his religion for their intellectual failings by blindly adhering to a medieval philosophy unsustainable in the twenty-first century. (He had also publicly excoriated moderates of the faith for their cowardice in protesting that they were misunderstood, that Islam was basically Presbyterianism with a different holy book. But they simply blogged insults; they weren’t going to fatwa him.)

  Rashid wanted a new order, a complete reimagining of faith and society. If he had any model, it wasn’t Zawahiri or Bin Laden. It would be a hybrid of Karl Marx and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who happened to have attended his own school—the University of Michigan.

  But as unpopular as he was, Rashid believed in his heart he was right. Remove the cancer and the world will right itself.

  The metastasizing cells were, of course, the United States of America. From the subprime crisis, to Iraq, to the insulting carrot of foreign aid, to the racist diatribes of Christian preachers and politicians, to the deification of consumer goods, the country was a sea anchor on the progress of civilization. He’d left the country after a graduate degree in political science, never to return.

  Yes, enemies were eager as wolves to get to him because of his views. Even those countries that didn’t like America needed America.

  But he felt more or less safe at the moment, presently in a sprawling ranch-style house in Reynosa, Mexico, as he awaited the arrival of an ally.

  He couldn’t say “friend,” of course. His relationship with the slick individuals of the Matamoros Cartel was symbiotic but their motives diverged considerably. Rashid’s was ideological, the war against American capitalism and society (and support for Israel, but that went without saying). The cartel’s purpose was, in a way, the opposite, making vast sums of money from that very society. But its goals were basically the same. Get as many drugs as you can into the country. And kill those who want to stop you from doing that.

  Sipping strong tea, he looked at his watch. One of the cartel bosses was sending his chief bomb maker to see Rashid within the hour. He would provide what Rashid needed to build a particularly smart device, which would, in two days, kill a DEA regional director in Brownsville, Texas, together with her family and however many others happened to be nearby at the picnic.

  Rashid was presently sitting at a coffee table, bent over a pad of yellow paper, and clutching a mechanical pencil as he drew engineering diagrams for the IED.

  Although Reynosa was a thoroughly unpleasant town, dusty, dun-colored and filled with small, sagging factories, this house was large and quite pleasant. The cartel had put some good money into maintaining it. It had decent air-conditioning, plenty of food and tea and bottled water, comfortable furniture and thick shades on all the windows. Yes, not a bad house at all.

  Though occasionally noisy.

  He walked to the back bedroom door and knocked, then opened it. One of the enforcers with the cartel, a heavyset unsmiling man named Norzagaray, nodded a greeting.

  Rashid looked over the cartel’s hostages: The husband and wife, both native Mexican and stocky, their teenage son and little girl sat on the floor, in front of a TV. The father’s and wife’s hands were bound with bell wire, loose enough so they could drink water and eat. Not so loose they could attack their kidnappers.

  In Rashid’s opinion, they should have bound the wife’s more tightly. She was the danger; she had the rage. It was obvious as she comforted her daughter, a slim child whose head was crowned with dark, curly hair. The husband and boy were more frightened.

  Rashid had been told by his contacts here that he could use the house but he would have to share it with these hostages, who’d been here for eight or nine days. The man’s small business had been spending that time struggling to raise the two million dollars in ransom the drug lords had demanded—because of the man’s defiance of the cartel.

  Rashid said to Norzagaray, “Could you turn the volume down please?” A nod at the TV, on which a cartoon was playing.

  Their guard did so.

  “Thank you.” He looked the family over carefully now, taking no pleasure in their terror. This was crime for profit; he didn’t approve. He regarded the teenager and then a soccer ball in the corner. The colors were those of Club América, the pro team in Mexico City.

  “You like football?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you play?”

  “Midfield.”

  “I did too when I was your age.” Rashid didn’t smile. He never did but his voice was soft. He looked at them a moment more. Though they did not know it yet, Rashid had been told the negotiations were nearly complete and the family would be released tomorrow. Rashid was pleased at this. These people were not the enemy. The father wasn’t working for an American company that was exploitative and amoral. He was just a small businessman who’d fallen on the wrong side of the cartel. Rashid wanted to reassure them that they would survive the ordeal. But this wasn’t his concern.

  He closed the door and returned to the diagrams he was working on. He reviewed them for long moments. And finally concluded: First, no one could possibly survive being in the proximity of the device they described. And second—he allowed himself the immodest thought—the drawings were as elegant as the finest zellige terra-cotta tiles, a cornerstone of Moroccan art.

  CHAPTER 64

  LINCOLN RHYME WAS SAYING, “And the same evidence we thought exculpated Shales by placing him in New York at the time of the shooting now helps implicate him: the phone calls from his mobile to the South Cove Inn to verify when Moreno was checking in, the metadata that placed him at NIOS headquarters in New York at the time of the death. We’ll need more, though. We need to place him at the joystick of the drone. UAV, excuse me, rookie. How can we do that?”

  “Air traffic control in Florida and the Bahamas,” Sachs said.

  “Good.”

  Sachs called their federal liaison, Fred Dellray, with the request and had a lengthy conversation with him. Finally Sachs disconnected. “Fred’s calling the FAA here and the Civil Aviation Department in Nassau. But he gave me another idea.” She was typing on her computer.

  Rhyme couldn’t see clearly. It appeared that she was examining a map. “Well,” she whispered.

  “What?” Rhyme wondered.

  “Fred suggested we ought to try to get a look at the Kill Room itself.”

  “What?” Sellitto barked. “How?”

  Google apparently.

  Sachs smiled. She’d called up a satellite image of the block in which NIOS headquarters was located in downtown Manha
ttan. Behind the building itself was a parking lot, separated from the street with an impressive-looking security fence and overseen by a guard station. In the corner was a large rectangular structure, like a shipping container—the sort you see bolted to decks and cruising down highways behind tractor-trailer semis. Next to it a ten-foot antenna pointed skyward.

  “That’s the Ground Control Station, Fred told me. GCS. He said most of the UAVs are controlled from portable facilities like that.”

  “The Kill Room,” Mel Cooper said.

  “Perfect,” Laurel said briskly to Sachs. “Print that out, if you would.”

  Rhyme could see Sachs bristle, hesitate and then with a thumb and finger—with a dot of dried blood behind the nail—tap hard on the keyboard. A printer began to exhale.

  When the document was disgorged, Laurel slipped it from the tray and added it to her files.

  Sachs’s phone buzzed. “It’s Fred again,” she announced. She hit speaker.

  Rhyme called, “Fred. Don’t insult anybody.”

  “I can hear. Well, well, you all have yourself quite a case here. Good luck on this one. Hey, see any funny-lookin’ airplanes hovering outside your windows? Might wanta think about closing the blinds.”

  This was not as funny as Dellray intended, Rhyme decided, given Barry Shales’s skill at firing million-dollar bullets.

  “Hokay, the radar situation. Sentcha screenshots. What we put together is the morning of May nine a small aircraft, no transponder, was tracked heading east over the Atlantic, south of Miami.”

  “Where Homestead air base is,” Sellitto pointed out.

  “Right you are. Now, the craft was on visual flight rules, no flight plan. Speed was very slow—about a hundred ten miles an hour. Which is typical drone speed. We all together on that?”

  “With you, Fred. Keep going.”

  “Well, it’s about a hundred eighty miles to Nassau from Miami. Exactly one hour and fifty-two minutes later, ATC in Nassau tracked a small aircraft, no transponder, ascend into radar range, about six hundred feet.” Dellray paused. “And then it stopped.”

  “Stopped?”

  “They thought it stalled. But it didn’t drop off the screen.”

  “It was hovering,” Rhyme said.

  “My guess. They figured that with no transponder the plane was an ultralight—one of those homemade gizmos that sometimes just sit like birds in headwinds? It wasn’t in controlled airspace so they didn’t pay any more mind. The time was eleven oh four a.m.”

  “Moreno was shot at eleven sixteen,” Sachs said.

  “And at eleven eighteen it turned around and descended outta radar. Two hours and five minutes later, a small aircraft, no transponder, crossed into U.S. airspace and headed toward South Miami.”

  “That’s our boy,” Rhyme said. “Thanks, Fred.”

  “Gooood luck. And forget you ever knew me.”

  Click.

  Wasn’t conclusive but like all elements in a case it was a solid brick in the wall of establishing a suspect’s guilt.

  Nance Laurel got a call. While someone else might have nodded or offered some facial clues as to the content she listened without expression; her powdered face was a mask. She disconnected. “There’s an issue with another case of mine. I have to go interview a prisoner in detention. It shouldn’t be long. I’d like to stay but I have to take care of this.”

  The prosecutor gathered up her purse and headed out the door.

  Sachs too received a call. She listened and jotted a few notes.

  Rhyme turned from her and was regarding the charts once again. “But I want more,” he griped. “Something to prove that Shales was at the controls of the drone.”

  “Ask and ye shall receive.” This, from Amelia Sachs.

  Rhyme lifted an eyebrow.

  She said, “We have a lead to the whistleblower. If anybody can place Barry Shales in the Kill Room on May ninth, it’s him.”

  * * *

  SACHS WAS PLEASED to report that Captain Myers’s officers who’d been canvassing the patrons of Java Hut when the whistleblower uploaded the STO had found some witnesses.

  Her computer gave a bleat and she looked toward the screen. “Incoming,” she said.

  Sellitto gave a harsh laugh. “Not a good choice of words in this case, you don’t mind.”

  She opened the attachment. “People buy a lot more with credit or debit cards nowadays. Even if the bill’s only three, four dollars. Sure helps us, though. The canvassers talked to everybody who charged something around one p.m. on the eleventh. Mostly a bust but one of them got a picture.” She printed out the photo attachments. Not terrible, she decided, but hardly high-def mug shots. “Has to be our man.”

  She read the officer’s memo. “‘The photographer was a tourist from Ohio. Shooting pictures of his wife sitting across from him. You can see in the background a man, blurred—because he’s turning away fast and raising his hand to cover his face. Asked the tourists if they got a better look at him. They didn’t and other patrons and the baristas didn’t pay any attention to him.’”

  Rhyme looked at the picture. Two tables behind the smiling woman was the presumed whistleblower. White. Solidly built, in a blue suit, an odd color, just shy of navy. He wore a baseball cap—suspicious, given the business attire—but seemed to have light-colored hair. A big laptop sat open before him.

  “That’s him,” Sachs said. “He’s got an iBook.” She’d downloaded a picture of every model.

  The criminalist observed, “Suit doesn’t fit well. It’s cheap. And see the Splenda packets on the table, along with the stirrer? Confirms he’s our man.”

  “Why?” Sellitto asked. “I use Splenda.”

  “Not the substance—the fact it’s on the table. Most people add sugar or sweetener at the milk station and throw the empty packets out, and the stirrers too. So there’s less mess at the table. He’s taking his detritus with him. Didn’t want to leave friction ridge evidence.”

  Most objects, even paper, retain very good fingerprints where food is served because of grease from the meals.

  “Anything else about him?” Pulaski asked.

  “You tell me, rookie.”

  The young officer said, “Look how he’s holding his right hand, palm cupped upward? Maybe he was about to take a pill. Could be a headache, backache. Wait, look, there’s a box. Is it? A box at the side of the table?”

  It seemed that there was. Blue and gold.

  Rhyme said, “Good. I think you’re right. And notice he’s drinking tea—see the bag in the napkin?—in a coffeehouse? Looks pale. Maybe it’s herbal. Not that unusual but a reasonable deduction could be stomach issues. Check antacid, reflux, indigestion medicine boxes that come in two colors.”

  A moment later Cooper said, “Could be Zantac, maximum strength. Hard to say.”

  “We don’t need definitive answers on everything,” Rhyme said softly. “We need direction. So he’s probably got a bum gut.”

  “Stress from leaking classified government documents’ll do that,” Mel Cooper offered.

  “Age?” Rhyme wondered.

  “Can’t tell,” the young officer replied. “How could you tell?”

  “Well, I’m not asking you to play a carnival game, rookie. We see he’s stocky, we see he’s got stomach issues. Hair could be blond but could be gray. Conservative dress. It’s reasonable to speculate he’s middle-aged or older.”

  “Sure. I see.”

  “And his posture. It’s perfect, even though he’s not young. Suggests a military background. Or could still be in the service, dressing civie.”

  They stared at the picture and Sachs found herself wondering, Why did you leak the kill order? What was in it for you?

  A person with a conscience…

  But are you a patriot or a traitor?

  Wondering too: And where the hell are you?

  Sellitto took a call. Sachs noticed that his face went from curious to dark. He glanced at the others in the room, then turn
ed away.

  Whispering now: “What?…That’s fucked up. You can’t just tell me that. I need details.”

  Everyone was staring at him.

  “Who? I want to know who. All right, find out and let me know.”

  He disconnected and the glance in Sachs’s direction, but not directly at her, explained that she was the subject of the call.

  “What, Lon?”

  “You want to step outside.” He nodded toward the hallway.

  Sachs glanced at Rhyme and said, “No. Here. What is it? Who called?”

  He hesitated.

  “Lon,” she said firmly. “Tell me.”

  “Okay, Amelia, I’m sorry. Look, you’re off the case.”

  “What?”

  “Actually, gotta say, you’re on mandatory leave altogether. You’ve gotta report down to—”

  “What happened?” Rhyme snapped.

  “I don’t know for sure. That was my PA. She told me the word came from the chief of detectives’ office. The formal report’s on its way. I don’t know who’s behind this.”

  “Oh, I do,” Sachs snapped. She ripped open her purse and looked inside to make sure she had the copy of the document she’d found on Nance Laurel’s desk the other night. At that time, she’d been reluctant to brandish it as a weapon.

  Now she no longer was.

  CHAPTER 65

  SHREVE METZGER RAN A HAND through his trim hair, remembered his first day out of the service.

  Somebody, a civilian, on the streets of Buffalo had called him a skinhead. Baby-killer too. The guy was drunk. Anti-military. An asshole. All of the above.

  The Smoke had filled Metzger fast, though he didn’t call it Smoke then, didn’t call it anything. He proceeded to break at least four bones in the man’s body before the relief shot through him. More than relief—almost sexual.

  Sometimes this memory came back, like now, when he happened to touch his hair. Nothing more than that. He remembered the man, his unfocused, slightly crossed eyes. The blood, the remarkably swollen jaw.