“The passport for the final leg, when he landed at Newark, was Georgian. Josef Dobyns. Not a watchlist baby. And his address here was a fake one in Paterson, New Jersey. I’ll send you all the names he used on the flights. You can check hotel registries. Though my bet is he’s got another ID that he hasn’t used before.”
“Five passports?” Sachs asked.
Mulbry only chuckled.
Rhyme gave the man Mel Cooper’s email and asked him to send the names on the passports.
“Now,” Mulbry continued, “you were asking about explosives. About a week ago we had an alert about a weapons package that was reportedly smuggled into the East Coast: three one-kilo packets of C4 and a crate of a dozen lehabahs.”
“Of what?”
“Gas line bombs. Lehabahs. The word’s Hebrew. It has two meanings: ‘flame,’ and ‘the tip of a spear or weapon.’”
Which, Rhyme reflected, described the mean little things pretty well. He asked, “A Mossad invention?”
Now that he dabbled in the world of espionage, he’d done some homework on the various intelligence agencies around the world. None was more clever at weaponry, or more talented at its deployment, than the Mossad.
“Yep. For just what you’re talking about: making it seem that there was a gas leak and explosion. Who knows how many Hamas or Hezbollah terrorist homes have gone up in flames quote ‘accidentally’?”
Three loads of C4. They didn’t know how much the unsub had used for the IEDs in the Northeast Geo shafts. They’d have to assume he had some left for at least one more “earthquake.” He had other lehabahs too. How much more carnage did he have in mind?
Mulbry now asked, “So, please, Lincoln, give. What’s this all about?”
“You followed the earthquakes in New York? And the fires?”
“Yes, sure. It’s big news everywhere.”
Sachs explained that their perp was creating the phony quakes and accompanying fires.
“So that’s what he was using the devices for. Hm. Clever.” His job, as head of the AIS, was to come up with ways to, well, alternatively engage the enemy. Faking earthquakes as a mask for arson fell squarely within the AIS toolbox. Mulbry was clearly impressed. “Why?”
Rhyme said, “That we don’t know. Our best guess is to stop the drilling. Somebody doesn’t want that geothermal operation up and running. We don’t see it as political terrorism.”
Mulbry said, “I agree. The C4 shipment and gas bombs raised eyebrows—anything like that always does, of course—but our algorithms scoured the intel and they couldn’t pin the explosive to known terrorist actors. We’ll keep an eye on that side of it, though.”
“Please do,” Sachs said.
“While I’ve got you on the line?”
“Yes, Daryl?”
“I got your email about the dozenal coding—that nobody at NYPD or FBI New York knew anyone who’d ever used it. Thank you again for checking, by the way. Now, actually there’s more to the matter. We were never able to decrypt the messages but we did trace the traffic pattern of a couple of them. To a hotel—a long-stay residence hotel—near the Seine in Paris. The Left Bank. Have you been?”
“No. Go on.”
“It’s remarkable—a whole different smell and feel. And the cultural history. Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialists. I digress.”
True.
“A couple of EVIDINT folks got inside and, my, had the place been scrubbed. And I mean literally: Beaucoup de bleach and le Windex for DNA and fingerprints. Traces of sandpaper to remove something from the floor and Gorilla Glue in places where trace had lodged, then pulling it out. I mean, really, whoever this person or cell is, they’re very, very good. But they missed one thing, a small piece of metal. Didn’t show up in any metal parts database. Homemade. We scanned it. Positive for radium. Not nuclear-device-quality but it might be part of a dirty bomb. Makes us all a bit nervous. Could you take a peek?”
“I will, sure, Daryl. Tell me: What does it look like?”
“Flexible, springy, silver-colored. Typical of mechanical detonators. There’s a trend away from electronic. You know, EMPs—electromagnetic pulses—can take out the digital detonators.”
“Send it overnight.” He gave the man his address.
As soon as they’d disconnected, Rhyme’s phone trilled. It was Crime Scene headquarters in Queens. He picked up and, via speakerphone, had a conversation with an analyst there. The man reported that searching the basement in Claire Porter’s apartment, near Cadman Plaza, had revealed that the fingerprints on and around the gas line were the superintendent’s or were very old and, in any case, came back negative from the IAFIS database. The lock was easily jimmied with basic tools, and whoever did it had apparently taken these with him when he left. The local precinct told him that a canvass of tenants and residents of nearby buildings found no one else who had seen the man in the hard hat and vest.
While he’d been talking to the detective in Brooklyn, Lon Sellitto had called.
Rhyme now called him back at One Police Plaza and hit Speakerphone.
“Got some news. Vimal sent his phone on a bus ride. Trooper tracked it down in Pennsylvania. Slipped it into the bag of some girl. So he’s back to being MIA. Damn smart kid.”
“Well.” Rhyme sighed. Smart indeed.
Sachs said, “He’s got a two-hour head start, wherever he’s going to. He’ll take Amtrak or public transit to Jersey, get to a smaller Greyhound station there. Or Westchester.”
Rhyme told him about the conversation with Mulbry. He had Cooper email the names of the four passports they suspected the unsub had used to travel here.
“K, Linc. I’ll order a canvass of hotels.”
Rhyme reminded him that their spy believed the unsub would have yet another identification, though.
Sellitto said, “Yeah, I’d guess. But we gotta do it.”
“Now, you’ll find this interesting, Lon.” Rhyme reported on the explosives that Mulbry had learned of.
“Israeli intelligence gas bombs? Fuck me.”
“Daryl’s still doing some looking.”
Sellitto said, “Well, one thing you should know, Linc: ESU and Bomb Squad talked to the mayor’s office. They decided not to send robots down the shafts at the geothermal site to try to render safe, but rather to just put bomb curtains over the openings. They think another explosion’ll at least give people in the vicinity ten minutes’ warning to evacuate. And the fire department’s sent extra trucks and crews to stage around the geothermal site—since it’s the hub of the attacks. If there’s another detonation, they’ll be ready to go at the first report of a fire. And…”
Silence.
“Lon?”
“Fucking hell,” the lieutenant muttered.
“What is it?”
“Just saw on the wire: Forty-Seven got another vic.”
Sachs asked, “Engaged couple?”
“No.” A pause, while Sellitto presumably read. “But it’s related. Somehow. Got to be. The vic was Kirtan Boshi. About Vimal’s age, Indian. Worked in the diamond business. An apprentice cutter. Just like Vimal. Can’t be a coincidence.”
“Circumstances?” Sachs asked.
“Basement of a coffee shop in the Fashion District. About a block from where he worked.” Sellitto paused. “Some employees just found the body but looks like he was killed around lunchtime today. Son of a bitch broke his windpipe. Killed him with the box cutter.”
“Kirtan was probably a friend of Vimal’s and knew where he lived. He probably gave the address up.”
“Yeah. He’d been tortured. A mess. And the unsub cut Kirtan’s ring finger off and put it in his mouth. Postmortem, but still.”
“Goddamn it,” Sachs muttered.
Rhyme looked her way.
“We canvassed for anybody who knew Vimal in every store in the Diamond District, Jackson Heights, other parts of Queens and Brooklyn. Never occurred to me to look for diamond cutters in the Fashion Distri
ct. But Forty-Seven did. He outthought me.”
Us, Rhyme corrected silently. He outthought us. But he knew the words would mean little to her. Any failing to which she contributed, however small her part, she owned.
Sellitto said, “He’s got the Lahoris’ address now and he doesn’t know the boy’s on the run. Amelia, tell your security team at their house to stay out of sight and expect Forty-Seven might show up.”
“I will,” Sachs said. “Though I think he’s too smart to fall into a trap like that.” She sighed. “I’ll walk the grid at the coffee shop.”
Sellitto gave her the address and she hurried from the parlor, tugging her jacket on absently. A moment later Rhyme heard the engine of her big car fire up and a squeal as the tires slung her into traffic.
His eyes drifted toward the sounds out the window, gazing over the dun dusk.
So Unsub 47 had spent all day, last week, planting gas bombs meant to mimic the fires after earthquakes. Presumably more existed, and announcing that the authorities knew the quakes were being faked wouldn’t change the fact that they were timed to explode.
And even if his plans were now exposed, Unsub 47 would have no incentive whatsoever to remove the devices or let the police know where they were.
Chapter 44
The Promisor’s backup plan.
Vladimir Rostov steered the stolen Toyota carefully along the streets of Queens. East Elmhurst to be specific.
Somewhat carefully. He was used to driving in Moscow, where one didn’t need to be very careful; the congestion left little risk of high-speed collisions.
Here, though, the weaving was due to the fact he was digging beneath the passenger seat, as best he could. Making a sharp turn had catapulted his Roll N Roaster beef sandwich to the space between front passenger seat and door.
Where, where the hell, where?
Ah, he got a corner of the bag and pulled it out, ripped the paper apart with his teeth and began chewing the cold, but still tasty, sandwich.
Why the fuck don’t we have these in Moscow?
In three minutes the sandwich and fries were consumed. He belched and lit a cigarette. He noted that in America very few people smoked in cars any longer, unlike Russia. Of course, when he was through finding Vimal, the little kuritsa, and he was done with the car, he’d make sure it did plenty of smoking. This was a joke: The only way to get rid of the evidence in a vehicle was to burn it to the rims—which was, in fact, the source of an expression used in certain criminal circles in Russian. “Rim it,” a mob boss might say. Usually the automobile flambé contained merely evidence. Sometimes, a corpse. Sometimes, depending on your playful mood, the person might not yet be a corpse when you tied them up inside and set the gas tank ablazing.
Rostov now thought of the red-haired kuritsa cop once more. A fantasy blossomed in his mind: the woman as cowgirl. Vladimir Rostov happened to love the Louis L’Amour novels of the American West. He thought they were finely crafted jewels, adventure tales that gave you a peek at life back then. Russia had the Cossacks and, from Mongolia, the Tartars. But there was nothing romantic about marauding drunks and rapists. The American West…ah, those were the days of heroes! He owned all the Sergio Leone films. John Ford’s movies, too, starring John Wayne. And there was no better Western than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
He sometimes thought about living back then. The Germans were in Mexico. The Spanish and Portuguese in South and Central America. The French in Canada and the Caribbean.
There must have been some Russians in the nineteenth-century New World.
Oh, how he would have loved to be among them.
With his six-shooter and horse. And bourbon, of course.
And the whores.
His thoughts returned to the cowgirl kuritsa, the one with the red hair and the blue diamond on her white finger.
His blue diamond, his white finger.
He turned the corner and slowed. Vladimir Rostov was feeling proud of himself, for being smarter than the cowgirl cop.
Because I know where Vimal Lahori is going.
His backup plan.
When Rostov had his chat with Kirtan in the basement of the diner in the Fashion District, he’d learned more about Vimal than just his name and address and family. A cut here, a cut there. He’d found out Vimal had a girlfriend.
I’ll tell you but don’t hurt her!! Kirtan had written (the crushed throat matter).
“No, no, kuritsa. I won’t hurt a hair on her head. I just need to have a talk with Vimal. I won’t hurt him either. That’s a peeing promise.”
Rostov had had to read the response twice, to make it out—the kid’s hand was shaking so. The message was: Will die before I tell you if you hurt her.
Which made no sense.
“Hair on head. Really.”
Peeing promise. Rostov had just made that phrase up but he liked it. He’d use it again.
He’d bent down and slid the knife along the kid’s fingernail.
In three minutes, poof. Vimal’s girlfriend was Adeela Badour. And she lived in East Elmhurst, Queens, a mile or so from Vimal’s family.
A check of Google revealed that a Mohammad Badour lived at the address. And, yes, he had two daughters, Adeela and Taalia, twenty-two and ten. Though, sadly, no online pictures of the little creatures. Some parents were so protective.
“Anyone else?” Rostov had asked. “That Vimal is close to?”
Kirtan had shaken his head vigorously. His last gesture. Rostov had slit his throat then. It was a favor, he reasoned. The kid would have lived with guilt his whole life, for having given up Vimal and his friend.
After he died—which took some messy time—Rostov had cut his pinkie finger off and placed it, still holding the travesty of a ring, into Kirtan’s slack-jawed mouth. The Promisor didn’t have to limit himself to making statements only about diamonds on the fingers of slutty fiancées.
Adeela Badour…
He’d be at her house soon.
At a traffic light, he took a napkin from his pocket and coughed into it for a moment. Fucker, he thought angrily. A problem all his life. Cigarettes, of course. He’d stop smoking someday. The condition would go away.
He wondered if this Adeela was sexy. He generally preferred pale-complexioned women. But since he’d been thinking of the little Persian kur, Kitten and Scheherazade, he was of a mind to spend some time with a darker girl, an Arab girl. Hell, didn’t matter if she was sexy. He was hungry. He needed a woman. Now.
Oh, and the Promisor would keep his peeing promise to Kirtan. What was going to happen to her wouldn’t damage a single hair on her head.
Chapter 45
It’d be an adventure.”
“Adventure,” Adeela Badour replied to Vimal, clearly troubled by his choice of words. “What is this? A quest? The Hobbit.”
They were in her backyard. The Badours had a nice house, brick with red wooden trim, in East Elmhurst, Queens, about a mile from Vimal’s family. This neighborhood embraced LaGuardia airport and on days when the wind wasn’t kind, residents would have to endure the scream of jets skimming over houses to land on Runway 4. Today the air was, more or less, quiet.
The Badours’ home was bigger than the Lahoris’; Adeela’s father had a good job with a big tech company, her mother—like his—was a nurse. The place featured a yard with a well-tended garden, both rare here.
As far as Vimal was concerned, though, one of the better features was a detached garage, behind the house, which opened onto an alley, shared by all the homes here.
Better, because it was in the musty structure that Vimal and Adeela had first kissed—daringly in the backseat of her mother’s Subaru—after the adults had gone to sleep, of course—and where they had explored, touching and tasting, growing warm, teasing open buttons and finally a zipper or two.
At the moment, though, the mood was different. The only agenda item was escape.
He directed her into the garage, just to be out of sight, though he wasn’t conc
erned the ski-masked man had found his way here—that would be impossible. But he didn’t want neighbors to see him and call his father.
She leaned against her car, an old dark-green Mazda (fond memories there too, though the backseats were comically small). There was no room inside the garage for a second vehicle. Much of the rest of the space was occupied with a shabby workbench and limp storage cartons, inscribed with faded labels describing contents. Mothers dishes. Clothes for goodwill. Textbooks/diapers.
He said, “I’m not making, you know, light of it or anything. I mean, it’d be a change for you.”
“California?” she asked. “Why California?”
“Have you ever been?”
Adeela fired a thoughtful look, tilting her head. “In a land long ago, far away, there was a magical place out to the west, beyond the far reaches of humankind.”
Vimal sighed. Now she was being sardonic. “I’m just—”
“Disney, Legoland, San Francisco, Yosemite. I skied in July at Mammoth.”
“I didn’t mean it to sound like you were…what’s that word?”
“Young, provincial, naive?”
He sighed, but only slightly. Then recovered. “So? Did you like it?”
“Vim! Of course. That has nothing to do with anything. How can you just pick up and go—and expect me—”
“Not expect.”
“—to go with you?”
“UCLA has a fine arts program with a sculpting track. And a great medical school. I checked.” Then he took her hand.
“This isn’t the time to be thinking about that.” Her brown eyes narrowed. “You’re a witness to a murder. Do you get it, that this is not a normal time? Is that registering with you? You’re joking about adventures. This is serious!”
The Cutting Edge Page 27
