The Cutting Edge

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Got it,” she said. She slammed the shifter forward into first and popped the clutch, hitting the flow of traffic in three seconds and exceeding it in five.

  She knew the scrapyard and barge dock. They were south of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Piers, about five minutes away—at least in the Torino—if traffic cooperated. Which it decidedly was not doing. She set the blue flasher on her dash, downshifted and returned to the shoulder. She accelerated again, hoping fervently that nobody would have a flat and swerve in front of her.

  “Lon, my ETA’s five minutes, I hope. Get uniforms and ESU to the scrapyard. Silent roll-up.”

  “Will do, Amelia.”

  She didn’t bother to shut off the phone, letting Sellitto disconnect. Sachs didn’t dare remove her hands from the wheel as she sped along the rough shoulder, with side-view mirrors inches from the concrete abutment on the right and traffic on the left.

  Thinking: Am I too late?

  She traded sixty miles an hour for eighty.

  Chapter 62

  Sachs beat the blue-and-whites and ESU to the debris transfer station.

  She skidded into the site—a sprawling yard, which she remembered as a dusty, shimmering sprawl in the summer but was now forbidding and gray. The large gate was open and she saw no security. There was no parking lot, per se, but as she cruised around, the Torino bounding over the rough ground, she came upon a level area, free of scrap, between two large mounds of shattered concrete and rotting wood and plaster. A Ford was parked here, by itself; all the other vehicles were dump trucks and bulldozers. The few personal vehicles were pickup trucks and SUVs.

  She skidded to a stop and climbed out. Drawing her weapon, she made her way cautiously to the Ford. Nobody inside.

  She reached inside, pulled the trunk release.

  A huge relief seeing the empty space.

  Vimal Lahori was, possibly, still alive.

  A flash of motion caught her eye. Two squad cars from the local precinct sped up and stopped nearby. Four officers, all in uniform, climbed out.

  “Detective,” one said, his voice soft. She knew the slim, sandy-haired officer. Jerry Jones, a ten-year, or so, veteran.

  “Jones, call in the tag.”

  He fitted an earbud—to keep his Motorola quiet—and put in the request. Adding, “Need it now. We’re in a tactical situation. K.”

  She nodded to him and the others—two white men and an African American woman. “You got the description of our perp?”

  They all had.

  Sachs said, “We’ve got one of his weapons but assume he’s armed again. Glock Nines may be his weapon of choice. No evidence of long guns. He’ll have a knife too. Box cutter. Remember that the younger man with him is a hostage. Indian, dark hair, twenty-two. I don’t know what he’s wearing. The suspect was last seen in a tan overcoat but he’s worn dark outer clothes, too. We want this perp alive, if there’s any way. He’s got information we need.”

  Jones said, “He’s planted those gas bombs, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s him.”

  “What’s he want here?” the woman officer asked.

  “A pile of rock.”

  The uniforms glanced toward one another.

  No time to explain further.

  “Jones, you and I go west, to the docks. You three, south. You’re going to stand out in your uniforms, against the landscape—” It was beige and light gray. “—So keep your eye out for sniping positions. He’ll kill to take out witnesses. No reason to think he won’t target us.”

  “Sure, Detective,” one of the uniforms called and the trio started off.

  She and Jones moved perpendicular to them, toward the water.

  Jones’s radio gave a quiet clatter. He listened. She couldn’t hear the transmission. A moment later he told her, “ESU, ten minutes away.”

  The two of them moved quickly through the valleys between the piles of rock and refuse. Jones cocked his head—he’d be receiving a transmission through his earbud. And whispered, “K.” He then turned to Sachs. “Vehicle on monthlong lease from a dealer in Queens. Lessee is Andrew Krueger. South African driver’s license. Address in Cape Town. Gave an address in New York but it’s a vacant lot.”

  The uniform lifted his phone and showed an image of the driver’s license photo. “That him?”

  Confirming that Krueger had been acting the role of Ackroyd all along. She nodded.

  Like Rostov, Krueger would be one of those security operatives in the diamond business, working for a competitor to Dobprom.

  You don’t usually shoot your partner in the head…

  Now Sachs brought all her senses to the game. In a recent case a suspect—a bit psychotic, more than a bit fascinating—had decided that Sachs was an incarnation of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt.

  One of her finest compliments, even if it had come from a crazy man.

  They moved as fast as they dared. Sachs and Jones kept low, scanning constantly, left right, the ridges of the trash mounds, which were indeed perfect sniper nests. Breathing hard, muscles knotted.

  Oh, how Amelia Sachs loved this.

  She ignored the pain in her left side from the fall at the muddy grave at the construction site, ignored the pain from her run-in with the Russian. There was nothing in her mind except her prey.

  She used hand signals to tell Jones where to look, when to hurry, when to slow. He did the same from time to time. She suspected he’d never been in a firefight. Uneasy, tense but willing…and able: He held his Glock with confidence and skill.

  They proceeded slowly. She didn’t want to stumble on Krueger and force a gunfight; she needed to find him, unawares, for a bloodless takedown.

  Alive…

  She also didn’t want him circling around on her and Jones. Two hundred feet away a huge backhoe was filling a barge with scrap. The roaring engine and the clatter and boom of the rock tumbling into the vessel obscured all sounds. Krueger could easily get close to them without their hearing.

  So she scanned forward, to the sides and behind. Constantly.

  Another fifty feet. Where, where, where?

  She and Jones were nearly to the water when she spotted them.

  Between two large piles of rocks and timber and twisted metal, Krueger was pulling Vimal along behind him. In a gloved left hand he gripped the kid’s collar; his right was under his short, dark jacket. He’d be holding his weapon.

  Jones pointed to himself, then to the crest of the scrap pile near Krueger and Vimal. It was on the officer’s right, about twenty feet high. He then pointed to Sachs and made a semicircular gesture, indicating the pile on the left.

  Good tactical plan. Jones would cover Krueger from above and Sachs would flank him. She pointed back to their staging area, held up three fingers—meaning the other officers—and pointed a palm his way. Meaning to have them hold position. Sachs didn’t want the others stumbling onto the scene and she had no way of explaining to them exactly where the target was.

  Jones stepped aside and made a quiet call to the others. He holstered his weapon and began climbing the debris pile. Sachs trotted to the left, around the base of the mound to the right and began to close on where she’d last seen Krueger and Vimal.

  As she eased around the pile, she noted that, yes, it was going to work, if she could just get closer. Jones was atop the debris heap to the right and had his weapon trained on Krueger. Sachs just needed to close the distance a bit more so she could demand his surrender—over the sound of the chugging backhoes and bulldozers.

  Jones looked her way and nodded.

  She reciprocated and then moved closer yet toward the suspect and Vimal, who had stopped. Krueger’s cold face—so different from the man he’d pretended to be—bent close and whispered something into his ear. The kid, who was crying and wiping tears, nodded and looked around. Then he pointed and the two of them turned abruptly and hurried down another valley, away from Sachs and Jones. Apparently Vimal had spotted the piles of kimberlite.

&n
bsp; She glanced at Jones, who shook his head and pointed to his eyes. He’d lost sight. Sachs rounded the base of the mound closest to Krueger and began to follow. Then she looked beyond them.

  Oh, no…

  Not far away one of the male NYPD officers was crouching, with his back to Krueger, no more than twenty feet away. Without hesitating, Krueger whipped his pistol from beneath his jacket and fired a round into the officer’s back. The uniform plunged forward, dropping his own weapon. Sachs had noted that they wore body armor but at that range, even a slug stopped by armor would incapacitate him. He struggled to rise.

  Krueger flung his left arm around Vimal’s throat, so he wouldn’t run, pulling him close. Together they moved toward the injured officer.

  Sachs, behind them, stepped closer to the downed cop, drawing a target. “Krueger!” she shouted. “Drop the weapon.”

  He didn’t hear and took one step closer, aiming, about to fire a fatal round.

  Any incapacitating shot she might try would possibly hit Vimal too.

  So, with the thought in her mind that only Krueger knew where the deadly gas bombs were planted, Amelia Sachs lowered her center of gravity, settled the white dot of the front sight on the back of Krueger’s head and gently added pressure to the trigger until her weapon fired.

  Chapter 63

  Now that they knew the name Andrew Krueger, they could assemble an accurate dossier on him.

  While Sachs was searching the deceased’s residence motel in Brooklyn Heights, Rhyme, Fred Dellray from the FBI, the South African Police and ever-helpful Alternative Intelligence Service began filling in details.

  The killer’s residence was a flat in Cape Town, not far from the water, in the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront area. According to the South African Police, it was quite the posh neighborhood. The man had no criminal record but following his discharge from the army he’d been associated with some “dodgy” businessmen in the diamond trade. Though his father had been a vocal advocate of apartheid, Krueger himself rejected those prejudices, either because they were repugnant to him or, more likely, because they were not economically beneficial. He would work for anyone in the trade who would pay him, including some of the more dangerous “black diamond” businessmen, whose roots had been the impoverished squatter townships but who were now wealthy. When in the army, Krueger worked demolition. In civilian life, in his younger days, he’d been in mining and had studied engineering, which explained how he could rig the explosives to mimic earthquakes. It was his military connections, of course, that gave him access to both the C4 and gas line bombs.

  Krueger’s company was AK Associates. He was managing director; his partner was a former mine labor enforcer, Terrance DeVoer. The company specialized in “security work” for the gem and precious metals and materials industries.

  That vague description translated, one SAP detective told them, as “corporate mercenary.” Attempts to interview DeVoer were unsuccessful; he and his wife had disappeared.

  When he’d been among Rhyme, Sachs and the others, Krueger, as Ackroyd, had professed a knowledge of the diamond world and this wasn’t fiction. A raid on his Cape Town digs by the SAP revealed a genuine obsession with the stones: Hundreds of books on the subject, photographs, and documents about diamonds, from the scientific to the cultural to the artistic. He himself, one inspector said, had even written poetry about the gems.

  “Very bad verse, I will tell you.”

  They found actual diamonds too. Rough and finished. Close to two million dollars’ worth, another investigator said. An odd display sat on Krueger’s bedside table, the officer added. A low-power spotlight was aimed upward from underneath a lens of clear glass, on which Krueger had placed a dozen diamonds. The light beamed the translucent forms of the stones onto the ceiling, like constellations, the edges of each one radiating with the colors of rainbows.

  Rhyme recalled that the name for this refraction was “fire.”

  The raid revealed the likely employer. Bank records showed that two wire transfers of $250K each had been deposited at Krueger’s company. They originated from a numbered account in Guatemala City. These had been received within the past two weeks. The memos on the wires reported the payments were for “Installment 1” and Installment 2.”

  The police also found printouts about a company called Nuevo Mundo Minería—New World Mining—a diamond producer located in Guatemala City.

  But nothing in the raid or an examination of police records, including Interpol and Europol, had revealed what they needed so desperately: information about where the final gas IEDs had been planted.

  Maybe the evidence from Krueger’s motel would have that answer. He was about to find out. He could tell this from the roar of a sports car engine and the squeal of brakes in the street outside his town house.

  * * *

  Sachs had walked the grid—twice—at Krueger’s extended-stay motel in Brooklyn Heights.

  Lincoln Rhyme and she were now looking over the results of her efforts. Mel Cooper was processing some of the finds, as well. McEllis was still present, waiting to help them narrow down the possible locations that the bombs might be, based on his knowledge of the half-mile-long geologic fault.

  In Krueger’s motel were diagrams of the geothermal site, photos of the drilling operation, maps of the area around the site, articles about explosions whose seismic profile had been mistaken for earthquakes, emails from untraceable accounts with attachments on the diamond content of kimberlite samples, echoing what Don McEllis had told them. Krueger had researched Ezekiel Shapiro and the One Earth movement as well. The dead environmentalist’s address was on a Post-it note.

  Sachs had found an attaché case that matched the one Krueger’d had with him at Patel’s. It contained a small but powerful portable microscope, some tools and pieces of kimberlite. He’d taken it with him to Patel’s shop to analyze the rock, Rhyme supposed. If the kimberlite proved diamond-rich, he’d steal it and torture Patel to find more information. Here too was a carton that contained traces of RDX, the main component of C4, and another with the label on the side: תרמוסטטים. Which was Hebrew for “thermostats”—which the gas line IEDs were meant to impersonate.

  Sachs taped up pictures of the rooms. She said, “One thing real? His love of crossword puzzles. He had dozens of puzzle books.”

  This reminded Rhyme.

  He glanced at the present—the electronic cryptic crossword device the killer had given Rhyme.

  Edward Ackroyd—the man he thought he could become friends with.

  Five-letter word beginning with J meaning “betrayer.” Then he shot that moment of melodrama dead.

  He told Mel Cooper, “See if there’s a transmitter inside.”

  “A—”

  “See if he fucking bugged us.”

  “Ah.” Using a set of miniature computer tools, Cooper removed the backing. He looked it over and scanned it with a transmission-detecting wand.

  “Nothing. It’s safe.”

  He started to reassemble it. But Rhyme said softly, “No, throw it out.”

  “You don’t want—”

  “Throw it out.”

  Cooper did, and Rhyme and Sachs returned to the evidence.

  Where the hell were the gas line bombs?

  No maps or notes suggested an answer. Krueger’s computer was locked and had gone to Rodney Szarnek downtown, along with two burner phones, and the one he’d had with him at the waste site in Brooklyn—which was not locked and showed calls to a number in Moscow. The numbers had been dialed after Rostov had died, and Rhyme believed that Krueger himself had done so to make it seem that Vimal’s killer was an unknown associate of Rostov. This was exceedingly unlikely—especially since Sachs also found a Russian cigarette and rubles in Krueger’s pocket, meant, obviously, to be strewn around Vimal’s body. A feint.

  Unlikely, yes, but until Rodney confirmed the calls were made at the same place that Krueger’s phones had been located, Vimal would stay safely in a loc
al precinct house.

  Sachs had also found the keys to the now-infamous Toyota—though its whereabouts weren’t known—and Rostov’s residence.

  Mel Cooper said, “I’ve got some things on the mining company in Guatemala. New World. Big outfit with diamond mines throughout Latin America, producing mostly industrial-grade. Not the nicest crew on earth. They’ve been accused by environmentalists and the government of destroying rain forests with strip mining, clear-cutting, things like that. They pay small miners, garimpeiros, to raid indigenous lands. There’re battles—real battles. Dozens of miners and Indians have been killed.”

  Rhyme called Fred Dellray at the FBI once again, and asked if he could tap some of his State Department contacts to have security and the U.S. embassy or consulate in Guatemala City talk to executives at the mining company.

  As if they’d cooperate, he thought sardonically.

  “Let’s look over the trace,” Rhyme said.

  Among the items found by Sachs were raw honey, rotting felt, clay soil, shreds of old electrical wire insulation, bits of insect wings, probably from genus Apis (bees—the honey helped in this speculation, though they might be unrelated). Also, on a pair of boots in the motel she’d found traces of unusual agricultural soil—lightweight, absorbent shale and clay and compost containing flecks of straw and hay—and organic fertilizer.

  “Ah.”

  “What, Lincoln?”

  He didn’t respond to Cooper but went online and gave the Google microphone a command. “Composition of Rooflite.” Sometimes you needed esoteric databases, sometimes you didn’t.

  The answer came back in milliseconds.

  “Yes!”

  Sachs, Cooper and McEllis turned his way.

  Rhyme said, “It’s sketchy but we don’t have much else to go with. I think he planted one device, at least, north of the government buildings in Cadman Plaza. In Vinegar Hill.”

  This was an old area of Brooklyn, adjacent to the old Navy Yard. Named after the battle in Ireland in 1798 between Irish rebels and British troops, the neighborhood was a curious mix: quaint residences from Victorian times encircled by grim, imposing industrial structures.