NCIS Los Angeles

by Jerome Preisler

  “To him the only clouds were the ones drifting around in the sky,” Callen said.

  Granger grunted. “Any idea why the SA didn’t try abducting him?”

  Kensi shrugged.

  “My hunch,” she replied, “is that whatever Holloway said convinced them the info was on his computer.”

  “They didn’t expect Sutton or the housekeeper to be home,” Sam said. “It was her off day, but she decided to surprise him.”

  Callen nodded. “Valli says his visits to his wife’s grave were always tough on him,” he said. “She came to cheer him up.”

  “And got blown away for her kindness,” Sam said.

  Hetty sighed into the suddenly quiet room.

  “Our problem right now is that we don’t know whether or not Greer ever found the information about the uranium on Sutton’s computer,” she said at length. “I also doubt Holloway will voluntarily share it with us. Certainly not without lawyering up and trying to broker a deal.”

  “We can’t wait for that,” Granger said abruptly. “There’s no time.”

  “Isaak says Greer was under pressure from the Armenians to get the info fast,” Callen said. “Heavy pressure.”

  Granger exchanged glances with Hetty, then looked around the room.

  “Have any of you noticed the date?” he said.

  Sam checked his watch. “April twenty-fourth,” he said. “That mean something?”

  Hetty’s face was sober.

  “A little over a century ago today, three hundred innocent members of Constantinople’s Armenian community were slaughtered by the military government,” she said. “Blame the usual sludge of primitive, senseless reasons—nationalism, ethnic strife, territorial conflict.” She paused. “It was the first of several massacres that took a million and a half Armenian lives in Turkish-controlled lands over the next decade.”

  “At the time Armenia was part of the Ottoman Empire,” Granger said. “It went on to be annexed to the Soviet Union after World War One.”

  “Anybody ask the Armenians what they wanted?” Sam said.

  “I assume that’s a rhetorical question,” Granger replied. “The Armenian Justice Commandos formed in the nineteen-seventies. Their M.O. primarily involved attacks against Turkish diplomats and calling for recognition of the genocide by the government in Istanbul. A more violent offshoot called the Armenian Secret Army broadened the terrorist activities throughout Europe. And added Armenian self-rule to their demands.”

  “After Armenia declared its independence in nineteen-ninety, the Justice Commandos fell out of sight,” Hetty said. “But the SA still had angry factions. They insisted the Turks admit to their crimes against humanity and pay reparations to survivors. And that America lead the world in imposing sanctions for noncompliance.”

  “And we didn’t,” Sam said.

  Granger shook his head. “Too many other battles to fight,” he said. “Geopolitics makes for awkward bedfellows. We needed Turkey as a strategic coalition partner during the first and second Gulf Wars, and still do in the war against ISIS.”

  “The SA’s rhetoric hasn’t helped their cause, either,” Hetty said. “Every now and then they surface to advocate reprisals against the Turks and their allies.”

  “And what else?” Sam said. “What’ve they been up to lately?”

  “It’s widely thought that their funding dried up years ago,” Hetty said. “Our intelligence agencies believe they’re dormant.”

  “But we all know better,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “We know they’ve been after the Nazi uranium so they could build a dirty bomb.”

  “Yes.”

  “That they kidnapped one person, and killed at least four other people trying to get hold of it.”

  She gave a slow nod.

  “Yes, Mr. Hanna,” she said. “Four since yesterday.”

  Sam thought a moment, looking from her to Granger.

  “And today’s April twenty-fourth,” he said. “The anniversary of the genocide.”

  A hush settled over the room.

  “What we don’t know is where the uranium was stashed,” Callen finally said. “If they do and get their hands on it—or already have it—we’re cooked.”

  There was another deep, heavy silence. Then Nell cleared her throat to interrupt it.

  “I think I might be able to help on that score,” she said.

  * * *

  It was a little past ten in the morning when Matous entered the ordnance and explosives lab, briefly looking in on his commandos before he left for the railway station.

  The small, bare room was lit with bright metal floor lamps. There were two worktables, a long rectangular one in the middle, and a wheeled, stainless steel laboratory table to his left near a wall-mounted gun cabinet. Blackout shades covered the windows.

  One of the men, Pavel, sat at the wheeled table loading bullets from plastic ammunition boxes into forty and fifty round magazines. Gaspar, Narem, and Davit were at the other table on adjustable stools, inspecting the half-dozen satchel charges in front of them.

  Each of the black nylon haversacks contained eight two-pound bricks of cocrystallized HMX-CL20 plastic explosive, a state-of-the-art formulation that combined high yield with enhanced stability—and produced less vapor signature than other comparable materials. Although the packets would be undetectable to most electronic scanners—and even escape the sensitive noses of bomb-sniffing dogs—Matous had instructed his men to seal them in large Ziploc freezer bags, further tamping down their chemical scents.

  Using a screen of proxy buyers, Jag Azarian had acquired the HMX-CL20 from a black market Pakistani arms dealer for an even six thousand U.S. dollars.

  Matous himself had purchased the detonating system from KABOOM.COM, a Cincinnati-based e-commerce site specializing in pyrotechnic supplies.

  Its six wallet-sized firing modules received their radio signals with small, nubby radio antennas and ran on plain AA batteries. The LED remote control with which Matous would activate them took a single twelve-volt battery.

  The system was legal, inexpensive, easily acquired, and patently ordinary.

  In a few short hours he would be putting it to extraordinary use.

  He watched Gaspar snap open his satchel’s outer pouch, pull out its firing module, and closely examine the thin copper wire running from the module to the explosive packet in the bag’s main compartment. Satisfied the connection was secure at both ends, he slipped the module back into the pouch and then closed the flap.

  The team’s methodical preparations gave Matous a sense of calm assurance. When the men left here this afternoon, they would carry many times the destructive power needed for their mission.

  In Iraq during the Battle of Fallujah, his Marine unit would clear out blocks of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party loyalists with satchel charges of C-4, using a single twenty-pound bomb to level a sprawling, palatial home.

  The HMX-CL20 packed significantly more explosive force than C-4, and there would be four satchels on the railbed. That made for sixty-four pounds of plastic explosive at the target location, enough to bring down an entire row of houses. The other pair of haversacks—containing thirty-two pounds of explosive between them—would be handed off to Tomas after he brought the hijacked express shuttle in from Union Station.

  With the drums of powdered uranium onboard, the shuttle would turn into an enormous radiological dispersal device—a dirty bomb that would annihilate hundreds in the initial blast, and spread a cloud of deadly radioactive contamination across a large, populated area.

  “What are you doing here? I assumed you would have left by now.”

  Matous turned to see Tomas standing behind him in the hall.

  “I’m waiting for Alysha,” he said. And raised an eyebrow. “She isn’t with you?”

  Tomas shook his head. “I last saw her a half hour ago. She was doing something to her hair.”

  “Prettying up for her date?”

  “She w
ould slice off your balls and feed them to the vultures for that remark,” Tomas said. “And you’d deserve it.”

  Matous tried not to look too amused.

  “You sound a bit defensive,” he said.

  “She doesn’t need me or anyone else to defend her… but let’s drop it.” Tomas looked him in the eyes. “With Alysha going on ahead of us, I’m a person short. Yuri can’t guard the passengers himself while I pilot the train.”

  Matous gestured toward the man at the steel table.

  “You’ll have Pavel,” he said. “He’s already been informed.”

  “And you can vouch for his reliability?”

  “He fought under me in two deployments,” Matous said. “There isn’t a steadier hand here with a weapon.”

  Tomas looked through the doorway at him and nodded.

  Hearing Alysha’s light, quick footsteps, Tomas glanced around to see her approaching in a white peasant blouse, jeans, and sneakers. A purse under her arm, a pair of designer sunglasses up over her forehead. The blouse was made to fall loosely below her shoulder, offering a hint of smooth, toned flesh.

  His eyebrows rose. She had darkened her hair so it was almost black and tucked it into a neat French Twist.

  “You’re ready for your conductor friend,” Matous said. “He’ll be spellbound.”

  Her face was cold.

  “I’m being cautious,” she said. “I don’t want to look the same today as I did yesterday.”

  Tomas regarded her in silence, his eyes brushing over the curve of her collarbone…

  “Is something wrong?” she said suddenly.

  “No.” He remembered the smoothness of her skin on his lips. “Nothing. You were saying?”

  “Just that I’ll be in touch.” Alysha regarded him for another minute. “Things will develop quickly. You’ll need to be fast and adaptable.”

  Her words, if not her tone, seemed a jab.

  “I’m no stranger to action,” Tomas said. “You of all people shouldn’t have to be reminded.”

  Silence. She shrugged, turning to Matous.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and strode off toward the front door.

  16

  “Late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi came to believe in necrophony, or the science of receiving voice transmissions from the dead,” said Nell.

  “Which isn’t really a science, but who here wants to argue with someone who kind-of-but-not-quite invented the radio?” Eric said, realizing he’d cut in on her for a change.

  It was 10:43 A.M. Crammed into a forensics lab with the two intelligence analysts were Granger and Hetty Lange, along with Callen, Hanna, Deeks, and Blye.

  Granger studied the contraption in front of Nell, thinking it looked like what you got crossing a garage workshop table with a half-million dollar digital microscope.

  Mona, the analyst had called it.

  “Tell me that’s a necrophone and I’m out of here,” he said.

  Nell gave a quick laugh. “Marconi’s dream was to build a radio receiver that could capture Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount out of thin air,” she said. “Mona can’t do that. But it’s the next best thing.”

  “Tubwayhun lahvday,” Hetty said. “It’s Aramaic. Blessed are the peacemakers.”

  No one said anything for a long moment.

  “The clock’s ticking,” she said. “Let’s focus.”

  Nell nodded, motioning to the wide vertical tubes above the instrument’s mounting platform.

  “My college friend had it rushed over from UC Berkeley overnight,” she said. “She works for Intelligence and Analysis under Homeland Security, and I&A and the Defense Intelligence Agency run a joint project to recover and preserve historic wartime records—ours and other countries’.”

  “Mona’s optics should be able to map the topography of the brown wax cylinders in Sutton’s collection,” Eric said. “Recreate what’s in them—”

  “—without physically making contact with their surfaces,” Nell interjected, finishing the sentence. “It appears Sutton had a half dozen home recordings, and they’re the ones that really interest us.”

  “The problem’s that they’re all severely infested with mold,” Eric said. “Active mold spores spread easily…”

  “And since mold feeds on dead organic material—”

  “Like the waxy substance they’re made of…”

  “It’ll have eaten away and disfigured their surfaces…”

  “Which could create dead spots in the digital reconstruction,” Eric said. “Also, Mona can’t see through excessive dirt or mold encrustations. We’re betting her predictive intelligence engine can fill in some of the gaps—”

  “By looking at the hills and valleys it is able to see, and making statistical guesses about what’s between them,” Nell said.

  Eric was nodding. “To give ourselves the best shot at success, we’ll need to clean as much gunk off the cylinders as possible before scanning them…”

  “And that’s going to be tricky,” Nell said.

  “Very tricky,” Eric said.

  “How long do you expect it to take?” Hetty asked.

  “It’s a delicate process,” Eric said. “We don’t want them to crumble in our hands…”

  “How long?”

  Eric motioned to a stainless steel counter across the room, where he’d carefully removed the cylinders from their cardboard containers and set them out on lab trays.

  “There are experts at the Library of Congress who specialize in this kind of physical restoration,” he said. “I fired off some red-flagged queries about how to proceed but haven’t heard back.”

  “Have you tried calling them?”

  “We just get routed to voice mail,” Nell said. “The problem’s that the library’s underfunded and understaffed.”

  “This can’t wait,” Granger said. “Give me your contacts. I’ll set a fire under their asses that’ll leave them smoking for a month.”

  Nell nodded, reaching for her tablet.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Granger said. “What’s convinced you two the cylinders will give us the location of the ore?”

  “I was about to ask the same question,” Kensi said. “Isaak Dorani swears they weren’t on the Secret Army’s wish list. He only grabbed them as an afterthought, thinking he could roll them over for getaway money.”

  Eric started to respond but then thought twice about it, interrupting himself this time. Admittedly, he was first to notice some of the cylinders were homemade recordings. But it had been Nell who connected the dots.

  He lobbed her a glance that said she should be the one to answer, and got a quick, acknowledging look in return.

  “We’ve been working under the hypothesis that the murders of Zory Daggut and Erasmo Greer are both related to the Sutton murder,” she said. “Isaak Dorani being the connecting link. Right?”

  Kensi nodded.

  “So if the killers are the same people–members of the Secret Army—what brought them to Daggut’s shop?” Nell asked. “What could they have wanted except the cylinders?”

  “And why?” Kensi said. “Why did they want to get hold of them?”

  Nell glanced over at her.

  “That’s what we think Elias Sutton will tell us,” she said.

  “If we can make him talk,” Eric said.

  * * *

  “Your chaperon’s here, Isaak,” Kensi said.

  It was a quarter past eleven and a pair of U.S. Navy masters-at-arms were waiting outside the Boatshed for Isaak Dorani’s transfer to the custody of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Blye and Deeks had driven over from HQ only minutes ago.

  Dorani looked at her across the table. “They bring my prom tux?” he said. “I’m pretty much a small, though they say I got manly shoulders.”

  Kensi almost told him he’d have to settle for baggy orange jumps for a while, but bit her tongue.

  “You’ll be copied via email on the paperwork,” she said to Scardella.
/>   The lawyer folded her laptop.

  “Thanks,” she said. Then hesitated. “Godspeed finding what you need.”

  Kensi thought a second.

  “I have one last question for your client,” she said. “It’s important.”

  Scardella sighed.

  “The interrogation’s over,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t allow—”

  “I’ll keep it off the record.”

  “On your word?”

  “Yes.”

  The attorney turned to Dorani. “Your choice,” she said.

  He nodded, still in his chair. “Ask away,” he said, looking at Kensi. “Since you promised you’d be nice to my cats.”

  She sat down opposite him.

  “About the SA’s safehouse… that’s what they call it, right?”

  “Yeah. Like it’s beneath them to say they got a hideout.”

  She held her eyes on him.

  “You told us you were there a few times,” she said. “That it’s somewhere in the desert.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Can you share anything that might help us find the place?”

  He shook his head.

  “We been through this already,” he said. “I thought you were gonna ask something different…”

  “Isaak,” she said. “Try to remember.”

  He sighed.

  “My answer’s the same as before,” he said. “They drove me out there in a crappy old van… the kind with no windows. Blindfolded me. I couldn’t see anything.”

  “You had your other senses,” Kensi said. “Smell. Hearing. Touch. You must have picked up something from your surroundings.”

  “All I know is it was hot. And the road was full of bumps,” he said, expelling another breath. “Listen, believe it or not, I ain’t no keener on getting microwaved than the next guy. But I got no more to tell you.”

  Kensi looked at him a long moment, her hands folded on the table. Then she nodded.

  “Okay, Isaak,” she said. “If anything comes to you, we’d appreciate you telling us.”

  He half shrugged, half nodded, and then just sat there in silence.

  Kensi stood up, turned to Scardella.