Solomon's Gold

by Alex Lukeman

  Agent Silverton was doing the kind of tedious work that characterized criminal investigations everywhere, looking for a lead. Other agents were reviewing tapes from the hotel interior. Silverton's assignment was to look at surveillance recordings from garages in the area where Dayoud's phone had briefly been active. It was boring and repetitive work. There were hundreds of hours of video and many garages to search through.

  It was a long shot, but it was possible the van was parked in one of those garages. One of those cameras might have caught it at some point in time. That was assuming the van was in a garage in the first place, that the cameras in that particular garage were working, and that he'd be able to identify it if it did pass by a camera.

  Those were a lot of ifs, but Silverton was used to doing things that often led nowhere. Sometimes if you did enough of those things, an answer appeared.

  He paused the recording he was watching and glanced over at the photographs on his desk. One showed a smiling woman lying on a lounge chair on a beach. There were palm trees behind her. She was looking at the camera. The other was a picture of the same woman and two young children. Everyone was laughing.

  Looking at the pictures reminded Silverton of why he put up with the boring bureaucracy of his job. He was one of the good guys. What he did helped protect the family he loved, and a lot of other people besides. He could put up with a lot of boring, because of that.

  Jock turned his attention back to the monitor. Figuring that the bad guys would want to keep a low profile, he thought the driver would avoid the intense surveillance of Midtown. Silverton had started near the river and begun working up through a grid of streets he'd drawn up to guide his search. He'd been looking at video recordings for most of the day.

  There were a lot of white vans in New York, a lot of them parked in garages. The one he was looking for might be on the street somewhere, in which case he'd never find it. The cops were on the lookout for the license plate, but Silverton thought the bad guys would have stashed it in a garage. It's what he would've done, if he were a terrorist. Why risk being towed, or the casual vandalism of parking on the street?

  He was looking at recordings from a garage on Avenue B when he saw it. He ran the recording back and forth a few times to be sure, but there was no question. It was the license plate he was looking for.

  Silverton called his boss and told him what he'd found.

  "You're sure about it, Jock?"

  "Yes, sir, I am. It's the right make and model, and the license plate matches the rental contract."

  "Is there a sign on it?"

  "Yes, sir. It says Azari Brothers, Heating and Air-Conditioning."

  "You're sure about the license plate."

  "Absolutely."

  "Good work, Jock. Would you like to be there when we check it out?"

  "Yes, sir, I would."

  An hour later Silverton sat in an idling, unmarked car with three other agents, parked a half block away from the entrance to the garage. It was the middle of the afternoon in New York. The Special Agent in Charge was a man named Matthews. The other two agents were Phillips and Dodge. All four men wore blue suits and forgettable ties. Anyone looking at them couldn't fail to mistake them for cops of one kind or another. All of them had hair cropped short in a style that was almost military. They all had the sort of clean-cut look that would have made J. Edgar Hoover proud. Looking at his fellow agents, Silverton had a sudden thought that he'd somehow ended up in a 60s movie with James Stewart. He often had heretical thoughts like that. He quickly suppressed it.

  "It's unlikely these guys are anywhere around," Matthews said. "All the same, make sure you're locked and loaded. Everybody set?"

  Nods all around.

  Matthews put the car in gear and drove forward to the entrance. A sign advertised a special half hour rate at $12.50. Across the way, on the exit side of the garage, a man sat reading a newspaper in a booth. Matthews stopped the car and got out. He walked over to the booth and rapped on the glass.

  Matthews showed his badge. The attendant slid a glass panel open.

  "This garage is temporarily closed," Matthews said.

  "I can't do that," the man said. "What about the customers? What if someone wants their car?"

  "We won't be long," Matthews said, "but we need to look at a vehicle in here. We don't want anyone coming in or out."

  "Is there going to be trouble?"

  "No trouble. But don't let any new vehicles in. Keep people out."

  "I gotta call my boss."

  "You do that. In the meantime, open the gate for us, and then lock the place down."

  "But..."

  Matthews gave the man a hard look. "Do it, if you know what's good for you."

  He walked back to the car, waited for the gate to lift, and drove into the building.

  The garage was large. It had three levels, two of them below ground. Hundreds of cars filled the spaces. Matthews followed a winding path down to the lowest level of the building. Everything was lit with harsh fluorescent light. They reached the bottom level and continued to the back, where the access road turned back toward the upper levels. The van was parked against the back wall, nose in to the corner.

  Matthews stopped the Ford in the middle of the road and shut down the motor.

  "Jock, take a video while we look. Stream it back to the office."

  The four men got out of the car. Silverton made the connection back to the office with his phone and stood a few feet away from the van, recording. He took a close up of the license plate, then focused on Matthews and the others.

  Matthews walked to the van and peered inside the driver side window.

  "I don't see anything except fast food trash on the floor. I can't see into the back, there's a screen in the way."

  He pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and tried the door.

  "Locked. Figures."

  "How about the back?" Dodge said.

  Matthews came around to the back. The van had a double door set up. There were no windows in the doors. He tried the handle. It was unlocked.

  "We're in luck," Matthews said.

  He pulled open the door.

  The explosion blew the doors off and ripped through the roof of the van, hurling razor-sharp shards of steel into the air. One of the doors smashed into Matthews, crushing him against the back wall. The other struck Dodge and almost cut him in half. A vicious tongue of flame and debris caught Silverton and Phillips where they stood, lifting them off their feet and throwing them across the roadway. Their clothes caught fire, but neither man could feel it. Both were dead before they hit the ground.

  Sprinklers erupted throughout the garage, raining down on the blazing van and the smoldering bodies of the agents.

  Somewhere, an alarm began a frantic ringing.

  CHAPTER 46

  Elizabeth was on the phone with Hood.

  "Four agents dead?" Elizabeth said. "What happened?"

  "One of them was looking through video recordings from parking garages and found the van. The four of them went to the garage to check it out. The van was booby trapped. It blew up when they opened a door."

  "What about forensics? Can they get anything from what's left?"

  "They won't find much," Hood said. "The explosion started a fire. It took six hours to put it out. Everything was soaked by sprinklers and buried in foam by the fire department."

  "If anyone had doubts about the seriousness of this threat, that should put an end to them," Elizabeth said.

  "There's one piece of good news. The video from the garage showed the sign on the side of the van. It was for a heating and air conditioning company. The phone number and the address don't exist, and the contractor's number turned out to belong to a plumber in Yonkers. The poor bastard had a SWAT team show up at his door. Of course, he isn't involved."

  "Has anyone talked to the people at the hotel who would deal with a contractor like that?"

  "They have. The chief engineer is a guy named Dawson. He wa
s conveniently out sick. He's being questioned as we speak, but my feeling is that he wasn't involved. His assistant is Kowalski. Kowalski is the one who dealt with the terrorists. There were three of them. They told him they were there to inspect the heating and cooling system and showed him paperwork signed by Dawson. No surprise, he never signed anything like that."

  "How long were they there?"

  "Kowalski says not very long. Forty-five minutes, more or less."

  "Did he see what they were doing?"

  "Nope. He was up on the twelfth floor, fixing an electrical problem."

  "So the bad guys were in the hotel, unsupervised, for most of an hour."

  "Correct."

  "Whatever they did, it has to be something simple. Did Kowalski see anything unusual when he talked with them?"

  "All he saw was the usual contractor stuff. They had a couple of toolboxes and a cylinder on a dolly."

  "A cylinder? What kind of cylinder?"

  "Kowalski says he's seen one like it before. The HVAC people use them to test the cooling system."

  "But these weren't HVAC people. What would they be doing with a cylinder like that?"

  "That's what I was wondering. Kowalski showed the terrorists where everything was and then went away. Federal agents searched the basement where Kowalski left them, but nothing has turned up. The dogs haven't sensed anything. There doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary in the area where the terrorists were supposed to be working. No odd packages, no out of place trash, nothing."

  "I'm getting a bad feeling about this," Elizabeth said. "A cylinder could be a bomb."

  "Kowalski says they took everything they had with them when they left, including the cylinder."

  "Then there must have been something in the toolboxes. The cylinder could have been for show, to give them a look of legitimacy."

  "I was wondering if you could send your team to the hotel and take a look," Hood said. "Nick and the others have been dealing with things like this for a long time. They're used to finding things that can kill you that look innocent. The Bureau is good, but the mindset is different. They don't have the same kind of experience."

  "Nick's been chomping at the bit to do something since they came back from Israel. I'll send them up. If there's anything there, they'll find it."

  "That's what I wanted to hear. That was quite a find they made over there."

  "It's unfortunate that they didn't find it in Israel," Elizabeth said. "The Egyptians are determined to claim it for themselves. So far, it's a standoff."

  "Too bad Solomon isn't around to pass judgment."

  "I don't believe you said that," Elizabeth said.

  "I have my moments."

  "When this conference is over, let's head for the Caribbean."

  "It's a date," Hood said.

  CHAPTER 47

  It was the day of the conference. Nick and the team had been in the hotel since first light. Everywhere they went they were stopped by Secret Service or FBI. The general attitude was that they weren't welcome and everything was under control, so why were they there in the first place?

  They had been all through the building, including the basement. They'd found nothing out of the ordinary.

  The Israeli prime minister and President Corrigan were already in the hotel. The prime minister had arrived at 12:30. President Corrigan had greeted him in the lobby. They'd been shepherded to a private conference room, trailing a gaggle of Mossad and Secret Service agents behind. The hotel was packed with delegates from all over the world.

  Selena stood in the lobby with the others, watching people mill about.

  "Alan should have been here to see this," she said. "This was his creation."

  "From a security standpoint, this is a nightmare," Nick said. "There are too many people."

  "Seems like half of them are Secret Service or something else," Ronnie said.

  "It only takes one lunatic to make them all useless," Nick said.

  "We still haven't talked to the maintenance guy, Kowalski."

  "They had him over at the FBI office all morning. He has to be back by now. Let's find him."

  They found Kowalski in the basement.

  It didn't take Nick long to figure out that the assistant engineer wasn't the highest card in the deck.

  "Like I told those other guys, I don't know nothin'."

  "What other guys?" Nick asked.

  "You know, the feds, guys like you."

  "We're not FBI," Nick said. "We're something else. Tell me again why you left three men here without watching them."

  "They had a work order. They looked okay."

  "What does that mean?"

  "What does what mean?"

  "That they looked okay."

  "You know. They looked like anybody else. Like working guys. Like guys that work on air-conditioning. Waddaya want from me?"

  Selena said, "Mister Kowalski, no one is blaming you for anything. These men are terrorists. They were here for a reason. Our job is to try and find out what that was. Can you show me where they were when you last saw them?"

  Relieved to know something they wanted, Kowalski led them into the control room where he'd last seen Dayoud and the others.

  "I left them right here," he said. "Then I went upstairs."

  "Just a few more questions, Mister Kowalski. Then you can get on with your work."

  "Okay. That's good, I got a plumbing problem on the fourth floor. What with the president being here and all, everything's a mess. But the plumbing still has to work."

  "What did they have with them?"

  "Two toolboxes, like you carry tools in."

  "What else?"

  "They had a dolly with a cylinder on it. Like refrigeration guys use when they need to recharge something. I told the other guys that."

  "Was there anything else?" Selena asked.

  "Yeah, they had a ladder, one of those folding aluminum jobs."

  Nick and Selena looked at each other. No one had mentioned a ladder before.

  "Did you tell the other people who talked with you about that?"

  "Come to think of it, it kind of slipped my mind, what with everybody being angry, confusing me."

  "Angry?"

  "Yeah, they acted like I'd done something wrong. All I did was follow orders. One guy was yelling at me."

  "Well, he shouldn't have done that," Selena said.

  "That's right," Kowalski said. "What right have those guys got to yell at me? I was just doing my job."

  She looked at Nick. He nodded.

  "Thank you for your time, Mister Kowalski. I don't think we have any more questions for you."

  Kowalski looked like he wanted to get out of there. "Yeah, well, if you need to get hold of me, I'll be on the fourth floor."

  They watched him leave.

  "You did a good job with him," Nick said.

  "The poor man was frightened," Selena said. "How would you feel if a bunch of federal agents came out of nowhere and started asking you a lot of questions?"

  "Wouldn't bother me," Lamont said. "I'd tell them to take a hike back to the Hoover building."

  "How would you get them to do that?" Ronnie asked.

  "I'll show them my badge."

  "They've got badges."

  "Yeah, but mine's bigger than theirs."

  In spite of herself, Selena laughed.

  "The ladder is new info," Nick said.

  Ronnie looked around the room. "I don't see anything they could have climbed up on. The feebs must have crawled all over the place. If there was anything up on top of that ductwork, they would have found it. Besides, most of it's right up against the ceiling. There isn't room for anything."

  "What about inside the ducts?" Selena asked.

  "Harker said the feds looked inside the ducts," Nick said. "They chalked a mark everywhere they looked, like that big access panel over there."

  They walked over to the panel. A blue chalk mark showed that someone had checked it out.

>   "They went inside?" Ronnie asked.

  "Yes." Nick looked at the panel. "Something bothers me about this, but I can't put my finger on it."

  "It's got the chalk mark," Lamont said.

  "Yeah, but something is bugging me about it."

  Nick studied the panel.

  "Why is one screw different from the others?" Selena asked.

  "That's it," Nick said. "That's what was bugging me. It shouldn't be different. They should all be exactly the same. That one is the same size, but it's shiny. The others are all dull."

  "Like someone replaced it," Lamont said.

  "We need to open it up," Ronnie said.

  "Get Kowalski back in here with his tools," Nick said. "Tell him to bring a ladder."

  Fifteen minutes later, Kowalski showed up carrying a toolbox and a ladder.

  "I gotta turn off the blower before I pull that off," Kowalski said.

  He punched the button that shut down the big fan. A few minutes after that, he had the panel off the ductwork.

  "The whole system is shut down with that blower off," Kowalski said. "I'll stay here until you're done, so I can put it back together."

  "Okay," Nick said. "I'd like you to stand over by the wall, away from the opening."

  "You think there's a bomb in there? Those guys already checked it out."

  "It's only a precaution. Please, stand over there."

  Grumbling, Kowalski moved to the other side of the room.

  Nick got inside the ductwork and looked up. It was dark. He couldn't see anything except sheet-metal rising toward the ceiling.

  Why did they need a ladder?

  He took a flashlight from his pocket and turned it on.

  "There's another large branch going off at a right angle, about ten feet up. Let me have the ladder."

  His voice echoed inside the metal work.

  Lamont handed the ladder in to him. Nick set it up against the steel and climbed. He shone his light down the branch and saw a round, black container with wires coming off it. The wires were connected to a digital timing device. Red LEDs on the display counted down as he watched.