Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

“Every night.” Tom signaled the bartender for two more Coronas. Kostmayer thought Tom’s eyes were glassy. He’d already had a lot to drink.

  Kostmayer glanced down at Tom Coleman’s hands.

  He was wearing the demon-claws silver skull on the ring finger of his right hand.

  Tom was served immediately. He was a regular. He grabbed the beers and made his way back to the booth. He handed the blonde her beer and kissed her.

  So much for grieving for your older brother, Kostmayer thought.

  Kostmayer walked outside to use his cell phone. It rang twice and McCall answered. “Tom Coleman is wearing a silver skull ring. He must’ve gone back to his apartment and slipped it on. He’s getting pretty hammered. He’s with a blonde who looks like she’d like to crawl into his lap.”

  McCall told him to stay close to Tom Coleman. Kostmayer said he would and disconnected. He walked back into the pub and found an empty seat at the bar. He ordered a Stella Artois and watched the NYU student and his date getting cozier and drunker.

  * * *

  Sam Kinney met Rosemont as he stepped out of the elevator of the hotel.

  “Everyone checked in?”

  “They’re all set,” Rosemont said. “They’re meeting me in the dining room for dinner. Not that they want to celebrate. They’ve all lost their homes.”

  “But not their lives,” Sam said simply.

  Norman Rosemont looked at him for a moment. “Who are you?”

  Sam was expecting that. But all he said was “I’m your friend.”

  “About ten days ago a rather elegant black man walked into my offices on Fifth Avenue with an ultimatum. He said he represented a client who wanted me to live in one of my apartment buildings—a slum building, he called it—for two weeks. All of the computers that I need to run my business have gone dark. My business empire came crashing down. I agreed to this maniac’s terms and moved into the building on Tenth Street, apartment 4B.” Rosemont took a breath, then he just smiled. “It was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because it forced me to look at myself in a way I never had before. I made new friends in the building. I started to care about these people and the miserable conditions they were living under. Before I could make it right, the building was torched. Now I can do something about their lives. There will be a new building and it’s going to be spectacular. But that won’t matter to you, Sam. I don’t think you really live there.”

  “No, I live in an apartment building a few blocks up on Amsterdam and Seventieth,” Sam admitted. “But I did stay in that apartment for a few nights.”

  “And you know this mysterious ‘client’ that Mr. Foozelman is representing?”

  “I do.”

  “Why did he single me out?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Because he thought I needed to learn a few life lessons?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, he would have been right. Do you still make great breakfasts here at the hotel?”

  Sam smiled. “I’ve been known to whip up a Colorado omelet once in a while to piss off the chef.”

  Linda Hathaway moved to one side of Rosemont and Connie Hewitt to the other.

  “I just put Gemma down to sleep,” Linda said. “She’s over the moon about her new room! It’s a suite of rooms!”

  Connie took Rosemont’s arm. “We’re all in the dining room. We’re going to buy you dinner, Mr. Rosemont!”

  “Oh, I almost forgot this.” Rosemont reached into his coat pocket and took out a piece of jewelry. It was a man’s silver bracelet, tarnished with age. “I found this on the floor of your bedroom in the apartment, Sam. Is it yours?”

  “Never seen it before.”

  “You should give it to the police.”

  Rosemont dropped the bracelet into Sam’s hand. Linda and Connie hustled their new friend through the lobby. Connie was singing a Broadway song from Hamilton, but she stopped abruptly. “I haven’t quite got the rhythm of hip-hop yet.”

  Rosemont laughed outright. They disappeared into the dining room. Sam looked down at the bracelet in his hand.

  He wouldn’t be giving it to the police.

  But he would give it to Robert McCall.

  * * *

  Kostmayer watched Tom Coleman stagger out of the Peculier Pub with the blonde whose name, Kostmayer had discovered, was Brittney. She was an NYU student majoring in political science. She and Tom climbed into a cab, and Kostmayer followed in another. The first cab pulled up to Tom’s apartment building on Eighteenth. Kostmayer stopped his cab at Union Square, paid the driver, and hustled onto Eighteenth in time to see Tom and Brittney entering the apartment building. A minute later a light went on in a third-floor window.

  Five minutes later the light went out. Kostmayer waited another forty-five minutes before he let himself into the building with the duplicate key that McCall had given him. He climbed the stairs to the third floor and listened at Tom Coleman’s apartment door. There was no sound. He turned a second key in the lock and entered silently.

  Tom Coleman was lying naked on his bed, passed out. Unfortunately Brittney was lying naked on top of him, also passed out. Kostmayer walked to Tom’s side of the bed, and Brittney’s figure stirred. She half turned with her left breast nestled over Tom’s right hand.

  Kostmayer took out the silver demons-claws skull from his jacket pocket. It matched exactly the ring that Tom was wearing—except that Brahms had removed a small piece of the back of it and had inserted a tiny tracking device. He had soldered the piece back so that it was seamless.

  Kostmayer just had to make the switch.

  He knelt down and moved Brittney’s breast from the top of Tom’s hand. She stirred but didn’t awaken. Carefully Kostmayer clutched Tom’s hand and tried to slide the silver skull off his ring finger.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  Kostmayer was sweating in the hot little room. He moved the silver skull back and forth on Tom’s finger, each time tugging at it a little more. It took him a full three minutes, but finally the ring came off. Kostmayer pocketed it and slid the duplicate ring onto Tom’s finger. It was a little less tight. Kostmayer slid the silver skull up and over the knuckle.

  Tom moved.

  He turned over, turning Brittney over, putting his hands onto her breasts. They were both still asleep.

  Kostmayer let out his breath slowly. He crept around the bed and exited. He listened for another five minutes, but no sound came from the apartment. He climbed down the stairs and out on Eighteenth Street. He took out of his pocket the small receiver that Brahms had given McCall and which he had given to Kostmayer. It glowed red. The tracking device was activated. Kostmayer could go home and sleep on his couch while Candy Annie slept in his bedroom. He would keep track of Tom’s Coleman’s movements and report them.

  What happened next would be up to McCall.

  CHAPTER 43

  McCall brought Control up to speed on everything that had happened in Syria with Captain Josh Coleman and everything McCall knew about Josh’s three brothers. It was a lot of intel for the spymaster to assimilate in his present physical condition. But he listened to it all and made notes. Then he went to work on the laptop computer. McCall left him alone for almost two hours and brewed coffee in the small modern kitchen in the apartment. Finally Control motioned to McCall to join him at the desk, where he could see the laptop screen. On one side were the pages Control had copied off McCall’s cell phone from Tom Coleman’s journal. On the other side were notes scrawled over dozens of sheets of yellow foolscap paper. They consisted of various phrases written out by Control, all of them crossed out except for three lines of recognizable text. It didn’t look promising, but McCall didn’t offer a comment.

  “Not all of the scribbled notes in Tom Coleman’s journal were in code,” Control said. “The ones that were, I started out using monoalphabetic ciphers, which use the same substitution letter for the entire message. That
’s where A is, let’s say, D, using the cryptanalysis technique of the frequency that letters occurred in the encrypted text. The most common letter in Tom Coleman’s journal code is E, and that doesn’t work in the Caesar cipher I was using. I tried using the Atbash cipher, where the letters of the alphabet are reversed—the As are Zs, the Bs are Ys, you get the idea. When you’ve got the phrases, reversing the alphabet twice will get you the same algorithm in a substitution cipher, so you can decipher the message. That didn’t work. So I moved on to a polyalphabetic cipher. I used the Vigenére cipher, which is a Caesar cipher. Each letter of the alphabet is shifted along a few places. I got up to shift three, where A would be D, B would be E. The Vigenère cipher consists of using several Caesar ciphers in sequence with different values.

  “I made a columns graph of the alphabet horizontally and vertically. The tabula recta can be used, or a Vigenère square. It consists of the alphabet written out twenty-six times in different rows, each alphabet letter shifted cyclically to the twenty-six possible Caesar ciphers. At different points in the encryption process, the cipher uses a different alphabet from one of the rows. The alphabet at each point depends on a repeating keyword. I tried several, none of them any good.

  “Then I started reading some of Tom Coleman’s passages in his journal that weren’t encrypted. They were all from various books.” Control scrolled down them. McCall leaned forward. “‘The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also hate his friends.’ Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.’ Anaïs Nin. ‘In time we hate that which we often fear.’ William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.

  “There are more on the next page.” Control scrolled to it. “‘I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love.’ Janet Fitch, White Oleander. ‘Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unmoving; unlike love.’ Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye.”

  McCall read, “‘There is no shark like hatred.’ Buddha.”

  “There are a lot of these quotes, some rambling, some taken out of context, but they all have one word that recurs over and over: hatred. So I wrote the word hatred in twelve letters—HATREDHATRED—and I was able to decipher the first encrypted entry in the journal.”

  McCall picked up the yellow pad. Control had written in block letters: NEW YORK CITY—BOERNE—SAN ANTONIO.

  “Tom Coleman is in New York City,” McCall said. “Dr. Patrick Cross lives in Atlanta. Boerne, Texas, is where Bo Ellsworth lives. I don’t see where San Antonio fits in.”

  “Except it’s only about thirty miles southwest of Boerne.”

  McCall had already programmed the profiles for Tom Coleman, Dr. Patrick Cross, and Bo Ellsworth onto Control’s laptop. McCall brought up Cross’s file. “Dr. Cross works for Emory University Hospital and also has an office at the CDC. We need to know if he’s at home, or if he’s going to his offices at the hospital or the CDC. His wife is named Beth—there’s her picture—and there are two kids, Lisa, nine, and David, six. It lists Beth’s phone number. You keep working.”

  “It’s taken me two hours to come up with one breakthrough, six words,” Control said wearily.

  “You’ve got the keyword now for the cipher. I’ll call Beth Cross.”

  McCall dialed his iPhone.

  A sleepy Beth Cross answered, “Yes?”

  McCall told her he was an old friend of her husband’s and asked to speak to him.

  McCall could see Beth Cross in his mind’s eye, sitting up in bed, wide awake now. “Has something happened to Patrick?”

  McCall told her nothing was wrong and her husband was fine.

  “It’s midnight,” Beth said, irritated. “Who is this?”

  McCall told her it was a personal matter.

  “Patrick’s not home,” Beth said shortly. “He left yesterday morning to drive to Texas. If you know him personally, then you’ve got his cell number. If you don’t, he probably doesn’t want to hear from you.”

  She hung up.

  McCall thought he heard anxiety in her voice. He walked back to Control, who was working on the next passage of coded text.

  “Beth Cross said her husband is driving to Texas, whether to Boerne or San Antonio I don’t know.”

  “If he didn’t drive directly to Texas and stayed somewhere for the night, he’ll be back on the road tomorrow morning,” Control said. “He’ll have a GPS unit. You can track it using a Live Trak vehicle-tracking device. I can link you up.”

  Control found the link, then went back to his deciphering. McCall located the signal from Dr. Cross’s GPS unit and looked at the surveillance footage along the route. Dr. Cross had stopped his BMW at a McDonald’s off I-65 in Montgomery, Alabama. McCall picked him up again at Love’s Travel Stop #264 service station off the I-10 in Mobile, Alabama, where he’d stopped for gas. Then Cross had stopped at the Hyatt Place on Bluebonnet Boulevard just off the I-10 in Baton Rouge. McCall accessed Cross’s MasterCard when he paid for his room. On one of the hotel’s surveillance cameras, McCall found Cross’s BMW still parked in the parking lot.

  So Dr. Cross was in Baton Rouge until morning.

  Control balled up another piece of yellow paper and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. His hands clenched into fists.

  McCall moved back to the desk.

  “Tom changed ciphers. The Vigenère cipher now makes no sense. It’s like he wanted to mix it up, make sure he couldn’t be decoded.”

  “Is there another cipher you can try?”

  “There’s the rail cipher. The plain text is written on a succession of ‘rails’ of an imaginary fence, starting with a new column when the bottom is reached. The message is then read off in rows. I may have to use some random letters as placeholders. The message is then condensed and regrouped. I need to figure out how many rails Tom is using. I’ll start with three, then go to four if I can’t make sense of it. Then I have to stack the groups on top of each other and read the message vertically. If it’s gibberish, there may be a couple of random letters that should be deleted. The messages are short, but he’s put a lot of work into them.”

  McCall poured Control a shot of Rémy Martin XO cognac. He sipped it as he started scribbling more notes and calculations. McCall moved to the window and looked out at the traffic moving east down Fiftieth Street. He saw no sign of the rogue cell who was looking for Control right now.

  At 3:00 a.m. Control sat back. “Almost got it.”

  McCall crossed to the desk. Control had various windows on the computer screen open and a new sheet of yellow foolscap beside him. Only a few lines were written on it in Control’s block writing.

  “There are two words that I still have to decipher. I need to go back to one of the other ciphers. What we’ve got here is significant, but it’s all based on conjecture. We have no proof of any terrorist acts that are going to be carried out on our soil, no matter how provocative this journal reads. Give me another hour.”

  McCall made some phone calls.

  * * *

  At 4:00 a.m. three more men were crowded around the computer on the desk in the safe house. Mickey Kostmayer had been the first to arrive. The ordeal he had suffered in the North Korean prison camp had taken its toll on him. Candy Annie had heard him crying out in the night and had run into the living room to find him sitting up on the couch, bathed in sweat. She had folded her arms around him and held him close. It had been such an innocent gesture that he had accepted it without question.

  McCall had found Hayden Vallance in a jazz club called Cleopatra’s Needle uptown on Broadway and Ninety-Second Street. Vallance didn’t work well with authority figures such as Control, but he knew that McCall wouldn’t have called him without a good reason.

  Colonel Michael G. Ralston had been in New York City to be close to Helen Coleman. McCall had told him that his call was a matter of national security. Ralston could tell no one at the Pentagon about this meeting. This briefing would be classified top secret.

  McCall introduced Con
trol under his real name of James Thurgood Cameron, but told them to use his Company name of Control. McCall told them about the Jihadist flag that he’d found in the bottom drawer in the chest at Tom Coleman’s apartment and about the notebook.

  “We’re dealing with three brothers,” Control said, “all of whom have been in contact with each other, even if they haven’t seen each other in a long time. Tom Coleman is a student at NYU, Dr. Patrick Cross works with Doctors Without Borders, and ‘Bo’ Ellsworth is a factory foreman. We believe they are planning to carry out three separate terrorist attacks on American soil. All of them are United States citizens. None of them have profiles with Homeland Security, although the third brother, Bo Ellsworth, has been questioned by the FBI, and the compound where he lives in Boerne, Texas, has been searched at least once. The Feds were looking for armaments, of which Bo has plenty, but all of them were legally purchased.”

  “Will you get in touch with the FBI?” Gunner asked.

  “When I get to Texas. There’s a clock on this, gentlemen. But I’ll get to that at the end. Let’s take it one line at a time.”

  Control brought up the first line of Tom Coleman’s deciphered text: NEW YORK CITY—BOERNE—SAN ANTONIO.

  “Tom Coleman is New York. Dr. Cross is on the road from Atlanta, and we’re pretty sure he’s heading to Texas to meet up with Bo Ellsworth. I don’t know yet what the reference to San Antonio means.”

  Control put up the next deciphered sentence of plain text: ALAMO RENDEZVOUS—MINUTEMEN—VALENCIA.

  “We don’t know what ‘Alamo rendezvous’ means. Dr. Cross and Bo Ellsworth could be planning an attack on the Alamo Mission, which would be a Jihadist target, but it’s heavily guarded. And Bo Ellsworth’s profile doesn’t match. He considers himself a patriot and would never condone an attack on a Texas shrine. He commands a local military force, the Texas Minutemen Militia, dedicated to preserving the rights of American citizens. This ‘Alamo rendezvous’ may just be a place with the name Alamo in it.”

  “What’s the significance of Valencia?” Kostmayer asked.

  “We don’t know,” Control said. He brought up the next line of plain text: BULL AND HORSE—BRUTALITY AND DARKNESS.