The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Tommy nodded. Six million bucks, an inside job.

  “Not a major player, of course, or he’d be farting through silk,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been working nickel-and-dime rackets like that cell-phone scam.”

  “He might still be alive,” Tommy pointed out.

  “You want to play with the big dogs, you have to learn to piss in the tall grass,” Babs said. “No disrespect, but Roy was never cut out to be a big dog. He didn’t have the chops.”

  “Roy was only half smart,” Tommy said. “We both know it.”

  “So don’t be half-assed, Tommy,” Beeks said.

  “You haven’t told me what you want,” Tommy said.

  “You still got a line into Port Authority?” Babs asked him.

  “Their security’s a lot tighter these days, after 9/11.”

  “It might leave something to be desired.”

  “TSA couldn’t find the crack in their ass with a mirror.”

  Babs smiled in spite of herself. “Well, there’s the crack in your ass, and then there’s the mirror,” she said.

  “I hear stuff,” he admitted.

  “What kind of stuff?” Babs asked.

  Tommy shrugged. “I heard of a guy wants to smuggle a tractor-trailer load of smokes up from North Carolina,” he said.

  “Useful, but not exactly what we’re looking for.”

  “Hey, you wanted a for-instance.”

  “For instance, what do you hear about an air cargo heist at JFK?”

  “Give me a what, I might know a who,” he said.

  So there it was. He had her in a fork. She had no choice but to spell it out. “A container shipment of 5.56 NATO. Going to Iraq. Somebody lost the manifest and made it disappear.”

  “That’s some heavy lifting,” Tommy said.

  “Somebody with more muscle than brains,” Beeks said. “Seem familiar?”

  “I’d only be guessing, but my guess is probably the same as yours,” Tommy said. “Viktor Guzenko.”

  No surprise there. Of the Russian gang lords, Guzenko was one of the most feared, both by the other ethnic crime families in Brighton Beach—even the Chechens, who weren’t scared of much—and by the older, more established New York mobs, Irish and Italian. Like the Jamaicans and the brutally violent MS-13, Guzenko settled his scores in blood. He was reported to have survived half-a-dozen assassination attempts by rivals and his own colleagues. If anybody was contemptuous of bringing down federal heat, Guzenko was your man. But it led nowhere. It was an educated guess, as Tommy had said.

  “What can you find out?” Babs asked him.

  “I’m not going to wear a wire,” Tommy said.

  She looked at Beeks, surprised. Neither one of them had even thought to suggest it. Why so quick to say no to something they hadn’t put on the table?

  “You think he’s blowing smoke?” Beeks asked her after they let Tommy go.

  “Maybe he knows more than he’s ready to tell,” Babs said.

  ***

  Of course, that was the impression Tommy wanted to leave. He’d played the cops before. They were always a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.

  The question was what to give.

  Not that Tommy had much to offer. He’d been bluffing Babs, and he knew better than to try and bluff the Russians. He’d gotten away with it once, and nobody had read his handwriting in it, but he didn’t think he’d luck out a second time.

  DiMello had given him the lead, though. He knew Brooklyn South would have already squeezed the guys working the terminal, and the feds would have put them through the wringer, too, but you couldn’t get blood from a stone. Tommy figured the cops had drawn a blank, or they wouldn’t be grasping at straws. Thing was, after 9/11, security had tightened up, but more often than not, the new procedures simply made everything more inconvenient and cumbersome. They didn’t address the underlying problem and served to create grievances. The union rank and file didn’t appreciate being taken to task for something that wasn’t in fact their responsibility. Background checks were already strict. The heightened clearance requirements made for bad blood. Loss of seniority because your next of kin came from Pakistan was one step away from a class-action lawsuit.

  Tommy had the one arrow in his quiver. Either the cargo handlers knew nothing or they were unwilling to speculate. You didn’t give the FBI the loose end of a ball of yarn, not if you might be open to uncomfortable questions, none of which had dick to do with international terrorism, but you were vulnerable.

  Tommy knew a bar in South Ozone. He took the subway out to Queens.

  You spring for a round of draft beers, it’s an investment.

  Jeremy Chapin, she found out, was now heading up ATF regional out of Phoenix. AIC, agent in charge, so on paper it was a promotion, but if you read the runes, it might just as easily be a career ender.

  “Detective DiMello,” he said when Babs got him on the phone. “Good to hear from you.” He sounded as if he meant it, and Babs felt a little guilty, since she’d played an inadvertent part in getting him reassigned from the New York office.

  “I’ve got a situation here,” she said. She told him about the Kennedy hijack. “There’s a Russian gangster named Guzenko who might have a piece of it, but nobody’s talking. They’re all either bought off or scared.”

  “Georgian, actually,” Chapin said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Guzenko’s a Georgian, like Joe Stalin.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not personally, but I hear he’s a ruthless bastard.”

  “Who can he sell to, that kind of volume?”

  Chapin grunted. “I could point you at some guys,” he said. “Across the border from El Paso, the Juarez cartel.”

  “Drug lords.”

  “It’s a free-fire zone down there, you hadn’t heard. The gangs are whacking each other ten or a dozen a day. And there’s a lot of collateral damage, civilian casualties.”

  “With all due respect, you’ve got a dog in the fight.”

  “Sure, it’s my area of responsibility,” Chapin said. “But you’re not going to sell 5.56 NATO to the muj or the rebels in Chechnya. Weapon of choice in that neck of the woods is the AK, 7.62 Soviet. Down in Mexico, it’s the M4.”

  The M4 was a slightly shortened configuration of the M16, U.S. military issue. “How come?” Babs asked him.

  Chapin blew out his breath. “Think about the provenance,” he said. “Where do the cartels get their guns? They don’t have a source for Warsaw Pact surplus weapons.”

  “Right,” she said, catching up. “They smuggle guns in from the U.S.”

  “So yeah, I’ve got a dog in the fight,” he said. “All the border states, this is heavy traffic. The hot-button issue is illegals, but that’s bullshit. What comes north is drugs, what goes south is guns and money. You want a market for ammo? You could turn that stuff in forty-eight hours, cash money.”

  “How do I get it there?”

  “Label it plasma-screen TVs. How the hell do I know? All I know is, it slips through the cracks each and every day.”

  “Big crack, for containerized cargo to fall through.”

  There was a long hesitation on the Arizona end of the line.

  She could picture him frowning. “Containerized?” he asked.

  “Yeah, we’re talking a couple of million rounds.”

  “What was it doing at JFK?”

  “Waiting shipment.”

  “No,” he said. “You ship containers by rail or sea. You can’t get something that size and weight on an aircraft, not even a C-5A Galaxy. A container would be across the river, at the docks in Jersey, or downstate, McGuire AFB. And it would be broken down into something manageable, thousand-pound pallets.”

  “Not my information.”

  “Either your information is mistaken or you’re looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope,” he said. “That container shouldn’t have been at Kennedy. It couldn’t be loaded as air freight.”<
br />
  She studied the problem. “It would have come in by truck.”

  “A semi could haul it. It could go out the same way.”

  “Let me get back to you,” she said.

  “Keep me in the loop,” Chapin said. He hung up.

  He had Washington on speed dial, Babs figured. Maybe this was going to break open. ATF had resources she didn’t. Not that it mattered who made the case. Still, better if she stayed in front of the curve. The container. Where did that lead?

  Xynergistics had good computer capacity, but nothing like the big arrays available to the intelligence community. Lydie Temple put her data together and ran it by her boss, and got his approval to forward the package to their NSA contact.

  He e-mailed her back two hours later, which was way fast.

  CALL ON THE SECURE LINE

  RAPTOR

  The cover name was an inside joke, a reference to Omnivore, the FBI targeted data-mining program, now on the shelf and collecting nothing but dust. NSA had newer-generation software.

  Raptor was a career spook named Felix Soto.

  Lydie went into the communications center and signed onto a terminal. It was a dedicated landline to Fort Meade.

  Felix picked up at his end immediately. “I bow to genius,” he said.

  She laughed. He was teasing, but she was pleased.

  “Seriously,” he said. “You’re onto something. I bought some time on the Cray, and we’re showing consistency.” He was talking about one of the half-dozen supercomputers in the bowels of the agency. “How’d you snap to this?”

  “Random pattern,” she said. “It was just background noise. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything.”

  “Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty hard to miss.”

  “How long have we been missing it?”

  “You cut right to the chase, kid. We’ll walk the cat back. Hopefully, we can come up with a timeline.”

  “It’s not of purely historical interest,” she said.

  “You got that right,” Felix said. “We’re working against the clock. You know how much materiel is floating around out there, in transit, or waiting shipment? Any of it falls through the cracks, it’s a raft of grief.” He hung up.

  Well. Out of her hands. The national security apparatus would grind into motion. It was unhappy that they were only now playing catch-up ball.

  Because here was what Lydie had stumbled across. DOD, the Defense Department, contracted with common carriers, UPS and FedEx, long-haul freight companies like Old Dominion and United Van Lines and R&L, and they were on an approved list. But the other thing was that they all had websites. You could go on the Internet and schedule a pickup, a box of cookies you were sending your mom, for example, or a container cargo of 5.56 NATO, for another. Somebody had hacked into one of the websites and misdirected a shipment. Not your mom’s cookies, either.

  How many shipments? she wondered.

  According to Tommy’s guy, all you needed was a couple of cans of spray paint and some stencils.

  “Containers are labeled,” the guy told him. His name was Kaufman. “Originating shipper, destination, routing logs. It’s written right on the box.”

  “Everybody knows what’s inside?”

  Kaufman shook his head. “They use an alphanumeric code, referencing the load ticket. The contents are on the manifest, not the container. What gets marked are the transit points. Yokohama to Los Angeles. L.A. to Biloxi. Every time that box transits a freight yard, the yard’s route number goes on it, and then it gets handed off to the next station of the cross.”

  “What if the numbers are off?”

  “Then it sits in Biloxi.”

  Or at JFK. “How often does that happen?” Tommy asked.

  “We don’t get many orphans.”

  “What happens if you do?”

  “You get dispatch to crosscheck.”

  “Could something sit there for a week and not be noticed?”

  Kaufman shrugged. “We move a lot of cargo,” he said. “The yardmaster has a clipboard full.”

  “So the answer is yes.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Kaufman said. “You could put a nuclear weapon in a container. You don’t ship it from Dubai, you send it through Singapore. It takes six weeks to get to New York. You fudge the numbers, it sits on a dock, unclaimed. You want I should spell it out any more?”

  Tommy had been upstate when the Trade Center went down, but he didn’t need it spelled out for him.

  “I don’t know what you’re sniffing around this for, Tommy,” Kaufman said, “but I smell trouble.”

  “You know a hood named Viktor Guzenko?” Tommy asked.

  Kaufman’s face shut like a door.

  The agent from ATF’s New York office was a woman. Babs DiMello had to wonder whether that was just the luck of the draw or they’d sent another woman to soften Babs up. The name on her ID read Phoebe Kreuz. They were about the same age.

  “Jeremy Chapin’s been burning up the wires,” Kreuz said.

  “You getting any collateralization?”

  “Other agencies? Sure.”

  “What’s the FBI given up?” Babs asked.

  “Well, the Bureau . . .” Kreuz paused. “You don’t change a culture overnight. They get ahold of something, if they’re the lead agency, they sink their teeth into it. And they’re used to protecting their turf. It’s like Hoover never died.”

  “Like trying to turn the Titanic around.”

  “More like trying to turn the iceberg,” Kreuz said.

  She had a quick smile, and Babs was warming up to her.

  “You’d be surprised at what turns up, if you cultivate a relationship,” Kreuz said. “For instance, Jerry Chapin tells me you’re the go-to gal, Brooklyn South.”

  “That’s flattering.”

  “I didn’t bring a box of chocolates, but I’ve got something to share. We’ve received specific intelligence.”

  “FBI?”

  Again the quick smile. “NSA,” Kreuz said. “You know what I’m talking about?”

  Intercepted communications. “I hear the initials stand for No Such Agency,” Babs said.

  “I can’t speak to sources and methods,” Kreuz said. “Plain fact is, I don’t know what their sources and methods are. But here’s what they came up with. War materiel is being rerouted. Somebody’s hacked the websites of the shippers.”

  “Chapin said there was no way a container should be at JFK, because an aircraft couldn’t lift that kind of weight.”

  “Why did it end up at Kennedy?”

  “Ease of access,” Babs said.

  “What happened to it?”

  “It disappeared.”

  “Yeah,” Kreuz said. “We’re having the same conversation everybody else has been having for a week. What’s different is, we know it’s not just a target of opportunity.”

  “It’s not accidental. It’s organized.”

  “That’s some serious diversion going on. There might be a host of corruption in Baghdad and Kabul, but we’re talking about stuff that never sees the Gulf.”

  “Chapin says it’s going to the drug lords in Mexico.”

  “I don’t care where it’s going. I want it to stay here, or we keep track of it, and it goes where it’s supposed to go.”

  “You and me both,” Babs said. She had a brother serving in the National Guard, posted to Afghanistan.

  “What about this Russian gangster, Guzenko?”

  “I’m hitting a wall. These guys don’t rat each other out, or if they do, they’re dead before it ever gets to a grand jury. People in the life are terrified of Guzenko.”

  “You get anything out of NYPD Organized Crime?”

  “Known associates. Involvement in sex slavery, protection, identity theft. But it’s a lock nobody can pick.”

  “Identity theft suggests some minimal computer literacy.”

  “I see where you’re going,” Babs said. “Hacking the shippers’ websites. It’s not that
I don’t make the guy for it, or that he’s not capable of it. The issue is, we’ve got nothing we could take to a judge. There’s no chain of evidence.”

  “So we’re still sucking air.”

  DiMello’s cell chimed. She looked at the caller ID. Tommy Meadows. “Wait one,” she said to Phoebe Kreuz.

  Tommy was at a Starbucks near Prospect Park.

  “Be there in ten,” Babs said. She broke the connection.

  “Yes, no?” Kreuz asked.

  “Maybe we got, maybe we don’t,” Babs said. She took her weapon out of the desk drawer and snapped it on her belt. She stood up. “You down with it?”

  Kreuz opened her jacket to show a gun, strong-side carry. It looked to Babs like a steel-frame Sig, probably a .357 or .40 Smith.

  “Let’s go buy this guy a cup of coffee,” Babs said.

  Porfírio and Hernán were made men, MS-13, stone killers with teardrop tattoos at the outside corner of each eye, a trickle of dark ink, crocodile tears, one for every man they’d murdered. Porfírio was lean and quick, stripped down like a racecar, while Hernán was blocked out like a diesel truck, all the muscle between his ears. They’d met at Attica. They were in their late twenties, and already they had thirty years in the prison system between them, going back to Juvenile. Like other immigrants to the New World, the Italians and the Irish, Latinos and Chinese, some of them had turned to crime, muling drugs and illegals, but the Maras were enforcers. Porfírio and Hernán had never met the Vor, the boss of thieves, but they knew they were taking his money. Guzenko’s chosen intermediary was a man named Iosif Bagratyön, another Georgian.

  He gave them a name and a photograph.

  “¿Qué tan pronto?” Porfírio asked. How soon?

  “As soon as you can,” the Georgian said.

  “Does it matter where?” Porfírio asked.

  “Near his workplace, or his family. Either one.”

  “Are there special instructions?”

  “Make it messy,” Bagratyön told them. “Make it hurt. Make it ugly. We want to send a message.”

  Porfírio smiled. He enjoyed using a knife.