Buried Secrets (25 page)

“Then who?”

“Certain oligarchs. Our newly minted Russian billionaires. They’re often in need of hard men. A few in particular are known to use Sova members.”

“Which ones?”

He laughed. “Nicholas, we haven’t even discussed a fee yet! First things first.” He told me his fee, and after I stifled the impulse to tell him where to stuff his hard currency, I agreed to his usurious terms.

Then he said, “Excellent. Let me make some calls.”

65.

Dragomir was a fast learner.

This time he used the Wasp knife correctly. The young police officer didn’t even have time to turn around before the blade went into his side, lightning-fast, right up to the hilt.

He thumbed the button and heard the hiss and the pop.

Officer Kent sagged to the ground. It looked like he’d suddenly decided to sit right there in the middle of the yard, except that his legs sprawled awkwardly in a way that would be unbearably painful if he were alive.

But he died instantly, or close to it. His internal organs had expanded and frozen at the same time. His abdomen was swollen as if he’d suddenly developed a beer belly.

As Dragomir hoisted the body over his shoulders, he could hear the crackle of Officer Kent’s handheld radio.

66.

Diana and I met at the Sheep’s Head Tavern, a sorta-kinda Irish pub in Government Center right next to FBI headquarters. She’d told me she had to grab a quick dinner and then get back up to work. That was fine with me: I had a very long night ahead.

The outside tables were all full, so we sat in a booth inside. I saw a lot of old-looking wood, or new wood made to look old with random gouges and a lot of dark varnish. There were old pub signs on the wall and a carved wooden bar with Celtic lettering on the front and reproductions of old Guinness ads. There were a lot of fancy beers on tap, mostly American microbrews, some German. She was wearing a turquoise silk top and black jeans that somehow managed to emphasize her curves without looking totally unprofessional.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “We didn’t turn up anything in the FAA’s flight log database.”

“How often is it updated?”

“Constantly. In real time.”

“And it’s complete?”

She nodded. “Private airports as well as public ones.”

“Well, it was a brilliant idea,” I said. “But not all brilliant ideas work out. Thanks for trying. Now I have something for
you
.”

“Bad news?”

“No. But I don’t think you’re going to like it.” I handed her Mauricio’s mobile phone in a ziplock bag.

“I don’t understand,” she said after looking at it for a few seconds. “What is it?” I told her.

“You took that from his apartment?”

I nodded.

“Without telling me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t trust Snyder.”

Her mouth tightened and her nostrils flared.

“It was wrong to withhold it from you,” I said. “I know that.” She didn’t say anything. She just looked down at the table, face flushed.

“Talk to me,” I said.

Finally she looked up. “So was it worth it, Nick? You know we can never use that as evidence in court, right? Since you disrupted the chain of custody?”

“I don’t think the Bureau is going to be prosecuting a dead guy.”

“I’m talking about whoever’s behind this thing. There’s a reason we have procedures.”

“You always colored within the lines.”

“I’m a rules girl, Nico. Whereas you were never big on the chain of command, as I recall.

You’re not an organization man.”

“The last organization I joined sent me to Iraq.”

“We both want the same thing. We just have different ways to get there. But as long as you’re working with me and the FBI, you have to respect the rules we play by.”

“I understand.”

She looked at me hard. “Don’t ever do this to me again.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. Now, at least tell me you got something useful out of it.” I nodded. “His phone number and the only number on his call log, presumably the guy who hired him to abduct Alexa. One of my sources plotted those numbers along with Alexa’s phone number on a map of cell phone towers and was able to chart the route they traveled.” She shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did he get a map of cell phone towers?”

“Don’t ask. Bottom line, the path seems to point up north to New Hampshire.”

“Meaning what? The kidnapper came down from New Hampshire?”

“Yes, but more important, it means he’s probably got her up there now.”

“Where, specifically?”

“That’s all we know—New Hampshire. Somewhere in New Hampshire.”

“Well, that helps, I guess,” Diana said. “But we’re going to need more data points than that. Otherwise it’s a lost cause.”

“How about the tattoo?”

She shook her head. “Nothing came back on that from any of our legats.”

“Well, I’ve got an excellent source in Moscow who’s making some calls for me right now.”

“Moscow?”

“That owl is Russian prison ink.”

“Who’s your source on that?”

“Actually, my twenty-four-year-old militant-vegan office manager.” She gave me a look.

“I’m serious. It’s complicated. That owl tattoo identifies members of Sova, a gang of former Russian prison inmates.”

She took out a small notepad and jotted something down. “If Alexa’s kidnapper is Russian, does that mean he’s working for Russians?”

“Not for sure. But I’d put money on it. My source in Moscow says Sova members are often hired by Russian oligarchs to do dirty work when they need plausible deniability. He’s helping me narrow down the pool of suspects. Meanwhile, I want to find out what David Schechter’s role in all this really is.”

“How’s that going to help find Alexa?”

I told her about the exchange I’d overheard between David Schechter and Marshall Marcus.

“You think Schechter is controlling Marcus?” she said.

“Clearly.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe his wife’s shady past has something to do with it.” She cocked a brow, and I explained what I’d found out about Belinda Marcus’s last profession. “I have a PI digging into it right now,” I said. “To see what else he can find. But I don’t think that’s it. It’s too recent and too trivial.”

“Then what’s the hold Schechter has over him?”

“That’s what I plan to find out.”

“How?”

I told her.

“That’s illegal,” she said.

“Then you didn’t hear it from me.”

“It doesn’t bother you that you’d be committing a crime?”

I shrugged. “As a great man once said, in certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law.”

“Martin Luther King?”

“Close. The Punisher.”

She looked confused.

“I guess you don’t read comic books,” I said.

67.

Dragomir drove out to the main road, relieved to pass only a lumber truck. Not someone from the town who might notice a police squad car coming out of the Alderson property and gossip about it later, maybe ask questions.

He knew where to go. Earlier, he’d driven around the area, scouting escape routes in case it came to that, until he’d discovered a deserted stretch of narrow road that would do well. A place where the road curved sharply on the lip of a ravine.

Of course there was a guardrail. But not on the long straight stretch leading into it, where the plunge was just as steep.

He pulled over at a point where he could see the traffic in both directions. There wasn’t any. Then he drove a bit farther down the road until he was about twenty feet or so from an edge where there was no guardrail.

Glancing around again, he opened the trunk of the police cruiser, lifted Officer Kent’s body out, and quickly carried it around to the open driver’s door. There he carefully positioned the body. Then he lifted the black plastic trash bags from the floor of the trunk.

An autopsy wasn’t likely. Mostly likely they’d see a police officer killed in a tragic car crash and it would end there. Anyway, by the time any autopsy was done, he’d be long gone. He only cared about what might be found in the next twenty-four hours.

Before he pushed the car into the ravine he put it in drive. If the gear selector were in neutral when the crash was discovered, any skilled investigator would immediately figure out what had really happened.

He didn’t make that kind of mistake.

68.

At a few minutes after nine at night, the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston, was an obsidian monolith. A few lighted windows scattered here and there like a corncob with not many kernels remaining. Some of the building’s tenants were open round the clock.

But not the law offices of Batten Schechter, on the forty-eighth floor. No paralegals toiling frantically through the night to meet a filing deadline or a court date. Batten Schechter’s attorneys rarely soiled their hands with anything so vulgar as a public trial. This was a sedate, dignified firm that specialized in trusts and estates and the occasional litigation, always resolved in quietly vicious backroom negotiations, perhaps a word whispered in the ear of the right judge or official. It was like growing mushrooms: They preferred to work out of the light of day.

I drove the white Ford panel truck down Trinity Place along the back of the Hancock Tower, and up to the loading dock. A row of five steel pylons blocked my way. I got out, saw the warning signs—DO NOT SOUND HORN FOR ENTRY and PUSH BUTTON & USE

INTERCOM FOR ACCESS WHEN DOOR IS CLOSED—and I hit the big black button.

The steel overhead door rolled up, and a little fireplug of a man stood there, looking annoyed at the interruption. It was 9:16 P.M. Stitched in script on his blue shirt, above the name of his company, was CARLOS. He glanced at the logo on the side of the van—DERDERIAN

FINE ORIENTAL RUGS—nodded, hit a switch, and the steel columns sank into the pavement.

He pointed to a space inside the loading dock where a few other service vehicles were parked.

He insisted on guiding me in as if I couldn’t park by myself, waving me in closer and closer to the dock until the van’s front end nudged the black rubber bumpers.

“You here for Batten Schechter?” Carlos said.

I nodded, striking a balance between cordial and aloof.

All he knew was that the law firm of Batten Schechter had called the Hancock’s property management office and told them that a carpet cleaner would be working in their offices some time after nine o’clock. He didn’t need to know that the “facilities manager” of Batten Schechter was actually Dorothy.

Couldn’t have been easier. All I had to do was promise Mr. Derderian I’d buy one of his overpriced, though elegant, rugs for my office. In exchange he was happy to lend me one of his vans. None of them were in use at night anyway.

“How’s it going there, Carlos?”

He gave the standard Boston answer: “Doin’ good, doin’ good.” A Boston accent with a Latin flavor. “Got a lotta carpets to clean, up there?”

“Just one.”

He grunted.

I pulled open the van’s rear doors and wrestled with the big bulky commercial carpet extractor/shampooer. He helped me lower it to the floor, even though it wasn’t his job, then pointed a thumb toward a bank of freight elevators.

The elevator was slow to arrive. It had scuffed steel walls and aluminum diamond-tread-plate floors. I hit the button for forty-eight. As it rose, I adjusted Mauricio’s STI pistol in my waistband. I’d been storing it in the Defender’s glove box ever since I’d grabbed it from his apartment.

I didn’t see any security cameras inside the elevator, but I couldn’t be sure, so I didn’t take it out.

A moment later, the steel doors opened slowly on a small fluorescent-lit service lobby on the forty-eighth floor. Obviously not where the firm’s clients or partners entered. I wheeled out the rug shampooer and saw four doors. Each was the service entrance to a different firm, each labeled with a black embossed plastic nameplate.

The one for Batten Schechter had an electronic digital keypad mounted next to it. David Schechter’s firm probably had reason to take extra security measures.

From my duffel bag I drew a long flexible metal rod, bent at a ninety-degree angle, a hook at one end. This was a special tool called a Leverlock, sold only to security professionals and government agencies.

I knelt down and pushed the rod underneath the door and twisted it around and up until it caught the lever handle on the inside, then yanked it down. Thirteen seconds later I was in.

So much for the fancy digital keypad.

Now I found myself in some back corridor where the firm stored office supplies and cleaning equipment and such. I pushed the rug shampooer against a wall and made my way by the dim emergency lighting.

It was like going from steerage to a stateroom on the
Queen Mary
. Soft carpeting, mahogany doors with brass nameplates, antique furnishings.

David Schechter, as a name partner, got the corner office. In an alcove before the mahogany double doors to his inner sanctum was a secretary’s desk and a small couch with coffee table. The double doors were locked.

Then I saw another digital keypad, mounted unobtrusively by the doorframe at eye level.

Strange. It meant that Schechter’s office probably wasn’t cleaned by the crew that did the rest of the building.

It also meant there was something inside worth protecting.

The odds were, the combination to the digital lock was scrawled on some Post-it pad in his secretary’s desk drawer. But faster than looking for it would be to use the Leverlock.

The whole thing felt almost too easy.

From the duffel bag I removed a black carrying case. Inside, a flexible fiberscope lay coiled in the form-fitted foam padding like a metallic snake. A tungsten-braided sheath encased a fiber-optic cable two meters long and less than six millimeters in diameter. Bomb-disposal teams used these in Iraq to look for concealed explosives.

I bent the scope into an angle, screwed on the eyepiece, and attached an external metal-halide light source, then fished it under the door. A lever on the handle allowed me to move the probe around like an elephant’s trunk. Now I could see what was on the other side of the door. Angling it upward, I inspected the wall on the far side of the doorframe. Nothing appeared to be mounted there.