Finding North (18 page)

“
We should check when we
get a chance,” Alex said. “But why would anyone kill Orchid? Why
here?”

“
We’d have to look into
Orchid’s background, certainly,” Raz said. “But I think Orchid was
murdered to keep us here today.”

“
Why would anyone want to
ground us?” Alex asked.

“
So they can get into
Dex’s house,” Raz said. “I thought that when the FBI arrived at the
scene, but . . . it sounded kind of
paranoid.”

“
No, I think you’re
right,” Alex said. “I wondered about it when Colin told me the team
couldn’t get in here.”

“
Joseph said he was told
there was no access to this apartment,” Colin said. “But we didn’t
set that up.”

“
I doubt Orchid thought of
it,” Raz said. “I mean, we’ll have to check,
but . . .”

“
Right,” Alex said. “What
if they didn’t want to ground us?”

Alex gestured to Colin,
Raz, and herself.

“
What if they just wanted
to ground you?” Alex nodded to Raz. “What . . .
uh . . . I’m not even sure what questions to ask?
That’s usually your job.”

Raz smiled.

“
What gets me is that we
have another set of people looking for another bevy of mysterious
objects,” Colin said. He leaned in to Alex and used a low voice.
This was one of his new skills. She smiled at his use of it.
“Didn’t we just find that book?”

“
The mysterious ‘they’
don’t know that we have the book,” Alex said in the same tone.
“Think about it. They believe I’ve deciphered Linear A, which means
I can read Josef Yakovlev’s comments in the book.”

“
We haven’t acted on the
intel from those notes.” Raz put his head between Alex and Colin’s.
“They’d have to assume that we don’t have the book.”

Colin leaned back and
thought for a moment before nodding. The low voice was incredibly
effective but could be used only in small doses, or those watching
would catch on. Colin pointed to something on the screen and said
in his usual voice, “Do you think this is it?”

“
Probably not,” Raz said,
to continue a louder conversation for the videotape.

“
I think it’s this one.”
Alex flipped the computer to her and brought up a satellite map.
She pointed to where they’d gone into the river. “We went in
there.”

Raz and Colin leaned in to
look at the computer screen.

“
The book came from New
York,” Alex said in a barely audible tone. “We are here because of
the symbol on the maps in my office. Were Dex or his father
connected to Yakovlev? Or Cooper’s dad?
Or . . .?”

Alex shrugged. Raz and
Colin shook their heads.

“
Dex gave me a key last
night,” Raz said in the same low tone. “He said he wanted me to
have it. It’s to his father’s ‘private collection,’ whatever that
is. He was going to show me today.”

“
Maybe he was taken to
keep from showing you the collection,” Colin said in his newly
acquired low voice.

“
As for the
others . . .” Raz shrugged. He leaned back and spoke
in his normal voice. “Dex’s father was a chemical engineer. His
grandfather fought at Normandy and then worked in California after
the war. Their family has always owned land here in Tribeca, so,
when his grandfather died, his father moved back here.”

“
So it’s very possible
we’re circling the same group of people,” Alex said in her low
voice.

Raz intentionally didn’t
acknowledge what she’d said, so as to not draw attention to
her.

“
I asked Dex last night if
he knew Troy,” Raz said in his normal voice. “He said he’d heard of
Troy’s father, Haemon, through his father.”

“
How so?” Alex
asked.

“
His father was a chemical
engineer,” Raz said. “Haemon Jasper is an eminent
physicist.”

Raz shrugged.

“
Sounds like Alex is
right,” Colin said. Switching to the low tone, “Dex’s collection is
connected to that group.”

“
Maybe it’s about
maintaining control of this collection,” Alex said in her normal
voice. “Do we know where this collection came from?”

Raz shook his
head.

“
Why did Dex leave
everything to you?” Alex asked.

“
He said he never believed
I was dead,” Raz said. “He always thought I would show back up.
When I did, yesterday, he was too freaked out about it to believe
it was me.”

Colin looked up when the
agent-in-charge came into the kitchen.

“
We’d like you to show us
where you were at the time of the shooting,” the agent said. “We
want to know what you heard.”

“
Sure,” Alex
said.

Alex and Raz went into
their room and lay down on the bed. Colin went into the smaller
bedroom near the kitchen. The agent-in-charge closed their doors
and locked them.

“
Now what?” Raz asked
under his breath.

“
No idea,” Alex
said.

“
You think we’re locked
in?” Raz asked.

“
It is one of the security
features of the apartment,” Alex said.

The door locks could be
set so that the people inside couldn’t get out. Alex looked up at
the surveillance camera and hoped her Sergeant would be able to let
them out. Alex was just starting to get antsy when the lock on
their doors clicked open.

“
Did you hear anything?”
the agent-in-charge asked.

“
No,” Alex
said.

“
It’s as we thought,” the
agent-in-charge said. “The soundproofing kept you from hearing the
attack on Agent Hong.”

Alex nodded.

“
You may come out,” the
agent-in-charge said. “We’ve decided to move you to another
apartment, so that we can finish our work and you can continue on
with your day.”

“
Thank you,” Alex
said.

“
We’ll move everything, so
you don’t have to worry,” the agent-in-charge said.

Alex gave him a long look.
The agency would also have a chance to go through their belongings.
She nodded. Raz turned to catch her eye from the north windows of
the apartment. He nodded.

“
Sir,” Alex said to the
agent-in-charge. “You might want to look at something.”

She nodded to where Raz
was standing.

“
It looks like someone
came in and out of the apartment from this window,” Raz
said.

“
This north-east window?”
the agent-in-charge asked.

“
Yes,” Raz said. “That’s
the one.”

The agent-in-charge took a
look and waved his forensics people over to take a look.

“
Excellent find,” the
agent-in-charge said. “How did you notice this?”

“
We saw it on the tapes,”
Colin said to relieve Raz of some of the agent-in-charge’s intense
scrutiny. “I can show you.”

Colin led the
agent-in-charge to the kitchen area.

“
What do you think?” Alex
asked.

“
Definitely professional,”
Raz said.

“
Intelligence
community?”

“
Yes,” Raz said.
“You?”

“
Contractor or agency,”
Alex nodded. She shook her head and snorted. “Probably that douche
Zutterberg.”

Raz nodded in agreement.
Hearing the agent-in-charge thank Colin, Raz got Alex’s jacket.
They were escorted out of the apartment before they could take
anything else with them. They remained silent on the elevator ride
down and the walk out of the building. Two agents followed them the
moment they stepped out of the building.

“
Dinner?” Colin
asked.

“
Good idea,” Alex said.
“There’s nothing we can do until the NYPD turns over the
scene.”

“
You don’t want to demand
control?” Raz asked.

“
Seems a little public,”
Alex said. “We just were on the news. I’d like to limit that to one
a day.”

“
Good thinking,” Raz
said.

“
Where shall we go?” Alex
asked.

“
I know just the place,”
Raz said.

F

Chapter
Fourteen

Tuesday evening

May 17 — 6:35 p.m.
EDT

New York City, New
York

Joseph was waiting for
them at the hole-in-the-wall steak house. While Raz ordered steaks
for everyone, Joseph updated Alex on their minimal progress. So
far, all they knew was that Dex had been taken by force a few
minutes after Raz had left him. There had been no ransom request or
contact from anyone about Dex. For all intents and purposes, he was
gone.

Even though, technically,
the Fey Team had authority over the scene, the NYPD had made it
nearly impossible to get into Dex’s home. The FBI had launched a
public campaign against the NYPD. In turn, the NYPD had closed and
locked the Zeno estate.

“
I thought you’d like to
review the tape,” Joseph said. He gave Alex his phone. “I had
Sergeant Dusty send it to my phone.”

“
Your phone?” Alex gave
him a wry smile.

When Joseph had been the
Staff Sergeant for the Fey Special Forces Team, he had insisted
that the team never use cell technology. They traveled the world to
communicate and do their research rather than run the risk of being
monitored.

“
Very fancy, very secure.”
Joseph winked at Alex, and she laughed. “It’s from the lot you
received from Ji and has no leaky apps.”

Ji Fong was Steven
Pershing’s only child and the head of China’s elite military
unit,
Shāsh
ǒ
uji
à
n
or
“Assassin’s Mace.” Last fall, Alex and the Fey Team had worked with
Ji and the
Shāsh
ǒ
uji
à
n
in order
to retrieve Steve Pershing from North Korea. Alex smiled and took
the phone from Joseph, and played the video. She
blinked.

“
What did you see?” Joseph
asked.

Alex shook her head and
played the video again. Confused, she slowed the video down so that
it played image by image. She shook her head and gave the phone to
Colin.

“
Would you excuse me?”
Alex asked.

She was aware of getting
up and walking to the restroom, but her mind was focused on the
replay of the video.

Had she seen what she’d
thought she’d seen?

She went into a stall and
sat down.

“
I saw it,” Jesse said.
“What do you think it means?”

“
I have no idea,” Alex
used American Sign Language so that no one would hear
her.

“
You have to have some
idea,” Jesse said.

“
It looks identical to the
kidnapping of Javier Mestadus from Buenos Aires in 1976,” Alex
signed.

“
And Gleb Petrov, Moscow,
1984,” Jesse said. “And Marcus Jenkins, London, 1992.”

“
And a whole bunch more,”
Alex signed. “Romulus, serial kidnapper for hire.”

“
I thought we caught him,”
Jesse said.

“
I thought you shot him,”
Alex signed.

“
I did,” Jesse pointed to
his heart. “Is this a copycat?”

Alex looked at him for a
moment before giving a slow nod.

“
Why would anyone want to
copy him?” Jesse asked.

“
It’s a lucrative
business,” Alex signed. “Kidnap for hire, ask for an outrageous
sum, take what you’re given, whenever you’re given it, because the
hostage is dead.”

“
Killed or abandoned
within eight hours of acquisition,” Jesse said.

“
Sometimes less,” Alex
signed.

“
After subject is taken to
a location and . . .” Jesse said. “We never figured
out what.”

“
Right,” Alex signed. “The
bodies weren’t found for years. Any physical evidence had decayed.
We have no idea what happened to them.”

“
If anything,” Jesse
said.

“
If anything,” Alex
repeated in sign language. “Dean thought they took the hostages to
a location where they convinced the hostage they were going to be
interrogated. They were murdered . . .”

“
Or abandoned,” Jesse
said.

“
Right,” Alex signed.
“There was never any physical evidence.”

“
Why go to the trouble?”
Jesse asked. “Why not kill them on sight and move on?”

“
Keeps people from knowing
someone is dead,” Alex signed.

“
Keeps the authorities
running in circles,” Jesse said.

“
Gets people like me
involved,” Alex signed.

“
I don’t think it’s about
us,” Jesse said.

“
It’s not about us,” Alex
signed. “No one knew Josh was alive, so I don’t think it’s about
him, either. Based on what we know, Dex was a lonely, overworked
homicide detective who inherited a large home in a pricey
neighborhood. Josh said Dex thought someone had been trying to kill
him.”