Off the Grid (15 page)

30

T
ommy called a few minutes after Gino and Magozzi had talked to Beth Hardy. “Get down here right now, Magozzi.”

Magozzi hung up the phone with a puzzled expression.

“Who was that?” Gino asked.

“Tommy. He hung up on me.”

“You’re kidding? That little shit. What did he want?”

“He said to get down there right now. Roll the phones over to switchboard and come along, McLaren. You’re part of this now.”

Tommy was pacing when they got down to his office, worrying the sleeves of his sweater into fuzzy pills. He talked really fast, and his voice kept climbing the scale until he remembered to breathe. “We’re not finished yet, the translator just took a break, but we’ll probably have to kill him anyway, can’t have just anybody walking around with information like this, but there’s some really bad shit on that computer you pulled out of the house where you found the Native American girls, and you’ve gotta see it now, and then we gotta call the Feds and maybe the Army.” His shoulders slumped and he collapsed in his chair.

“Jeez, Tommy, take a chill.” Gino actually looked worried. “You’re going to stroke out.”

Tommy jumped out of his chair and started pacing again, but now he was actually wringing his hands. “No chilling, no time, look at the screen. Oh, shit, you can’t read Arabic, I forgot. So listen, this is the deal, there’s nothing happy on that computer except for somebody’s Tunisian grandma’s recipe for brik, whatever that is, and a response saying add more cumin, which our translator thought was a great idea, since he’s Tunisian . . .”

“Tommy.” Magozzi took him by his shoulders and pushed him back down into his chair, then squatted to look into his eyes, which was weird, because men from Minnesota didn’t normally look at each other. “Deep breaths, slow and easy. There. Better?”

Tommy nodded.

“Good. Now tell us what you found on that computer.”

“You know what a flash mob is?”

McLaren nodded. “Sure. Teenagers break into stores en masse and steal stuff. It didn’t start out that way. Just a bunch of weirdos agreeing to meet up and dance or otherwise make asses out of themselves in some public place at a particular time . . .”

“Shut up, Johnny.” Tommy took a breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. This is a terrorist flash mob spread out all over the goddamned country. They’ve already got their stuff ready to go. Explosives, chemicals, weapons—I mean this is
exactly
like a flash mob. There’s no leader, no organizational planning, somebody just posts, ‘Gee, I’ve got an idea, let’s everybody get together at noon on such and such a date and do Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in the middle of Times Square,’ except these creeps are planning a kill-the-infidels day.”

“Jesus,” Gino whispered, and Tommy just kept talking.

“We found tons of posts from all over the country and we’ve just scratched the surface. God knows how many are out there, or how many are actually going to do it, but these are not kids playing games. These are seriously radicalized dudes, some of them bragging about summer fun at terror camps in the Middle East, and there are a bunch of imams doing some online cheerleading from American-loving places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia. You get the drift.”

Magozzi felt all his blood rush from his head to his feet. There was business as usual, where the people you were fighting made sense. And then, there was the incomprehensible violence of people who had been programmed to hate. “Did you find a timeline for this thing?”

Tommy dragged his hands down his face, puddling a bunch of skin on his chin line. “Four days from now. October thirty-first.”

Gino and Magozzi both closed their eyes.

Tommy grabbed a sheet of paper and passed it to Magozzi. “Here’s a list of the cities we’ve pulled off the posts so far. We’ll keep at it until the Feds get here and confiscate this computer.”

“You burned copies of the hard drive, right?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Gino and McLaren closed in on either side of Magozzi as they all read the horrifyingly long list of American cities.

“Damn,” McLaren breathed. “Minneapolis is on that list.”

“Can you trace these posts to exact locations so we can give the Feds something to work with on the fly?” Magozzi asked Tommy, trying to keep himself calm even though the floor beneath him felt like quicksand.

Tommy threw up his hands in frustration. “Hell, no, not from where I’m sitting. I don’t have the computing power. Now, Monkeewrench, for instance—they might be able to get the job done, if someone were to send them the information they needed . . .” He shrugged. “And who knows? Maybe somebody already did.”

Magozzi smiled. “Good work, Tommy. We’ll let you get back to it.”

Magozzi called Agent Dahl on the way back to Homicide, told him enough to scare him to death without broadcasting any details over the cell network, because he kept hearing Grace’s words from the other night.
We don’t know who might be listening.
Given the tone of the man’s voice, he would probably already be en route. Poor bastard—he wouldn’t be sleeping much for the next four days. Then again, none of them would.

Back at the cube farm, Gino practically fell into his chair. “L.A., Detroit, Minneapolis. They were all on that list, Leo, and every one of those cities has dead terrorists chilling down in a morgue cooler.”

Magozzi nodded. “Somebody’s hunting these guys down before we do.”

Gino looked at him, spreading his hands. “Not just somebody. Joe Hardy got four of them. The dead shooter in L.A. got five more. He was a vet, too, Leo, remember?”

Magozzi sighed. “I remember.”

31

G
ino and Magozzi were sitting on a bench in the front lobby of City Hall, waiting for Dahl and Company to arrive. Gino was staring out the front window, mesmerized by something on the concrete steps.

“What are you looking at?”

“I like the way those bits of quartz in the cement flash back the sunlight.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, I’m just giving my eyes a place to rest while my brain tries to sort through all this crap. Vets killing terrorists before they can do damage . . .”

“We don’t know for sure that’s what’s happening.”

“Yeah, but say it is. Am I happy about this? Because if that’s what they’re doing, technically, they’re murderers. I’m not supposed to like murderers. On the other hand, they might be preventing terror attacks on the homeland. So what’s our role here? Hunt down vets and lock them up so the terrorists can blow up our cities? I’m having a serious existential conflict, Leo.” Gino spun around on the bench until his back was to the door.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going blind from the sun. Why did you bring us down here anyway? Dahl can trek up to the office without an escort. I feel like I’m picking up a date at the door.”

Magozzi shrugged. “Change of scenery. Besides, I love the way the light from the front windows glistens on your hair.”

“Screw you.”

Magozzi nodded toward a gray sedan that had just pulled up to City Hall’s front curb, disgorging Dahl and two other men wearing FBI windbreakers.

Magozzi had learned to respect Agent Dahl for the way he had handled the joint jurisdiction with MPD at the explosives house and the subsequent evacuation of the neighborhood. He’d shared information, he’d respected the police department’s handling of the situation, and had been damn near friendly. But he didn’t look all that friendly today. He had tight little lines around his mouth and two bright spots of color riding high on his cheeks.

“That was a pretty ambiguous phone call, Detective Magozzi. Come to City Hall ASAP? Hundreds of lives are at stake?”

“Lately, I’ve become a little paranoid about assuming cell phone conversations are private.”

“That’s a sensible precaution. You can’t be certain who’s listening in.”

“A friend of mine told me that very thing not so long ago.”

“Well, listen to your friend. The cell networks are wide open. I can sit in my living room and monitor every call in and out of your cell on my computer.”

“That’s really creepy,” Gino said.

“That’s the new world.”

Magozzi glanced at the two men Dahl had brought with him. “You might want to have your friends wait for you down here.”

Dahl’s brows lifted. “They’re agents, Magozzi.”

“Same clearance as you?”

“Not quite.”

“Take a look at what we’ve got for you, then you can decide if you want to read them in.”

Dahl tipped his head toward the bench by the door. “Take a load off, gentlemen.”

Gino and Magozzi started walking down the wide hallway faster than usual, briefing Dahl on the way. “We pulled a computer from the house where we found the kidnapped Native American girls and it turned up some pretty scary stuff. Stuff you need to see right now. Our computer forensics guy will give you the rundown, but afterward, meet us in Homicide. We uncovered a wrinkle that puts a whole new spin on things.”

• • •

Half an hour later,
Dahl walked into Homicide, bullied his way past the new temp, and headed for Gino’s and Magozzi’s facing desks. Now he looked scary FBI, but also scared, which was not in the demeanor rule book. His expression was even more tense than it had been when they’d met him downstairs, which was saying something. His anxiety level had obviously amped up to a level so toxic, you could almost see it rising off his skin. What you could definitely see was his pulse pounding in a vein on his forehead.

“Tommy briefed you?” Gino offered him a spare chair next to his terminally disarrayed credenza.

Dahl sank into it like he never wanted to get out. “In great and miserable detail. So far we have some terrorist chatter from the computer we took out of the explosives house, but nothing like this.” He closed his eyes. “Goddamnit, we missed it. Multiple times. The two Somalis at the kidnappers’ house weren’t on the watch list. And neither were the victims in Detroit and Los Angeles.”

Magozzi lifted a brow. He didn’t think he’d ever heard a Fed swear before. “So how the hell did these people slip through the cracks?”

Dahl gave him a grim look. “At any given time, there are four hundred thousand people on our international watch list . . .”

“Four hundred thousand?” Gino asked incredulously.

“Yes. But those are operatives who have already been linked to terrorism or terrorist organizations. The lone wolves are the biggest, newest threat, and they aren’t connected to any organization, or even each other, which is why we can’t find them. We’re riding a razor, Detectives. Always.”

Magozzi felt his stomach churn. That little insight was not what he’d wanted to hear. The visual wasn’t all that great, either.

Dahl rubbed his brow and breathed a weary sigh. “So what’s this new wrinkle, Detectives? And please tell me it’s going to put a prettier spin on things, because as of right now, the Bureau has four days to avert a possible national disaster and the clock is ticking.”

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Magozzi said. “Joe Hardy didn’t just kill the two Somalis who killed him; he also murdered the two in the kidnapping house. We don’t know who the shooter was in Detroit, but we know the shooter in L.A. was a vet, just like Joe Hardy. The coincidence bothered us.”

“Where are you going with this, Detective?”

• • •

Magozzi cleared his throat.
“What if veterans all over the country are targeting and eliminating terrorists the FBI doesn’t have a bead on yet.”

Dahl raised his head and stared at them for a long time before he spoke. “If that’s true, then they’re getting their information from somewhere. I need Joe Hardy’s computer. Right now.”

Gino winced. “Jeez, Dahl, his widow is making funeral plans, and you want to show up at her door with Storm Troopers and a warrant?”

“Not particularly. You two want to run interference?”

Gino held up one finger and reached for his phone. “Wait one.”

Dahl was fidgeting in his chair, counting lost seconds, when Gino hung up with Beth.

“What did you tell her?” Magozzi asked.

“Same old lame line about tying up loose ends.”

“Did she buy it?”

“Hell, no, but she’ll give us the computer. Trouble is, it’s up at Elbow Lake Reservation in his duffel bag. She said she’d tell his friends to give it to us if we promised to tell her later what this is all about.”

Dahl jumped to his feet. “Are you two still on the interagency cooperation train?”

“For this, you bet,” Magozzi told him.

“So where is Elbow Lake?”

“About five hours north.”

Dahl shook his head. “That’s too long.”

“That’s where it is.”

Dahl started walking out in a hurry. “Stay by your phone. I’ll get back to you within half an hour.”

32

T
wenty minutes after Agent Dahl left the Homicide office, he called them back as promised. Magozzi listened, scribbled notes, then hung up and looked at Gino. “We’re going to Elbow Lake. Dahl cleared our time with Chief Malcherson.”

“Great. This is double time. Five hours up, five hours back . . .”

“We’re flying. The Feds booked us on a charter at two this afternoon out of Holman Field in St. Paul.”

Gino lowered his head and started massaging his temples vigorously, redirecting his forehead skin to places it had probably never been before. “Come on, Leo. You know I don’t fly, especially in the kind of crop dusters that would service a nowhere place like Elbow Lake. Besides, you know what kind of stuff flies out of Holman? The shit people build in their garages out of Popsicle sticks and Gorilla Glue. I have a tramp art lamp in my house built better than some of those things.”

“This is a charter, Gino. A private plane service. They fly up there all the time to service the big snowmobile plant and the window factory.”

“By private plane, do you mean the Citation X type or do you mean the kind with flimsy little props made out of balsa wood that crash down into cornfields and kill rock stars? Because I refuse to board anything that doesn’t have turbines. At least two of them. Period.”

“There’s nothing wrong with props. In fact, the good thing about props is that if you stall out in midair, you can restart the engines. A jet stalls out in midair, you’re pretty much toast.”

Gino’s face turned gray. “Jesus Christ, is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Makes me feel better. Besides, statistically, flying is much safer than . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, safer than driving, and I fucking hate it when people roll out that stupid comparison. Statistically speaking, you actually have a chance of surviving a car wreck.
Statistically speaking,
if you’re in a plane wreck, you get vaporized and some coroner ends up identifying you by your teeth. If those don’t get vaporized, too.”

Magozzi sighed impatiently. “Look, Gino, I know you got a problem with planes, but we have to take the flight. The Feds need that computer, and it won’t hurt us to talk to Joe’s friends face-to-face. Maybe they knew what he was into and where he was getting his information. There’s a lot at stake here.”

Gino looked down at his hands, probably envisioning them being vaporized. “Shit,” he finally mumbled.

Magozzi took it as a good sign that Gino wasn’t protesting anymore. Maybe he’d gone into shock. “It’s going to be fine, Gino. You think the Feds would entrust that computer to a sketchy charter service? No way.”

Gino closed his eyes. “I have to call Angela. Remind her where the will is.”

Magozzi parked in the guest lot of Holman Field and he and Gino walked into the terminal, which was little more than one room with a counter, a couple computers, some seating, and a vending machine.

A lean, middle-aged guy with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut was behind the counter, tapping away at his keyboard. He was wearing a pilot’s uniform, which seemed to be a slight consolation for Gino.

“Afternoon,” he said as he greeted them. “You must be the two detectives.”

“That’s right.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Fuhrman, USAF retired, at your service. I’ll be your pilot today.”

Gino relaxed a little. “Air Force, huh? Did you fly?”

“Yes, sir. Fifteen years. Flew twenty-seven sorties in the first two desert operations. Killed a lot of camels.” He chuckled.

“So what kind of craft are we talking about for our trip?”

“Today, we rustled up a nice Beech for you.”

“Rustled up?” Gino asked, his voice suddenly small. “That sounds like you picked it up at a thrift store.”

Fuhrman laughed. “Nervous one, are you? Don’t worry, Detective. Small planes scare most everybody. Thing is, they’re low-tech and easy to fly. I’ll get you there and back in one piece, guaranteed.” He checked his watch. “We should be good to go in thirty. I just need you two to step on the scale.”

Gino looked alarmed. “Why?”

“So we can distribute the cabin load properly. We don’t want to be doing any barrel rolls today,” he said with a little smile.

Gino jumped on the scale. He’d probably already lost five pounds in sweat during the drive to the airfield.

“Okay, Detectives, you can follow me out to the strip. I’ll do my preflight check and we can take to the friendly skies. Weather shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but I’d prepare myself for some bumps along the way—there’s a tiny little system moving in from the west.”

“Oh my God,” Gino breathed as they walked out to the tarmac. “Shouldn’t be too much of a problem? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Magozzi pointed to the plane, which was a lot smaller than he thought it would be, but it looked pretty decent. No twist ties holding on the wings or anything. “Look at that. See? No Popsicle sticks. Genuine metal. And check out those props. That’s a beefy plane, Gino.”

Fuhrman turned around. “It’s a solid craft, Detective.”

“How old is it?”

“Twenty years old.”

“That sounds old.”

“It is. But these things last forever. One of these babies hasn’t gone down in almost four years.”

Gino stopped dead. “Leo, I can’t do this. I cannot do this. I’m walking up to Elbow Lake, unless we find a better plane.”

“Trust me, this is the best game in town to suit your purposes,” Fuhrman said. “In fact, you two got lucky today with this little honey,” he said, slapping the wing fondly. “I usually fly this route in a fork-tailed doctor killer.”

Magozzi had seen his partner work through a myriad of stressors over the years, and his reaction had always been pretty consistent—he ranted until he ran out of steam, then knuckled under and worked it through. This was the first time he’d ever seen Gino completely paralyzed.

He gave Fuhrman a nasty look for his effort, which seemed to take the wind out of his sadistic, smart-ass sails a little bit. The pilot disappeared into the plane and came down with two tiny airline bottles and held them out to Gino.

“Cheap vodka. Down these babies and you’ll have the time of your life. Welcome to the world of private air travel.”

Gino unscrewed the cap and drained one bottle. “Five of these, and I might be okay,” he said, wincing.

“Five more of those, and you won’t be able to get up those steps,” Magozzi said, snatching the other bottle out of Gino’s hand. “Come on, before you bail for real. You ever think about getting a prescription for tranquilizers when you fly?”

“I don’t fly. I don’t plan to ever again. It would be a waste of pharmaceuticals.”

The interior of the plane was about the size of a test tube, and there were only six seats laid out in a weird configuration, where some faced each other and some faced the backs of the other seats. Everything seemed miniaturized compared to a normal plane, right down to the tiny round windows that offered a hazy glance at the terra firma beneath them. Gino was panting and sighing a lot—a sure indication of extreme anxiety.

“See, this isn’t so bad, is it?” Magozzi asked, feeling a little anxious himself.

“Oh, it’s just peachy, Leo,” he hissed, tugging at the floral shower curtain hanging between the main fuselage and the cockpit.

“This is a goddamned shower curtain! And it’s out in plain view! If you go to a restaurant and there are cockroaches crawling on the tables, do you eat the shit that comes out of the kitchen? No. So what do you think we’d find if we looked under the hood of this thing? Maybe they shop at Bed Bath and Beyond for spare engine parts, too!”

Magozzi lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. This was going to be a long flight. He shoved the second vodka bottle into Gino’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go sit down.”