Seven Grams of Lead (14 page)

As did the van. He felt as if he’d just swallowed an icicle. Unless the bugs had somehow malfunctioned, whoever installed them had no reason to tail him or Mallery; the devices themselves could serve as tracking beacons. A good-case scenario, he thought, was that the two people in the van were FBI. But the Bureau would deploy a fleet of surveillance vehicles and maybe a helicopter, not just one van. A single van was too easily detected, as Thornton had just established.

His mind leaped to the worst-case scenario, which, unfortunately, fit the facts: The eavesdroppers were onto him and Mallery, and the van carried assassins, one to drive and the other to fire something like a compact active denial system, so that the killing would appear to be a traffic accident. Assassins liked highways because targets were especially vulnerable in speeding vehicles. Also mistakes were more likely and more perilous, and the incidents seldom yielded reliable
witnesses. And what better highway to stage such an operation than the Connecticut Turnpike, commonly referred to by locals as the Highway of Death? Connecticut had designed its segment of I-95 to accommodate a maximum of 90,000 vehicles per day, but after five decades of explosive suburban growth along the corridor and the installation of two of the country’s largest casinos, 200,000 vehicles was the daily norm, and the fatality rate of 2.7 per million vehicle-miles of travel nearly tripled the national average.

Thornton’s car had retained the handling that made BMW’s name, but it had a hard time topping ninety these days, so he doubted he could outrun the Nissan, the van’s two tons notwithstanding. He might try anyway in hope of getting caught at a speed trap. But with vehicles so often limited to forty miles per hour by all the traffic, the Connecticut Turnpike offered such slim pickings that state troopers didn’t bother.

A pair of yellow arches shone through the trees lining the road. A McDonald’s in the food court at the next rest stop. Or, as Thornton thought of it, an escape route.

“Finally,” he exclaimed, signaling right and accelerating toward the off-ramp.

The van followed.

Mallery didn’t look up.

Thornton recalled a recent incident that he’d tracked online but never wrote about. Two men wearing
ski masks and gloves entered a bank in nearby New Canaan, Connecticut. Brandishing guns, they ordered the customers and employees to lie on the floor. Encountering no resistance, one robber stood watch by the front door; the other jumped over the counter, heaped cash from the tellers’ drawers into his duffel bag, then had the manager and assistant manager go to the cash vault and enter their combinations. The thieves made off with $103,400, in a Honda Accord reported stolen in New Haven an hour earlier. The car was recovered by police a half mile from the bank minus the bank robbers and any substantive clues. At the time, the story hadn’t been
RealStory
material. But, Thornton thought, it might be useful today.

He planned to enter the food court, find a policeman, and, conveying with a finger to his lips that stealth was in order, hand off a note explaining that the two New Canaan bank robbers were about, having parked a tall white Nissan van outside. For the sake of credibility, he would write the note on his reporter’s pad. Flashing the distinctive notebook—it was half the width of an ordinary page in order to fit in a back pocket—usually got him into crime scenes faster than an actual press credential. It was a good bet that the cop would read the note and investigate. Then, while the men in the van protested their innocence—maybe while being taken to a holding cell—Thornton and Mallery could get away.

The exit ramp sliced through a field of patchy brown grass before forking, one lane for cars, the other for trucks. Thornton took the car route, as did both a Saab and a station wagon behind him. The white van followed.

While the Saab and station wagon rounded the parking lot to get on the line for drive-through, the van accompanied Thornton to the food court.

“Want to come inside?” he asked Mallery, anticipating that she would. It had been six hours since she’d had anything to eat or drink or used a restroom.

She looked up. “I’m good, thanks.” Then she was gone, back to her e-mail.

Going inside now meant leaving her out here, unaware and unprotected. He wasn’t sure how to explain the situation—in the time he scrawled a note, the van might pull up and zap them with millimeter wave energy. He also didn’t want to needlessly frighten her. Possibly he was just paranoid. He looked and spotted a New Haven PD cruiser. Empty—the cops no doubt inside the food court. But another option presented itself: an elephantine garbage truck was lumbering around the corner of the food court building.

Thornton wove through open spaces in the parking lot as if returning to the highway. The van shot after him, abandoning any pretense of stealth.

“Decided you wanted to live longer?” Mallery asked.

You got that right, Thornton thought. “Just save time,” he said.

Taking an only-in-a-BMW ninety-degree left turn around the food court building, he found the garbage truck backing up to an enormous dumpster, completely blocking the right lane.

Perfect, he thought.

He jumped into the left lane, joining the moderate drive-through line just ahead of the Saab and the station wagon, drawing an angry honk from the former.

By the time the white van caught up, it couldn’t get past the Saab, the station wagon, or the newly arrived Camry because of the garbage truck. Two more cars fell into place behind the van, preventing it from backing up.

Canning couldn’t decide whether to drink the vodka. Russo-Baltique was by far the finest in the world. It couldn’t be found in stores or bars. Its manufacturer wasn’t even a liquor company, but a railway-car manufacturer. The golden flask was a small-scale replica of the 1912 Russo-Baltique automobile’s signature radiator guard. This particular flask had been confiscated from Iranian smugglers on the Strait of Hormuz by a team from the U.S. Department of Commerce overseeing the embargo. The chief, aware of his old colleague’s predilection for vodka, buried the unusual container in the paperwork as
one (1) bottle misc.
and
shipped it to Canning. Would have never happened if the guy’d had an inkling that the going rate for a bottle of Russo-Baltique was $1.3 million. That is, if you could get your hands on one.

Canning could probably flip the bottle for as much as $2 million, or about five times the value of his Reston two-bedroom condo, in which he now sat after a long stretch at the safe house—a bathtub full of water, chlorine bleach, and sodium hydroxide did a good job of eliminating a body; it just took a long time. He longed to drink the vodka. Funny, because once upon a time, he couldn’t tell the difference between Russo-Baltique and a four-buck bottle of Putinka. But over the course of his Russian tour, he developed quite the palate. And although he didn’t realize it until now, he had wanted to drink the bottle of Russo-Baltique the way other men coveted Porsches or supermodels.

And why not indulge? The blogger, the lone remaining threat to his plan, was about to be flushed. Canning expected to make enough money on the sale of the E-bomb that he would be able to keep Russo-Baltique on hand at all times.

He pried off the yellow and white gold cap, topped with a Russian imperial double eagle. Setting a highball glass on the coffee table, he dispensed the liquor in a glistening chute. He thought of Mark Twain’s adage,
The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality.

The wrong ringtone interrupted his thoughts. He fished the phone from his pocket, hit the green
ANSWER
button, and said, “Goodwyn.”

“Good afternoon, Norm,” said the South Atlantic Resources manager, Mickey Rapada, sounding so blithe that Canning surmised that something was very wrong.

“Is it really?”

“Well, we had no choice but to follow them onto a McDonald’s drive-through lane. The clearance was nine feet, and even though the van’s height is only one hundred and five inches, according to the specs, it set off the sensor.”

“ ‘Nothing is according to specs.’ ”

“Sir?”

“ ‘Nothing is according to specs,’ is the ninth of the General Laws of Augustus De Morgan, who’s better known by his nom de plume, Murphy. Murphy’s first law, of course, is ‘Anything that can go wrong will.’ His second is ‘Anything that cannot go wrong will anyway.’ He also wrote that ‘If only two things can happen and one might lead to catastrophe, it does.’ A buck says that’s the case here, right?”

Rapada laughed. “The good news is you win a buck.”

The onetime Green Beret was as tough as a badger, Canning thought, but his laughter failed to hide his unease at being the bearer of more bad news. “Tell me why, please.”

“The manager of the food court came outside and told us we had to back out of the drive-through chute. A couple of New Haven cops, who happened to be at the McDonald’s, helped direct traffic. Six vehicles in line behind the van had to be backed out.”

“Murphy also wrote, ‘The number of people watching you is directly proportional to the stupidity of your action,’ ” Canning said.

“I’m afraid Murphy’s right again, chief,” Rapada said. “By the time we got back onto the highway, the targets had a twenty-five-mile lead.”

“You know where they’re headed?”

“Yes, sir, I’ve been monitoring their feed the whole time. They’re going to meet O’Clair at the Abbey Pub on upper Broadway.”

“Double or nothing on the dollar that they made you, used the McDonald’s drive-through lane as an escape route, and are really headed to see the supposed dope fiend from No Such Agency. How about you scramble another unit to get the lovebirds, and I’ll take care of the dope fiend?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Canning liked Rapada. The kid believed “national security interests” justified any and all means, and he followed orders without question.

“Just remember this, junior,” Canning said. “ ‘In preparing for battle, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.’ ”

“Murphy again?”

“Actually, Eisenhower.”

A few
yessirs
later, Rapada rang off.

The Russo-Baltique was exquisite, but it might as well have been Putinka. Canning couldn’t focus on anything except the blogger.

As planned, O’Clair
texted Thornton:
instead of abbey, why not come as my guests 2 casa italiana?
The Columbia Italian academy’s lavish
ristorante
was accessible only by university staffers.

Thornton replied:
love 2! grazie!

Twenty minutes later, while he was parallel parking across campus from the Casa Italiana, on the west side of Broadway between 119th and 120th, O’Clair texted again:
u guys mind hanging for a few mins @ my office?—sorry, some work that won’t go 2 bed …

No problem
, Thornton replied.

In theory, O’Clair’s office at Columbia was more easily accessible than the scientist’s regular office. To gain admittance to the National Security Agency downtown, visitors had to pass a full background
check in advance of their visit. Upon arrival they faced a battery of additional security measures including a millimeter-wave scanner generations ahead of the imaging devices at airports. In contrast, Columbia University’s fourteen-story interdisciplinary science building, home to as many as twenty classified military and intelligence service research projects at a given time, required visitors to simply pass beneath a ceremonial gate at Broadway and 116th Street, then stroll along a picturesque cherry tree–lined brick path through the quad.

Thornton and Mallery found two security guards sitting in lawn chairs by the gate, their police-model Segway electric personal transports—or, as he thought of them, $6,500 scooters—standing at the ready. The men nodded hospitably as Thornton and Mallery ambled past. The guards’ primary functions, he guessed, were fending off panhandlers and dissuading freshmen from doing the things that freshmen do.

At the Science Building, an austere bluish gray steel tower, they pushed through a revolving door and entered a creamy marble lobby that offset the severity of the exterior. Probably typical for a Sunday, the vast space was empty, save for one more member of the campus security force, a bony, dark-skinned man in his sixties who sat at a small desk to the side of the entrance. He looked up from his magazine long enough to ascertain that Thornton wasn’t carrying an assault rifle.

Then he fixated on Mallery. “I’ve seen you on TV, yes?” he asked with a musical Indian accent—Gujarati, Thornton guessed.

“It’s possible,” she said.

“Are you an actress?”

“Not by profession.”

“Oh, well, so much for adding to my granddaughter’s autograph collection.” With a smile, the man returned to his reading.

And that, Thornton suspected, was the extent of the safeguarding of classified research here—a story for another day.

They rode an escalator up to an elevator bank across from floor-to-ceiling windows framing West 120th Street, a stretch of four- and five-story redbrick academic buildings. The elevator stopped at the fourth floor, the doors snapping open to reveal a corridor that evoked the Death Star. Lighting panels flush with the ceiling caused the metallic walls to shimmer a dull blue. Thornton led Mallery past a row of what appeared, through frosted glass portholes, to be laboratories.

A door to an office swung open and O’Clair wandered out. “Oh, hey, guys,” he said, as if he hadn’t been eagerly awaiting their arrival.

Thornton made introductions while O’Clair guided them down the hall.

“Russ has told me a lot of great things about you,” Mallery said.

“That’s only because he owes me money.” O’Clair admitted them to a laboratory, in which they passed beneath a flap and into a glossy silver mesh fifteen-by-fifteen-foot tent. At its center stood a pair of stools and a cart that held surgical instruments and a lunchbox-size container made of the same silvery material as the tent.

With a wave at the surroundings, O’Clair said, “This is a Faraday tent, generally used for computer forensic tests. It’s made of a highly conductive textile that redistributes electrical charges to cancel out external nonstatic electric fields. In other words, you can say whatever you want now and it won’t be overheard or recorded.”