Seven Grams of Lead (3 page)

Manhattan receded in the ferry’s wake, the engines churning smoothly. Thornton and Peretti chatted
about what had become of his former rugby teammates. He used to play in the United Nations’ recreational rugby league, primarily to develop sources; she enjoyed the games. The lavender scent of her hair vaulted him back to those days, which he now viewed through a golden filter.

He felt a twinge of disappointment when the Staten Island terminal came into view. An announcement instructed all passengers to prepare to disembark. The man in the Yankees jacket was among the first off, greeted by a Hispanic woman of about thirty carrying an excited little boy who wore a Yankees cap.

Peretti turned to Thornton, her cheeks reddening. “My imagination got the better of me, I guess.”

“Better than the alternative,” he said.

He steered her into the Au Bon Pain, deserted but for a pair of hollow-eyed young women behind the counter.

While Peretti was looking up at the menu board, a thickset man emerged from the men’s room. He wore a black woolen overcoat, blocky glasses, and a tight orange ski cap. From inside the coat, he drew a sleek Ruger, pointed it at her, and pressed the trigger. The silenced barrel coughed twice. A plastic seat back flew end over end, cracking the glass fronting the café. Peretti dropped as though the floor tiles had been whisked from beneath her feet.

Thornton threw himself over her, to protect her from another shot. She lay facedown, her brown
wig having fallen off. Blood seeped through her true blond locks. There was a second bullet hole in her suede jacket, between her shoulder blades.

The shooter knelt, inadvertently knocking a tented advertisement off a tabletop as he extended his gloved left hand to collect his bullet casings from the floor. The ad bounced off his face, then sailed away. Biting back a wince, he pocketed both casings. He shoved the Ruger into his waistband as he rose and strode out of the café.

Thornton clutched Peretti’s shoulders and turned her face toward him. Seeing the dark hole between her eyebrows made his body temperature plummet. Blood burbled from the exit wound beneath her left collarbone. She’d lost consciousness but was still breathing.

“Call nine one one,” he shouted to the two employees crouched behind the counter. Then he took off after the gunman.

A line of taxis idled at the curb just outside the terminal building, their exhaust blurring the dozens of people getting in and out. Thornton didn’t see an orange ski cap but spotted the gunman anyway. He’d taken off the cap, but his leisurely pace gave him away: New Yorkers don’t do leisurely.

Making a beeline for the guy, Thornton slowed to avoid a uniformed policeman, who sure as hell had not been paying attention.

The gunman waved toward the man in the Yankees
jacket, now buckling the little boy into a booster seat in a Vanagon. A taxi suddenly darted into view from behind the Vanagon. The gunman opened the taxi’s rear door.

Thornton turned to the cop for help, but a metallic thunk jerked his attention back to the taxi.

Leaning across the front passenger seat, the heavyset taxi driver balanced a black tube the size of a paper towel core atop the open passenger window. Aiming at Thornton, he tugged at a trigger. There was no click, no flash, but the air all around Thornton grew hot, searing away his consciousness.

When building his
four-story Arlington Financial Center in the late 1980s, the developer hoped to lure boutique financial firms from downtown Washington. So many of the principals lived in Virginia; it made sense. Clad in mirrored glass, the structure was a perfect cube, except where the front half of the lower two stories should have been, there was nothing, or so it appeared. A closer look revealed a concrete pillar keeping the top two stories from collapsing. Critics lauded the bold architecture. At the same time, warehouses in downtown D.C. were replaced with decent-enough-looking buildings, transforming Foggy Bottom into Washington’s answer to Wall Street and forcing the developer of the Arlington Financial Center to subdivide his sprawling suites
for lower-rent entities, including a travel agency, an orthodontist, and a massage therapy collective. For the past two months, South Atlantic Resources, LLC—an engineering supplies distributor, if anyone asked—had been renting the three-office suite in the corner above the pillar, the building’s least accessible area. Canning’s reason for concocting South Atlantic Resources and signing a one-year lease—using an alias, of course—was to gather intelligence produced by the eavesdropping device he’d implanted in Bella Sokolova, his ultimate goal being the assembly of his own Sokolov E-bomb.

Every night, he came to the South Atlantic offices from his day job in the city and listened to the day’s feed. Usually it began with Bella, back from the Cleveland safe house and home alone in Port Washington, Wisconsin, talking to her late husband Leonid as if he were lying in bed beside her. She didn’t broach the topic of electronic weapons, or even science. Just memories, of walks together along the shore in Yevpatoriya, their daughters’ births, family vacations—in short, nothing Canning wanted to hear.

When she finally got out of bed, Bella invariably switched on the TV in the den and watched whatever happened to be on, for hours on end, never changing the channel, getting up only to pad into the kitchen, dispense fresh ice cubes and pour more—Canning surmised—vodka. She spoke of work only when informing her DARPA handler, an excessively gung ho
young case officer named Hank Hughes who called every couple of days, that she couldn’t bear to go into the lab. Her daughters encouraged her to come visit them in Miami or Seattle, where they lived with their own families. When that failed, they encouraged her to at least get out of the house. She promised she would, but she didn’t, not once in four weeks after the burial. The gate guard ran errands for her, leaving grocery bags and packages from the pharmacy outside the kitchen door.

The next week, Hank Hughes called to say DARPA could harden a laboratory for her in either Seattle or Miami. Bella felt it would dishonor Leonid to continue their work anywhere but their old lab, which DARPA had stealthily dismantled within hours of the Flight 89 accident.

A few days later, Hughes called again with news that the old lab had been restored. Too many estate issues still to settle here, Bella replied, before drinking away another week.

In their next talk, Hughes told Bella that DARPA had deployed two of its brightest scientists to Wisconsin to assist in the E-bomb effort. Would she at least bring them up to speed?

Leonid’s fatal accident turned out to be a stroke of luck, thought Canning, listening to the call from the Arlington office and envisioning himself harvesting Bella’s details of the E-bomb from soup to nuts.

She said she would think it over. If she indeed
thought about it during the next two weeks, it was while watching game shows and drinking.

This week, once again, the DARPA man called in hope of getting Bella to go to the lab. He tried several of the same exhortations that he had in the past, including repaying the country that had brought her and her family from Russia, contractual bonuses, the chance to perfect the “peacekeeping contraption” that would be her and Leonid’s legacy, and a trip to Oslo to pick up another Nobel Prize. Once again, Bella said no.

This morning, however, soon after waking up, she called Hughes and said,
“Na miru i smert’ krasna.”

Canning knew the old Russian expression to mean, “With company, even death loses its sting.” But today he thought of it as “South Atlantic Resources is finally open for business.”

Bella was finally going back to work.

Thornton awoke to
a medley of electronic blips. He was lying on his back in a bed with metal side rails, his hospital gown drenched with perspiration. Five floral arrangements were packed onto the windowsill, the petals beginning to wilt. Raising his head from the pillow set off a network of fiery pain. An IV tube hung from a bag labeled
FENTANYL 50MCG
/
ML
. Fentanyl, he recalled, was a major-league painkiller, 100 times as powerful as morphine. Better not to think about how he’d feel without it. Around his left wrist was a plastic band identifying him as Staten Island University Hospital patient
BALDWIN
,
MYERS
,
DOB 08/20/75
. His actual date of birth was more than a year later, but Baldwin was his late mother’s maiden name. He anticipated an explanation from the man slumped in
the armchair to his right, FBI Special Agent Jim Musseridge, whom he’d met once or twice on the story circuit.

“How long?” Thornton croaked. It felt as if someone had lodged a sword in his throat.

“Good, you haven’t lost your powers of observation.” Musseridge’s gruffness was almost as strong as his Brooklyn accent. “The flowers are from your Uncle Sam, part of the cover for your own protection. It’s been four and a half days since you took a header on the sidewalk outside the ferry terminal.”

Thornton felt an inclination to quarrel. His rusty faculties provided no backup.

The wrinkles in Musseridge’s gray business suit indicated that he, too, had been in the hospital awhile. Or not. In contrast to the current generation of yoga-svelte G-men, the fortysomething Musseridge resembled an old school linebacker, the sort of guy on whom a fresh suit is rumpled in minutes.

“There was some bleeding inside your head,” Musseridge went on. “They had to operate to relieve the pressure.”

Thornton ran his fingertips over his scalp. He felt prickly stubble and a bandaged ridge of sutures.

“Luckily you’ve got yourself one thick noggin. But you swallowed some vomit, which led to pneumonia, so they had to put you on a ventilator for seventy-two hours. None of this probably sounds too good, but they say you should be out of here in a day or two.”

A flashback broadsided Thornton: the man in the overcoat, materializing from the men’s room, pointing a Ruger.

Finding the bed’s lift control, Thornton started the backrest groaning toward an upright position. Too slow. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he used the side rails for leverage and sat up. The full events of the St. George terminal exploded back into his consciousness. “What about Catherine?” he asked.

Musseridge eyed his worn wing tips. “She didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

Thornton hoped he’d misunderstood. “Is there a funeral?”

“There’s a wake tonight down in Maryland.”

“What time?” Thornton tried to get out of bed. The room seemed to tip.

The FBI man restrained him. “You’re not gonna be able to get there, bud.”

Reaching the same conclusion, Thornton lowered himself back to the mattress.

“So what was Ms. Peretti doing up here in the first place?” Musseridge asked.

“I was going to ask you the same thing.” Thornton noticed a young man pacing the hall. The close-cropped white-blond hair and a more stylish model of Musseridge’s suit proclaimed him an FBI agent. Where there was one Feeb, you could usually expect to find a second. Warren Lamont, if Thornton wasn’t mistaken. Called “Corky” by his fellow agents, who teased him that he should have been a surfer.

“How about you tell me your story first?” said Musseridge.

Thornton provided the most accurate account he could, the only pertinent bit as far as he knew being the Potomac jogger who’d threatened Peretti. “I don’t have any idea what she was planning to tell me,” he concluded with regret.

Although Musseridge’s tie required no adjustment, he tightened it. “The Bureau was hoping you’d provide a little more insight than that.”

“It would help if I knew what she was working on at Senate Intel. A terrorist threat, maybe a Mexican cartel—”

“The answer could be in one of 1,854 classified documents she may have seen in the twenty-four hours prior to coming to New York. Or it could be somewhere else. Unfortunately, she didn’t keep any kind of diary. We went through all of her calls and e-mails: nothing there. Based on our interviews with her colleagues, friends, and family, you’d think this was just a random act of violence.”

“Except the shooter had a Ruger Mark III with a suppressor, and he used it like it was just another day at the office for him.”

“Yeah, except that. We plucked the rounds out of the wall.”

“Learn anything?”

“Twenty-two LRs, subsonic, hollow point—pretty much what you’d expect.” Musseridge twisted his wedding ring. “Other than the victim, there was no
evidence that a human had come in contact with the bullets since they left the Remington factory.”

“So you have absolutely nothing on the guy.” Thornton figured he was most likely to get information by putting Musseridge on the defensive.

The agent sighed. “We’ve got ferry terminal security video of the shooter described by the witnesses at the crime scene—the same guy you described—plus a shitty shot of him leaving in a cab.”

“You couldn’t find the cab?”

“NYPD found it, parked at a pub by the stadium.” Musseridge meant the minor-league Staten Island Yankees’ Richmond County Bank Ballpark, a fly ball away from the ferry terminal. “The cabbie’d been sitting at the bar for three hours as the incident went down. There were about fifty witnesses. Had his car keys on him the whole time.”

“Still, there had to be some biological evidence, right?”

“We’re talking about a New York City taxi, a ginormous ferry terminal, and a fast-food place. Hard to tell the shooter’s hair and prints, if he left any, from the thousands of other—”

Thornton remembered. “He was wearing surgical gloves.” Labs could lift prints from within the gloves.

“We didn’t find them, and not for lack of dumpster diving. Which leaves us with this.” Musseridge glanced at the notepad balanced on his lap. “A young woman holding an important position with the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence tells her husband and coworkers that she’s going up to New York for a conference on commercial shipping security. Instead, she meets an old flame for dinner at a tourist restaurant where the two of them could go with a reasonable amount of confidence that they wouldn’t run into anyone they knew. Later the same night, the same couple is seen on a ferry ride, awfully cozy.” Musseridge looked up. “That’s another reason you’d be ill-advised to go to the funeral. As far as the media knows, this
was
a random act of violence, and we’ve kept your name out of it, but not from Ms. Peretti’s family. As far the Bureau’s concerned, a fling isn’t a federal offense. But you are gonna have to tell us how you happened to take her to the exact spot where an assassin was waiting.”