Seven Grams of Lead (8 page)

He blinked to reboot an imagination that had possibly gotten the better of him. Again he saw the blood. This time it brought the euphoria of hitting a home run. Until he noticed a second substance within the blood. Probably the cleanser sprayed onto the tabletops. Cleansers typically contained ammonia or isopropanol, and the introduction of even water could kill DNA evidence. He could only pray that enough uncontaminated blood remained to make a match to an offender in the DNA database. Quantico was working on handheld devices that could profile such samples in seconds, determining the gender, ethnicity, and eye and hair color of the shooter, then search for matches in multiple DNA data banks
around the world. Five years away, they said—which meant twenty-five, Musseridge said. For now Lamont opened a clear plastic evidence bag and dropped in the placard. He would collect the rest of the placards for good measure.

Although Quantico’s evidence lab was the best in existence, it was far from the speediest. An expedited order could reduce the wait time only from weeks to days. All Lamont needed was a written request approved by his supervisor. And the Assistant Special Agent in Charge. And the Special Agent in Charge. And the Assistant Director in Charge. Still, the find was exciting enough that Musseridge forgot about getting the pastry in his rush to return to the office and launch into the paperwork.

Kevin O’Clair hadn’t
done fieldwork in his eleven years at the NSA. He’d never done fieldwork—period. This morning was a first. He drove his take from the divorce settlement—a ten-year-old beige Nissan Qwest minivan—along a desolate stretch of Queens Boulevard, passing discount stores, fast-food restaurants, and, mostly, abandoned office buildings. On a quiet side street between a run-down dry cleaner’s and Bayside Putt-Putt—where the minigolf course had been replaced by a go-kart track—he found Schechter’s Home Appliances.

The store took up the first floor of a dilapidated split-level house. A worn banner announcing the business’s fiftieth anniversary celebration sagged from the upper story. Who would ever guess that this
location racked up $3 million in profits last year and stood to double that figure this year? Not even the proprietor, Irving Schechter, knew what a lucrative trade in electronic surveillance devices his son Leonard conducted from the basement.

O’Clair slowed as he drove past, on the lookout for any unusual motion.

“Then the Fire King said, ‘I want the heads of all the Water Warriors,’ ” Nathan said from the booster seat in back, breaking O’Clair’s concentration.

The seven-year-old retold television show episodes line by line. His facility was usually a source of wonder for O’Clair. Now it was throwing O’Clair off his game, and he needed to get back on it because of the black SUV that had been behind them since Queens Boulevard.

“Hang on just a sec, buddy,” he said. “I really want to hear the rest of the story, but …”

Bypassing an open parking spot in front of Schechter’s, he turned left onto a tree-lined residential block. The black SUV continued on, pulling into a Wendy’s. O’Clair’s shaky rearview showed a young woman yawning and stretching her arms as she slid from the driver’s seat to the parking lot. Two boys flew out of the back. It was 9:42 on a Saturday. Probably a mom resorting to corn syrup to kill the eighteen minutes until the go-kart place opened, O’Clair thought.

Relieved, he doubled back to Schechter’s while his son detailed the remainder of the plan for universal
conquest. Bringing Nathan along this morning was a good cover, as long as he stayed in the minivan. Around strangers, there was a fair chance he would share the wrong information, like their names.

“Buddy, I’m going to need you to wait in here while Daddy runs into the store for a minute.”

“But I’ll get bored.”

Just a few months ago, prior to reaching the age that he could be left alone however briefly, Nathan used to plead to be left in the car while O’Clair ran errands.

“I’ve got a question to keep you busy,” O’Clair said.

Nathan perked up. “A puzzler?”

“Say you have building blocks that are each one foot long and one foot high. How many blocks would it take you to complete a wall ten feet long and five feet high?”

Nathan chewed it over while O’Clair parked in front of Schechter’s.

“Got it,” the boy exclaimed. “You need fifty blocks total, right?”

“Not quite. Again, how many to complete the wall?”

Nathan erupted into laughter. “Only one block to
complete
the wall.”

Pride overrode O’Clair’s disappointment in the longevity of the time killer. He reached around his headrest to his son’s waiting palm for a resounding five.

“Okay, here’s a tougher one: A Ping-Pong ball falls down a hole in a cement basement floor. The hole is one foot deep and only a tiny bit wider than the ball. How do you get the ball back out without damaging it if you can use only these three things: your Ping-Pong paddle, your shoelaces, and a plastic bottle of water?”

With Nathan lost in contemplation, O’Clair got out of the minivan and headed up a walkway of circular paving stones fragmented by wear and weeds. Ducking beneath the anniversary banner, he pushed open the door. An unseen bell tinkled as he entered an underheated showroom where off-brand toasters, blenders, irons, and vacuum cleaners packed worn shelves and glass display cases. Behind the counter, a doughy man of about seventy-five adjusted his bow tie. Thick eyeglasses magnified the hope in his watery eyes. “How may I help you, sir?” he asked.

“I’m here for the new iPod operating system.”

The old man scowled. “Down the stairs.” He shot a wrinkled hand at what appeared to be the door to a utility closet.

It led to a flight of warped stairs that groaned with each of O’Clair’s steps. On a raised platform at the center of the basement room, Lenny Schechter sat puffing a clove cigarette in an ergonomic chair that faced a semicircle of six giant computer monitors. All four walls were lined with stacks of brown cardboard cartons stamped with Chinese characters, Lenny’s inventory presumably—within days of an eavesdropping
gadget hitting the market in the United States, manufacturers in Guangzhou started selling decent knockoffs at a fraction of the price.

Lenny resembled the man upstairs, minus forty years. He wore a pristine Mets hoody, vintage Adidas track pants, and a pair of fancy loafers. “How can I help, yo?” he asked, setting his cigarette in a chrome ashtray.

“I’m in the market for a nannycam,” O’Clair said.

“This your ‘client’?” Lenny tossed a glance at the upper left monitor.

Rounding the bank of monitors, O’Clair saw Nathan holding an imaginary Ping-Pong ball.

“My client, right,” said O’Clair. “He’s been learning French curse words from our
au pair.
Lord only knows what she’s been doing to the poor kid while she’s cursing.”

Lenny shook his head in commiseration. “I hear this kinda thing way too much. The good news is that it translates into demand, then supply.”

Like everyone at the NSA’s New York office, O’Clair knew all about Lenny Schechter. Six years ago, his business consisted only of a URL and a conviction that search engines would bring him hordes of suspicious spouses and parents who didn’t trust their nannies. Indeed, civilian eavesdropping exploded into a three-billion-dollar industry, but because the use of such products routinely violated electronic eavesdropping laws, placing the customer at risk of
becoming another Linda Tripp and the seller being charged as an accessory, vendors preferred to operate in the shadows. Lenny was known at intelligence and law enforcement agencies not for any transgression but because agents did so much business with him. He provided the tools they needed at a fraction of the usual cost and without the government red tape. He even offered free overnight shipping.

This morning, O’Clair didn’t have the luxury of time. The trap had been set. Thornton was due to meet someone “from the agency” at a Connecticut diner this afternoon. O’Clair had three hours to get the covert cameras in place.

“What do you have that’s small and suitable for outdoor use?” he asked. Lenny’s bestsellers, camcorders concealed in stuffed animals or potted plants, wouldn’t work on the street.

Lenny tapped his keyboard. All six monitors combined to show a house key. “This little fella’s the sweetest of the subminis on the market, if you’re asking me. Captures audio within a twelve-foot radius and shoots up to eight hours of good-enough-to-incriminate-quality vid that you can download just by plugging it into a laptop or tablet. Same camcorder also comes in a ballpoint pen, a cigarette …”

The monitors flashed images of a Bic pen and what appeared to be an ordinary Lucky Strike, along with photos of cameras concealed in a pack of gum, a nickel, and an American Express card.

O’Clair paid $500 in cash for two sixty-four-megabyte cigarette-cams, the chargers and USB adaptors included.

Returning to the minivan, he was delighted when he opened the door to Nathan’s exclamation of, “Pour the water into the hole and let the Ping-Pong ball float up.”

Thornton sat at
the wheel of his Inka orange 1973 BMW model 2002, a coupe that was at once boxy, sleek, art deco, and a rocket. His was also rusty and dinged and worth too little to interest car thieves—an ideal conveyance if your work took you to dicey places and you might need to get away in a hurry. Like most old cars, it was perpetually in need of one or two new parts at any time—a heater motor now—making it suitable for short drives in and around Manhattan, as opposed to the current eighty-mile journey on the Merritt Parkway through hard rain poised to become sleet and over slick autumn leaves. Normally Thornton would have used a rental car for a clandestine meeting, but this afternoon, he wanted a tail, so the conspicuous orange ’02 was ideal.

It took an hour and a half to reach Torrington, Connecticut, a fading industrial town that remained gray even when the sun came out. He pulled into the gravel parking lot in front of Bill’s, a vintage boxcar diner nestled against the radio station at the end of quiet Prospect Street. Taking a seat on a patched vinyl bench in the back booth, he ordered a late lunch and tried to block out the Muzak rendition of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.”

At three in the afternoon, the diner’s population consisted of a stout Nicaraguan short-order cook with several gold teeth, an overweight middle-aged waitress, and a wan elderly woman nursing a cup of tea. None looked like surveillants, though that could have been the precise reason for their deployment.

Finishing his plate of spaghetti, Thornton paid, returned to his car, and drove halfway down the block before rolling into a gas station, an Exxon largely unchanged since its Esso days. He spotted no vehicles or pedestrians following him.

Leaving the tank set to fill with premium, he wandered into the minimart and chose an orange Gatorade from the refrigerated case. He paid with a fifty so that he would receive plenty of change, hidden among which, a surveillant might suspect, was a message. The young cashier had a pretty face and a set of curves that elevated her bland UConn sweatshirt to alluring. He asked her what she thought of the basketball team’s chances come March. She made a compelling
argument that the Huskies would once again reach the Final Four. He acted pleased, and in fact he was: If anyone were watching him, this conversation would raise a flag.

Three hours later, he arrived at O’Clair’s Jersey City apartment building, which could have passed for a penal institution if not for the parking lot shared with the FedEx depot. Cobra-head streetlights burned so brightly that the night resembled dusk. O’Clair ushered Thornton into a ground-floor apartment that looked to have been decorated—carpets, furniture, even the four-by-six-foot oil painting of the Taj Mahal—with a brief trip to Sam’s Club.

“You good with burritos for dinner?” asked O’Clair, leading the way into the kitchenette.

“That’d be great, thanks.” Thornton set his overcoat on a barstool.

“Super.” O’Clair set the microwave whirring. “Because I realized that microwave ovens have the same effect as radio jammers.”

Thornton was grateful to be able to speak, rather than write notes by hand, which, since leaving the railroad tunnel, had been his only reliable method of communication with O’Clair.

“The hitch,” O’Clair added, “is that keeping it on for more than eight minutes could arouse suspicion.” Directing Thornton to a laptop computer at the ready on the adjacent counter, he brought up startlingly crisp images of Bill’s Diner shot from across the
street. “This starts at noon, about three hours before you got to Torrington,” he said.

They watched time-lapse video of the lunchtime crowd leaving, one or two patrons at a time. Over the next hour, nobody entered the diner except a mail carrier who stayed for the time required to deliver a small stack of envelopes. After the mail truck shot back onto Prospect Street, the lot was lifeless until a comet slowed to Thornton’s orange BMW. He was shown entering the diner and then, through a window, sitting down and ordering. After he left and drove off, no one entered for forty-two minutes, when four teenage boys pedaled up, dropped their bicycles, and piled into a booth.

“I didn’t see anyone precede or follow you to the diner or to the gas station,” O’Clair said. “You?”

“I didn’t see a thing. But what if, at some point, a surveillant pulled up in a car across the street, offscreen?”

“That’s what I figured. So I duct-taped a second cig-cam inside a trash basket at the end of Prospect Street, the lens aimed out through the perforated metal.” O’Clair winced as he queued up the second video. “I’m afraid this makes the first tape look like an action flick.”

The camera provided clear panoramic video of a beauty shop, a fast-food restaurant, a ninety-nine-cent shop, and several empty storefronts across Prospect Street from the diner. A painted Singer sewing
machine ad had mostly flaked or chipped off the brick wall of the block’s largest building, a vacant bank. The weekday traffic was sparse. The eatery and the Exxon station garnered all of the vehicles that stopped, save a van that parallel parked in front of the beauty parlor. The uniformed driver went into the beauty parlor; his features were mostly veiled by a baseball cap and sunglasses.