Silent Assassin (10 page)

C
HAPTER
17

 

L
en Stuart woke up groggy and confused, which was in itself strange, but he was not in any shape to notice right away. He tried to jump out of bed as per his usual routine, only to find that, not only was he in fact sitting down, but his hands were tied behind his back with something tight and sharp cutting into his numb wrists.

“Hello, Len.” The voice was more like a growl, low and intimidating. He looked up, his head lolling on his neck, and saw through fuzzy eyes that there were two men in the room with him: one standing against the wall in front of him, watching him silently from behind a black ski mask; and another one, the one who had been talking, standing over him, wearing a mask too, a deep crimson one.

“What the hell’s going on?” he said, slurring the words. “Who are you?”

“I’m the angel of justice, Len,” said the man in the red mask. He was white, while the other was black, and this one was shorter than the other man, but from where he was standing, he looked frighteningly tall and powerful. “An avenging spirit here to punish you for the evil things you’ve done. And there are a lot of them, Len. You have a lot to answer for.”

“What?” he said, flabbergasted. He was trying and failing to make the words fit into some semblance of meaning. His thoughts were clouded, and it all seemed so strange. Nothing seemed to make sense. He couldn’t even bring himself to be properly afraid, even though he knew he should be. The back of his head felt raw. “Who are you? What is this?”

“So you like to beat up on women, do you?” said the one in the red mask. “Does that make you feel like more of a man? Does it make you feel
powerful?
”

“Women?” he said, confused. “The whore!” he remembered suddenly. She had tried to drug him, and then . . . he wracked his fuzzy brain but couldn’t remember what had happened next.

“She has a name,” the man in the red mask said. “She can also take care of herself. How many others were there that couldn’t?”

“I have cash,” he said, still slurring his words and struggling to keep his thoughts straight. “In the apartment. I can tell you where it is. I’ll give you whatever you want. My cards. I got a couple things worth some money too. I’ll tell you where to find everything. Please. Take it all. I don’t care. Just take it and go.”

“I don’t want money, Len.”

Clarity was eluding him. His fear at that moment still seemed distant and hazy. How did they know his name? “Are-are you going to kill me?” he stammered.

“It’s a distinct possibility.” He said it like it was nothing, and Len heard it from a distance.
They are going to kill me
. He tried to wrap his mind around the significance of this, but he couldn’t.

“In fact,” the man continued, “I’d say that it’s pretty damn
certain
that you’ll die today. That is, unless you tell us what we want to know.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Stuart, dread finally beginning to catch up with him.

“That’s the attitude I like! Now. You recently made a lot of money, Len. I want to know how you did that.”

He frowned, perplexed. “Financial markets. I play the financial markets. I’m a trader. It’s what I do. I get more money out than I put in. That’s all there is to it.”

“I’m sure,” the man said. “Except this time, you made a lot more than you had ever made before. It was, oh, some time around the Paris bombing. Does that ring a bell,
Len
?”

The mention of the bombing in connection to his score jogged him awake. They couldn’t know. Could they? The plan was supposed to be foolproof! “I made some good investments. That’s it.”

“Good investments?” The man in the red mask chuckled and looked at his partner. “In that case let me hire you to take care of my money, Len. Since it seems like you’re so good at it. But no. That was a little more than good investments. It went well beyond what’s reasonably believable, even for insider trading. Because you didn’t have an insider in any company, did you, Len? You had a different kind of insider, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a half-panicked stammer. Normally, he knew how to lie, but all his faculties were failing him at the moment.

“Let’s not play this game.” The man bent down so that he was inches from Stuart’s face. Stuart could see his mustache peeking through the mouth hole of the face mask, his hard brown eyes. “Someone tipped you off to the attack. They did it in a way that you were able to make money off of it with strategic investments. Are we getting warm yet?”

“I don’t know—”

The man grabbed Stuart’s hair and pulled his head back, raising his hand to strike Stuart’s face. “Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Tell me. I
dare you
.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” he said, doing a fairly good job of sounding convincing.

The red-masked man’s hand came down to strike him, but before it hit, it was stayed by another hand: it was the man in the black mask. “Hold on,” he said. Then, looking down at Stuart: “We know that you know, Len.” His voice was deep, and not as cool as that of the man in the red mask—smoother, but just as chilling. “And make no mistake about it: we are prepared to kill you if you don’t give us what we came here for. Now, you can cooperate, or you can die painfully. The choice is yours.”

Stuart gulped. “He’ll kill me.”

“We’ll kill you,” said the man in the black mask.

“Who is
he
?” asked the man in the red mask, moving toward Stuart as he did.

There was no getting away from this. They had him, literally tied up, and they knew. There was no way he was going to talk himself out of this one. Cooperating was the only way, even if it meant . . . well, he wouldn’t think about it right now. “I want protection. I want to be in custody. I want you to guarantee that he won’t kill me.”

“We’re not gonna offer you protection, Len,” said the man in the red mask. “You’ve got yourself involved with some very nasty people so you could make a quick buck on the bodies of dozens of innocent people. That’s on you. I’d plug you myself if we didn’t have use for you. To them, though, you’re just a liability, especially once they know we’re on to you. So here’s what you’re gonna do: you’re gonna give us everything you know, and do everything you can so we can catch these sons of bitches. And in return, we get rid of them and pinky-swear that any bullet that scrambles that genius brain of yours doesn’t belong to us.”

“And remember,” said the man in the black mask, “all this is contingent on you being useful to us. So you’d best start talking now, ’cause this is the best deal you’re gonna get.”

Len Stuart took a deep breath.

“From the beginning, Len,” said the man in the red mask.

He’d have to tell them. There was no way out now, except hope. “I heard about it through a friend. A solid guy. We’d exchanged information before, and not the kind the SEC looks kindly on, so I knew he had some hookups. He said he knew a guy who was selling this tip. Some shady kind of guy, billing himself as some sort of mastermind. Called himself Moriarty. Apparently, that’s some kingpin from the Sherlock Holmes books. I looked it up. Anyway, this Moriarty guy is supposed to be a sure thing, a way to make a lot of money quick, boom-boom. Something top secret, especially illegal, super risky, extremely—”

“Wrong?” said the man in the red mask.

Stuart gave a hollow chuckle. “No such thing in my line of work.”

“So he gave you this man’s number,” said the other.

“No,” said Stuart. “No numbers. I got a location and a time. I was told that he would meet me there, and that I should bring two hundred thousand dollars, cash.”

“Where?”

“He told me I had to order a large coffee at Starbucks and sit on the Broadway and Cedar corner of Zuccotti Park, reading the
Wall Street Journal
. So I do that, with my black Samsonite rolling suitcase with two hundred grand. After a few minutes, a guy in a Yankees cap sits next to me. He slips me a piece of paper, and tells me to get up and walk away, and leave the suitcase for him.”

“Two hundred grand for a piece of paper?”

“Worth a lot more than that if you know how to use it.”

“What did he look like, this Moriarty?” the man in the black mask cut in.

“Average height. Just under six foot. A bit on the skinny side. Asian. Didn’t see much of his face. He had big aviator sunglasses on.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know,” Stuart said.

“You’d better remember, or I’ll find the right incentive that will.”

Stuart was sweating nervously. “Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you. But I couldn’t tell much when I met him. A bit younger than me, maybe.”

“What was he wearing apart from the hat and sunglasses?” asked the man in the red mask.

“Blue jeans and a dark grey hoodie,” said Stuart.

“Anything written on it?”

“Not that I remember.”

“And the piece of paper—”

“Contained only a date—the date of the attack—and two columns, one labeled ‘up,’ and another ‘down.’ Under each was a detailed list of stocks and commodities. I made my trades based on that list—and almost everything went either up or down that day, just as predicted.”

“Do you still have that list?”

Stuart nodded. “That desk over there. Bottom drawer. The one with the padlock. The combination is. . . .”

But the man in the red mask pulled hard enough to yank the screws from the lock hinge out of the wood. Stuart felt a bit foolish at how little security the lock actually provided.

“Should be among the top papers,” he told the man.

“Got it,” the man in red said to the other. “Is there anything else you feel like telling us, Len?” he added.

“Please don’t kill me?” he said, as breezily as he could.

“We’re not done with you yet, Len,” said the tall one. “You’re still going to do one more thing for us. If he contacts you again, and I’m betting he will, you’re gonna let us know. See that table over there, by the window? Once you get another tip-off about making another trade, you’re going to put a bottle of whiskey on it, and you’re going to leave it there. Once we get the signal, we’ll contact you. Can I count on you to do that, Len? Or do I have to remind you what happens if you don’t cooperate?”

“I understand. I’ll do it.”

The man in the red mask moved as if to hit him. Stuart cowered under his hand.

“I’ll do it! I swear!”

“You’d better,” said the man in the red mask. “And remember: we’re watching you.”

Someone put a dark cloth bag over his head. He felt them undo his ties, and then he was tossed onto the ground. He felt sharp, sickening pain as someone’s foot hit his abdomen. He heard footsteps walking out of his apartment as he retched, writhing on the floor.

C
HAPTER
18

 

M
organ came into the garage with his car and drove down to the lowest level and then to a forgotten corner beyond the available spaces and hidden away from the view of the rest of the cars and pedestrians. He parked his car and walked out to a forgotten unmarked door with a key-card reader next to it. Inside was a dark room, which lit up when he closed the door behind him. Here was another door, and a breaker box next to it. He opened the box and revealed a biometric reader. Morgan scanned his retina and palm. The door unlocked. There was a small hallway that led to an elevator and stairwell. He knew that there was another layer of security at work here—cameras with face-recognition software checking every person who came in. The elevator door opened, and he went down.

He emerged and walked down a short hallway to the Zeta Division war room, where Diana Bloch and Lincoln Shepard were both standing, looking at one of the smaller monitors embedded in the wall while Karen O’Neal sat against a wall, flicking through pages on a tablet computer.

“Come in, Cobra,” said Bloch. “We were just looking over some surveillance footage. Please, sit down.”

Morgan pulled up a chair near the monitor, next to Shepard, but it was unnecessary, because moments later Shepard switched the active monitor to the big screen. Morgan dragged his chair back a few paces in order to get a more comfortable view.

“We’ve been going over the info we got from Stuart,” said Shepard. He sat down, slumped in his chair worse than usual—it was always obvious when he was bored—and his tone made it clear they hadn’t gotten very far. “It’s pretty thin. Painfully nondescript Asian man, average height, average complexion, dark brown hair, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Calls himself Moriarty, after the fictional criminal mastermind from the Sherlock Holmes series. In the books, he was supposed to be some kind of godfather, ruling over every major crime in England.”

“I’m going to call it that this guy’s not the mastermind we’re looking for,” said Morgan. “The real big fish don’t bother with the cutesy nicknames. And what he’s getting here is chump change for the magnitude of this operation. Whoever’s really behind this is making a lot more than a couple hundred thousand.”

“You share my opinion on him, then,” said Bloch, who had remained standing up, subtly dominating the room as she usually did. “Shepard, why don’t you show Cobra what we have?”

Shepard stood up wearily under the screen with a clicker in his hand. “First bit of evidence is this note,” he said. With the clicker, he brought a scan of the note up on the monitor. “Written on a typewriter, which sidesteps printer ID altogether. Tells us we’re not working with an amateur.” Morgan had learned about that from working in intelligence. Every consumer printer always printed, with every document, a few imperceptibly small and light dots scattered around the document. While invisible to the naked eye, these could be scanned by a machine, which meant that any printer could be identified from a database.

“The typewriter is a potential lead, isn’t it?” asked Morgan, pointing to the note. “Can’t we track him using that?”

“Well,” said Shepard, “this much is true: there’s a thousand little moving parts, and the wear and tear will cause each typewriter to leave a specific signature—usually in the form of slightly, distinctively misaligned letters.” Shepard seemed more engaged, and his frame seemed to sag slightly less, as he explained—Morgan could tell he enjoyed going through this sort of explanation. “So it would be possible to match a piece of text to a particular typewriter.” He bent down at a computer and typed something into it. “But here’s the problem.”

Shepard brought up on the big screen a photo of a big, clunky machine with a dull grey plastic casing. “Analysis shows that this is the machine that the note was written on. The Underwood Touch-Master 5. An office favorite in the early sixties. You can find at least a couple dozen for sale on the Internet at any given moment. Then there are antique shops, garage sales.... There’s no telling how many of those are still out there, and it very well may be that there’s absolutely no record of this particular typewriter after it was originally manufactured and sold. Bottom line, there’s no way of identifying and finding out where it is. It’s hopeless to try to track it.”

“I see,” said Morgan. “But we still have the surveillance tapes of Stuart’s first meeting with this guy, right? What do we have on that?”

“
That’s
a little more promising,” said Shepard. He went back to typing and moving things around at his terminal. “I pulled whatever footage I could get of the area during the time when Stuart made the exchange, from traffic and security cameras.” He brought up a video window on the big screen that showed a view about five feet above eye level of a paved plaza with a number of regularly spaced slender trees, a thin, heavily trodden sprinkle of snow on the ground, with a sparse but steady flow of pedestrians walking left to right and a few sitting on evenly spread stone benches. “That’s Zuccotti Park, and you can see our guy there a little to the right of center.” The picture showed Stuart sitting nervously on one of the stone benches in a fancy tan overcoat with a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
, a large cup of coffee sitting on the stone next to him, his hand resting on a black suitcase as he looked furtively in every direction. The angle was a little above eye level, and the picture was crisp and clear enough to just make out the label on Stuart’s coffee.

“We’ve got another angle on the scene,” said Shepard, and brought up another window playing video of the same scene simultaneously, but this one from much higher up, two stories at least, and from the side rather than the front. Morgan saw by comparing walking figures in both images that they were perfectly synchronized.

“There’s our guy,” said Shepard, pointing out a man wearing, just as Stuart had described, a grey hoodie jacket and blue jeans, old white sneakers on his feet. His face was well-obscured by sunglasses and a baseball cap. He faced away from both cameras as he walked. He sat down next to Stuart.

“Watch his face,” Shepard said.

Morgan did—or rather, tried. The hat alone would have obscured it almost completely given the angles of both cameras. In addition to that, however, he managed to keep his head down, and somehow, at no point was Morgan able to catch a glimpse of anything more than his chin.

“The bastard knows where the cameras are,” he said. “He’s hiding from us.”

“Right,” said Shepard. “He keeps it up, too. Not one good frame. Look,” he said, pointing. “Here is where he passes the note.”

“How about face-recognition software?” Morgan asked

In the video, Len Stuart got up nervously and walked away, leaving the suitcase behind.

“Never even registers as a face at all,” said Shepard. “I ran it three times, just to be sure. See, this is when he gets up.” Shepard pointed at the videos with two fingers on his right hand. Perfectly synchronized, the figure in both videos got up, grabbed the handle of the suitcase, and wheeled it away.

“I managed to follow him through various video feeds along a couple of blocks.” Shepard brought up a new window with video from a different camera that showed the man as he turned a corner. He navigated around pedestrians, walking quickly. His pace was brisk, though not quite athletic. In fact, his step was graceless, almost mechanical.

“And this is where we lose him.”

The man walked into a deli, pulling the suitcase in behind him.

“He doesn’t come out,” said Shepard. “Not out of this door, not unless he’s heavily disguised. Our best guess is that he walked out into the back alley.”

“Has anyone been down to check out the deli?”

“I sent Bishop,” cut in Diana Bloch. “No security cameras inside, and nobody remembers anything, except one thing: they found an empty black suitcase in the bathroom. Nobody remembers who left it there. And it seems the door to the back alley is easily accessible, so it’s plausible he slipped out without anyone noticing. The question,” she continued, “is, what next?”

“What’s the status on Stuart?” asked Morgan.

“We’ve got Rogue, from tactical, tailing him,” said Bloch. “Plus the surveillance you installed in his apartment and taps on every piece of electronic equipment he owns. He’s not squealing.”

Morgan ran his hands through his hair as he thought. “Len wasn’t our only lead to this guy,” he said, looking at Karen O’Neal, who was still standing against the wall fiddling with her tablet.

“We’ve got four more names at the moment,” she said.

“Which means four more people who made trades,” said Morgan. “Four more meetings where this guy might have made a slip and showed his face. Four more meetings to establish a pattern, and maybe triangulate his position in the city.”

“All that may be true and still not worth the risk,” Bloch said, staring pensively at the screen. “Targeting more of his buyers makes it that much more likely that we’ll tip this guy off. We can’t afford to spook him. He’s our only connection to all this now.”

“You’re saying we wait until the next drop-off?” said Morgan. “Just sit on our asses until it happens?”

“That’s the long and short of it,” said Bloch, shooting Morgan a stony, superior look. “What would you have us do?”

“Attack this with everything we’ve got,” said Morgan.

“Of course,” she said wryly. “What else
would
you suggest?”

“Get each name on that list and extract every drop of information that we can from them,” he said, ignoring her comment. “We hit him
fast
and
hard
. We’ll be on him before he has any idea we were even aware of his existence.”

“Every person we contact is another possible breach,” she said. “If our man Moriarty catches wind that we’re on his tail, he’s going to drop everything and we’re back at a dead end.”

“He gave Stuart the information on the last attack less than a week before Paris,” Morgan insisted. “If we don’t go all out now, we won’t be able to stop the next attack. Damn it, Bloch, people’s lives are at stake!”

“Do you think you need to remind me of that?” snapped Bloch, uncrossing her arms. She raised her voice in anger. “Do you think I don’t know what the stakes are here, Cobra? Every day that passes means we’re one day closer to the next attack. The clock’s ticking. I haven’t forgotten. I couldn’t if I tried. But every single lead we’ve had has slipped through our fingers. I don’t intend to let the same happen with this one.” She took a few deep breaths, and then sat down heavily on the nearest chair. “I apologize for that outburst,” she said. “Your input is appreciated. But we need to be cautious here. We don’t know how long this pattern will go on. We focus on the big picture. Getting whoever is behind this. If that means risking letting another one happen, well.” She gave a rueful pause. “That’s a risk we need to take.”

“Am I hearing this correctly?” he said, standing over her. “You’re actually going to risk people dying because you’re too timid to act?
Bullshit
. You’re weak, and your weakness is going to cost people their lives.”

“You watch your mouth, Morgan,” she said. “I’m still your superior here, in case you’ve forgotten. The final decision is mine. We wait.”

“You’re making a mistake,” he said.

“It’s mine to make,” she said. “Until you bear this level of responsibility, you’ll have no idea what it means to make the tough call.”

“You’re the boss,” he said with a cold, controlled fury. Without taking his eyes off her, he pushed his chair so that it flipped onto the floor and slid to O’Neal’s foot. He stormed off without another word.

“Yes,” she said quietly, bending down to pick up the chair. “I am.”