The Kill Room (9 page)

I
N ALL ENDEAVORS MISTAKES HAPPEN.

You can’t let them affect you emotionally.

You try to whip cream without chilling the bowl and beaters and you’re going to end up with butter.

You and the tech department datamine the name of a client’s regular driver at a limo company and it turns out he was sick the
one
day you need to ask him about. And even removing a few careful strips of flesh couldn’t get the man lying in front of you to give up the substitute’s name. Which meant that he didn’t know.

Silverskin…

Jacob Swann reflected that he should have known this, should have prepared, and that gave him a dose of humble. You can’t make assumptions. The first rule to any good meal is prep. Get all the work done ahead of time, all the chopping, all the measuring, all the stock reduction.

Everything.

Only then do you assemble, cook and finish.

He now cleaned up quickly in Vlad Nikolov’s house, reflecting that the hour wasn’t a complete waste of time—refining your skills never is. Besides, Nikolov might have known something helpful to the police (though as it turned out, he hadn’t). Since he had people like that ADA Nance Laurel and the whistleblower to take care of, he wanted to keep Vlad Nikolov’s corpse a secret for as long as possible. He wrapped the oozing body in a dozen towels and then in garbage bags, taping them shut. He dragged the corpse to the basement,
thud thud thud
on the stairs, and eased it into a supply room. The odor wouldn’t begin to escape for a week or so.

He then used the man’s mobile and called Elite Limousines, reporting in hesitant English with a functional Slavic accent that he was Vlad Nikolov’s cousin. The driver had learned of a death in the family, back in the old country (he didn’t mention Moscow or Kiev or Tbilisi, since he didn’t know). Vlad was taking several weeks off. The receptionist protested—only about scheduling, not that the story seemed incredible—but he’d hung up.

Swann surveyed the scene of the interrogation and noted he’d left very little evidence. He’d used trash bags and towels to catch the blood. He now scrubbed the rest, using bleach, and put the towels and phone in a trash bag, which he’d take with him for disposal in a Dumpster on his way home.

As he was about to leave, he received an encrypted email. Well, it seemed that NIOS had learned some very interesting information. The whistleblower was still unknown, though Metzger had people looking into that. However, the tech department had discovered some names of other people involved in the case, in addition to Ms. Nance Laurel, the prosecutor. The lead investigators were two individuals—an NYPD detective named Amelia Sachs and a consultant, someone with the curious name Lincoln Rhyme.

It was time for some more digging and datamining, Swann reflected, pulling out his phone. After all, the strength of the best cookbook in the world,
The Joy of Cooking
, derived from the patient assembly and organization of facts, from
knowledge
, in short—not showy recipes.

D
O YOU KNOW ABOUT PANAMA?
” Tash Farada asked Sachs, in the passenger seat of the Town Car. He was animated and seemed to enjoy speeding through traffic as they headed toward Wall Street.

She said, “The canal. Some invasion or something down there. A while ago.”

The driver laughed and accelerated hard to avoid a slow-moving lane of traffic on the FDR. “Some ‘invasion or something.’ Yes, yes. I read history a great deal. I enjoy it. In the eighties Panama had a regime change. A revolution. Just like our country.”

“Yes, Iran. In ’seventy-nine, wasn’t it?”

He glanced at her with a frown.

“Persia, I mean,” she corrected.

“No, I’m speaking of seventeen seventy-six. I’m American.”

Oh.
Our
country.

“Sorry.”

A wrinkle of brow but a forgiving one. “Now, Panama. Noriega used to be an ally of America. Fighting the Communist evil. Helping the CIA and the DEA wage war on the scourge of drugs…Of course, he was also helping the cartel heads wage war on the scourge of the CIA and the DEA. That game caught up with him and in nineteen eighty-nine the U.S. had had enough. We invaded. The problem was that Panama was a dirty little war. You’ve read George Orwell?”

“No.” Sachs might have, long ago, but she never bluffed or tried to impress with knowledge she didn’t have command of.

“In
Animal Farm
, Orwell wrote, ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Well, all wars are bad. But some wars are more bad than others. The head of Panama was corrupt, his underlings were corrupt. They were dangerous men and oppressed the people. But the invasion was very hard too. Very violent. Roberto Moreno was living there, in the capital, with his mother and father.”

Sachs recalled her conversation with Fred Dellray, who’d told them that Robert Moreno also went by Roberto. She wondered if he’d legally changed it or just used the Latino version as a pseudonym.

“Now, he was a young teenager. That day in the car he told Lydia, his voluptuous friend, that he didn’t have the happiest home life, his father traveling, his mother had sadness problems. She was not much there for him.”

Sachs remembered too the father’s oil company job, the demanding hours, and the woman’s eventual suicide.

“The boy, it seemed, made friends with a family living in Panama City. Roberto and the two brothers became close. Enrico and José, I think were their names. About his age, to hear him tell it.”

Tash Farada’s voice faded.

Sachs could see where the narrative was headed.

“The brothers were killed in the invasion?”

“One was—Roberto’s best friend. He doesn’t know who actually fired the shots but he blames the Americans. He said the government changed the rules. They didn’t care about people or freedom, like they said. They were happy to support Noriega and tolerate the drugs until he grew unstable and they were worried the canal would close and the oil tankers could not get through. That’s when they invaded.” A whisper now. “Mr. Moreno found his friend’s body. He still had nightmares about it, he told the woman Lydia.”

Although the evidence might point to Moreno’s being less than a saint, contrary to what Nance Laurel would have liked, Sachs couldn’t help but be moved by the sad story. She wondered if Laurel would have been. Doubted it.

The driver added, “And when he was telling this story, telling it to Lydia, his voice grew broken. But then all of a sudden he laughed and gestured around him. He said he was saying goodbye to America and was happy about that. This would be his last trip here. He knew he couldn’t return.”

“
Couldn’t
return?”

“That’s right. Couldn’t. ‘Good riddance,’ he said.” Tash Farada added darkly, “
I
thought good riddance to
him
. I love this country.” A pause then he added, “I’m not happy he’s dead, you understand. But he said many bad things about my home. Which I think is the best nation on earth and always has been.”

As they approached Wall Street, Sachs nodded toward the site of the September 11 attacks. “Did he want to see ground zero?”

“No,” the driver said. “I thought he might. I thought possibly he wanted to gloat, after all he had said. I would have asked him out of the car at that point. But he didn’t. He’d grown quiet.”

“Where did you take him down here?”

“I just dropped them at this place.” He’d pulled over on Fulton Street, near Broadway. “Which I thought was odd. Just on this street corner. They got out and he said they would be several hours. If I couldn’t wait here they would call me. I gave him my card.”

“What did you think was odd about that?”

“In this area of the city we limo drivers can get almost anywhere if there’s no construction. But it was as if he didn’t want me to see where they were going. I assumed to one of the hotels, the Millenium or one of the others. That’s the direction they walked in.”

For a tryst with his voluptuous friend? But then why not just stay at the hotel uptown?

“Did he call you?” Sachs was hoping to get Moreno’s phone number, which might still be in the driver’s log.

But the man said, “No. I just waited here. And they returned.”

She climbed out of the Lincoln, then walked in the direction that the driver had indicated. She canvassed the three hotels within walking distance but none had a record of a guest under Moreno’s name on May 1. If they had checked in, Lydia might have used her name though that lead wasn’t going anywhere without more information about her. Sachs also displayed a picture of Moreno but no one recognized him.

Had the activist paid her to have sex with somebody else? she wondered. Had they met with someone in one of the hotels or an office here? As a bribe or to blackmail him? Sachs walked back outside into the congested street from the last hotel, looking around her at the hundreds of buildings—offices, stores, apartments. A team of NYPD canvassers could have spent a month inquiring about Robert Moreno and his companion and still not scratched the surface.

She wondered too if Lydia might have received her cash for another reason. Was she part of a cell, a terrorist organization that Moreno was working with? Did they meet with a group that wanted to send another violent message in this financial hub of the city?

This conjecture too, while reasonable to Sachs, was surely something that Nance Laurel would not want to hear.

You mean, you can’t keep an open mind…

Sachs turned around and walked back to the limo. Dropping into the front seat again, she stretched, winced at a burst of arthritic pain and dug one nail into another. Stop it, she told herself. Dug a bit harder and wiped the blood on her black jeans.

“And after this?”

Farada told her, “I drove them back to the hotel. The woman got out with him but they went different ways. He went inside and she walked east.”

“Did they hug?”

“Not really. They brushed cheeks. That was all. He tipped me and he tipped well, even though it’s included.”

“All right, let’s head back to Queens.”

He put the car in gear and made his way east through the dense rush-hour traffic. The time was around 7 p.m. As they plodded along she asked Farada, “Did you get any sense that he was being followed or watched? Did he feel uneasy? Did he act suspicious or paranoid?”

“Hm. Ah. I can say he was cautious. He looked around frequently. But there were never any specific concerns. Not like he said, ‘That red car is following me.’ He seemed like somebody who tried to be aware of his surroundings. I see that much. Businesspeople are that way. I think they must be nowadays.”

Sachs was frustrated. She’d learned nothing conclusive about the man’s sojourn in New York. Even more questions than answers now floated. And yet she couldn’t shake the sense of urgency, thinking of the STO naming Rashid as the next target.

We do know that NIOS’s going to kill him before Friday. And who’ll be the collateral damage then? His wife and children? Some passerby?…

They were on the Williamsburg Bridge when her phone rang.

“Fred, hi.”

“Hey, Amelia. Listen, gotta coupla things. Had our people look through SIGINT down in Venezuela. Snagged one of Moreno’s voice from ’bout a month ago. Might be relevant. He was saying, ‘Yes, May twenty-fourth, that’s right…disappearing into thin air. After that, it’ll be heaven.’”

The 24th was less than two weeks away. Did he mean he was planning some attack and he’d have to vanish, like Bin Laden?

“Any ideas about that?” Sachs asked.

“No, but we’re still checkin’.”

She told the agent what Farada had explained about this being Moreno’s last trip to New York and his mysterious meeting in the vicinity of ground zero.

“That’d fit,” Dellray said. “Yeah, yeah, could be he’s got something nasty in mind and is going to ground. Makes sense—’specially when you hear the other thing I’m about to tell you.”

“Go on.” Her notebook was on her lap, pen poised.

The agent said, “ ’Nother voice-call trap. Ten days before he died. Moreno was saying, ‘Can we find somebody to blow them up?’”

Sachs’s gut clenched.

Dellray continued, “The tech geeks think he mentioned the date May thirteen, along with Mexico.”

This was two days ago. She didn’t remember any incident but Mexico was largely a war zone, with so many drug-related attacks and killings that they often didn’t rate a mention on U.S. TV news. “I’m checking t’see if something happened then. Now, lastly—I said
coupla
things; I meant three. We got Moreno’s travel records. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

The agent explained. “On May second Moreno flew from New York to Mexico City, maybe to plan for the bombing. Then the next day on to Nicaragua. The day after that to San José, Costa Rica. He stayed there for a few days and then flew to the Bahamas on the seventh, where—coupla days later—he had his run-in with the fine marksmanship of Mr. Don Bruns.”

Dellray added, “Some casual surveillance was conducted on him in Mexico City and Costa Rica, where he was spotted outside the U.S. embassies. But there was no evidence that he was lookin’ like any kinda threat, so your boy was never detained.”

“Thanks, Fred. That’s helpful.”

“I’ll keep at it, Amelia. But gotta tell you, I ain’t got oodles of time.”

“Why, you have something big going down?”

“Yup. I’m changing my name and moving to Canada. Joining the Mounted Police.”

Click.

She didn’t laugh. His comment had struck too close to home; this case was like unstable explosives.

A half hour later Tash Farada parked in his driveway and they got out. He struck a certain pose, unmistakable.

“How much do I owe you?” Sachs asked.

“Well, normally we charge from garage to garage, which isn’t fair for you. Since the car was here. So it will be from the time we left to the time we arrived.” A look at his watch. “We left at four twelve and we’ve now returned now at seven thirty-eight.”

Well, that’s some precision.

“For you, I will round downward. Four fifteen to seven thirty. That’s three hours and fifteen minutes.”

And that’s some speedy calculation.

“What’s the hourly rate?”

“That would be ninety dollars.”

“An hour?” she asked before remembering she’d added the qualifier with her prior question.

A smile. “That’s three hundred and eighty-two dollars and fifty cents.”

Shit, Sachs thought, she’d assumed it would be about a quarter of that. So, one more reason not to be a limo girl.

He added, “And of course…”

“I agreed to double it.”

“That is a grand total of seven hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

A sigh. “Will you give me one more ride?” Sachs asked.

“Well, if it won’t take too much time.” A nod toward the house. “Supper, you know.”

“Just to the nearest ATM.”

“Ah, yes, yes…And I won’t charge you for that trip at all!”