The Prince of Risk (7 page)

“That would be fine,” said Astor. The agenda cut a crease into his lower back. It was difficult to walk without wincing.

Thomasson showed him to the elevator. “Exit at one,” he said.

Astor shook hands and thanked him. The ride to the ground floor required less than ten seconds. He rushed out the door and onto the pavement beyond.

The felon was happy to escape the building.

E
ach day before beginning work, Supervisory Special Agent Alex Forza bowed her head and prayed.

“Dear Father, I ask your blessing that I meet today’s challenges with intelligence, courage, and fortitude, that I give no quarter, now or ever, to enemies of this country, and that I perform my duties to your highest standards and in a manner that will bring credit to the Bureau.”

She kept her eyes closed a moment longer, allowing the words to resonate, then lifted her head and gazed at the photograph behind her desk. It was a portrait of a ruthless, cynical, manipulative middle-aged man. At fifty, he looked seventy. His hairline was receding, his jowls flabby, his eyes bulging, and he was well along the way to acquiring the toadlike stare of his later years. He was not an attractive man. Yet there was no mistaking the purpose in his forthright gaze, the single-minded and holy commitment to duty that was the cornerstone of his life and that, God-like, he had transferred to the Bureau.

“And Father,” Alex added in closing, whispering because this was a private matter between the two of them, “no matter what, do not let me fuck up.”

J. Edgar Hoover stared back mutely.

Alex took a seat at her desk and began sifting through the incident reports that had come in the night before. The stack was thicker than usual for a weekend, and she suspected that many of the calls were false alarms, or what she called “Al Qaeda alarms.” The first report validated her suspicion. A passenger riding in a taxi complained that the cabdriver had made derogatory comments about the United States and was, in his estimation, “a friggin’ terrorist.” The time of the call was 1:30 a.m. The caller left his name as well as the cabbie’s and the taxi medallion number. Alex classified the report as “nonurgent” and started a pile to the right. When time allowed, one of her investigators would call and interview the complainant. She felt confident that the city would be safe until then.

Alex headed CT-26, the Bureau’s threat assessment squad tasked with investigating claims of suspicious activities pertaining to acts of terror on United States soil. “See something, say something” was the watchword of the day, and the citizens of New York had taken it to heart. The hotline received north of fifty calls a day, and it was up to Alex and her team of twenty-six investigators to separate the chaff from the grain.

Alex had been given command six months earlier in an effort to provide the squad with a more aggressive stance. She’d made a name for herself in the bank robbery squad and child crimes before joining the CT pool five years back. There were agents who had more arrests, but none could match her take-no-prisoners attitude. No one gave the Bureau more than Alex Forza.

One glance at her office testified to that commitment. There was no couch, no coffee table, and no chairs for visitors to sit in while they were shooting the shit. Meetings were conducted standing up and face-to-face. Other than the photograph of J. Edgar Hoover, the walls were bare. The only furniture was her desk, her chair, and a bookcase, all standard issue. She was not, however, without a flair for decoration. A handheld battering ram lay against one wall. Her prized Benelli twelve-gauge assault shotgun stood in a corner next to it, along with her Kevlar vest. The office was everything she’d ever wanted.

Alex powered through a dozen incident reports, finding none to be urgent. An hour had passed when Jim Malloy popped his head in the door. “Hey, Alex, you already here? Thought you’d sleep in and get some rest.”

“I’m the boss,” she answered. “I ask those questions. Why aren’t you grabbing forty winks?”

Malloy stifled a yawn as he entered the office. “Me? You kidding? I got home just in time to wake up my little cherubs. Guess who gave them breakfast and looked after them while his wife slept an extra hour?”

Alex frowned. “So you show up at work tired and your wife is fresh as a daisy. Bad decision.”

Malloy’s disposition soured. “I’ll remember that.”

Alex pointed to the photo of Hoover. “You think he came to work tired so he could let his wife sleep?”

“He wasn’t married.”

“Not officially, at least.” Alex cracked a smile to show that the boss was human.

Malloy wandered over to the corner and picked up the battering ram. “This the thirty-five-pounder?”

“Little Bess.” Little Bess weighed thirty-five pounds. Big Bess weighed fifty. As the first woman to make the FBI’s SWAT team, Alex had been rewarded by being allowed to carry Little Bess up five flights of stairs every other Saturday when the team met to train. She didn’t mind one bit.

Malloy dropped the battering ram. “We get the warrant for Windermere yet?”

“Not enough to go on. No way to tell if the picture is real or fake. Plus no imminent threat. We wait another day. If our guy doesn’t show, I’ll call the judge.”

“Fair enough. Still, I wonder what—”

Alex’s phone rang and she raised a hand to interrupt Malloy. “Yeah?”

It was Jason Mara, one of her squad members, calling from Inwood. “Our guy just came home.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” said Alex, but she was already snatching her blazer off her chair, burying an arm in one sleeve and lunging for her vest. “When did he show?”

“A minute ago,” said Mara.

“What took you so long to call?”

“You serious?”

“Shut up and listen. Get that place locked down. He is not to leave the premises under any conditions. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s out there with you?”

“DiRienzo.”

“Good. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

Alex hung up and looked at Malloy. “Let’s go earn a beer.”

T
he call had come in three days earlier.

A woman in Long Island phoned the hotline claiming to have witnessed her neighbor unloading crates of military hardware from his car at three in the morning. The report was verified and a written copy forwarded to CT-26, where it landed on Alex’s desk.

The mention of military hardware graded the call “urgent.” Alex vetted the source herself. The woman was named Irene Turner and lived in Inwood, a scruffy lower-middle-class neighborhood on the southern tip of Long Island. Inwood had plenty of temporary residents, some organized crime, and a significant foreign-born population, but it was the town’s proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, a major international freight hub, that piqued her curiosity and made the hackles on the back of her neck stand up.

“I saw guns,” the woman named Irene Turner explained.

“Really? What kind?”

“Well, actually boxes full of guns.”

“Boxes of guns?”

“They were really crates with markings on them. I’m Russian. The writing was Cyrillic.”

Alex hadn’t caught an accent. “Have you lived here long?”

“Since I was four. My parents were refuseniks. We emigrated in 1982. I have my American passport.”

Alex’s interest ratcheted up a notch. “Please go on.”

“It was past three in the morning. I don’t sleep. I was downstairs in the kitchen making coffee. From my window, I can see into his garage. Of course, he doesn’t know this. Otherwise he would think I’m some kind of crazy for watching him so much.”

“Do you know your neighbor’s name?”

“Oh, no. We don’t speak. He moved in a couple of months back, but I don’t see him much. He’s nice-looking. About thirty. Tall. Fit.” She giggled. “He has a nice behind.”

Alex began to get a picture of Irene Turner. Thirty-five years old. Single. Lonely. A life lived looking through windows. “About the guns…”

“Yesterday night he came home late. He opened the back of his truck and that’s when I saw them. The crates. Green with rope handles…”

“And Cyrillic writing on the side.”

“It said
Kalashnikov.
”

“Excuse me, Ms. Turner, I don’t mean to be rude, but how can you see that far?”

“The writing on the side was yellow. It was easy to read. I took a picture.”

“A picture?” Alex smiled to herself. The technology these days. Every man a spy.

“With my phone.”

Alex asked her to send the photograph to her own phone. Fifteen seconds later she had it.

The picture was terrible. It was dark and out of focus and of course taken from 50 feet away. Still, there was no mistaking the olive-drab crate with rope handles and some kind of yellow writing on the sides.

Alex considered this. Wooden crates with rope handles. Cyrillic writing. Whatever was inside the box—Kalashnikovs or Tokarevs or little wooden matryoshkas—it sounded as if it were military issue and a resident of Nassau County should not be in possession of it.

Alex ended the call after confirming Turner’s address and that of her neighbor and extracting a promise from Turner to come to the FBI’s office in Chelsea for an interview the following day. After that, she walked into the bullpen and waited until all her young lions raised their heads and gave her their attention.

“Gentlemen and gentlemen,” she announced, with the theatricality she reserved for promising leads, “we have a live one.”

A
lex stood beside Jim Malloy at the door of 1254 Windermere. “Ready to go?”

Malloy nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Alex rapped twice on the door, then stepped back so that the keyholder could see her. She pushed her shoulders back and lifted her chin. She liked this moment best. The moment before the real job began. She never knew what she might find out, what crime she might discover, what threat she might mitigate. Too much of her job involved waiting, analyzing, convincing, and cajoling. This is what she had joined the Bureau for. Catching bad guys.

The house was a two-story clapboard with a shingle roof built in the early ’40s. A fringe of lawn out front needed mowing. An American flag hung limply next to the door. The owner was one Maxim Ustinov, an immigrant from Russia like Irene Turner, the neighbor who had called in the report, but Ustinov was just the landlord. The tenant, or in FBI parlance “the keyholder,” was a thirty-one-year-old male named Randall Shepherd. According to the owner, Shepherd was a model tenant. He had moved in on June 1 on a twelve-month lease. A cashier’s check in the amount of $9,000 had covered the security deposit as well as the first three months’ rent.

Alex had established twenty-four-hour watch on the house two days earlier. During that time there had been no sightings of Shepherd coming or going. To verify that no one was inside, she’d conducted a pretext, sending Malloy and Mara to the front door, posing as activists canvassing the area for signatures. No one had answered, and readings from the infrared scanner programmed to detect warmth emitted by human beings came back negative.

She was raising her hand to knock again when the door swung open.

“Hello.” The man was tall and fit, with dark hair cut to the scalp. He wore a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. His eyes were blue and steady. Alex couldn’t tell if he had a nice behind or not. He did, however, have arms like a weightlifter, his biceps bursting from the sleeves. Alex felt a pinch between her shoulder blades, a twinge, nothing more. It was her sixth sense, and it said, “Trouble.”

“Mr. Randall Shepherd?”

“Yes?” The response was tentative, as the man looked at the two agents, both attired in dark suits, both wearing sunglasses.

Alex badged him. “I’m Special Agent Forza with the FBI. This is Special Agent Malloy. We were wondering if we might have a word.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Not yet.” Alex smiled as she removed her sunglasses. “May we come in?”

“I’m happy to answer any questions out here.”

Alex detected a hint of a foreign accent. The
h
in
happy
was too soft, more
’appy.
A background search on Shepherd had come up close to empty. He had no credit cards, didn’t subscribe to cable TV, and neither the IRS nor Social Security had heard from him in years. The Texas driver’s license number he’d given on his rental application was valid, though she hadn’t been able to pull up the picture. And of course there was the matter of the cashier’s check. No one paid three months’ rent in advance. To Alex’s eye, he was a straw man.

“We’d prefer to come inside,” said Malloy. “We can get a warrant if you’d like.”

Shepherd shrugged and his blue eyes softened. “Come in, then. The place is a mess. Don’t want to give the FBI the wrong impression.”

Shepherd swung open the door. Alex followed Malloy inside. The home was cheaply furnished and smelled of smoke and stale beer. There was a sagging couch, a beat-up armchair, and a coffee table scarred with cigarette burns. Copies of
New York, Time Out, This Week in New York,
and, more interestingly,
Guns and Ammo
lay arranged messily on one end
.
At the other, Alex noted a residue of spilled coffee or tea, not in a puddle but shaped very clearly at a right angle, as if it had been spilled next to a magazine. A magazine that had been hastily hidden.

“You like guns?” she asked.

“I’m from Texas,” Shepherd volunteered. “I hunt.”

“Whereabouts?” asked Malloy.

“Where do I come from or where do I hunt?”

“Both,” said Alex.

“I come from Houston, but we used to hunt in East Texas. A place called Nacogdoches, near the Louisiana border.”

“Where in Houston?” asked Malloy. “I’m from Dallas myself.”

Alex said nothing. Malloy was born and raised in Seattle, but she liked his tactic to keep the pressure on Shepherd.

“Sugarland.”

Malloy nodded, then asked offhandedly, “Who’s mayor down there?”

“No idea,” said Shepherd. “I haven’t lived there in years. Who’s the mayor of Dallas?”

Malloy stumbled and Alex picked up the baton. “You don’t sound like you’re from Houston,” she said. “Are you in this country illegally?”

It was Alex’s practice to go at a suspect head-on. She believed that confrontation yielded the greatest results, both immediate and in the long term. You had to shake the tree to see if any fruit might drop to the ground. She liked to shake it hard.

“I’m American,” said Shepherd. “Last I checked, that gives me the right to be here.”

“Do you have a passport?”

“Okay, enough,” said Shepherd, holding up his hands. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”

“I’m sure you know.”

Shepherd didn’t respond, and Alex saw his eyes narrow, a current of anger rustle the calm façade.

“We want to know where you are keeping the machine guns,” she added.

“Pardon me?”

“I believe they are AK-47s.”

Shepherd’s eyes widened, and he laughed as if a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. “AK-47s? Here? You’re serious? At least now I know you’re at the wrong house. You had me worried.”

Alex assessed Shepherd’s body language. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His eyes held hers. The laugh was rich and easy. There was no fidgeting, no playing with his hands, no delaying or prevaricating or any of the giveaways typically found in a person who had something to hide. Everything indicated that he was telling the truth. The twinge had lessened, but it was still there.

“We had a report that you were unloading a crate with Russian markings at three a.m. a few days ago,” she said.

“That?” Shepherd chuckled, showing a set of straight white teeth: just a big ole Texas boy. “Can you stay here a second? I show you.”

I show you.
Odd, thought Alex. “We’d rather come with you.”

“Suit yourself.” Shepherd led the way through the kitchen and into the attached garage, where a late-model Ford pickup was parked. He skirted the truck and stopped, pointing at the ground. “There’s your crate,” he said. “I like to play paintball. That’s our ammo.”

Alex rifled through the crate, sifting the bags of paint balls. Malloy picked up a bag, then dropped it, disappointed. He looked at Alex and sighed. Case over. One more false alarm. Alex couldn’t read Cyrillic, but she could make out
AK-47
well enough. She ran a hand inside the crate; her fingers came away slick with paint. She rose, and the three walked back through the kitchen.

“That’s some load of groceries,” said Alex. “Expecting someone?”

“Family,” said Shepherd. “Barbecue tonight.”

“They in from Texas?”

“All over, actually,” said Shepherd. “You’re welcome to stop by and see for yourself. We’re firing up the grill around seven.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Malloy.

Alex slowed, eyeing the groceries on the counter. There was milk and orange juice, bread and peanut butter, and bags of beef jerky. To one side were amassed a dozen small bottles of five-hour energy drink. Above the fridge sat two cartons of Marlboro Reds, but she knew Shepherd didn’t smoke. His fingers were clean, with no nicotine stains between the index and middle fingers. And there were those white teeth. She didn’t see any chicken or steaks or ground beef: staples of a summer barbecue. Of course, he could have already put it away. She looked at the refrigerator, then thought better of it.

She and Malloy stopped at the front door. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Shepherd,” she said. “We’re sorry to have intruded on your day.”

“It is no problem.”

Alex smiled as the twinge in her back turned into a dagger. There it was again. The clumsy syntax. The faintest of accents, turning
it
into
eet.
She didn’t know exactly where he was from, but it wasn’t Houston, Texas.

She rubbed her fingers together and found them as slippery as a few minutes before. Not paint but grease. The kind of grease that keeps rust from gun barrels. And all the while she kept her eyes locked on Mr. Randall Shepherd.

You bastard,
she thought.
You goddamned, Oscar-winning bastard.

Shepherd stared back, eyes steady, unblinking. He ran a hand over his scalp, and Alex observed two rivulets of sweat at his temple beginning to roll toward his jaw.

“Au revoir,”
she said, as lightly as her thundering heart would permit.

“Au revoir,”
said Shepherd. The response was immediate and unrehearsed. It was
French
French, not her clumsy American variant. She knew it, and he knew she knew it. Shepherd shook his head, chuckling to himself.
“Mais merde.”

“Hands against the wall,” said Alex. “You’re under arrest.”

“What is it?” asked Malloy. “Did I miss something?”

But by then the man who called himself Randall Shepherd was bringing a large semiautomatic pistol to bear and Alex was pushing Malloy aside as she cleared her Glock.

“Drop it!”

She was a second late.