by Steven James
As I burst into the hallway, I called to DeYoung, “Have Cyber wipe those phones so he can’t access them!”
Mannie was a human battering ram, and I found one agent unconscious in the hallway and another groaning on the floor near where the hall ended in a T.
“Where’d he go?” I said. “Which way?”
He pointed left.
I darted in that direction, evaluating the layout of the building with respect to the route Mannie had chosen. It made sense if he was heading for the parking garage. How does he know where to go? Did he study the schematics of this building? Has he been in here before?
I hadn’t gone far before the lockdown alarm went off, and I knew we were talking about a total shutdown of exterior doors. If Mannie was still in this building—and based on the amount of ground he would’ve needed to cover to get out, I guessed that he was—we should be good.
My next thought went to my stepdaughter. I didn’t know her well enough to guess how she would respond to the alarms, but I didn’t want her to be afraid. However, I had no phone to call her, and the lobby wasn’t close by. I figured we had enough agents to sweep through the parking garage looking for Mannie. I wanted to make sure nothing happened to her.
A security team of three agents came sprinting up to me.
“Check the garage,” I said. “Every car, every trunk. And no one leaves or enters the front gate.” I turned to the lead agent. “Let me have your phone.”
“But I—”
“Now.”
He unlocked the screen and handed it over. Tessa normally didn’t answer phone calls—just texts. So I sent her a text to stay where she was in the lobby and not to worry about the alarms, that she was safe.
When I returned to the agent who’d told me where Mannie had headed, I asked him what his name was.
“Jason Thurman.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“He got my phone and my wallet.”
“He—wait. What? Your wallet?”
Thurman bit his lip nervously.
I’d seen this tactic before—an offender gets a guy’s wallet, which has his home address in it, then he threatens the man’s family to procure his help.
“Are you married?” I asked. “Do you have kids?”
“Yeah.” The man was shaking. “I—”
“Did Mannie threaten your family?”
A tear formed in his eye. “I didn’t want to—”
“Where did he go?” I demanded. “Tell me the truth.”
Thurman pointed down the other hallway.
I cursed under my breath.
I gave him the phone I’d just acquired. “Call your family. Get them someplace safe.”
Then I ran down the hall Mannie had actually used, thought through the routes he might have chosen to get out of the building, and remembered that there was a little-used tunnel that ran from the federal building on this side of Duane Street to the Ted Weiss Federal Building on the other.
I couldn’t come up with any other scenarios that saw Mannie escaping this building.
In the past, Blake and his team had been able to access the Federal Digital Database, so they might have obtained the building’s blueprints.
Is this part of their plan? Did Mannie want to get caught?
I descended the stairs and made my way to the tunnel that led under the street. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door.
The cramped corridor was less than two meters wide and had only sporadic fluorescent lights, leaving plenty of shadowy recesses. A network of pipes leading from one building to the other obstructed the view even more.
“Mannie!” My voice echoed thinly and sharply through the corridor.
No reply.
Alright, let’s do this.
Quickly, but cautiously, and with the gun in the high ready position, I proceeded into the tunnel.
21
Shadow to light.
I moved forward.
The pulsing emergency lights and the glaring alarm weren’t in sync with each other and it created a disorienting, vertiginous effect.
I’d never been in this corridor before, and I didn’t know exactly where it opened up in the other building.
However, the farther I went into the tunnel, the more convinced I became that Mannie would not have holed up in here but would have bolted through to the other side.
Ten more meters.
The alarm kept cycling.
Then five.
Then two.
And then I was there.
Bracing myself, I threw open the door and entered a small, empty room that had a freight elevator on the right, a stairwell on the left.
I punched the elevator’s up button, then opened the stairwell door while I waited for the elevator doors to open.
Gun raised, I studied the steps above me but saw no one, heard no one.
Back in front of the elevator, I leveled my SIG as the doors parted.
Empty.
If Mannie had used the elevator, he could have exited onto any floor in the building. Since I had no way to tell if that’s what he’d done, I turned my attention to the stairwell.
I took the steps two at a time, crossed a short hallway, and found an exit door that was now lying on the pavement outside, either kicked down or torn free.
Busting down the door would’ve set off an alarm, but since one was already sounding, nobody would’ve necessarily noticed the difference or paid specific attention to it.
Not a bad strategy for getting out.
I scanned the street.
You’d think that someone Mannie’s size would be visible a mile away, but I saw no sign of him outside the building. Even when I ran down the street to the corner, I came up with nothing.
He was gone.
But then another thought: Or maybe he isn’t. Just because the door is broken down doesn’t mean he went through it.
It was true, he could still be in the building somewhere.
When Ralph and I were working on a case in Detroit last summer, we’d found it necessary at one point to disable the GPS tracking on our phones. I wasn’t sure if Mannie would know how to do that. Right now, our fugitive had five phones that we knew of. Certainly, we would be able to track one of them to locate him.
Even with the remote data wipe that I’d asked DeYoung to order, the GPS should still be traceable.
Back in the building, I flagged down an agent from a security team sweeping the hallway, told her to guard the doorway and make sure no one went in or out, then ran upstairs to our computer forensics suite on the third level to Agent Vanessa Collins, the woman who’d enhanced the footage of Jon Murray’s suicide video for me. “I need you to track some phones,” I said.
“Whose?”
“Everyone’s.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ping the phones of any employees on the surrounding streets or in any vehicles leaving the area. Start with DeYoung’s, Thurman’s, and mine. Then, find out the name of the lawyer and the attending agent who were stationed in interview room 422 across the street until about five minutes ago. Move out from there.”
“I’m on it.”
* * *
+++
“What are you doing, sweetie?” the escort asked him.
“Just getting everything ready,” Blake replied.
He unfolded the plastic tarp in the middle of the room and began to meticulously spread it out across the carpet.
“Ready for what?”
“A chat.”
He’d enjoyed Sasha so much Friday night that he’d brought her back now, during the day. A lesson he’d learned a long time ago: all of the pleasures of the evening do not need to wait for dar
kness to be enjoyed.
The NSA employee whom he’d contacted earlier hadn’t been able to tell him much, other than that Mannie had been picked up by the FBI and was being held somewhere, but he didn’t know where. “They’re playing this one really close to the vest,” the guy had said.
“I imagine they are.”
Now, Sasha pointed. “But I don’t get it. What’s the plastic for?”
“Easier cleanup.”
“But—”
“Trust me, my dear. The less you know, the better.”
As he was setting a chair in the middle of the tarp, his encrypted phone rang, and when he answered it, Mannie’s voice came on: “I’m out. I’m free. The Feds had me at the Field Office.”
“What happened?”
“Picked me up on Amber Road. I’ll fill you in when I see you.”
“Where are you?”
“On my way to Kingsbridge Heights. The reservoir.”
Blake knew the place. One of their prearranged meeting locations.
“I’ll send a car to pick you up,” Blake said.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell them anything.”
Blake smoothed out the few remaining wrinkles in the plastic. “The thought never crossed my mind.”
* * *
+++
Collins was good.
It took her less than four minutes to tag the phones. All five of them were traveling in different routes and at different speeds along nearby streets. One dot on the map might have been our suspect, but all of them clearly were not.
Mannie passed the phones out. He gave them away.
Not bad. That’s what I would have done.
Over the next few minutes, we checked our external CCTV cameras to no avail and tracked down all the people carrying the missing phones. However, even when the agents or NYPD officers caught up with them and asked where the big guy who’d handed them the phone had gone, none of them could tell us anything helpful.
The fact that Mannie was able to elude detection on the street and avoid being captured on any exterior cameras made me think again of how the observer in the senator’s house was able to avoid being seen on the security cameras at the residence.
I still hadn’t spoken with Tessa, which concerned me, so, before regrouping with DeYoung, I headed to the lobby to touch base with her.
When I arrived, she wasn’t there. I asked the FBI Police officer assigned to the metal detector if he knew where she was, and he told me simply that she’d left.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Nope. She was worried about coming back through again, though. Said something about getting a sandwich.”
I felt a flood of frustration that quickly turned to worry.
“Was she alone?”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t know where she might have gone?”
“I already told you that I don’t.”
This guy was irritating me. “Right.”
I went outside and scanned the street but didn’t see her.
Back in the lobby, I used the phone at the front desk and tried her number, but she didn’t pick up. I told myself that it was maybe because I kept calling from all these different numbers rather than my own.
This time, I left a voicemail for her to give me a call—the Cyber team was doing a restore on my phone and I would have it back in a few minutes.
Of course, it was unlikely that something might’ve happened to Tessa with regard to Mannie’s escape, but still, I was worried. From my encounters with Blake last summer, I knew that he was aware of Tessa and Christie and how much they meant to me, and right now that did not reassure me.
A rush of fierce protectiveness triggered inside me, something that felt both foreign and also somehow, at the same time, natural. Maybe it was how a dad was supposed to feel. I liked it even though it scared me. I never would’ve thought I would be this worried about someone else’s daughter.
She’s not just someone else’s. Not anymore.
I knew that DeYoung wanted to see me again, but before I left for his office I put another call through, this time to Agent Collins. “Listen, there’s one more phone I need you to track.”
“Whose is that?”
“My stepdaughter’s. She’s going to hate me for this, but could you locate her cell?”
“You sure? My nephew, he’s a teenager; if I did something like that with him, well . . .”
“Yeah, no, I hear what you’re saying, but right now I just need to know that she’s safe.”
I gave her Tessa’s number and headed to the conference room adjacent to DeYoung’s office to debrief Mannie’s escape.
22
DeYoung informed the receptionist that he didn’t want to be disturbed, then tugged the door shut.
A television screen stared at us from one wall, a speaker’s lectern sat on the other side of the room. We gathered around the mammoth table that barely fit between them.
DeYoung and I were joined by the lawyer, who I learned was named Vincent Ashworth and who was still shaking, and Agent Thurman, whose wallet had been taken. The young man whose arm Mannie had broken had been taken to the hospital.
“So what do we know?” DeYoung said. “Where are we at?”
“Blake is still on the loose,” Ashworth muttered. “Mannie’s gone. And we don’t know anything more than we did before he escaped.”
That wasn’t quite true, but I didn’t correct him. I was still processing everything Mannie had said to me.
DeYoung flopped the legal pad Mannie had used onto the table. “And what does this mean, Pat? This cipher?”
“I’m not familiar with it. He told me that remembering death was the key. I’m not sure if he was referring to any specific death—Jon Murray’s, for instance—or just death in general.”
“We can analyze it, though, right?” Thurman said to me. “Have our team decode it?”
“We can try.”
DeYoung looked at me curiously. “What was all that about plea bargaining?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.”
A knock on the door. When DeYoung answered it, Collins appeared with our phones in hand.
As she was passing them out, she said, “Pat, your latest backup on the system was twenty-four hours ago, so we don’t have your most up-to-date messages.”
“Okay. And the other matter?”
“Renaldo’s. Just down the street. A coffee shop.”
I knew the place.
I gave her a description of Tessa and what she was wearing. “Do me a favor. Call the manager and confirm that a girl fitting that description is in there. And that she’s alone.”
“Done.”
Collins told us to contact her if we needed to, then slipped into the hallway again.
Once she was gone, I said to DeYoung, “There are five things we need to do.”
“Go on.”
I ticked them off on my fingers as I listed them. “First, provide protection for Agent Thurman’s family. If Mannie and Blake know where they live and decide to make a move on them, I want them safe and agents waiting in the house instead.”
“Good call,” DeYoung told me. “I’ll get a team over there.”
Thurman nodded, looking relieved.
“Second,” I said, “contact Ralph Hawkins. He told me last night that he was planning to fly up here today. He needs to know that Mannie escaped. Third, let’s see if Ralph has any information in his case files that might give us a bead on where Mannie might have gone. Fourth, check traffic cameras and exterior CCTV cameras from the surrounding blocks to see if we can catch sight of Mannie.”
He was taking notes. “And number five?”
“Mannie told me to follow the Selzucaine back to the source. Let’s wor
k our CIs to find out all we can about the drug’s dealers and distributors.”
“Thurman, that’s you,” DeYoung said. “You handle high-level confidential informants, don’t you?”
“I do. I’m on it,” he said.
As DeYoung put things into play, I stepped aside and texted Tessa again, this time from my own phone, asking her one more time to call me as soon as possible.
I was considering how to gracefully make an exit so I could follow up with Collins and confirm Tessa’s location when DeYoung’s receptionist knocked once on the door and then pressed it open before waiting for him to invite her in.
“Annalise, I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“I know, sir. I’m sorry. This is important. I thought you might want to know. It’s the senator. He’s about to do a press conference.”
“What?”
“Senator Murray. Public Affairs just gave me a call, wondered who was behind green-lighting it.”
DeYoung clicked on the television. “What channel?”
“CBN.”
He flipped to Cable Broadcast News.
“Is this about his son?” I asked Annalise.
“That’s what the anchors are saying.”
“You need to call him, sir,” I told DeYoung. “Stop him.”
He already had his phone out and was speed-dialing the senator.
“I should speak to him,” I said. “I was there at his house the other night. I’m the closest to all of this.”
Annalise left us alone, and while DeYoung put the call through, I thought about the possible fallout if the senator gave too much away about the investigation.
Once it became public knowledge that there was someone else present at his son’s suicide, things with the media could easily spin out of control—especially if we ended up with a person of interest. The court of public opinion convicts all too many people long before the actual courts ever try them—if it even comes to that. Innocent people get mired in and permanently affected by issues like this all the time.