by Tom Clancy
“Any other names associated with the missing girls?”
Chatham shook his head. “Nope. They both said they saw him talking to the missing one and he walked one out once, like he told us, but nothing special about it. Just the usual singles bar scene. Nothing that contradicts anything he said. Neither one likes Maclean very much. They say he comes on to girls, asks some questions, and usually leaves them.”
“What kind of questions?”
“The usual—name, address, work, family stuff. Same stuff we ask, Tom.”
“The two girls you talked to today,” Sullivan asked thoughtfully. “Where they from?”
“One’s a New Yorker, one’s from across the river in Jersey.”
“Bannister and Pretloe are from out of town,” Sullivan pointed out.
“Yeah, I know. So?”
“So, if you’re a serial killer, it’s easier to take down victims with no close family members, isn’t it?”
“Part of the selection process? That’s a stretch, Tom.”
“Maybe, but what else we got?” The answer was, not very much. The flyers handed out by the NYPD had turned up fifteen people who’d said they recognized the faces, but they were unable to provide any useful information. “I agree, Maclean was cooperative, but if he approaches girls, dumps those who grew up near here and have family here, then walks our victim home, hell, it’s more than we have on anyone else.”
“Go back to talk to him?”
Sullivan nodded. “Yeah.” It was just routine procedure. Kirk Maclean hadn’t struck either agent as a potential serial killer—but that was the best-disguised form of criminal, both had learned in the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. They also knew that the dullest of routine investigative work broke far more cases than the miracles so beloved of mystery novels. Real police work was boring, mind-dulling repetition, and those who stuck with it won. Usually.
It was strange that morning at Hereford. On the one hand, Team-2 was somewhat cowed by what had happened the day before. The loss of comrades did that to any unit. But on the other hand, their boss was now a father, and that was always the best thing to happen to a man. On the way to morning PT, a somewhat strung-out Team-2 Leader, who’d had no sleep at all the night before, had his hand shaken by every member of the team, invariably with a brief word of congratulations and a knowing smile, since all of them were fathers already, even those younger than their boss. Morning PT was abbreviated, in acknowledgment of his physical condition, and after the run, Eddie Price suggested to Chavez that he might as well drive home for a few hours of sleep, since he’d be of little use to anyone in his current condition. This Chavez did, crashing and burning past noon, and wakening with a screaming headache.
As did Dmitriy Popov. It hardly seemed fair, since he’d had little to drink the day before. He supposed it was his body’s revenge on him for all the travel abuse on top of a long and exciting day west of London. He awoke to CNN on his bedroom TV, and padded off to the bathroom for the usual morning routine, plus some aspirin, then to the kitchen to make coffee. In two hours, he’d showered and dressed, unpacked his bags, and hung up the clothes he’d taken to Europe. The wrinkles would stretch out in a day or two, he thought. Then it was time for him to catch a cab for midtown.
On Staten Island, the lost-and-found person was a secretary who had this as one of her additional duties, and hated it. The items dropped on her desk were always smelly, sometimes enough to make her gag. Today was no exception, and she found herself wondering why people had to place such noxious items in the trash instead of—what? she never thought to wonder. Keep them in their pockets? The crimson passport was no exception. Joseph A. Serov. The photo was of a man about fifty, she thought, and about as remarkable to look at as a McDonald’s hamburger. But it was a passport and two credit cards and it belonged to somebody. She lifted the phone book from her desk and called the British Consulate in Manhattan, told the operator what it was about, and got the passport control officer as a result. She didn’t know that the passport-control office had for generations been the semisecret cover job for field officers of the Secret Intelligence Service. After a brief conversation, a company truck that was headed for Manhattan anyway dropped off the envelope at the consulate, where the door guard called to the proper office, and a secretary came down to collect it. This she dropped on the desk of her boss, Peter Williams.
Williams really was a spook of sorts, a young man on his first field assignment outside his own country. It was typically a safe, comfortable job, in a major city of an allied country, and he did work a few agents, all of them diplomats working at the United Nations. From them, he sought and sometimes got low-level diplomatic intelligence, which was forwarded to Whitehall to be examined and considered by equally low-level bureaucrats in the Foreign Office.
This smelly passport was unusual. Though his job was supposed to handle things like this, in fact he most often arranged substitute passports for people who’d somehow lost them in New York, which was not exactly a rare occurrence, though invariably an embarrassing one for the people who needed the replacements. The procedure was for Williams to fax the identification number on the document to London to identify the owner properly, and then call him or her at home, hoping to get a family member or employee who would know where the passport holder might be.
But in this case, Williams got a telephone call from Whitehall barely thirty minutes after sending the information.
“Peter?”
“Yes, Burt?”
“This passport, Joseph Serov—rather strange thing just happened.”
“What’s that?”
“The address we have for the chap is a mortuary, and the telephone number is to the same place. They’ve never heard of Joseph Serov, alive or dead.”
“Oh? A false passport?” Williams lifted it from his desk blotter. If it were a fake, it was a damned good one. So was something interesting happening for a change?
“No, the computer has the passport number and name in it, but this Serov chap doesn’t live where he claims to live. I think it’s a matter of false papers. The records show that he is a naturalized subject. Want us to run that down, as well?”
Williams wondered about that. He’d seen false papers before, and been trained on how to obtain them for himself at the SIS training academy. Well, why not? Maybe he’d uncover a spy or something. “Yes, Burt, could you do that for me?”
“Call you tomorrow,” the Foreign Office official promised.
For his part, Peter Williams lit up his computer and sent an e-mail to London, just one more routine day for a young and very junior intelligence officer on his first posting abroad. New York was much like London, expensive, impersonal, and full of culture, but sadly lacking in the good manners of his hometown.
Serov, he thought, a Russian name, but you could find them everywhere. Quite a few in London. Even more in New York City, where so many of the cabdrivers were right off the boat or plane from Mother Russia and knew neither the English language nor where to find the landmarks of New York. Lost British passport, Russian name.
Three thousand four hundred miles away, the name “Serov” had been input onto the SIS computer system. The name had already been run for possible hits and nothing of value had been found, but the executive program had many names and phrases, and it scanned for all of them. The name “Serov” was enough—it had also been entered spelled as Seroff and Serof—and when the e-mail from New York arrived, the computer seized upon and directed the message to a desk officer. Knowing that Iosef was the Russian version of Joseph, and since the passport description gave an age in the proper range, he flagged the message and forwarded it to the computer terminal of the person who had originated the enquiry on one Serov, Iosef Andreyevich.
In due course, that message appeared as e-mail on the desktop computer of Bill Tawney. Bloody useful things, computers, Tawney thought, as he printed up the message. New York. That was interesting. He called the number of the Consulate and got Pete
r Williams.
“This passport from the Serov chap, anything else you can tell me?” he asked, after establishing his credentials.
“Well, yes, there are two credit cards that were inside it, a MasterCard and a Visa, both platinum.” Which, he didn’t have to add, meant that they had relatively large credit limits.
“Very well. I want you to send me the photo and the credit-card numbers over secure lines immediately.” Tawney gave him the correct numbers to call.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that at once,” Williams replied earnestly, wondering what this was all about. And who the devil was William Tawney? Whoever it was, he was working late, since England was five hours ahead of New York, and Peter Williams was already wondering what he’d have for dinner.
“John?”
“Yeah, Bill?” Clark replied tiredly, looking up from his desk and wondering if he’d get to see his grandson that day.
“Our friend Serov has turned up,” the SIS man said next. That got a reaction. Clark’s eyes narrowed at once.
“Oh? Where?”
“New York. A British passport was found in a dustbin at La Guardia Airport, along with two credit cards. Well,” he amended his report, “the passport and credit cards were in the name of one Joseph A. Serov.”
“Run the cards to see if—”
“I called the legal attaché in your embassy in London to have the accounts run, yes. Should have some information within the hour. Could be a break for us, John,” Tawney added, with a hopeful voice.
“Who’s handling it in the U.S.?”
“Gus Werner, assistant director, Terrorism Division. Ever met him?”
Clark shook his head. “No, but I know the name.”
“I know Gus. Good chap.”
The FBI has cordial relationships with all manner of businesses. Visa and MasterCard were no exceptions. An FBI agent called the headquarters of both companies from his desk in the Hoover Building, and gave the card numbers to the chiefs of security of both companies. Both were former FBI agents themselves—the FBI sends many retired agents off to such positions, which creates a large and diverse old-boy network—and both of them queried their computers and came up with account information, including name, address, credit history, and most important of all, recent charges. The British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Chicago O’Hare leaped off the screen—actually the faxed page—at the agent’s desk in Washington.
“Yeah?” Gus Werner said, when the young agent came into his office.
“He caught a flight from London to Chicago late yesterday, and then a flight from Chicago to New York, about the last one, got a back-room ticket on standby. Must have dumped the ID right after he got in. Here.” The agent handed over the charge records and the flight information. Werner scanned the pages.
“No shit,” the former chief of the Hostage Rescue Team observed quietly. “This looks like a hit, Johnny.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the young agent, fresh in from the Oklahoma City field division. “But it leaves one thing out—how he got to Europe this time. Everything else is documented, and there’s a flight from Dublin to London, but nothing from here to Ireland,” Special Agent James Washington told his boss.
“Maybe he’s got American Express. Call and find out,” Werner ordered the junior man.
“Will do,” Washington promised.
“Who do I call on this?” Werner asked.
“Right here, sir.” Washington pointed to the number on the covering sheet.
“Oh, good, I’ve met him. Thanks, Jimmy.” Werner lifted his phone and dialed the international number. “Mr. Tawney, please,” he told the operator. “It’s Gus Werner calling from FBI Headquarters in Washington.”
“Hello, Gus. That was very fast of you,” Tawney said, half in his overcoat and hoping to get home.
“The wonders of the computer age, Bill. I have a possible hit on this Serov guy. He flew from Heathrow to Chicago yesterday. The flight was about three hours after the fracas you had at Hereford. I have a rental car, a hotel bill, and a flight from Chicago to New York City after he got here.”
“Address?”
“We’re not that lucky. Post office box in lower Manhattan,” the Assistant Director told his counterpart. “Bill, how hot is this?”
“Gus, it’s bloody hot. Sean Grady gave us the name, and one of the other prisoners confirmed it. This Serov chap delivered a large sum of money and ten pounds of cocaine shortly before the attack. We’re working with the Swiss to track the money right now. And now it appears that this chap is based in America. Very interesting.”
“No shit. We’re going to have to track this mutt down if we can,” Werner thought aloud. There was ample jurisdiction for the investigation he was about to open. American laws on terrorism reached across the world and had draconian penalties attached to them. And so did drug laws.
“You’ll try?” Tawney asked.
“You bet your ass on that one, Bill,” Werner replied positively. “I’m starting the case file myself. The hunt is on for Mr. Serov.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Gus.”
Werner consulted his computer for a codeword. This case would be important and classified, and the codeword on the file would read . . . no, not that one. He told the machine to pick another. Yes. PREFECT, a word he remembered from his Jesuit high school in St. Louis.
“Mr. Werner?” his secretary called. “Mr. Henriksen on line three.”
“Hey, Bill,” Werner said, picking up the phone.
“Cute little guy, isn’t he?” Chavez asked.
John Conor Chavez was in his plastic crib-tray, sleeping peacefully at the moment. The name card in the slot on the front established his identity, helped somewhat by an armed policeman in the nursery. There would be another on the maternity floor, and an SAS team of three soldiers on the hospital grounds—they were harder to identify, as they didn’t have military haircuts. It was, again, the horse-gone-lock-the-door mentality, but Chavez didn’t mind that people were around to protect his wife and child.
“Most of ’em are,” John Clark agreed, remembering what Patsy and Maggie had been like at that age—only yesterday, it so often seemed. Like most men, John always thought of his children as infants, never able to forget the first time he’d held them in their hospital receiving blankets. And so now, again, he basked in the warm glow, knowing exactly how Ding felt, proud and a little intimidated by the responsibility that attended fatherhood. Well, that was how it was supposed to be. Takes after his mother, John thought next, which meant after his side of the family, which, he thought, was good. But John wondered, with an ironic smile, if the little guy was dreaming in Spanish, and if he learned Spanish growing up, well, what was the harm in being bilingual? Then his beeper went off. John grumbled as he lifted it from his belt. Bill Tawney’s number. He pulled his shoe-phone from his pants pocket and dialed the number. It took five seconds for the encryption systems to synchronize.
“Yeah, Bill?”
“Good news. John, your FBI are tracking down this Serov chap. I spoke with Gus Werner half an hour ago. They’ve established that he took a flight from Heathrow to Chicago yesterday, then on to New York. That’s the address for his credit cards. The FBI are moving very quickly on this one.”
The next step was checking for a driver’s license, and that came up dry, which meant they were also denied a photograph of the subject. The FBI agents checking it out in Albany were disappointed, but not especially surprised. The next step, for the next day, was to interview the postal employees at the station with the P.O. box.
“So, Dmitriy, you got back here in a hurry,” Brightling observed.
“It seemed a good idea,” Popov replied. “The mission was a mistake. The Rainbow soldiers are too good for such an attack on them. Sean’s people did well. Their planning struck me as excellent, but the enemy was far too proficient. The skill of these people is remarkable, as we saw before.”
“Well, the attack must have shaken them up,”
his employer observed.
“Perhaps,” Popov allowed. Just then, Henriksen walked in.
“Bad news,” he announced.
“What’s that?”
“Dmitriy, you goofed up some, son.”
“Oh? How did I do that?” the Russian asked, no small amount of irony in his voice.
“Not sure, but they know there was a Russian involved in cueing the attack on Rainbow, and the FBI is working the case now. They may know you’re here.”
“That is not possible,” Popov objected. “Well . . . yes, they have Grady, and perhaps he talked . . . yes, he did know that I flew in from America, or he could have figured that out, and he knows the cover name I used, but that identity is gone—destroyed.”
“Maybe so, but I was just on the phone with Gus Werner. I asked him about the Hereford incident, if there was anything I needed to know. He told me they’ve started a case looking for a Russian name, that they had reason to believe a Russian, possibly based in America, had been in contact with the PIRA. That means they know the name, Dmitriy, and that means they’ll be tracking down names on airline passenger lists. Don’t underestimate the FBI, pal,” Henriksen warned.
“I do not,” Popov replied, now slightly worried, but only slightly. It would not be all that easy to check every transatlantic flight, even in the age of computers. He also decided that his next set of false ID papers would be in the name of Jones, Smith, Brown, or Johnson, not that of a disgraced KGB chairman from the 1950s. The Serov ID name had been a joke on his part. Not a good one, he decided now. Joseph Andrew Brown, that would be the next one, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov thought, sitting there in the top-floor office.
“Is this a danger to us?” Brightling asked.