“—who probably had a face like Godzilla, but nobody could tell—”
“—and here’s King dropping in on him in the middle of a sentence and trashing his fantasy.”
“The girl was freaking, too.”
“Girl, she was probably a grandmother.”
“She’s going like, ‘Who said that? Where are you? How did you get on this line?’ ”
Throughout this exchange Jimmy Hong had been participating in another dialogue as well, this one with the computer. Now he held up a hand for silence and hit keys with the other. “Okay,” he said. “Gimme the date. It was in March, right?”
“The twenty-eighth.”
“Month three, date two-eight. And we want calls to 04-053-904.”
“No, his number is—”
“That’s his line number, Matt. Remember the difference? Uh, what I figured. Data not available.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means we were smart to bring in a lot of food. Could somebody bring me some of those Doritos? We’re going to be here awhile, that’s all. You interested in calls he made from his phone, while we’re in this part of the system? Seems a shame to waste it.”
“Might as well.”
“See what we get. Look at that, it doesn’t want to tell me a thing. Okay, let’s try this. Uh-huh. Okay, now—”
Then the system began spitting out a record of calls, reeling them off chronologically starting a few minutes after midnight. There were two calls before one in the morning, then nothing until 8:47, when the system logged a thirty-second call to a 212 number. There was one other call in the morning and several in the early afternoon, and none at all between 2:51 and 5:18, when he had been on the phone for a minute and a half with his brother. I recognized Peter Khoury’s number.
Then nothing else that night.
“Anything you want to copy, Matt?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said. “Now for the hard part.”
I COULDN’T tell you what it was that they did. A little after eleven they switched and David took over the controls, while Jimmy paced the floor and yawned and stretched and went to the bathroom and came back and polished off a package of Hostess cupcakes. At twelve-thirty they switched again and David went into the bathroom and took a shower. By this time TJ was sound asleep on the bed, lying fully clothed on the bedspread, shoes and all, and clutching one of the pillows as if the world were trying to get it away from him.
At one-thirty Jimmy said, “God damn it, I can’t believe there’s no way into NPSN.”
“Give me the phone,” David said. He dialed a number, snarled, broke the connection, dialed again, and on the third try got through to somebody. “Yo,” he said. “Who’m I talkin’ to? Great. Listen, Rita, this is Taylor Fielding at NICNAC Central an’ I got a Code Five emergency coming down. I need your NPSN access code and your password before the whole thing backs up clear to Cleveland. That’s Code Five, did you hear me?” He listened intently, then reached out a hand for the computer keyboard. “Rita,” he said, “you’re beautiful. You saved my life, no joke. Can you believe I had two people in a row didn’t know a Code Five takes precedence? Yeah, well, that’s ’cause you pay attention. Listen, if you get any static on this, I’ll take full responsibility. Yeah, you too. ‘Bye.”
“You take full responsibility,” Jimmy said. “I like that.”
“Well, it seemed only right.”
“What the hell is a Code Five, will you tell me that?”
“I don’t know. What’s NICNAC Central? Who’s Taylor Feldman?”
“You said Fielding.”
“Well, it was Feldman before he changed it. I don’t know, man. I just made it all up but it sure impressed Rita.”
“You sounded so desperate.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I be? Half-past one in the morning and we’re not even into NPSN yet.”
“We are now.”
“And how sweet it is. I’ll tell you, Hong, you can’t beat that Code Five. It really cuts through all the bureaucratic bullshit, you know what I mean. ‘I got a Code Five emergency coming down.’ Man, that just about blew her doors off.”
“ ‘Rita, you’re beautiful.’ ”
“Man, I was falling in love, I have to say it. And by the time we were through we’d sort of established a relationship, you know?”
“You gonna call her again?”
“I bet I can get a password off her anytime, unless something tips her that she just gave away the store. Otherwise next time I call her we’re gonna be old friends.”
“Call her sometime,” I said, “and don’t try to get a password or an access code or anything else.”
“You mean just ring her up to chat?”
“That’s the idea. Maybe give her some information, but don’t try to get anything out of her.”
“Far out,” David said.
“And then later on—”
“Got it,” Jimmy said. “Matt, I don’t know if you’ve got either the digital dexterity or the hand-eye coordination, and you don’t really know a thing about the technology, but I have to tell you something. You’ve got the heart and soul of a hacker.”
ACCORDING to the Kongs, the whole process really got interesting after they got into NPSN, whatever that meant. “This is the part that’s fascinating from a technical standpoint,” David explained, “because here’s where we try retrieving information the NYNEX people claimed wasn’t available. They’ll say that just to brush you off, but some of them were telling the truth, or what they thought was the truth, because the fact of the matter is they wouldn’t know how to go about finding it. So it’s almost as though we have to invent our own program and feed it into their system so it’ll spit out the data we want.”
“But,” Jimmy said, “if you’re not into the technical side of it, there’s really nothing there to keep you on the edge of your chair.”
TJ, awake now, was standing behind David’s chair and watching the computer screen as if hypnotized. Jimmy went over to the refrigerator for a can of Jolt. I dropped into the one easy chair, and David was right, there was nothing to keep me on the edge of it. I sank back into the cushions, and the next thing I knew TJ was shaking me gently by the shoulder, saying my name.
I opened my eyes. “I must have been sleeping.”
“Yeah, you sleepin’, all right. You was snorin’ some earlier.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost four. The calls is comin’ up now.”
“Can they just get a printout?”
TJ turned and relayed the request, and the Kongs started giggling. David got control of himself and reminded me that we didn’t have a printer with us. My sponsor was a printer, I almost said. Instead I said, “No, of course not. I’m sorry, I’m still half-asleep.”
“Stay where you are. We’ll copy it all down for you.”
“I’ll get you some Jolt,” TJ offered. I told him not to bother but he brought me a can of it anyway. I took a sip of it but it really wasn’t what I wanted, nor was I entirely certain what I did want. I got to my feet and tried to stretch some of the stiffness out of my back and shoulders, then walked over to the desk where David King was working the computer while Jimmy Hong copied down the information on the screen.
“There they are,” I said.
They were coming right up on the screen, starting with the first call at 3:38 to tell Kenan Khoury his wife was missing. Then three calls at roughly twenty-minute intervals, the last one logged at 4:54. Kenan had called his brother at 5:18, and the next call he’d received came in at 6:04, which must have been just before Peter got to the Colonial Road house.
Then there was a sixth call at 8:01. That would have been the one ordering them to Farragut Road, where they received the call that sent them chasing out to Veterans Avenue. And then they’d come home, having been assured that Francine would be delivered there, and then they waited in an empty house until 10:04, when the last call came, the one that sent them a
round the corner to the Ford Tempo with the parcels in its trunk.
“Wow,” David was saying. “This has been, like, the most amazing education. Because we had to keep at it, you know? There was data you needed, so we couldn’t quit. When you’re just hacking you can only take so much boredom before you go and do something else, but we had to stay with it until we crashed through the boredom and got to what was on the other side of it.”
“Which was more boredom,” Jimmy said.
“But you learn a lot, you really do. If we had to do this same operation again—”
“God forbid.”
“Yeah, but if we did, we could do it in half the time. Less, because the whole speed-search option gets double-timed when you cut back into the—”
What he said after that was even less comprehensible to me, and I’d stopped listening anyway because Jimmy Hong was handing me a sheet of all calls into the Khoury house on the twenty-eighth of March. “I should have told you,” I said. “The early ones don’t matter, just the seven starting at three-thirty-eight.” I studied the list. He’d copied everything: time of the call, the line number of the caller, the phone number you’d dial in order to reach that phone, and the duration of the call. That, too, was more than I needed, but there was no reason to tell him that.
“Seven calls, each from a different phone,” I said. “No, I’m wrong. They used one phone twice, for calls two and seven.”
“Is it what you wanted?”
I nodded. “How much it gives me is something else again. It could be a lot or a little. I won’t know until I get hold of a reverse directory and find out who those phones belong to.”
They stared at me. I still didn’t get it until Jimmy Hong took off his glasses and blinked at me. “A reverse directory? You’ve got the two of us here, with everything buried in the deep inner recesses of NPSN, and you think you need a reverse directory?”
“Because we’re talking child’s play here,” David King said. He sat down at the keyboard again. “Okay,” he said. “Give me the first number.”
THEY were all pay phones.
I’d been afraid of that. They had been professionally cautious throughout, and there was no reason to suppose that they wouldn’t have taken care to use phones that couldn’t be linked to them.
But a different pay phone each time? That was harder to figure, but one of the Kongs came up with a theory that made sense. They were guarding against the possibility that Kenan Khoury had alerted someone who was in a position to tap in on the line and identify the phone at the other end. By keeping the calls short they could be sure of being away from the scene before anyone who traced the call could get there; by never returning to the same phone, they were covered even if Khoury had the call traced and the telephone staked out.
“Because tracing a call is instantaneous now,” Jimmy told me. “You don’t really trace it, not if you’re hooked into it with a setup like this. You just look on the screen and read it off.”
Why the lapse in security on the last call? By then they’d obviously known there was no need for it. Khoury had done everything the way he was supposed to, had made no attempt to interfere with the ransom pickup, and was no longer worth such elaborate precautions. That was the time they could have felt safe enough to use a phone in their own house or apartment, and if only they’d done so I would have had the bastards. If it had started raining, if there’d been some compelling reason to stay inside. If nobody had wanted to leave the other two with the ransom money.
It was too bad. It would have been nice to get lucky for a change.
On the other hand, the night’s work and the seventeen hundred and change it was costing me were by no means wasted. I had learned something, and not just that the three men I was after were very careful planners for a trio of psychopathic sex killers.
The addresses were all in Brooklyn. And they were all in a far more compact area than the whole Khoury case covered. The kidnap and ransom delivery had begun in Bay Ridge, moved to Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill, ranged to Flatbush and Farragut and then way over to Veterans Avenue, and then swung back to the drop-off of the remains in Bay Ridge again. That covered a fair chunk of the borough, while their previous activities were spread all over Brooklyn and Queens. Their home base could be anywhere.
But the pay phones weren’t that far apart. I would have to sit down with the list and a map to plot their positions precisely, but I could tell already that they were all in the same general area, on the west side of Brooklyn, north of Khoury’s house in Bay Ridge and south of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Where they’d dumped Leila Alvarez.
One phone was on Sixtieth Street, another on New Utrecht at Forty-first, so it’s not as though they were within walking distance of each other. They had left the house and driven around to make those calls. But it stood to reason that home base was somewhere in that neighborhood, and probably not too far from the one phone they’d used a second time. It was all over, they were all done, all that remained was to rub salt in Kenan Khoury’s wounds, so why drive ten blocks out of the way if you didn’t have to? Why not use the handiest pay phone of the lot?
Which happened to be on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets.
* * *
I DIDN’T go into all of that with the boys, and indeed a lot of my own ruminations had to wait until later on. I gave the Kongs five hundred dollars each and told them how much I appreciated what they’d done. They insisted it was fun, even the boring part. Jimmy said he had a headache and a bad case of hacker’s wrist, but that it was worth it.
“You two go down first,” I said. “Put your ties and jackets on and just nonchalant your way out the front door. I’ll want to make sure there’s nothing traceable in the room, and I guess I’ll have to stop at the desk and settle up what I owe for the phone. I left a fifty-dollar deposit but we were hooked into it for over seven hours, and I don’t have any idea what the charges are going to be.”
“Oh, my,” David said. “He just doesn’t get it.”
“It’s amazing,” Jimmy said.
“Huh? What don’t I get?”
“You don’t get to pay any phone charges,” Jimmy said. “First thing I did once we were hooked up was bypass the desk. We could have called Shanghai and there wouldn’t be any record of it at the desk.” He grinned. “You might as well let them keep the deposit, though. Because King had about thirty dollars’ worth of macadamia nuts from the mini-bar.”
“Which means thirty macadamia nuts at a dollar each,” David said.
“But if I were you,” Jimmy said, “I’d just go home.”
AFTER they left I paid TJ. He fanned the sheaf of bills I handed him, looked at me, looked at them again, at me again, and said, “This here for me?”
“Would have been no game without you. You brought the bat and the ball.”
“I figured a hundred,” he said. “I didn’t do much, just sat around, but you was payin’ out a lot of bread and I figured you wasn’t about to leave me out. How much I got here?”
“Five,” I said.
“I knew this’d pay off,” he said. “Me an’ you. I like this detectin’ business. I be resourceful, I good at it, and I like it.”
“It doesn’t usually pay this well.”
“Don’t make no difference. Man, what other line of work I gone find lets me use all the shit I know?”
“So you want to be a detective when you grow up, TJ?”
“Ain’t gonna wait that long,” he said. “Gonna be one now. And that’s where it’s at, Matt.”
I told him his first assignment was to get out of the hotel without drawing the wrong kind of attention from the hotel staff. “It would be easier if you were dressed like the Kongs,” I said, “but we work with what we’ve got. I think you and I should walk out together.”
“White guy your age and a black teenager? You know what they be thinking.”
“Uh-huh, and they can shake their heads over it all they want. But
if you walk out by yourself they’ll think you’ve been burgling the rooms, and they might not let you walk.”
“Yeah, you right,” he said, “but you not lookin’ at all the possibilities. Room’s all paid for, right? Checkout time’s like noon. An’ I see where you live, man, and I don’t mean to be dissin’ you, but your room ain’t this nice.”
“No, it’s not. It doesn’t cost me a hundred and sixty dollars a night, either.”
“Well, this room ain’t gonna cost me a dime, Simon, an’ I gonna take me a hot shower an’ dry myself on three towels an’ get in that bed an’ sleep six or seven hours. ’Cause this room ain’t just better than where you live, it’s like ten times better than where I live.”
“Oh.”
“So I gone hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the knob and kick back an’ be undisturbed, like. Then noon comes an’ I walk outta here an’ nobody look at me twice, nice young man like me, musta just come an’ delivered somebody’s lunch. Hey, Matt? You think I can call downstairs an’ they’ll gimme a wake-up call at half-past eleven?”
“I think you can count on it,” I said.
Chapter 12
I stopped at an all-night coffee shop on Broadway. Someone had left an early edition of the Times in the booth, and I read it along with my eggs and coffee, but nothing much registered. I was too groggy, and what little mental acuity I had insisted on centering itself on the locations of the six pay phones in Sunset Park. I kept yanking the list out of my pocket and studying it, as if the order and precise locations of the phones held a secret message if one only possessed the key. There ought to be someone I could call, claiming a Code Five emergency. “Give me your access code,” I would demand. “Tell me the password.”
The sky was bright with dawn by the time I got back to my hotel. I showered and went to bed, and after an hour or so I gave up and turned on the television set. I watched the morning news program on one of the networks. The secretary of state had just come back from a tour of the Middle East, and they had him on, and followed him with a Palestinian spokesman commenting on the possibilities for a lasting peace in the region.
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