by Norman Green
“You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as death.”
“So you want to know what I’ve got on Frank Waters?”
He surprised her again. “No. Not unless you know where he is.”
“Well, I don’t, but—”
“Drop the ball, Al. I mean it. Right now Frank Waters is the object of the full and righteous attention of the U.S. government. There are agents crawling over every aspect of his life, and they are gonna know everything there is to know about him in very short order. I already told you, if anyone sees you and I talking in this car my career is over. And I’m telling you right now, unless someone shows you video that demonstrates otherwise, this meeting never happened. As things stand at the moment, there is no safe way for me to pass along any information you might have without getting burned for knowing it. I mean, if you know where Waters is, I’ll go ahead and take the fall for it, but barring that, this case is radioactive. Don’t touch it, don’t go near it, don’t do any more digging, don’t call anybody up. Let it go. There’s no way for you to come out of this clean.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Go back to your life. It’s not your fault that you work with Frank Waters’s ex-wife, and it’s not her fault that she married the son of a bitch. Not really. If you two just go on about your business you just might squeak by, but the last thing you need right now is to get any more stink from Frank Waters attached to your name. Walk away, Al. This could ruin you.”
“All right. Thank you, Sal.”
“I’m gonna take the exit up ahead into Williamsburg. You can catch the G from there, okay? I’m sorry to dump you, but—”
“No problem. Tell me one thing, if you can. What is it exactly that they think Waters is trying to do?”
Edwards stared out the window. “The president,” he finally said, “is due to address the United Nations on Monday. He’s flying into Newark Sunday afternoon. What’s that tell you?”
“You think Frank Waters is trying to assassinate the president?”
He looked at her, bleak. “Can you even imagine,” he said, “what something like that could do to this country?”
Eighteen
If there was anybody watching the entrance to the building where she and Sarah had the office, Alessandra did not spot them in the flood of humanity outside the building. She went inside and did not see anyone lurking, no one followed her when she went up the stairs. She wished she could be sure they were gone, but she could not. She went on up, went into the office, sat down in Sarah’s client chair. Sarah was tearing through invoices. She did not even glance at the monitor when she typed.
“You know what,” Sarah said, “I think I know what happened to Thomas West. You remember him, the late husband of our client Agatha West. Him and his son Isaac.”
Alessandra was grateful she did not have to talk about Frank Waters yet. “What do you mean what happened to him? He died. Didn’t we know that already?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t die accidentally, he was killed. Probably Isaac, too, but I can’t prove it. Anyhow, I think I know who did it.”
“Okay,” Al told her. “Lay it on me.”
She did.
Al listened to the whole thing without interrupting. “You’re nuts,” she finally said.
“Maybe,” Sarah said. “But I’ll bet my house I’m right.”
“You ain’t got a house.”
“Yes I do, on Staten Island. Someone with my maiden name bought one a month ago. Never mind that. Here’s how we can prove my theory.”
Again, Al listened without interrupting. “If you’re right,” Al told her, “you’re gonna get us all killed.”
“Bitch bitch bitch,” Sarah said. “Jake and I will pick you up in the morning. I’ve got it all set up.”
“Jake is in town?”
Sarah flushed slightly. “Well, umm . . .”
“Don’t tell me. All right, we’ll do it. Hopefully that wraps up the Agatha West situation. Listen, about Frank, I have bad news,” Al told her.
Sarah listened to Al’s story, her disbelief plain on her face. “That’s total bullshit,” she said when Al finished. “Those guys Frank was with were trying to get better treatment for returning veterans. Health care, Al. They were not interested in killing anybody or blowing anything up. So do what the man says, back off and let them look. They won’t find anything.”
“Yeah, maybe not. Here’s my problem with that approach: if something bad does go down, God forbid—”
“God forbid,” Sarah said. “But Frank won’t have had anything to do with it.’
“You might feel that way,” Al said, “and I might, but if someone decides we need a fall guy, there’s Frank, right in the middle of everything. You don’t think they’d jump on that?”
“What could they do? The truth is bound to come out eventually.”
“Sure, like it did with Kennedy.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
“Right now,” Al told her, “let’s just let them think we went back to business as usual.”
Sarah thought it over for a minute. “Do you think they’ll find Frank?”
“I wouldn’t wanna bet my life on it.”
“Okay. And even if they do, they’ll never get it right. Do you remember those searches you wanted me to do? Well, I got some strange results. For one thing, Frank owns that Staten Island warehouse. At least on paper, anyhow. I mean, in real life, please, there’s no way. I checked with the city, there’s no mortgage on the property. Or at least no record of one. And it’s in arrears, whoever owns it for real owes like nine grand in back taxes. I mean, Frank never had anything, money runs through the man’s hands like it was water. If you gave him nine grand right now, he’d be broke before he got to the corner, and he wouldn’t be able to tell you what the hell he spent it on. But it’s too much of a coincidence, this guy he worked for, Paolo Torrente, he can’t know two Frank Waters. Can he?”
“No,” Al said. “It’s a set-up. Torrente, or whoever he really is, wasn’t importing wine, he was importing weapons. The wine business was just a cover, whatever he really brought into the country, once he got his hands on it he disappeared. I don’t know what these guys are trying to pull, Sarah, but Frank is all set up to take the heat for it.”
Sarah went pale.
“Listen,” Al said, “I’m sure he didn’t have anything to do with—”
“How’s anyone supposed to know for sure what really happened? If those guys snuck some kind of a bomb into the city and they blow up a building or whatever, Frank will end up being famous for being the guy who did it, whether he really did or not. Shit, I’m not even sure and I know him better than anybody . . . God. My kid’s gonna have to change his name. How the hell do I explain that to him?”
“What do you mean you’re not sure?”
Sarah’s fingers went back to her keyboard. “Look at this Web site. I found it last night.”
Al got up, went to look. “For a Rebirth of America,” she read. “Is that Frank’s picture?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you read all the rest of this crap? What’s ‘the second American revolution’ supposed to be? ‘Aryan heritage’? Is all this for real?”
“Looks real enough, doesn’t it? I never thought he cared about any of that, Al, but we been apart for a couple years now. Who the hell knows what he could have gotten into? He’s . . . He was always gullible, Al, he was always easy to sucker into things. If he met some of these neo-Nazi ding-dongs and they treated him nice, he’d follow them around like a lost puppy. So to answer your question, no, I can’t be sure he’s not mixed up in this shit or not. And I guess that makes him just about the perfect patsy.”
“Damn. Was this site hard to find?”
“No. All I did was type his name into a search engine and this came up down near the bottom of the first page.”
Al shook her head. “I’m not buying this, it’s too easy. It’s bogus, Sarah. Look, so
meone went to a lot of trouble and expense with this whole situation. They bought an old warehouse? Even if the place is a wreck, it had to cost them a couple hundred thou. And they bought a boatload of wine and then they just walked away from it? And now this. It’s a scam, Sarah, it’s the classic scam technique: they distract you, look here, look here, keep your eyes on the right hand, and you never see the left coming. When their bomb goes off, the cops backtrack, and what do they find? A home-grown American, an army vet with a history of anti-government protest, ties to a foreign arms supplier, and the whole thing financed by persons unknown. Whoever’s behind this, they’re gonna get what they want. Some damage, some dead people, and fingers pointing at the wrong guy. And major unrest, if they’re lucky.”
“What can we do?”
Al shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “They’ve got us in a box. If we’re not careful, we’ll wind up looking just as guilty as Frank. Listen, tell me about this house of yours.”
“It’s nothing,” Sarah said. “Someone else named Sarah Rizzo bought an old shack on the stinky side of Staten Island, down by Arthur Kill. Place looks like the house from the friggin’ Addams Family.”
“How do you know it’s nothing?”
“I don’t, but do you know how many Sarah Rizzos there are in New York City?”
“No. But when you look at the transaction, does the sale of this house look anything like the sale of that warehouse? Time frame’s about the same, am I right? Did Sarah Rizzo take out a mortgage on the place? Where did the down payment money come from? Does she owe back real estate taxes on the place?”
“Jesus,” Sarah said. “I didn’t look. Oh, shit, the agent told me they hadda wait like weeks for the check to clear, because it was on the Bank of Dubai.” She glanced at her watch. “I scammed the clerk to get the details on the warehouse deal,” she said. “I gotta come up with something else for this one, but they should still be open—”
“Before you get into that, tell me what you know about the place.”
“I can do better than that,” she said. “I can show it to you.” She called up the real estate agent’s Web site and took Al on the virtual tour. When that was done, she pulled up Google Earth and got the satellite view. “Same shot they had last time,” she said. “I thought Sarah Rizzo was moving in. Doesn’t that look like a moving van, parked in front of the garage?”
Al peered at the indistinct image on Sarah’s monitor. “Yeah, that could be Sarah, moving in,” she said.
“You suppose she’s got a couple spare rooms she might like to rent out?”
“I don’t know,” Al said. “I’ll ask her when I see her.”
“You going down there? You want me to come?”
“No. You still need to get the details of the house sale, if you can. And when you’re done with that, write up a report on this whole goddam catastrophe, just like you were doing it for a client, from Costello’s right up to now, and e-mail it to Rod Benson.”
“That reporter from last time?”
“He’s not a reporter, he’s a schlock-meister, but he’s gonna have to do. I got his e-mail address on a card in the other office. I’ll get it for you, then I’m gone. Okay? What time is this thing you wanna do tomorrow? I don’t know how late I’m gonna be up, here.”
“Ten,” Sarah said. “Ten. I forgot all about that. You think we ought to put it off?”
“No. If we can finish up the West business, let’s at least do that.”
“What about the house? Shouldn’t we, you know, talk to someone about all of this?”
“Like the cops?”
“Yeah.”
“I was warned by my contact in the NYPD, yesterday. He told me to stay away. Don’t call anyone, don’t do anything, walk away. That’s what he said. Otherwise, we get pulled into this, we’re in trouble.”
“I know, but . . . You know.”
“Yeah. I know. Listen, right now, they don’t wanna hear anything we got to say. I made some calls to that number Bobby Fallon gave me and nobody called me back. I gotta believe they know everything we do. My guy told me to stay away, don’t even think about calling him unless I got something concrete.”
“You mean, like something at the Addams Family house.”
“Yeah.” Something like Frank Waters, done up with a bow.
“All right. How do I contact this Rod Benson character? And are you really sure you want me to send him everything we have?”
“Yeah.” Al walked into the inner office to get Rod Benson’s e-mail address for Sarah. She was still digging for it when her phone went off. “Shit,” she said. “Now what?”
He didn’t hear Al when she stepped through the door of Paratronix. She stood in the entryway, watching him. He still had that Euro look, blue eyes in a thin face, beard growth that seemed no longer and no shorter than it had the last time she’d seen him. She was surprised, again, that he differed so much from the nerd cliché, he was not skinny, pale, or out of shape, he was built more or less like a racing greyhound. Despite the stress she was under, she could sense the tension between them, almost like a living presence that grew stronger the longer she stood there. Something’s gonna happen, she thought, if I let it . . . something’s gonna happen with me and this guy . . . After a moment, he must have sensed it, too, felt it somehow. He looked up.
“Robbie,” she said.
“Ooh,” he said. “Wow. I get that jolt, I mean, every time I see you, okay, all two times. But you know, wow.”
She smiled. It felt like the first good one in a while. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Never,” he said. “Thanks for coming. Listen, we got a hit. On the pictures, I mean. Check this out.” She walked around behind the counter and looked over his shoulder. He was scrolling down through a message board. “Where is it? Shit, man, it was right here. Damn. And they took the pictures down, too. I wonder who . . . Son of a bitch. Doesn’t matter . . . that code, it was military. Military code. They used to use it, back in the day, to track shipments. Not anymore. Now it’s electronic, satellites.” He laughed. “Lo-Jack. Whatever. And they only use secure transport. But back when, you know, they were all worried about Soviet tanks in Eastern Europe. Which probably didn’t run. But they were afraid, ’cause we didn’t have as many. And they shipped stuff. You know, by truck.”
Al looked at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He gave her a look. “Show you.” He lit up his favorites list, clicked on the bottom entry. Seconds later Al was looking at two squat, squared off olive drab vehicles. “Each one of these is about the size of a senior-citizen bus,” he told her.
“So what are they?”
“What? Oh, yeah. Well, this one is like power and radar. Targeting system. This other one is the launch vehicle.”
“What?”
“Launch vehicle. See those tubes, right there?” He tapped the screen. “Right there. The missiles . . .”
“Missiles? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He shook his head. “Swear to God. Surface to air. I mean, this is nothing, we got much better stuff now, this is like the eighties. Much more compact these days. I mean, we’ve had shoulder-fired stingers for a long time, okay, but these things, man, they got some serious range to them. You don’t have to have anything like visual. Contact, I mean. Okay, they’re old and whatever. Still, you were on approach, flying some big old Boeing cattle car, got your wheels down, I’m guessing you saw one or two of these babies coming up after you it would give you a serious rush. This particular one, okay, not the one in the picture. The one with your code, it got stolen in Austria back in ’86. On its way to a depot or something. You know, somebody, ahh . . . They hijacked the truck. Somewhere near Innsbruck. Where’d you find it?”
“My picture came off a crate in a wine wholesaler’s warehouse,” she said.
“Holy shit! Are you kidding? We gotta . . . Who do we call? We gotta call somebody. I mean, we can’t have this. I mean, it’s ol
d and whatnot, but if it still works and everything, Jesus . . .” He stared at her, blue eyes wide. “Don’t we? Um, who, you know . . . Who do we call?”
“Okay, Robbie, listen to me carefully. Here’s your story. I came to you with these pictures, okay—”
“Well, you did. Come to me, I mean.”
“Quiet. I came to you, you found the answers, okay, and you’re calling the authorities. Okay? Official story, you didn’t wait to show them to me, you called right away, because this is too serious. You got that?”
“Got it. Oh, man. Yeah. I should have thought. Right? I should have. Called, I mean. Um, who? The cops?”
“No,” she told him. “Military Police. I don’t know where—”
His fingers flew across the keyboard. “I got it,” he said, but then he stopped abruptly. “Do you know, like . . . where this thing is?”
She shrugged. “I know where I saw the crate, and I know it ain’t there now.” All she really had was her suspicion. Certainly not anything like concrete . . . “No. Not really. But whoever you get, tell ’em I went to Staten Island to look for it. Tell ’em I saw it out there.”
“You got it.” He took his hands and his full attention away from the computer, stood up straight, focused completely on her, maybe for the first time. “Al,” he said. “Um. You know . . . this is probably not the right . . . Well, anyway. Am I gonna see you again?”
She could feel it, whatever it was, and so could he. And your musician, she told herself, just dumped you for an orange-haired teenager . . . Polish soccer player, she thought. I’ll have to ask him some time.
“I sure hope so,” she said.
Al pointed her uncle’s van down Arthur Kill Road, which ran down Staten Island’s western verge. You couldn’t exactly call it a shore, there were no beaches, no sand, just a wide muddy expanse of tall pale brown reeds standing stiff, tall, and dead in the frozen mud. CHEMICAL LANE, she thought, reading a passing street sign, Jesus Christ, they don’t even try to hide it. And no matter how long she’d lived in New York City, it seemed to always have one more wonder to show her, and one more horror . . . The hills to her right blocked off the lights of the city, and to her left the island sloped down to the oddly tinted waters of Arthur Kill. She drove past the address she wanted, saw only a dark neglected Victorian that looked like it had been built on a stony apron of rubble dumped into the swamp. Three-story house of no discernible color, oversized detached garage. Another hour, she thought, and it’ll be dark down here, there were few other habitations to provide any illumination, just a couple of streetlights and a few poison-blue mercury vapor lamps casting their unhealthy pallor across the parking lot of a metal-sided industrial building across the way. A thin layer of snow lay over everything, gray in the dying light of day, dirty up near the road.