by Drew Chapman
Celeste showed up a few minutes later, looking hot and tired; she gave him the rundown on the old woman at the Chinese restaurant and the clinic in Hunts Point. She had asked the nurse behind the desk about Anna Bachev, but the nurse said she’d never heard the name before. From the look of surprise on her face and the way she fled to the back of the offices, Celeste didn’t believe her, but Celeste didn’t have any way of forcing the truth out of her either.
“We’ll probe their computer systems later,” Garrett said. “At the very least, this is another link between Steinkamp, Markov, and Russia. Good work and thanks.”
Celeste stared at him blankly, but she didn’t swear or take a swing at his jaw, and Garrett decided that this was progress in their relationship. Quite a bit of progress, actually.
At nine that night, Garrett shut down the effort; he figured no customer-satisfaction survey would call people past then, and the team seemed beat. Patmore brought in take-out Mexican food and beer, and Garrett got the distinct sense that Mitty was counting how many he drank. He tried to break into the servers of the Hunts Point Medicare clinic, but he couldn’t find any worth hacking. He suspected they were mostly a pen-and-paper business—easier to defraud people that way. He checked trades in the black pool that he had noticed a week ago and thought he saw another ripple of buying movement around Crowd Analytics. The name had come up twice now—that was a foundation for a pattern, and he knew it.
At midnight he slipped into the bathroom and took a few more Percodans, then staggered into a corner and fell asleep on a pile of old towels. He tossed and turned all night.
At six the next morning, Mitty woke him by kicking him in the ankle. The sun was streaming in the window, and it took Garrett fifteen minutes just to get his eyes accustomed to the light. They ate a breakfast of stale bagels and got back to work. After about a dozen calls, Celeste got a hit: a woman from Fort Lauderdale remembered seeing a young man start to set his backpack down on seat 27H, but then he changed his mind and kept walking. As if he’d read his boarding pass wrong.
“He switched seats,” Garrett said when Celeste told him the news. “He knew the manifest would tell us who he sat next to, but that if he switched seats, it would be harder to figure out who he scammed. And he must have scammed someone.”
“He could have gone anywhere. It would take days to contact everyone on the entire flight,” Celeste said.
“No. We don’t have to.” Garrett closed his eyes to imagine the inside of the plane five days ago: crowded, grumpy passengers, patient flight attendants. Noise, crying children, people trying to jam roll-on bags into the overhead bins. He searched his imagination for some hint of a trail that Markov might have left.
“He went to his assigned seat. There were women on both sides of him. That doesn’t help him with identity theft,” Garrett said, eyes still closed. “He can’t use a woman’s name. So he moved. But it was boarding time. Chaos. People shoving bags in the overhead compartments. He wouldn’t have fought traffic to go toward the front of the plane—too hard. And he probably wouldn’t have switched aisles. It was an Airbus A340.”
Bingo pulled up seatguru.com, a plane-seating website, for the layout of the Lufthansa flights to Florida. Bingo ran his fingers in a line down the map of the plane. “We could call people in rows twenty-eight through forty-five, seats D, E, H, and F. That’s a lot of people, but not impossible.”
“No, not necessary,” Garrett said. “Just the passengers with empty seats next to them.”
Ten minutes later, Bingo called out from a corner of the office, “Got him!”
The team gathered around Bingo’s desk.
“Thirty-four H and J,” Bingo said. “James Delacourt, from Bethesda, Maryland, was in H, and he sat next to a young guy named Ilya.”
Garrett broke into a wide grin.
“Delacourt didn’t come right out and admit it, but I think they got drunk together. They talked for a long time, and then he fell asleep. He said he ‘passed out.’ He woke up just before they landed. He said he thought Ilya had mentioned that he was from Russia.”
“Markov liquored him up,” Celeste said, “and then took advantage of him. Identity date rape.”
“Ten to one Delacourt has a drinking problem. Markov found the weakness and targeted it.” Garrett turned to Bingo. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, his cell phone wouldn’t work once he left the plane. He took it to the Verizon store a few days later and they said his SIM card was missing. They gave him a new one, but charged him, and he was pissed.”
“Good,” Garrett said. “We can track that number.”
“There’s more,” Bingo said. “Delacourt said he’s been having a weird time with his credit card. That’s what he thought I was calling about. There were a few minor charges—to political campaigns—that he didn’t make. He couldn’t figure out how they got there.”
“What’s that about?” Patmore asked. “Why political campaigns?”
“It’s a credit-card-fraud trick,” Garrett said. “You test the waters. Markov’s seeing if Delacourt is paying attention. Make a small purchase, see if the card gets canceled. Then make a bigger one. If the card stays clean, then you buy the thing you’re really interested in.”
“So we should call Delacourt, tell him to cancel the card,” Celeste said.
“No. We do the opposite. We encourage him to keep the card active, and we track where Markov uses it,” Garrett said. “We want to see what he’s up to.”
Celeste shook her head vigorously. “Delacourt’s just some schlep on a business trip. We’re hanging him out to dry. All he could afford was coach, and he sat next to the wrong guy. Markov is going to screw him. We can stop that.”
Garrett shrugged. “He’s doing it for the good of the country.”
“That’s a rationalization,” Celeste said.
“So what?”
“I had almost forgotten your true nature.”
Garrett smiled. He told Mitty to run a credit-card watch under DIA auspices. Half an hour later they got a forwarded e-mail alert from the government’s HotWatch program: James Delacourt had bought $10,000 worth of computer equipment at a Best Buy in Arlington, Virginia.
The purchase had occurred seventeen minutes ago.
• • •
Alexis arrived at the Best Buy at 11:10 a.m., twenty-seven minutes after Markov’s purchase. The sprint from her office to her car had taken two minutes, and the drive from DIA headquarters, across the river, to Pentagon City, had taken another eight. She slid her Honda into a parking spot in the mall lot and scanned the cars and shoppers. A mother and her three kids squabbled outside a parked Volvo. A middle-aged man tossed a plastic bag into the trunk of his Hyundai and drove off. A pair of women in fatigues strolled across the street to the mall. There was no sign of Markov.
Alexis found it hard to believe Markov would buy his computer equipment so close to the home of the US military—the Pentagon was a ten-minute walk away, five if you hurried—but then she wasn’t entirely sure the Delacourt credit-card hit was actually Markov’s. Maybe Delacourt himself had gone into the store. Perhaps he had been the middle-aged man with the Hyundai. Something was wrong with the whole setup. A faint alarm bell began to sound in her head.
The two salesmen in the computer department told her the only people buying laptops in the last hour had been a young couple, a man and a woman—clearly an attractive young woman, from the sly smiles on both the salesmen’s faces—and they had bought a cartload of stuff: four laptops, two printers, a dozen memory cards, ten cell phones, extra cable, Wi-Fi routers, and a host of smaller items that they couldn’t remember. Chris, the older of the salesmen, seemed to have focused most of his attention on the woman, because when Alexis showed him a printout of Markov’s passport photo, he admitted that he hadn’t looked too closely at the man.
Alexis sighed silently. Men were
such idiots when it came to members of the opposite sex, and so easily distracted. The pretty-girl ruse seemed to be standard in Markov’s arsenal of scams, and Alexis could understand why: it worked.
“Anything else you can remember about him? Or her?”
Chris nodded quickly, as if eager to make up for the blank he’d drawn on the man’s face. “He was carrying a metal lunch box. Like, you know, the kind that construction guys use. Red, about that big.”
The blood drained from Alexis’s face. She pointed. “Like that one?” The alarm bell in her head was now shrieking.
Chris glanced over his shoulder. Sitting on the ground, tucked under the laptop display rack, was a red metal lunch box. Chris nodded and started for it. “Yeah. He must have forgotten it—”
Alexis grabbed the salesman by the arm and yanked him backward. “Leave it.”
“It’s a lunch box.”
“You have no idea what it is.” Just as Alexis said it, one of the display computers began to beep at her side. An incoming Skype call on the screen was asking to be answered. Alexis stared at it. Everything was happening at once. “Do you install Skype on your display models?”
“Not really.” Chris looked confused. “Never.”
The Skype call was from HappyToSeeYou. “The man who bought the computers—did he touch this machine?”
“Now that you mention it, yeah, he did. He played with it for a few minutes.” Chris stared warily at the beeping machine. “But that’s kinda weird. I’m not even sure how that’s actually happening.”
Alexis clicked the connect button on the Skype app. The image was grainy for a moment, then a face appeared on-screen.
Ilya Markov’s face.
Alexis didn’t hesitate. Three years in Iraq, surrounded by IEDs and hounded by sniper fire, had conditioned her: when there was a threat, you protected yourself and those around you, and you did it without thinking. Every millisecond of reaction time mattered. Those who hesitated, died.
She raced at Chris, the salesman, lowering her shoulder into his chest, and driving him ten yards backward, away from the red metal lunch box. He stumbled, trying to keep his balance, grunting in surprise as he did, and Alexis kept her feet churning, left, right, left, right, pushing him as far from the lunch box as possible before they both tumbled to the ground.
“What the fu—” he yelled.
She gave him a last shove, throwing her full weight into him, and she could feel his legs go out from under him. Together, they hit the ground with a thud, and just before they did, white light filled her field of vision, and she felt herself carried away by a wall of pure explosive force.
SOUTHEAST, WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE 20, 12:42 P.M.
Ilya sat quietly in the corner of the motel room while Thad had sex with the young woman Ilya had procured for him. Ilya guessed, from Thad’s energy and enthusiasm, that he hadn’t slept with a woman in quite a while. Ilya also guessed this because Thad was pale, with long, stringy, unwashed hair, bad skin, and a nasty case of body odor. But Thad, while unattractive, had three qualities that Ilya found useful.
First, he was readily available; Ilya had contacted him only last night, and Thad had agreed to help right away. Ilya had met Thad on a previous trip to the States, at a gaming convention, and had kept his name and number on file as a person to call in a pinch. Yesterday had been that pinch.
Second, he was easily manipulated. Thad wanted desperately to be part of a group, what he considered the in-crowd, and was willing to do almost anything to get there. Alienated people who were anxious to be socially accepted were perfect targets for Ilya, and he had long ago learned to read that part of their characters at a glance: the too-eager response, the submissive posture, the obsession with other people’s opinions. In Thad’s case, Ilya had dangled participation in a circle of underground hackers—a coterie of hip, anarchic troublemakers, whose Internet mischief was a form of performance art. Thad considered himself a budding revolutionary, but a lonely one, and the romance of marching arm in arm with comrades seemed to loom large in his fantasies.
Thad’s third quality was by far the most important: a love of explosives. Not just explosives, but armaments of any kind. He was a classic weapons geek; two years ago he’d bragged to Ilya that he kept an arsenal in his basement in Baltimore, and when Ilya had called yesterday and said he’d pay for two pipe bombs, Thad had come through for him. Thad had balked at delivering one of the bombs to the Best Buy in Arlington, so Ilya had had to throw in the offer of sex with an escort as a sweetener, and that closed the deal.
Ilya slipped quietly from his chair, watching as Thad grunted and snorted under the sheets. The young explosives enthusiast didn’t seem to have any qualms about performing the act with a third party in the room; once Ilya had told Thad that he should behave as if Ilya weren’t there, he seemed to lose all inhibitions. To Ilya, that meant Thad was suggestible as well as easily manipulated, which were closely linked personality traits.
Ilya ran his hands through the pockets of Thad’s crumpled blue jeans—they were lying by the bed—and extracted his keys. Ilya cleared his throat by the door. “Just getting some air.” Neither Thad nor the escort—she said her name was Natasha—looked up from the bed, so Ilya left without another word.
He found Thad’s rusted Nissan Sentra parked across the street from the motel by clicking the unlock button on the car fob a few times, then searched the trunk. It was empty, so he rummaged through the front and back seats, but found nothing except a few old blankets.
He considered where Thad might have hidden his guns—guns Thad had admitted earlier he’d brought with him—then popped the trunk once again and peeled back a piece of black rubber that concealed the car’s spare tire. There was no spare tire, but in a blue canvas gym bag were a stack of pistols, maybe half a dozen in all. He took the smallest gun from the pile, pulled back the chamber to see if it was loaded—it was—then stuffed the gun into his belt at the small of his back.
From the brief glimpse he’d seen, he figured the gun was a .22. Ilya knew how to use a pistol. He had friends in Moscow who carried semiautomatics wherever they went, and often, after they’d been drinking for days without pause, they’d drive out to the forests near Losiny Ostrov Park and fire them into trees or garbage cans or whatever else they could find to shoot at. It wasn’t much of a firearms education, but Ilya didn’t need to be an expert. He just needed to be good enough.
When Ilya returned to the second-floor motel room, Natasha was gone—he could hear the shower running—and Thad was sitting on the bed, shirtless and in his underwear, drinking a beer.
“Hey.” Thad looked slightly dazed. “Forgot you were here.”
“Enjoy yourself?”
Thad ducked his head as if embarrassed. “She’s awesome.”
“Multitalented.” Ilya would have to remember to give her a big tip.
Thad reached for the TV remote control, but Ilya waved a finger in the air. “Not now.”
“I want to see if there’s news. On, you know, the thing.”
“There’s news. Trust me. But you don’t need to see it. Not yet.”
Thad put the remote back down. “Okay. So what’s next?”
“There’s a lot to be done.”
Thad bit his lip, as if gathering his courage. Then he spit it out. “I want to meet the others. I have guns for you. But I want to meet other people first.”
Ilya smiled broadly at the young man, sitting there on the bed in his underwear. Amazing what a little sex could do for a man’s confidence. The worm had turned.
“And I’m all in with you. You know that,” Thad said.
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t mean to be busting your balls or anything, it’s just—I went out on a limb for you. I want to know what I’m getting into. I’m real excited.”
Ilya sat on the opposite twin bed from Thad a
nd said nothing, deciding that silence was the best play. Thad hung his head after a bit, as if uneasy about his own neediness, and ashamed of vocalizing his wants. Ilya had observed that when people were naked about their needs, shame usually accompanied desire in equal measure. Those emotions made a lethal cocktail when mixed, and that lethality was another tool for Ilya.
Natasha exited the bathroom, dressed now in a tight T-shirt and skinny blue jeans. She had platinum-blond hair and hooded, sleepy eyelids. She was quite beautiful, and most definitely a pro: her body was clearly her place of business, and her patchy clothing did a nice job of displaying the merchandise.
Ilya motioned to her, and she bent near him, ear to his mouth. “Take a few days off. I’ll send you another thousand dollars to pay for it. Have fun, go to the beach. But stay out of sight.”
She smiled, pleased. Natasha—or whatever her name really was—had no idea what had transpired back at the Best Buy. Ilya had hired her to be Thad’s escort. He’d told her to meet Thad at the Arlington mall and then to bring him back to this motel room and fuck him. She hadn’t seen Thad plant the pipe bomb, had no idea anything had happened, and wouldn’t, probably, until the police caught up with her. Or when she bothered to turn on the TV news. Either way, that would not be a fun moment in her life.
She grabbed an Orioles cap from the dresser, slipped wide sunglasses onto her face, blew a kiss to Thad, then sauntered out the door. The moment she was gone, Thad seemed to deflate.
Ilya put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve acquitted yourself well, and people have noticed.”
“They have?”
“Absolutely.” Ilya patted Thad’s shoulder gently. “They’re very pleased, and they want to meet you. But first let’s do a thought experiment together.”