The Kill Room

by Jeffery Deaver

  How long would Bruns stay on the line? she wondered. If he disconnected they could still follow him, unless he pulled the battery out. But it was easier to spot someone actually using a phone.

  She reminded herself too: This could be a trap. She recalled all too clearly the explosion at Java Hut. The sniper knew about the investigation. He clearly knew about her; Sachs's phone was the one he'd tapped to learn about the coffee shop. A trickle of electric fear down her spine once more.

  Her own mobile trilled.

  "Sachs."

  "Got him on GPS," Rodney Szarnek called excitedly, like a teenager (he'd once said being a cop was nearly as much fun as playing Grand Theft Auto). "We're in real time, on the provider's server. He's walking on the west side of the street, Broadway. Just at Vesey now."

  "I'm on the move." Sachs started in the direction he'd indicated, feeling the pain in her left hip; the knee alone wasn't torment enough apparently. She dug into her back pocket--felt past the switchblade and pulled out a blister pack of Advil. Ripped it open with her teeth, swallowed the pills fast and littered the wrapper away.

  She closed in on her target as quickly as she could.

  Szarnek: "He's stopped. Maybe for a light."

  Dodging through pedestrian traffic the same way she'd woven through vehicular moments ago, Sachs got closer to the intersection where a red light stopped southbound traffic and pedestrians.

  "Still there," Szarnek said. There was no rock music pumping into his office at the moment.

  She could see, about forty feet away, the red light yield to green. Those waiting at the curb surged across the street.

  "He's moving." One block later, Szarnek said unemotionally, "He's disconnected."

  Shit.

  Sachs sped up to see if she could spot anybody holstering a phone. No one. And she couldn't help but think that maybe the most recent call was the last he'd make with the tainted phone. Their sniper was, after all, a pro. He must know there was some liability in mobiles. Maybe he'd even spotted her and was about to send his cell into the same sewer system graveyard she just had.

  At Dey Street the light changed to red. She had to stop. Surrounded by a crowd of perhaps twenty people--businessmen and -women, construction workers, students, tourists. Quite the ethnic mix, of course, Anglo, Asian, Latino, black and all combinations.

  "Amelia?" Rodney Szarnek was on the line.

  "Go ahead," she said.

  "He's getting an incoming call. Should be ringing now."

  Just as the phone in the pocket of the man inches to Sachs's right began to buzz.

  They were literally shoulder-to-shoulder.

  He fit the rough description of the man in the South Cove Inn, according to Corporal Mychal Poitier, the Bahamian cop: white male, athletic figure, compact. He wore slacks, shirt and a windbreaker. A baseball cap too. She couldn't tell if he had brown hair; it seemed more dark blond, but a witness could easily have described that as brown. The cut was short, like their sniper's. His laced shoes were polished to a shine.

  Military.

  She said cheerfully into her phone, "Sure. That's interesting."

  Szarnek asked, "You're next to him?"

  "That's exactly right." Don't overdo the playacting, she told herself.

  The light changed and she let him step away first.

  Sachs wondered if there was anything she could do to get the man's identity. She and Rhyme had worked a case a few years ago in which they'd sought the help of a young woman illusionist and sleight-of-hand artist, whose skills included pickpocketing--for theatrical entertainment only, she'd laughingly assured them--Sachs could have used her now. Was there any way she herself might slip her fingers into the man's jacket pocket to boost a wallet or receipt?

  Impossible, she decided. Even if she'd had this skill, the man seemed far too vigilant, looking around frequently.

  They crossed the street and continued down Broadway, leaving Liberty behind. Then the sniper turned right suddenly and cut through Zuccotti Park, presently unoccupied, just as Szarnek said, "He's heading west through Zuccotti."

  "You're right about that." Keeping up the act even though her target probably couldn't hear her.

  She followed him diagonally through the park. On the west end he headed south on Trinity.

  Szarnek asked, "How're you going to handle it, Amelia? Want me to call in backup?"

  She debated. They couldn't collar him; there wasn't enough evidence for that. "I'll stay with him as long as I can, try to get a picture," she said, risking speaking for real to Szarnek; the sniper was well out of hearing range now. "If I'm lucky he's going to his car and I'll pick up the tag. If not, maybe I'll be taking a subway ride to Far Rockaway. I'll call you back."

  Pretending to continue the call, Sachs sped up and walked past the sniper, then paused at the next red light. She turned, as if lost in her conversation, aiming the lens of her phone toward him, and pressed the shutter a half dozen times. When the light changed, she let the sniper cross the street before her. He was lost in his own conversation and didn't seem to notice Sachs.

  She resumed the tail and called Szarnek back. The tech cop said, "Okay, he's disconnected now."

  Sachs watched the man slip his phone into his pocket. He was making for a ten-or twelve-story building on the gloomy canyon of Rector Street. Rather than entering through the front door of the structure, though, he walked around the side into an alleyway. Halfway down that narrow avenue, he turned and, slipping an ID card lanyard over his neck, walked through a gate into what seemed to be a parking lot, bejeweled with serious razor wire.

  Staying to the shadows, Sachs had Szarnek transfer her to Sellitto. She told the detective that she'd found the shooter and needed a surveillance team to keep on him.

  "Good, Amelia. I'll get somebody from Special Services on it right away."

  "I'll upload some pictures of him. Have them contact Rodney. He can keep tracing the phone and let them know when he's on the move again. I'll stay here with him until they show up. Then I'll go interview Lydia Foster."

  "Where are you exactly?" Sellitto asked.

  "Eighty-Five Rector. He went through a gate at the side of the building, a parking lot. Or maybe a courtyard. I didn't want to get too close."

  "Sure. What's the building?"

  Sachs gave a laugh. She'd just noticed a subtle sign.

  National Intelligence and Operations Service.

  She told Sellitto, "It's his office."

  CHAPTER 39

  TERRIBLE NEWS: THAT NICE Mr. Moreno was dead.

  In her apartment on Third Avenue, Lydia Foster now made a cup of Keurig coffee, picking hazelnut flavored from the hundreds of capsules, and returned to the living room, wondering when that policewoman was going to be here.

  Lydia had liked him quite a bit. Smart, courteous. And quite the gentleman. She knew she was pretty well built and had been described as attractive, but unlike some men using her services as an interpreter, Mr. Moreno hadn't flirted once. On the first translating job for him, several months ago, he'd shown her pictures of his children--adorable! Which men do sometimes as a prelude to trying to pick you up, which Lydia found incredibly tacky, even for the single dads. But Mr. Moreno had followed the pictures of the bambinos with a picture of his wife and announced that he was looking forward to their wedding anniversary.

  What a nice man. Polite--holding the car door for her, even though they had a chauffeur. Moreno had been charming. And talkative. They had some engaging conversations. They were, for instance, both fascinated with language. He was a writer for blogs and magazines and a radio host, while she made her living interpreting other people's words. They'd spoken about similarities between languages and even technical aspects: nominative and dative and possessive cases, as well as verb conjugations. He told her he disliked English intensely, though it was his mother tongue, which she found curious. One may not like the tonal quality of a tongue for being too harsh--German or Xhosa, for instance--or be dismayed at t
he difficulty of achieving fluency, like Japanese, but to dislike a language in general was something Lydia had never heard of.

  He characterized it as random and lazy (all the irregular constructions), confusing and inelegant. It turned out that his real objection was a bit different. "And it's rammed down the throats of people throughout the world, like it or not. Just another way to make other nations dependent on the U.S."

  But Mr. Moreno had been opinionated about a lot of things. Once he'd started lecturing about politics, you couldn't dislodge him. She found herself steering away from those subjects.

  She'd have to tell the detective that Mr. Moreno had seemed concerned for his safety. He'd looked around quite a bit as they'd driven through the city and walked to their meetings. Once, they'd left one meeting and were on their way to another when Mr. Moreno had stopped suddenly.

  "That man? Haven't we seen him before, outside the other office? Is he following us?" The person he noted was a young, somber-faced white guy, looking through a magazine. That alone struck Lydia as odd, something out of an old-time detective film, where a PI pretends to read a newspaper on the street while spying on a suspect. Nobody lounges on the streets of New York, browsing through reading material; they check iPhones or BlackBerrys.

  Lydia would be sure to tell the police officer about the incident; maybe that man had something to do with Mr. Moreno's death.

  Digging through Redweld folders, she assembled her notes from the assignments she'd had with Mr. Moreno over the past few months. She'd saved everything. As an interpreter, she worked with the police and court system from time to time. She had gotten into the habit of being very conscientious about retaining all her files in such cases because a mistaken phrasing of a detective's question or a suspect's answer could easily result in an innocent man being convicted or a guilty one going free. This diligence carried over into her commercial interpreting assignments too.

  The police would get nearly a thousand pages of translated material by and about the late Mr. Moreno.

  The intercom buzzer rang and she answered. "Yes?"

  "Ms. Foster, I'm with the NYPD," a male voice said. "Detective Sachs spoke to you earlier? She's been delayed and asked me to come by and ask you a few questions about Robert Moreno."

  "Sure, come on up. Twelve B."

  "Thank you."

  A few minutes later a knock on the door. She looked out through the peephole, to see a pleasant-looking man in his thirties, wearing a suit. He was holding up a leather wallet containing a gold badge.

  "Come on in," she said, unbolting and unchaining.

  He nodded a greeting and stepped inside.

  As soon as she closed the door she noted that there was something wrong with his hands. They were wrinkled. No, he was wearing flesh-colored gloves.

  She frowned. "Wait--"

  Before she could scream he struck her hard in the throat with an open hand.

  Gurgling, crying, she dropped to the floor.

  CHAPTER 40

  HE SOMETIMES WONDERED ABOUT PEOPLE, Jacob Swann did.

  Either you were conscientious or you weren't. Either you scrubbed every bit of scorch off your copper-bottomed, stainless-steel saute pan or you didn't. Either you went the distance with the souffle, and saw it rise five inches over the top of the ramekin, or you said to hell with it and for dessert served Haagen-Dazs, spelled in faux Scandinavian but made in the U.S. of A.

  Standing over a crumpled, gasping Lydia Foster, he was thinking of Amelia Sachs.

  She'd been smart enough to destroy her cell phone (and it was destroyed, not simply castrated, his tech people had learned). But then she'd made the mistake of calling Detective Sellitto back from a pay phone only about twenty-five feet from Java Hut. By the time she called, those same tech gurus at headquarters had rammed a tap on this phone--and several others nearby.

  (While of course officially claiming they didn't know how to do it and, even if they had known, never would.)

  Sometimes your Miele oven conks out--just before you're ready to slip the lamb roast in, natch--and you have to improvise.

  Sure enough, Sachs had delivered to Lon Sellitto--and inadvertently to Jacob Swann--the vitals about Lydia Foster.

  He now moved through the apartment quietly, verifying that they were alone. He probably didn't have a lot of time. Sachs had said she'd be delayed but presumably she'd call or arrive soon. Should he wait for her? He'd have to consider that. She might not show up alone, of course. There was that and while he did have a pistol, shooting, as opposed to cutting, was the sloppiest (and least enjoyable) way of solving problems.

  But if Sachs was alone? Several options presented themselves.

  Slipping the knife away, he now returned to the interpreter, grabbed her by the hair and collar of her blouse and dumped her in a heavy dining room chair. He tied her to this with lamp wire, cut with a cheap utility knife he carried--not the Kai Shun, of course. He never even used the blade to slice string for tying beef roulade, one of his favorite recipes.

  Tears streamed down her face and, gasping from the throat-punch, Lydia Foster shivered and kicked.

  Jacob Swann reached into his breast pocket and removed his Kai Shun from the wooden scabbard. Her reaction, the terror, didn't deepen. We are dismayed only by the unexpected. She would have seen this coming.

  My little butcher man...

  He crouched beside her as she sat making ungodly sounds and shaking madly.

  "Be still," he whispered into her ear.

  He thought of the Bahamas, yesterday, of Annette uhn-uhn-uhning in a clearing near the beach, surrounded by silver palm and buttonwood trees strangling to death from orange love vines.

  The interpreter didn't comply exactly but she calmed enough.

  "I have a few questions. I'm going to need all the material about your assignments for Robert Moreno. What you talked about. And who you met. But first of all, how many officers have you talked to about Robert Moreno?" He was concerned that somebody had called her after Amelia Sachs.

  She shook her head.

  Jacob Swann rested his left hand on the back of hers, tied tightly down. "That's not a number. How many officers?"

  She made more bizarre sounds and then, when he brushed the knife against her fingers, she whispered, "No one."

  She glanced toward the door. It meant she believed she could save herself if she stalled, to give the police time to arrive.

  Jacob Swann curled the fingers of his left hand and rested the side of the Kai Shun blade, pounded with indentations, against his knuckles. The razor edge lowered to her middle and ring fingers. This was the way all serious chefs wielded their knives when they sliced food, fingertips of the guide hand curved below and away from the dangerous blade. You had to be very careful when you cut. He'd sliced through his own fingertips on several occasions. The pain was indescribable; fingers contain more nerve endings than any other part of the body.

  He whispered, "Now, I'm going to ask you once more."

  CHAPTER 41

  THE DRIVE TO THE SNIPER'S NEST on the outcropping of land near the South Cove Inn took considerably longer than it otherwise might have.

  Mychal Poitier gave Thom a complicated route to get to the main highway that led them to their destination--SW Road. The point of this evasion was to see if the gold Mercury was following them. Poitier assured him that the car did not contain officers of the Royal Bahamas Police Force conducting surveillance. The tail might have to do with Moreno or something else entirely. A well-dressed and vulnerable American in a wheelchair might simply have aroused the interest of thieves.

  Rhyme called Pulaski, who was still at the inn, and told him where they'd be. The young officer continued to wait for the maid who might have more information about the sniper's intelligence gathering at the inn the day before the shooting.

  Once past the airport the traffic thinned and Thom sped up, piloting the van along SW Road and its gentle arc around the island, past manicured gated communities, past shack
s decorated with laundry on lines and goats in pens, past swamps and then an endless mass of forest and greenery--Clifton Heritage Park.

  "Here, turn here," Poitier said.

  They had arrived at a dirt road, which veered right and led through a wide, rusting gate, which was open. The road followed a narrow outcropping of land that extended a half mile into Clifton Bay. The spit was a few feet above sea level, dotted with trees and brush and scruffy bare spots, lined with a shore that was rocky in some places, sandy in others. The road was bordered with Do Not Swim signs. No explanation was given but the water was noxious, sickly green and singularly unappealing.

  Thom followed the road, which skirted the north edge of the spit, past the several commercial facilities Poitier had alluded to in the restaurant earlier. The first they passed, at the intersection of the unnamed drive and SW Road, was the public trash yard where several fires burned and a dozen people wandered about, picking for anything of value. Next was the tire recycling operation and finally the metal fabricating plant composed of several low shacks so unsubstantial that it looked as if a gentle breeze, forget a hurricane, could have blown them down. The businesses were identified by hand-painted signs. Fences were topped with barbed wire and tense dogs prowled the grounds, squat and broad-chested--very different from the potcake they'd shared lunch with.

  Clouds of smoke, yellow and gray, lingered defiantly, as if too heavy to be moved by the breezes.

  As Thom picked his way along the pitted road, the view to the right suddenly opened up and they were looking at the bay of azure water beneath a stunning blue sky and white clouds dense as wads of cotton. About a mile away was the low beige line of land and buildings that was the South Cove Inn and surrounding grounds. Somewhere along this north edge of the spit from here to the end, about a hundred yards away, the sniper would have set up his nest.

  "Anywhere here," Rhyme said. Thom drove a short distance to a pull-off and parked. He shut the engine off and two sounds filled the van--some harsh rhythmic pounding from the metal factory and the faint crash of waves on the rocks that lined the shore.

  "One thing first," Poitier said. He reached into his backpack and extracted something then offered it to Rhyme. "Do you want this?"