High Heat

by Richard Castle

  “Well, I don’t think I’m betraying any security clearances when I tell you Kline Industries has a fair number of contracts with various branches of the armed forces,” she said. “There are enough generals and admirals who owe Daddy favors, and he called in a few of them. It really is remarkable what those military satellites can do and see. I’ve heard Daddy say they can read a newspaper over a terrorist’s shoulder from twenty-two thousand miles in the air. But until they were able to locate Jamie and Inez, I didn’t realize just how good they were.”

  “For the record, I believe they reviewed satellite footage to track us from the moment of the kidnapping, through the change of vehicles, all the way to the warehouse where they hid us,” Rook interjected. “Then they used thermal imaging technology to confirm our positions within the warehouse.”

  “Thermal imaging. That was the picture with all those red blotches Daddy showed me?”

  “Indeed,” Rook said.

  “Well, then, yes, thermal imaging,” Lana said. “I just know that once Daddy was able to get a location, he didn’t hesitate. He sent his best people right in.”

  Kline turned to Hamner, who she sensed was in charge. “I’m sorry. I know the proper thing to do would have just been to call y’all and let you do it. But Daddy was worried there wasn’t time. And his private security is very, very good. Most of them are ex–Special Forces and he had already put them on alert that they might be needed. So they were geared up and ready to move. He just thought, given the circumstances, better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission.”

  “Well, officially, we can’t condone vigilante behavior,” Hamner said, pulling off what was, for him, a wry smile.

  “But unofficially my neck has already written a long and eloquent thank-you note expressing its gratitude about not being sawed in two,” Rook said.

  “So where was this warehouse they took you to?” Heat asked.

  “Along the East River, but on the Brooklyn side,” Rook said. “I’ll be honest, we really thought it was all over for us. They had both of us bound. We had those burlap hoods over our heads. Those are incredibly itchy, by the way.”

  Rook turned to Aguinaldo. “Did you find yours itchy? I think I might have a rash…”

  “That was kind of the least of my worries,” Aguinaldo assured him with a smile.

  “Anyhow, it really was over astonishingly quickly,” Rook said. “We couldn’t see anything, of course. But the lights suddenly went out and then I’m guessing from the sound they used some flash-bang grenades—those things are loud, by the way. I could barely hear a thing after that. Even the gunfire that followed sounded muffled. By the time we even knew what was going on, someone had taken our hoods off and we were being helped up by these guys with night-vision goggles and gas masks on their faces. They were the very picture of efficiency. They had us back out on the street and in Lana’s limousine before I even had the chance to thank them.”

  He thought for a moment. “Though hopefully my neck’s thank-you note will get passed around.”

  “What about the assailants?” Hamner asked. “The four men who pulled off the abduction, the two men in the video, the leader. There had to be at least seven of them.”

  Everyone looked at Lana.

  “Not anymore,” was all she said.

  The Hammer nodded grimly. Heat had worked with Hamner long enough to recognize the calculations he was already making. Hamner recognized there were circumstances where private enterprise could offer solutions not available to the government. And he realized, with the political instincts that had thrust him into his role as the NYPD’s chief fixer, that this was one of those times when the less he knew, the better.

  He would come up with some kind of story to pave things over with the press, the brass at One PP, and City Hall. He would do it because he was The Hammer, and sometimes hammers were used to countersink nails so they could then be covered over.

  Towing Rook by the hand, Heat walked over to Lana Kline. Then Heat separated from Rook—if only briefly—so she could give Kline a hug.

  A real hug this time. Not a girl hug.

  “Thank you,” she said, smothering her with an embrace that most certainly mussed both women’s hair and makeup. “Thank you so, so much. To say I am forever in your debt seems…completely inadequate.”

  “Oh, pish,” Kline said, smoothing her dress as Heat separated. “I’m just another opportunistic press agent trying to assure her candidate a nice profile in First Press.”

  She winked at Rook.

  “I do believe,” Rook said, “that Legs Kline has earned himself the most glowing profile in the history of First Press.”

  She nodded toward the murder board. “Well, then, my last quote for the article is that Legs Kline is proud of the NYPD for closing another case and for its continuing efforts to keep the citizens of New York safe.”

  “We appreciate that,” Hamner said, clearly already thinking about how this would all play out on the morning news shows.

  “Not a problem. And while we’d love to stick around and celebrate, I’m afraid we have to take our leave of you,” Kline said. “They’re holding the plane for us as we speak. Daddy is giving a big speech in Zagreb tomorrow…or, I guess, by now, today. He has to bolster his foreign policy credentials, you know.”

  Kline clapped her hands twice. “Justin, Preston!” she said. “Come along, boys!”

  “Yes, Ms. Kline,” Preston said.

  “Yes, Ms. Kline,” Justin said.

  Or it may have been Justin, then Preston. Heat still wasn’t sure as the elevator doors closed behind them.

  Hamner still had a few questions, which Rook and Aguinaldo did their best to answer.

  It wasn’t a thorough debriefing, because that wasn’t really what Hamner wanted. He just needed enough details so he could concoct a story that fit all the facts anyone on the outside would be able to uncover.

  The detectives quickly began peeling away. Ochoa limped off with Raley. Facing a true life-or-death situation seemed to have put their squabble about the shooting incident into perspective. They had smoothed things over the way guys often do: not with words, but with a mutual silent arrival at the conclusion that what they had squabbled over was not really worth fighting about.

  Feller and Rhymer followed them out not long after. Then Hamner and Aguinaldo departed, leaving just Heat and Rook, alone in the bull pen.

  “So it’s very late,” Rook said.

  “It is,” Heat replied.

  “And I’m beyond exhausted.”

  “As am I.”

  “And, of course, we’ve both been through a harrowing physical and emotional ordeal.”

  “The worst.”

  “The only thing we should be thinking about right now is getting home and collapsing into a deep sleep that lasts for at least a day.”

  “Or two.”

  “Because we just don’t have a shred of energy left.”

  “None whatsoever.”

  They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and, at the exact same moment, said:

  “Reykjavík?”

  Heat said, “You’re on,” while Rook, in the midst of scrambling toward the door of Heat’s office, simultaneously said, “I’ll get my bag.”

  Rook’s bag. The one with the inexplicable Laura Hopper scarf still stuffed inside.

  It wasn’t that Heat had forgotten about it. It had just slid out of the immediate forefront of her mind, what with Rook facing imminent decapitation. Should she make an issue out of it now?

  No, she quickly decided. There were some mysteries that could be solved later. Or perhaps they could just stay mysteries.

  Heat had her husband back, safe and sound. The men responsible for Tam Svejda’s death had suffered the ultimate penalty. Their corpses were currently providing nourishment to aquatic life at the bottom of the East River—or wherever it was Kline’s men had decided to dispose of them.

  The point was they would never be able to terrorize an
yone, ever again. For once in her life, Heat thought, she could attempt to ignore the legal implications and leave well enough alone.

  Then Rook emerged from her office, dragging the scarf across his face like a gypsy dancer.

  “I know it’s not time for gift-giving,” he said. “But this one is special. And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the end of this case.”

  He clumsily whirled around, took three long dancer’s strides toward Heat, humming a made-up melody the whole way, then presented it to her with a high degree of ceremony.

  “Your very own, one-of-a-kind, handmade Laura Hopper scarf,” he said.

  He bowed deeply.

  Heat felt her mouth go dry as she accepted it. Her heart was suddenly pounding.

  “Wow,” she forced herself to say, as if she were pleased to be receiving it. “Where…Wherever did you get it from?”

  “Oh,” Rook said breezily. “Lana gave it to me.”

  Rook didn’t seem to notice that Heat’s jaw had become unhinged. He just continued carrying on in very Rook-esque fashion.

  “I know, I know, you’re speechless!” Rook said. “I was, too. I mean, I think by now you know how rare these are. But we were down in Miami on Tuesday night and Lana had just changed outfits and she came out wearing it. And I said, ‘Wow! A Laura Hopper?’ And I think at first she was impressed I recognized it was a Laura Hopper—I daresay it takes a special kind of man with a special kind of eye. Then she asked if I liked it. And of course I said I did. And she said, ‘Here, I want you to give it to Nikki.’

  “At first I was like, ‘No, no, no! I couldn’t.’ But then she insisted. She said some sheik or something like that had given it to her father just so he’d consider some kind of deal. I don’t know the details. Anyhow, she said that it was a scarf that simply had to be shared, and she had enjoyed it for a while and had already worn it several times and she thinks so highly of you she liked the idea of you getting to enjoy it and why haven’t you interrupted me yet? You generally always interrupt me when I’m babbling while we should be hurrying toward the bedroom.”

  Heat worked her tongue just to get enough saliva in her mouth to be able to talk.

  “Rook,” she said, her voice raspy. “That’s the scarf from the first video.”

  She walked over to the murder board and pointed to its picture.

  Now it was Rook’s turn to stare with his mouth agape. “So, wait,” he stammered. “That means…that means…”

  “Lana Kline was in the room when the video was shot,” Heat said.

  Rook began, “But how is that—”

  Then he stopped himself. Heat watched Rook’s eyes greedily take in the murder board, which he hadn’t really looked at since early in the investigation.

  “What does this mean?” he asked, then started reading from the board. “‘Joanna Masters’s bullet.’ ‘Where did ISIS get its bullets?’”

  Heat told Rook about how the Joanna Masters interview had launched Svejda into a story about how ISIS was staying supplied with munitions.

  “What about this?” Rook asked, pointing to the phrase Interviewing steelworkers.

  Heat told him about Svejda’s bar-hopping exploits, and how the steelworker she had managed to make contact with, George Lichman, had gone missing.

  “And this?” Rook asked, jabbing at zinc.

  “Traces of zinc were found on her shoes.”

  “And she was last seen in Lorain, Ohio?” Rook said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I can tell you exactly what she was doing there,” Rook said. “And it wasn’t interviewing steelworkers. Not exactly. To the cops in Lorain, I’d be willing to bet the word ‘steelworker’ is a kind of interchangeable term that they use to describe anyone who works in any of the factories down by the waterfront. But those aren’t just steel mills. Remember how I told you my tour of Kline Industries took me to a smelting plant on the shores of Lake Erie?”

  “Yes.”

  “That plant was in Lorain, Ohio. In addition to a smelting operation, that’s also where the Kline Industries Munitions Division is located. That zinc on the bottom of her shoes? Zinc is what you add to copper to make brass. The brass they make is then moved right over to the armory, where it is turned into jackets for bullets.”

  “Which were then being sold to ISIS,” Heat surmised.

  “Tam must have figured it out. Or at least had a strong hunch. She was going around to those bars, looking for guys who worked for Kline Industries—guys who could sneak her in and then give her the kind of grand tour I got…just the sub rosa variety. And I bet I know where her tour ended. Because you know what else that arm of Kline Industries had in Lorain? Its own airstrip.”

  Rook pointed at kerosene on the board. “That’s why she had this stuff on her. Kerosene may have been discovered long ago by al-Razi, but these days one of its major uses is in jet fuel. Maybe she was just skulking around the refueling area or got blasted with some jet exhaust. That’s why her clothes reeked of the stuff. She was snooping around the planes, trying to confirm that the bullets coming from the armory were being loaded aboard.

  “And then…” He was now pointing at the words self-contained breathing apparatus with his eyes aglow. “She was going for a long ride in the unpressurized cargo hold of an airplane. That’s why she had all those extra tanks. One of the oldest rules of journalism is ‘follow the money.’ She was just doing a variation of that. She was going to follow the bullets. It was the only way she could confirm that Kline Industries was selling directly to ISIS and not some middleman.”

  Heat had her hands on her hips. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Rook’s version. It was that she wanted to test it.

  “But why would Kline Industries sell to ISIS?” she asked.

  “Because Legs isn’t as wealthy as he lets on,” Rook said. “Especially right now, with gas so cheap. His petroleum businesses are leaching money badly. And he’s the modern version of land rich, cash poor. Except in his case it’s stock rich, cash poor. All he ever does is reinvest, reinvest, reinvest. He never takes any capital out, and he’s highly leveraged. That was going to be the one red flag in an otherwise glowing profile. I had one analyst tell me that if Kline Industries had one more bad quarter, there could be a margin call, and then the whole house of cards would fall in on itself.

  “ISIS was probably willing to pay four or five times what the bullets were worth. So ISIS was doing the killing, but Kline Industries was making a killing. Legs knew he couldn’t afford to pass up that kind of profit margin, and he was overconfident that no one would be able to track it back to him. He could always say, ‘Well, yeah, you’re finding our bullets over there. But you’re finding everyone’s bullets over there. It wasn’t us selling them. It was a middleman.’ One well-bribed pilot and copilot, and the scheme was, if you’ll excuse the phrase, bulletproof.”

  “Until Tam Svejda came along,” Heat said, picking up the narrative. “The timeline certainly works. She was last seen at breakfast on Friday morning. They could have easily gotten her to New York by Saturday night in time to shoot the video. She must have hooked up with George Lichman Friday morning and then gotten caught sometime later. Trying to sneak aboard with all those air tanks was probably what did her in.”

  “At which point Kline Industries had a major problem: a journalist who was onto their ISIS connection,” Rook said. “You can’t just let her go, because she’ll continue asking questions, and sooner or later, things are going to unravel. So they had to get rid of Tam. And they had to do it in a way so that they didn’t get caught.”

  Heat picked it up from there. “You couldn’t just throw her in a smelter and forget about her. That’s probably what they did to poor George Lichman. But no one was going to kick up a huge fuss about one missing millworker. Tam on the other hand? People were going to ask questions if she disappeared. They would have eventually followed her paper trail to Lorain and figured out what she was doing—unless someone came up
with a huge ISIS-sized distraction, like that video.”

  “Blame the Middle Eastern terrorist,” Rook crowed. “It works every time, because it fits so nicely into everyone’s preconceived notions. It’s like Muharib Qawi said. Ever since 9/11, the Muslim is America’s favorite boogeyman.”

  Heat picked up where he left off. “And, as a bonus, it directly feeds the anti-immigration plank of Legs Kline’s presidential platform. So not only was the video a great red herring, it was also the best campaign propaganda he could have hoped for. With a renewed wave of Islamophobia and xenophobia sweeping the nation, America would turn to the guy who was most vehement about keeping outsiders on the outside.”

  “What’s more, quote unquote ‘rescuing’ Aguinaldo and me would give the Kline candidacy another big win in all of tomorrow’s news cycles. And they knew it would further cast suspicion away from them. Why would anyone think their hero and their suspect were the same entity?”

  Having finally deciphered the mysteries of the murder board, Rook was now face-to-face with Heat.

  “You know, you are so hot when you’re solving crimes,” he said lustily. “I want to go to Reykjavík with you so badly.”

  “Me too,” Heat purred. “But we have this little issue.”

  “Legs and Lana Kline are getting away?”

  “And not just getting away. They’re going to Zagreb, which is in Croatia. Which as we all know…”

  “Doesn’t have an extradition treaty to the US,” Rook said. “And there’s no way we’ll be able to keep the lid on this thing until he gets back. He’ll go to Croatia and, when he figures out he’s a wanted man, he’ll cash out his stock for whatever it’s worth and use it as bribe money. He’ll be able to stay as Croatia’s honored guest for as long as he likes. We have to stop him before he leaves US soil.”

  “Are we too late already?” Heat asked.

  Rook said, “It’s been thirty-five minutes since they left…”

  “Which wouldn’t be quite enough time to get out to LaGuardia and get a jet in the air. They’d still have to file a flight plan, get approval, then get themselves in the runway queue.”