Finding North

by Christian, Claudia Hall

  At 11:47 a.m., she was shot in the head.

  The video showed a projectile moving at an angle, seemingly through the window. However, the windows were in perfect condition when they’d entered the living room. There was nothing of interest on any of the other security cameras. The audio recording picked up a pop, possibly the sound of a projectile moving through the glass a second before Orchid was hit. Satellite imaging of the building showed that there were no window washers or other human beings clinging to the outside of the building.

  Somehow, Orchid had been shot with a relatively small-caliber bullet through bullet-resistant glass on the fourth floor of a building by an invisible person.

  “I don’t see anything,” Alex shrugged.

  “I don’t, either,” Colin said.

  Alex stood up so Raz could sit in front of the computer. He sat down to watch the videos again.

  “Any word on Erin and Matthew?” Alex asked.

  “They’ve checked out of the hotel,” Colin said. “Julie picked them up and took them home. Mattie’s on base, and I think Erin went into the lab. You guys really bought them a long weekend in Hawaii?”

  “John,” Alex said. “They leave Thursday night. So they’ll have most of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. We were going to keep Grace, but they wanted her to go with them.”

  “I was hoping your husband remembers Uncle Colin on his birthday,” Colin grinned. “I’d love to spend a weekend in Hawaii.”

  “Especially right this moment,” Alex smiled.

  “No doubt,” Colin said.

  Alex glanced at Raz. His finger was on the computer screen, and he was running a piece of tape back and forth.

  “Is there a way to enhance this further?” Raz asked.

  “Not with what I have here,” Colin said. “You can upload it to the service and use the programs there, but that means giving the tapes to DHS.”

  Raz nodded.

  “What do you see?” Alex asked.

  “It’s more like what I don’t see,” Raz said.

  Alex stood right behind him, and Colin moved his chair over.

  “First, listen to this sound,” Raz said. “What does it sound like?”

  He gave Alex the headset and played the tape. She nodded and gave it to Colin.

  “Sounds like a round going through glass,” Alex said. “Colin?”

  “That’s what I hear, too,” Colin said.

  “In this video . . .” Raz pulled up the security camera from the east wall of the apartment. They could see the dining area, the back of the television, and Orchid’s feet. He pointed. “If any of these windows were broken, you should see a spray of glass to match the sound.”

  He rewound the tape and played it again. His finger rested on the second counter.

  “Maybe you wouldn’t see the spray of glass from that angle,” Raz said. “You should see it from here.”

  He played the tape that showed Orchid’s murder. He enlarged the area where the bullet came from.

  “Not one shard of glass, mist of fragments, nothing,” Raz said. “There’s nothing but the sound. And check this out . . .”

  Raz flipped to the satellite video of the time Orchid was killed.

  “Nothing on the glass, right?” Raz said. “But look at that . . .”

  “I saw that,” Colin said. “I thought it was a shadow.”

  “The shadow didn’t exist yesterday morning at the same time.” Raz flipped to the satellite video of the day before. “Or the day before that.”

  “You think someone was in the apartment,” Alex said.

  “Someone was in the apartment,” Raz said. He looked at Colin and asked, “Did you lock your door?”

  “Yes,” Colin said. “I knew Alex would kill me if I didn’t. I used my key to get in your door.”

  “They could have come for us,” Raz said. “The door locks are the best in their class. It’s one of the features of these apartments.”

  “The flyer for the apartments says, ‘Give your security team the night off,’” Alex said.

  “Right,” Raz said. “The locks are to allow agents to get some rest when their target is secure in their room.”

  “The shadow doesn’t try our doors,” Alex said. “We would have seen him or her on the other security feed.”

  “Right,” Raz said. “That’s the other weird thing. Shadow seems to get into the apartment from the north end of the building and disappear the same way.”

  “Is there another door?” Alex asked.

  “Not that I’ve seen,” Colin said. “There’s supposed to be only one door. That’s part of the security.”

  “We should check when we get a chance,” Alex said. “But why would anyone kill Orchid? Why here?”

  “We’d have to look into Orchid’s background, certainly,” Raz said. “But I think Orchid was murdered to keep us here today.”

  “Why would anyone want to ground us?” Alex asked.

  “So they can get into Dex’s house,” Raz said. “I thought that when the FBI arrived at the scene, but . . . it sounded kind of paranoid.”

  “No, I think you’re right,” Alex said. “I wondered about it when Colin told me the team couldn’t get in here.”

  “Joseph said he was told there was no access to this apartment,” Colin said. “But we didn’t set that up.”

  “I doubt Orchid thought of it,” Raz said. “I mean, we’ll have to check, but . . .”

  “Right,” Alex said. “What if they didn’t want to ground us?”

  Alex gestured to Colin, Raz, and herself.

  “What if they just wanted to ground you?” Alex nodded to Raz. “What . . . uh . . . I’m not even sure what questions to ask? That’s usually your job.”

  Raz smiled.

  “What gets me is that we have another set of people looking for another bevy of mysterious objects,” Colin said. He leaned in to Alex and used a low voice. This was one of his new skills. She smiled at his use of it. “Didn’t we just find that book?”

  “The mysterious ‘they’ don’t know that we have the book,” Alex said in the same tone. “Think about it. They believe I’ve deciphered Linear A, which means I can read Josef Yakovlev’s comments in the book.”

  “We haven’t acted on the intel from those notes.” Raz put his head between Alex and Colin’s. “They’d have to assume that we don’t have the book.”

  Colin leaned back and thought for a moment before nodding. The low voice was incredibly effective but could be used only in small doses, or those watching would catch on. Colin pointed to something on the screen and said in his usual voice, “Do you think this is it?”

  “Probably not,” Raz said, to continue a louder conversation for the videotape.

  “I think it’s this one.” Alex flipped the computer to her and brought up a satellite map. She pointed to where they’d gone into the river. “We went in there.”

  Raz and Colin leaned in to look at the computer screen.

  “The book came from New York,” Alex said in a barely audible tone. “We are here because of the symbol on the maps in my office. Were Dex or his father connected to Yakovlev? Or Cooper’s dad? Or . . .?”

  Alex shrugged. Raz and Colin shook their heads.

  “Dex gave me a key last night,” Raz said in the same low tone. “He said he wanted me to have it. It’s to his father’s ‘private collection,’ whatever that is. He was going to show me today.”

  “Maybe he was taken to keep from showing you the collection,” Colin said in his newly acquired low voice.

  “As for the others . . .” Raz shrugged. He leaned back and spoke in his normal voice. “Dex’s father was a chemical engineer. His grandfather fought at Normandy and then worked in California after the war. Their family has always owned land here in Tribeca, so, when his grandfather died, his father moved back here.”

  “So it’s very possible we’re circling the same group of people,” Alex said in her low voice.

  Raz intentionally d
idn’t acknowledge what she’d said, so as to not draw attention to her.

  “I asked Dex last night if he knew Troy,” Raz said in his normal voice. “He said he’d heard of Troy’s father, Haemon, through his father.”

  “How so?” Alex asked.

  “His father was a chemical engineer,” Raz said. “Haemon Jasper is an eminent physicist.”

  Raz shrugged.

  “Sounds like Alex is right,” Colin said. Switching to the low tone, “Dex’s collection is connected to that group.”

  “Maybe it’s about maintaining control of this collection,” Alex said in her normal voice. “Do we know where this collection came from?”

  Raz shook his head.

  “Why did Dex leave everything to you?” Alex asked.

  “He said he never believed I was dead,” Raz said. “He always thought I would show back up. When I did, yesterday, he was too freaked out about it to believe it was me.”

  Colin looked up when the agent-in-charge came into the kitchen.

  “We’d like you to show us where you were at the time of the shooting,” the agent said. “We want to know what you heard.”

  “Sure,” Alex said.

  Alex and Raz went into their room and lay down on the bed. Colin went into the smaller bedroom near the kitchen. The agent-in-charge closed their doors and locked them.

  “Now what?” Raz asked under his breath.

  “No idea,” Alex said.

  “You think we’re locked in?” Raz asked.

  “It is one of the security features of the apartment,” Alex said.

  The door locks could be set so that the people inside couldn’t get out. Alex looked up at the surveillance camera and hoped her Sergeant would be able to let them out. Alex was just starting to get antsy when the lock on their doors clicked open.

  “Did you hear anything?” the agent-in-charge asked.

  “No,” Alex said.

  “It’s as we thought,” the agent-in-charge said. “The soundproofing kept you from hearing the attack on Agent Hong.”

  Alex nodded.

  “You may come out,” the agent-in-charge said. “We’ve decided to move you to another apartment, so that we can finish our work and you can continue on with your day.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said.

  “We’ll move everything, so you don’t have to worry,” the agent-in-charge said.

  Alex gave him a long look. The agency would also have a chance to go through their belongings. She nodded. Raz turned to catch her eye from the north windows of the apartment. He nodded.

  “Sir,” Alex said to the agent-in-charge. “You might want to look at something.”

  She nodded to where Raz was standing.

  “It looks like someone came in and out of the apartment from this window,” Raz said.

  “This north-east window?” the agent-in-charge asked.

  “Yes,” Raz said. “That’s the one.”

  The agent-in-charge took a look and waved his forensics people over to take a look.

  “Excellent find,” the agent-in-charge said. “How did you notice this?”

  “We saw it on the tapes,” Colin said to relieve Raz of some of the agent-in-charge’s intense scrutiny. “I can show you.”

  Colin led the agent-in-charge to the kitchen area.

  “What do you think?” Alex asked.

  “Definitely professional,” Raz said.

  “Intelligence community?”

  “Yes,” Raz said. “You?”

  “Contractor or agency,” Alex nodded. She shook her head and snorted. “Probably that douche Zutterberg.”

  Raz nodded in agreement. Hearing the agent-in-charge thank Colin, Raz got Alex’s jacket. They were escorted out of the apartment before they could take anything else with them. They remained silent on the elevator ride down and the walk out of the building. Two agents followed them the moment they stepped out of the building.

  “Dinner?” Colin asked.

  “Good idea,” Alex said. “There’s nothing we can do until the NYPD turns over the scene.”

  “You don’t want to demand control?” Raz asked.

  “Seems a little public,” Alex said. “We just were on the news. I’d like to limit that to one a day.”

  “Good thinking,” Raz said.

  “Where shall we go?” Alex asked.

  “I know just the place,” Raz said.

  F

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tuesday evening

  May 17 — 6:35 p.m. EDT

  New York City, New York

  Joseph was waiting for them at the hole-in-the-wall steak house. While Raz ordered steaks for everyone, Joseph updated Alex on their minimal progress. So far, all they knew was that Dex had been taken by force a few minutes after Raz had left him. There had been no ransom request or contact from anyone about Dex. For all intents and purposes, he was gone.

  Even though, technically, the Fey Team had authority over the scene, the NYPD had made it nearly impossible to get into Dex’s home. The FBI had launched a public campaign against the NYPD. In turn, the NYPD had closed and locked the Zeno estate.

  “I thought you’d like to review the tape,” Joseph said. He gave Alex his phone. “I had Sergeant Dusty send it to my phone.”

  “Your phone?” Alex gave him a wry smile.

  When Joseph had been the Staff Sergeant for the Fey Special Forces Team, he had insisted that the team never use cell technology. They traveled the world to communicate and do their research rather than run the risk of being monitored.

  “Very fancy, very secure.” Joseph winked at Alex, and she laughed. “It’s from the lot you received from Ji and has no leaky apps.”

  Ji Fong was Steven Pershing’s only child and the head of China’s elite military unit, Shāshǒujiàn or “Assassin’s Mace.” Last fall, Alex and the Fey Team had worked with Ji and the Shāshǒujiàn in order to retrieve Steve Pershing from North Korea. Alex smiled and took the phone from Joseph, and played the video. She blinked.

  “What did you see?” Joseph asked.

  Alex shook her head and played the video again. Confused, she slowed the video down so that it played image by image. She shook her head and gave the phone to Colin.

  “Would you excuse me?” Alex asked.

  She was aware of getting up and walking to the restroom, but her mind was focused on the replay of the video.

  Had she seen what she’d thought she’d seen?

  She went into a stall and sat down.

  “I saw it,” Jesse said. “What do you think it means?”

  “I have no idea,” Alex used American Sign Language so that no one would hear her.

  “You have to have some idea,” Jesse said.

  “It looks identical to the kidnapping of Javier Mestadus from Buenos Aires in 1976,” Alex signed.

  “And Gleb Petrov, Moscow, 1984,” Jesse said. “And Marcus Jenkins, London, 1992.”

  “And a whole bunch more,” Alex signed. “Romulus, serial kidnapper for hire.”

  “I thought we caught him,” Jesse said.

  “I thought you shot him,” Alex signed.

  “I did,” Jesse pointed to his heart. “Is this a copycat?”

  Alex looked at him for a moment before giving a slow nod.

  “Why would anyone want to copy him?” Jesse asked.

  “It’s a lucrative business,” Alex signed. “Kidnap for hire, ask for an outrageous sum, take what you’re given, whenever you’re given it, because the hostage is dead.”

  “Killed or abandoned within eight hours of acquisition,” Jesse said.

  “Sometimes less,” Alex signed.

  “After subject is taken to a location and . . .” Jesse said. “We never figured out what.”

  “Right,” Alex signed. “The bodies weren’t found for years. Any physical evidence had decayed. We have no idea what happened to them.”

  “If anything,” Jesse said.

  “If anything,” Alex repeated in sign
language. “Dean thought they took the hostages to a location where they convinced the hostage they were going to be interrogated. They were murdered . . .”

  “Or abandoned,” Jesse said.

  “Right,” Alex signed. “There was never any physical evidence.”

  “Why go to the trouble?” Jesse asked. “Why not kill them on sight and move on?”

  “Keeps people from knowing someone is dead,” Alex signed.

  “Keeps the authorities running in circles,” Jesse said.

  “Gets people like me involved,” Alex signed.

  “I don’t think it’s about us,” Jesse said.

  “It’s not about us,” Alex signed. “No one knew Josh was alive, so I don’t think it’s about him, either. Based on what we know, Dex was a lonely, overworked homicide detective who inherited a large home in a pricey neighborhood. Josh said Dex thought someone had been trying to kill him.”

  “You think that someone took him for the house?” Jesse asked.

  “It was probably an overzealous realtor,” Alex signed.

  Jesse laughed. Alex smiled.

  “There’s something there, isn’t there?” Jesse asked. “On the tape. That’s why you’re here talking to me.”

  Alex nodded.

  “I think so,” Alex said.

  “Alex?” Colin’s voice came from the door. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be right out,” Alex said. She got up and left the stall. She stopped to wash her hands. To the woman standing at the sinks, she said, “Sorry, my brother’s an asshole.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows as if that were obvious.

  “Sorry to be concerned,” Colin played along.

  Alex smiled and followed him into the hallway.

  “What happened?” Colin asked under his breath.

  “I’ve seen that kind of capture before,” Alex said.

  “And?” Colin asked.

  “Let’s just say it doesn’t end well.”