by Unknown
‘Sweet God alive!’ he swore out loud.
The picture on his screen cut to an overhead shot.
He could see the young girl’s battered face in horrifying close-up. She kept rocking her head from side to side with distressed monotony. Tariq had seen enough war-zone pictures, enough video evidence of tortured people to know what was real and what wasn’t. He had no doubt about its authenticity. The girl was in an advanced state of trauma, and the rocking was a sure sign that she was close to breaking point.
Suddenly, the camera started to zoom in again. This time it headed towards the right side of the table.
On the floor, three white pieces of paper slowly became visible.
Tariq bent towards the monitor and squinted hard. He could see some big, blurred shapes or letters on each of them. The zoom stopped and the picture became sharp.
Tariq was shocked and confused. Three words blazed off the screen back at him: ‘HA! HA! HA!’
53
FBI Field Office, New York
Howie Baumguard finished his call with the Director of the FBI and speed-dialled Jack King’s cell number. His eyes never left the news bulletin on the TV screen.
In Rome, Jack was already asleep. The third rude peel of ring tone woke him. ‘Hello,’ he said groggily.
‘Jack, it’s Howie, I’m real sorry to wake you, I guess you were sleeping –’
Jack flicked on a bedside light. ‘Yeah, oddly enough you guessed right. Sleep is that freaky thing that oddballs like me do every night for as long as we possibly can.’
Howie gunned up the sound a little on the TV as he spoke. ‘I’m sorry, buddy, I’m not dicking around, I had to call you. We’ve got a real shit storm blowing up.’
Jack dropped his smart-ass act. ‘What’s wrong? Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, no worries, but we’ve got a situation and it looks like it’s related to our favourite sociopath, old BR-fucking-K himself.’
The mention of the Black River Killer was enough to get Jack to sit up. ‘How do you mean? Go slowly with me, buddy; I’m not fully awake yet.’
‘Well, this sure as hell is going to wake you up. You know Pan Arabia, the Arab channel set up in competition to Al Jazeera, the guys who do the special line in Bin Laden home videos?’
Jack rubbed sleep from his eyes. ‘Yeah, I was part of one of the early validation teams that checked them out.’
‘Well, they’ve got themselves one hell of a fucking exclusive this morning. They just friggin’ well ran some video footage and a story about a woman being held hostage and being tortured to death.’
Jack struggled to catch it all. ‘I don’t get it, Howie; you’re going to have to go slower, man. They’ve got pictures of an Arab woman hostage and you think it’s somehow connected to BRK?’
‘Fuck!’ said Howie. ‘I’m sorry. Let me start again. They’re running an exclusive story on their English news channel, not their normal Arab output, video footage and a voiceover from their chief crime guy, Tariq el Daher. The report they’ve cobbled together shows a young white woman chained up in some kind of dark room. She looks in a hell of a fucking way. They’re rerunning it now if you can find it on your TV over there.’
‘I’ll look when we’re done,’ said Jack, straining his eyes open. ‘I’m still spaced-out at the moment.’
‘Jack, you should see this girl, she looks really beat-up and distressed. Our friend Tariq showed a copy to some dumb-ass detective on Homicide down at the NYPD and got quotes enough to stand up a line that there’s a nationwide hunt to find this kid before she gets croaked.’
‘How do you know the footage is for real?’ asked Jack, his brain in gear at last.
‘I’m pretty sure it is,’ said Howie. ‘There’s a copy of USA Today on the floor in the video and it’s dated July the second, and here’s the clincher, Jack, there were three other pieces of paper in the video, spelling out the words “HA! HA! HA!”’
Jack’s head started to pound. ‘Was it written the same way BRK did in his note here in Italy?’
‘The very same way,’ said Howie. ‘All big capitals.’
‘Holy fuck!’ The worst of Jack’s fears were coming true. The Italian connection was indeed a red herring, just as he’d told Orsetta he suspected. And, as he’d also guessed, BRK had been planning a new spree of America-based violence that was turning out to be unthinkably horrendous. ‘Howie, do you really think this girl is being held right now by BRK somewhere in America? You reckon we’ve just been pissing in the wind over here in Italy?’
Howie could feel Jack’s pain and humiliation. ‘That seems to be the top and bottom of it. Italy’s a false trail, laid just for us. I’m sure he had a lot of fun laying it, a creep like him would, but his real action is Stateside, always has been, always will be.’
Jack’s mind focused on the videotape. He knew the film was going to turn out to be more than a one-off publicity stunt. BRK would be planning something far more sinister as a sequel. ‘The way things are stacking up, BRK’s going to kill this girl any time soon and then leak video footage of her murder to the Western world’s most hated news channel.’
Howie shared the same fear. ‘You got it. And you know these fuckers, Jack, they show beheadings of Western hostages and any manner of atrocity; they’ll probably be praying to Allah, or Mohammed, or whoever the hell it is, that something happens right in the middle of the fucking ratings sweeps.’
Jack let out a long sigh. ‘What are you going to do now, Howie? I guess your hot-shot new boss Joey Marsh is all over this and will be wanting a multi-agency briefing asap?’
‘You got it. Marsh is so attached to my butt that I may have to have him surgically removed. We need you over here, Jack; can you get out of your obligations to the Italians?’
Jack took a beat to think about the consequences. ‘Marsh okay with that?’
‘Yeah, more than okay. He suggested it even before me. It’s all going to kick off again, and this time this friggin’ BRK screwball is begging for us to come get him. You never know, buddy, he might just be about to make his one big mistake.’
Jack weighed up the possibilities. Howie could be right. If BRK was behind the video footage, then he was taking risks, and he would do that only if he was very close to killing again. It was a unique moment; never before had they been able to so accurately predict when the serial murderer was about to strike next. ‘I’ll sort it out with Massimo. I’ll come,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when the next flight from Rome to JFK is, but I’ll be on it. Meantime, get yourself all over this Tariq guy, clamp his balls in a vice and squeeze so hard that they come out of his ears. He’s got to know that what happens next isn’t about TV, it’s about someone’s life or death.’
PART SIX
Friday, 6 July
54
Rome
By the time Orsetta and Massimo arrived at their office, Jack was already en route to New York. The concierge at the hotel had managed to get him one of the few remaining seats on the 9.55 a.m. Lufthansa flight from Rome’s Fiumicino airport. It wasn’t going to be the best of journeys; Jack topped six foot and squeezing into Economy was one of his pet hates. To make matters worse, he had to change planes at Düsseldorf and make the last leg of the long haul also in ‘cattle class’. Orsetta and Massimo learned all this from the various messages he left on their answerphones. Just before boarding, he’d called Nancy and told her where he was heading and not to worry if she didn’t get calls at the times he’d promised. He’d been encouraged by how understanding she’d been. He also managed a brief chat with Massimo, during which he’d told him more about the breaking news on BRK and the reason why he had to leave so suddenly.
Orsetta sat in her boss’s office leaning her elbows on his giant desk. They both cradled espressos and discussed their disappointment at Jack’s departure.
Massimo resisted lighting a cigarette to go with his coffee, his new pledge to himself being not to smoke before lunchtime. He tapped the desk with his
finger, as though he were banging ash from it. ‘Orsetta, I am hoping that Jack is right and that the murder of Cristina Barbuggiani is just a cruel decoy, but it is not a risk we can afford to take. When Benito comes in, we must impress upon him that our own investigations must remain fully focused. I do not want everyone sitting back and thinking the ball is now in the Americans’ side of the court. That might be a tragic mistake to make.’
Orsetta was ahead of him. ‘I spoke yesterday to the murder squad in Livorno and they are a determined team. I know the officer in charge, Marco Rem Picci, and he is not the kind to allow anyone to relax and do nothing.’
‘Good,’ said Massimo, the tension of the case showing in his red-rimmed eyes. ‘Almost every day now I have phone calls or e-mails from the Prime Minister’s office, the Minister of the Interior, the head of the Polizia Scientifica, the Direzione Centrale Anticrimine della Polizia di Stato and even the damn Chief of Police wanting to know what progress we are making.’ He threw his hands up to show his exasperation. ‘Hopefully this development in America will take a little heat off us for a while.’
Orsetta finished her espresso and drank water to take the bitterness away. She wanted to press on with the case more than anyone else, this was the biggest investigation she’d ever been involved in, and as far as she was concerned, it was just starting, not winding down. ‘I’d like to go ahead with the 3D reconstruction of the crime scene. Can you authorize payment and access?’
For some years, the Italian police had been nurturing the use of a sophisticated computer system that reproduced crime scenes with startling realism, recreating everything from the path of a bullet to the movement of a corpse.
‘Call RiTriDEC and tell them to go ahead. I will have the paperwork with them by early afternoon,’ said Massimo, referring to the special laboratory in Rome known as the Ricostruzione Tridimensionale della Dinamica dell’Evento Criminale.
Orsetta was a big fan of the system. It worked by devouring all the crime scene data available, everything from traffic-camera video footage to the measurements a pathologist might make during an autopsy. Once everything was fed in, it would recreate crime scenes in 3D pictures on giant video screens in a special theatre. Experts like Orsetta were then able to examine the pictures, almost like art critics, studying every screen pixel for a clue that might lead them to their killer.
Massimo called her to the other side of his desk. ‘Benito has patched through an FBI feed of the video footage that Jack spoke about. I have it now on the computer.’
Neither of them spoke as they watched Tariq el Daher’s report. Orsetta made notes and was the first to break the silence. ‘Just because there’s a copy of USA Today in that video it doesn’t mean the location is in America. You can pick that paper up in a hundred places in Rome.’
‘Or indeed on a plane landing in Rome,’ added Massimo. ‘Jack might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wish we could have discussed this with him.’
Orsetta nodded. She felt exactly the same way. As far as she was concerned, Jack King and the FBI were still ignoring the elephant in the room.
55
Montepulciano, Tuscany
Montepulciano stood out against an early-evening sky as beautiful and mystical as a fortified medieval settlement drawn in a kid’s book of fairy tales. From its lofty perch on a limestone ridge, six hundred metres above sea level, it watched majestically over Italy’s magic kingdom of Tuscany.
Nancy King had briefed Paullina, her waitress-come-guide-for-the-day, to make sure the photo-happy Mr Terry McLeod got to focus his lens on every corner of the town. And Paullina had been as good as the promise she pledged to her boss.
First, she made him walk the last part of the famous Corso, which starts at Porta al Prato and winds its way for more than eleven kilometres up to the top of the town and the huge open square of the Piazza Grande. They took a late lunch in the open air at Trattoria di Cagnano, where Paullina made the mistake of insisting that he try the local vino de nobile. McLeod enthusiastically complied. He drank most of the bottle, along with a brandy to polish off a hearty plate of pasta and a slice of torte large enough to wedge open one of the town hall’s giant doors.
After lunch, she guided him along the sixteenth-century town walls designed by the Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. He stopped once to take photographs, once to make phone calls and once to relieve himself of his surfeit of strong red wine.
Paullina showed him the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and, just before they left, the Sanctuary of the Madonna of St Blaise on the outskirts of the town.
He was far less interested in church architecture than he’d led her to believe, and seemed more intent on finding out everything and anything about the lives of her employers.
As promised, Paullina telephoned Nancy just before they got in the taxi for the return journey home. She gave a full report of what they’d seen and what they’d done. After ending the call with Paullina, Nancy turned to Carlo. They were both standing inside the bedroom of supposed tourist Terence T. McLeod, Nancy having used the staff key to let them in. He was no more a tourist than she was, of that she was sure.
Nancy had agonized about whether she should break her guest’s right to privacy by going through his room and his belongings while he was out. In the end, she’d subscribed to her father’s old maxim that it was ‘far better to say sorry than ask permission’. Surprisingly though, their search had turned up absolutely nothing to support her superficial dislike of him or her deep-rooted suspicion that he might have been the intruder in her bedroom.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Carlo.
The hotel manager shrugged. ‘It was dark when it happened. And you say yourself that you never saw the man, because of his mask. We have found nothing that shows it was Signor McLeod.’ He looked at her sympathetically; he was aware that she had been badly spooked by the incident. ‘I can only think, Signora King, that you may have made a mistake. It seems our Signor McLeod is what he says he is. An American tourist. And in my experience, sometimes they can be much stranger and far more trouble than any burglar.’
56
Pan Arabia News Channel, New York
Tariq el Daher looked out over the hazy New York skyline while he tried to decide exactly how long he should keep the two FBI agents waiting. He checked his watch; it was a little after 11.30. Was twenty minutes enough to show them that he was in control and that things happened as and when he wanted them to? Or should he go for a full hour, to make sure that at least this government agency took Pan Arabia seriously in future and had the politeness to return its calls and treat it with the same respect they extended to the likes of Fox and CNN?
Tariq sent his PA to make him more coffee and asked her to tell the Feds that he was very busy and would do his best to fit them in as soon as possible. He drank the coffee while he finished reading the morning newspapers. He smiled to himself. Tomorrow, they would be full of quotes from him, and probably a photograph or two as well. He hoped they used the one taken a few years back at a press dinner when he had been presented with the special award for investigative journalism.
Tariq fully anticipated that all the news media, be it newspapers, TV or magazines, would steal screen shots of the girl from the video report he’d put together, so he’d already instructed Pan Arabia’s lawyers to issue a legal copyright warning and circulate a range of digitally enhanced photographs that the press could use for free, providing of course they credited Pan Arabia. Yes, tomorrow all the hacks will be scavenging on his scoop, he was sure of that. He smiled once more, this time at the thought of them having to search for his long-forgotten phone number and wonder if he’d deign to speak to them. First though, he would have to put up with annoying meetings with the FBI and the NYPD. The tame cop he’d used to help stand up the story in the first place was now going crazy, claiming he’d been quoted out of context and threatening to bust Tariq’s balls for getting him in so much trouble. Tariq wondered whether he’d also give
him back the $500 he’d asked for in return for the interview. Somehow he thought not.
After forty minutes Tariq instructed his PA to show the agents through to the executive boardroom. Then he changed his mind. He decided instead that he’d see them, along with the company lawyer, in the smallest of all the ground-floor meeting rooms, the one usually reserved for junior reporters who were sent downstairs to get rid of potential time-wasters.
Ryan Jeffries from Legal met him in his office and they rode the elevator together. Fifty-year-old Jeffries had been round the block more times than a yellow cab and there wasn’t anything about media law that he either didn’t know, or couldn’t find a way round.
‘Good morning, officers,’ said Tariq energetically as he pushed open the glass door to the cramped room. ‘I’m Tariq el Daher and this is my Head of Legal Affairs, Ryan Jeffries. Sorry to have kept you waiting.’
Howie’s first glance showed the obvious contempt that he had for both of them. ‘Senior Supervisory Special Agent Howie Baumguard and Special Agent Angelita Fernandez.’
They all settled around a cheap wooden table that was so flimsy it almost buckled when Howie thudded his meaty arms down on it. Tariq sat back in his seat while Jeffries went in to bat. ‘Mr el Daher and the channel have already made a statement to the New York Police Department, who we understand have operational control. We have delivered a copy of the material we uncovered and we will continue to assist the NYPD to the very best of our ability. Mr el Daher is, as you know, an extremely busy man and we do not think it necessary to waste his time with repetitive processes.’
Fernandez was curious to see how her boss was going to handle this. The bulging veins in his neck and the giant clenched fists hinted that he might be about to go Hulk green, shred his shirt and then pick up the lawyer and beat the smug bastard journalist to death with him.