BOLDT PULLED INTO THE WEDGE of white hash marks separating the northbound lane of I-5 from the NE 45th Street exit ramp leading into the U District, believing whoever was behind this was ingenious for his choice of locations. The highway traffic to his left moved at sixty miles an hour or better, the exit traffic to his right only slightly slower given that it was a multiple-lane ramp. The SPD car following him was forced to drive past, remaining on I-5. By the same token, whoever was behind this could also drive right past, Boldt never the wiser. He thought it more promising that his mystery man was parked with a good view of his position, monitoring him, interpreting the degree to which he was willing to cooperate. If this person wanted him off the highway, he could direct him to exit right. If he wanted him back on the highway, that was possible too.
Boldt waited.
He answered his purring cell phone with a steady voice despite the way he felt inside. Pahwan Riz spoke his rank. “Lieutenant.”
“I’m assuming you lost visual,” Boldt said. “That’s okay, Reece.”
“Affirmative. Give us about three minutes, we’ll have someone break down in the opposite lane.”
“Too obvious.”
“Let me do my job.”
“My terms. That was the agreement.”
“Which is why I’m doing the service of calling you,” Riz explained. A commander, Riz was not used to taking orders.
“You’ll have to do better than a breakdown in the opposing lane, that’s all I’m saying. They’ll spot that in a heartbeat.” His own heart beat somewhat frantically. Boldt longed for a cup of tea. It never failed to settle his nerves.
“We’ve got you on radar,” Riz said, meaning the Global Positioning System. “We’ll stay with that for the moment, circle the wagons, and let you come to us.” Boldt found this acceptable. Riz would establish perimeter surveillance positions and wait for Boldt either to drive past one of his people or to provide the team the color of a car or a description of the individual who showed up to receive the encrypted computer disk.
Boldt’s cell phone beeped in his ear, indicating call waiting-an incoming call. He told Riz to sit tight and answered this second call, placing Riz on hold in the process. The synthesized voice named another location. “I-5 south. The Boeing Access Road exit. Pull into the wedge between the highway and the exit lane and await instructions. You have seven minutes.” The line went dead.
An unreasonably short amount of time. Boldt jerked the wheel right, getting off the exit in order to cross and return in the southbound lanes. Once onto the highway, he’d have to invoke his siren and dashboard bubble flasher if he were to make it on time. He switched the phone call back to Riz. “I’m heading south toward Boeing Field.”
“We’ve got you,” Riz said. Again, Boldt believed he meant they could see him on the GPS system.
“Visual?” Boldt asked.
“Negative. Will have any minute. I’m signing off for now. Hang in there, Lieutenant.” The phone clicked and Riz was gone.
Somewhere, somehow, this man who ran him intended for Boldt to pass the disk or make a drop. But with Riz’s team lurking a short distance away, it seemed unlikely a runner could get very far without becoming a target of the same surveillance. Boldt brought the Crown Vic up to eighty-five miles per hour on his way toward the bridge. Even in light traffic, he’d have to slow somewhat when he reached the narrowing stretch of highway that ran through the city. He wondered how the drop would be engineered, confident in the abilities of Riz’s team.
Boldt understood better than anyone the precarious situation he was in. He had to control Hayes’s software in order to ensure the recovery and transfer of the money, if he were to safeguard his family. He still hadn’t settled on a way to allow Liz to help Svengrad, but no matter what, this software was the key. His inclusion of Special Operations was mandated by the fact that someone wanted him to make that drop in the first place. If Svengrad or Hayes were behind this plan, then why not just have Boldt remove the software from the property room and hand it over to his wife? Why bother with this elaborate and risky scheme? The first answer that came to Boldt was that Svengrad or Hayes had determined a way to get the money out of the bank without Liz’s involvement. He/they needed the software, but not Liz. This didn’t make a lot of sense, since Svengrad had taken an enormous risk by pressuring Boldt for his wife’s involvement. And if not Svengrad or Hayes, then who, and why? Boldt couldn’t make the drop without knowing this, and he couldn’t know this without Special Operations.
The second thought that came to him was this elaborate plan was simply a way for Svengrad to protect Boldt from being seen as cooperating, a way to tangle up the investigation. Handing the software to Liz would signal the endgame, would give investigators a head start on surveillance of every kind. Boldt’s cooperation in that event might be construed as a criminal act. At some point Boldt would answer for that. A shiver ran through him as it occurred to him that Svengrad had wanted to protect him merely because he was a police lieutenant, a Homicide lieutenant at that, and a good cop to have in your pocket. Had this drop been orchestrated merely to make Boldt look less culpable than he really was? This idea hit him hard-that he was now seen as an asset by the Russian mob, a turned cop worth preserving.
He slowed and stopped the car in the triangle of paint that separated the highway from the exit ramp. He wiped his brow with a Starbucks napkin. Raindrops on the windshield grew in size. Boldt switched on the wipers. A semi-truck rolled by, the concussion of its wake rocking Boldt’s car. He pulled ahead a few feet and angled the car slightly, pointing in toward the highway traffic.
His mobile phone rang. The caller-ID read OUT OF AREA. No number to trace. He answered the call, but the reception made it impossible to hear.
“Wait!” he shouted into the phone, afraid he might miss an instruction, his eyes fixed on the flickering small black bars indicating reception. He hurried out of the car, into the rain, running up a slight embankment, his head aimed up, looking hopefully at the phone’s signal indicator as it moved from one bar to two and then three. He clamped it to his ear and said, “Is this any better?”
“Don’t fuck with me,” the eerie electronic voice warned.
“I’m not,” Boldt shouted.
“Webster’s,” the voice said. “It’s a bar just south of northeast Forty-fifth on Brooklyn.”
“I’ll find it.”
“Leave your phone on. And come alone.” The line died.
Boldt was still looking up into the wet night sky, eyes searching for a cell tower’s blinking red light when something winked at him through the rain. Binoculars?
Boldt moved his head, trying to force that wink to appear a second time. And there it was! Another wink of light from a spot slightly above the overpass. Some spy looking down, perched in a tree beyond? he wondered. But then he saw it again. Not a person at all. A camera lens mounted high atop an aluminum light post. A traffic cam.
He was being watched, but from a distance. Cell phone in hand, he wanted badly to make a call but thought better of it, not knowing if in the rain and the dark that camera could see him or not, but not wanting to test it. He headed back to the car at a run, slipping once on the wet grass, smearing his knee down into the muddy incline, and jumping back up. He hurried toward the car realizing the traffic camera, if accessible from the Internet, which he was guessing would prove to be the case, allowed those running him to look for ground surveillance while at the same time confirming Boldt did exactly as he was told. Big Brother, and in the hands of the wrong people.
Back in the car, yanking the wheel to make the exit ramp so he could reverse directions and return to the very exit where he’d been parked only ten minutes earlier, Boldt pulled the phone to his ear to report his situation. But the idea that the person on the other end of these calls might not be Svengrad or Hayes stayed with him, and for a moment he resisted connecting with Riz. The idea of a third party, an unknown, instilled fear. On some level, Boldt believed he
could fight the enemies he could see-but was he putting the kids or Liz even further at risk if this proved to be an unknown? He took a moment to think.
As he drove, he typed the bar’s name into the Mobile Data Terminal to confirm its existence. After a long hesitation the computer’s tiny screen returned:
DO YOU MEAN: “Web-Stirs, 1100 NE 45th Street”??? (Y)es (N)o?
Boldt pushed Y, and the terminal offered to compute the quickest course, but Boldt declined, well aware that I-5 was the fastest way there.
Web-Stirs, he realized, was an Internet bar, and now he raced to conclusions. Weighing risks, he nonetheless called Pahwan Riz and caught him up to date on the traffic camera and his next destination being an Internet café. Before Boldt was off the phone Riz had confirmed that the traffic camera he’d seen was one of about fifty viewable live on the state’s highway website. Whoever had arranged this was able to watch Boldt move place to place in the comfort of his living room. It made him feel all the more like a pawn and brought his blood pressure considerably higher.
“I’m not liking this,” Riz said. “An Internet café. Get it?”
Boldt was no techno-wizard unless it related to the crime lab, an area where few could outdo him. “No.”
“Ingenious.”
“How so?”
“David Hayes? Web-Stirs an Internet café? That means a small office network hub, a router. Simple stuff. For a guy who could probably hack the Pentagon, kid’s stuff.”
“He’ll hack the computer network at the bar,” Boldt said, feeling his way through this.
“He has long since hacked the network. He’s established drive sharing on one or more of the machines. This guy is good,” Riz said with a distant respect. “What he’s going to do is direct you to a particular machine. You’ll insert the disk, and the rest will be history, he’ll take it from there. He’ll enter the correct password that we could never determine, copy the disk, reformat it, destroying all its contents. Brilliant.”
“Can we stop praising him and start figuring out some way to prevent this?”
“No,” Riz answered. “Not unless you simply refuse to show up.”
“That’s not an option.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“He’s got us?” Boldt asked.
“He’s got us,” Riz confirmed. “You’re about to turn over the software to him.”
The Crown Vic screamed over the bridge through the pouring rain, Boldt bothered not only by what he heard, but by something else, something intangible, indefinable, like a moving shadow. Highways? he wondered. Cars? Websites? Something in the back of his mind that he couldn’t quite pull forward.
Riz, on the other hand, proved prescient, and for the first time a tingle of suspicion entered Boldt’s thought that a police insider like Riz could mastermind all of this from behind the scenes, no one ever the wiser. Make it all seem like the work of someone else while this person manipulated events for his own personal wealth.
This thought churning inside him, Boldt parked and walked a wet block to Web-Stirs, a glass and tile, ultra hip, ultra modern interior with colorful graphics and odd shapes hanging from the ceiling that Boldt assumed were meant to be art. A twenty-something bartender with slicked-back hair and black-framed nerd eyeglasses served food-coloring-hued mixed drinks in exotic plastic stemware. James Bond on a budget. The beer looked like a dark amber. The crowd was a surprising mix of women and men-Boldt had expected all men for no reason other than his own prejudices. The women showed their navels above their pants’ waists, as provocative as the waitresses, one of whose buttocks cleavage showed when she bent to retrieve a fallen napkin.
His phone rang again and, for a second or two, Boldt debated what Riz had said, debated not answering it, or walking out of the bar altogether. But it was not to be. He answered the call, stuck the phone to his ear, and was dictated a simple instruction. “Machine in the corner, when it comes open. Insert the disk into the drive bay and walk away.”
An Asian girl occupied the machine at the moment. Boldt wondered if the caller knew that, and what it meant if he did. Boldt scanned the room’s ceiling for security cameras and spotted two in opposite corners, wondering if a hacker could gain access to these as well. His world felt smaller and more claustrophobic everywhere he went, people watching. The girl looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, and he wondered if she were a plant or an innocent. Then he wondered if there were any innocents anywhere, taken in again by the sexual, casual dress of these kids-from his angle it was nearly impossible not to look directly down the shirt of this Asian girl. He turned and walked toward the bar, keeping a fuzzy eye on her in the smoked-glass mirror behind the bar.
“Get you something?” the bartender asked.
“Hot tea to go?”
“Two doors down.” The owner was not stupid enough to go up against the coffeehouses.
“Something soft,” Boldt said.
The guy ran off a list of pop drinks and bubbling waters. Boldt requested a ginger ale. The Asian girl spun out of the chair. Impossibly tight pants wrapped around a firm body. She headed in Boldt’s direction. He felt ancient in this company. He wondered if she were a messenger, a spy, a twenty-something prostitute. She walked right at him, her young nipples showing darkly through the T-shirt, the not-so-gentle sway of her hips emphasized by the low cut of the corduroy pants, the straight-cut black bangs so classic and timeless.
“Lieutenant Boldt?” she asked.
He felt a spike of heat, deciding someone had sent her, perhaps believing Boldt in need of a computer coach. He doubted immediately they’d ever trace the twenty or fifty he believed he’d find in her pocket to a suspect. At every turn the person behind this proved himself clever, and that pointed increasingly away from Svengrad and toward Hayes in Boldt’s mind. No way he had died in that cabin horror.
She said, “I’m Ming Lee, a junior at the U. Your lecture series: The application of the physical sciences to the detection of crime… I made criminalistics my major.”
Boldt felt catapulted into another realm. This bursting package of primal youth, a person he felt sure connected to the case, nothing but a secret admirer.
“What are you doing at Web’s?” she inquired. Then she blushed, glanced around, and said in a forced whisper that proved just as loud as her normal voice, “Are you undercover or something? Oh, my God! How totally cool is that?” She stepped closer and again he looked away, for as short as she was, his aerial view left little to the imagination. “Did I just blow this, or what?”
“Nothing so dramatic as that,” Boldt lied. “I live near here and our home computer went down. That’s all. Missing some e-mail.”
“You gonna have a drink?” she asked, and he expected that the next thing out of her mouth was going to be her coming on to him and he didn’t know what to make of that. So-called badgers came in every age, every ethnicity, but usually went for the young, hard, and handsome men in uniform.
“Nonalcoholic,” he said. “I’m on duty.” Immediately regretting the pat response.
“I thought you said your home computer went down… ” Then she blushed again. “Oh, my God,” she repeated, covering her mouth. “I’m so sorry.” Now more convinced than ever she’d interrupted an undercover op. “Can I sit with you?”
“I think not,” Boldt said.
“I won’t say a word.”
“Better not,” Boldt said. “We can discuss this at the next lecture.”
“After the next lecture?” she pressed, and there was no mistaking that look in any woman’s eyes, even a woman this young. He felt his face flush and his groin stir.
“Another time,” he said. “Good to meet you, Ming.” He stepped past her, leaving a whole other world behind him and wondering why a collision like this would present itself just now. Other than during his occasional teasing with Matthews, no woman had openly flirted with him in at least a decade, certainly not a child. The repartee with Matthews had ground to a halt once she’d
attached herself to LaMoia. The implied interest of this girl nearly derailed his thought long enough for him to forget himself. But he moved to the computer terminal in the corner, sat down on the warm stool, reminded once again of his eager student, and leaned to slip the disk into the machine.
Within seconds the disk drive began to whir. With it, in Boldt’s mind, a resurrection. Yes, David Hayes was very much alive.
Driving home twenty minutes later, the disk coming out of the machine blank, as Riz had anticipated, and Boldt momentarily blank along with it, Boldt crossed I- 5 in the Crown Vic, catching sight of the painted triangle where he’d been pulled over and waiting for a call only an hour before. He yanked the wheel, hit the emergency flashers, and pulled over in traffic on westbound NE 45th.
“Command,” Riz answered the phone.
“The Forty-fifth Street exit off I-5 north,” Boldt said, without further introduction. “Is there a traffic cam that watches that location as well?” As Riz checked, Boldt ended the call and crossed the busy street and peered over a low rail at the interchange in question, his mind whirring. He had briefly held suspicions that Riz, or another SPD officer, was involved in this. It was certainly not beyond the realm of Yasmani Svengrad to “turn” a cop through extortion or threat, or to entice a cop with the smell of that kind of big money. Now, watching the highway traffic stream past, Boldt’s phone rang and it was Riz.
“Affirmative,” Riz said. “They had you in plain sight for both stops.”
They discussed the possibility that Hayes might have been able to access Web-Stir’s video security cameras, and Riz confirmed this possibility, “depending on the firmware they’re using.”
Working on the notion that the obvious is always the solution to a certain level of crime, and rarely the solution to sophisticated crime, Boldt placed a call to his department’s traffic division. He felt like a spider carefully laying out his web while knowing all along his predatory victory amounted to little more than haphazard chance. The fly had to be in the room for the web to be effective.
The Body of David Hayes Page 17