by J. B. Turner
The agent leaned back in his seat and bit the end of his pencil. “That’s intriguing.”
“Once I’d stripped away the voice morphing and reduced it to the genuine conversation, it wasn’t long before I had figured it out. I now knew who the other guy was. And it wasn’t a member of Mossad or former member of Mossad or any Israeli.”
“So, who is it, Thomas?”
Wesley was about to answer when it suddenly struck him that he’d been the one doing all the talking. The one detailing all his work and analysis he had carried out. He looked around as the impassive cold faces of the men in suits scrutinised him. He didn’t know why, but he started to feel uncomfortable. Not overly uncomfortable. Just a feeling that something wasn’t right. “Look guys, I’ve been very open with you, and given it to you straight. I need a break, if that’s OK. I’d also like to call my wife. She’ll be worried.”
“That’ll be arranged. But let’s talk about the other voice on the recording.”
“Listen, I want to speak to my wife.”
“She’s back at the house. Don’t worry about a thing.”
Wesley said nothing.
“Thomas, can you tell me just now if you have a definitive version of the conversation of the two original voices? Because, I think we need to know about that before we go any further with this.”
“I need to speak to my wife.”
The agent got up and smiled. “Not a problem. I’ll go and speak to my boss. Probably have to wake him up. You can have a break and call your wife.”
Wesley sighed in relief. His imagination had begun to get the better of him.
“Can I get you a drink? A water? Soda, perhaps?”
“Black coffee would be great.”
“You got it.”
The agent disappeared with his colleagues. Wesley turned and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He looked haggard. Eyes bloodshot.
A few minutes later, the door opened and a young female agent walked in. She wore a dark blue suit, white blouse and was carrying a mug of coffee. She looked in her mid-thirties and was very attractive. “Milk or sugar?”
“It’s good as it is,” Wesley said.
She handed him the mug and smiled, before leaving the room.
Wesley sighed and closed his eyes for a few moments thinking of his wife. She’d be worried sick. He lifted the mug to his mouth and took a couple of gulps of the strong coffee. He tasted the strong flavour that he enjoyed. Then all of a sudden, he felt a tingling feeling rush up his arms and to his head. The coffee mug fell to the floor.
Then blackness engulfed his world.
TWENTY-FIVE
The sun was edging over the horizon when the twin-engine Cessna air ambulance landed on runway three at Forrest Sherman Field, the naval air station in Pensacola. Reznick helped the doctor and two nurses lift the gurney, with his daughter strapped to it, from the plane and into a waiting ambulance. He sat beside her and held her hand, as they sped off on a seven-mile journey, lights flashing, to the Naval Hospital, and waved past the armed guards at the back gate security checkpoint.
Two feds travelled in a car following close behind. The ambulance pulled up outside the eight-storey hospital and Lauren was rushed straight up to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor.
Reznick could only watch as Lauren was hooked up to another ventilator. Nurses and a couple of doctors took her vital signs and talked about the risks involved in giving a higher dose of Naloxone, as if Reznick wasn’t there.
A doctor pulled back the left eyelid and shone a penlight in her eyes. “That’s interesting. Slight dilation.” He did the same for the right eye. And then repeated it. “Dilation confirmed.”
Then the doctor checked her arms and legs for track marks. “Lauren, can you hear me?” he said. There was urgency in his voice. “Lauren, wake up.”
But she didn’t respond.
After what seemed a lifetime, one of the doctors finally approached Reznick. “I believe you are the father, sir,” he said.
Reznick nodded.
“Come with me,” the doctor said.
He led Reznick out into the corridor and headed up the stairs to his office. He swiped his ID badge at the side of a door with the sign “Dr Jerry Winkelman”. A beep. “Please come in,” he said, as he pushed the door open.
The doctor sat down in a black leather chair behind his paper-strewn desk and leaned back in his seat. “Take a seat,” he said.
Reznick sat down opposite.
“Lauren, as you’ve just seen, is seriously ill. To say otherwise would be misleading and wrong. But she did respond to the light, which might give us a bit of hope.”
Reznick nodded.
“But her age is adding to our concern, and the length of time she has been in this heroin coma. We’re going to give her an extremely high dosage of an antidote, which we think has to be administered right now, if we are to have any hope of bringing her round.”
Reznick felt disassociated as if the doctor wasn’t talking about his daughter.
“We believe that the marks on her arm were caused by skin-popping, where the needle is sunk into any bit of skin, not direct to the vein. And this may be the thing that will save her, although we can’t say for sure. Your daughter’s case is very similar to one I dealt with earlier this year. A thirteen year old who’d tried shooting up with his friends, and had been skin-popping. He recovered despite slipping into a coma for twenty-four hours.”
When they returned to the ICU room, Lauren was again unrecognisable, tubes coming out of her nose and mouth, as the machines kept her alive.
The doctor said, “She’s on a ventilator because of the low respiratory rate. And I’ve been told that the blood gases were shown to be hypoxic. We will monitor your daughter before, during and after this treatment process, keeping a close eye on temperature, pulse, urine output, electrocardiography, and O2 saturation.”
Reznick stared down at her.
The sound of the beeping from the ventilator was the only response.
The doctor said, “Sorry, but you’re going to have to leave, at least for now,” he said “We need to begin her treatment. Why don’t you go to the Rest Room and get some sleep. It’s for the parents of patients. You look as though you need it.”
The doctor called over to a nurse and asked her to show Reznick to the Rest Room.
Reznick took one long final look at his daughter. She looked as if she was just sleeping. Out in the corridor, the two Feds were waiting. They followed Reznick and the nurse along the corridor to the Rest Room without saying a word.
The nurse showed him into the large room with wooden blinds, TV on the wall. “If you need anything, just pick up the phone on the bedside table and this will take you straight through to reception.”
Waves of tiredness washed over Reznick. The last two days had been insane. “Thank you.”
The nurse turned to leave and Reznick noticed the two Feds were pulling up chairs outside the room to babysit him. The door slammed shut.
Reznick closed the blinds, took off his shoes and lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes. But he couldn’t get the picture of Lauren – covered in tubes and hooked up to the ventilator – out of his head.
His mind drifted as sleep beckoned. Need to be strong for Lauren. There were already signs she was fighting back. He would also dig deep. He was going to will her back to him.
He had done all he could. Her life was now in the hands of the doctors and the Lord above. His shattered mind tracked back to when she was a ten month old baby. He was in Bahrain when he got a call. “Lauren has pneumonia,” Elisabeth had said, voice riven by anxiety. She said Lauren’s little chest was rapidly rising up and down, struggling for breath. He felt sick. Helpless. But Elisabeth had told him that Lauren was a fighter, just like her dad. And over the coming days, as he conducted a surveillance operation on an Islamist leader in one of the most Godforsaken countries he’d ever had the misfortune to visit, his daughter slowly fought back to
health. But what she faced here and now was different.
The more he thought of her predicament the darker his mood. Her innocence had been taken. She had been defiled.
Reznick felt his eyelids becoming heavy. He felt himself falling. Deeper and deeper. Waves of tiredness swamped him. Then he was gone. The sky was a perfect blue. He was standing on a beach. He saw Lauren in the distance, aged around eleven months, paddling in the cold summer ocean, recovered from her pneumonia. Her cheeks were red and she was laughing and splashing in her pink bathing costume. It was late-August 2011.
He tried to shout and warn her of the breakers crashing onto shore. But his voice was lost in the roar of the water and howl of the wind, as the waves rolled up the sand. He shouted again, but still she didn’t hear. Then Elisabeth appeared from the water and took Lauren by the hand, leading her to safety.
Suddenly he was cloaked in darkness. The smell of acrid smoke filled the air. The sound of sirens. He was running through a tunnel. Heart pounding. Darkness all around. Then he was out of the tunnel. Skyscrapers everywhere. He was in the city. Manhattan. And the sun was shining. A perfect sky. He looked up. A tiny figure high up in the burning building, waving a handkerchief. Tower One. “Jon! Jon! Please come and get me! Jon! Jon!” He tried to move, but he was paralyzed. He willed himself to move. But he was frozen. All of a sudden an ominous thunderous roar and the tiny figure was swallowed in a cloud of dust and ash as the building descended at free fall speed, the smell of burning fuel thick in the air, the screaming unrelenting.
Reznick sat bolt upright in the bed, bathed in sweat and struggling for breath.
TWENTY-SIX
The Gulfstream was en route to New York, cruising at thirty-five thousand feet, as Meyerstein held a progress update meeting with senior members of her team. She was in full flow when the phone on her armrest rang.
Meyerstein sighed and picked it up. “Assistant Director Meyerstein,” she said.
“Martha, it’s Freddie Limonton in Washington.” He was the FBI’s top computer guy working at HQ. He had been seconded from the FBI Forensic, Audio and Image Analysis Unit (FAVIAU). “We’ve run face recognition scanning and retinal scans into the system for Scott Caan in New York for November 19th.”
“I’m listening.”
“We got something. We have picked him up from a scan at JFK.”
Martha clenched her fist. She felt herself flush at the display of emotion in front of her team. They just shrugged wondering what she’d been told. “Good work.”
“I’ve just emailed you an edited three minutes and twenty-five seconds we have of Scott Caan. It’s been pieced together from countless cameras around Terminal 5. The first piece of footage comes in at one minute and twenty-two seconds, as he walks through the terminal.”
“You got his flight details?”
“JetBlue from Dulles. The second lot of footage was taken in Tribeca, Lower Manhattan. Corner of Duane and Greenwich is where he gets out. The footage should be with you now.”
“Lower Manhattan?” Meyerstein scanned her inbox and saw there was one new message. “OK, Freddie, I got that. But I need another favour.”
“You don’t ask much.”
“I know, I know. Listen. Same guy, I want his image ran through every CCTV database we can get our hands on, especially government buildings and trains in New York City in the last month. But also in businesses in the Tribeca area. What was he doing there on November 19? We need to try and get a handle on his movements. Where has he visited? You know the drill.”
“You want footage of every surveillance camera database to be scanned in the last month? Whoa, Martha, are you serious?”
“Absolutely.”
He sighed long and hard. “That’s a huge trawl. That could take–”
“Then you better get started. You need extra resources. You got it. He’s out there somewhere.”
Meyerstein double clicked the file and a frozen still of Caan automatically appeared on the large screen. He was strikingly handsome, high cheekbones, dark hair, dark eyes and clean-shaven. She pointed to the remote control that was on a table where Stamper was sitting. “OK, Roy, let’s run this straight through first. This is the first visual of Caan since he went missing from the lab. Taken on November 19.”
A few murmurs from her team.
Stamper rolled his eyes. “A month ago? That’s a lifetime.”
“I know, I know. But it’s all we’ve got so far. Let’s run it.”
Stamper pressed the Play button and the image of Caan came into view. He strode past the huge windows of Terminal 5, which overlooked the runway. Then past the Lacoste shop. He wore a pair of faded jeans, Timberland boots and a dark coat.
Meyerstein said, “Very cute. He doesn’t stand out at all. Blends in real nice.”
Stamper stared at the screen. “It’s no wonder this guy hasn’t come up on anyone’s radar. He looks like an ordinary Joe just visiting the Big Apple.”
They watched as the lean Caan ambled past the shops in the terminal before he stopped to look in the window of the Ron Jon Surfer Shop.
Stamper said, “Counter surveillance measure, what do you think, Martha?”
“Well, he sure as hell wouldn’t be surfing in New York in November, that’s for sure.”
The footage, spliced together from numerous cameras in the terminal, switched angles as he meandered past the shops, carefully avoiding the hundreds of other passengers with huge bags and suitcases. He walked past a Japanese restaurant, then a silver jewelry shop and out to a long line of yellow cabs outside.
“Freeze that, Roy!”
Meyerstein pointed at the screen. “Excellent. Now run the plates of that cab, Roy.”
Stamper scribbled the details and handed it to one of his team.
Meyerstein said, “OK, Roy, let’s roll the footage to Lower Manhattan.”
The footage picked up Caan as he got out of the same cab. “OK,” Meyerstein said, “This is Caan arriving in Tribeca. Kinda upscale these days. Let’s pay attention.”
The footage showed Caan carrying a holdall walking across the street at the corner of Duane and Greenwich. “Freeze that, if you will,” she said. She turned to look at her team. “He is carrying a bag. Go back to the airport footage, Roy. I’m sure he wasn’t carrying anything.”
Roy rewound the footage. It confirmed that Meyerstein was right. No holdall.
“Where did the holdall come from? Was this placed in the taxi for him? We need to know, people.”
Meyerstein faced the freeze-framed screen showing Caan at the airport. “Go back to Tribeca.” She shifted in her seat aware she was snapping at her team. She needed to calm down.
They watched Caan again emerge from the cab in Tribeca. “I want our guys in New York to swamp the area around Duane and Greenwich, and start asking questions. I want every resident within one block of there to be shown a picture of Caan. Do they know him? Have they seen him out and about? Was he staying there? Visiting someone? Check all the hotels within a mile. I want to know the instant we have a breakthrough.”
Stamper groaned. “This footage is a month old, Martha.”
“It’s all we have. It’s a start.”
Meyerstein wasn’t as pessimistic as Stamper. He viewed himself as a realist and a pragmatist. And it was true. But sometimes he didn’t view small breakthroughs in the same light as she did. To her it was concrete proof that they were on the right track. She learned that as a child watching her father in his studying. The forensic way he pieced together the smallest facts, and constructed a rational and plausible case as part of his preparations. Nothing was too small to overlook. She was doing the same. The FBI now knew Caan had visited New York and when. They had something to work with, even if it was one month old.
Meyerstein sank back in her seat. She was so tired she couldn’t sleep. It was pure adrenaline that was keeping her going. She was certain her heart rate was constantly beating faster these days.
She looked around at
her team again. Exhausted faces, all running on empty. “We’re getting close now. I want every FBI field office, police force and all government agencies to be made aware of Caan and his image. I want every avenue explored, and leads followed up.”
Roy gave a wry smile from his seat in the opposite aisle and got up, before taking a seat beside her. He leaned in close. “Martha,” he said, his voice low, “you need to ease up. You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack.”
Meyerstein nodded, knowing he was right. She needed to slow down. Maybe even take time off. But that wasn’t a realistic option until the investigation was concluded. Too much was at stake. “The bastard is out there. We’ll get him. Make sure the New York field office has the footage. I want to know what the hell he was doing in Manhattan. Was this reconnaissance? Meeting with people who may have conceived of a bio-terror plot?”
“They know what to do. We’re getting there. We’ll find the son-of-a-bitch.”
The team started firing out instructions via secure email and encrypted phones.
Within five minutes, Martha had Tom Callaghan, the Special Agent in Charge of New York City, on the phone.
“Where’s this come from?” Callaghan asked.
“We got lucky. It’s footage from CCTV taken at Terminal 5 at JFK on November 19. Have you watched the footage?”
“My guys are watching it just now.”
“We need to throw everything at this, Tom. He was in Tribeca.”
“Leave it with me, Martha. You en route?”
“I’ll be with you in under an hour.”
Meyerstein and five of her team took the elevator to the twenty-third floor of the FBI’s New York field office, located in a monolithic forty-one storey glass-walled slab in Lower Manhattan. She had visited numerous times and was always impressed by the high quality of the Special Agents.