The Devil's Interval

by Kevin Tumlinson

  This was interesting. Kotler had expected some sort of noncommittal retort, maybe something snide and derogatory, but had instead he seemed to have hit a nerve. “I’m a little powerless at the moment,” Kotler said, pulling his tied hands up from the arms of his chair.

  There was laughter, which sounded mechanical and eerie thanks to the voice modulation. “Now we both know that isn’t true. You’re exercising power even now. Oh, you’re caught, and you’re in trouble, for sure. You may not even make it out of this alive. But despite all of that, you’re doing your best to control the situation, and even succeeding somewhat. I shouldn’t even be engaging with you, but I just couldn’t help it. Your recent activities in London have made things difficult.”

  “Well, in that case, I apologize,” Kotler said. “I meant to make things impossibly difficult.”

  “I’m sure you did,” the voice replied. “And that’s exactly what I mean, Dr. Kotler. Even now you are reflexively trying to establish your dominance. Your power. Your privilege. You have it, even when you’re at a disadvantage. What an injustice.”

  There was something about this conversation that was starting to buzz with Kotler. He wasn’t certain why, but he was getting a vibe now, about the voice. There was something there, a fact that hadn’t quite bubbled to the surface.

  Your privilege, the voice had said.

  “Well, this has been entertaining," the voice continued, "but I have work to do. There’s a trade to arrange, after all. I hope you enjoy your accommodations for the evening.”

  With that, the bag was back over his head and the bonds were cut from his wrists, before he was dragged out of the room.

  He didn’t struggle. There were too many guns, even if he’d only seen one so far. And he had no idea where he was or how many people might be in on this. It was better to let things play out for now. He was safe, for the moment. The trade, whatever it would turn out to be, would be something of a guarantee for his safety, despite what the voice had implied. If he didn't cause trouble, he would be safe enough.

  There was the sound of a key turning a large deadbolt, and Kotler was shoved through a doorway. He stumbled and fell, sprawling on the ground, just as the door slammed shut.

  He pulled the hood from his head, but may as well have left it on. The room he was in was pitch black, without even a seam of light from the edges of the door.

  Feeling around, he found a roll of blankets. No pillow, no cot, no anything else, that he could determine. The room was empty. He was lucky to have the blankets, perhaps.

  He stood and felt along each wall, moving his hands up and down in sweeping arcs, trying to find anything that might be useful. The walls themselves were cinder blocks, with lines of grout forming a grid work everywhere Kotler touched.

  In his sweep, he found no electrical sockets in the walls, no shelves, not so much as a leftover nail or screw, where a picture might have hung. And as he reached upward, he got no sense of where the ceiling might be. This space could have a ten-foot ceiling, or a fifty foot one. No way to know.

  He wasn’t sure what time it was, but it had to be late. He'd been nabbed from his apartment shortly before midnight, and that was starting to catch up to him. Jet lag was catching up as well.

  He had exhausted every possibility he could think of, here in the dark, and so the last option was to take the gift of blankets, find a spot to rest, roll one up as a pillow, and go to sleep. He would need the rest. There was no way to know what tomorrow would bring.

  Chapter 14

  Denzel had grown impatient with the results they were getting, and was ready to try just about anything new.

  They had scoured every security and traffic camera they could locate on the route taken by the SUV, but their search was going nowhere. The SUV had taken a series of random turns, looping around blocks at times, sometimes driving into areas of the city that had very sparse coverage. This wasn’t London, after all. There weren’t clusters of cameras at every city block. Denzel and Holden were relying on traffic cams, primarily.

  Getting permission to access all those cameras was taking too long, of course. It had been twenty-four hours now, since Kotler had been abducted, and in that time, they’d only gotten court orders for maybe a third of the cameras along the SUV’s route, most of which were associated with banks and ATMs. Denzel and Holden had resorted to calling individual branches and asking politely, hoping they could convince empathetic bank managers to cooperate and hand over footage voluntarily. Many did. Some didn’t.

  The video angle was coming along, but it wasn’t producing much in way of results, and it was costing time. The crucial 48-hour window was closing. Denzel decided, after several hours of sitting in on review, that it was best to leave this part to the techs, and to go pursue new leads on his own.

  The trouble was, there were no leads. Not in Kotler’s disappearance.

  “So, let’s get back to Mink’s murder,” Holden said, gruffly. “That’s the point, ain’t it? Your boy was grabbed in connection to this murder, and this doohickey … the, uh …”

  “Devil’s Interval,” Denzel said.

  “Right. We solve this, we might have a better chance of finding your guy.”

  Denzel could only agree. He knew it deep down. Kotler’s kidnapping was a complication in a bigger, ongoing investigation. Their best chance of finding him was to solve this case.

  Only, parts of this case involved Kotler’s expertise. How was Denzel supposed to fill in those gaps? He had nowhere near Kotler’s insight into history and science. The closest he came to cultural anthropology and archeology and quantum physics was watching Ancient Aliens on the History channel.

  He felt a gripping sensation in his chest and stomach, like what he felt in tight spaces. That’s what this felt like, now. He was confined. He was in a tight space. He was in trouble.

  Except …

  He took a few deep breaths. He had ducked into the men’s room at the precinct, and he now splashed water on this face, rubbing his eyes and toweling off with paper towels. He slicked his hair at the temples, where it was starting to stick out a bit. He stood straight, tightened his tie, smoothed his shirt, and pulled on his suit coat. He was engaging the FBI agent within.

  Because that’s what he was.

  Without Kotler, he had no immediate access to his partner’s wealth of personal knowledge, expertise, and insight. But he was still an FBI agent. And he had a case to work. He would do his job the way he’d been trained to do it.

  He left the men’s room and found Holden, already pulling on his own soiled and wrinkled coat and brushing some crumbs from his shirt. Holden’s tie was loose, as always, and the top button of his shirt was missing. He was, essentially, the opposite of Denzel’s agent persona, but in his own way, he was doing just as Denzel had done. He was pulling on the uniform. He was preparing to go do the job.

  “I was thinking,” Holden said. “They grabbed Kotler right after your meeting with the AMSL people.”

  Denzel considered this. “They may have been watching Kotler’s place. Waiting for us to arrive.”

  “But they knew who he was,” Holden said. “They knew where to find him.”

  Denzel blinked. “That’s right,” he said. “I hadn’t put that together.”

  “So that points pretty strongly to someone in the organization. Again.”

  “So, it’s time to stop playing polite with these people,” Denzel said. “They have a mole somewhere in their lineup, and we need to know exactly who it is. How’s it coming with Jared Partano?”

  “He’s lawyered up, and isn’t saying much. We didn’t have anything on him, so I couldn’t hold him. He’s been released, but warned not to leave town. I have a unit watching him for the next 48 hours. And Nick Peters told me the kid’s on leave until this is cleared up.”

  “What about the brother? Has he come out of it yet?”

  “He’s in a coma. You brained him pretty good,” Holden said.

  “He tried to shoot m
e,” Denzel replied.

  “I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it. But the docs aren’t giving him very good odds of pulling through.”

  Denzel felt a strange stab of regret at that. The man had tried to kill him, so Denzel had little sympathy for his current state. But he had information they needed, and it was Denzel who had taken him out of commission.

  He shook it off. Things like this happened, during an investigation. Advantages and disadvantages were all part of the flow. Partano’s coma, Kotler’s abduction, a hidden mole within AMSL—these were all part of the puzzle. Solving this case would mean being able to think around the obstacles and limitations, and come up with a solution regardless.

  “We need to go back to AMSL,” Denzel said.

  “And talk to who?” Holden asked. “We’ve already put everyone in that place in the spotlight. Whoever the mole is, they’ve covered their tracks pretty well.”

  Denzel thought for a moment, shaking his head. “What are we missing? There are pieces to this that we must be overlooking.” He considered. "Did we ever get an answer on the question of who had access to Lawny Bristol's personal files, after she died?"

  Holden took out his notebook. Hand-writing notes in a weathered reporter's notepad was a vice that he and Denzel shared. Kotler stored all his observations electronically, and usually well after the fact. The man had a near eidetic memory, which Denzel envied. But it was far too comforting to fall back to the handwritten notes, when he needed a refresher.

  Handwritten notes.

  "Wait," Denzel said. "What do we have on the notebook? The one that Jack Harris grabbed in London? Have we seen any reference to that?"

  Holden had glanced up at him, then riffled through his notebook again. "Nothing significant," he said.

  Denzel was flipping through his own notebook now. "I have a brief statement on it from Patel," he said. "It wasn't something he knew about beforehand. It was older, though. He told me it contained notes in several different sets of handwriting."

  "So, it had more than one owner," Holden said. "So what?"

  "Where did it come from?” Denzel asked. “How does it factor into all of this? If we can pick up the trail on this thing, it might lead us to whoever is behind all of this."

  Holden nodded. "So, we do need to talk to the AMSL folks again."

  "Just one," Denzel said. "It's time that Nick Peters opened up everything he's got."

  Chapter 15

  “How many of these visits can we expect, Agent Denzel?” asked Ross Miller. He and Garrett Chandler were sitting with Nick Peters in the conference room once more, across from Denzel and Holden.

  Miller raised a hand, waving off his own comment before Denzel could respond. “I apologize,” he said. “I know that your partner was abducted, and that’s adding to the weight of this. Of course, anything we can do to help, we will do. It’s just …” he trailed off.

  “We have a company to run,” Chandler said, with an edge to his voice. “And frankly, this investigation is starting to have an impact. We got something of a PR boost over Ashton’s murder, but now the press is asking questions we’re not even allowed to answer. If they get wind of your friend’s abduction, and link it back to us, there’s no telling how the public is going to react.”

  Denzel nodded. “I appreciate the predicament, gentlemen. But since we have a body and an abduction on our hands, I’m not particularly in the mood to give a shit about your PR.”

  There was a stunned silence in the room as everyone, even Detective Holden, reacted to Denzel’s tone. He had delivered his words calmly and in the same professional way he might have asked about their whereabouts or alibis, and that somehow made his statement even more intimidating.

  “Agent Denzel,” Peters said, “We’re cooperating. What can we do?”

  “I need access to Dr. Lawny Bristol’s archived files, and a list of everyone who had prior access to them.”

  “Already pulled that up for you,” Peters said, sliding a smart tablet across the table.

  Denzel took it and immediately started sliding through the data. “I also need to know if there was a handwritten journal in Dr. Bristol’s possessions. Old. Leather bound.”

  Peters shook his head. “Not to my knowledge. We boxed her personal belongings and sent them to her family, in Chicago. Her sister. Name is Kate Bristol. She’s all the family that Lawny had left, from what we could find. Her name was the only one listed in Dr. Bristol’s employee file, anyway. She insisted that we ship everything to her home address. But the box we sent was small. Dr. Bristol didn’t keep a lot of personal belongings here. Everything else was tied to her work, and so it’s been archived.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Denzel said.

  Peters nodded, “Of course.” He picked his phone out of his hip pocket and tapped out a message, presumably to someone on his security team.

  Holden spoke up then. “I’d like the contact information for the sister. She probably took possession of Bristol’s personal things, from her home.”

  Peters nodded, looked back at his phone, and after a few taps said, “I can email this information to both of you.”

  Holden nodded, though Denzel knew he’d prefer to hear it and write it down.

  “Anything else?” Peters asked.

  “Your man, Partano, is in a coma,” Denzel said, glossing over the fact that it was he who put the man there. “We can assume he was in on all of this, so I’d like all of his records as well. Particularly his activities over the past few months. And those of his brother, too.”

  “That will take some time to pull together,” Peters said. “Should we look for anything specific?”

  “Anything to do with Dr. Bristol,” Denzel said. “Particularly any time that Christopher had accessed her records.”

  Garrett Chandler spoke up. “You think Dr. Bristol is involved in this, too?”

  “I can’t rule it out,” Denzel said. “Not based on what we have.”

  “Which isn’t much,” Holden grumbled.

  “Right now, we’re on the hunt for any hints about that journal,” Denzel said. “And we want to track down the mole in your organization.”

  “Wouldn’t that be Christopher Partano?” Chandler asked.

  “I don’t believe he acted alone. Based on the timing of Dan Kotler’s abduction, and the presence of Partano in my home early the next morning, we believe someone else fed Partano and Jack Harris information on our movements. And, unless we discover that it was Partano who accessed Bristol’s files and effects, there’s still the matter of someone breaching your internal security.”

  “That system is beyond state of the art,” Peters said, looking to the CEO and COO. “If someone did hack it, they had to have been inside.”

  “And who would be most likely to do that?” Miller asked.

  “The list is short,” Holden said. “And sitting in this room.”

  Miller and Chandler looked first at Peters, then at each other, and finally back to Holden. “You’re saying it was one of us?” Miller asked.

  “That’s my suspicion,” Holden said. “It’s also why I’ve brought this.” He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and produced the search warrant, which Denzel had helped to expedite. “Warrant to search both of your personal access logs, your offices, and your homes. Officers are already doing all three.”

  Chandler stood first, his body tense with outrage. “What the hell? You couldn’t have warned us?”

  “Warned you for what?” Holden asked.

  “I would have handed all of this over anyway,” Miller said. “All you had to do was ask.”

  “I find it works better when the suspects don’t know I’m coming,” Holden said. “But don’t worry, gentlemen. We’re after some pretty specific things. Information, mostly. And your cooperation is both noted and appreciated. But for the time being, I’m going to ask that all three of you stay right here, in this room.”

  “Three?” Peters asked. “So, you’re searchin
g my offices, too?”

  “Anything we need to know about?” Holden asked.

  Peters smiled and chuckled. “Detective, everything is wide open. Go find whatever you can.”

  Chapter 16

  Kotler awoke to the door slamming open, and a flood of light pouring in from outside. The bright whiteness of it hurt his eyes, and he shielded them even as two men yanked him to his feet and pulled the hood back over his head.

  He had to pee, but he doubted he'd be given the chance. He held it, hoping he could preserve his dignity long enough to at least be able to request a restroom.

  He tried to keep pace with the two men, but found himself tripping and stumbling as his groggy brain struggled to send signals to all the right parts of his body. As a result, he was half dragged along the corridor, his arms and shoulders aching as two sets of very strong hands tightened their grip. In just a moment he was thrust into a chair again, his hands and feet tied for the second time in twenty-four hours. The hood was removed, the four bright lights shown, and Kotler realized he was back in the same interrogation room.

  “Did you sleep well?” the voice asked.

  “A bit rough,” Kotler said, clearing his throat. “I could use a restroom.”

  “There isn’t time, I’m afraid,” the voice said. “I’ve come to an agreement with the other party. They should be arriving with my package any moment, and once it’s verified I’ll give you to them.”

  “That was quick,” Kotler said. “I’ve had no time to request a rock hammer and a Rita Hayworth poster.”

  “You’ll have to take it up with your new captor,” the voice replied.

  Kotler wasn’t sure how to feel about this development, but he decided that the best course of action was to roll with it. He had a few moments with the disembodied voice on the other side of the lights, and this might be his only chance to glean more information.

  “What is it I’m being traded for, exactly?” Kotler asked. “As far as I know, you have everything you need.”