Cruz grunted and felt himself on the verge of nodding off, something he could absolutely not do. Not when the veterinarian or Goldberg might overpower him. He shook his head to clear it.
He’d refused general anesthesia, though he’d let the vet shoot lidocaine into the wound before she gave him IV antibiotics. But he’d taken less than half the dose of painkiller she recommended in an effort to stay conscious as long as possible.
Cruz motioned with the pistol in his right hand. “I see zip ties all over the place. Get me six long ones.”
Kerry hesitated, then went to a closet and found six.
Cruz had her put zip ties around her ankles and the marina security guard’s. Then he had them restrain each other’s wrists. With the last two zip ties, Cruz bound their wrists low and tight to one of the steel bars that supported the kennel cages.
“I won’t gag you,” he said. “But if you start yelling, I’ll kill you. Understand?”
Goldberg looked petrified as he bobbed his head. Dr. Kerry just nodded.
Cruz needed sleep desperately, but he had things to do first.
He left them. He turned off the outside lights and found Kerry’s personal office. He sat at the veterinarian’s desk and used Goldberg’s cell phone to dial a number from memory. He heard clicks and hissing before the man he knew as Piotr came on.
“Talk,” Piotr said in Russian.
“It’s Gabriel,” Cruz said, also in Russian. “I want payment.”
A pause. “Are you insane? We had a deal. You were to wait until things cool down. Then you’ll get exactly what we contracted for. Where are you?”
“If you don’t put the money in my account, I will come find you,” Cruz said, and he hung up.
He looked at the couch in the vet’s office and almost lay down.
But then he retrieved the little black book from his dry bag and made one more call, this time on the desk phone. A woman’s automated voice answered and prompted him to enter a series of codes and passwords.
There was a short delay before a woman with an Eastern European accent said, “Universal Rescue. How may I be of assistance this evening?”
“I need full service. These coordinates. Medical and relocation specialists.”
She was silent. Then: “Given your location and the current circumstances thereof, that will be quite expensive, I’m afraid.”
“Two, six zeros, in BTC?”
After a longer silence, she said, “Three point five, six zeros.”
“Three.”
“Agreed. Make the transfers. Expect delivery shortly after your curfew lifts.”
CHAPTER
86
IN THE HANGAR at Joint Base Andrews, I glanced at the clock, saw it was almost midnight, yawned, and contemplated another strong cup of coffee.
My cell phone rang. It was Bree.
“Hey, you,” she said, sounding bushed herself. “Coming home soon?”
“Looks like I’ll be bunking here tonight. They put up a tent city for us in an adjoining hangar. Think I’ll catch a few hours right now.”
“Me too. I’ll miss you, but sweet dreams, and I love you.”
“I love you too, baby.”
I carried the warm memory of her voice over to the hangar next door and found a cot in the corner. After a few prayers, I lay down. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow and slept dreamlessly until Mahoney shook me awake at four a.m.
“He’s here,” he said. “Viktor Kasimov.”
Ten minutes later, I was drinking coffee once again and listening to the brief on the suspect awaiting us in the same room where we’d spoken to Morris Franks.
When the briefing was finished, Carstensen said, “You ready, Dr. Cross?”
“Yes,” I said. “Cameras?”
She nodded. “Running on the other side of the mirror, trained tight on his face. If the body-language experts catch anything, we’ll call it in to you.”
“Translator?”
“There will be one in the booth with me, but you’ll find he’s fluent in English.”
In both English and Russian, Viktor Kasimov told us he was spitting mad when Ned and I entered the interrogation room and found him manacled and chained to the table.
“You!” Kasimov shouted at me and Mahoney. “You two think crazy imbecile thoughts! Invent these things!”
“I could say the same about you, Viktor,” Ned said, unruffled.
Kasimov looked like he wanted to rip both our heads off, but he took several deep, trembling breaths before saying, “I am a Russian diplomat, an envoy of the Kremlin, and there will be serious repercussions if—”
Mahoney cut him off. “We don’t care about your bona fides or your diplomatic passport.”
I said, “We’ve gone far beyond the normal rule of law here, Mr. Kasimov. Martial law allows us to do pretty much whatever we want. And I can tell you that there could be painful and perhaps deadly repercussions for you if you don’t start helping us right now.”
“I have no idea how to help you,” he snapped.
“Tell us about Sean Lawlor.”
There was a twitch at the corner of his lips before he said, “Who?”
Over the earbud I wore, I heard Carstensen say, “That’s a lie.”
I said, “Lawlor, Sean. The former SAS sniper you hired to perform at least three murders in the past four years. Your name turned up in his Scotland Yard file after he was killed following the assassination of Senator Walker. But of course you know all that.”
“I do not know what you’re talking about.”
Mahoney said, “You understand that by refusing to cooperate, you are aiding forces hostile to the sovereign security of the United States?”
“I am not cooperating with any—”
“You could be taken out and shot or hung, Mr. Kasimov,” I said. “It’s not what we want, but it is what could happen if you don’t start speaking truthfully.”
When Kasimov glared at us, we both returned flat gazes.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I did know this Lawlor person. He did two jobs for me, not three. Both domestic affairs. Russian domestic affairs.”
We asked him how he’d contacted Lawlor. Through a middleman, a number he called when he needed such work done. He agreed to give the number to us but said the access code was usually changed every six months, and he hadn’t needed any such services in more than a year.
“Beyond that, I tell you for certain, and on my mother’s grave, I know nothing more,” Kasimov said.
“I think you’re in it up to your eyeballs,” Mahoney said.
The Russian threw back his head and laughed. “I am not that smart or cunning or ruthless, Mr. Special Agent of the FBI. Believe it or not, I think we should all coexist in peace. I mean, who needs war?”
“Right,” I said, “who needs war if you can achieve the same ends through political assassinations?”
Kasimov sighed. “Whoever are these masterminds you look for, they are playing games with you, I think. Yes, they are theorists, like the chess player. You know, somebody who thinks ahead twenty, fifty steps, this is the kind of person you search for, Dr. Cross. Me? My mind is simple. I do what I’m told.”
“Unless you’re raping women,” Ned said.
He gave us a weary expression. “I don’t know how these lies follow me.”
I decided a different route might be more helpful. “So what else do you think was behind the assassinations? Hypothetically. What’s the purpose? A takeover?”
Kasimov perked up, thought about that, and then shook his head. “If it was to be an attack on your shores, it would have happened already.”
“We had multiple cyberattacks coming out of your country and China and North Korea in the immediate wake of the assassinations,” Mahoney said.
“Just what you’d expect,” he said dismissively. “The sudden shift in power leaves a vacuum and gives an excuse and opportunity to look around, to—how do you Americans say it? To see what’
s what? The U.S.A. would do the same thing if the situation were reversed. Look, in my humble opinion, the money is where you should focus your attention. The whole Russia thing? It’s a dead end, I tell you. What did your Watergate Deep Throat teach you? Follow the money.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, and I was thinking Bree had better get back on the phone with her contacts at Scotland Yard to find out if they’d managed to track down Lawlor’s bank accounts. But then there was a knock at the door.
In my ear, I heard Carstensen say, “Who the hell is that?”
I got up, opened the door a crack, and saw Rawlins standing there.
“Keith, I’m in the middle of—”
“Take a break,” he said. “Your trap? It caught a bug, maybe two.”
CHAPTER
87
WHEN I LOOKED up from the screens and data the FBI consultant had been showing me, it was 5:21 a.m. on Sunday, February 7, two days after President Hobbs and the others were assassinated.
“Do that second sweep we talked about, and I’ll be right back,” I said, and I ran to the booth outside the interrogation room where Kasimov was still talking with Mahoney.
I knocked sharply, stuck my head in. “Madam Deputy Director, I need to show you something ASAP.”
Carstensen looked annoyed at having to leave the Russian, who was explaining how he’d paid Lawlor for his services, but she came out into the hall.
“What is it?”
“Probably better to let Rawlins explain,” I said. “Mahoney needs to see this too. Kasimov can wait a few minutes.”
Rawlins soon had the three of us looking over his shoulders at the trio of screens before him.
“The algorithm’s function was Dr. Cross’s idea,” the FBI consultant said. “He asked me to write it to sift through NSA-gathered data limited to international phone calls and international data transmissions cross-referenced with proximity to eight specific locations and times.”
He typed on his keyboard. The screen changed to a satellite image of the lower forty-eight states. Seven digital pins glowed on the map.
Rawlins zoomed in on each, and I identified them.
Senator Walker’s murder scene in Georgetown
The murder scene of the assassin Sean Lawlor, a few blocks away
GW University Hospital, where the former Senate president pro tempore had died two mornings ago
The DC arena where the late president and the secretary of defense had been shot
The street where Bree and DC Metro SWAT had engaged in a firefight with West Coast gangbangers
The West Texas ranch where the Speaker and secretary of state were assassinated and, to the north of it, the site of the remote cabin that had been burned down
The motel room that Kristina Varjan had booby-trapped
Lower Manhattan, where the treasury secretary had been shot
“My idea was to look for commonalities in and around these areas,” I said. “Phone numbers used or large data transmissions going to a specific site.”
“And?” Carstensen said.
Rawlins said, “The algorithm found nothing unusual in Texas, around Senator Walker’s home, by the DC arena, near the gangbanger scene, or around GW Hospital. But …”
He typed again, and a new file came up. He tapped on an international phone number: 011-7-812-579-5207.
“This number was called from inside or near Lawlor’s death scene well before discovery of the body. The number was also dialed on Skype from inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel in DC two days before the assassinations, and on a phone in Lower Manhattan shortly after Abbie Bowman was shot.”
“The Mandarin Oriental,” Carstensen said. “Kasimov is lying. He is the mastermind.”
“Or someone else staying at the hotel or working at the hotel was involved,” I said, thinking about Dr. Winters and wanting to go back to ask Kasimov about the makeup and masks the doctor had seen.
“Whose phone number is that?” Mahoney asked.
“Someone in St. Petersburg, Russia,” Rawlins said. “Beyond that, I don’t know yet. If we could get some cooperation from the Russians, it would be a bit easier.”
“Fat chance,” I said. “Did you do that second sweep we talked about?”
“I started it but haven’t taken a look at the results yet.”
The FBI contractor pivoted in his chair and started typing. Carstensen and Mahoney were puzzled.
I said, “I asked him if he could look for that phone number being used in any call coming to or leaving the continental United States in the past ten days.”
“Bam!” Rawlins said. “Look at that!”
The map of the U.S.A. now showed five glowing blue pins. One was in West Texas, not far from the burned-down cabin. Another was close to Varjan’s motel in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The third was near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The fourth was well south of Washington, DC, near I-95 in Ladysmith, Virginia. The fifth pin was not far away from the fourth, near rural Storck, Virginia.
“Can you give us the times with the locations?” Carstensen asked.
Rawlins nodded and gave his computer a command.
The screen blinked and showed dates, times, and whether the connection was incoming or outgoing beside the blue pins.
There was a call from the Russian number to a burn cell in rural West Texas that had occurred late in the afternoon a few days before.
There was a call to the Russian number from near Varjan’s motel that was made the evening before she almost blew us up.
The call near Lancaster was also to the Russian number and had occurred the day before that in the afternoon. The fourth call was from the St. Petersburg number to a burn phone several hours later.
“Look at the one near Storck, Virginia, though!” I said. “My God, that was outgoing to St. Petersburg last night! Less than seven hours ago!”
CHAPTER
88
SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER, along with eight heavily armed and experienced agents in full SWAT gear, Mahoney and I boarded an air force helicopter. We were all harnessed into jump seats, radioed up, and in direct contact with Carstensen and Rawlins, who’d identified the final phone number as that of twenty-two-year-old Jared Goldberg, a resident of Stafford, Virginia.
“I wonder what Jared’s doing down in Storck?” I asked.
Carstensen said, “We’ve got agents working on Mr. Goldberg right now.”
“Any luck getting us a tighter location on the call? Or Goldberg’s phone?”
“I’ve got you down to a five-mile radius,” Rawlins replied. “Sorry, there are only two towers in the area. Meantime, I’ll try to ping the phone.”
“Can you send that radius superimposed on sat images?” Mahoney asked.
“Already on its way to the pilot and to your e-mail accounts.”
We lifted off. Mahoney had an iPad, and he called up Rawlins’s link. The screen launched Google Maps and showed the circular search area, which was bisected by Virginia State Route 17, a four-lane highway.
Storck itself didn’t look like much. No stores. No gas stations. It was all farmland, small subdivisions, and dense forest.
“I pinged Mr. Goldberg’s number three times,” Rawlins said. “It’s been turned off.”
“We’re going to need him to turn it on and make another call or we’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” Mahoney said.
I said, “Rawlins, can you further refine what we’re looking at? Show us property ownership?”
“Give me a few minutes.”
The first gray light of a winter day showed in the east as we hurtled south beyond the nearly empty Beltway and over suburban sprawl that soon gave way to leafless wooded lots, farms, and the odd tract-home development. Shortly after 6:30 a.m., we passed Fredericksburg and flew over Civil War battlefields and then large stretches of forest broken up by farms.
“We’re three minutes out from the perimeter,” the pilot said.
“What are we looking for?” one of the SWAT agents said.
“Something out of place,” Mahoney said. “If we don’t see it from the air, I’ll fly in twenty agents and we’ll hit the pavement and knock on doors until we find something.”
That didn’t seem to satisfy the SWAT agent, nor did it satisfy me. Goldberg, or someone using Goldberg’s phone, had called that number in St. Petersburg not eight hours before, and …
“Rawlins,” I said, triggering the mike. “Can you do another sift? Seven to nine hours ago, any other international calls out of the Storck area?”
There was a pause before he came back, sounding stressed. “You’re next, Dr. Cross. Sorry, this map’s being a pain.”
We flew over Route 17 and headed west toward Storck. Out both sides of the chopper, I saw farms and cows and then, near the exit to County Road 610, a small business of some sort with a large steel building and a smaller structure set near a large paved parking lot.
There were two vehicles there. A wine-colored sedan was parked nose in to the smaller building. A tan panel van was parked a few feet away, pointing nose out. Its rear doors were wide open to a walkway and front door.
That was all there was to Storck. If I’d blinked, I’d have missed it.
We kept flying above the highway until we reached the southwestern edge of the search area. The pilot turned south, meaning to trace the perimeter so we understood the full lay of the land.
Our radios crackled.
“Link to the map with property owners on its way,” Rawlins said. “And, Dr. Cross, yes, there was a call from a phone near Storck a few minutes following the one made to St. Petersburg. That second call went to Pretoria, South Africa.”
“Pretoria?”
“Affirmative,” he said. “I’m trying to get a reverse ID on both the—”
Carstensen cut him off, excited. “Stafford police just called our hotline. The owners of a marina on the Potomac there found drops of blood on their dock and no sign of their young security guard, Jared Goldberg, or his burgundy Toyota Camry.”
“The Frogman got him!” Mahoney said.
Target: Alex Cross Page 24