by Matthew Hart
“Mr. Turner,” she said impatiently.
“Her right cheek was shattered and her teeth dislodged,” I said in a louder voice. “There was a gaping wound in her stomach. She’d bled to death, probably knowing she was dying.”
“Look,” she said, “things like that, they’re horrible.”
“They snipped off her fingers and stuffed her in a ditch in Prospect Park.” I wasn’t shouting, but one of the agents in her detail appeared in the door again and frowned at me. She motioned him back.
“Her dad is a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher in the Bronx. Widower. No other kids. He had to come down and confirm the ID.”
Matilda Bolt had wielded power for a long time. She had chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee until her party lost the majority. Even out of the chair, her military ties were deep. She’d sent men to war, and had heard the ugly things you have to hear when they die.
“That’s a terrible death,” she said. “I grieve for that girl. So let’s find out who did it.”
“I’m not laying off Harry Nash.”
She gave me a wintry look. “You’re not understanding me. I’m not asking you to lay off Harry. I want you to investigate him and his moronic bauble. Because you won’t find a killer. You won’t even find a criminal. You’ll find the shameless schemer that voters have already fallen for. In other words, the perfect president.”
Another crackle of radio noise came from the house. She glanced at the aide leaning anxiously out.
“One last thing,” she said. “It wasn’t hard to find you, and as you’ve learned, I’m not the only one looking.” She had a hawk’s-beak nose, and her pale eyes stared down it. “But I find I need you, Mr. Turner. So lucky you. In a friendless world, you’ve got me.”
She didn’t wait for a reply.
7
The mint-green Mini Cooper was waiting at the corner of Madison Avenue. As soon as I clicked the seat belt into place Tabitha popped the clutch and shot into the traffic.
“The whole world seems to know about Chuck’s new toy pointing the finger at Harry Nash,” I said.
“FinCEN techs wired it up. He should have known. But that’s not what’s really bothering him. Chuck has friends in the West Wing,” she said. “Apparently they have private polling that says the president’s headed for a train wreck in the next election.”
That would account for Chuck’s hesitation to open a file on Nash.
We went through the park and took the West Side Highway downtown.
“The computer guy, is he there now?” I asked.
“He’s waiting.”
“And he’s worked for us before?”
“The Russian diamond-smuggling network. He wrote that program for tracking the diamond flows from the Russian mines so we could tell how much Lime was laundering for the oligarchs.”
I remembered him now. Patrick Ho. PhD from Stanford in computer science. He had worked for the Office of Tailored Access Operations, the team of NSA hackers that penetrated the Chinese military’s Shanghai-based hacking operation. For weeks, the team at Fort Meade had logged every keystroke that the Chinese made in their campaign to penetrate the US government’s computer defenses. Finally, when they’d got all the information they wanted, Tailored Access had snapped pictures of the Chinese hackers, using the cameras on the hackers’ own computers. The first the Chinese knew they’d been hacked was when Tailored Access posted their faces online, with their names.
Patrick had later joined a unit at the Treasury that was modelling some kind of big-data weapon to help the United States bludgeon other countries with the power of the dollar. I mean, more than we were bludgeoning them already. Tabitha had managed to get him temporarily seconded to me when we launched the original operation against Lime.
Her window was open. Her hair flew around her head. The car smelled of her shampoo.
“Patrick Ho,” I said. “His dad is Ho Wang Wei. Used to run a big mahjong game in Chinatown.”
“He still does,” Tabitha said.
That was true, but since I’d never put it in a file Tabitha must have developed sources of her own. Strictly speaking, she should have told me first. I filed it away in the corner of my mind where I store suspicion. It’s a large corner.
We turned off the highway into a parking lot beside one of the cavernous old freight terminals that survive on the west bank of Lower Manhattan. They stick out into the Hudson like fingers clawing at the past. Around them the waterfront blazes with glass condos and outdoor restaurants and parks where people walk their tiny dogs. Against this, the old piers mount a crumbling rearguard of boxing gyms and doomed businesses that ebb and flow like the murky waters of the river.
As we got out of the car, I waved to the black man who was sliding the chain-link gate shut behind us. Augie Treacher ran the pier. He did me favors because I was Tommy’s friend. Tommy had arranged a no-contest plea deal with suspended sentence after Augie had walked into a Queens restaurant with a rivet gun and fatally interrupted two members of the Capezi crime family in the middle of the pasta special, which that night was spaghetti carbonara. Two months before, they had cut out Augie’s tongue in a dispute about who said what to whom.
“And you’ve explained the problem?” I asked Tabitha as we climbed a narrow flight of stairs.
“He understands,” Tabitha said.
“And his clearance?”
“It’s current.”
The narrow passage smelled of damp metal and oil and old timbers. The steel stairs echoed as we climbed. On the top floor, cracked linoleum added the odor of old wax to the smell of the river. At the end of the hall was a tiny office cut in half by a wooden counter. Behind the counter hung a rack of golf clubs. I grabbed a driver, and we pushed through a steel door onto the driving range.
After the dim interior the light was blinding. Across the river the towers of Hoboken blazed in the sun. The driving range stretched before us, 350 yards of Astroturf surrounded by nets hung from pylons. Beyond the netting, white hydrofoil ferries went skimming down the river to the Battery. In front of us a tanker the length of a football field plowed slowly up the Hudson.
We stepped onto the driving platform. I placed a ball on a tee and handed Tabitha a driver and stood back to watch the most beautiful swing I had ever seen that was not on the PGA. The ball lifted in a lazy arc, following a perfect line. It bounced onto the green carpeting around the 225-yard marker. We’d been here before. We both knew that I would follow with a vicious slice, so I got it over with while Tab tried not to look.
Patrick Ho was waiting in the glassed-in booth to one side of the tees, where the golf pro kept his bookings, his whisky, and his despair. I don’t know why he was always so morose. If he wanted to remind himself that things could be worse New Jersey was right there across the river.
Augie had closed the range for a few hours, and the rickety pro shop was a handy place to sit. The glass rattled and wind whistled through cracks and water lapped at the old black piers. I shut the door behind me and sat down.
Patrick Ho was short and compact, with a crewcut and black-framed glasses. He wore a gray turtleneck, black chinos, and brown suede ankle boots, an attire that managed to be monastic and stylish at the same time, as if he belonged to an order of monks that ordered its habits from J. Crew.
“Tabitha says you think you can help us.”
“Maybe. The problem, as she explained it, goes roughly like this. Nash bought into First Partners when the Russian oligarchs forced Lime to sell. Later, Nash bought the Russian Pink from the fund. Question: Are Lime and Nash in some kind of partnership, and is the Russian Pink part of it?”
“That’s right. I don’t know why Nash would buy shares in a Russian fund and then immediately buy an asset from it. But he had a reason, and I think it’s a reason he shared with Lime.”
“Do we know how First Partners bought the pink? I’m assuming it’s not a normal kind of business acquisition for a fund.”
I told him
that all I had was a tip from a South African source that Barry Stern, a Johannesburg dealer, had paid $12 million for a large pink.
“If we take that as the start of the money trail, can you follow it?”
“Maybe later, when we have more data,” Patrick said. “But there’s something else I’d like to try first.”
The wind was rattling the glass so hard I was leaning across the desk to hear him. We left the pro shack and made our way down to the end of the range. A Circle Line boat loaded with tourists wallowed through the waves.
“Shoot,” I said.
He hooked his fingers through the netting.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I’d like to create a program that thinks like the person we’re targeting.”
“And how do you do that?”
“By using a new kind of computing system called a neural network. The problem with most computers is that they only know how to do what we tell them to do. They don’t think, they follow rules.”
He warmed to his plan. As he explained it, a computer following rules never benefits from its experience. It doesn’t get smarter with each successive operation. A neural network actually got smarter. Through a process called machine learning, the computer absorbed data and learned to draw conclusions from it.
“But how do you know its answers are right?”
He took off his glasses and polished them carefully. He held them up and squinted at them before he put them back on.
“Do you ever know someone is lying to you? You have no proof, but you’re certain anyway?”
“Sure.”
“That’s because many people have lied to you, and you’ve discovered they have, and now you’re able to recognize the lie as it’s happening. You don’t follow rules, you’ve just learned to know. A neural network works like that.”
He used medicine as an example. Neural networks were already making complicated diagnoses. Instead of writing rules to tell the computer what a lung tumor looked like, programmers created data sets of hundreds of thousands of images and scans of lung tumors. They fed them into the machine. The computer learned what lung cancer looked like the way a doctor learned: by seeing it.
“The computer looking for a tumor knows what it’s looking for,” I said. “This time it won’t.”
“It will learn,” Patrick said. “It will sift through emails and phone logs and bank records, and eventually, if I’m right, it will figure out how Lime did business, not only with Stern but with Nash.”
A bright red chopper from the heliport near the Battery appeared in the sky and headed for the Statue of Liberty with another load of tourists. Two hundred bucks apiece for a seven-minute spin. Huddled masses, welcome to New York.
“Earlier you mentioned computers we have access to. You’ve probably gathered that what I’m asking you to do is off the books. That’s why we’re meeting here. You wouldn’t have a Treasury contract.”
“I know that,” Patrick said.
“I want to make this clear. When I said off the books, I meant way off.”
Patrick nodded, took off his glasses, and polished them again with the bottom of his shirt.
“You cut my dad a break. There were some aspects of his business that were not one hundred percent legal.” He held his glasses up to the sky again. “If you had gone strictly by the letter of the law, my dad would have been deported as a felon. And anyway,” he said with a sudden grin, “the Treasury will never catch me. When I go into the network, they won’t know I’m there.”
Even with the river lapping at the pier and the deep thrum of a tugboat as it chugged upriver, the ping from my phone sounded loud.
I could count on one hand the people who have my cell number. Unrecognized sender—right away that’s bad. No message, just a link to a live stream. It took me a moment to recognize what I was looking at, and when I did a block of ice formed around my heart. It was a stretch of highway I knew well. That’s how the horror starts. Something mundane. It’s your life, and now someone else is driving it.
That highway was the road to Annie’s school.
8
My mouth filled with an acid taste. My heart pounded as chemicals surged through my body to prime it for violent action. But what action? I was forty miles south of Annie’s school. Bolt had warned me I’d be targeted. Here was the attack. On my daughter.
The Convent of St. Mary at Croton-on-Hudson was a girls’ high school. Like every school in America, they had a lockdown protocol for shooters. I didn’t know the intentions of the people streaming to me, except to do harm.
“Lockdown. Please, lockdown,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded like the snarl of a cornered animal.
“Alex?” Tabitha put her hand on my arm. I had walked back up the length of the range with the phone gripped in my hands.
I shrank the image and called the school. The line was busy. I stabbed redial. Still busy. The call didn’t bounce to voice mail. I knew right away what was happening. Whoever was streaming to me had tied up the number. It’s not hard. You can hire a call-flooding company online. Services in India will bombard a number with so many calls that the phone is effectively out of service.
I must have groaned. Tabitha’s fingers tightened on my arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Where are the twins?” I said.
“They’ll be where Annie is. One of them will. They’ve split the job into twelve-hour shifts. Alex, what’s going on?”
“There’s an attack on Annie’s school,” I yelled, rushing for the stairs. “Call the twins’ number. Tell whichever one is at the school to alert the school security guard. Tell them there’s a call flood on the school, so I can’t call the guard direct. They have to go to lockdown.”
We ran down the stairs and out of the building. Augie read the urgency at a glance and dashed for the gate. We shot out onto the West Side Highway, took the left-hand lane, and were running the light at Twenty-Third Street as Tabitha finished the call.
“Tell him we’re on our way, Luis. I’ll keep you posted as soon as we know more, but you should treat it as an armed attack.”
“Call DeLucca now,” I said, as soon as she was finished. “Tell him to get the state police to send cruisers to St. Mary’s School at Croton. There’s a back entrance that they have to cover too. Tell him somebody’s after my kid again.”
Tabitha had the department’s private switchboard on speed dial, and asked the operator to get hold of DeLucca.
The view on my screen was across the steering wheel to the road, so I guessed the driver had a GoPro strapped to his head. In the foreground, his gloves gripped the wheel. Tight leather gloves fastened at the wrist with straps.
DeLucca was on an operation with restricted communications. Tabitha had the call on speaker. I listened as our operator made her way implacably through the succession of closed doors.
Now the black gloves framed the familiar strip mall a quarter mile from the school. I gripped the phone so tightly my hands were shaking. I was only dimly aware of how fast we made it up the length of Manhattan and left the city behind. We were racing along the twisting parkway that goes north through Riverdale when my phone pinged again. Another unknown number. I tapped, and another stream began. I recognized the narrow bridge that crossed the Croton River and led to the back entrance to the school.
“Tell Luis they’re coming from two directions,” I said, forcing my voice under control. “Tell him to get down to the back gate. They’re about five minutes away.”
The school occupied a large, wooded property. It was three-quarters of a mile from the main building to the back gate. Luis and his brother had been Army Rangers. Luis would understand that it was better to move toward the attack and neutralize it than let the attackers get into the grounds.
The feeds ran side by side. The slow pace made the action feel unstoppable. The second car drifted along the suburban lane that ended at the property. The first car reached the white gates of the main entr
ance. Agonizingly slowly, it turned in through the gates and started up the road that climbed through woods to the hilltop school.
From Tabitha’s phone I heard the NYPD dispatcher snap a code word at someone in a command trailer.
The school appeared, a three-story redbrick house with tall, white-trimmed windows and a cupola topped by a weathervane. The shot jiggled as the car went over the speed bump where the driveway loops around to the front door.
Then the camera jerked as the black gloves left the wheel and the driver opened his door. The lens pointed at the ground as he swung out of the car and planted his dirty Reeboks on the gravel.
Cyril, the retired cop who ran security at the school, would be alone inside, watching the approach.
“Don’t come out, Cyril,” I said out loud. “For Christ’s sake, don’t come out.”
He came out, placing his feet carefully, his pistol held straight out in both hands as he kept his eyes on the men. I knew there were two of them, because he kept swinging his aim back and forth from the camera to a point beside the camera. Cyril was a tough old guy. He’d made his sergeant’s stripes in the NYPD before he’d bailed for a softer job upriver. He’d spent the last ten years of his service running the desk at the Fortieth Precinct in the Bronx, the one they call Fort Apache. He was no pussycat, but in addition to his age he had one more serious disadvantage: there was only one of him.
The guy on the passenger side must have been standing behind his open door, to conceal his weapon. He waited until Cyril was swinging the gun away from him and back to the driver, and gunned him down point blank. He must have let the whole clip go. Cyril wore protection, but the burst blew him off his feet and tore his arms to rags.
DeLucca’s voice crackled from the speaker.
“We’re just getting onto the Saw Mill River Parkway,” Tabitha told him. “Escort should look for a green Mini Cooper.”