They Disappeared

by Rick Mofina

Forsyth went around the table for status reports on the tips called in since the press conference with Jeff Griffin.

  “Ninety-one tips so far. All are being processed,” said NYPD Lieutenant Fred Ryan.

  Forsyth then moved on for summaries of the status of the arson, the crime scene investigation, the FBI’s lab work on processing the detonator and the backpack. He got updates on video analysis by the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center. Then he went to the airports.

  “Glen, where are your people at with the origin of the backpack?”

  Glen Healy, a security director with the Transportation Security Administration who oversaw airport screening and checkpoint operations for the New York area, loosened his tie.

  “In working with the airlines, this is the best we have at this time. As we know, the Griffins flew from Billings, Montana, connected in Minneapolis–Saint Paul to LaGuardia. The bag mix-up was just an erroneous grab from the carousel. We’ve also learned that other airline tickets may have been purchased for a passenger Hans Beck. At first we believed he’d arrived at LaGuardia, via Montreal and Paris.”

  “Was that wrong?” Forsyth said.

  “No, but here’s the complication. It turns out there may be more than one person traveling as Hans Beck. Our updated investigation shows he may have also entered through JFK, linked to one of several flights originating from four potential locations and airlines served by Kennedy—an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to terminal one, one from Pakistan International Airlines out of Lahore to terminal four, a Turkish Airlines flight out of Istanbul to terminal one and one with Uzbekistan Airways, to terminal four. It is unclear how it happened.”

  “Maybe they used decoys as part of the scenario?” Forsyth asked.

  “We can’t rule it out,” Healy said. “We are working with the airlines, scrutinizing all passenger manifests, records and surveillance of airport baggage check-in, drop-off and handling.”

  Forsyth went to NYPD Lieutenant Ted Stroud and his team for the status of leads arising from the SUV used in the abduction and its ties to the investigation of a global auto theft ring by the D.A.’s Organized Crime and Rackets Bureau, the NYPD Auto Crime Division and the Insurance Frauds Bureau.

  “I’ll turn that over to Detective Brewer, who is leading that aspect,” Stroud said.

  “With respect to our investigation on the two deceased—Donald Dalfini and Omarr Aimes—confidential sources arising from inquiries on Omarr Aimes led to Florence Payne, aka Mary Ballard, aka Miss Tangiers, an exotic dancer, thought to be the last to see Aimes.

  “We interviewed Payne, who indicated that on the night before his death, Aimes took a cell phone call from a man she referred to as—” Brewer read from his notebook “—‘Zeta’ or ‘Rama.’ She said, ‘It maybe had something to do with making a movie, that some guy named Zeta or Rama, some crazy Albanian or Russian, had a job for them that was big easy money.’

  “We’ve investigated records through the mayor’s office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. Subsequently, we’ve contacted location managers and we’re waiting to hear back for leads in this direction.”

  “Thank you, Detective Brewer.”

  Forsyth then turned to Cordelli.

  “Detective Cordelli, you’re working with Jeff Griffin on any subsequent leads based on his contact with the suspects. What do you have?”

  “Working with Detective Lucy Chu, one of our forensic artists, we compiled a series of images based on what Griffin saw in the van. Using that material we’re in the process of canvassing targeted locations for leads.”

  Forsyth glanced at his files, spotted a note and frowned.

  “Excuse me, I’ve received this from our agents with you, but am I to understand Griffin left his hotel unescorted and we’ve lost track of him?”

  Cordelli cleared his throat.

  “That’s correct. But I remind everyone he is not in custody.”

  “Has he been contacted again by the suspects?”

  “All indications are that he has not had any further contact.”

  “But we don’t know what he’s up to or where he is?”

  “No, but it was the FBI who were assigned to him this morning.”

  “I don’t care,” Forsyth said. “Lieutenant Stroud, were you aware that we’d lost Jeff Griffin?”

  “No, I was not.” Stroud glared at Cordelli. “Triangulate his phone. Track him down. He should not be out of our sight.”

  “We’re done for now.” Forsyth recapped his pen, closed his folders.

  As the meeting broke up, investigators checked their phones while standing to leave.

  Detective Brewer was the last to remain seated. His full attention was on his phone and the message he’d just received from Chuck Pennick, a location manager from Los Angeles in New York working on a film. Betty Bonner, Brewer’s ex-partner in the film office, had said, “If anyone knows what’s going on here, it’s Chuck.” Betty said Pennick was plugged into all foreign productions and crews.

  Brewer read Pennick’s message.

  Detective: I heard a foreign crew was working without permits in a warehouse in the Bronx maybe making porn, or horror, or thriller. It’s all rumor but I can try to find out more, if you like.

  CHAPTER 55

  Purgatory Point, the Bronx, New York City

  “You’re sure it’s in here?”

  Minutes after Jeff’s cab had left the Major Deegan Expressway, it rolled into a wasteland, making him doubt this was the location of the restaurant’s address on the printout.

  “Yeah, man, relax,” the driver said. “I told you, my ex grew up here. I sent the bitch four years of support payments to this freakin’ zip code. It’s cool.”

  But what Jeff saw was an industrial graveyard of abandoned factories and decaying warehouses built in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. They passed a crumbling tool factory, then a shirt factory that had been established in 1889, according to its massive decaying sign.

  On the way out of Manhattan, the driver had explained how “the Point” used to be a grim section of the southwest Bronx, with the Harlem River to the west, and the East River to the southeast. You could see Rikers Island out there, and across the river you could see the planes lifting off and landing way out at LaGuardia. The cab now weaved through along hulking public housing projects, dingy apartment buildings and squat houses on deserted streets.

  “A lot of people are on welfare and there’s a lot of crime,” the driver said. “I guess it’s getting better. People have fixed up big chunks and stuff. Most people here, like me, are Puerto Rican, but in the past few years a lot of art pothead student types and a lot of Eastern Europeans, Albanians, Turks, Chechens, Bulgarians, Russians, people like that, have moved into the neighborhoods and it’s been good, or so friends tell me. I live in Yonkers now.”

  Jeff saw the architectural and esthetic changes emerging as they came to the revitalized business district. There were blocks of tree-lined sidewalks with inviting benches, neo-Victorian streetlamps adorned with hanging planters bursting with flowers. Older buildings had been converted to condos and lofts above new galleries, specialty shops, boutiques and offices.

  “Here you go.” The driver nodded to a sign that read Vakhiyta’s Kitchen.

  “Go another block and drop me there.”

  “Okay.”

  Before Jeff got out, he paid the driver and gave him another twenty.

  “Can you stay here and wait for me? I’ll need a ride back.”

  “Sure.” The driver handed him a card with his cell phone number.

  Jeff adjusted his ball cap and dark glasses and headed for the restaurant. Since his face and identity had been published after the press conference he couldn’t risk being recognized.

  Come on, this is crazy. I’m out of my mind to thin
k this will amount to anything except pissing off Cordelli, Brewer and the FBI.

  So what? I refuse to do nothing.

  Vakhiyta’s Kitchen was old-world plain. The name was painted on a wooden sideboard over a weatherworn brick storefront. It had dirty windows with half-drawn shades. A yellowed menu was taped to the glass-front door under the Open sign.

  Jeff went in and was greeted with the smells of boiled cabbage, cooked meat and spices. High-backed red vinyl booths lined the sides; about a dozen wooden tables and chairs filled the dining room floor that led to a dark wooden front counter and the kitchen.

  Jeff took a booth on the left. The place was about a third full with a dozen customers. Old travel posters of the Caucasus Mountains had been taped to the wall. Soft, mournful violin music flowed from ancient speakers. The atmosphere was sleepy, akin to an outdoor café or gathering spot, where people passed time with idle talk. The pieces of conversation he picked up were not English. Given the restaurant’s specialty, he figured them for Eastern European.

  The staff: a couple of women and men were deep in conversation behind the counter. No one came to take Jeff’s order. He noticed a spread of newspapers near the counter. It gave him reason to get closer to search for the take-out logo. He went to the counter and sifted through the papers—most were foreign, Russian, he guessed—before glancing around for a stack of take-out coffee cups.

  “You would like something to eat?” asked one of the women, a heavyset babushka with an apron and head scarf.

  “Yes—” Jeff had to buy time “—coffee to go and something to eat here.”

  “Sit, sit. I bring you menu.”

  Moments later she came to his table with a cracked laminated menu that listed a few dishes, none of which he understood.

  “Maybe you like to try our soup? We make very good.” She smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “I bring you today special cream of potato, the best in New York.”

  “Yes and coffee to go in a take-out cup, please?”

  She nodded and returned with the coffee, creamers and sugar. Jeff’s attention flew to the logo and his heart skipped.

  It bore a stylized V with blue letters spelling Vakhiyta’s Kitchen.

  “Excuse me.” Jeff tried to stay calm. “Is this the only Vakhiyta’s Kitchen in New York? Do you have more at other locations anywhere?”

  The woman held up a single, thick finger.

  “Only one in the world,” she said.

  When she left, Jeff took a few slow breaths. I should call Cordelli and Brewer, alert them. He struggled to understand what he had. He carefully withdrew one of Detective Chu’s pictures from his pocket, unfolded and turned it so the L resembled a V. He compared it with the logo on his take-out cup.

  This is it. This is definitely it!

  Jeff was convinced the killers had been in this restaurant, had bought coffee and food here, because he’d seen the containers in the van.

  Okay, what now?

  Think.

  Were the killers just passing by? Or were they near?

  He took slow inventory, assessing the customers, searching for anything to help him. He saw a young well-dressed couple he’d figured for Russian tourists. He took note of some old men playing chess. A group of other men were talking about matters they pointed out in the newspapers. Issues in the old country? Before Jeff could continue, a bowl of soup and slab of homemade bread with butter were set before him.

  “You will like,” the babushka said.

  In the time the soup came, Jeff ate it, liked it and continued eyeing the customers. After the woman took his bowl away, he continued his vigil. He declined more food and eventually feared that his investigation had stalled. He felt the futility, the weight of all his failures, come crashing down on him.

  He called Cordelli, got his voice mail but hesitated. He didn’t leave a message. He couldn’t risk being overheard.

  It can’t all end here.

  Jeff glanced at the well-thumbed copies of the New York papers and reports of the investigation, the headline Murder-Abduction Trigger Terror Plot Fears, at his photo and those of Sarah and Cole. He touched his fingertips to their faces.

  I can’t give up.

  What if I am close?

  Jeff was so lost in the faces of his wife and son he hadn’t noticed the man who’d entered the restaurant. His age was difficult to determine but from his body and posture, he had to be in his early thirties. He was about six feet tall, medium build. He wore a dark sweatshirt with the hood up, dark pants and work boots.

  The man was standing at the counter near the cash, waiting as the babushka lady packed up a take-out order of coffee and food. He was solemn, engrossed in the newspaper reports on the “terror plot.” The chime of the register pulled Jeff from his thoughts in time to notice the man walking by his booth with his take-out order.

  Jeff glanced down at the man’s boots. They were dark boots that covered the ankle. They had rounded toes and a thin bright red line where the top was stitched to the sole.

  Jesus.

  Jeff swallowed, fumbled for cash and tossed a few bills on the table.

  He left his booth and, keeping a safe distance back, followed the man along the street, his heart hammering.

  That fucker is one of them.

  CHAPTER 56

  Darmstadt, Germany

  “The game is going ahead as scheduled. Our team is favored to win.”

  The American intelligence officer sat up in his chair at his computer monitor and used both hands to press his headset to his ears.

  He quickly reread the notes the traffic operator, the linguist and the cryptologist had provided, then he replayed the recording.

  “The game is going ahead as scheduled….”

  The officer worked in a corner of a listening station that was part of a U.S. military complex hidden in the forests of the Rhine region, less than an hour’s drive south of Frankfurt. It was an ultrasecret tentacle of the National Security Agency’s foreign intelligence surveillance operations that few people knew existed.

  Code name: HUSH.

  The system had grown from ECHELON, a Cold War communications network operated by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Since then it had emerged to monitor activities of pariah countries, insurgency, organized crime and terrorist plots.

  HUSH went beyond monitoring satellite telecommunications traffic. It also used an advanced network of secret listening stations around the world that were strategically placed near major switching bases for fiber-optic communications.

  In this sector, the path of much of Europe’s internet communications traveled through a critical exchange point near Frankfurt International Airport. Here, through its Darmstadt station, HUSH had been running a long-standing operation of tracking, capturing, decrypting and analyzing the phone and web traffic of scores of terror groups.

  In most cases the targets used untraceable disposable phones, or encrypted satellite phones, or coded internet communication. HUSH’s experts drew upon information harvested from captured suspects and equipment. They also relied on the work of intelligence officers in the field whose sources and informants provided key but ever-changing numbers, codes, positions and data.

  Intelligence operators and traffic analysts had to contend with some seventy languages and dialects. Linguists where often challenged understanding everything they’d heard. So much could be lost if one didn’t understand the cultural contexts. All intelligence operators, despite listening in on targets for months, feared they could miss something. They used technology and human resources to sort through millions of intercepted calls, decode keywords for further analysis.

  The intelligence officer continued concentr
ating and replayed the fragment of captured communications several more times.

  “The game is going ahead as scheduled. Our team is favored to win.”

  These calls were very recent and had pinballed from Istanbul to Athens, from Grozny to Makhachkala, Dagestan, from Amsterdam to Mykrekistan, from Munich to Queens, New York.

  The languages on this file had been a mix of Azeri, Chechen, Dargwa, Greek, Kumyk, Lezgian, Mykrekistani, Tabasaran, Turkish and Russian.

  The officer checked his notes.

  The targets had been European cells supporting a dangerous group of insurgents in the Caucasuses. CIA informants had indicated the insurgents had boasted of an attack planned for the UN meeting in New York City and that when the target’s plans moved closer to activation, the targets would encrypt their conversations to sound like they were talking about a specific football match—the game between the U.S. and Iranian national soccer teams to be played today in New York City.

  The officer signaled to a supervisor.

  “Sir, take a look at the notes, and listen,” the officer said. “I think we have something.”

  The supervisor listened on his headset.

  “The game is going ahead…”

  He listened twice, consulted the notes and drew upon all the alerts he’d been privy to from the past forty-eight hours.

  “Okay, get this to Langley and Iron Shield in New York.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Purgatory Point, the Bronx, New York City

  Don’t lose him.

  Jeff’s breathing quickened. Keeping a safe distance back, he followed the man from the restaurant, watching him turn a corner.

  Two blocks later the man vanished into an alley and Jeff rushed to the entry. The narrow passage darkened between two buildings. Jeff saw the man’s silhouette at the opposite end and tried calling Cordelli.

  This time the detective answered.

  “Cordelli?”

  Jeff kept his voice low. “It’s me, Griffin. I found them!”