Threat Level Black (18 page)

“You went on TV?”

McIntyre’s laughter roiled into something almost vicious. “No way.”

“Let me ask you something,” said Howe. “Do the North Koreans have UAVs?”

“UAVS? I don’t think so. I mean…well, in theory you can use just about anything as a UAV. Crop duster even. I forget the last assessments. You talk to Thompson over at the CIA?”

“Actually, no.”

“They have the last force estimate. He’d know because he would’ve worked on it. He’s the guy to ask. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Dalton would have a handle on the technology if you’re looking to get up-to-date on UAVs in general,” said McIntyre. He was referring to the head of NADT’s technical aviation section, Mark Dalton. “I’d talk to him.”

“You sure they were robot planes?” the scientist asked when Howe described what he’d seen. “In
North
Korea?”

“Pretty sure. There were no cockpits, and the fuselages were fairly narrow.”

Howe took the small pad of Post-it notes from the top of Dalton’s computer screen and sketched out the craft. It had gull wings that extended well to the rear.

Dalton shook his head. “You sure?”

“Yup.”

“Like that or like this?” He took the pen and modified the wings, making them droop more in the rear.

“Might have been like that, yeah. That’s what attracted my attention.”

Dalton went online and pulled up some schematics of American projects. Howe thought he saw some similarities with a Boeing project dubbed Bird of Prey that had flown in the mid-1990s. It was a manned, jet-propelled craft that tested a variety of capabilities.

“But not an exact match,” said Dalton.

“No.”

“How big were they?”

“I don’t know.” Howe didn’t feel he could tell Dalton everything—like the fact that he’d been in an airplane when he’d seen them.

“Well, let’s think about this. You saw two abreast in a hangar. How big was the hangar?”

“It was small, designed for a small plane, maybe an early-generation MiG. There was some space on either side and between the planes.”

Dalton estimated that the aircraft might have a wingspan from ten to fifteen feet; by contrast a MiG-21, itself relatively small, would span about twenty-three and a half feet. Payload, range, speed, and other capabilities would depend on any number of factors, but Dalton envisioned a several-hundred-mile range with good endurance.

“Low radar profile,” said Dalton, explaining that between the plane’s small size and angles, it would probably produce a radar cross section down toward 6- or 7/10,000 of a square inch. That was not quite as good as the best American stealthy designs, but it was extremely small, and a good deal smaller than the early F-117A, which had a cross section of approximately 8/10 of a square inch on normal radar, about that of a very small bird.

“Pretty capable aircraft, if they have them. No match for a manned fighter,” said Dalton, “but potentially capable.”

“What would you use it for?”

“Reconnaissance. Stealthy attack. Hell, put a bomb in it and you have a long-range cruise missile.”

“Thanks,” Howe told the scientist.

The credit card Fisher had found had been used for cash advances from several ATMs in Queens, running through the daily limit of five hundred dollars with a series of small withdrawals. With no other leads, Fisher spent nearly an entire day looking at where they were, trying to find a common link. He decided that they were all within six or seven blocks of R train stops, though what that meant if anything was difficult to say.

On the other hand, there was a significant correlation with decent coffee places; while such a fact could not be undervalued in terms of its contributions toward solving a crime, it was not, in Fisher’s experience, of much use in the courtroom.

“So he probably doesn’t have access to a car, but he’s being supplied with credit cards,” said Macklin after Fisher returned to the compound and they marked out the ATMs on a large map of the city. “He’s trying to disguise where he is, so he makes withdrawals from all over the place. He has the antidote for Sarin poisoning in his basement, where he’s obviously playing chemist, though we’re not sure why. He buys a lot of Clorox: That eliminates biological traces, you know. If he was playing with some sort of bacteria, that would kill it.”

“It also cleans the toilet and whitens underwear,” said Fisher. “There’s a problem with connecting Faud to these ATM withdrawals.”

“What’s that?”

“They were made when he should have been at school.”

“You don’t think he had perfect attendance, do you?”

Fisher went to the computer where the task force’s information was fed. An investigator had spoken to his teachers and yes, Faud Daraghmeh had decent attendance. They hadn’t asked about particular dates. Fisher scrolled about halfway through the interview notes when he realized he’d missed the obvious.

“The card and the money were delivered by the guy who made the cell calls,” Fisher told Macklin. “Look at the dates. They’re the same.”

“So?”

“How long would five hundred dollars last in New York?”

Macklin shrugged. “Twenty minutes, if you spent it right.”

Fisher pulled up Faud’s and then Mrs. DeGarmo’s phone records—they’d gone to the phone company and gotten incoming as well as outgoing—and tried to find a pattern. A number repeated every few weeks, but to the landlady’s phone.

“We check these all out?” Fisher asked Macklin.

“Not enough time to look at her numbers yet.”

Fisher called the number, even though he figured it would be a relative. But the call wouldn’t go through. When they checked it, the number turned out to belong to a telephone booth near the subway station near the Washington Heights apartment.

So the courier would call—preferably though not always from the phone booth—before going to Queens. The calls were always around four in the afternoon, after Faud got home and while Mrs. DeGarmo was watching the last of her “stories” before making dinner, at least as she had described her day to Fisher. Something had caused him to deviate from that schedule once—the time they had been able to trace originally—but this was the more usual routine.

“You think he answered them in his apartment?” Macklin asked.

“You’re starting to get ahold of this investigating thing,” Fisher told him. “Let’s look at some more phone numbers, okay?”

The phone booth was in Staten Island, within walking distance of the ferry but not in the station. Four calls had been made on the same day as the calls to the Astoria apartment, though roughly three hours before those.

“So your theory is, he calls ahead to make sure his people are there, then comes along?” said Macklin as they walked from the booth to a nearby pizza joint for dinner.

“Probably that’s just a signal for them to meet him somewhere. If you’re just going to show up at the apartment, why call ahead?” said Fisher.

“He’s a courier, then.”

“Maybe, or maybe more important than that,” said Fisher. “He got off the ferry that one day the cell phone calls were made. The question is, why was he in Staten Island? But then again, that is one of the great unanswerable questions of all time.”

After two slices of killer anchovy pizza, Fisher and Macklin took a walk, crisscrossing an area roughly eight blocks from the phone booth, looking for anything the courier or whoever had made the calls had been interested in. The area was half-commercial and half-residential, and while not the busiest in the city there were plenty of people on the streets. They didn’t see any mosques.

While Staten Island was part of New York City, physically it was much closer to New Jersey, which loomed to the west and north and was visible over many of the buildings they passed. Three roadways connected to New Jersey; the only way to the rest of the city was either by the ferry or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which led to Brooklyn.

“Boat,” said Fisher.

“Boat?”

“It’s easier to get here by boat than by car.”

“Okay. How does that help us?”

“It doesn’t,” said Fisher.

“A lot of docks and slips and stuff back that way, the other side of Front and Bay Streets.”

“Yeah,” said Fisher, changing direction.

“Where we going?”

“Get some smokes. And a map of the train line.”

“There’s a train on Staten Island?”

The Staten Island train line ran down the eastern side of the island, from St. George to Tottenville. It ran far less often than the subways did, however. It connected to the ferry stop, and Fisher saw that it was unlikely their man had taken the train: With one exception, he made his phone calls before the train arrived at the terminal.

The bus system, on the other hand, was extensive; the possibilities led almost literally all over the island. So Fisher returned by necessity to his first theory: that the courier had made the call after walking from the area on foot.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” said Macklin after they walked around a bit more.

Fisher did what he always did when he couldn’t figure something out: He lit a cigarette.

Actually, he did that when he could figure something out too.

“It’s okay, Andy. You can’t break every case, and you can’t always be right. Staten Island’s just a red herring,” said Macklin.

Fisher took a long draw and wondered if Camel had altered its blend, or if cigarettes just tasted different on Staten Island.

“Even the best gumshoe comes up dry sometimes,” added Macklin. “Let’s head back.”

Fisher, starting to feel cold, agreed. They were waiting for the ferry when Macklin’s cell phone rang.

“Going to take us a while to get there,” Fisher heard Macklin say after he answered.

Then he added, “Oh.”

“What’s the deal?” asked Fisher.

“It was Kowalski. They tracked one of the calls to a warehouse and they want to put a team together to raid it.”

“Where is it?”

“Three blocks from the pizza parlor.”

“The granite counter is a dead giveaway,” said Alice, swinging her hand across the room. “When you see it in an ad, it means the place is going for over three thousand a month. But it also tells you you’ll get other amenities, like the whirlpool, which isn’t always mentioned.”

“Like a code, huh?” asked Howe, following her as she walked through the large kitchen into a much larger dining room. She led him back out into the hallway, showing off the unit’s third bathroom. A chandelier strung with crystal beads hung down in the center at about eye level in front of the mirror. It was so bright that Howe had to look away when Alice turned the light on.

“They’d have to fix that,” she said.

“Make it less bright?”

“No, raise it. It’s down to make it easier for cleaning.”

“A lot of places have chandeliers in the bathroom?”

“It’s a half-bath,” she said, as if that were an explanation.

Howe gave a mumbled “Mmmph.”

“Five-five a month,” she said, leading him back to the living room.

“As in five thousand five hundred?” he asked.

She nodded. “They might come down a little.”

Howe and the real estate agent had spent the past three hours working their way up the price chain. While he had some rough ideas now of what things cost, in truth he was no closer to knowing what sort of place he wanted to live in.

Except that this wasn’t it.

“I don’t know about this place,” he said.

“Well, is the price range okay?”

It seemed outrageously high, but everything did. Using the base salary figures that Blitz and the others were throwing around, though, he could easily afford it. But did he want a place with a crystal chandelier in the bathroom?

“It’s not so much the price as—”

“It’s too ostentatious,” she said, finishing his sentence.

“Yeah. I’m not that formal. I’ve spent most of my time in the military, and, uh, not that I don’t appreciate nice houses or anything…” he said, flustered again. “What kind of place would
you
live in? This?”

“Here?” She laughed. “I couldn’t afford this.”

“Let’s say you could. Where would you live?”

“Tell you what, I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s get something to eat and we’ll think about it some more.”

“Great,” said Howe.

They were just getting out of her car when Howe’s cell phone rang. He fumbled getting it out of his pocket, then thought maybe he shouldn’t answer; this wouldn’t be a good place to get into a discussion with a senator or one of the other influential people he’d called to sound out about the post. But habit and duty conspired to make him snap it open.

“Colonel, stand by for Dr. Blitz,” said Blitz’s assistant.

“I have to take this,” Howe told Alice.

“I’ll wait.”

“It’s kind of—”

“Your girlfriend?”

“No, I’m not—It’s business.”

She had a smirk on her face; Howe thought she hadn’t believed what he’d said about it not being a girlfriend. “I’ll be inside,” she told him. Howe watched her walk away as Blitz came on the line.

“Sorry it took so long to get back to you, Colonel. What’s up?”

“I’ve been talking to people about those UAVs I saw in Korea,” said Howe. “I think they’re significant.”

“UAVs? What, at the base?”

“In the hangar there. I mentioned them. And they should be in the reports. I was talking to Mark Dalton over at NADT, and to Howard McIntyre.”

“How is Mac?”

“I think he’s fine.”

“He’s a good man. We have to get him back to work.”

“I’d like to talk to the CIA about what I saw,” said Howe. “According to Dalton, the aircraft would be pretty potent. And we don’t seem to know about it.”

“Tell you what, Colonel. There’s an evaluation group at the Pentagon working with some of my staff and coordinating with the intelligence community. Why don’t you talk directly to them. My assistant will make the arrangements. Have you spoken to Senator Elwell yet?”

“About this?”

“No, about NADT. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Listen, I’m going to see Elwell tonight. I’ll make sure he calls you tomorrow. Thanks.”

Blitz snapped off the line.