Buried Secrets

35.



“Right there.” Diana pointed. “That’s 482 North Main Street.”

Behind the Friendly’s was a four-story motel built of stucco and brick in the classic American architectural style best described as Motel Ugly. A tall pole-mounted road sign out front with a yellow-and-red Motel 12 logo brightly illuminated. It looked like the local kids had been using it for target practice, because there were a couple of holes and cracks in it where white light shone through. Mounted below that was a marquee sign board that said in black plastic letters COMPLEMENTARY HI SPED.

I pulled into the motel parking lot. There were maybe a dozen cars parked here. None of them was the Jaguar I’d seen on the surveillance video, not that I expected to see it here. On the other side of the motel loomed a tall self-storage building.

“Dammit,” I said, “we need more precise coordinates. Can you call AT&T back and ask them to ping the phone again? I want the GPS coordinates in decimal format.”

While she called, I walked back toward the road. A few cars passed. A sign across the street said SHERATON FOUR POINTS. No construction lots that I could see, no fields or private homes.

“Got it,” Diana called out, running toward me. She held the Garmin out, and I took it. She’d already programmed the new coordinates in. A flashing arrow represented us. A dot indicated Alexa’s iPhone, and it was quite near. I walked closer to the road and the flashing arrow moved with me.

Closer to Alexa’s iPhone.

I crossed the street, glancing at the GPS screen as I did, to a scrubby shoulder beside a guardrail. Now the arrow and the dot were almost aligned. Her phone had to be right around here.

I stepped over the guardrail and onto a steep downward grade that rolled into a drainage ditch, then rose sharply. I scrambled down the hill, lost my footing, and slid part of the way.

As I got to my feet at the bottom, I looked again at the GPS. The arrow was precisely on top of the dot. I looked up, then to my right, and to my left.

And there, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, I saw it. Lying in the ditch, a few feet away. An iPhone in a pink rubber case.

Alexa’s iPhone.

Discarded by the side of the road.





36.



“Alexa?”

The Owl’s voice startled her.

She’d been trying to remember the lyrics to “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. She’d been singing songs dredged up from memory, jingles from TV commercials, anything she could think of. Anything to keep her mind off where she was. She’d managed to recall all of the words to “American Pie.” That took a long time. She didn’t know how long, since she’d lost all sense of time.

“You deviated from the script, Alexa.”

She didn’t reply. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then she remembered. The way she’d sneaked in those song lyrics to tell her father what they’d done to her.

“Do you understand that your life is entirely in my hands?”

“Oh—God—kill me!” she screamed, though it came out as a strangled croak. “Just do it. I don’t care!”

“Why would I want to kill you, Alexa? It is much worse for you to be buried so deep under the ground in your coffin.”

“Oh God, kill me, please!”

“Oh, no,” said the voice. “I want you to stay alive for a very long time. Knowing that no one will ever find you. No one.”

She moaned, screamed, felt light-headed, nauseous.

“There you are, ten feet underground, and no one has any idea where you are. Maybe I go for a ride. Maybe I go for a trip for some days. I will keep the ventilation on, of course, so you won’t run out of air. You will scream and no one can hear you, and you will beat your fists and claw against the steel walls of your casket, and no one knows you are there.”

“Please, I’ll do anything,” she said. “Anything.” She paused, swallowed hard, thought she might be sick again. “You’re very strong. I think you’re a very attractive man.”

A chuckle came from the speaker overhead. “Nothing you can do to me can excite me more than watching you beg. This is very very exciting to me, Alexa.”

“My father will give you anything you want. Anything!”

“No. You are wrong. He gives nothing to free you.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what Mercury is.”

“Your father knows. He understands very well. Do you know why he doesn’t give what we ask?”

“He doesn’t know what you want!”

“You are not important to him, Alexa. He loves his wife and his money more than he loves you. Maybe he never loves you. You are trapped like a rat and your father knows you are there and he doesn’t even care.”

“That’s not true!”

No reply.

Just silence.

“It’s not true,” Alexa repeated. “Let me talk to him again. I’ll tell him he has to do it now.”

Nothing. Silence.

“Please, let me talk to him.”

Not a sound.

In the dreadful silence she began to hear distant sounds that at first she thought were just hallucinations, squeaking from the hamster wheel of her terrified mind.

But no, these really were voices. Murmured, indistinct, but definitely voices. The way she’d sometimes hear her parents’ voices coming through the heating grates in the floor of the big old house, even though they were two floors below.

There were people up there. Probably the Owl and the others he was working with. Their voices were coming through the tube or pipe or duct that let in the fresh air. Were they with him? What if they weren’t and they knew nothing about her?

She yelled as loudly as she could: “HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME I’M DOWN HERE HELP ME!”

Only silence in reply.

Then the distant murmuring started up again, and she was sure she could hear someone laughing.





37.



Instead of finding Alexa, we’d found her discarded phone.

A huge disappointment, sure. But the more I thought about it, the more it told us.

It told us she was probably within a hundred miles of Boston.

We knew from the hotel’s surveillance tape what time she’d been abducted. We knew from the 911 call that she’d passed through Leominster, north of Boston, less than an hour later.

Once Diana had made a few calls, we concluded that Alexa had probably been driven, not put on a plane. The only airfield nearby was the Fitchburg Municipal Airport, which had two runways and was used by a couple of small charter companies. But no flights had left between midnight the night before and six that morning.

Only fourteen hours had elapsed between her abduction and the first time her kidnappers had contacted Marshall Marcus. That included transporting her and then—if her clues were to be taken literally—burying her in some sort of crypt or vault. And setting up cameras that could broadcast over the Internet. An arrangement like that was complicated and time-intensive and must have taken several hours. So they couldn’t have gone too far.

But that didn’t narrow it down much.

* * *



I DROPPED Diana off at FBI headquarters. It was barely six in the morning, but she thought she might as well get a very early start on the day. She’d grab the techs as soon as they got in and ask them for a complete workup of Alexa’s phone.

After she got out I sat in the Defender for a while, idling in front of One Center Plaza, and thought about going home to catch a few hours’ sleep, since it was likely to be a very long day.

Until I checked my e-mail.

I found a long series of e-mails not from a name but from a number I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds to realize that they’d been sent automatically by the miniature GPS tracker concealed in Taylor Armstrong’s gold S. T. Dupont lighter.

Well, not her lighter, but the one I’d switched with hers when I’d “accidentally” dropped it on the cobblestones of Beacon Hill. I’d bought it at the tobacco shop in Park Square, the exact same S. T. Dupont Ligne 2 Gold Diamond Head lighter. A classic, and ridiculously expensive. But a lot cheaper, and more reliable, than hiring someone to tail her.

The tiny tracking device had been installed by an old Special Forces buddy of mine we used to call Romeo who had his own business in TSCM, or technical surveillance countermeasures. He complained bitterly about how small the lighter was. He wasn’t sure he had a tracker small enough. He wanted me to steal her cell phone: That would have been a breeze.

It would have been easier to remove one of her kidneys.

But Romeo figured out how to wedge a nano GPS device inside the lighter’s fluid reservoir. Complaining all the while, of course. Romeo, whose real name was George Devlin, was not an easy man to deal with, but he did great work.

He programmed the thing to start sending out location signals only when it was moved more than a thousand feet. Now I could see that, immediately after Taylor and I had our little talk on the corner of Charles and Beacon, she went home—or was driven home in David Schechter’s limousine—and then she drove to Medford, five miles northwest.

So who might she be meeting so urgently?

I had a pretty good idea.





38.



Twenty minutes later I was driving down Oldfield Road in Medford, a pleasant street lined with graceful old trees and clapboard houses. Some were two-family houses, some apartment buildings. Most of them were well maintained, regularly painted, their lawns neatly mowed and shrubs perfectly clipped, their driveways polished ebony. A few looked like they’d been all but abandoned by absentee landlords who’d thrown up their hands in despair at the squalor of their student tenants. The Tufts University campus was a short walk away.

The house where Taylor Armstrong had spent forty-three minutes last night was a white-painted three-story wooden house, one of the nicer ones. At six thirty in the morning, there wasn’t much going on in the neighborhood. A woman running in black-and-turquoise spandex. A car pulling out of a driveway at the other end of the block. I waited and watched the house.

Then I got out and walked past the house as if I were a neighbor out for a morning stroll. With a quick glance around, I climbed the front porch quietly, but casually, and saw a stack of five buzzers with a stack of matching names. Five apartments. One was probably the owner. Two apartments each on the upper two floors.

Five surnames. Schiff, Murdoch, Perreira, O’Connor, and Unger. I memorized them, went back to the car, hit a speed-dial button on my BlackBerry, and woke Dorothy up.

* * *



SHE CALLED back five minutes later.

“Margaret O’Connor is seventy-nine years old, a widow for fifteen years, and has owned the house since 1974. The other four rent. One’s a recent graduate of the college who works for Amnesty International. Two of them are Tufts graduate students. The fourth is our guy.”

“Which one?”

“Perreira. His full name is Mauricio da Silva Cordeiro-Perreira, and yes, I pulled up his pic. It’s the same guy from the hotel surveillance tape.”

“Taylor called him Lorenzo.”

“He gave her a fake name.”

“His surname’s on his doorbell. So even if she didn’t know his true first name, she knew his last name. What’s his connection to her?”

“Here’s what I found out: Thirty-two years old. Born in São Paulo, Brazil. Rich family—we’re talking major money. Daddy’s with the UN in New York.”

“Huh. What does his father do?”

“Probably not much. He’s a member of Brazil’s permanent mission, and those guys don’t do anything, far as I can tell. Mauricio grew up in a gated compound in Morumbi, on the outskirts of São Paulo. Our boy went to a bilingual school—Saint Paul’s, then Universidade de São Paulo. A member of the Harmonia tennis club and the Helvetia polo club—”

“So how’d a rich boy like that end up living in a crappy walk-up apartment in Medford?”

“Looks like he did a few lazy years as a grad student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. But he didn’t spend much time at Tisch Library. He’s a dealer—mostly coke and weed, some meth.”

“Now it gets interesting. What do you have on that?”

“A couple years ago there was this joint DEA/ICE investigation on the theory that the kid was using his father’s diplomatic pouch to bring in controlled substances.”

“Dad must not have been too pleased with that,” I said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if Daddy disowned him. He’s been busted a couple of times, but nothing sticks. Sounds like the kid knows how to game the system.”

“If his dad’s at the UN, he’s protected by diplomatic immunity.”

“That covers a diplomat’s grown kids?”

“All family,” I said.

“They can’t get arrested for drugs?”

“They can’t get arrested for murder,” I said.

“Man, I picked the wrong life. I shoulda been a diplomat. What I’d give for a loaded gun and ten minutes of diplomatic immunity.”

“Now this is starting to come together,” I said. “Taylor has a record of drug problems, and Mauricio is probably her dealer.” His wealthy family background gave him entrée to the right social circles. It probably lent him an air of panache, an ease with well-off college kids, who’d never be caught dead associating with some clocker from Revere.

Not just college students. Also prep school kids like Taylor Armstrong, the senator’s daughter.

“Daddy disowns him, there goes the trust fund,” Dorothy said. “And the diplomatic pouch. Supply drops, money stops gushing in, it gets hard to pay the rent. Or keep up the car payments. Guy like that might get desperate for money. Take on a high-risk job like kidnapping a rich girl.”

“Or maybe he was hired because he was Taylor’s dealer,” I said. “Made it easy.”

“Hired by who?”

“Well, Mauricio is from Brazil, from a rich, well-connected family. One of Marcus Capital’s unhappy investors is Juan Carlos Guzman.”

“Who is…?”

“Colombian drug lord who lives in Brazil.”

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh, sweet Jesus. A drug cartel has that girl? And you think you’re gonna get her back?”

“With your help I have a chance.”

“Nick, there’s no way I or anyone else is gonna trace that video feed. I’ve talked to everyone I know, including some people who’ve been at this a whole lot longer.”

“You told people what we’re working on?”

“Of course not. We were talking IP traces and algorithms. Digital forensics. We’re not going to find them that way.”

“They went to a lot of trouble to send Marcus a ransom demand,” I said.

“You think our guy’s still in that apartment, or do you think he took off after Taylor warned him?”

“I don’t know. If he’s in there, he was just the courier—he just picked Alexa up and handed her off to someone else. He wouldn’t have driven her out to Leominster and back here.”

“Maybe he dumped her phone there to set up a fake trail. So people would think she’s out there instead of right near Boston.”

“That’s too complex. Much smarter to just destroy her phone and have no trail at all. Also, he was driving a stolen car. Not worth the risk of getting caught with a broken taillight or an out-of-date registration sticker. Or just having some ambitious local cop run the plates.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“I’ll ransack his apartment and see what I can find that might lead me to Alexa. Bills, scraps of papers, computer files, anything.”

“Well, if he is there? Don’t forget, rich boy or not, he’s a dealer. He’s gonna be armed. Please don’t get yourself killed before our ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“The governor? Hello? You wanted me around in case they had technical questions you couldn’t answer because you’re only the ‘big picture’ guy?”

She was talking about a long-scheduled meeting with a former governor of a large state who’d been forced to resign over a bribery scandal. Everyone on the inside knew he’d been set up.

“Tell Jillian to cancel it,” I said.

“Cancel it?” she said incredulously. “These lawyers flew up from New York for this meeting. You can’t just cancel it.”

“Last I checked, I’m still the boss. Tell Jillian to cancel it. And ask her to clear my calendar for the rest of the week. Everything. I’m not doing anything else until I get this girl home.”

“The rest of the week?” she said. “You think this is only gonna take you a couple of days, you got your head up your butt. Anyway—”

“Talk later,” I interrupted, and I clicked off and got out of the car. Walked around to the side of the apartment building where Mauricio Perreira lived.

Drug dealers tend to live in a state of permanent paranoia. He probably had a gun close to the bed. Not under the pillow, which isn’t very comfortable. But under the bed or behind the headboard.

The only workable plan was to take him by surprise.





39.



Unless you pick locks for a living, knowing how doesn’t mean doing it well. I once hired a professional locksmith to give me lessons, though I’d already learned the basics from a repo man I’d met as a teenager, hanging out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors in Malden.

I also kept an assortment of tools in my car’s glove box, including a professional locksmith’s set of lock picks and tension wrenches. But an old-fashioned lock-pick set requires finesse, time, and patience. And I was short on all three. I grabbed my SouthOrd electric pick gun, a sleek stainless-steel instrument the size of an electric toothbrush, which is quicker and easier, though noisier, than any hand tool. But the batteries were dead. So I reached for the EZ snap gun, a good old manual lock pick, originally developed for police officers who didn’t have time to learn the fine, slow art of lockpicking.

Unfortunately, lock-pick guns aren’t particularly quiet. They make a fairly loud snap. But they’re quick.

I mounted the apartment building’s side stairs, which provided exterior entry to the separate units. A short cement flight of steps led to a narrow porch with a gray-painted wooden railing. From there on up, the stairs were painted wood. Keeping my tread light, I ascended to the top level, sidled along the railing for a few feet, and assessed.

A small window, curtains drawn, next to the apartment door. A simple pin tumbler lock. Not Schlage or some high-security brand, which would have been a challenge. Some no-name brand. That was a relief.

And a pinpoint LED light: a security system.

But the light was dark. He probably disarmed the system when he was at home.

So maybe he was here. Good.

I didn’t even look around. In case one of the neighbors was up early and happened to see me, I wanted to look like I was supposed to be there.

I worked quickly but casually. First I inserted the tension tool, roughly the size of a straightened paper clip, into the keyhole and worked it a bit. Grasping the snap gun in my right hand, I poked its needle into the keyhole beside the tension tool, careful not to touch the pins, and squeezed the handle.

A loud snap.

I had to snap it ten or eleven more times. The sound echoed in the gulley between the houses. Unless Perreira was a sound sleeper, he must have heard it.

Finally I felt the lock turn.

And I was in.