Buried Secrets

40.



The air was cold. An air conditioner was on somewhere, in another room. I was hit at once by the fetid, festering-swamp stench of old bong water.

Someone was here.

All the curtains were closed. The front room was almost completely dark. In a few seconds, though, my eyes became accustomed, and I was able to make my way through the cluttered room, weaving between an enormous flat-screen TV and an outsize leather couch, the path strewn with discarded beer and wine bottles. Somehow managing not to knock anything over, I approached the loud snoring that came from an open bedroom door. At the threshold I stopped. A lump in the bed, I saw. No, two lumps.

Long blond hair lay atop a pillow as if a lion had coughed up a hairball. I saw the nape of a woman’s neck, her well-defined shoulders. Next to her, mouth gaping, snoring like a buzz saw, was the man I recognized as Lorenzo. The guy from the security video at Slammer. The guy who’d abducted Alexa. No question about it.

I thought for just a second. Ran through my options.

Decided on the simplest one.

I came around to the side of the bed where Perreira lay under the rumpled sheet, half under the blanket. My footsteps were muffled by the wall-to-wall carpet. An old air conditioner rattled and roared like a jet engine. The room was ice-cold and smelled of rancid sweat. His face was turned away, toward the blond girl, the sheet pulled up to his chin.

In my left fist I grabbed the end of the sheet. With a swift jerk I yanked it up and over his head, then under, trapping his head. He began to flail. He cursed and shouted and thrashed his arms and legs. But he was wrapped as tight as a mummy. My right hand gripped his throat and squeezed. His struggles grew more frenzied, his screams muffled by the sheet.

The blond girl in the bed next to him screamed too and scrambled out of the bed, the screams strangely deep and masculine. As I clambered on top of Mauricio’s writhing body, pinning him down with my knees, I saw that the long-haired blond was in fact a skinny, delicate-looking young man.

“I don’t have anything to do with anything!” the boy shouted. “Dude, I barely know this guy!”

He backed away, as if he expected me to lunge at him too, but I turned and let him go.

I was afraid Perreira might pass out, so I eased up a bit on his throat. He gasped, then said hoarsely: “O que você quer? O que diabos você quer?”

I had no idea what he was saying. I don’t speak Portuguese. “Where is she?” I said.

“Entreguei o pacote!”

“Where is she?”

“Eu entreguei a menina!”

“Speak English.”

“O pacote! Entreguei o pacote!”

One of the words sounded sort of familiar. “The package?”

“I deliver”—he gasped—“the package. I deliver the package!”

“Package?” A white-hot anger crackled in my blood like a live wire. It took great restraint to keep from crushing his windpipe.

Clearly he thought I was connected to the kidnapping. Someone he worked for. So he was just the delivery boy. The first link in the chain. He’d been hired to abduct Alexa and hand her over to someone else.

And since he thought I was one of his employers, that meant he probably didn’t know them, hadn’t met them. This could be useful. I relaxed my grip on his throat, and he croaked, “Entreguei a cadela, qual é?”

Though I don’t speak Portuguese, I do know a few obscenities in several languages, and I was pretty sure he’d just used one in reference to Alexa. This displeased me. I squeezed his throat until I felt the soft cartilage start to give way, and then I made myself stop. Killing this cockroach was pointless. He was useful to me only alive.

“I’m going to let you go so you can answer a few questions,” I said. “If you lie about anything at all, no matter how trivial, I’m going to slice your ear off and send it to your father at the UN. For his office wall. The second lie, you lose the other ear. That one goes—”

“No! No! I tell you everything! What do you want? I do what you say! I do everything you say! I gave you this girl and I shut my mouth.”

“Where is she?”

“Why you asking me this? You tell me to pick the bitch up and drug her and bring her to you, I do it. What do you want, man? You got the girl. I got the money. I say nothing. We’re all done here. It’s all good.”

It’s all good. A phrase I really despise. He was slick and polished and used to dealing with high-end customers who’d never buy “party favors” from some slinger with prison ink and low riders. Most college kids and rich kids didn’t like thinking what they did was criminal, really. They considered the goods he sold them just another arbitrarily outlawed delicacy, like Iranian caviar or unpasteurized Camembert. A man like Mauricio made the drug trade seem not unlawful but exclusive.

“For you I’d say it’s pretty much all bad right now.”

On his bedside table was a Nokia cell phone. I grabbed it with my free hand and slipped it in my pocket.

Then I reached behind the headboard and found what felt a lot like a gun duct-taped back there. A very expensive STI pistol, I saw. I pocketed that too, then released my grip on his throat entirely. He drew a deep, rattling breath. His face was deep red, and he looked like he was on the verge of blacking out. Maybe I’d pushed it too far.

“All right,” I said, climbing off and standing beside the bed. “Get up.”

He struggled to sit up, tangled up in the sheets and weak from oxygen deprivation. He was wearing only red Speedos. Weakly, he shifted his legs over the side of the bed. His fingernails and toenails were manicured to a high gloss. “Jesus Cristo,” he gasped, “what you want from me, man?”

“You screwed up,” I said.

He shook his head, eyes terrified. “I gave you—I gave it to—the guy.”

“Which guy?”

“The guy who gave me the phone. You—you guys? What the hell, man? You work for them, too?”

“Which one?” I said.

“No one give me names. What is this? Who are you, man?”

“What was his name?” I shouted.

“I don’t know anyone’s name, man! I can’t talk. The guy got eyes on the back of his head!”

I was about to ask what he meant when I heard the thunder of footsteps on the stairs outside. He heard it too. His face was tight with fear. “Oh, Jesus Cristo, that’s them! That’s them! He said they kill me if I talk to anyone. I didn’t tell you nothing, man!”

Then came a crash and the splintering sound of his door being broken down with a metal ram.

The men who burst into the room were wearing green uniforms with green ballistic vests and black Kevlar helmets and goggles that made them look like giant insects from some bad science-fiction flick. Right behind the breachers came the assaulters with their H&K MP5 submachine guns. The ones with shields carried Glocks. They all had FBI patches on their shoulders and chests.

When he saw who they were, the expression on his face changed.

He looked relieved.





41.



The man was slowly crossing the bare earthen field toward the farmhouse when the sat phone on his belt began to trill. The morning was cold and brisk and the sky was blue glass.

He knew who it was, because only one person had this number, and he knew what the caller wanted.

As he answered the phone, he stopped at the exact center of the hump of earth and made a mental note to take another run at it with the pneumatic backfill tamper. Or just a few passes with the backhoe tires: That should do it.

Not that the girl was going anywhere, ten feet down.

But here in rural New Hampshire, neighbors sometimes got curious, or too friendly.

“Yes?” Dragomir said.

“Nothing yet,” said the man who called himself Kirill. They spoke in Russian.

Maybe that was his real name, maybe not. Dragomir didn’t care. Kirill was nothing more than an intermediary, an errand boy who passed messages back and forth between Dragomir and the very rich man Kirill called only the Client. Never a name. This was fine with Dragomir. The less he and the Client knew about each other, the better.

But Kirill fretted and hovered and yammered like a frightened old babushka. He worried that some detail might go awry. He seemed to think that his constant monitoring, the daily check-ins, would keep everything running smoothly.

He didn’t know that Dragomir rarely made mistakes.

“It’s only been a few hours,” Dragomir said.

“What do you think, the father went back to sleep? He should have sent the file immediately. His daughter—”

“Patience,” Dragomir said.

A plane roared overhead, and the line went staticky. Jets flew by every hour or so, mostly at night, from the air base in Bangor, Maine. They had that big lumbering sound of military cargo transport planes. It reminded him of Afghanistan, the Ilyushin 76s that were always blasting by overhead.

“—hostage is in good health?” Kirill was saying when the static cleared.

The Iridium sat phone was encrypted, so Kirill spoke fairly openly, even though Dragomir never did. He never trusted technology. His reply was curt: “Is there anything else?”

“Nothing.”

He disconnected the call. The setting sun gave a golden cast to the freshly raked soil. His boots sank into the soft earth, the tread leaving precise impressions, like a plaster-of-Paris cast. Some of his footsteps crossed the deep tread of the backhoe loader’s tires.

He had a fleeting memory of the hard dirt prison yard, where sunlight never entered and no grass could grow. He’d liked lawns ever since.

Dragomir mounted the porch, past the air compressor on its long yellow extension cord, and pulled the screen door open. There were holes in the screen, so he opened and closed the wooden back door swiftly to keep out the bugs. The whole damned farmhouse was falling down. But he had no right to complain. The house and the land it sat on, nearly three hundred acres of forest in a remote part of New Hampshire, were owned by an old man who’d moved to Florida. The property hadn’t had a visitor in four years. Not even a caretaker.

So Dragomir had appointed himself the caretaker.

Even though the family trust had no idea.

As he went through the converted sunroom, he could hear the girl’s pathetic mewling over the computer speakers. On the monitor she twisted and clawed and screamed and writhed like some eerie green apparition.

The noise irritated him, so he hit a key to mute it.





42.



An hour later I was on the sixth floor of One Center Plaza with Diana, who looked exhausted, her eyes red-rimmed and bleary. The corkscrew tendrils of her hair were even more Medusan than usual. Yet she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

She waited for them to hand me my visitor badge, then escorted me in.

“So how’d that happen?” I said quietly as we walked.

Not until we’d passed the row of offices belonging to the assistant special agents in charge did she reply. Gordon Snyder’s door was open, I noticed, but it was angled in such a way that I couldn’t see whether he was there.

“All I was told was, a CI tipped them off.”

A confidential informant. “Whose?”

No reply. We reached a warren of cubicles, most of them empty. It was still early.

Her cubicle was unmistakable.

It was the grade-school photos taped to the cubicle walls that marked it as her workspace: sweet-looking kids who obviously weren’t relatives of hers. And the curling clips from the Stowe (Vermont) Reporter and the Biddeford (Maine) Journal Tribune and the Boston Herald with headlines like SEX OFFENDER CHARGED IN GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE. A close-up photo of a paisley-patterned bedspread. A photocopy of a note scrawled in block letters, a barely literate hand:



HI HONEY I BEEN WATCHING YOU I AM THE SAME PERSON THAT KIDNAPPED AN RAPE AN KILL ARDEN …





Things a normal person couldn’t bear to look at even once hung before her eyes every minute she sat at her desk.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I’m not cleared at that level.”

I could hear the annoying little snap of someone clipping fingernails at a nearby cubicle. “So who gave the order to roll the SWAT team?”

“The only person who can mobilize tactical is the SAC. But how did you know where to find Perreira?”

“I put a tracker on Taylor Armstrong.”

She smiled, nodded. “Nice.”

“Whoever did this just screwed up our best chance to find Alexa,” I said. “Where is he?”

“Downstairs in a locked interview room.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“You can’t.”

“Because I’m a private citizen?”

“That’s not the only reason. He’s not talking to anybody.”

“He’s lawyering up?”

“He’s invoking diplomatic immunity.”

“Who’s with him now?”

“Nobody. We’re in talks with Main Justice on how to handle this.”

“I know how to handle it.”

She smiled again. “No doubt.”

“Can you sneak me in there?”

“You serious?”

“Completely.”

“The answer is no. A legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate in Boston is on his way in. A man named…” She glanced at a scrawl on a Post-it pad next to her desk phone. “Cláudio Duarte Carvalho Barboza. Until he’s finished consulting with Perreira, no one can even enter the interview room.”

I stood up.

“Do me a favor and show me where he is,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just curious,” I said.

* * *



DIANA LED me down a flight of stairs to a closed, windowless room. A plain white door with a metal knob. No one standing around outside keeping watch.

“Any cameras or one-way mirrors?”

“Never. It’s against Bureau policy.”

“Huh. You know, I’d love a cup of coffee.”

“Don’t do anything to screw me up, Nick.”

“I won’t. Take your time with that coffee.”

Her face was impassive but there was a glint in her eyes. “I may need to brew a fresh pot. Might take me a while.”

* * *



MAURICIO WAS leaning back in a metal chair behind a Formica-topped table, looking bored. When he recognized me, he slowly grinned a broad smile of victory.

“I’m not talking, man. I got the … the imunidade diplomática.”

“So as soon as the legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate shows up, you’re a free man. You go home. That it?”

“That’s how it works, man. It’s all good.”

“Excellent,” I said. “I like that.”

He found this amusing. “You like that, huh?” He laughed.

I did too. “Oh, yeah. Definitely. Because out there, you don’t have any diplomatic immunity.”

His smile dimmed a few clicks.

“As soon as they let you go,” I said, “it’s going to be like tossing a handful of chum into a shark tank. Gonna be a feeding frenzy out there. The water’s going to be churning and the sharks are going to be circling.”

“Don’t try to threaten me.”

“Think about this. The guys that hired you? They’re going to assume you told us everything.”

A quick headshake. “I don’t cooperate with FBI.”

“You’re far too modest about all the help you’ve given us.”

“I don’t say nothing to the FBI. I don’t say nothing to nobody.”

“Sure you did.” I pulled out his Nokia mobile phone and showed it to him. “You gave us a phone number, for one. And the U.S. government is extremely grateful to you. In fact, I’m going to personally see to it that we issue you a commendation for all your help to U.S. law enforcement.”

“No one believe I talk,” he said. But he didn’t sound so confident anymore. He’d assumed I was with the FBI, and I didn’t plan to correct the impression.

“Yeah? I wonder what they’ll think when I leave a message on your voice mail giving you the name of your regular contact here at the Bureau. Telling you how to arrange our next meeting. Maybe talking about how you’ll be wearing a wire next time you meet with your Colombian friends.”

I could see the blood drain from his face.

“I hope you know they’ve got your line tapped,” I said. “They probably cloned your cell phone too.”

He shook his head, jutted his lower lip, feigning skepticism, but I could see I’d gotten to him.

“Ever hear what they do to people who betray them?”

“They not gonna kill me.”

“True,” I said. “They like to torture and mutilate first. They like to drag it out. You’ll wish they’d kill you, what I hear. They have a saying, ‘You can’t get a positive identification of a body from a torso.’” I paused for effect. “That’s why they like to cut off the hands and feet and head. Of course, they’re wrong. You can get a positive identification from a torso. It just takes a little longer.”

Mauricio’s brown eyes had gone flat and dull, and terror was contorting his facial muscles.

“Maybe your daddy can pull in some favors and get them to go easy on you, hmm?”

His larynx worked up and down. He was trying to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry. It looked like a sock was stuck in his throat.

“But you know what?” I said. “Today’s your lucky day. Because I’m prepared to offer you a special deal. Great terms too. You tell us what we want to know, and you’ll never hear from us again. No thank-you notes. No friendly calls. You might even live.” I waited a beat. “It’s all good.”

“What do you want?” he whispered, his voice cracking.

“A name. The name of the guy who hired you to pick up the girl.”

“I told you—”

“A full description. Height. Eye color. How he contacted you in the first place. Where you delivered the … ‘package’… to them.”

“I don’t know the name, man,” he whispered. “He was some big dude, real strong. Real scary.”

He was telling the truth now, I was convinced. His terror had yanked away his habitual scrim of dishonesty. He had just one objective, which was to stay alive. Not to protect his employers. He wasn’t going to hold anything back from me.

“Did he tell you why he wanted the girl?”

“He just told me to pick her up and give her this drug and hand her over—”

I heard what sounded like footsteps approaching, voices becoming louder. Mauricio heard it too. He froze, looked at the door.

“Where did he take her?” I said.

“The guy’s got eyes on the back of his head,” he whispered. “I can’t say nothing.”

“What do you mean, eyes on the back of his head?”

But then the door came open, and a squat, hulking man in a gray suit with a gleaming bald head stared in.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” came the rumbling voice of Gordon Snyder.