Buried Secrets

43.



“Hello, Spike,” I said.

“What’s your game, Heller?” Snyder said. “Trying to coach the witness? Or buy his silence?”

Before I could reply, a loud voice came from behind him: “No one is allowed to talk to my client! I made that eminently clear on the phone.”

Someone shoved his way past Snyder into the interview room: a large, elegant man, probably six foot two, broad shoulders. He had long gray hair almost to his shirt collar, deep-set eyes, and acne-gouged cheeks. He was wearing a dark nailhead suit and a burgundy foulard tie and an air of imperious authority. The fabric of his bespoke suit draped snugly along his broad shoulders.

The legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, of course. “Remove this person at once,” he said, his English impeccable, with barely a trace of an accent. “You may not question this man. And if there is any recording equipment in here, it must be switched off at once. My discussions with my client must be absolutely privileged.”

“Understood, Mr. Barboza,” Snyder said. His eyes flashed with fury at me, and he leveled a stubby finger, then swiveled it smoothly toward the doorway like a magician wielding a wand.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said.





44.



A dog was barking in the yard.

Dragomir’s first thought was of hunters. It wasn’t hunting season, but that didn’t deter some people. He’d posted NO TRESPASSING/NO HUNTING signs every fifty feet in the wooded part of the property, but not everyone could read, or chose to.

Hunters meant intruders, and intruders meant scrutiny.

People in rural areas were always getting involved in their neighbors’ business. Especially a stranger who showed up one day with no introduction.

Are you the new owner? Are you an Alderson?

What’s with the Caterpillar backhoe loader out back? Are you doing construction? All by yourself, no crew? Really? Huh. Whatcha building?

He’d bought all the equipment with cash. The backhoe came from a farm supply store in Biddeford, the air compressor from the Home Depot in Plaistow.

The casket he’d picked out at a wholesale casket company in Dover. He’d said something about the family burial plot, double deep, his sadly departed uncle the first one in. At a depth of twelve feet, he’d explained, he wanted to make absolute certain it was crushproof.

The sturdiest one they had was sixteen-gauge carbon steel, painted Triton Gray, in the Generous Dimensions line. Americans were increasingly obese, so oversized caskets were strong sellers, and he’d had to settle for a floor model.

Groundwater seepage was always a problem, even in the most well-made caskets, which might cause the girl to drown slowly, before they were done with her, and that wouldn’t do either. Fortunately, the model he’d purchased was equipped with a water-resistant gasket. You turned a crank at the end of the box to seal it tight. A steel bar rolled across the top to lock it down. All of this was standard equipment, as if grave robbers were still a problem in the twenty-first century.

The refitting was quick work, the sort of mechanical job he’d always enjoyed. Using a cobalt drill bit he drilled a hole through the carbon steel at the end where the girl’s head would be. There he welded a quarter-inch brass connector plug in place and attached it to a crushproof hose that ran several hundred feet to the air compressor on the porch. Air would flow in here every time the air compressor went on, which was a couple of minutes each hour, night and day, since it was on a timer switch. He trenched the hose into the ground along with the Ethernet cable.

At the other end of the casket he cut a much larger opening with a hole saw. There he welded the brass bushing to attach a four-inch exhaust line. Now the gray PVC pipe stuck out of the ground in the middle of the dirt field like a solitary sapling. Its end curved down like an umbrella handle. It was the sort of thing used at a landfill to vent the methane gas that built up underground.

So the girl would get a steady supply of fresh air, which was more than his father had when he’d been trapped in the coal mine in Tomsk.

As a young boy, Dragomir used to enjoy watching his father and the other miners ride backward in the mantrip, descending hundreds of meters into the depths. Dragomir was forever asking to ride too, but his father always refused.

Each night his father came home caked in black dust so thick you could see only his eyes. His coughing kept Dragomir up many a night. He spat black and left the sputum floating in the toilet bowl.

Coal mining, he told once told Dragomir, was the only job where you had to dig your own grave.

Dragomir listened, rapt, to his father’s grim tales. How he’d seen a roof bolter come down on a friend of his and crush his face. Or watched a guy cut in half by the coal car. Someone was once caught between the drums of the coal crusher and smashed into pieces between its teeth.

His mother, Dusya, raged at his father for filling a young boy’s head with such frightening stories. But Dragomir always wanted to hear more.

The bedtime stories stopped when Dragomir was almost ten.

A knock at the door to their communal apartment in the middle of the night. His mother’s high thin scream.

She brought him to the mine to join the crowds gathered there, pleading for any sort of news, even bad news.

He was fascinated. He wanted to know what had happened, but no one would tell him. He overheard only fragments. Something about how the miners had accidentally dug into an abandoned, flooded shaft. How the water rushed in and trapped them like rats.

But Dragomir wanted to know more. His thirst was unslakable. He wanted details.

He imagined his father and the other men, dozens or even hundreds of them, struggling to keep their heads above the rising black water, fighting over a few inches of air space that dwindled by the minute. He imagined them grappling in the black water, pushing each other’s heads down into the water, old friends and even brothers, trying to survive a few minutes longer, all the while knowing that none of them would ever come out.

He wanted to know what it felt like to realize with absolute certainty that you were about to die and to be powerless to do anything about it. His mind returned to this again and again, the way a child fingers a wound. He was fascinated by the unknown, lured to what repelled others, because it allowed him to draw close to his father, to know what his father knew in those last moments of his life.

He’d always felt cheated somehow not to have witnessed the last seconds of his father’s life.

All he had was his imagination.

* * *



THE DAMNED dog would not stop barking. Now he could hear it pawing at the screen door out back. He looked out a window and saw a dirt-covered mongrel, leaping and snarling at the screen. Feral, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure.

He opened the wooden door, his Wasp gas injection knife at the ready, his new toy. Just the screen between him and the cur.

Startled, the dog backed away, bared its teeth, gave a low snarl.

He called to it softly in Russian, “Here, pooch,” and opened the screen door. The dog lunged at him, and he plunged the blade into the beast’s abdomen.

With his thumb he slid the button to shoot out a frozen basketball of compressed air.

The explosion was instantaneous and satisfying, but he realized at once he’d done it wrong. He was spattered by the animal’s viscera, red and glistening, slimy scraps of skin and fur, a rainburst of offal.

Once in a while he did make mistakes. Next time he would make sure to plunge the knife in to the hilt before flicking the gas release.

It took him half an hour to sweep the ruined carcass into a trash bag and haul it into the woods to be buried later, and then hose down the blood-slick porch and screen door.

He took a shower in the small pre-fab fiberglass stall on the second floor and got into clean jeans and a flannel shirt, and then he heard the doorbell ring. He looked out the bedroom window, saw a Lexus SUV parked in the dirt road out front. He put on a baseball cap, backward, to conceal the tattoo, and casually came down the stairs and opened the front door.

“Sorry to disturb you,” said a middle-aged man with no chin and thick wire-rim glasses. “My dog ran off and I was wondering if you might have seen it.”

“Dog?” Dragomir said through the front screen.

“Oh, now, where’s my manners,” the man said. “I’m Sam Dupuis, from across the road.”

Then the man paused expectantly.

“Andros,” Dragomir said. “Caretaker.”

Andros was a Polish name, but it also sounded Greek.

“Good to know you, Andros,” the neighbor said. “I thought I saw Hercules run down your driveway, but maybe I was wrong.”

“Very sorry,” Dragomir said with a smile. “Wish I could help. Hope you find him soon.”





45.



I found Diana in a break room, sitting by herself, the Boston Globe spread out on a round table before her. It didn’t look like she’d cracked it, though. The sections were arrayed but unopened. She was just waiting.

“Your coffee,” she said, holding out a cup. “Walk with me.”

I followed her out. “They found Alexa’s purse under his bed,” she said. “He’d taken all her cash but was probably afraid to use her credit cards. The stolen Jaguar was found in a Tufts University garage.”

“That give up any location information?”

“It’s too old to have air bags let alone a nav system. But they did find trace quantities of a white powder.”

“Coke?”

“Burundanga powder. It’s an extract of the borrachio plant—also known as Colombian devil’s breath. A naturally occurring source of scopolamine.”

“An herbal date-rape drug.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard that half the admissions to Bogotá’s emergency rooms are caused by burundanga. Criminals spike their victims’ drinks with the stuff at nightclubs and brothels. It’s tasteless, odorless, and water-soluble. And it turns the victims into zombies, basically. Lucid, but totally submissive. A complete loss of will. So their victims will do what they’re told—they’ll withdraw cash from their ATMs and hand it over without arguing. And when it wears off, they have no recollection of what happened.”

On the way to the stairs we passed the legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate, the guy with the long gray hair and the expensive suit. Black curly chest hair sprouted out of his open shirt collar. He was walking briskly but seemed lost in thought, his head down.

As we climbed the stairs, I said, “Any phone records in his apartment, cell phone records, any of that stuff?”

“They’ve collected everything and they’re working it. Nothing so far.”

As she opened the door to the seventh floor, I stopped. “Wasn’t that guy wearing a tie?”

She looked at me in the dim light of the stairwell, then whirled around, and we went back down the stairs at a fairly good clip.

When we reached the interview room where I’d talked to Perreira, Diana opened the door, and she gasped.

I can’t say I was entirely surprised by what I saw, but it was grotesque all the same.

Mauricio Perreira’s body was twisted unnaturally, his face horribly contorted, frozen in a silent, agonized shriek. His lips were blue and his eyes bulged, the sclera mottled with blood from the burst capillaries. The classic signs of petechial hemorrhaging.

Fastened tightly around his neck like a tourniquet, like some kinky fashion statement, was the legal attaché’s burgundy silk necktie. It was only slightly darker than the bruising on his throat above and below the ligature.

“He’s probably still in the building,” Diana said. “On his way out.”

“Check the tie,” I said. “I doubt it’s from Brooks Brothers.”





46.



I raced down the five flights of stairs to Cambridge Street, hoping I’d catch the Brazilian on his way out, but by the time I reached the street, there was no sign of him. There were at least a dozen ways he could have gone. I circled back to the lobby, hoping that he’d taken one of the glacially slow elevators, but he didn’t appear. I took the stairs down to the parking garage underneath One Center Plaza, but once I got down there I saw it was hopeless, far too big and mazelike. And since he’d obviously come here to kill a man in FBI custody, he must have planned his getaway in advance.

I’d failed at catching the man who’d just snuffed out my only lead to Alexa Marcus.

Diana greeted me in the sixth-floor lobby and didn’t even ask. “You never had a chance,” she said.

A loud, blatting alarm was sounding throughout the floor, clogging the aisles with a lot of confused FBI agents and clerical staff who didn’t know what they were supposed to do. Outside the interview room where Perreira had been detained, a small crowd had gathered. FBI crime-scene techs were already at work inside, gathering prints and hair and fiber. They’d probably never had to travel such a short distance to do a job. A couple of important-looking men and women in business suits stood outside the threshold of the room in tense conversation.

“You were wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“The tie. It was Brooks Brothers.”

“My bad.”

“Only it had something like fishing line stitched inside.”

“Probably eighty-pound high-tensile-strength, braided line. It makes a very effective garrote. Works like a cheese slicer. He could easily have decapitated Perreira if he chose to, only he probably didn’t want to get arterial blood all over his expensive suit.”

She looked horrified, said nothing.

“Who cleared him in?” I said.

“See, that’s the problem. There is no clearance procedure. Everyone assumed someone else had vetted him. He presented ID at the desk, claiming to be Cláudio Barboza from the Brazilian consulate, and who’s going to question him?”

“Someone should call the consulate to check whether there’s anyone there with that name.”

“I just did.”

“And?”

“They don’t even have a legal attaché in Boston.”

I just groaned. “It’s probably too much to expect that the guy left any prints.”

“Didn’t you notice those very expensive-looking black lambskin gloves he wore?”

“No,” I admitted. “But at least you guys have surveillance video.”

“That we do,” she said. “Cameras all over the place.”

“Except in the interview room, where it might have done us some good.”

“The video’s not going to tell us anything we don’t know.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope you have better facial recognition than the Pentagon had when I was there. Which was crap.” People sometimes forgot that facial recognition isn’t the same as facial identification. It works by matching a face with a photo of someone who’s already been identified. Unless you had a good high-resolution image to match it against, the software couldn’t tell the difference between Lillian Hellman and Scarlett Johansson.

“No better. The guy’s obviously a pro. He wouldn’t have been sloppy enough to show his face here unless he felt secure we wouldn’t catch him.”

“Right,” I said. “He knew he’d have no problem getting in—or out. So why was that?”

She shrugged. “Way above my pay grade.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone being killed in FBI custody before—inside an FBI field office?”

“Never.”

“A couple of guys break into my loft to put a local intercept on my Internet. The SWAT team shows up in Medford just minutes after I do. They grab a key witness, who’s later murdered in a secure interview room within FBI headquarters. Obviously someone didn’t want me talking to Perreira.”

“Don’t tell me you’re accusing Gordon Snyder.”

“I’d happily blame Gordon Snyder for the BP oil spill, cancer, and global warming if I could. But not this. He’s too obsessed with bringing Marshall Marcus down.”

She smiled. “Exactly.”

“But it’s someone in the government. Someone at a high level. Someone who doesn’t want me finding out who kidnapped Alexa.”

“Come on, Nico. That’s conspiracy theory stuff.”

“As the saying goes, not every conspiracy is a theory.”

“I guess that means you don’t trust me either.”

“I trust you absolutely. Totally. Without reservation. I just need to keep in mind that anything I tell you might end up in Gordon Snyder’s in-box.”

She looked wounded. “So you don’t trust me?”

“Put it this way: If you learned something germane to your investigation and you didn’t pass it along to him, you wouldn’t be doing your job, would you?”

After a moment, she nodded slowly. “True.”

“So you see, I’d never lie to you, but I can’t tell you everything.”

“Okay. Fair enough. So if someone’s really trying to stop you from finding Alexa, what’s the reason?”

I shrugged. “No idea. But I feel like they’re sending me a message.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m on the right track.”





47.



My old friend George Devlin—Romeo, as we called him in the Special Forces—was the handsomest man you ever saw.

Not only was he the best-looking, most popular guy in his high school class, as well as the class president, but he was also the star of the school’s hockey team. In a hockey-crazed town like Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was saying something. He had a great voice too and starred in his high school musical senior year. He was a whiz at computers and an avid gamer.

He could have done anything, but the Devlins had no money to send him to college, so he enlisted in the army. There he qualified for the Special Forces, of course, because he was just that kind of guy. After some specialized computer training he was made a communications sergeant. That’s how I first got to know George: He was the comms sergeant in my detachment. I don’t know who first came up with the nickname “Romeo,” but it stuck.

After he was wounded in Afghanistan, and his VA therapy ended, however, he told us to stop calling him Romeo and start calling him George.

* * *



I MET him in the enormous white RV, bristling with antennas, that served as his combination home and mobile office. He’d parked it in an underground garage in a Holiday Inn in Dedham. That was typical for him. He preferred to meet in out-of-the-way locations. He seemed to live his life on the lam. As if someone were out to get him.

I opened the van door and entered the dimly lit interior.

“Heller.” His voice came out of the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could see him sitting on a stool, his back to me, before a bank of computer monitors and such.

“Hey, George. Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

“I take it the GPS tracker was successful.”

“Absolutely. It was brilliant. Thank you.”

“Next time please remember to check your e-mail.”

I nodded, held out the Nokia cell phone I’d taken from Mauricio’s apartment. He swiveled and turned his face toward me.

What was left of his face.

I’d never gotten used to seeing it, so each time it gave me a jolt. It was a horrible welter of ropy scar tissue, some strands paste-white, others an inflamed red. He had nostrils and a slash of a mouth, and eyelids the army surgeons had crafted from patches of skin taken from his inner thigh. The stitch marks were still prominent.

Fortunately, Devlin was able to breathe without too much pain now. He was able to see out of one eye.

But he was not easy to look at. He’d become a monster. I suppose there was some sort of irony in the fact that his physical appearance, which had defined him for so long, defined him still.

“I assume you know how to retrieve numbers from the call log,” he said. He spoke in a raspy whisper, his vocal cords ruined, and his mouth often made a wet clicking noise, the sound of tissue in the wrong place.

“Even I know how to do that.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“The only phone number on here, dialed or retrieved, is for a mobile phone. That’s probably his contact—whoever hired him to abduct the girl. If anyone can locate the bad guy from his phone, it’s you.”

“Why didn’t you ask the FBI for help?”

“Because I’m not sure who I can trust there.”

“The answer is no one. Why are you working with them, anyway? I thought you left all that government crap behind.”

“Because I need them. Whatever it takes to get Alexa back.”

He breathed in and out noisily. “No comment.”

He despised all government agencies and viewed them with extreme paranoia. They were the enemy. They were all too powerful and malevolent and I think he blamed every one of them for the Iraqi IED that had detonated his Humvee’s gas tank. He didn’t seem to credit the heroic army plastic surgeons who’d saved his life and given him at least some semblance of a face, grotesque though it was. But who could blame him for being angry?

He tilted his head in a funny way to inspect the phone. He preferred to work in low light, even near-darkness, because his eye had become hypersensitive to the light. “Ah, a Nokla 8800. This is no ordinary burner.”

“You mean Nokia.”

He showed it to me. “Can you read, Nick? It says NOKLA.”

He was right. It said NOKLA. “A knockoff?”

He punched out a few numbers on the phone. “Yep, the IMEI confirms it.”

“The what?”

“The serial number.” He slid off the back cover and popped the battery out. “A Shenzhen Special,” he said, holding it up. I leaned close. The battery had Chinese characters all over it. “Ever look on eBay and see a special sale on Nokia phones—brand-new, half price? They’re all made in China.”

I nodded. “If you order mobile phones over the Internet, you don’t have to risk going into Walmart or Target and having your face show up on a surveillance camera,” I said. I immediately regretted the choice of words. What he’d give to be able to walk into a Walmart without encountering the averted looks, the squeamishness, the screams of children.

Devlin abruptly turned to look at one of his screens. A green dot was flashing.

“Speaking of tracking devices, do you have one on you?”

“None that I know of.”

“Didn’t I tell you to take precautions coming here?”

“I did.”

“May I see your handheld?”

I handed him my BlackBerry. He peered at it, set it down on the narrow counter, popped open its battery compartment. Lifted out the battery, then wriggled something loose with a pair of tweezers. Held it up and looked at it aslant. Devlin was no longer capable of facial expressions, but if he were, he’d probably have displayed triumph.

“Someone’s been tracking your every move, Heller,” he said. “Any idea how long?”