Buried Secrets

60.



In the late afternoon, when I returned to the office, Jillian was on the floor packing boxes for some reason. I didn’t want to get involved. She looked up as I entered. Her face was red and sticky with tears.

“Good-bye, Mr. Heller.”

It took me a moment. I had my mind on other things. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Before I leave, I wanted to apologize.”

“About the clothing? Don’t be silly.”

“That e-card.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone e-mailed me a greeting card and I opened it at work.”

“That’s why you’re leaving?”

“Dorothy didn’t tell you?”

“Did she fire you?”

“No, I’m leaving.” She lifted her chin in pride, or maybe defiance. “And I was even starting to think that, like, for corporate America, this really wasn’t too sucky a job.”

“Nice of you to say. Now you want to tell me what happened?”

“I guess that e-card had some kind of software bug in it, like spyware or something? Dorothy says that’s how people got into our server and your personal files and got the codes to your home security system?”

“It was you?”

“I … thought she told you,” Jillian stammered.

“Well, Jillian, I’m sorry, but you picked a bad time to quit, so you can’t. Unpack your boxes and get back to answering phones, please.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Back to work.”

As I was headed over to Dorothy’s office, she called after me. “Um, Mr. Heller?”

“Yes?”

“I heard you guys talking about that owl tattoo?”

“Yeah?”

“I might be able to help. My brother used to work—”

“In a tattoo parlor,” I said. “Yes, I remember. You know what would be a really big help?”

She looked at me eagerly.

“How about reading the office phone system manual?”





61.



The more I thought about Marshall and Belinda Marcus, the more I was sure something wasn’t right.

I knew a cyber-investigator in New Jersey named Mo Gandle who was very good—when I was with Stoddard Associates in D.C., I had used him on a couple of cases—and I gave him a call.

“I want you to check on the dates of her employment by VIP Exxxecutive Service in Trenton,” I said. “And I want you to trace her back as far as you can.”

* * *



I FOUND Dorothy sitting at her desk, chin resting on the palms of her hands, staring at her computer screen.

On the monitor, Alexa was speaking, her eyes sunken, her hair matted. “I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy!”

The image froze, then broke up into thousands of tiny colored squares, like a Chuck Close painting. They scattered and clumped irregularly.

And then as the image redrew, she went on: “… They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I—I don’t know what that means. They said—”

“I unfired Jillian,” I said.

She hit a key without glancing at the keyboard, and the same few seconds of video played again: Alexa speaking, the picture freezing and then breaking up into jagged geometric detritus, and then reforming into a coherent image.

Dorothy murmured distractedly, “I didn’t fire her.”

“Well, I told her she can’t quit. What are you doing?”

“Cracking my head against a brick wall, that’s what I’m doing.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Yeah. Fire my ass.”

“You too? Nope.”

“Then I quit.”

“You’re not allowed to quit either. No one’s allowed to quit. Now tell me what’s up.”

Dorothy replied quietly and slowly, and I saw she was baring a part of herself she’d never shown before. “I’m not going to quit, you know that. I never quit. But I’m not earning my salary. I’m not doing what you pay me to do. I’m failing at the most important job anyone’s ever given me.”

Tears gleamed in her eyes.

Placing my hand on top of hers, I said, “Oh, come on. Whatever happened to the good old arrogant Dorothy I know and love?”

“She saw the light.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “You’re frustrated. I get that. But I need you on this full throttle. And I thought you never give up. Remind me what your father says about you?”

“Stubborn as a mule on ice,” she said in a small voice.

“Why ‘on ice’ anyway?”

“How the hell do I know? Nick, do you know how often I think of that girl and what she must be going through? I pray for her, and I keep asking myself who would do something like this to an innocent girl, and I just feel … powerless.”

“It’s not your job to save her.”

Her eyes shone, fierce and haunted. “In the Gospel of John it says, ‘We know that we are children of God and the whole world is under the control of the evil one.’ I never got that before. Like, what’s that supposed to mean? That Satan’s in charge of the whole show? But now I’m starting to get it. Maybe there’s just … evil in the world that even God is powerless to do anything about. And that’s the real point.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” I said softly. “I’ve stopped asking the big questions like that. I just keep my head down and do my job.”

“I’m sorry, Nick. I promised myself never to bring my religion to the office.”

“I never expected you to leave it at home. So tell me what you’re stuck on.”

She hesitated only briefly. “Okay, listen to this.”

She tapped a key, moved the mouse and clicked it, and we were back to that same loop of Alexa speaking. Dorothy raised the volume. Under Alexa’s words a hum grew steadily louder. Then the image froze and broke up into tiny bits.

“You hear the noise, right?”

“A car or truck, like we said. So?”

She shook her head. “Notice the noise is always followed by the picture breaking up? Every single time.”

“Okay.”

“Thing is, a car or a truck or a train, they’re not going to interrupt the video transmission like that.”

“So?”

She gave me the Look: she widened her eyes, lowered her brows, and glowered. The Look could turn a lesser being into stone or a pillar of salt. Our old boss, Jay Stoddard, found the Look so unsettling that he refused to deal with her directly unless forced to. Staring back was pointless. It was like a staring contest with the sun. One of you was going to go blind, and it wasn’t likely to be the sun.

“‘So’?” she said. “It’s going to tell us where Alexa Marcus is.”





62.



“There is some problem, Officer?”

Dragomir had learned that American policemen liked it when you used the honorific “Officer.” They craved respect and so rarely got it.

“Well, no big deal, sir. We just like to introduce ourselves, just so’s you know who to call in case you ever need any help.”

The young man’s ears and cheeks had gone crimson. When he smiled, his gums showed.

“Is good to know.” Exaggerating his bad English was disarming to most people. It made him seem more hapless. Dragomir had made a habit of studying other people as a butterfly collector examines a specimen.

The policeman shifted his weight from foot to foot again. The porch floorboards creaked. He drummed his fingertips against his thighs and said, “So you, ah, work for the Aldersons?”

Dragomir shook his head, a modest grin. “Just caretaker. I do work for family. Fix up.”

“Oh, okay, right. So I guess one of your neighbors kinda noticed some construction equipment?”

“Yes?”

“Just want to make sure there’s no, um, infractions of the building code? You know, like, if you’re building an extension without a permit?”

The youngster projected no authority whatsoever. He was almost apologetic for being here. Not like the police in Russia, who treated everyone like a criminal.

“Just landscape.”

“Is that—you’re not doing construction here, or…?”

“No construction,” Dragomir said. “Owner wants terraced gardens.”

“Mind if I take a quick look out back?”

This was going too far. If Dragomir insisted on a search warrant, the boy would be back in an hour with two other policemen and a court order, and they’d search the house too, just to show they could.

He shrugged, said hospitably, “Please.”

Officer Kent seemed relieved. “You know, just so I can tell the chief I did my job, right?”

“We all have to do our jobs.”

He followed the policeman around the back, onto the field of bare earth. The officer seemed to be looking at the tracks in the hard soil, then the gray vent pipe in the middle of the field, and he approached it.

“That a septic tank, um, Andros?”

Dragomir went still. He hadn’t told the cop his name. Obviously the neighbor had.

This concerned him.

“Is to vent the soil,” Dragomir said as they stood next to the pipe. “From the landfill, the … compost pile.” An improvisation, the best he could do.

“Like for methane buildup or something?”

Dragomir shrugged. He didn’t understand English. He just did what he was told. He was a simple laborer.

“Because you do need a permit if you’re putting in a septic tank, you know.”

The cop’s cheeks and ears were the color of cold borscht.

Dragomir smiled. “No septic tank.”

Tiny muffled cries from the vent pipe.

The policeman cocked his head. His ridiculous ears seemed to twitch. “You hear something?” he said.

Dragomir shook his head slowly. “No…”

The girl’s cries had become louder and more distinct.

“HELP GOD HELP SAVE ME PLEASE OH GOD…”

“That sounds like it’s coming from down there,” the policeman said. “How weird is that?”





63.



“I’m listening,” I said.

Dorothy sighed. “Let’s start with the basic question: How are they getting on the Internet, okay? And I don’t think it’s your standard high-speed connection.”

“Why not?”

She leaned back, folded her arms. “My parents live in North Carolina, right? So a couple of years ago they decided they wanted to get cable TV so they could watch all those movies. Only there wasn’t any cable available, so they had to put one of those satellite dishes on their roof.”

I nodded.

“Once I tried to watch a movie at their house, and the picture kept fuzzing out. Drove me crazy. So I asked them what the problem was, you know, was it always like this, did they call the satellite company to get it fixed, right? And Momma said, oh, that happens a lot, every time a plane flies by overhead. You get used to it. Nothing to do about it. See, they live close to the Charlotte/Douglas airport. Right in the flight path. I mean, the planes are loud. And then I began to notice that, yeah, every time I heard a plane overhead the TV would crap out.”

“Okay,” I said. “If our kidnappers are deep in the woods somewhere, or in some rural area where they don’t even have high-speed Internet, satellite is probably their only way to get online. And you think a plane can break up the signal?”

“Easy. A bad rainstorm can do it too. Satellite works by line-of-sight, so if something gets between the dish and the big old satellite up there in the sky, the signal’s gonna break up. You got a big enough plane, flying low enough, that thing can interrupt the signal. Might only be a fraction of a second, but that’ll screw up the video stream.”

“This is good,” I said. “That noise we’re hearing could well come from a jet engine. So let’s say they’re near an airport. How near, do you think?”

“Hard to calculate. But close enough so when a plane lands or takes off, it’s low enough to the ground to block the path to the satellite. So it depends on how big the plane is and how fast it’s going and all that.”

“There are a hell of a lot of airports in the U.S.,” I pointed out.

“That right?” she said dryly. “Hadn’t thought about that. But if we can narrow down the search, it gets a whole lot easier.”

“I think we can.”

“You do?”

“New Hampshire.” I explained about George Devlin’s cell phone mapping. How we knew that “Mr. X” took Alexa across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire.

She listened, staring into space. After twenty seconds of silence, she said, “That helps a lot. I don’t know how many airports there are in New Hampshire, but we’ve just narrowed it down to a manageable number.”

“Maybe we can narrow it down more than that,” I said. “Does that creepy website CamFriendz stream in real time?”

“They claim to. I’d say yes, within a few seconds. You have to account for slow connections and server lag time and so on. Maybe the times are five seconds off.”

“So we match up those times with the exact flight times in the FAA’s flight database.”

“They have such a thing?”

“Of course they do. We’re looking for airports in New Hampshire—hell, let’s broaden the search, make it Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire, just to be safe—with a flight schedule matching the times of our four interruptions.”

She nodded vigorously.

“And we can narrow it down a lot more,” I said. “Aren’t there two separate interruptions during one of those broadcasts?”

“You’re right.”

“So we have an exact interval between two flights.”

Her smile widened slowly. “Not bad, boss.”

I shrugged. “Your idea.” One of the few things I’ve learned since going into business for myself: The boss should never take credit for anything. “Can you hack into the Federal Aviation Administration’s secure electronic database?”

“No.”

“Well, the FBI will be able to get it through channels. I’ll give Diana a call.”

“Excuse me?”

Jillian Alperin was standing there hesitantly.

“We’re in a meeting,” Dorothy said. “Is there a problem?”

“I forgot to take this out of the printer.” She held up a large glossy color photograph. It was an enlargement of the photograph from Alexa’s iPhone of her kidnapper’s tattoo.

“Thank you,” Dorothy said, taking it from her.

“I think I know what it is,” Jillian said.

“That’s an owl,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

Then she held up something else, which she’d been holding in her other hand. A slim white paperback. On the front cover was a black-and-white line drawing of an owl.

It was identical to the owl tattoo in the photo.

“What’s that?” I said.

“It’s a book of tattoos my brother found?”

She handed me the book. It was titled Criminal Tattoos of Russia.

“Dorothy,” I said. “What time is it in Russia right now?”





64.



One of my best sources in Russia was a former KGB major general. Anatoly Vasilenko was a whippet-thin man in his late sixties with an aquiline profile and the demeanor of a Cambridge don. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he was already cashing in on his access and connections.

I couldn’t say I liked him very much—he was one of the most mercenary men I’d ever met—but he could be affable and charming, and he did have an amazing Rolodex. For the right price he could get you almost any piece of intelligence you wanted.

Tolya always knew who to call, who to bribe, and who to throw a scare into. If a client of mine suspected the local manager of their Moscow plant was embezzling, Tolya could take care of the problem with one quick phone call. He’d have the guy hauled in and interrogated and so terrified he’d be scared to steal a paper clip from his own desk.

I reached him at dinner. From the background noise I could tell he wasn’t at home.

“Have I never taken you to Turandot, Nicholas?” he said. “Hold on, let me move someplace quieter.”

“Twice,” I said. “Shark-fin soup, I think.”

Turandot was a restaurant a few blocks from the Kremlin, on Tverskoy Boulevard, which was the favored dining spot of oligarchs and criminals and high government officials (many of them all three). It was a vast gilded reproduction of a Baroque palace with a Venetian marble courtyard and statues of Roman gods and Aubusson tapestries and an enormous crystal chandelier. Burly security guards gathered out front to smoke and keep a watch over their employers’ Bentleys.

When he got back on the phone, the background clamor gone, he said, “There, that’s much better. Nothing worse than a table full of drunken Tatars.” His English was better than that of most Americans. I didn’t know where he’d acquired his plummy British accent, unless they taught it at KGB school. “That’s quite a picture you sent.”

“Tell me.”

“That tattoo? It’s Sova.”

“Who?”

“Not ‘who.’ Sova is—well, sova means owl, of course. It’s a criminal gang, you might say.”

“Russian mafia?”

“Mafia? No, nothing that organized,” he said. “Sova is more like a loose confederation of men who’ve all done time at the same prison.”

“Which one?”

“Prison Number One, in Kopeisk. Quite the nasty place.”

“Do you have a list of all known Sova members?”

“Of all Sova members?” He gave a low chortle. “If only I had such a list. I would be either very rich or very dead.”

“You must have some names.”

“Why is this of interest to you?”

I told him.

Then he said, “This is not a good situation for you. Or for your client’s daughter, more to the point.”

“Why’s that?”

“These are very bad people, Nicholas. Hardened criminals of the very worst sort.”

“So I understand.”

“No, I’m not so sure you do. They don’t operate by normal rules. They’re … untroubled, shall we say, by conventional standards of morality.”

“How bad?”

“I think you had a very unpleasant incident in the States not so long ago. Do you remember a brutal home invasion in Connecticut?”

He pronounced the hard C in the middle of “Connecticut.” A rare slip.

“Not offhand.”

“Oh, dear. Some wealthy bedroom community in Connecticut—Darien, maybe? Truly a nightmare. A doctor and his wife and three daughters were at home one night when a couple of burglars broke in. They beat the doctor with a baseball bat, tied him up, and tossed him down the basement stairs. Then they tied the girls to their beds and proceeded to rape them for seven hours. After which, they poured gasoline on the women and lit them afire—”

“All right,” I said, unable to hear any more. “These were Sova members?”

“Correct. One of them was killed during an attempted arrest, I seem to recall. The other one escaped.”

“A burglary?”

“Entertainment.”

“Excuse me?” I felt something cold and hard form in my stomach.

“You heard me. Just fun and games. These Sova people will do things a normal person cannot begin to imagine. You couldn’t ask for better enforcers.”

“Enforcers?”

“They hire themselves out. If you need outside talent for a really dirty job, something violent and extremely bloody, you might hire a couple of Sova gang members.”

“Who hires them? Russian mafia groups?”

“Usually not. The mafia have some pretty brutal talent of their own.”

“Then who?”

“Certain oligarchs. Our newly minted Russian billionaires. They’re often in need of hard men. A few in particular are known to use Sova members.”

“Which ones?”

He laughed. “Nicholas, we haven’t even discussed a fee yet! First things first.”

He told me his fee, and after I stifled the impulse to tell him where to stuff his hard currency, I agreed to his usurious terms.

Then he said, “Excellent. Let me make some calls.”





65.



Dragomir was a fast learner.

This time he used the Wasp knife correctly. The young police officer didn’t even have time to turn around before the blade went into his side, lightning-fast, right up to the hilt.

He thumbed the button and heard the hiss and the pop.

Officer Kent sagged to the ground. It looked like he’d suddenly decided to sit right there in the middle of the yard, except that his legs sprawled awkwardly in a way that would be unbearably painful if he were alive.

But he died instantly, or close to it. His internal organs had expanded and frozen at the same time. His abdomen was swollen as if he’d suddenly developed a beer belly.

As Dragomir hoisted the body over his shoulders, he could hear the crackle of Officer Kent’s handheld radio.





66.



Diana and I met at the Sheep’s Head Tavern, a sorta-kinda Irish pub in Government Center right next to FBI headquarters. She’d told me she had to grab a quick dinner and then get back up to work. That was fine with me: I had a very long night ahead.

The outside tables were all full, so we sat in a booth inside. I saw a lot of old-looking wood, or new wood made to look old with random gouges and a lot of dark varnish. There were old pub signs on the wall and a carved wooden bar with Celtic lettering on the front and reproductions of old Guinness ads. There were a lot of fancy beers on tap, mostly American microbrews, some German. She was wearing a turquoise silk top and black jeans that somehow managed to emphasize her curves without looking totally unprofessional.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “We didn’t turn up anything in the FAA’s flight log database.”

“How often is it updated?”

“Constantly. In real time.”

“And it’s complete?”

She nodded. “Private airports as well as public ones.”

“Well, it was a brilliant idea,” I said. “But not all brilliant ideas work out. Thanks for trying. Now I have something for you.”

“Bad news?”

“No. But I don’t think you’re going to like it.” I handed her Mauricio’s mobile phone in a ziplock bag.

“I don’t understand,” she said after looking at it for a few seconds. “What is it?”

I told her.

“You took that from his apartment?”

I nodded.

“Without telling me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t trust Snyder.”

Her mouth tightened and her nostrils flared.

“It was wrong to withhold it from you,” I said. “I know that.”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked down at the table, face flushed.

“Talk to me,” I said.

Finally she looked up. “So was it worth it, Nick? You know we can never use that as evidence in court, right? Since you disrupted the chain of custody?”

“I don’t think the Bureau is going to be prosecuting a dead guy.”

“I’m talking about whoever’s behind this thing. There’s a reason we have procedures.”

“You always colored within the lines.”

“I’m a rules girl, Nico. Whereas you were never big on the chain of command, as I recall. You’re not an organization man.”

“The last organization I joined sent me to Iraq.”

“We both want the same thing. We just have different ways to get there. But as long as you’re working with me and the FBI, you have to respect the rules we play by.”

“I understand.”

She looked at me hard. “Don’t ever do this to me again.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. Now, at least tell me you got something useful out of it.”

I nodded. “His phone number and the only number on his call log, presumably the guy who hired him to abduct Alexa. One of my sources plotted those numbers along with Alexa’s phone number on a map of cell phone towers and was able to chart the route they traveled.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did he get a map of cell phone towers?”

“Don’t ask. Bottom line, the path seems to point up north to New Hampshire.”

“Meaning what? The kidnapper came down from New Hampshire?”

“Yes, but more important, it means he’s probably got her up there now.”

“Where, specifically?”

“That’s all we know—New Hampshire. Somewhere in New Hampshire.”

“Well, that helps, I guess,” Diana said. “But we’re going to need more data points than that. Otherwise it’s a lost cause.”

“How about the tattoo?”

She shook her head. “Nothing came back on that from any of our legats.”

“Well, I’ve got an excellent source in Moscow who’s making some calls for me right now.”

“Moscow?”

“That owl is Russian prison ink.”

“Who’s your source on that?”

“Actually, my twenty-four-year-old militant-vegan office manager.”

She gave me a look.

“I’m serious. It’s complicated. That owl tattoo identifies members of Sova, a gang of former Russian prison inmates.”

She took out a small notepad and jotted something down. “If Alexa’s kidnapper is Russian, does that mean he’s working for Russians?”

“Not for sure. But I’d put money on it. My source in Moscow says Sova members are often hired by Russian oligarchs to do dirty work when they need plausible deniability. He’s helping me narrow down the pool of suspects. Meanwhile, I want to find out what David Schechter’s role in all this really is.”

“How’s that going to help find Alexa?”

I told her about the exchange I’d overheard between David Schechter and Marshall Marcus.

“You think Schechter is controlling Marcus?” she said.

“Clearly.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe his wife’s shady past has something to do with it.”

She cocked a brow, and I explained what I’d found out about Belinda Marcus’s last profession. “I have a PI digging into it right now,” I said. “To see what else he can find. But I don’t think that’s it. It’s too recent and too trivial.”

“Then what’s the hold Schechter has over him?”

“That’s what I plan to find out.”

“How?”

I told her.

“That’s illegal,” she said.

“Then you didn’t hear it from me.”

“It doesn’t bother you that you’d be committing a crime?”

I shrugged. “As a great man once said, in certain extreme situations, the law is inadequate. In order to shame its inadequacy, it is necessary to act outside the law.”

“Martin Luther King?”

“Close. The Punisher.”

She looked confused.

“I guess you don’t read comic books,” I said.





67.



Dragomir drove out to the main road, relieved to pass only a lumber truck. Not someone from the town who might notice a police squad car coming out of the Alderson property and gossip about it later, maybe ask questions.

He knew where to go. Earlier, he’d driven around the area, scouting escape routes in case it came to that, until he’d discovered a deserted stretch of narrow road that would do well. A place where the road curved sharply on the lip of a ravine.

Of course there was a guardrail. But not on the long straight stretch leading into it, where the plunge was just as steep.

He pulled over at a point where he could see the traffic in both directions. There wasn’t any. Then he drove a bit farther down the road until he was about twenty feet or so from an edge where there was no guardrail.

Glancing around again, he opened the trunk of the police cruiser, lifted Officer Kent’s body out, and quickly carried it around to the open driver’s door. There he carefully positioned the body. Then he lifted the black plastic trash bags from the floor of the trunk.

An autopsy wasn’t likely. Mostly likely they’d see a police officer killed in a tragic car crash and it would end there. Anyway, by the time any autopsy was done, he’d be long gone. He only cared about what might be found in the next twenty-four hours.

Before he pushed the car into the ravine he put it in drive. If the gear selector were in neutral when the crash was discovered, any skilled investigator would immediately figure out what had really happened.

He didn’t make that kind of mistake.