Buried Secrets

87.



As I drove north on 93, it started to rain, first a few ominous drops from a steel sky, then a full-fledged torrential downpour. It came down with the sort of force that almost always tells you it’s going to be short-lived, that it can’t possibly last.

But this one kept going. Out of nowhere, the wind began to gust, driving the rain nearly sideways. My windshield wipers were flipping at maximum speed but I could still barely see the road. The other cars began to skid, then slowed to a crawl, and a few pulled over to wait it out.

Normally I enjoy dramatic weather, but not then. It seemed to echo the strange, unaccustomed feeling of anxiety that had come over me.

My instinct told me that this was not going to end well.

* * *



SO I blasted music. Few tunes pump me up like the twangy guitar licks and huge, booming, diesel-fueled rockabilly sound of Bill Kirchen, the Titan of the Telecaster, the guy who did “Hot Rod Lincoln” years ago. I played “Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods” and then his live version of “Too Much Fun.” By the time I reached the New Hampshire border, I was feeling like my old self.

Then I had to hit MUTE to answer the phone.

It was Diana, with directions to the SWAT staging area. “We’re mustering at a parking lot two miles from the house,” she said. “You’re going to join me on the perimeter surveillance team. But that means staying outside the hard perimeter.”

The highway had gotten narrower, down to a two-lane road with steel guardrails on either side. I passed a BRAKE FOR MOOSE sign.

“Works for me. Are we going to be in a vehicle or on foot?”

“In one of their SUVs, thank God. I’d hate to be standing around in weather like this. Is it raining where you are?”

“Pouring. I’m maybe thirty miles away, no more.”

“Drive safe, Nico.”





88.



Forty-five minutes later I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a black Suburban. It had been specially modified for the SWAT team with roof rails and side rungs, though it wasn’t armored. We were outside the crisis area. We weren’t supposed to get hit.

Diana was behind the wheel. Under her FBI sweatshirt she was wearing a level III trauma vest, a concealable ballistic garment fitted with a trauma plate.

Rain sheeted down. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth like a metronome at top speed.

We were parked at the end of the woods, just off a narrow winding asphalt road, stationed at what the SWAT team called “phase line yellow,” the last cover-and-conceal position before the action started. Phase line green was the imaginary line around the house. Phase line green meant game on.

Supposedly we were part of the perimeter team, at the point of egress, but in truth we were nothing more than observers. My role was limited and quite clear: If they were able to take the Russian alive, and if he resisted cooperation, I was to be put on the radio to communicate directly with him. Not in person, on the radio.

Surrounding us were various American-made SUVs—Ford Explorers and Blazers and Suburbans, also fitted with roof rails and side rungs. SWAT operators hung off the side, wearing two-piece olive drab suits with armor that was supposed to withstand a rifle round, ceramic trauma plates inside. They wore ballistic helmets and eye protection and FBI signage everywhere. They carried M4 carbine rifles equipped with red-dot optical sights. In their side holsters they had pistols, to be used only if their machine guns jammed. Snipers in ghillie suits were secreted in the woods, in the shadows cast by the trees, within range of the house.

For a long while we sat in silence, listening to the exchange on the dash-mounted radio.

We waited. Everyone out there seemed to be waiting for a signal. The air was charged with tension.

I said, “If he shows his face—”

“The snipers will take him out. Deadly force has been pre-authorized.”

“Is that FBI protocol?”

“Only in circumstances where we believe the target has the means and the probable intention to kill his victim, yeah, killing him is considered legally justified.”

“And if he doesn’t show his face?”

“They’ll attempt a silent breach of the house from two points and go into hostage-rescue mode.”

After sitting in silence a while longer, Diana said, “You want to be up there, don’t you? Admit it.”

I didn’t reply. I was still mulling things over. Something seemed somehow off about the whole situation.

She looked at me. I said, “Can I borrow your binoculars?” I hadn’t grabbed mine from the Land Rover. I didn’t think I’d need them.

She handed me a pair of army-green Steiners, standard SWAT-team issue, full-size, a PROPERTY OF FBI SWAT sticker on one side. I dialed in the focus until the house came into view: a small, neat, white-painted clapboard house with dark green shutters. It wasn’t a farmhouse at all but a house in the woods. The land surrounding it was surprisingly small, given the size of the property. The grass was overgrown and wild, probably waist-high, as if no one had been looking after it for a year or more.

It was dark. No car or truck in the driveway that I could see.

Then I handed the binoculars back to her. “I don’t think we’re in the right place,” I said.

“How so? It’s his phone number that came up, no question about it.”

“Look at the egress. Only one way in or out, and we’re sitting at it. The woods in back of his house are overgrown, choked with underbrush and vine. He can’t walk for two minutes through that without getting stuck in thorn bushes.”

“You saw all that?”

“Good binoculars.”

“Good eyes.”

“He’s trapped. This isn’t the sort of property he’d ever pick.”

“Maybe he didn’t pick it. Maybe Navrozov’s people chose it for him. It’s been abandoned for a year and a half.”

“I don’t think he’d ever let someone else make that kind of decision for him. He doesn’t like to rely on anyone.”

“That’s your assessment, based on a thirdhand evaluation in some old KGB file.”

I ignored that. “Did anyone check the utility bills on this place?”

“It’s been empty for eighteen months.”

“I don’t see any generators, do you? So how the hell does he get on the Internet?”

She shook her head slowly, considering.

“Or a satellite dish,” I said.

She continued to shake her head.

“Also, it’s sloppy,” I said.

“What’s sloppy?”

“Using his mobile phone. He shouldn’t be using it again.”

“He doesn’t know we have his phone number.”

“This guy never underestimates anyone. That’s why he’s still alive.”

I took out my cell phone and hit the speed-dial for Dorothy.

“Where are you, Heller?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Right. Where?”

“In the middle of what’s beginning to feel a lot like a diversion,” I said. “West of Nashua.”

“Nashua? That’s … something like forty miles south of the flight path area.”

“Can you send me the GPS coordinates?” I said.

“Done.”

“How large an area are you vectoring in on? I wonder if we can narrow down the possibilities. Look at terrain and available properties and—”

“I may have one more data point.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I’ve been combing NCIC for anything coming out of New Hampshire, and I came across a possible homicide.”

The National Crime Information Center was the computerized database of crimes maintained by the FBI and used by every police force and other law-enforcement agency in the country.

“How is that connected?”

“The code on the report was 908. A premeditated homicide of a police officer by means of a weapon.”

“And?”

“So a rookie police officer was found in his car at the bottom of a ravine in New Hampshire. At first it looked like he drove off the road. But the local police chief strongly suspects homicide.”

“Why?”

“Because of the victim’s injuries. According to the county coroner, they’re nothing like what you’d expect to see in a car accident. For one thing, all the internal organs in his chest cavity were destroyed. Like someone detonated a depth charge down there.”

My pulse started to race. “Where was this?”

“Within the flight path radius. Town of Pine Ridge, New Hampshire. Forty miles away, like I said.”





89.



“We’re in the wrong place,” I said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“His phone’s probably in there. But he’s not. This is a diversion, maybe even a setup.”

“How so?”

“He knows Navrozov is trying to shut him down. Maybe he wants to lure Navrozov’s guys to the wrong site to conceal his true whereabouts.” I took the handset from the dash-mounted radio, pressed the communicator button, and said, “Break—Zulu One, this is Victor Eight.”

“Nick, what are you doing?” Diana said.

“We need to stand down,” I said to her. “And head north.”

The SWAT team leader’s voice came over the speaker, crisp and loud: “Go ahead, Victor Eight.”

“Zulu One, I have some new intel I need to pass to you. What’s your location for a meet?”

Diana stared, aghast.

A pause. “Say again, Victor Eight?”

“Zulu One, I have urgent intel I need to pass on. Request a meet ASAP. How copy?”

“That’s a negative, Victor Eight,” the voice came back.

But I wasn’t going to give up. “Zulu One, urgently request meeting.”

The team leader’s voice came back immediately: “Received, Victor Eight, and that’s a negative. Get off the radio. Out.”

I shrugged, replaced the handset on the hook.

“Wow, Nick,” Diana said. “Just … wow.”

“What?”

“We’re about to launch an assault.”

“Which means that the FBI’s best people are tied up forty miles away while our guy finishes the job. Come on, let’s go.”

“I can’t just leave the scene, you know that. You don’t leave your position without permission.”

“They don’t need you here. You’re a spectator. This is a waste of your time and your talents.”

She looked agonized, wracked with indecision.

“Come on,” I said, opening the Suburban’s door.

“Heller!”

“Sorry,” I said, getting out.

“Nick, wait.”

I turned back.

“Don’t do it, Nick. Not by yourself.”

For a moment I looked at her: those amazing green eyes, the crazy hair. I felt something inside me tighten. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Don’t, Nick.”

I gently pushed the door closed.





90.



The walk back to the parking lot where I’d left my car, a mile away, was arduous and slow, along narrow country roads and then a heavily trafficked highway. The rain had become a downpour of biblical proportions. By the time I reached the Defender, my clothes were soaked through, even despite the rain slicker.

Then I cranked the heat all the way up and headed north toward Pine Ridge. Dusk rapidly turned into night, and still the rain didn’t let up.

Three hundred and twenty days a year the Land Rover was an overpowered beast, a curiosity, an M1 Abrams tank in the city streets. That night, the driving treacherous, it was king of the road. I passed countless beached cars, washed up along the side of the road, their drivers waiting out the storm.

About fifteen minutes after I’d set out, Diana called.

“They found a body.”

“Any ID?” I asked.

“Yes. The name is Kirill Chuzhoi. In the U.S. on a green card, residing in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Born in Moscow. He’s on the payroll of Roman Navrozov’s holding company, RosInvest.”

“And in his pocket you found a knockoff Nokia cell phone,” I said.

“Right. Probably Zhukov’s.”

“No, more likely his own phone, with Zhukov’s SIM card inside.”

“Huh?”

“He knew if he put his SIM card in the other guy’s phone, his phone number would pop up in your search and you’d think you finally found him. And he was right.”

“I don’t get it. Why not just swap phones?”

“Look, the guy’s smart. He didn’t want to take the chance that Chuzhoi’s phone had some sort of tracking software encoded in it. Now, can you send me a photo of the body?”

“Hold on,” she said. A minute or so later she got back on. “You should have it now.”

I put the call on hold, looked at my e-mail, and found the picture.

The bogus legal attaché from the Brazilian consulate. The one who’d killed the drug dealer at the FBI office in Boston. Roman Navrozov had probably sent him to make sure Mauricio Perreira didn’t give up any information that might tie him to Alexa’s abduction.

When I got back on the call, I told Diana, “Send this picture to Gordon Snyder, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because it ties Navrozov to the murder at FBI headquarters.”

“Got it. Will do.”

“Where are you now?” I said.

“Headed back to the staging area. You?”

“Twenty-two miles away. But the driving is really slow. Can you get the team redeployed up here?”

“Where?”

I read off the GPS coordinates.

“Is that the exact location where you think he is?”

“No. That’s the center of the town of Pine Ridge. Which covers thirty-five square miles.”

“What makes you so sure you have the right place?”

“I’m not sure. Dorothy’s cross-checking property records against Google Earth satellite views.”

“Looking for what?”

“Land that’s big enough and private enough. Multiple points of egress. Unoccupied, abandoned, foreclosed, whatever. Absentee owner goes to the top of the list.”

“What about utility bills?”

“We don’t have your resources. We’re sort of running blind here. So try to get SWAT up here as soon as possible.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “See you up there.”

“I hope so.”

A minute or so after I hung up, I had an idea. I reached Dorothy on her cell. “Can you get me the home number of the chief of police in Pine Ridge?” I said.





91.



“Oh, believe me,” the police chief’s wife said, “you’re not interrupting dinner. Walter’s out there sandbagging, and I don’t know when to expect him home. They’re all out there, the part-timers and every volunteer they can rustle up. It’s a mess. The river’s swollen and there’s mudslides just all over the place. Can I help you with anything?”

“Think he can use one more volunteer?” I said.

“Head out there.”

“What’s his cell phone?”

Chief Walter Nowitzki answered on the first ring.

“Chief,” I said, “I’m sorry to bother you during such a difficult time, but I’m calling about one of your officers—”

“That’s gonna have to wait,” he said. “I’m up to my neck in alligators here.”

“It’s about Jason Kent. He was on your force, reported as a homicide?”

“Who’s this?” he said sharply.

“FBI,” I said. “CJIS.”

He knew the jargon. Any cop would. CJIS was the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which maintained the central NCIC database of all reported crimes.

“How can I help you?”

“You reported this as a 908, a premeditated homicide on a police officer, and I was following up on that.”

“All right, I—you know, this is probably not the best time to talk, we’ve got some real bad flooding up here in New Hampshire and we’ve got people stuck in their cars and the river’s swelling its banks, and—”

“Understood,” I replied. “But this is a matter of some urgency. We’ve got a homicide in Massachusetts that seems to fit some of the basic parameters of the one you reported, so if you could answer just a couple of real quick questions…”

“Let me get into my vehicle so’s I can hear you. Can’t even hear myself think out here.”

I could hear him fumbling with the phone, then the door slam.

“Tell me what you wanna know,” he said.

“Do you have any suspects?”

“Suspects? No, sir. I’m sure it was someone from out of town.”

“Was he investigating a crime or anything of that sort before he was killed?”

“We don’t get a lot of crime in these parts. Mostly speeders, but they’re usually not from around here. He made some routine rounds, checked up on a noise complaint, but…”

“Did he make a traffic stop near where he was killed?”

“Not so far’s I know. That was my theory, but he didn’t call anything in.”

“No run-ins with anyone?”

“Not that he mentioned.”

“Any theory at all what might have happened to him?”

“No, sir. I wish I did. That kid—they didn’t make ’em any better than that one—” He seemed to swallow his words, and he went quiet for a moment.

“I’m very sorry.”

“If that kid met Satan himself he’d offer him the shirt off his back. Only bad thing I can say about him is he probably wasn’t cut out to be a cop. That’s on me. I shouldn’t never have hired him.”

“The day he was killed, what were his duties?”

“The usual. I mean, I asked him to look into a sort of, well, I call ’em nuisance calls. We got a fella called Dupuis who’s sort of a fussy sort, you know? Kept calling to complain about one of his neighbors, and I asked Jason to go check it out. And I’ll bet you Jason didn’t even—”

“What sort of complaint?”

“Oh, I dunno, Dupuis said he thought the guy down the road stole his dog, like anyone would want that mangy mutt, and he said the guy mighta been doing work without a permit.”

I was about to steer him into another line of questioning when I had a thought. “What kind of work?”

“Construction maybe? All I know is, there hasn’t been no one living on the Alderson farm for years, not since Ray Alderson’s wife died and he moved down to Delray Beach. I figured maybe Ray had a caretaker getting the place ready to sell, because they had your, whatcha call it, earth-moving equipment delivered a week or so back.”

I’d stopped listening. I was less than ten miles away. The rain was drumming the roof of the car and the hood, though it seemed finally to be letting up. The visibility wasn’t great. Ten miles in weather like this could take twenty minutes.

Then a couple of words jumped out at me.

Caretaker.

Moved down to Delray Beach.

That meant the owner didn’t live there.

“This caretaker,” I said. “Has he been there a while?”

“Well, of course, I’d have no way of knowing that. I’ve never met the fella. Foreigner, maybe, but they all are these days, right? Can’t get an American to do manual labor worth a damn. Far as I know he just showed up one day, but we keep to ourselves up here, try to stay out of other people’s business for the most part.”

“Do you have a street address?”

“We don’t really go by numbers so much around here. Ray’s farm is a nice piece of land, more than two hundred acres, but the main house is a wreck, you know? Doesn’t show well, which is why—”

“Where is it?” I cut in sharply.

“It’s on Goddard just past Hubbard Farm Road. You thinking the caretaker had something to do with this?”

“No,” I said quickly.

The last thing I wanted was for the local police chief to show up and start asking questions.

“Because I would be more than happy to take a run over there. Take the four-by-four—that’s a summer road, and it’s surely a swamp by now.”

“No hurry,” I said. “Next couple of days would be fine.”

“You wanna talk to the owner, I can probably rustle up Ray’s number down in Florida, give me a couple minutes.”

“Don’t bother. I know you’ve got your hands full. This is for the database. Routine data entry. It’s what I spend my life doing.”

“Well, it’s important work,” the police chief said kindly. “Somebody’s got to do it. I’m just glad it’s someone who speaks the language.”

I thanked him and I hung up before he could ask anything else.

“Dorothy,” I said fifteen seconds later. “I need directions.”





92.



By the time I drove into Pine Ridge, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The main highway looked recently built. Its asphalt surface was as smooth as glass, the road crowned, the drainage good. I passed Pine Ridge Quality Auto, which was nothing more than a glorified gas station, and then the Pine Ridge Memorial School, a modern brick structure built in the architectural style best described as Modern High School Ugly. Then a post office. At the first major intersection was a gas station on one side next to a twenty-four-hour convenience store that was dark. At the next light I took a left.

I passed farmhouses and modest split-level ranches built too close to the road. There were unmarked curb cuts, narrow lanes sliced through the woods, most of the roads dirt, a few paved. The only landmarks were mailboxes, most of them big, names painted on, occasionally press-on letters.

About three miles down a narrow tree-choked road I came to a roadblock. Hastily improvised: a couple of wooden sawhorses lined with red reflector discs.

This was Goddard Road. About two miles down this way was the Alderson farm.

If I’d guessed right, it was also where Alexa Marcus was buried in the ground.

And where I might find Dragomir Zhukov.

I nosed the car right up to the sawhorses, clicked the high beams.

The road was rutted, deep mud. Walking the two miles, especially down a road like this, would be tortuously slow, time I couldn’t afford.

I got out, dragged a sawhorse out of the way, got back in the Defender, and plowed ahead.

It was like driving across a marsh. The tires sank deep into the muck, and a curtain of water sprayed into the air. I kept it in third gear and drove at a steady pace. Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to be in too low a gear when moving through mud. Drive too slowly and you risk water seeping into the exhaust pipe and flooding the engine.

Gradually the road became a narrow dark lane choked with tall pines and birches. The only illumination came from my headlights, which skimmed over the river of mud.

The car performed like an amphibious vehicle, though, and soon I was halfway there.

Then the tires sank in a few more inches and I was finally stuck.

A mile to go.

I knew better than to rev it. Instead, I lifted my foot off the accelerator pedal, gave it some gas.

And I was still stuck.

A quick burst of gas, just a tap of the pedal, and it started rocking back and forth, and after a few minutes of this the car climbed out of the gulley and back through the brown soup.

Then my high beams lit up a rusty metal mailbox that said ALDERSON.

An absentee owner, a caretaker recently arrived. Earth-moving equipment: Might that include a backhoe?

Everything was pure speculation at this point.

But I had no other possibilities.