“Is this a threat?”
“Of course not, but everyone has to pay to play. No one gets something for nothing.”
A pause, then the second man said, “I don’t make these decisions. I’ll have to get back to you.”
Another pause, longer, then the first speaker said, so quickly that he was even harder to understand, “You work with us and we work with you. You don’t want to work with us, just remember we gave you [unclear—maybe ‘a chance’].”
That was the end of the file.
I looked at Aliana. “Was that Sebastian?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know who either of them was.”
“Would you know Nabiyev’s voice?” I asked.
“He has a very heavy accent, Russian, Uzbeki, whatever,” Tyler said. “And his voice is deeper.”
“Where could this have taken place? Is there some project your engineering firm is trying to bid on?”
“I don’t know either of those guys,” Tyler said sharply. “And my firm doesn’t do business that way, not with threats. There’s plenty of work for construction engineers in this city. We don’t get one project, we go after a different one.”
“Any idea where the original of the recording is?” I asked.
“It’s not in this room—it would be on a thumb drive, likely, not in the Cloud,” Tyler said. “Otherwise, Sebastian wouldn’t have been in here early to upload it. But after I heard it, I shut this office. Aliana and I scoured the place. While she was waiting for you, I checked the contents of all the drives we found.”
He pointed at a carton that held a good thirty or more USB drives. “I discovered that some of our architects and engineers are too bored—I saw a staggering amount of porn as well as video games—but not the audio file.”
It hadn’t been in the gym bag he’d left in his locker, so either someone had taken it from the room, or Sebastian had been carrying it when he disappeared. Or it had been taken by the person who ransacked his and Viola’s apartment last week.
Uncle Jerry had promised if Sebastian did something difficult for him, he’d make sure the debt was forgiven. Fugher and his handlers hadn’t asked Sebastian to deliver the threat, but they must have had some assignment connected with the threat, otherwise why had he recorded it? Or had the assignment been to record the conversation so that someone—Fugher? Nabiyev?—could use it for blackmail?
“I can’t figure out background noise on this,” I said, listening to the recording again. “Was Sebastian in the room with a device, or did he plant a bug, or was he eavesdropping?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was standing on his head juggling beer bottles while he recorded it.” Tyler’s expression was fierce. “He’s a punk. As of this morning, he is barred from this job site. If he’s smart, he will find a new line of work, because I will make sure no one hires him again as an engineer.”
I had an uneasy feeling that Sebastian wasn’t ever going to work at anything again, but I only said, “It would help to know what project they’re talking about, even if it isn’t one that your firm, or the contract firm Sebastian works for, cares about.”
Tyler said, “This is a needle in a haystack, Warshawski. Too many projects, too many building and zoning permits in play all over the Metro area.”
He turned to Aliana. “Make a copy of the file for Warshawski. Put another on a thumb drive for me and then delete it from the hard drive. And then we’d better stop wasting the Virejas project’s money and get back to work.”
While Aliana uploaded the recording to a couple of clean drives, Tyler unlocked the door. Angry—and vocal—young architects and engineers crowded into the room.
“Easy, boys and girls,” Tyler said. “Aliana discovered a security breach in one of our machines this morning. We called in this woman here to try to sort it out. We’re good to go now, so let’s get going.”
I put the drive into my hip pocket. All the way down to the ground, all the way across the pockmarked dusty ground, I felt as though the device were burning through my jeans into my butt. I drove quickly to my office, keeping a jittery eye out for tails, and got the file uploaded to the Mac as soon as I was in the door. It wasn’t until I’d stored it both in my backup drives and in the Cloud that I finally stopped to think.
Pay to play. That is the phrase that defines Illinois politics. The speaker was threatening to block permits for some kind of project. The recording was unclear, but the word might have been “zoning” or “building.”