“Do you think I give a shit what you think of me?” Noah asked him. “I only need one of you to deliver my message, so my question still remains the same. Tell me where to find Nicolaich and I let you walk away from here. You can disappear, go somewhere he’ll never find you. Don’t tell me and one of you dies today. You have thirty seconds to decide.”
The two men stared at each other for several seconds, and then the other man turned to Noah. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “In our business, you never talk—and if you do, you make sure there’s nobody left who can snitch on you for doing it. You want to know where the Russian is?” He hooked a thumb at Morabito. “You kill this piece of crap and I’ll tell you.”
Morabito’s eyes went wide as he looked at his companion, and then even wider when he saw Noah’s gun swing toward his face. It was the last thing he ever saw, because both of his eyes imploded as the hollow-point slug passed between them and blew out the back of his head.
The gun instantly went back to the other man. “Done,” Noah said. “Where is Nicolaich?”
The man looked down at the corpse beside him for a second or two, then looked up at Noah. “I can’t give you his exact location because he keeps it secret, only a few people know it, but I can tell you how to find him tomorrow. He’s got this habit, see? Every Wednesday, dead on 11 o’clock in the morning, he calls his daughter in Russia so he can talk to his grandson. The kid’s only like seven or eight, and the old man is crazy about him. Doesn’t matter where he is or what he’s doing, he’ll drop it to make that call.”
Noah glanced at Moose. “Get Neil over here,” he said. Moose nodded and jogged toward the car as Noah turned back to his informant. “What’s your name?”
“Tom Bridger,” the man said. “I don’t know the daughter’s number, but I’m pretty sure you can get it. He always talks to the kid for half an hour, should give you plenty of time to run a trace and get a location, right?”
Sarah drove the car closer while Moose jogged back to Noah, and Neil slid out of the backseat when they got there. He kept his machine pistol pointed at Bridger as he approached, and avoided looking down at the corpse. “Yeah, Boss?”
“I just found out that Nicolaich calls his daughter in Russia every Wednesday morning. How hard would it be for you to track down her number and trace the call back to Nicolaich when he makes it?”
Neil snorted. “I’m sure we can get her number from NSA,” he said. “There’s a half-dozen ways I can tap her line, then when he calls it I just start tracing back. The problem could be if he uses a lot of reroutes. If it takes too long to get back to his originating phone, he’ll be off the line before I get a location.”
“Like I said,” Bridger put in, “he always talks to the kid for at least a half hour.”
Neil shrugged. “Half an hour should be plenty, but it still boils down to how many different forwarding numbers he runs it through. I’d say the odds are pretty good. To stay hidden in a half-hour phone call, he’d have to bounce the call dozens of times. It’s not like you see in the movies, where you have to keep somebody talking for so many minutes to trace a call. Nowadays it’s pretty much instantaneous, but each time the call is forwarded, you have to punch in another whole trace. Figure each one takes maybe twenty seconds to set up, he’d have to bounce through ninety different phones to make sure I couldn’t track him back to the phone he’s using. If it’s a landline, the phone company will have an address for it that I can hack, and a cell phone will give me its GPS location.” He grinned. “I think we can do this, Boss.”
Noah nodded thoughtfully, then looked back at Bridger. “Of course, that’s assuming you’re telling me the truth. Then the only problem that remains is how to be sure you don’t warn him that I’m going to be tracing that call.”
Bridger smiled. “I look stupid to you? If I go back to him now, after these guys are dead, he’s gonna naturally figure I gave up something and put a bullet in my head. The only hope I’ve got of staying alive now is to disappear as fast as I can. You ain’t gotta worry about me saying anything.”
“I know,” Noah said as he squeezed the trigger. The bullet took Bridger’s left eye, and most of the left side of his head seemed to explode out the back. His body stood for almost three seconds more before it fell.
“Jesus!” Neil said, his eyes wide and his face pale. “Jesus, Boss! He told you what you wanted to know! You said you wouldn’t kill him if he told you what you wanted to know!”
“Chill out, Neil,” Moose said. “The guy would probably have gone straight back to Nicolaich, and even if he tried to run, Nicolaich would catch him before he could get out of town. Noah did exactly what he had to do.”
“Get into the car,” Noah said. “Let’s get back to the hotel and get you started on whatever you have to do to catch and trace that call. If Bridger was telling the truth, we’ve got one possible shot at getting Nicolaich before he can get Molly or me. We can’t afford to miss the chance, even if it’s just a long shot.”