Mulbry settled for a sardonic smile. “Some folks in Washington’ll take him out to the woodshed on the QT. Y’all might appreciate this: I had a thought last night: Compared with Mike Hill, Stefan Merck was the saner of the two. More interesting too. I’ll tell you, I’d have a beer with that fellow. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, what exactly am I doing here?”
The interior of the van was hot and getting hotter, with the full-on sun taxing the lethargic AC. Mulbry dried his brow yet again. “Want to hear a story? You know that years ago CIA technical services tried to build a fake dragonfly? It’s in the museum at Langley. It’s quite something. A work of art. Equipped with an early miniature video camera, an audio system, a flight mechanism that was revolutionary for the time. And guess what? It didn’t work worth squat. The least headwind would send it all over the landscape. But a few years later, the inspiration behind those dragonflies gave us drones. S’all about refinement. Story of life.
“Now, you could say that the AIS is an attempt to build a dragonfly. The Composer project would have worked pretty well. Except for one thing.”
“A headwind.”
“Exactly! And that’d be you and Detective Sachs. I’ll say—this isn’t flattery—not many people could have figured out the story we’d put together, the musical kidnapper and all.”
Not many? Rhyme thought.
“When you raided Charlotte’s home, you explained how you figured it all out.” A big grin. “We were listening, sure.”
Rhyme tipped his head.
“Impressive, Lincoln, Amelia. And hearing you—how you figured out the plan—I got myself an idea.”
“Your dragonfly molting into a drone.”
“I like that. So. In the world of intelligence gathering, there’s HUMINT—that’s info from people, assets on the ground. Then there’re satellites, computer hacking, wiretapping and video surveillance. That’s signals and electronic intelligence. SIGINT, ELINT. But until you took down our dragonfly, Lincoln, it never occurred to me how much intelligence we might learn from…evidence. Forensic evidence.”
“Really?”
“Oh, we have teams we use, or borrow the Bureau’s or army’s or somebody’s. But it’s usually after the fact, when an op goes bad. Get fingerprints or blast signatures or handwriting. We don’t use forensic investigation…”
Please don’t say proactively.
“…proactively. The way you analyze evidence, it’s like it talks to you.”
Sachs laughed, a clear, ringing sound. “Rhyme, I think he wants to hire us.”
Mulbry’s pale face betrayed that this was exactly what he was suggesting. “Remember, we’re ‘Alternative’ intelligence gathering. What’s more alternative than a forensic team running an espionage op? You consult for the NYPD. Why not for us? You’ve broken the international barrier. Here you are—in Italia! We have private jets too. They’re government, so no liquor cabinets. But you can BYOB. Not against the rules. Or not against any rules anyone cares about.”
Mulbry’s eyes actually shone. “And it occurred to me: What a great cover you’d have! A fabled forensic scientist and his associate. A professor, no less. Yeah, I’ll admit I looked you up, Lincoln. Imagine how it would work: You’re in Europe assisting local officers in an intractable crime, a serial killer, a cult leader, a master money launderer. Or you’re in Singapore to lecture at the criminal justice institute on the latest developments in crime scene techniques. And, in your spare time, you look into whether Natasha Ivanovich has been listening in on conversations she shouldn’t, naughty girl. Or Park Jung went shopping for a teeny piece of nuclear trigger he’s not supposed to have.”
Mulbry eased a glance toward Sachs. “There’d be the issue of your being on the payroll of the NYPD. But that’s not insurmountable. They have liaison offices overseas, you know. Or maybe a leave of absence. It’s all negotiable.”
If Rhyme’s torso had been sensate, he suspected he would have been feeling a stirring. Certainly, he was aware that his pulse had increased; this he knew from the rhythm in his temples. Not patriotism, which was a subcategory of sentimentality, an emotion he bluntly rejected. No, what stirred him was the possibility of a whole new set of challenges.
A thought occurred. He said, “EVIDINT.”
“Evidence intelligence.” Mulbry’s lower lip extended and he nodded. “Nice.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, though,” Rhyme muttered. “We’re not closing the deal yet.”
A nod from Mulbry. “Sure, sure. But say what, just for the fun of it, let me run this by you. Of course, just as an example.” The words seemed spontaneous but Rhyme guessed the dangle had been prepared ahead of time, tied like a fly with painstaking care by a fisherman intent on catching a particularly elusive and astute bass.
“Go ahead.”
“We have intel that someone connected with the World Criminal Court in The Hague has been targeted for assassination. Not immediately but in the next month. There’s a Prague connection. Unfortunately, at this point we have mostly SIGINT—wiretaps and emails, all of which is as vague as the narrator in a Viagra ad. Our people have only one bit of physical evidence related to the plot.”
Rhyme lifted an eyebrow.
“A gargoyle’s head.”
“Gargoyle.”
“Apparently a souvenir from, well, wherever one buys gargoyle head souvenirs. It’s gray. Plastic. Gargoyley.”
“And this is evidence why?” Sachs asked.
“We still use dead drops. A public location where one asset leaves a message for another, usually—”
Sachs said, “I’ve seen the Bourne movies.”
“I haven’t,” Rhyme said. “But I get the idea.”
“We received intel that the bad guys had a dead drop in the square by the astronomical clock in Prague, the famous one. We started surveillance.”
“’Round the clock?” Sachs asked, a faint smile. Rhyme nodded to acknowledge the pun.
Smiling too, Mulbry said, “That one did make the rounds. Anyway, after two days, a man in hat and sunglasses walked past the location and left the gargoyle on a windowsill, the dead drop. It meant something—a go-ahead, we assume. We’re still trying to find out more.”
“Anyone come by and do something with the gargoyle?”
“Some kids, teen kids, saw it and stole it. But we moved in and got it from them.” Mulbry shrugged. “We could show it to you if you like. Maybe you could find something.”
“When was this?”
“About a week ago.”
Rhyme scoffed, “Too late, too late. All the important evidence is long gone.”
“Only the asset and the boy who stole it touched the thing. We couldn’t find any note or code inside. The presence of the gargoyle was a message in itself. Like a go-ahead for a prearranged meeting. So, we thought you could take a look at it and—”
“No point.”
“It’s preserved in plastic. Our people wore gloves. And the dead drop—the windowsill—hasn’t been touched. We’ve been monitoring it.”
“The dead drop’s not a scene. That’s a non-scene. There’s another one, one that would have been important if you’d moved quickly.”