Threat Level Black af-2 Page 16

  “I don’t know, really.”

  “We’ll arrange for a flight back to the States,” said the ambassador, gently touching Howe’s arm.

  “Actually, I have my own plane to look after,” said Howe. “What I need is a ride back to the airport. The S-37 is an NADT asset.”

  “Yes, of course,” said the ambassador. “You’ve done a very good job, Colonel,” he added. “A very good job.”

  Howe nodded, though he didn’t agree.

  * * *

  It was only in the car on the way back to the airport that Howe realized what he’d said — or rather, what he’d thought.

  His asset. He wanted the NADT job. Not for the money or the power, but because it was where he belonged. He had the ability to do it, and the will to do it right.

  And it was his duty to do it. Or at least to try.

  Chapter 6

  Blitz could hear the buzz of the press corps in the East Room of the White House down the hall. The President stood next to Blitz, going over the most recent bulletins and handing each page back as he did. The press conference was already running about three minutes late, but that made it early by President D’Amici’s standards.

  The President’s press adviser had suggested something less formal, perhaps remarks off-the-cuff as he boarded Marine One, the helicopter that flew him around the country. But the President sensed this was a historical moment, and he wanted to use the White House setting to emphasize not only its importance but the fact that America was in control of the situation.

  And it was. Almost.

  The North Korean army had collapsed. While on paper it was one of the most ferocious fighting forces in the world, the reality had proven considerably different. As American and Korean troops came across the border following the missile launches and artillery strikes, most of the soldiers had fled. Roughly a dozen strongholds remained in North Korean hands, as did the capital and the area close to the Chinese border. But not even the most optimistic Pentagon scenario envisioned such a swift collapse. The remaining units were dangerous, surely, but negotiations were already under way with most of them for a peaceful surrender. The real problem now was to plan for the peace.

  The President handed Blitz the last page, then checked his hair in a mirror held by one of his aides.

  “Last thoughts?” the President asked Blitz.

  “Only that we can’t trust the Chinese.”

  “Agreed. But they seem to have been taken by surprise.”

  “That’s why we can’t trust them.”

  The Chinese had moved two fresh divisions to the border area, saying that they were to help with refugees. There were refugees; nonetheless, the troops and China in general had to be watched very carefully. The President planned on mentioning their involvement as peace brokers in the speech, praising their cooperation and mentioning his three phone calls with the country’s leaders.

  “What was the latest with Colonel Howe and the E-bomb plot?” asked the President as one of his aides appeared in the hall, gesturing that all was ready.

  “Still trying to figure out who we helped escape,” said Blitz. “The ambassador thinks it was one of Kim Jong Il’s sons.”

  “A very good guess.”

  “I think it’s Paektu,” said Blitz, meaning the number two man in the security police agency, Hwang Paektu Jang. “He’s the sort who would think this up.”

  “Hopefully we’ll find him soon.”

  Blitz didn’t answer. With that well-thought-out a plot, he felt it unlikely.

  * * *

  The national security advisor listened to the President’s opening remarks from the hallway. He had to give D’Amici credit: The President managed to communicate his personal vision in a speech meant for the masses. Blitz knew that D’Amici’s model for the presidency was Eisenhower, but in his ability to speak he was closer to Reagan, though D’Amici lacked the folksy, casual touch Reagan could muster without any apparent effort.

  Historically, however, D’Amici’s vision seemed more like a blend of Teddy Roosevelt with some Woodrow Wilson thrown in, assuming one could remove some of the naiveté from Wilson ’s vision of world peace.

  That was probably a bum rap on Wilson, Blitz thought; Wilson ’s private papers showed he was hardly naive, and while he’d been snookered in Europe, it would have been difficult if not impossible to get the French to do the right thing after the bloodbath of World War I anyway.

  And to be honest, it only became apparent what the right thing was long after that indecisive war.

  There were no real parallels, Blitz thought as the President summed up and started taking questions. They were in completely new territory.

  Someone grabbed Blitz’s shoulder. He turned around and found the press secretary, who seemed nearly out of breath.

  “The AP is reporting that P’yongyang has been declared an open city,” he told Blitz. “The war is over.”

  “Now comes the hard part,” said Blitz, walking out to tell the President personally.

  Chapter 7

  “Atropine mixed with oximes. Classic antidote for sarin gas,” said Macklin.

  “But no trace of sarin in the basement on anything,” said Kowalski.

  “Maybe they were neat,” said Fisher.

  “Or maybe they never brought it there,” said Macklin.

  “No, they must have,” said Fisher. “The landlady smelled something.”

  “Sarin would have made her pretty sick,” said Kowalski. He got up from the table and began pacing at the back of the room.

  “She smelled the bleach, most likely,” said Fisher. “He used it to clean up any traces of the chemicals.”

  “That’s going pretty far,” said Kowalski. “Not to mention that there might have been a reaction.”

  “But there wasn’t,” said Fisher.

  “We’ve looked at his phone records,” said Macklin. “He only made a few calls.”

  Fisher leaned his head back on the chair. Sarin gas — of which there was as yet no real evidence — represented a serious left turn in the investigation. But left turns were often useful. If you kept turning right, you would end up in the same place you started.

  “The landlady’s phone — did you check that?” he asked.

  “The landlady?”

  “Maybe he cut into her line,” said Fisher. “There’s probably some sort of connection to the Internet, something along those lines.”

  “Subpoenaing the landlady’s records isn’t going to make us look very good,” said Macklin.

  “She’ll give them voluntarily,” said Fisher. “Just tell her we’re looking for a billing error and rave about her sauce.”

  Macklin frowned.

  “The problem is, we’re not getting any closer to the E-bomb,” said Kowalski. “This is just a diversion.”

  “Maybe there is no E-bomb,” said Macklin. “That’s the latest thinking from the CIA.”

  “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Kowalski. “They’re covering their butts because they blew it so badly on Korea. They didn’t realize the country was going to collapse the way it did.”

  “What do you think, Andy?” asked Macklin. “Connected to the E-bomb case, or a red herring?”

  “Definitely not a red herring,” said Fisher.

  “So, what is it?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “We got to break this,” said Macklin.

  “I agree,” said Kowalski.

  “I guess it’s time for desperate measures,” said Fisher.

  “What are they?” asked Macklin as he got up out of his chair.

  “Time to get a full night’s sleep,” said Fisher.

  * * *

  As a general rule, sleep didn’t particularly agree with Fisher, nor had it ever led directly to any particular insight, much less helped solve a case. But during the eight hours he stayed away, the others followed up a number of possible leads, including Mrs. DeGarmo’s phone bills.

  There w
ere calls to an Internet provider, and Macklin was now following up with a subpoena to see if they could come up with data on the account. The intelligence wizards had their fingers dancing on the computer keyboards, trying to pull up data from a myriad of sources.

  Fisher stuck to the old-fashioned methods. He signed out the soil bag — just the bag, not the dirt — from one of the heated garages that was serving as the task force’s evidence locker. Then he took Metro North to Grand Central and hopped the subway to Queens, walking to the apartment from Grand Street before exploring the neighborhood back around Steinway. It took three tries before he found what he was looking for: a hardware store that sold Agfarma potting soil.

  “I’m looking for someone who bought a bag of potting soil probably about two months back,” said Fisher. The store owner listened as he described Faud Daraghmeh, Mrs. DeGarmo’s tenant.

  The store owner shrugged, as Fisher knew he would.

  “This guy would have bought a whole bunch of Clorox bottles, probably at the same time,” the FBI agent told him.

  “Like a dozen?”

  “About that,” said Fisher.

  “That I remember. He cleaned me out.”

  “How did he carry them?”

  “Had one of those two-wheel folding carts. You know the kind? Made two trips.”

  “You wouldn’t have a name, would you?”

  “You don’t have to give a name to buy bleach.”

  “Maybe he used a credit card,” suggested Fisher.

  The man went to his computer. His inventory program allowed him to search transactions, and he was able to come up with the date of the purchase: February 23. But apparently he had paid cash.

  “There’s a couple of other times — twice, actually — when someone bought a lot of bleach,” said the store owner. “One of them is a credit card. Both in February.”

  Fisher took the account number and the dates. There was nothing to tie the credit card transaction to Faud, however, which meant getting a subpoena to check that credit card account was highly unlikely. He walked back to the apartment, hoping inspiration would strike him somewhere on the way.

  As usual, it didn’t.

  Mrs. DeGarmo had gone to stay with her granddaughter on Long Island. Fisher went first to the detail watching the house from a car across the street and asked for the key and a volunteer.

  “Volunteer for what?”

  “I want to look for a receipt in some bags,” he told them.

  The other detective, who obviously hadn’t seen Mrs. DeGarmo’s pantry, got out of the car.

  “Jesus,” said the man when he opened the pantry door. “You sure there’s not a body in here?”

  “If there is, it’s not our case,” said Fisher. He went upstairs and was still studying Faud’s closets when the detective came up with a collection of receipts. Unfortunately, they didn’t include any of the transactions involving bleach.

  But there was one with the same credit card number.

  “Thin,” said Macklin when Fisher showed it to him and laid out the logic.

  “Come on. I’ve built whole cases out of weaker links. All we need here is a subpoena.”

  “I don’t know, Andy. You sure this isn’t the landlady’s credit card?”

  Fisher had naturally checked that first but let the potential slight to his common sense pass without comment.

  “Your theory is that he used the credit card twice?” said Macklin.

  “My theory is he used it more than twice,” said Fisher. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth checking.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, the credit card had only been used four other times: once more at the hardware store to buy twenty-eight dollars’ worth of mouse poison, once at a nearby florist to buy a forty-eight-dollar bouquet, and twice for cash advances at an ATM.

  Much more interestingly, the account had been stopped as the result of an investigation into identity theft by the FBI.

  Fisher got a list of other account numbers and transactions and gave it to Macklin, who passed it over to the task force members tracking down the other credit card data. If time allowed, they’d try and run down everyone who had used a phony card.

  That looked to be quite some time. There were over a thousand accounts.

  “Maybe if we just look at the purchases in New York City,” suggested Fisher.

  “That’s still three hundred cards,” said Macklin. “We’ll check them all if we have to, but it’s going to take forever.”

  Macklin’s office at the former drug dealers’ home had been one of the bedrooms. It was more than big, probably twice the size of Hunter’s back at FBI headquarters. The only problem was that the drug lords who’d owned the place had, for reasons best guessed at, covered the ceiling with mirrored panels, and Macklin hadn’t gotten around to taking them down. It was difficult to resist the temptation to watch Macklin’s reflection as he spoke; he’d begun to develop a bald spot, and it wrinkled whenever he opened his mouth.

  Fisher saw the reflection of his own watch in the mirror. It was after four o’clock.

  “I have to get going,” he said.

  “Where to?” asked Macklin.

  “Buy some flowers.”

  * * *

  Steve’s Florist was located four blocks from Mrs. DeGarmo’s building in a short row of buildings that seemed to be waiting for a demolition crew. The stores themselves, however, seemed busy, and inside the florist shop Fisher found himself at the back of a chaotic line. He drifted toward the back, watching the two clerks as they checked people out and occasionally dashed from the register to the refrigerated area where the flowers were kept. One was a middle-aged woman with bright orange hair and a miniskirt that stopped well above the thigh; the other was a twenty-something male whose white button-down shirt failed to hide a torso’s worth of tattoos. A third man was working in the back, loading up a van for deliveries; he left before Fisher got a look at him.

  Fisher got the middle-aged woman.

  “So, is Steve around?” Fisher asked.

  “Steve?”

  “The owner. It’s Steve’s Florist?”

  “There is no Steve,” said the woman. “The owner’s name is Rose. She’s only in Monday mornings. I’m the manager.”

  Explaining that he was with the FBI, Fisher laid a copy of the receipt and an artist’s sketch of Faud on the counter. The information meant about as much to them as Macklin’s pool on the Final Four meant to Fisher.

  “He lived a couple of blocks away,” said Fisher.

  “There are a lot of Arab men in the neighborhood,” said the woman, whose name tag read Mira. There was a note of challenge in her voice, as if she expected Fisher to flay his suspect when he caught him.

  He wasn’t normally the flaying type, but nonetheless liked to keep his options open.

  “I’m not really looking for other Arab men,” Fisher told her. “Just him.”

  “Maybe Harry knows him,” said the young man. His name tag said his name was Pietro, though the kid looked Scandinavian, even with his tattoos.

  “Who’s Harry?” asked Fisher.

  “Works here on Sundays,” said Pietro. He took the receipt and looked at it. “Yup: Look. This was a Sunday.”

  “Harry around?” Fisher said.

  “It’s not Sunday,” said Mira.

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirty-five, forty,” said Pietro.

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Spageas or something like that,” said Pietro. “Something Greek.”

  That narrowed it down to three-quarters of the residents of Astoria.

  “You have an address or a phone number for him?”

  Mira shook her head. Pietro just shrugged. Fisher rubbed his eyes, trying to focus on the paper tacked to the bulletin board behind the counter. But he was standing too far away to see if Harry’s name was listed there.

  “So, what would my friend have bought for $48.50?” asked Fisher.

 
; Pietro thought it was probably a small grave bouquet, though the price didn’t quite work out right. Mira had no opinion.

  “If you see Faud again,” said Fisher finally, “have him call me.” He slid a business card with a special sat phone number onto the counter, even though he was pretty sure it would be thrown into the garbage after he left.

  He was wrong about that. Mira ripped it in half before he made it to the door.

  Chapter 8

  The first thing Howe did when he got back to the D.C. area was check into an inexpensive hotel and sleep.

  When he woke up eight hours later, it was a little past four A.M. He decided he would call Blitz and leave a message on his voice mail telling him that he had changed his mind and that, if the job was still open at NADT, he wanted it.

  Much to his surprise, Blitz picked up the phone himself.

  “Dr. Blitz?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Bill Howe.”

  “Colonel. How are you? Are you all right?” Blitz’s voice was tired and a little hoarse.

  “Yes, sir. A little, uh, embarrassed.”

  “Nonsense. We’re the ones who messed up: There should have been more people at the airport. Due to the circumstances in Korea — well, I don’t want to make excuses.”

  “Is that job at NADT still open?”

  Blitz didn’t answer.

  It’s all right, Howe thought to himself. My own fault.

  “It absolutely is,” said Blitz, his words practically gushing. “You’ve changed your mind?”

  “If that’s acceptable.”

  “Of course it is. That’s great. That’s great. Where are you?”

  “Actually, I’m not far from Andrews, in a motel.”

  “Can you come over to my office? There are a couple of hurdles — just little egos to gratify, really. But believe me, this is great. Really, really great.”

  “I’ll be over as soon as I shave, sir.”

  * * *

  If he’d been less tired, Blitz might have jumped up and done a little war whoop when he hung up the phone. Instead he merely got up and went over to the credenza where he had placed his coffee earlier. A full NSC meeting had been scheduled for seven A.M., and he needed to have a good handle on his recommendations for an interim North Korean government by then. Iraq stood as an important example: You had to get way out ahead of the curve on this, take advantage of the initial confusion and elation, and make the hard choices. The public would follow.