Buried Secrets (19 page)

“He’s probably still in the building,” Diana said. “On his way out.”

“Check the tie,” I said. “I doubt it’s from Brooks Brothers.”

46.

I raced down the five flights of stairs to Cambridge Street, hoping I’d catch the Brazilian on his way out, but by the time I reached the street, there was no sign of him. There were at least a dozen ways he could have gone. I circled back to the lobby, hoping that he’d taken one of the glacially slow elevators, but he didn’t appear. I took the stairs down to the parking garage underneath One Center Plaza, but once I got down there I saw it was hopeless, far too big and mazelike. And since he’d obviously come here to kill a man in FBI custody, he must have planned his getaway in advance.

I’d failed at catching the man who’d just snuffed out my only lead to Alexa Marcus.

Diana greeted me in the sixth-floor lobby and didn’t even ask. “You never had a chance,” she said.

A loud, blatting alarm was sounding throughout the floor, clogging the aisles with a lot of confused FBI agents and clerical staff who didn’t know what they were supposed to do. Outside the interview room where Perreira had been detained, a small crowd had gathered. FBI crime-scene techs were already at work inside, gathering prints and hair and fiber. They’d probably never had to travel such a short distance to do a job. A couple of important-looking men and women in business suits stood outside the threshold of the room in tense conversation.

“You were wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“The tie. It
was
Brooks Brothers.”

“My bad.”

“Only it had something like fishing line stitched inside.”

“Probably eighty-pound high-tensile-strength, braided line. It makes a very effective garrote. Works like a cheese slicer. He could easily have decapitated Perreira if he chose to, only he probably didn’t want to get arterial blood all over his expensive suit.” She looked horrified, said nothing.

“Who cleared him in?” I said.

“See, that’s the problem. There
is
no clearance procedure. Everyone assumed someone else had vetted him. He presented ID at the desk, claiming to be Cláudio Barboza from the Brazilian consulate, and who’s going to question him?”

“Someone should call the consulate to check whether there’s anyone there with that name.”

“I just did.”

“And?”

“They don’t even have a legal attaché in Boston.”

I just groaned. “It’s probably too much to expect that the guy left any prints.”

“Didn’t you notice those very expensive-looking black lambskin gloves he wore?”

“No,” I admitted. “But at least you guys have surveillance video.”

“That we do,” she said. “Cameras all over the place.”

“Except in the interview room, where it might have done us some good.”

“The video’s not going to tell us anything we don’t know.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope you have better facial recognition than the Pentagon had when I was there. Which was crap.” People sometimes forgot that facial
recognition
isn’t the same as facial
identification
. It works by matching a face with a photo of someone who’s already been identified. Unless you had a good high-resolution image to match it against, the software couldn’t tell the difference between Lillian Hellman and Scarlett Johansson.

“No better. The guy’s obviously a pro. He wouldn’t have been sloppy enough to show his face here unless he felt secure we wouldn’t catch him.”

“Right,” I said. “He knew he’d have no problem getting in—or out. So why was that?” She shrugged. “Way above my pay grade.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone being killed in FBI custody before—
inside
an FBI field office?”

“Never.”

“A couple of guys break into my loft to put a local intercept on my Internet. The SWAT

team shows up in Medford just minutes after I do. They grab a key witness, who’s later murdered in a secure interview room within FBI headquarters. Obviously someone didn’t want me talking to Perreira.”

“Don’t tell me you’re accusing Gordon Snyder.”

“I’d happily blame Gordon Snyder for the BP oil spill, cancer, and global warming if I could. But not this. He’s too obsessed with bringing Marshall Marcus down.” She smiled. “Exactly.”

“But it’s someone in the government. Someone at a high level. Someone who doesn’t want me finding out who kidnapped Alexa.”

“Come on, Nico. That’s conspiracy theory stuff.”

“As the saying goes, not every conspiracy is a theory.”

“I guess that means you don’t trust me either.”

“I trust you absolutely. Totally. Without reservation. I just need to keep in mind that anything I tell you might end up in Gordon Snyder’s in-box.” She looked wounded. “So you
don’t
trust me?”

“Put it this way: If you learned something germane to your investigation and you
didn’t
pass it along to him, you wouldn’t be doing your job, would you?” After a moment, she nodded slowly. “True.”

“So you see, I’d never lie to you, but I can’t tell you everything.”

“Okay. Fair enough. So if someone’s really trying to stop you from finding Alexa, what’s the reason?”

I shrugged. “No idea. But I feel like they’re sending me a message.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m on the right track.”

47.

My old friend George Devlin—Romeo, as we called him in the Special Forces—was the handsomest man you ever saw.

Not only was he the best-looking, most popular guy in his high school class, as well as the class president, but he was also the star of the school’s hockey team. In a hockey-crazed town like Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was saying something. He had a great voice too and starred in his high school musical senior year. He was a whiz at computers and an avid gamer.

He could have done anything, but the Devlins had no money to send him to college, so he enlisted in the army. There he qualified for the Special Forces, of course, because he was just that kind of guy. After some specialized computer training he was made a communications sergeant. That’s how I first got to know George: He was the comms sergeant in my detachment. I don’t know who first came up with the nickname “Romeo,” but it stuck.

After he was wounded in Afghanistan, and his VA therapy ended, however, he told us to stop calling him Romeo and start calling him George.

I MET him in the enormous white RV, bristling with antennas, that served as his combination home and mobile office. He’d parked it in an underground garage in a Holiday Inn in Dedham. That was typical for him. He preferred to meet in out-of-the-way locations. He seemed to live his life on the lam. As if someone were out to get him.

I opened the van door and entered the dimly lit interior.

“Heller.” His voice came out of the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could see him sitting on a stool, his back to me, before a bank of computer monitors and such.

“Hey, George. Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

“I take it the GPS tracker was successful.”

“Absolutely. It was brilliant. Thank you.”

“Next time please remember to check your e-mail.”

I nodded, held out the Nokia cell phone I’d taken from Mauricio’s apartment. He swiveled and turned his face toward me.

What was left of his face.

I’d never gotten used to seeing it, so each time it gave me a jolt. It was a horrible welter of ropy scar tissue, some strands paste-white, others an inflamed red. He had nostrils and a slash of a mouth, and eyelids the army surgeons had crafted from patches of skin taken from his inner thigh. The stitch marks were still prominent.

Fortunately, Devlin was able to breathe without too much pain now. He was able to see out of one eye.

But he was not easy to look at. He’d become a monster. I suppose there was some sort of irony in the fact that his physical appearance, which had defined him for so long, defined him still.

“I assume you know how to retrieve numbers from the call log,” he said. He spoke in a raspy whisper, his vocal cords ruined, and his mouth often made a wet clicking noise, the sound of tissue in the wrong place.

“Even I know how to do that.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“The only phone number on here, dialed or retrieved, is for a mobile phone. That’s probably his contact—whoever hired him to abduct the girl. If anyone can locate the bad guy from his phone, it’s you.”

“Why didn’t you ask the FBI for help?”

“Because I’m not sure who I can trust there.”

“The answer is no one. Why are you working with them, anyway? I thought you left all that government crap behind.”

“Because I need them. Whatever it takes to get Alexa back.” He breathed in and out noisily. “No comment.”

He despised all government agencies and viewed them with extreme paranoia. They were the enemy. They were all too powerful and malevolent and I think he blamed every one of them for the Iraqi IED that had detonated his Humvee’s gas tank. He didn’t seem to credit the heroic army plastic surgeons who’d saved his life and given him at least some semblance of a face, grotesque though it was. But who could blame him for being angry?

He tilted his head in a funny way to inspect the phone. He preferred to work in low light, even near-darkness, because his eye had become hypersensitive to the light. “Ah, a Nokla 8800.

This is no ordinary burner.”

“You mean Nokia.”

He showed it to me. “Can you read, Nick? It says NOKLA.”

He was right. It said NOKLA. “A knockoff?”

He punched out a few numbers on the phone. “Yep, the IMEI confirms it.”

“The what?”

“The serial number.” He slid off the back cover and popped the battery out. “A Shenzhen Special,” he said, holding it up. I leaned close. The battery had Chinese characters all over it.

“Ever look on eBay and see a special sale on Nokia phones—brand-new, half price? They’re all made in China.”

I nodded. “If you order mobile phones over the Internet, you don’t have to risk going into Walmart or Target and having your face show up on a surveillance camera,” I said. I immediately regretted the choice of words. What he’d give to be able to walk into a Walmart without encountering the averted looks, the squeamishness, the screams of children.

Devlin abruptly turned to look at one of his screens. A green dot was flashing.

“Speaking of tracking devices, do you have one on you?”

“None that I know of.”

“Didn’t I tell you to take precautions coming here?”

“I did.”

“May I see your handheld?”

I handed him my BlackBerry. He peered at it, set it down on the narrow counter, popped open its battery compartment. Lifted out the battery, then wriggled something loose with a pair of tweezers. Held it up and looked at it aslant. Devlin was no longer capable of facial expressions, but if he were, he’d probably have displayed triumph.

“Someone’s been tracking your every move, Heller,” he said. “Any idea how long?”

48.

I had no idea, of course, how long I’d been followed. But at least now I knew how they were able to track me to Mauricio Perreira’s apartment in Medford. Some “confidential informant.”

“Looks like the FBI put a tail on you. And I thought you were cooperating. Did anyone have an opportunity to meddle with your BlackBerry without you noticing?” I nodded. I remembered checking my BlackBerry at the FBI’s reception desk in Boston, not once but twice.

“Now even
I’m
starting to get paranoid,” I said.

He turned to look at me. Instinctively I wanted to look away from that face, so I made a point of meeting his eyes.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” he said. In the dark still interior of his van, his whisper gave me goose bumps. “I believe I’m quoting Nick Heller.”

“Not original to me.”

“In any case, you’re absolutely correct about the Chinese knockoffs. Buying them over the Internet reduces their risk of exposure, yes. But there’s an even better reason. Something only the best bad guys know about.”

“Okay.”

“The IMEI. The electronic serial number. Every mobile phone has one, even the cheapest disposables.”

“Even Noklas?”

“Yes, even Noklas. But by using Shenzhen Specials, your bad guys make it much,
much
harder to be caught by traditional means.”

“How so?”

“Put it this way. If the FBI has the serial number of a
real
Nokia phone, all they have to do is call Finland and Nokia’s going to tell them where the phone was sold. Bad guys don’t want that. But this baby, on the other hand—who’re you gonna call, some factory in Shenzhen? They won’t speak English and they sure as hell don’t keep records and they probably don’t even answer the phone. Good luck with that.”

“So these guys are pros,” I said.

He didn’t reply. He was leaning over the shallow ledge with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers trying to pry something out of the back of the phone. Finally he succeeded and held up a little orange cardboard rectangle.

“The SIM card,” I said. “Chinese too?”

“Uzbek. These guys are
really
smart.”

“The SIM card’s from
Uzbekistan
?”

“They probably buy ’em in bulk online, get them shipped to some drop box, end of the trail. Wow. A Chinese knockoff phone with an untraceable serial number and an untraceable SIM card. Know any FBI agents who speak Uzbek?”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“Some deep digging.”

“Of what sort?”

“Why don’t you leave that part to me,” he said.

“Because my puny mortal mind cannot possibly hope to comprehend?”

“Here’s your BlackBerry. Clean as a whistle.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “But I’d like you to put the GPS bug back in.”

“That’s … foolish.”

“No doubt,” I said. “But first I’d like you to drain the battery on the tracking bug. Can you do that?”

“It doesn’t draw from your BlackBerry’s battery, so sure, that’s not a problem.”

“Good. I want it to die a natural death in about, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.” He nodded. “So they’ll never know that you discovered it.”