Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (27 page)

“A what?”

“A ransom! Don’t give me that. Like you don’t know! It’s all over the news! The BBC! Where have you been?”

“We’ve been out of contact on an airplane,” said Mr. Beckett. “What’s all over the news?”

“You really don’t know? They’re evacuating New York!” she shrieked.

Mr. Beckett and Mr. Joyce looked at each other in horror.

“No,” Mr. Joyce groaned. “Not now. We’re so close.”

“You said a ransom. What ransom?” said Mr. Beckett.

“The BBC said the Americans said they were evacuating New York and the Eastern Seaboard because of a tsunami warning,” Katarina said as she screeched around a traffic circle, nearly on two wheels. “But the BBC said that was an unlikely story and that there were rumors about an impending terrorist attack and a ransom demand.”

“We didn’t ask for a ransom,” Mr. Joyce said. “Who would do that if we didn’t?”

“Two words. Dmitri Yevdokimov,” said Mr. Beckett after a long thirty seconds.

“That son of a bitch we bought the aluminum dust and the pump trucks from?” said Mr. Joyce.

“He’s the only one clever enough,” Mr. Beckett said, looking out at the passing island countryside. “Besides, he’s a computer expert. I knew I shouldn’t have given him my fucking e-mail. He must have hacked us—saw our plans and the video we were going to show after. He put two and two together, copied the video, and tried to pull a ransom deal.”

“I’m going to handcuff him to a radiator and snip out his liver with a pair of kitchen scissors!” Mr. Joyce said, screaming, as he punched at the door of the car. “He ruined our entire plan!”

“It gets worse!” Katarina yelled. “The fucking Americans are here! Armenio texted me two hours ago with this,” she said, handing Mr. Beckett her phone.

American soldiers just arrived in the village. I will do my best to keep them away but I will set it off manually if I can’t. Whatever happens the deal is still on.

“I keep trying to call him back, but he doesn’t respond. He must be under arrest by now. Or dead. It’s over. What are we going to do now? I’m all over Armenio’s phone. We need to get out of Cape Verde now.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters,” said Mr. Joyce, starting to cry in the backseat.

“Katarina, stop the car!” said Mr. Beckett, suddenly clutching his chest. “I’m not kidding. My chest. I’m having chest pains! I need my medication! In my bag in the trunk. Pull over! Please! Oh, it hurts!”

Katarina pulled over on the side of the deserted two-lane country road beside a stubbled field with baby sheep and goats roaming over it. Mr. Beckett stumbled out onto the shoulder and went to the trunk.

“Katarina! Help me—over here!” said Mr. Beckett a second later.

When she arrived at the trunk, Mr. Beckett without preamble smashed Katarina in the face with a tire iron. Blood poured out between her fingers, clutched to her face, as she began immediately to backpedal.

He hit her again in the back of the head as she turned, then she fell backwards into an irrigation ditch filled with muddy rainwater that ran parallel to the road.

She was beginning to crawl back up onto her knees when Mr. Beckett arrived to finish up. Right there in broad daylight, with three more blows to the head, he beat her to death with the tire iron as the baby sheep looked on.

A minute later, he was back on the road next to the car. He wiped the tire iron with a thin pink sweater that had been draped on the back of the driver’s seat before he chucked it back in the trunk, tossed the sweater in after it, and closed the lid. Crushing her cell phone under his heel, he found and pocketed its SIM card before he checked his watch. Then he got into the driver’s seat and made a U-turn back toward the airport.

He wriggled his wet toes in his muddy shoes as he drove. He’d have to hit the gift shop for some socks.

He hadn’t killed Katarina because she had disappointed him. On the contrary, she’d been loyal and competent to a fault in helping to set everything up. He’d even been good friends with her father back during the Cape Verdean revolution he’d helped bring about.

He killed her simply because he always covered his tracks. That’s why he had been in business for so long. It was the secret of his success.

In the backseat, Mr. Joyce was still sobbing.

“I know it’s disappointing after all our hard work,” said Mr. Beckett. “All the money, all the planning. We got rooked—they were ahead of us by a few measly hours. It was the ambitiousness of the plan. The more people, the more moving parts, the easier for one to malfunction.”

“But that city! That city deserves to be destroyed! What about Mikhail? What about Mikhail?!” sobbed Mr. Joyce.

“This isn’t over. Not by a long shot,” Mr. Beckett said reassuringly. “We need to regroup and go to the backup plan. We’re still ahead of them. We’ll use the Dutch passports and be back in New York by tomorrow.”

Mr. Beckett looked up at the narrow-bodied DC-9 airliner on takeoff that roared low over their car as they turned into the airport access road.

“There is more than one way to skin a cat, my son,” he said.

“I HAVE TO
admit, Mike, the homebound leg of this trip is starting to grow on me a little,” Emily said, yawning, as she placed her seat in the way-back position on the other side of the maple-paneled cabin.

“I’ll say,” I said, swirling the glass of Pinot Noir in my hand. “You think Yelp has a corporate jet section? I don’t know about you, but I’m giving this puppy five stars all the way.”

Things were looking up, for a welcome change. The mayor was so pleased with our finding the explosives that she insisted on sending her personal aircraft to give Emily and me and the two geophysical experts a lift home.

And what a plane. It was a sleek, brand-new eighty-million-dollar Bombardier Global 7000, with a custom interior that looked like a Park Avenue apartment. There were built-in flat screens everywhere, an Irish linen–covered dining table, Oriental rugs.

I couldn’t tell which was softer or more soothing, the classical music playing on the overhead speaker, the heated leather seat, or the dimmed lights. I yawned, too, and wriggled my aching shoeless feet against the expensive carpet as I drained my glass.

I’d actually buzzed back my own seat to catch a little sleep when my aggravating brain started bringing stuff up. Stuff like how though we’d finally put some points on the board, this wasn’t over. How it wouldn’t be over until the bombers were dead or behind bars. Mostly I couldn’t stop thinking how my kids, along with everyone else in New York, were still extremely vulnerable, and soon my finger found the seat switch and I was heading back into the upright position again.

I asked the flight attendant for some coffee and took out my laptop. A moment later, I had my e-mail open and for the tenth time started reading through the detailed brief that the excellent Cape Verde Judicial Police had put together about the island guide Armenio Rezende.

Police divers had found Rezende dead in the surf on the southwest side of the volcanic island about three miles away from the cliff he’d jumped off, and what they recovered from his pocket chilled me every time I thought about it.

Four twelve-volt garage door opener batteries.

So our theory was actually true: Rezende had tried to set off the bombs. He’d been dead set on killing himself and all of us there.

And only the Lord knew how many other innocent people would have died had the entire mountain shaken loose and crashed down into the sea.

I thought about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that had killed 230,000 people. Five Yankee Stadiums of human beings, old and young, innocent after terrified innocent, suddenly caught in the flood. Schoolchildren washed out of their desks and drowned in their classrooms. Commuters on trains looking up from their papers to see the ocean coming in the window. Mothers made to watch as their babies were whisked away in the flood or crushed by debris.

And someone wanted that? Rezende wanted that? I thought as I glanced out the dark circle of the plane’s window. He wanted countless homes and factories and churches and cities and towns destroyed? He wanted 230,000 last gulps of breath from people he didn’t even know? How? Was Rezende a space alien? A zombie from a crypt? Because it didn’t compute, that much hate. Not in human terms. How could a human be okay with a quarter million murders on his soul?

Yet it was true. Rezende did want it. Had in fact died trying to make it happen. Rezende had wanted it, along with whoever else was involved.

Because it was obvious that Rezende wasn’t the mastermind. We’d sat down with the Cape Verde cops before we left, and they told us Rezende didn’t even have a passport and that he had never been anywhere—let alone New York City.

No, Rezende was low-level, I thought, going over the report. He had several assault arrests as a young man, some domestic violence incidents, a 2010 burglary charge that didn’t stick. He definitely didn’t have any industrial or military experience with explosives.

What he did have, though, was a recent radical conversion to Islam. On his computer, they found records of time spent on jihadist websites. Time spent in chat rooms known to be frequented by people from al Qaeda and ISIS.

I thought about the low-level American criminal turned to Islam who recently beheaded a woman in Oklahoma. Maybe that was where all the hate was coming from. Islamic jihad was certainly no stranger to inhuman acts of barbaric violence these days.

That wasn’t all. What was even more curious was the fact that Rezende had an uncle on his father’s side who was one of the most violent of the revolutionaries during the Cape Verde independence movement.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cape Verde, along with the African continental nation of Portuguese Guinea, fought for independence from Portugal in a bloody jungle guerrilla war that many people called Portugal’s Vietnam. The Marxist rebels, led by Amilcar Cabral, had about a third of the troop strength that the Portuguese had, but the rebels were heavily supported by the Soviet Union with supplies and weaponry, including jet aircraft.

We’d learned from the Cape Verde cops that Rezende’s late uncle, Paulo Rezende, who raised him, was a colonel in that rebel army and was actually trained to fly MiGs in Russia.

The Russians again, I mumbled at the screen. It keeps coming back to the Russians.

“Who am I kidding?” Emily said, suddenly sitting up across from me. “I can’t sleep, either, with these maniacs still running loose out there. Is there any coffee left, Mike?”

“LET’S RUN THROUGH
it again from the very beginning,” I said after the flight attendant, Patricia, had poured a coffee for Emily.

“Okay,” Emily said, tucking her stockinged feet underneath her. “We land at Rezende’s village.”

“We land at Rezende’s village,” I repeated with a nod. “What I don’t understand is, if he was planning to detonate the bombs by the deadline, why wasn’t he on Árvore Preta already?”

“That’s an excellent point, Mike,” Emily said. “According to the deadline described in the video threat, he should have had all the batteries in place already—had everything ready to go.”

“But he didn’t,” I said, drumming my fingers along the edge of my Toshiba laptop. “We definitely seem to have surprised him. His attempt to manually set off everything with the batteries proved that. All the meticulous planning and money and expertise required to wire up the mountain came down to some sloppy and desperate last-ditch ploy to insert the batteries? No way. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“So what happened? Rezende was definitely involved in the planting of the explosives,” Emily said, biting her lip. “Did he wake up late? There was some communication screwup? Why the hell was he surprised if the deadline was only two hours away?”

“Maybe…,” I said, tapping my forehead as I stared down at my socks.

“Maybe what?” Emily said after a moment.

I snapped my fingers as I looked up.

“Maybe the people who set the bombs up weren’t the ones who called for the ransom. Maybe we’re looking at two different groups.”

“What do you mean? How? The guys on the phone actually sent a video of the bombs being set up.”

“True, they
sent
a video, but did they
make
the video?” I said.

“You’re losing me.”

“I keep thinking about our initial read that the bombing campaign is the idea of one person—one very angry, very motivated, very meticulous person—who is solely out to terrify and to destroy the city. That still makes the most sense to me.”

“Me, too,” Emily said with a nod. “The first thing the Unabomber told us out in Colorado was spot-on: ‘They’re going to destroy New York City—you know that, right?’”

“Precisely,” I said. “The ransom-money play never corresponded to that. What if someone found out about the plot, found the video of the real people setting it up, and decided to try to make money off of it?”

“A piggyback!” Emily said. “That’s entirely possible. Someone co-opting it.”

“Somebody Russian or who runs around in Russian circles,” I said.

“You’re right,” Emily said, putting her coffee down. “The mayor’s sniper had Russian ties, there were Russian explosives on the island, and now the direct Russian connection to Rezende through his uncle.”

I glanced out at the cloudy night rushing past the large porthole window beside me again as I racked my brain. Then it hit me. Right between the eyes, forty thousand feet above the dark Atlantic.

“Dmitri Yevdokimov!” I yelled, suddenly sitting up. “The Russian we had in custody. Not only can we place Yevdokimov at the drop where the video was picked up, he’s also a computer expert.”

“That’s it,” said Emily excitedly. “Yevdokimov must have hacked the real Russian bomber, copied the video, and cooked up the ransom deal!”

“Yevdokimov’s the link. We needed to find him yesterday,” I said as I almost knocked over my china coffee cup while fumbling out my phone to call New York. “He’s the only one who knows who the real bombers are.”