Buried Secrets (24 page)

Like, what’s that supposed to mean? That Satan’s in charge of the whole show? But now I’m starting to get it. Maybe there’s just … evil in the world that even God is powerless to do anything about. And that’s the real point.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” I said softly. “I’ve stopped asking the big questions like that. I just keep my head down and do my job.”

“I’m sorry, Nick. I promised myself never to bring my religion to the office.”

“I never expected you to leave it at home. So tell me what you’re stuck on.” She hesitated only briefly. “Okay, listen to this.”

She tapped a key, moved the mouse and clicked it, and we were back to that same loop of Alexa speaking. Dorothy raised the volume. Under Alexa’s words a hum grew steadily louder.

Then the image froze and broke up into tiny bits.

“You hear the noise, right?”

“A car or truck, like we said. So?”

She shook her head. “Notice the noise is always followed by the picture breaking up?

Every single time.”

“Okay.”

“Thing is, a car or a truck or a train, they’re not going to interrupt the video transmission like that.”

“So?”

She gave me the Look: she widened her eyes, lowered her brows, and glowered. The Look could turn a lesser being into stone or a pillar of salt. Our old boss, Jay Stoddard, found the Look so unsettling that he refused to deal with her directly unless forced to. Staring back was pointless. It was like a staring contest with the sun. One of you was going to go blind, and it wasn’t likely to be the sun.

“‘So’?”
she said. “It’s going to tell us where Alexa Marcus is.”

62.

“There is some problem, Officer?”

Dragomir had learned that American policemen liked it when you used the honorific

“Officer.” They craved respect and so rarely got it.

“Well, no big deal, sir. We just like to introduce ourselves, just so’s you know who to call in case you ever need any help.”

The young man’s ears and cheeks had gone crimson. When he smiled, his gums showed.

“Is good to know.” Exaggerating his bad English was disarming to most people. It made him seem more hapless. Dragomir had made a habit of studying other people as a butterfly collector examines a specimen.

The policeman shifted his weight from foot to foot again. The porch floorboards creaked.

He drummed his fingertips against his thighs and said, “So you, ah, work for the Aldersons?” Dragomir shook his head, a modest grin. “Just caretaker. I do work for family. Fix up.”

“Oh, okay, right. So I guess one of your neighbors kinda noticed some construction equipment?”

“Yes?”

“Just want to make sure there’s no, um, infractions of the building code? You know, like, if you’re building an extension without a permit?”

The youngster projected no authority whatsoever. He was almost apologetic for being here. Not like the police in Russia, who treated everyone like a criminal.

“Just landscape.”

“Is that—you’re not doing construction here, or…?”

“No construction,” Dragomir said. “Owner wants terraced gardens.”

“Mind if I take a quick look out back?”

This was going too far. If Dragomir insisted on a search warrant, the boy would be back in an hour with two other policemen and a court order, and they’d search the house too, just to show they could.

He shrugged, said hospitably, “Please.”

Officer Kent seemed relieved. “You know, just so I can tell the chief I did my job, right?”

“We all have to do our jobs.”

He followed the policeman around the back, onto the field of bare earth. The officer seemed to be looking at the tracks in the hard soil, then the gray vent pipe in the middle of the field, and he approached it.

“That a septic tank, um, Andros?”

Dragomir went still. He hadn’t told the cop his name. Obviously the neighbor had.

This concerned him.

“Is to vent the soil,” Dragomir said as they stood next to the pipe. “From the landfill, the

… compost pile.” An improvisation, the best he could do.

“Like for methane buildup or something?”

Dragomir shrugged. He didn’t understand English. He just did what he was told. He was a simple laborer.

“Because you do need a permit if you’re putting in a septic tank, you know.” The cop’s cheeks and ears were the color of cold borscht.

Dragomir smiled. “No septic tank.”

Tiny muffled cries from the vent pipe.

The policeman cocked his head. His ridiculous ears seemed to twitch. “You hear something?” he said.

Dragomir shook his head slowly. “No…”

The girl’s cries had become louder and more distinct.

“HELP GOD HELP SAVE ME PLEASE OH GOD…”

“That sounds like it’s coming from down there,” the policeman said. “How weird is that?”

63.

“I’m listening,” I said.

Dorothy sighed. “Let’s start with the basic question: How are they getting on the Internet, okay? And I don’t think it’s your standard high-speed connection.”

“Why not?”

She leaned back, folded her arms. “My parents live in North Carolina, right? So a couple of years ago they decided they wanted to get cable TV so they could watch all those movies.

Only there wasn’t any cable available, so they had to put one of those satellite dishes on their roof.”

I nodded.

“Once I tried to watch a movie at their house, and the picture kept fuzzing out. Drove me crazy. So I asked them what the problem was, you know, was it always like this, did they call the satellite company to get it fixed, right? And Momma said, oh, that happens a lot, every time a plane flies by overhead. You get used to it. Nothing to do about it. See, they live close to the Charlotte/Douglas airport. Right in the flight path. I mean, the planes are
loud
. And then I began to notice that, yeah, every time I heard a plane overhead the TV would crap out.”

“Okay,” I said. “If our kidnappers are deep in the woods somewhere, or in some rural area where they don’t even
have
high-speed Internet, satellite is probably their only way to get online. And you think a plane can break up the signal?”

“Easy. A bad rainstorm can do it too. Satellite works by line-of-sight, so if something gets between the dish and the big old satellite up there in the sky, the signal’s gonna break up.

You got a big enough plane, flying low enough, that thing can interrupt the signal. Might only be a fraction of a second, but that’ll screw up the video stream.”

“This is good,” I said. “That noise we’re hearing could well come from a jet engine. So let’s say they’re near an airport. How near, do you think?”

“Hard to calculate. But close enough so when a plane lands or takes off, it’s low enough to the ground to block the path to the satellite. So it depends on how big the plane is and how fast it’s going and all that.”

“There are a hell of a lot of airports in the U.S.,” I pointed out.

“That right?” she said dryly. “Hadn’t thought about that. But if we can narrow down the search, it gets a whole lot easier.”

“I think we can.”

“You do?”

“New Hampshire.” I explained about George Devlin’s cell phone mapping. How we knew that “Mr. X” took Alexa across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire.

She listened, staring into space. After twenty seconds of silence, she said, “That helps a lot. I don’t know how many airports there are in New Hampshire, but we’ve just narrowed it down to a manageable number.”

“Maybe we can narrow it down more than that,” I said. “Does that creepy website CamFriendz stream in real time?”

“They claim to. I’d say yes, within a few seconds. You have to account for slow connections and server lag time and so on. Maybe the times are five seconds off.”

“So we match up those times with the exact flight times in the FAA’s flight database.”

“They have such a thing?”

“Of course they do. We’re looking for airports in New Hampshire—hell, let’s broaden the search, make it Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire, just to be safe—with a flight schedule matching the times of our four interruptions.”

She nodded vigorously.

“And we can narrow it down a lot more,” I said. “Aren’t there two separate interruptions during one of those broadcasts?”

“You’re right.”

“So we have an exact interval between two flights.”

Her smile widened slowly. “Not bad, boss.”

I shrugged. “Your idea.” One of the few things I’ve learned since going into business for myself: The boss should never take credit for anything. “Can you hack into the Federal Aviation Administration’s secure electronic database?”

“No.”

“Well, the FBI will be able to get it through channels. I’ll give Diana a call.”

“Excuse me?”

Jillian Alperin was standing there hesitantly.

“We’re in a meeting,” Dorothy said. “Is there a problem?”

“I forgot to take this out of the printer.” She held up a large glossy color photograph. It was an enlargement of the photograph from Alexa’s iPhone of her kidnapper’s tattoo.

“Thank you,” Dorothy said, taking it from her.

“I think I know what it is,” Jillian said.

“That’s an owl,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

Then she held up something else, which she’d been holding in her other hand. A slim white paperback. On the front cover was a black-and-white line drawing of an owl.

It was identical to the owl tattoo in the photo.

“What’s that?” I said.

“It’s a book of tattoos my brother found?”

She handed me the book. It was titled
Criminal Tattoos of Russia.

“Dorothy,” I said. “What time is it in Russia right now?”

64.

One of my best sources in Russia was a former KGB major general. Anatoly Vasilenko was a whippet-thin man in his late sixties with an aquiline profile and the demeanor of a Cambridge don. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he was already cashing in on his access and connections.

I couldn’t say I liked him very much—he was one of the most mercenary men I’d ever met—but he could be affable and charming, and he did have an amazing Rolodex. For the right price he could get you almost any piece of intelligence you wanted.

Tolya always knew who to call, who to bribe, and who to throw a scare into. If a client of mine suspected the local manager of their Moscow plant was embezzling, Tolya could take care of the problem with one quick phone call. He’d have the guy hauled in and interrogated and so terrified he’d be scared to steal a paper clip from his own desk.

I reached him at dinner. From the background noise I could tell he wasn’t at home.

“Have I never taken you to Turandot, Nicholas?” he said. “Hold on, let me move someplace quieter.”

“Twice,” I said. “Shark-fin soup, I think.”

Turandot was a restaurant a few blocks from the Kremlin, on Tverskoy Boulevard, which was the favored dining spot of oligarchs and criminals and high government officials (many of them all three). It was a vast gilded reproduction of a Baroque palace with a Venetian marble courtyard and statues of Roman gods and Aubusson tapestries and an enormous crystal chandelier. Burly security guards gathered out front to smoke and keep a watch over their employers’ Bentleys.

When he got back on the phone, the background clamor gone, he said, “There, that’s much better. Nothing worse than a table full of drunken Tatars.” His English was better than that of most Americans. I didn’t know where he’d acquired his plummy British accent, unless they taught it at KGB school. “That’s quite a picture you sent.”

“Tell me.”

“That tattoo? It’s Sova.”

“Who?”

“Not ‘who.’ Sova is—well,
sova
means owl, of course. It’s a criminal gang, you might say.”

“Russian mafia?”

“Mafia? No, nothing that organized,” he said. “Sova is more like a loose confederation of men who’ve all done time at the same prison.”

“Which one?”

“Prison Number One, in Kopeisk. Quite the nasty place.”

“Do you have a list of all known Sova members?”

“Of all Sova members?” He gave a low chortle. “If only I had such a list. I would be either very rich or very dead.”

“You must have
some
names.”

“Why is this of interest to you?”

I told him.

Then he said, “This is not a good situation for you. Or for your client’s daughter, more to the point.”

“Why’s that?”

“These are very bad people, Nicholas. Hardened criminals of the very worst sort.”

“So I understand.”

“No, I’m not so sure you do. They don’t operate by normal rules. They’re … untroubled, shall we say, by conventional standards of morality.”

“How bad?”

“I think you had a very unpleasant incident in the States not so long ago. Do you remember a brutal home invasion in Connecticut?”

He pronounced the hard
C
in the middle of “Connecticut.” A rare slip.

“Not offhand.”

“Oh, dear. Some wealthy bedroom community in Connecticut—Darien, maybe? Truly a nightmare. A doctor and his wife and three daughters were at home one night when a couple of burglars broke in. They beat the doctor with a baseball bat, tied him up, and tossed him down the basement stairs. Then they tied the girls to their beds and proceeded to rape them for seven hours. After which, they poured gasoline on the women and lit them afire—”

“All right,” I said, unable to hear any more. “These were Sova members?”

“Correct. One of them was killed during an attempted arrest, I seem to recall. The other one escaped.”

“A burglary?”

“Entertainment.”

“Excuse me?” I felt something cold and hard form in my stomach.

“You heard me. Just fun and games. These Sova people will do things a normal person cannot begin to imagine. You couldn’t ask for better enforcers.”

“Enforcers?”

“They hire themselves out. If you need outside talent for a really dirty job, something violent and extremely bloody, you might hire a couple of Sova gang members.”

“Who hires them? Russian mafia groups?”

“Usually not. The mafia have some pretty brutal talent of their own.”