Buried Secrets (32 page)

She took a long sip of coffee from a mug that said JESUS SAVES—I SPEND. “And your friend in Belize can get this done?”

“He’ll pay a visit to the bank’s president himself. I’m guessing that this bank might not want to be complicit in the abduction of a teenage girl. Or maybe he has other means of persuasion. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“But it’s all a trick, right? The bank is going to confirm a deposit that was never made?”

“Of course.”

“But what’s the point? If this Zhukov guy has gone rogue, he doesn’t answer to anyone.

It doesn’t make any difference whether he gets the money or not, he’s never going to let Alexa go.”

“Not if he thinks he doesn’t have to. That’s why the timing is crucial. There’s going to be a last-minute complication. Some screwup in the number of his bank account that requires him to make a call.”

“And you’ll be on the other end of that call.”

I shrugged. “I’m going to let him know that he gets the five hundred million only after he releases Alexa.”

She looked at her computer, looked at me. Looked down at the floor and then back up at me. “Nick, you’re delusional. You have no leverage. None. He’ll just refuse, he’ll say it’s my way or the highway, and then he’ll kill her.”

“You’re probably right.”

“So what am I missing here?”

“He’ll want to keep her alive until five o’clock. So he can show that she’s still alive.

He’ll want to keep his options open.”

“Okay, but then at five, whether he gets the money or not, whether there’s a last-minute hitch or not, he’ll kill her anyway.”

“I agree.”

“So what’s the
point
, Nick?”

“To give me until five o’clock today to find Alexa,” I said. “Now I want you to go back to your idea about locating him based on the schedule of plane flights, the interruptions in the satellite signal.”

“What’s to go back to? That’s a dead end. Didn’t you tell me the FBI didn’t find any matches in the FAA database?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you think they’re wrong?”

“Not at all. I think they searched all flights in the FAA database. But I don’t think they searched
all
flights.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“Because the one thing I know is the U.S. military. And I know that they don’t like to share information on military flights with pencil-neck civilian geeks in the federal government.”

“Military flights?”

“There are military air bases in Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire. They each keep their own flight logs.”

“Online?”

“Never.”

“Then how do we get to them?”

I picked up the phone and handed it to her. “The old-fashioned way,” I said.

85.

Dorothy assigned Jillian to pull up a list of all companies in New Hampshire that rented or leased construction equipment.

There were almost nine hundred.

Even after narrowing it down to just “earth-moving equipment” and “heavy construction equipment,” we had close to a hundred. It was just about hopeless. We’d have to get extremely lucky.

Meanwhile Dorothy spent two hours on the phone with military air bases and Air National Guard air traffic controllers. I had to get on a few times and throw around names of generals in the Pentagon who probably didn’t remember me. But when she walked into my office with a wide grin on her face, I knew she had something for me.

“What’s a KC-135?” she asked.

“Ah. The Stratotanker. Made by Boeing. Mostly aerial refueling tankers, though some of them have been reconfigured as airborne command posts. Let’s hear it.”

“We got a hit. Each one of those interruptions in the video signal coincides exactly with a KC-135 flight out of the Pease Air National Guard Base.”

“Meaning what? They’re in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

“No, no,” she said. “Not that simple. The kidnap site could be anywhere from about five miles to forty miles away.”

“You can’t narrow it down? Like by triangulating or something? Don’t you digital forensic techs always triangulate stuff?”

“Not enough data points to do that. All I have is three cutouts on the video, about ten seconds after three KC-135s take off.”

“You’ve got plenty,” I said. “You know the direction the planes took off toward, right?”

“True.”

“You probably know the speed the planes generally take off at, right?”

“Maybe.”

“You should be able to get within ten miles, I’d say. Do I have to do all your work for you?”

I tried to head off the Look with what I thought was a disarming smile. But it didn’t work. I got the Look anyway.

Then my BlackBerry rang. I glanced at it, saw it was Diana.

“Hey,” I said. “You got the photo I sent.”

“More than that, Nick,” she said. “I think we found him.”

86.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“Nick?”

“You found Zhukov?”

Diana’s voice was taut, louder than normal. “We got a hit on his phone.”

“New Hampshire?”

“Right. Just west of Nashua.”

“He must have switched it on.”

“Listen, I have to go. We’re deploying up north.”

“Where?”

“A forward staging area in a parking lot a couple of miles away from the target site.”

“You’re deploying with the SWAT team?”

“They’re calling in all assets, operational or not. They want me at a surveillance point outside the SWAT perimeter.”

“Give me the exact location.”

“You can’t be there. You know that. It’s a Bureau operation. You’re a civilian.” I inhaled slowly. “Diana, listen. I don’t want her to die in the middle of some big noisy SWAT team operation. I want her alive.”

“So do they, Nick. Their number-one priority is always victim recovery.”

“I’m not talking about intention. I’m talking about technique.”

“Our SWAT guys are as good as you get.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

I closed my eyes, tried to focus. “What’s the location?”

“A house on a country road. It looks deserted, from the satellite imagery.”

“Is there land?”

“It’s a farmhouse.”

“Secluded?”

“What’s your point, Nick?”

“Is it just him, hiding out there? Or is that where he has Alexa buried? It makes all the difference in how you approach him.”

“We don’t know if she’s there or not.”

“As soon as he hears the snap of a twig, or he sees guys in ghillie suits coming through the woods, he’s not going to wait to be shot. He’s going to kill her. He’s already threatened to flood the grave, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s set up to do it remotely. As simple as pulling a lever on an irrigation system in the house. And no matter how fast you guys can dig, you’re not going to save her in time.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She’s his bargaining chip. He wants her alive. If he floods the grave and kills her, he has no leverage.”

“Diana, this guy doesn’t operate by normal rules. To assume he does would be a dangerous miscalculation. He wants to flood the grave or shut off her air supply and he wants to watch it on his computer screen. He wants to watch her gasping and struggling and trying to scream. He wants to watch her die.”

“Then why the ransom demand?”

“He figures he’ll collect a load of money and kill her anyway. Tell your squad commander he wants me there on scene. Tell him I’m the only one who knows anything about Dragomir Zhukov.”

87.

As I drove north on 93, it started to rain, first a few ominous drops from a steel sky, then a full-fledged torrential downpour. It came down with the sort of force that almost always tells you it’s going to be short-lived, that it can’t possibly last.

But this one kept going. Out of nowhere, the wind began to gust, driving the rain nearly sideways. My windshield wipers were flipping at maximum speed but I could still barely see the road. The other cars began to skid, then slowed to a crawl, and a few pulled over to wait it out.

Normally I enjoy dramatic weather, but not then. It seemed to echo the strange, unaccustomed feeling of anxiety that had come over me.

My instinct told me that this was not going to end well.

SO I blasted music. Few tunes pump me up like the twangy guitar licks and huge, booming, diesel-fueled rockabilly sound of Bill Kirchen, the Titan of the Telecaster, the guy who did “Hot Rod Lincoln” years ago. I played “Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods” and then his live version of “Too Much Fun.” By the time I reached the New Hampshire border, I was feeling like my old self.

Then I had to hit MUTE to answer the phone.

It was Diana, with directions to the SWAT staging area. “We’re mustering at a parking lot two miles from the house,” she said. “You’re going to join me on the perimeter surveillance team. But that means staying outside the hard perimeter.”

The highway had gotten narrower, down to a two-lane road with steel guardrails on either side. I passed a BRAKE FOR MOOSE sign.

“Works for me. Are we going to be in a vehicle or on foot?”

“In one of their SUVs, thank God. I’d hate to be standing around in weather like this. Is it raining where you are?”

“Pouring. I’m maybe thirty miles away, no more.”

“Drive safe, Nico.”

88.

Forty-five minutes later I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a black Suburban. It had been specially modified for the SWAT team with roof rails and side rungs, though it wasn’t armored. We were outside the crisis area. We weren’t supposed to get hit.

Diana was behind the wheel. Under her FBI sweatshirt she was wearing a level III trauma vest, a concealable ballistic garment fitted with a trauma plate.

Rain sheeted down. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth like a metronome at top speed.

We were parked at the end of the woods, just off a narrow winding asphalt road, stationed at what the SWAT team called “phase line yellow,” the last cover-and-conceal position before the action started. Phase line green was the imaginary line around the house. Phase line green meant game on.

Supposedly we were part of the perimeter team, at the point of egress, but in truth we were nothing more than observers. My role was limited and quite clear: If they were able to take the Russian alive, and if he resisted cooperation, I was to be put on the radio to communicate directly with him. Not in person, on the radio.

Surrounding us were various American-made SUVs—Ford Explorers and Blazers and Suburbans, also fitted with roof rails and side rungs. SWAT operators hung off the side, wearing two-piece olive drab suits with armor that was supposed to withstand a rifle round, ceramic trauma plates inside. They wore ballistic helmets and eye protection and FBI signage everywhere. They carried M4 carbine rifles equipped with red-dot optical sights. In their side holsters they had pistols, to be used only if their machine guns jammed. Snipers in ghillie suits were secreted in the woods, in the shadows cast by the trees, within range of the house.

For a long while we sat in silence, listening to the exchange on the dash-mounted radio.

We waited. Everyone out there seemed to be waiting for a signal. The air was charged with tension.

I said, “If he shows his face—”

“The snipers will take him out. Deadly force has been pre-authorized.”

“Is that FBI protocol?”

“Only in circumstances where we believe the target has the means and the probable intention to kill his victim, yeah, killing him is considered legally justified.”

“And if he doesn’t show his face?”

“They’ll attempt a silent breach of the house from two points and go into hostage-rescue mode.”

After sitting in silence a while longer, Diana said, “You want to be up there, don’t you?

Admit it.”

I didn’t reply. I was still mulling things over. Something seemed somehow
off
about the whole situation.

She looked at me. I said, “Can I borrow your binoculars?” I hadn’t grabbed mine from the Land Rover. I didn’t think I’d need them.

She handed me a pair of army-green Steiners, standard SWAT-team issue, full-size, a PROPERTY OF FBI SWAT sticker on one side. I dialed in the focus until the house came into view: a small, neat, white-painted clapboard house with dark green shutters. It wasn’t a farmhouse at all but a house in the woods. The land surrounding it was surprisingly small, given the size of the property. The grass was overgrown and wild, probably waist-high, as if no one had been looking after it for a year or more.

It was dark. No car or truck in the driveway that I could see.

Then I handed the binoculars back to her. “I don’t think we’re in the right place,” I said.

“How so? It’s his phone number that came up, no question about it.”

“Look at the egress. Only one way in or out, and we’re sitting at it. The woods in back of his house are overgrown, choked with underbrush and vine. He can’t walk for two minutes through that without getting stuck in thorn bushes.”

“You saw all that?”

“Good binoculars.”

“Good eyes.”

“He’s trapped. This isn’t the sort of property he’d ever pick.”

“Maybe he didn’t pick it. Maybe Navrozov’s people chose it for him. It’s been abandoned for a year and a half.”

“I don’t think he’d ever let someone else make that kind of decision for him. He doesn’t like to rely on anyone.”

“That’s your assessment, based on a thirdhand evaluation in some old KGB file.” I ignored that. “Did anyone check the utility bills on this place?”

“It’s been empty for eighteen months.”

“I don’t see any generators, do you? So how the hell does he get on the Internet?” She shook her head slowly, considering.

“Or a satellite dish,” I said.

She continued to shake her head.

“Also, it’s sloppy,” I said.

“What’s sloppy?”

“Using his mobile phone. He shouldn’t be using it again.”

“He doesn’t know we have his phone number.”

“This guy never underestimates anyone. That’s why he’s still alive.” I took out my cell phone and hit the speed-dial for Dorothy.

“Where are you, Heller?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Right. Where?”