The Prince of Risk (13 page)

A
stor walked tiredly down the street toward Battery Park. A hot, humid breeze skipped off the East River, snapping his cheeks. The wind smelled oily and foul, and he hated it, hated the day, hated his predicament. He checked over his shoulder and watched as Sully drove away. At some point on the ride back into town, he had told the former detective about his gaffe inside Evans’s home.

“It’ll take ’em a day to dust the place for prints and another day to start feeding what they got into the system,” Sullivan had explained. “And that’s with all the heat this case is going to get, and believe you me, it will get plenty. The FBI will be out there and so will the Secret Service. They’ll go slow and methodical. Even so, I wouldn’t bank on them IDing you. Who knows how many people visited that house? There could be a hundred different prints on that door. All depends on what they’re able to lift. This is real life, not some TV show. You’re lucky if you get one perfect print.”

“I put my hand flat on the door,” said Astor.

“We already established you’re a numskull. Let’s not belabor the point.”

“How long before we know?” Astor had asked.

“You got forty-eight hours until you have to start worrying,” said Sullivan. “Then it’s a crapshoot. You feelin’ lucky?”

Astor kept his answer to himself.

That was an hour ago.

He had forty-seven to go.

Assured of his privacy, Astor jogged across the pavement, loosening a button on his shirt as he cursed the heat. He’d told Sullivan he needed some space, a little time to think things through. There were some things best kept private.

Reaching Battery Park, he continued to the tourist telescopes. He paused, looking up and down for a lean, compact man, always impeccably dressed. There was no one who matched the description. Astor glanced at his watch, then stepped closer to the railing.

“Hey.”

A hand tapped him on the shoulder, and Astor jumped out of his shoes.

“Take it easy,” said the sandpaper voice.

Astor spun and looked into Michael Grillo’s wizened brown eyes. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“I told you I’d meet you here.”

“I expected you in front of me. Not sneaking up on me like a…a…”

“A spook?” Grillo tightened his lips, which was what passed for a smile. “Habit. Too many years making sure I saw people before they saw me.”

Astor shook Grillo’s hand. “Good to see you, Mike.”

“Likewise.” Michael Grillo was small and leathery, a retired jockey in a $3,000 suit. His hair was gray and close-cropped, his skin taut, craggy, tanned a permanent brown by the sun of hellholes the world over. He had the usual résumé: Army Ranger, Delta Force, tours in Iraq (both wars) and Afghanistan. He also had a Wharton MBA. That was not so usual. He called himself a “corporate security analyst.” No company. Just a crisp linen-stock business card with a single phone number, a promise of utmost secrecy, and an unrivaled skill set he brought from his former profession. Mike Grillo got things done. Astor knew better than to ask how, but the size of his fees suggested some shadowy dealings. Shadowy, as in dark black.

“You look like shit,” said Grillo.

“Tough day.”

Grillo took this in. He was a man who knew when to ask questions and when not to. “This about your dad?”

“Good guess.”

Grillo lit a slim black cigarette. He was the last man in Manhattan to smoke Nat Sherman 100s. “What can I do for you?”

“Palantir.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s walk.” Astor headed north out of the park. He went over what had happened the night before in Washington, sharing the message he’d received from his father and his belief that the word was a clue about who was responsible for the attack. “My father was working on a secret project at the Exchange,” he added, handing over the stolen agenda. “It’s all here. See for yourself.”

Astor didn’t go into what had transpired at Penelope Evans’s home in Greenwich. Grillo was an employee, not a friend. Astor was quick to draw that line, though there was more to it than that. Sharing that information would make Grillo an accessory. Grillo wouldn’t want that.

They crossed State Street and walked up Broadway. Grillo, an expert in all matters security, was unable to envision any scenario that would engender a Secret Service agent driving his vehicle onto the South Lawn. Astor brought up Sloan Thomasson’s suggestion that the driver had forfeited control of his vehicle. Grillo scoffed at the idea, then seemed to take it more seriously. “Forfeited how?” he asked. “You mean like someone else was driving the car for him?”

“Something like that,” said Astor. “I don’t know. Just spitballing here.”

“I think we need to take a step back,” said Grillo. “It’s not what happened on the lawn. It’s what happened before. You said he texted you a minute before he was killed?”

“Yeah.”

“That means he had an idea something bad was going to happen. He knew they were onto him—whoever ‘they’ are. We have to find out what those three big shots were going to tell the president.”

The men stopped at Trinity Church.

“That word…Palantir,” said Grillo. “Might ring a bell. When do you need something?”

“Yesterday.”

“I need some information about your pop: phones, credit cards, Social Security number.”

“How soon?”

“Yesterday.”

Astor shook hands with Grillo. “I’ll e-mail you what I have.”

“Do that.”

T
he Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was located in a six-story government building on the corner of First Avenue and 30th Street adjacent to NYU Langone Medical Center, where Alex had given birth to Katie and, in the years after, had recovered from two miscarriages. She parked in the red zone across the street, throwing her law enforcement shield on the dashboard.

Inside the building, the air conditioning was fighting a losing battle against the heat of the day. Alex crossed to the security desk, upset that the morgue assistant hadn’t come up to meet her as promised. She badged the young woman and waited as she called down to the body shop—the refrigerated storage locker where corpses were kept pending autopsy or burial. The morgue assistant appeared five minutes later. He was a short, bearded, unattractive man, slovenly in appearance as well as in manners.

“NYPD was already here,” he said as he led her to the elevator and they descended to the basement. “Got prints, DNA, took some pics—the whole nine yards.”

“I got the memo,” said Alex. “I still need to see the body.”

The attendant opened the door to the storage room and walked in ahead of her. Alex waited as he located the body and transferred it to an examining table. “Take your time,” he said. “He ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Alex approached the table without hesitation. A Catholic childhood and its attendant visitations and open-casket funerals had robbed her of any fear of the dead. Her job had done the rest. She stood over the assailant, Randall Shepherd, true name unknown. The body had been washed. Hours in refrigeration had turned it the complexion of a fish belly.

Three entry wounds decorated the torso. Two were spaced an inch apart just above the liver. The third defined an immaculate circle directly above his heart. Alex shot 40-caliber hollow-points designed to explode on impact and spend their energy within inches of entering a body. In layman’s terms, they went in small and came out big, and in between wreaked havoc on bone, arteries, and organs.

The hatred provoked by the sight of this lifeless, inert form astounded her. A will to violence rose up inside her. She dug her fingers into the seams of her pants to stop herself from striking the body. Death wasn’t enough. He deserved worse.

Three hits and thirteen misses.

If one of those misses had struck him earlier, Mara and DiRienzo might still be alive. The thought would haunt her for a long time. Alex released her grip on her slacks. She was not angry at Shepherd. She was angry at herself.

But she hadn’t come to the morgue to critique her marksmanship. She had come to confirm her hunch that the assailant was a professional soldier. It was not simply the perfect barracks corners on the beds. It was how Shepherd had handled his weapon. How he had fired in crisp three-shot bursts. How he had kept his cool under fire, holding his position and concentrating first on one target and then on another. She had no doubt that the assailant had been in a gun battle before, more likely more than once.

Alex had come because soldiers have tattoos.

At first glance she spotted three. A Samoan war band around the left arm and a series of tribal stripes running up the shoulder. The design was standard and told her nothing about the shooter. A second tattoo was more promising. Below the shoulder on the right arm, a striking cobra was inked, and below it the Roman numerals III.III.V and the words
Vincere aut Mori,
which she took to be Latin for “Conquer or Die.”

Alex snapped a photograph of the tattoo with her phone.

A third tattoo, on his right breast, showed an inverted isosceles triangle inside which a small, comical black owl sat staring straight ahead. A parachute filled the space behind the owl. In one corner was a red
1
⁰
. In another, a green
2 REP.
A single Latin word was written along the exterior of each of the triangle’s legs:
Legio. Patria. Nostra.
She knew the tattoo signified membership in a military organization. The question was which one.

Again she took a picture.

On a hunch, she lifted the right arm. She saw it at once and some small part of her felt assuaged. There on the fleshy underside of his torso were the letters
AB.

AB
for the soldier’s blood group.

Not just a soldier, she told herself. A commando.

And most probably a mercenary.

A
gentle breeze rustled the palms surrounding Simón Bolívar International Airport in Caracas, Venezuela. It was dusk and the thermometer registered a mild 75 degrees. A veil of mist decorated the crown of the El Ávila, the mountain that divided the city and stood as an imposing guard to the airport’s west.

Inside the terminal, 110 passengers crowded the waiting area at Gate 16, anxious to board Mexicana Flight 388 with service to Mexico City. Departure had been delayed two hours owing to a cell of thunderstorms passing to the north. Children pressed their faces to the glass, eager to spot a bolt of lightning streaking across the sky. They returned to their parents disappointed. The sky was cloudless. Not one of them had seen so much as the spark from a firefly. Parents shook their heads. Faulty weather forecasts were the least of Venezuela’s problems.

No one paid attention to the chartered bus that crossed the tarmac a little after 6 p.m. and pulled up to the rear of the aircraft. Nor did anyone notice the twenty-three men and women who alighted from the bus and climbed the mobile staircase onto the plane, having bypassed normal airline check-in procedures, security checkpoints, and passport control. When boarding was announced, the passengers sighed and filed onto the aircraft. No one said a word about the gringos already seated in the cabin. Nor did anyone comment when the plane landed in Mexico City and they were asked to remain in their seats while the gringos exited before them.

Two men waited for the twenty-three inside Benito Juárez International Airport. One was tall and broad-shouldered and wore the uniform of the Guardia Nacional. The other was short and dumpy and wore a wrinkled suit and expensive sunglasses. The soldier smiled and spoke loudly as he welcomed the group to Mexico. He had wonderful teeth. The short, fat man in the rumpled suit told him to shut up and get moving. The soldier clamped his square jaw shut and led the twenty-three to a door across the hall from Immigration Control.

Another uniformed official waited inside a large, unremarkable room. He asked the visitors to line up and have their passports ready. One by one, he examined the travel documents. All were new Portuguese passports that had never been stamped. The official had worked in immigration for many years. He knew that citizens of the European Union required a visa to visit Venezuela. He also knew better than to point out this discrepancy. One by one, he returned the passports to their owners. He did not, as was his custom, stamp each. Nor did he pass any through the optical scanner that recorded a person’s entry and read the biometric magnetic strip containing the visitor’s personal statistics. The official was a smart man and possessed a remarkable memory. It did not require significant effort to memorize two of the passport numbers and the names written inside. The official had many masters.

Thirty minutes after setting foot on Mexican soil, the twenty-three boarded a private bus and were driven to a respectable hotel on the outskirts of the city. Here they showered, changed clothes, and enjoyed a traditional Mexican dinner of carnitas, tortillas, and frijoles. Each was allowed one beer.

At 11 p.m., the first of three vans pulled into the hotel’s forecourt. Eight individuals—six men and two women—climbed aboard. All were trim and fit and in high spirits. They did not speak Portuguese but a mixture of German, French, and English. The van drove them to a private airstrip north of the city. A Pilatus P-3 waited on the asphalt runway. The eight stowed their bags and mounted the staircase. At midnight, the Pilatus took off and pointed its nose north for the five-hour flight to its destination.

Team One was airborne.

The second van collected a group of seven, six men and one woman. Again, all were fit to look at, impressively so. In contrast to the plain van that had picked up Team One, this one was painted sleek black and was as shiny as if it had been driven directly from the car wash. Two golden interlocking
S’
s adorned the doors on either side. The van drove west across the city to a private airport that catered to the city’s wealthiest citizens—industrialists, oilmen, ranking officials, and the landed gentry who counted as Mexico’s aristocrats. Tonight, however, the armed guards manning the main gate waved the van past without even a cursory inspection.

The van continued to the western end of the 6,000-foot runway where a Cessna Citation business jet waited, stairs lowered, navigation lights flashing, a uniformed steward standing by to help his passengers board. Like the van, the jet had the symbol of interlocking
S’
s painted on its fuselage.

At 1 a.m. the Citation radioed “wheels up” to the control tower. Its flight plan called for a first leg northwest to the city of Puerto Vallarta before it turned due north, crossed the United States border at El Centro, and continued on to its destination, San Francisco. Somewhere over the Sierra Madre mountain range, the pilot dipped the nose and descended to 6,000 feet. He plugged new coordinates into the plane’s navigation system. Moments later, the wings banked and the needle on the plane’s compass swung to east by northeast. The pilot was pleased to note that the fuel needle had barely strayed from full an hour after takeoff. His passengers were going to need every mile he could get if they hoped to reach their destination.

Team Two was en route.

A third van collected the final group of eight. The van drove all night east through the jungles of eastern Mexico. At 5 a.m. they arrived at the port city of Vera Cruz. The eight did not board a ship, however. Instead, they proceeded to a private airstrip owned by one of the multinational oil corporations based there and boarded a Bombardier business jet for the two-hour flight up the coast to Tampico. In Tampico they exchanged the jet for a CH-53 helicopter, formerly in the service of the United States Marine Corps but purchased recently by Noble Energy Corporation. The helicopter was spacious inside and fitted for another class of able-bodied men and women: roughnecks.

At dawn, they took off for the short flight to Tamondo.

Tamondo was not a city. It was the name of Noble Energy’s newest oil rig located in the Kaskida Field, 250 miles southwest of New Orleans.

Team Three was under way.