twenty

This time Vaslik drove, pushing hard through the traffic with the expertise of long experience working undercover in this city. While he focussed on not killing anybody, Ruth kept trying Valerie’s number, quietly berating herself for not having reacted to the instinctive warning signals she’d picked up earlier about the man outside the apartment.

Twenty minutes into the journey they received a call from Reiks. He sounded upbeat. “Brasher’s had to split for a meeting, but he got a patrol car to drop by DiPalma’s place. She’s okay. She said she was asleep and didn’t hear the phone. The responding officer believes she may have taken something like a sleeping pill, or it could be exhaustion. DiPalma’s promised to keep the door locked until you get there.”

Ruth breathed a sigh of relief and disconnected. She relayed the news to Vaslik.

“We need to move her,” he said. “If they’re tracking her to put pressure on Chadwick, it won’t be long before they make a move.”

“Put pressure on him to do what, though?”

“Well, if they want him but can’t find him, it would be a simple way to get him to show himself.”

“And if they’ve already got him, they’ll use her as leverage to make him do whatever it is they’re after.”

“Right.” He steered round a cab double-parked near a delivery truck. “It would help if we knew what it was this mystery guy really wanted.”

Ruth said nothing. It was like looking down on a giant puzzle when they only had some of the outside pieces to work on. The rest was all supposition and guesswork.

They arrived at the apartment block to find a patrol car standing outside and a black female officer chatting with a woman and small child. The officer nodded goodbye to the woman and turned to face them as they approached the entrance.

“Sir, madam—you mind giving me your names and showing me some ID?” She had one hand resting on her hip and looked ready for anything. It was obvious that Brasher’s call must have lit a spark under the local police precinct and they were taking the issue seriously.

Vaslik gave the officer their names and showed her his driver’s licence. “We know what this is—it’s a potential kidnap intruder scare called in by Special Agent Brasher of the FBI.”

The officer nodded. “No problem. I already checked with the tenant, a Ms. DiPalma, and she’s fine. She looks pretty rough, but I gather she’s had some bad news and it’s worn her down. I don’t suppose either of you can see the guy in the area?” She gave a minute jerk of her head towards the street without looking round.

Ruth had already been scanning the street and the park across the way, and she couldn’t see anybody resembling the man she’d seen earlier. But he could be using the trees or other people in the park as cover. Only a thorough search of the area would prove that.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

The officer smiled. “Damn, I love that accent. And no need to apologise, ma’am—it’s what we’re here for. Have a good one.” She gave Vaslik a more lingering look before climbing back in her car and driving away.

“Christ, Slik,” Ruth muttered, almost laughing with relief. “Pull it in. We’re working here.”

They went up to Valerie’s apartment and knocked on the door. She let them in with evident caution and looked at Ruth with puzzlement. “What’s going on?” she asked, stifling a yawn. “I asked the patrol officer, but she just said she’d been asked to check on the address after a nuisance call was made.”

Ruth explained about the man she had seen downstairs, and that they had found evidence that James had indeed been followed by persons unknown. “I don’t mean to alarm you, Valerie, but if anybody is trying to get to James, they might do so by using you. We think it would be a good idea if you could go away for a few days, somewhere nobody would know about. Can you do that?”

“I suppose I could take a few days’ vacation. But why? Have you found any trace of James? What about his iPad—has that helped?”

“The iPad was very useful,” Vaslik said calmly. “You did the right thing calling us. We haven’t finished looking through it yet, but we’re being helped by the FBI and they’ll let us know the minute they find anything.”

“Whoever this is,” she said tentatively, “whoever you think it is … there’s a chance that they already have him, isn’t there? Otherwise he’d have called me.”

“We don’t know that,” Ruth told her. “The first thing is to get you to safety; I’m sure James would want that.”

It seemed to act as the trigger they needed. They waited while Valerie went through to her bedroom and packed a small case, then checked the apartment was secure before accompanying her downstairs to her car. While Ruth kept her talking for a minute, Vaslik ran a check on the vehicle to make sure it was clean.

“Keep your cell phone on you at all times,” Ruth warned her, “and don’t come back here until we tell you it’s safe to do so. And if you hear from James … or anybody else, call us immediately.” She handed her one of Walter Reiks’s business cards. “If you can’t reach us, call this man and he’ll do whatever’s necessary.”

Valerie nodded and stowed the card away in her purse. “Thank you,” she said, her eyes welling up. “Thank you both. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

Back at the Cruxys office they found Brasher had returned. He pulled a wry face. “The consensus is that this Chadwick business is serious. I’ve sent the photos of the guy on the iPad to our technical people to see if NGI can pick him out.” He paused to explain, “Sorry—that’s our current facial recognition system. It’s called Next Generation Identification. If the face is anywhere on our database, there’s a good chance it’ll find him.”

“How long will it take?” Vaslik asked.

“Normally it shouldn’t take more than twenty to thirty minutes. But with all the activity we’re seeing at the moment, there’s a rush of stuff being pushed through, all marked top priority. I have to warn you, it’s not infallible; but it is a whole lot easier and quicker than going through millions of mug shots.”

While they waited, Ruth took over the iPad and looked again at Chadwick’s searches for airfields. The discovery of the photos of the man had energised her, and she sensed that they had picked up their first solid lead. It proved that James Chadwick hadn’t been imagining things about being followed, although there was still a possibility the man named Paul could have been nothing more than an obsessive who’d latched onto him.

But obsessives sometimes became dangerous.

The photos of the airfields were bugging her. She couldn’t put her finger on it, and she was certain she hadn’t seen any of these sites before. Yet a fragment of something was tugging at her memory, demanding attention.

She flicked through the various links; more aerial shots of runways and taxiways, of fuel storage tanks, outbuildings and hangars—the latter mostly of wood and metal construction with rusting corrugated iron roofs and lots of windows. Many of the airfields appeared to be in partial use, some as museums, some as private flying clubs or small commercial bases. All the pictures carried the same air of melancholy she’d picked up seeing old WWII airfields back in England, their structures slowly fading into the ground beneath them, remembered and praised by a shrinking few, remnants of a bygone age.

She pushed the iPad away, the links and pictures a clutter of confusion. She turned instead to the map she and Vaslik had found among Chadwick’s personal effects at StoneSeal’s offices.

She spread it out on the desk and studied the circles and notations she’d seen earlier. Most of the writing meant nothing, seemingly no more than a private code of abbreviations that only Chadwick himself would be able to translate. There were numerous small question marks and asterisks dotted here and there, as if he’d been marking the locations for further investigation, but with no indication of what he might have been looking for. A couple of place names had even been underlined, presumably with the aim to look at them in more detail later. But one thing still very apparent was that the circles on the map were all in the same three states she’d noticed before: Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

She revised her thoughts on needles in haystacks. This could turn out to be more like grains of dust they were searching for.

While Ruth had been focussing on the maps, Brasher had been talking with Vaslik. He took out his cell phone and hit speed-dial. It was picked up immediately and he asked to speak to somebody called Janice. Moments later he said, “Jan, I’m on the Chadwick thing at the Cruxys offices. Can you give me the description Chadwick gave of the man who he said was following him?” He waited, then listened for a few moments before saying thank you and disconnecting.

“Chadwick was asked for a description of the man who approached him, this Paul guy. He said he was mid-height, stocky but not fat, and could have been of Latino extraction but sounded pure American.” He tapped the screen of the iPad. “It’s not the guy you saw outside DiPalma’s place, Ruth—there’s no moustache. Could it have been muscles, here?”

“No. He wasn’t that big or that young—and he walked upright. He looked very … ordinary.”

“Most of them do. So now we’ve got three guys, possibly connected, possibly not.”

“And the watcher I tangled with at Chadwick’s apartment,” Ruth reminded him.

He nodded. “Him, too. It’s getting crowded.”

“I wonder why Chadwick didn’t send in the photos when he called in his report,” Vaslik said. “He must have known it would strengthen his claim.”

“Maybe he never got the chance,” Brasher replied quietly. “If this Paul guy was watching him this close, he might have figured that sooner or later he’d talk to us and decided to cut to the chase and take him.” He stopped as his phone buzzed and excused himself to take the call. He listened for a few moments, making quick notes on his notepad, then told the person on the other end to pull up a file of the suspect, before turning back to the others with a mixed look of triumph and uncertainty.

“We’ve got a hit.” He tapped the photo of the second man, the weightlifter figure seen under the arches at the transit station. “NGI says his name is Bilal Ammar. Aged twenty-eight, he’s been here about fifteen years, came over from Egypt with his father, an IT consultant on a work visa, and settled in Queens. When his father died of cancer he dropped out of school and became radicalised at a local mosque in Queens. He came to our attention mixing with a known pro-terror support group running a website calling for jihad against the West. Most of the group are hot-heads who like mixing with protest marches and starting fights. Ammar was picked up in connection with two serious assaults on anti-jihadist Muslims who were trying to calm things down at a couple of larger mosques in the city.”

“How come he’s walking free?”

“The usual: they couldn’t prove anything because the victims were unwilling to identify him. In the end they had to let him go, but it was enough to get his face added to NGI.” He lifted his hands. “At least now we know he’s acquainted with this guy Paul, whoever he is … and quite possibly the other guys as well. And if we get the prints off the knife and hard hat, that might give us another one.”

“Great,” Ruth murmured. “So we’ve got a potential terrorist cell.”