thirty-six

The cooked smell of fruit and food was the first thing to hit them, followed by the underlying sourness of unwashed bodies. But it was the result of heat, not direct fire. If the intention had been to burn this place down, it had failed. Where the outside skin of the workshop had been badly damaged, the inside stud walls were mostly untouched, although the ceiling was hanging down in places and the air inside the room was choking and still.

After the vast space inside the hangar, it was quite a contrast. Dave Proust kicked the door wide open to disturb the air and let in more light, and handed them each a pair of rubber gloves.

“Looks to me like a prison cell,” Ruth said, indicating handcuffs attached to the bed.

Dave nodded. “I guess we know who was being held here. But the really interesting bit is over there.” He was pointing to the other bed, and an area of browned blood splatter on the pale wall behind it, with a hole in the centre. “Somebody stopped a bullet.” He indicated the blankets, which showed a scattering of brown spots of blood. “From the area of residue and the location of that hole, I’d say he was standing in front of the bed when he got hit. It was probably a minor wound; there’s no sign of heavy bleeding that I can see, even on the floor to the door, unless they wrapped him up in something first.”

Ruth and Vaslik agreed. Unless the shooter had taken unusual care to staunch the flow of bleeding, the victim must have walked out of the shed under his own steam. Otherwise why bother if they were going to burn it down?

Ruth turned back to the bed with the handcuffs and lifted the mattress and pillow. Both were stained and filthy, but there was nothing to see. Whoever had been cuffed to the bed—and she figured Dave was right and that it had been James Chadwick—he had not been in a position to conceal anything that might help them find him.

Vaslik checked out the other bed and lifted the pillow. It revealed a large hunting knife in a scabbard, the leather stained by years of sweat and dirt. Using part of the sheet to prevent his fingerprints contaminating it, he pulled the scabbard away; the knife looked old but the blade itself was clean and shiny, and razor sharp. Whoever had owned this had looked after it.

He looked at the bed. “No cuffs on this one, and he had a weapon. So he wasn’t a prisoner.” He frowned. “Yet he got shot? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless it was Chadwick,” Dave reasoned. “Although I’m betting it was a low-level member of the crew posted to look after him. If Brasher gets prints and DNA off this we’ll soon know the answer.”

Vaslik nodded at the boxes of water bottles and canned food in the corner. “It looks like they had provisions for a while.” He stepped closer and pulled out a box containing bananas and apples, mostly blackened and rotting, the juices oozing through a hole in the cardboard. Some of the cans were bulging and looked ready to explode, and he left them alone. He turned back to the bed with the bloodstains, then inspected the lock on the door. “Why would they make somebody share this dump with a prisoner? He wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Maybe it was someone with no choice.”

“I guess.” Vaslik toured the walls and stopped, looking down in the corner. He stooped and came up with a DVD player. The casing showed some impact damage and was missing some bits but the screen was intact. He pushed the casing together and pressed the play button.

Surprisingly, it worked.

The three of them stood in absolute silence as the footage rolled by. The pictures on the screen were made all the more threatening by the complete absence of commentary.

Within the first few seconds Ruth recognised what she was seeing. She felt the hairs stir on the back of her neck. “That’s where I met Elizabeth Chadwick. It’s in Chelsea.”

The footage of Ben’s school spoke for itself, and nobody spoke until the DVD clicked off. The implications of the threat held over James Chadwick’s head were all-too clear: those closest to him had been under surveillance for a while, including the apartment block where Valerie DiPalma lived. It didn’t take much to imagine how vulnerable and powerless he must have felt being presented with this footage.

“The team will bag this up,” Dave concluded. “We’d better step out and leave the rest as it is. I’ll call it in.”

Ruth felt relieved to be back on the outside and breathing in deep gasps of fresh air. It must have been bad enough for the guard in there, but intolerable on a shocking scale for James Chadwick, knowing all the time that there were men out in the world within reach of his son, wife and Valerie DiPalma, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. The sense of desperation must have been tearing at his insides.

She shook her head. There was something bugging her and she couldn’t put her finger on it. But now she was out in the open, it was beginning to come to her. Whatever it was had been scratching away at the back of her mind ever since first stepping through the rear door of the hangar.

Then she had it: the smell she and Vaslik had both noticed. It had been too strong to be from a small dead animal, especially in that vast space. She’d subconsciously dismissed it because the aroma was followed closely by seeing the carcass. Yet it had lingered on the air more than she would have thought normal.

She said to Dave, “Wait. Before you do that there’s something I want to check. Give me a couple of minutes.”

She jogged over to the hangar and walked through the main doors to the side where she had seen the boards over the inspection pit. It was probably nothing but since she was here, she might as well check—

She ducked past the chain hanging from the overhead pulley and nudged one of the boards aside with her foot. Was that a heavy layer of soot?

The board moved with surprising ease. As it did so, what she’d thought was soot seemed to lift off and rise into the air. Then she realised what it was as a dense cloud of flies swirled around her head like a mini-storm, buzzing furiously. Her stomach heaved with revulsion as she felt hundreds of tiny bodies bouncing against her cheeks and getting tangled in her hair in their desperation to escape. But she was too stunned to react immediately by the sheer scale of what she glimpsed lying in the hole.

“My God. Slik! Dave!”

The two men came running and stopped dead when they saw what she was looking at.

“Now we definitely call it in,” Dave Proust said abruptly, and clamped a handkerchief over his face. “This place is a major crime scene. We’ll need to advise Homeland Security, too. No way is some pencil-head going to ignore this.”

“I’ll do it.” Vaslik paused to flick some of the flies out of Ruth’s hair, then took out his phone and called Brasher’s number. He was patched through immediately to Brasher’s cell phone, as he was on his way to Alva to interview Donny.

He took a couple of minutes to describe what they had found at the airfield, then came to what lay in the inspection pit. “At least four males, possibly five, it will be hard to tell until they’re pulled out of there. They look to me like Latinos, and some are wearing working clothes as far as we can see, including boots and gloves. Like construction workers.”

“Out there? Constructing what?”

“I’m coming to that.”

“Can you tell how they died?”

“They were shot at close range with an automatic weapon. There are dozens of shell casings in the pit around them, as if the men were ordered down there, then hosed down.”

“How long ago do you estimate?”

“Could be a couple of days to a week or more. With the temperature down there and the fire and flies … I’m only guessing. The bodies are a mess.”

“Christ, this is all we need,” Brasher breathed heavily down the phone. “I’ll arrange for the Oklahoma State Police and a forensics team, and some of our own people from the local bureau to get on the way immediately and lock the place down. What the hell were they doing out there?”

“It looks like they were a construction crew shipped in to build the inside of the workshop where Chadwick and one other, like a guard, were held. There was food and water and one of the beds had been fitted with handcuffs. Once the crew was done, it looks as if they’d served their purpose.” He looked across at Ruth, who waved her cell phone. “Ruth’s sending you photos of the scene and shipping labels on some cardboard boxes we think must have been used to bring the drones over. It should be easy to verify with Memphis FedEx by the codes on the boxes, but we’ve seen pieces of one of the missing EuroVol drones, anyway, so that’s pretty much a formality.”

“Got that. Good work. Before I go, I have some intel about the guy who attacked Ruth.”

“That’s good to hear. Let me put you on loudspeaker.” He pressed the button and Brasher’s voice echoed around the hangar.

“Ruth, we’ve come up with a name to match the prints found on the knife and hard hat from that guy who attacked you in Newark. His name is Yusuf Kalil, of no fixed address but appears to be known in Newark and New Jersey as a local hoodlum. He has no known extremist links, but he’s done time for robbery, aggravated assault, and a sexual assault on a female minor.”

“Sweet guy,” Ruth muttered. “Have you got him yet?”

“Not yet but we will soon. He arrived here on a student visa from Syria twelve years ago. Our guess is he might be a jihadi sympathiser but more likely he’s a cheap muscle for hire.”

“Did you come up with anything on the man named Paul?”

“Funny you should ask.” Brasher’s voice sounded upbeat. “I issued the photos to all agencies, some with ID- and data-matching resources they don’t like sharing on a general basis. You can guess who I mean.”

“Like Langley?” said Vaslik.

“In that general area, yes. Anyway, one of them came back with a positive ID. His name is listed as Paul Malick, aka Asim Malak, precise origins unknown.”

“So he’s an illegal.”

“That’s correct. We have nothing on him in the US so far, but from what little we do have he must have been living here under false papers for at least seven years, possibly longer. Our guess is he came in via Mexico or farther south and acquired papers that allowed him to travel in and out of the country on several occasions, mostly to Germany or Turkey, both gateways to the Middle East. The latest intel is that he’s currently wanted in Egypt and Jordan for murder, bombing, and organising crimes against the state, and is suspected of membership of organisations like al-Qaeda and specifically being allied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. If that’s true the guy has some serious history. Either way they say he’s considered highly dangerous and he’s definitely linked to Bilal Ammar and others with known extremist and jihadist agendas.”

Ruth and Vaslik looked at each other. If they needed proof of something serious being planned, then the links were now coming together, pointing towards a disparate group of extremists who had gotten together in the name of jihad.

But that didn’t tell them where this Paul, aka Asim Malak, had now gone, or where he had taken James Chadwick.

“So now will you call off this visit by the president?” said Vaslik. “This is looking more and more like a serious, planned assassination attempt.”

“I already suggested that as soon as we got word on Malak, but it got voted down. The president won’t bow to terrorist threats on home soil because of the message that would send to Americans: that the person in the White House can no longer go wherever he likes—even a US military base—because of a threat? No chance.”