Forty-Four

Bobby stormed out of the brush and advanced on the bodies. He checked their necks for pulses. Finding none, he rose and looked down at them. Jael had emerged from the trees and stood by my side. Bobby nudged Teardrop with his toe.

“I know this guy,” said Bobby. “He’s Stevie Donato. Worked for your cousin.”

“Sal sent him?”

Bobby shrugged. “There isn’t much Stevie does that Sal doesn’t know about.”

“It looked like he was working for Talevi,” I said.

Bobby said, “Yeah. I know. Makes no sense. The Mafia doesn’t do espionage. Or at least they didn’t. What did Talevi say to you?”

“He wanted Paladin’s downlink information.”

“Did he.”

“Patterson said he couldn’t get it. Talevi asked me if I could get it, but I didn’t know what they were talking about, so Talevi decided to shoot us.”

“That’s it? He didn’t say anything else?”

“He said that Talevi had been working with JT.”

Bobby said, “I was afraid of that.” He looked at the Madonna and back out to the highway.

I asked Bobby, “Did Talevi kill JT? It would have been nice to tell me that.”

“I have no idea who killed JT.” Bobby looked at Jael. “What do you think?”

Jael said, “I think that Talevi has decided that his operation is a failure. He is now cleaning up loose pieces. Tucker is no longer safe.”

Bobby blew out a big sigh, walked in a small circle on the grass, and stood looking out at the highway for a moment. He turned back to us. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want you guys answering questions from the staties.”

We collected our flashlights, made sure that Jael’s shell casings were picked up, and headed back into the woods.

Bobby stopped walking once we were in the middle of the woods. He turned to us. “I’m about to share secret information from the US government.”

I said, “Do I need to sign a nondisclosure agreement?”

“No. You need to keep your mouth shut and not tell anybody, and I mean anybody, about this for any reason. You got that?”

I said, “Yeah.”

Jael said, “Understood.”

Bobby looked at her and asked, “Are you even a US citizen?”

Jael remained silent.

“Goddamn. Motherfucker. Shit!”

I said, “What’s the big secret?”

Bobby said, “Do you know what I mean when I talk about intelligence chatter?”

“Yeah. Little bits of data pointing to something.”

“Right. So, we’ve been getting chatter lately that the Iranians are looking to buy secret information about the Paladin missile system.”

“The one that shot down missiles in Iraq?”

“Yeah. The one that Israel will use if their situation with Iran turns into a shooting war.”

“Oh, crap,” I said.

Jael muttered something in Hebrew. From the tone, I took it to mean, “Oh, crap.”

Bobby continued, “Of course, chatter that the Iranians are looking to buy secrets is nothing new. They’re always looking to buy secrets.
So we put this information on the back burner and waited—until we got the second piece of intel. We learned that someone in Massachusetts says he can sell the kind of information the Iranians are looking to buy.”

“What kind of information?”

“The Paladin missile uses radar to track its targets and a big computer to hit the target.”

“Okay.”

“The problem is that the computer is too big to fly. So the missile gathers its radar data and uses a radio downlink to feed the information into the computer. Then the computer sends back guidance instructions.”

“Talevi asked for information on the downlink.”

“Right. If you have the right information about the downlink, you can disrupt the guidance and the missile will be useless.”

“So JT and Patterson were selling information to Talevi?”

Jael said, “That is a reasonable theory.”

I said, “Thanks.”

She continued, “On the other hand, there are two questions that the theory does not answer.”

Bobby asked, “What are those?”

“If JT and Patterson had the information, then why doesn’t Talevi already have it? Why has he decided to abort the mission and kill his contacts—and Tucker?”

Bobby said, “Good point. What’s the second question?”

“How do young men like JT and Patterson get connected to an Iranian spy such as Talevi? Contacts such as those take years to develop. One cannot simply ask for the information in a first meeting. One must understand the contact and the pressures on him to manipulate him.”

I said, “Jael’s got a point. I heard that JT had just started on the Paladin project. How would Talevi have known to talk to him?”

Bobby said, “That’s why I want to keep this investigation a secret. There’s more here to unravel. Talevi has some other contacts out there.”

We emerged from the woods without using our flashlights and snuck past dark houses into Jael’s car. Bobby let me ride shotgun on the way home. We drove away as Klieg lights snapped on in the woods. The crime scene technicians had started work.

We found our way back to the Pike and headed east. I looked into the night and thought about JT being a spy. It explained surprisingly little. Specifically, it didn’t explain why he had been in front of my house holding my childhood drawing of the Paladin. Did he think I had coded the downlink into a crayon scrawl? I would have used yellow for the downlink if I had known it was there. Yellow is the perfect color for drawing something that should be invisible.

Jael drove down the Mass Pike, back toward Boston. We were silent. As we passed through Framingham, I took a habitual glance toward my mother’s house. My mother’s house is about three hundred yards from the road where a wall of dirt, shrubs, and trees shields it from the Pike. Normally I can’t see any evidence of her house, or any other.

Tonight was different. Tonight I could see a column of smoke billowing into the sky, inky black smoke, lit from below by a flickering orange light and shot through with cinders of burning paper.

Lots of burning paper.