Beyond the window of the Delta terminal at Detroit Metro Airport, battered Dariens littered the ramp, crushed against the yellow cabs or overturned by collisions with big tour buses. Verrazzano came up the escalator from the government flight that had brought him from JFK with Jahn and Frisch. He turned toward the rental car desks.
Frisch came into the concourse behind him. He whistled at the chaos. Jahn shoved him forward. He stumbled against Verrazzano and scowled at the FBI agent.
“Now you see why we’re willing to work with a traitor like you.” Jahn gave Frisch another poke in the shoulder to get him moving.
The concourse was jammed with travelers, none of whom had any prospect of traveling anywhere. Commercial flights were grounded across the country. The people inside the terminal were stuck, hoping that the skies would be opened soon enough to save them a night in a Detroit hotel or on a bench in the airport. Every child appeared to be bawling and crying. Every couple bickered. Everyone was scared, and a shrill tone of panic echoed around the high, sweeping ceiling. Verrazzano’s group picked their way through the crowd. Frisch edged slowly to the side of the bustle. Verrazzano took hold of his arm.
Frisch shook him off. “I’ve been in solitary for six months. All these people are freaking me out, is all. So give me a break and let’s go around the side here.”
Jahn tapped Verrazzano’s shoulder. She held up the screen of her phone to show an FBI alert. “Domestic flights got shut down right after the crash. International flights just got grounded too.”
“Makes sense. If they can get inside the computer in a car,” Frisch said, “they can hack a plane and bring it down, right?” He spoke loudly enough that the panicked vacationers and business travelers around him glared, angered and horrified.
“Let’s move,” Verrazzano said.
Frisch looked up at the welcoming smile of the Mexican farmer in the logo of the Juan Valdez Café. “I haven’t had a decent cup of java in six months. Get me some joe right here. You’ll see a totally different guy. I’ve got a smile like Julia Roberts.”
“We’ve got to see that. I could use a cup anyway.” Verrazzano went toward the café’s counter. He called to Jahn, “Watch him.”
“What do you think she’s going to do?” Frisch said. “Give me a ticket to Hawaii and send me on my way? The flights are all grounded. Just get me the coffee.”
“The flights are grounded?” A man in a gray suit turned toward Frisch. “I just spoke to a desk agent over there. She said we might be able to take off with a delay of only a few hours.”
Frisch shook his head. “They just don’t want you to panic, man. No one’s going anywhere. What part of ‘terror alert’ do you not understand?”
Jahn yanked at Frisch’s shoulder. “Shut up.”
The man in the suit didn’t question Frisch’s authority or knowledge. Instead, he started to spread the news about the grounding of all the flights. The murmur that circulated through the crowd rose in volume and became shrill.
Verrazzano dropped a few balled-up dollars on the counter at Juan Valdez. They had been in his pocket for days. He generally only ate at the cafeteria in the ICE field office. He didn’t spend money on entertainment. He’d been unknowingly saving up to buy a caffeine jolt for the worst man in the world.
“Three coffees.” He glanced up at the TV screen behind the counter. The news anchor’s baritone guided viewers through footage from the Golden Gate. The span of the famous old bridge was choked with car wrecks. The crawl line at the bottom of the screen told him riots had spread to inner cities all over the country. Police had shot looters dead in Atlanta, Houston, and Miami.
The skinny Indian behind the cash register rubbed his eyes. The whites were discolored to a caramel tone. Overindulgence in the store’s product must have been wrecking his kidneys. He laid Verrazzano’s change on the counter and set to work pouring the coffees with shaky hands. Verrazzano collected his coins and corrected himself. The second-worst man in the world. Wyatt could buy his own coffee.
“Oh my God.” The woman at the head of the next line gawked at the television screen above the counter. Verrazzano followed her glance. The news channel had cut away from San Francisco. Instead, it showed the traffic circle outside Buckingham Palace, where black taxis and passenger cars were tangled together. A few seconds later, the image cut to a similar scene around the Arc de Triomphe. In the time it took for the woman’s coffee to arrive, the news showed destruction in Berlin, Rome, Istanbul, and Tel Aviv. Verrazzano ran his hand over his face. It was everywhere. Each wrecked car on the screen was a signal to him from Colonel Wyatt, a reminder that no one in the world would be safe until Verrazzano and his old commander had their reckoning.
He stuck his change into the side pocket of his jacket. The pocket was empty. The fake ICE ID he had used to get Frisch out of the detention center in Brooklyn had been in there. Now it was gone. He glanced over at Frisch until he was sure he had caught his eye. Then he turned away.
The woman picked up her cup and moved off slowly, dazed, cradling the coffee in both hands. She reminded Verrazzano of his sister. She had the same bump halfway down her nose. He watched her walk toward the crowd. He wished he could be with Helen now, eating her brownies and playing with his niece. He would call them as soon as he was back from . . . from wherever he ended up in the next few days.
The woman with the coffee halted beside Jahn and Frisch. She squinted at the big departures board, looking for news of her flight.
“Three coffees, sir.” The Indian set a tray down on the counter with Verrazzano’s order.
Verrazzano had started to turn toward the counter to pick up his tray, when Frisch’s arm snapped out toward the woman with the coffee. Frisch braced his palm under the cup and jerked his hand upward. The cup flew into the air and dropped toward the crowd. The woman yelped in surprise.
The coffee cup came down on another woman’s head. The scalding liquid blew across her scalp and face. She shrieked. The crowd was suddenly in motion. They were in an airport, already tense because of the clogged terminal and cancelled flights and the fear of terrorism, and now someone was screaming in agony.
Frisch elbowed Jahn sharply on the nose. He punched her in the ear, kicked her kneecap, and was gone into the roiling crowd.
Verrazzano tried to follow, but Frisch ducked low. The crowd hid him. Jahn came to her feet. Her nose gushed blood. She wiped at it with the sleeve of her jacket. “I’m okay,” she said.
The woman with the scalded scalp wasn’t the only one screaming now. The wailing children turned up the volume. Men pushed each other in the melee, guarding their families and yelling in many languages.
“We’ve got to stop him before he gets out of here.” Jahn moved ahead. The exits were crowded with people trying to escape from whatever the panic was about.
Verrazzano cut through the crush in the opposite direction to Jahn—toward the security check. She followed him, shouting, “What the hell are you doing? Why would he go that way?”
A TSA agent stepped toward him at the metal detector. “Sir, the checkpoint is closed. Stay where you are.”
Verrazzano flipped his wallet to show his ICE identification. The TSA guy blinked at it, but Verrazzano was already gone. The metal detector beeped loudly. He waved his badge again and kept going.
He charged past a Cajun burger joint and a Mediterranean grill. Verrazzano cut along the shopping concourse. He didn’t see Frisch.
Jahn came up behind him. “We should be at the exits to the terminal. So he can’t break for the open.”
“Whatever you expect Frisch to do, he’ll do the opposite.”
“Well, I expected him to escape, and now he’s done just that. So much for your theory of doing the opposite.”
He sprinted away, past the luggage shops and food concessions. “Where the hell are you going?” Jahn came after him. At the furthest end of the concourse, Verrazzano halted at an unmarked white doorway. He took out his ICE ID and slipped it through the card reader beside the keypad. The lock clicked and he went inside.
A guard in a tan uniform looked up from behind a Perspex window. Verrazzano flashed his card. He jerked a finger at Jahn. “She’s with the Bureau.” The guard’s expression became less friendly. He examined Jahn’s identity card. The ICE logo on his sleeve rippled as he rolled his shoulders.
“Agent Todd?” Verrazzano asked the guard. “From the New York field office?”
“Down in the motor pool.” The guard directed them to a staircase.
As they leapt down the stairs, Jahn called to Verrazzano. “Agent Todd? But he’s still in—”
“Frisch is good at picking pockets.”
The stairs took them to a recess under the terminal where a row of dark-blue cars were parked. Another uniformed guard sat in a booth at the end of the rank, studying the sports pages. Verrazzano ran toward him. “Guy just took out a vehicle. Tall, long beard.”
“He sure did.” The guard set aside his newspaper.
“I need a car too.”
Verrazzano signed for a set of keys and jumped into a long dark sedan. He pulled away as Jahn dropped into the passenger seat and shut the door.
“How are we going to catch him?” she said. “We can’t have him pulled over. He’s supposed to be in a jail cell in New York. We’re never going to explain that.”
Verrazzano thumbed through the screen of his cell phone, even as he took the car toward the security gate out of the terminal area and into the public roadway.
“What’ve you got?” Jahn asked. “Is there a tracking device in the car he took out of the ICE pool?”
He smiled at her and held up his phone. A map of Detroit on the screen showed a pulsing dot progressing northeast along the interstate.
“Frisch?” she asked.
“Sure. Don’t you recognize him?”
“What if he stops and switches cars?”
“We’re not tracking the car. He tried to keep the fake ICE ID when we left the detention center. I figured he’d steal it again, so I doctored it while we were on the plane. There’s a microtransmitter taped to the back of the card.”
“So he didn’t escape. You let him go just now. You couldn’t have told me? So as maybe I wouldn’t get smacked in the head and have my kneecap near stomped off?”
“Your knee’s okay. You ran just fine through the terminal.”
“What if he ditches the ICE ID?”
Verrazzano pulled onto I-94. “The entire country is in lockdown. If Frisch wants to get around, he’s going to hang onto the ID. Keep an eye on that signal for me.”
A half hour later, they pulled up outside a house of brown and tan brick with a tall chimney stack and gabled windows south of Cherry Hill Street. At the curb was a beaten-up German midsize car. Verrazzano glanced through the driver’s side window. The housing of the steering column dangled where Frisch had ripped it away to hot-wire the engine when he switched vehicles.
The house looked like a chunk of Henry Ford’s old Fairlane estate had broken loose and floated across the Rouge River to settle in this wealthy corner of Dearborn. It was the kind of place where a thirties mogul might have set up his secretary so he could come by anytime to give her a session of energetic dictation. It was also, Verrazzano figured, home to whoever owned the Bitcoin wallet to which Colonel Wyatt had sent money from Beijing. He hadn’t trusted Frisch to take them here the way they agreed. But now he’d led them to the place.
“This isn’t right.”
Jahn got out of the ICE sedan. “Frisch brought us here.”
“I mean, it doesn’t feel right.”
He went to the path across the front lawn. He scanned the dark, leaded windows of the house. The house broadcast the absolute quiet of a hidden presence. The very bricks seemed to hold their breath. “Go around the back, Gina.”
Jahn cut across the lawn and went around the corner. Verrazzano gave her time to get to the back door. Then he nudged the oak front door. It swung open.
He went through the hallway and spun into the living room with his weapon before him. He let his back brace against the wall and listened to the silence for its deepest point. That was where he’d find Frisch. Or whoever else was hiding here. The room was empty.
He returned to the hallway. Jahn was in the kitchen with her Glock ready.
Verrazzano went to the dining room door. He sensed the cold quiet of death within. He wheeled inside. A man lay on his back on the dining table, arms and legs spread. He stared straight up at the ceiling. His broad, round face and the low bridge of his nose suggested he was East Asian. His hair was bristly, as though it had been shaved not long ago and was being allowed to grow back.
Except on top. From the center of his brow to the crown of his head, his skull was visible and scarred with gouts of drying blood. Verrazzano went closer. The man had been scalped.
Jahn spoke from the doorway. “I guess those Bitcoin payments really weren’t innocent. Did Frisch do this?”
Verrazzano leaned over the corpse. Nothing Wyatt does is ever innocent, he thought, and Wyatt’s behind this, not Frisch. He followed the dead man’s eyes. They stared at the ceiling. A man being scalped would’ve turned his eyes up in his sockets as far as he could, drawn to the source of his pain. But there was a horror that would’ve been even worse for the man on the table, Verrazzano realized, and his eyes were on that.
He went quickly out of the room and mounted the stairs. He crossed the landing to the room directly above the dead man. The room he had been looking toward when he died. It was a bedroom, undisturbed by the killer. Nothing in the house had been tossed. Whoever killed the man on the table had gotten what he wanted.
In the doorway Verrazzano listened. The dog-whistle murmur of electrical gadgets flowed toward him from the nightstands, cell phones and tablets plugged into the outlets. On the dresser, a remote audio speaker burped its barely audible low-battery signal.
In the far corner, there was an antique cherrywood closet. The quiet around it was deafening. He crossed the room smoothly, threw back the door, and pulled the rack of light floral dresses aside on their hangers. A small woman shrieked and buried herself farther back into the closet. She held her thin arms up over her head and pulled her knees into her chest, kicking out feebly at Verrazzano.
The things we can’t live with don’t actually kill us. So, unfortunately, we all live with things we can’t live with, and each time we confront them we sense the death that dwells within us. For Verrazzano, the sight of a woman cowering before him, expecting him to kill her, took him back to that stairwell in Beirut where he had realized that the only source of fear in his world was himself.
“It’s okay.” He moved his gun behind his leg to put it out of the woman’s sight. He touched her quivering arm. “I’m a federal agent. Ma’am, you can come out of there now.” He called for Jahn.
A heavy fist shot through the clothing on the hangers. It caught Verrazzano square on the nose. He rocked back onto the bed. Tom Frisch leapt out at him, reaching for the gun in his hand. Verrazzano stretched his arm away. Frisch head-butted him full in the face and buried his teeth in the skin around his eye. Verrazzano yelled. His mouth filled with Frisch’s long beard. He coughed and bit at the chin beneath it. Frisch growled and bit down harder.
Then Frisch flew away from him, tumbling to the floor. Jahn jumped across Verrazzano’s prone body with the impetus of the punch she’d delivered to Frisch’s head. She wrestled Frisch’s arms behind him, cuffed him, and dropped her weight on her knee between his shoulder blades. When she stood up, she kicked Frisch hard in the ribs. She went to tend to Verrazzano’s eye, but his urgent gesture directed her toward the closet.
She holstered her Glock and knelt before the frightened woman, talking to her softly.
Like the dead man downstairs, the woman was Asian. She looked about thirty years old and appeared not to weigh a lot more than that in pounds. Her tension and fear burst out of her with the arrival of a sympathetic woman and the realization that she was safe. She wept hard.
Jahn drew her out of her hiding place. When the woman stood, her flower-print dress bulged over a pregnant belly. Jahn glanced at Verrazzano, both agents hoping they were putting it together the wrong way. But they both sensed that the father was the man dead on the table on the ground floor. Jahn tipped her head toward the still, furious figure of Frisch on the floor. “Was it him?” she whispered.
Verrazzano shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Honey, what’s your name?” Jahn helped the woman sit on the edge of the bed. She knelt in front of her.
“Mo Hui,” she sobbed.
“We need your help to find out what happened here, Mo.”
“Hui. Her name is Hui.” Frisch wriggled angrily as he spoke. “Mo’s her family name. They put the names the other way around from us.”
Jahn glowered at him.
“I heard him die.” The pregnant woman collapsed forward, bawling.
“Do you know who did it?” Jahn pointed at Frisch. “Was it him?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, sister.” Frisch grinned.
“No, he came later,” the Chinese woman said.
“I bet the guy downstairs is her husband,” Frisch said. “Terrible way for a marriage to end. But maybe not the worst, eh, Verrazzano? Could be better to be dead than to have your wife say you’re dead to her.”
Verrazzano lifted Frisch by the elbows and hauled him onto the landing. He shoved him into the bathroom and shut the door. Back in the bedroom, he went onto one knee beside Mo Hui. For a moment, he made a deliberate effort to shift his focus away from the case. He brought his mind to bear on his compassion for her and her unborn child. It was a meditation technique he used every day, and like his work at ICE, it was intended to repair the world he had done so much to damage. He knew she would hear it in his voice when he spoke. “Hui, my name is Dominic.”
She sniffed at her tears. She linked her fingers across her bulging stomach. Then she nodded.
“Who did you hear?” he asked.
“My husband. Dying.” Her voice was precise and demure, every word in English requiring just a little thought, translated from her native language.
“What’s your husband’s name?”
“Gao Rong.”
“What does Rong do? What’s his job?”
“He works at Darien.”
The room seemed to fill with the squealing brakes and the compressing metal that had sounded on every street and highway from Los Angeles to Boston that morning, from Melbourne to Milan. Verrazzano focused hard, so that the connection to the company whose cars had gone out of control wouldn’t make his questions too eager and clumsy. “What does he do at Darien?”
“Rong is a computer programmer.”
“How long have you been here in Dearborn?” Verrazzano said.
“One year and a half.” She looked up with sudden urgency. “He changed the date.”
“What date?”
“Of the bad thing. It was the big crash. I figured it out this morning when I saw the news. We argued about it, me and Rong. He always said he couldn’t let the real attack happen. He had to give a big warning. So he changed the date. He said people would figure it out and stop the rest of it.”
The rest of it. A picture of something bigger than the crash of all the Darien cars formed in Verrazzano’s mind. What could be bigger than the disaster that had hit the roads that morning? “When Rong did this, did it put him in danger?”
“He thought maybe it did. The trouble started when I got pregnant. He began to talk about feeling guilty. He had to let people know somehow—let them know what would happen. His mood got worse and worse. Until a month ago.”
“What happened a month ago?”
“He went on a trip. He came back after a week. He was crazy. He was crying all the time. His hair was shaved. He wore a baseball cap, and he wouldn’t let me look at his head until the hair grew back. That was when he said he was going to give a warning, even if—even if it meant something bad would happen to him.” She covered her mouth with her hand.
“Did he tell you where he went a month ago?”
She shook her head and sobbed into her palm. “He said the trip started fine, but then it all went wrong when the big man took off his wig.”
“When the big man took off his wig? Were those his words?”
“He wouldn’t tell me what he meant. But that was exactly what he said.”
“What did he need to warn people about?”
“Rong said if he went to the cops he would die for sure. If he gave the warning his way, maybe he would be okay and we could live here and have our child in America.” She pressed her hands over her belly. “But he didn’t believe it. He knew what they would do to him.”
“Did you see anything?” Verrazzano dipped his head toward the ground floor. “Did you see anyone this morning? Apart from that man I put in the bathroom?”
“A man with skin like a crocodile. But red. Bumpy and split, like the scales of a crocodile.”
“What could that be?” Jahn whispered.
“Did this man have a skin disease?” Verrazzano asked.
“He was sick, I think, yes,” Hui said. “Rong saw him in the yard. He told me to hide. Then he went out to the man. The man’s face and hands were covered with big scabs. Like the scales of a crocodile. I could see them across the yard.”
Verrazzano murmured, “It’s Krokodil.”
“What’s that?” Jahn said.
“A cheap high. Started out in Russia. You cook codeine, paint thinner, and phosphorus. Then you inject it. Soon enough your skin starts to come away in scaly lumps. You die within a year. Which means you lose some of the inhibitions most of us have about risking your life or your future.”
“Could this have been a Russian that did this? Jesus, we’ve got China involved. Now Russia. And mass car crashes in every major city.”
Verrazzano touched her arm to quiet her. He focused on Hui. “This man who came to find Rong, did you hear him say anything?”
“He said nothing. Rong tried to speak to him. I heard Rong cry out, then he screamed, and then—” She whimpered and went silent.
“After breakfast. Eight o’clock. Maybe after that, yes, a little bit later.”
“Try to remember if Rong said anything more about his feelings of guilt.”
“This morning he was calm at last. He said it happened and he had done all he could. Now it was up to other people to understand the signal he sent them.”
Verrazzano lifted his head in understanding. It was the Darien crash. “He was part of something bad. When he tried to make it right this morning, his partners came and punished him.”
“I think so.”
“Did he ever tell you who those partners were?”
“He got angry when I questioned him. He got angry when anyone questioned him.”
Verrazzano was about to try another angle, then he picked up on her emphasis. “Anyone? There was someone else. Someone who talked about the bad thing he had been part of?”
“His friend Su Li.”
“Tell me about Su Li. Did he work at Darien too?”
“Li lives in New Jersey. We visited him last weekend. I was in the garden with Li’s family. I went inside and found Rong arguing with Li.”
“About what?”
“Li said that Rong shouldn’t feel guilty. He said, ‘We were all thinking about our careers when we agreed to be part of this. Now you want to ruin all our careers.’”
All. More than just Li and Rong, Verrazzano thought. How many people would be involved in a plot that caused every new Darien vehicle to speed to its doom? “When he talked about ‘we,’ did he mean other Chinese people? Did he say who he meant?”
“I think it must have been Chinese people. He spoke of training in China. He accused Rong of failing to speak up back then, when his feelings of guilt could have been easily corrected.”
“How did Rong react?”
“He slapped himself on top of the head. It was a strange gesture, but I remember it clearly for that reason. He shouted that he had something on his head that could never be corrected and it was very dangerous.”
“On his head?” Verrazzano wondered if she meant that Rong’s guilt weighed on him.
“He grabbed Li and rubbed his hand hard on Li’s head. Li pushed him away. Rong was yelling, ‘It’s on your head too.’” She seemed to return to the room in Jersey where her husband had grappled with his friend. The violence and shock of that moment overcame her. Her eyes flickered and she passed out. Jahn caught her by the shoulders.
“She’s got to have some rest,” she said.
Verrazzano reached for Hui’s chin as she came around. He looked closely into her eyes. “Hui, we are going to find the man who did this to your husband.”
“He will kill you. He cannot be killed. I sensed it.”
“Su Li lives in New Jersey?” Verrazzano said. “Do you know the name of the town?”
She frowned, thinking hard. “Part of it was his name. Something ending in Li. Yes, Rockleigh, it was called Rockleigh.”
“That’s up the Hudson on the New York state line,” Jahn said. “We’d better send someone over to find the guy. Hui, do you know his exact address?”
Verrazzano checked his watch. It was just before 2 PM. “He’s going to be at work at this time. Where does he work, Hui? I’ll get someone to go and make sure he’s safe.”
“Li is a computer programmer, same as Rong,” Hui said. “He makes to write on computer—”
She was exhausted and in shock. Her English was falling apart. Verrazzano repeated his question. “Do you know the name of the company where Li works?”
“He works for Theander.”
A Swedish car company. Jahn glanced grimly at Verrazzano, as she laid the woman on the bed. Verrazzano went onto the landing. Jahn joined him.
“You think we’re going to get a bunch of Theanders speeding out of control next?” she said.
Verrazzano thumbed the screen of his phone for Haddad’s number back at the New York field office. “Maybe.”
“Everyone always says they’re the safest kind of car to drive. But even in a Theander, you won’t be safe at a hundred miles an hour and gaining when the light turns red ahead of you.”
Haddad answered the call. Verrazzano lifted his hand to quiet Jahn. “Bill and Noelle need to head for Rockleigh, New Jersey. They’re looking for a Chinese male named Su Li. He’s an employee at Theander, the Swedish automaker. I want you to go with them. Su Li is a computer guy. It could be Bill and Noelle will need to gather cyber intel at Li’s home or office. I want you to oversee that.”
“Will do.”
“Get to him quick, Roula. He’s an associate of someone we believe was involved in the Darien crashes. He may have information about the incidents.”
“We’re on our way.”
“Okay, thanks.” He hung up.
He turned to speak to Jahn. Hui stood in the bedroom doorway, wavering on her thin legs. “You cannot kill him,” she said. “I saw him. The crocodile man wishes to die. But his fate is to live and give to other people the death he wants for himself.”
“We’re not going to kill him.” Verrazzano put his phone in his pocket. “We will catch him, Hui. Now go lie down. We’ll call some people to come over here and help you.” He went down the stairs.
Jahn came with him. “She seems damned sure the guy can’t be killed.”
“She’s right. He takes a drug that destroys you from within. He’s already dead.” Verrazzano crossed the hallway and fixed his eyes on the corpse in the dining room. “That’s why he’s so dangerous.”