THE MORNING SUN WAS bright on Coney Island Avenue and Jack shaded his eyes, thinking that it was time to dig out his sunglasses for the season. The light made him squint as if he had a bad hangover, which he didn’t; he simply had not enjoyed a good night’s sleep ever since he received his surprise visit from Darnel Teague.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Richie said, addressing a plump Pakistani woman in a bright blue sari, pushing a shopping cart stuffed with laundry bags. “I’m with the New York Police Department. We’re looking for people who might have passed by here at about this time on Monday morning.”
The two detectives were out in front of the deli again: it was always a good idea to return and canvass an area at the same time of day that a crime had been committed. That was the best way to find someone with a regular routine—commuting to work, making deliveries—that might have brought them by this spot at the same hour on the earlier date.
The woman looked up at Richie suspiciously. She raised her hands—“no English”—and then pushed her cart off down the block.
Jack stepped out in front of an elderly Caucasian man stooped over with scoliosis; he wore a heavy tweed coat more suitable for the middle of winter. “Excuse me. Do you live around here?”
The man squinted up. “Yah. Why?”
“Is there any chance that you might have passed by here at around this time on Monday morning?”
“You cops?”
Jack nodded. “We’re checking out an incident that took place here that day.”
“The murder, huh? Terrible. This whole neighborhood’s gettin’ shot to hell.”
Jack brightened. “Were you around?”
The old man shook his head. “Nope. But I’ll tell you somethin’.” He turned and pointed at the far end of the block. “Ya see those windows on the second floor? With the red curtains? Ya know why they’re red? I’ll tell ya: they got hookers in there! And nobody’s doin’ a goddamn thing about it!”
Jack refrained from frowning. “Thanks very much for the tip. I’ll pass it on to the vice squad.”
“My pleasure,” the man said. “You know, my grandson wants to be a cop.”
“That’s great,” Jack said, pulling out his cell phone. “Sorry—I gotta take a call.” He moved away; he didn’t really have a call, but he didn’t relish the half-hour monologue he was in for otherwise. The old man tottered off.
Richie wandered over. “It’s after nine. Whaddaya wanna do? Should we go back to the Brasciak angle?”
Jack shook his head. They could keep going, digging deeper to see if they could come up with anything else, but he kept thinking about the fed in his radiation suit.
He squared his shoulders. “I think I’ll take a little trip into Manhattan. Pay a visit to Federal Plaza. Our Homeland Security friend.”
Richie’s eyes widened. “You think that’s wise?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s wise. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna keep plugging away in vain here, when this Charlson jerk could just save us the trouble.”
Richie nodded—“Let’s go”—but Jack put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. I suspect some fur might fly here, and there’s no need for you to get caught up in it.”
The veteran from the Seven-oh grinned. “Hey, I’ve got my twenty in. They wanna bust my balls, let ’em try.”
AS JACK DISCOVERED WHEN he took another look at Charlson’s business card, the man’s office was not actually downtown in Federal Plaza (next to the FBI and City Hall)—it was in midtown, near Grand Central. As the two detectives got out of their car a couple of blocks away, they could see the building, a forbidding black monolith rising high above Third Avenue. Jack was staring at its tinted windows when a voice called him up short.
“Hey, mister!”
He paused in the flow of pedestrians. An old homeless man wearing a stained green Army jacket was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning back against the front of a Starbucks coffee shop and staring directly at him.
“Hey, mister,” the man repeated. “I’ll bet you three bucks I can tell you where you got your shoes.”
The crazy offer snapped Jack out of his musings about federal agents and their arrogance. He stepped out of the pedestrian flow and confronted the stranger. “Whaddaya mean? You’re gonna tell me I bought them in New York or something?”
The homeless man shook his head earnestly. “No, sir. I can tell you exactly where ya got em.”
Jack thought for a second: he had bought his footwear in a little store in Bay Ridge one afternoon when he’d been out there on a case. He looked at his partner and they both chuckled. Jack turned back to the stranger. “Okay, sure. If you can pull this off, it’ll be worth three bucks.”
The man grinned. “You got ’em on your own two feet.” He held out his hand.
Jack laughed, pulled out his wallet, and handed over the money, with absolutely no hard feelings. He had to give credit where credit was due.
Inside the skyscraper, the detectives took an elevator up to the State Office of Homeland Security, which looked like an impressive, well-funded government headquarters, with its official seals and photo of the president in the lobby.
An elderly blonde sitting behind a reception desk offered up a starchy smile. “May I help you?”
Jack flashed his tin. “I’m Detective Leightner and this is Detective Powker. We’re here to see Brent Charlson.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
Jack crossed his arms. “Nope. But it’s urgent.”
The receptionist picked up her phone. “I’ll try his office.” She dialed. “Hi, Deb. I’ve got a couple of NYPD detectives here asking for Mr. Charlson.” She listened. “Leightner. And Powker. From—”
She looked inquisitively at Jack.
“Brooklyn South Homicide.”
She repeated that, listened for a few seconds more, then hung up.
“I’m sorry—Mr. Charlson is not in the building right now.”
“I don’t think so,” Jack replied.
Her smile curdled. “Excuse me?”
Jack leaned over the desk. “I just called his office about thirty seconds ago. And he answered the phone.” He had hung up as soon as he heard the man’s voice.
The woman rose from her seat. “Could you wait here a moment?” She disappeared through a side door.
Jack turned and grinned at his partner. “As my son used to say, we seem to be about as welcome as a screen door in a submarine.”
After a minute, the door opened and the receptionist returned. “You’ll need to go up to seventeen.”
Up they went. This floor looked anonymous, no seals anywhere, not even signs on the doors, except for the suite numbers. Jack raised his eyebrows and gave his partner a grin. “Either we’re on the super-duper top-secret floor, or this guy is just some flunky.”
BRENT CHARLSON DIDN’T LOOK at all put out by the sudden visit.
“Sorry about that,” he said briskly, offering them a seat in his office, with its rich wood paneling and plush blue carpet “Our gorgon downstairs might be a little too efficient.”
Jack didn’t believe the receptionist had anything to do with it, but he held his tongue. Instead of sitting, he walked across the surprisingly large corner office to take in the views of midtown skyscrapers and the shining East River. By the looks of things, Charlson was hardly a flunky.
“What can I do for you?” the man said pleasantly. Jack would have expected him to ask if they’d had any success in tracking down the deli perp, but Charlson just waited. Jack didn’t take a seat; he preferred the psychological advantage of standing, as he would in a more routine station house interview. He stared down at the fed, who sat back in a swanky executive chair with his hands steepled together and a mildly curious expression on his face. Grandfatherly, Jack thought again.
“My partner and I have a bit of a problem here,” he said. “The thing is, we’ve got a murderer walking around our city right now. And it really troubles me that we’re out there pounding the sidewalks, looking for this guy, with what seems to be incomplete information.”
Charlson considered this statement thoughtfully. “I want to assure you gentlemen that I’m not out to disrespect you in any way or to maintain any secrecy that’s not absolutely necessary.” He didn’t continue.
“Okay. I’m glad to hear that. Maybe you could explain why secrecy is necessary at all.”
“Were you on the job in ’ninety-three, detective?”
Jack nodded.
“I don’t know how much you remember about what happened back then, with the first attack on the World Trade Center, but it was a major cock-up. The men who plotted that bombing had been under surveillance by the FBI for some time, but the surveillance was dropped just months before the attack. And there were confidential informants who were handled quite poorly.”
Jack leaned forward. “What are you saying? There’s some kind of terrorist plot going on here?”
Charlson took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I can tell you that we’re in the middle of an investigation. But this kind of case is incredibly sensitive. You bring too many people into the loop and lives get jeopardized. Or plotters hear about surveillance and they go deep into hiding.”
Richie entered the conversation. “We understand. But we’re not some rookies, running around shooting our mouths off. We know how to run an undercover operation. Do you know who our perp is? Did you already have him under surveillance?”
Charlson spoke carefully. “We know who the man is.”
Richie gave Jack a look, then turned back to the fed. “No offense, but you’re making it sound like he’s some kind of high-level terrorist or something. The fact is, he killed a guy right out in the open. With a can of beans. He doesn’t sound very smart or stealthy to me.”
Charlson fixed the detective with an eagle eye. “You know how we caught the first bomber in ’ninety-three? Shortly after the attack, he returned to the car rental place where he had ordered the van they filled with explosives. He asked for the deposit back! Now, that doesn’t sound very smart or stealthy either, but that man and his comrades succeeded in blowing a gigantic crater in the basement of the North Tower.”
“All right,” Richie conceded. “But you’ve got our guy’s picture on videotape. Why don’t we just put it out there? We can probably scoop him up within a few hours.”
Charlson shook his head, as if he were talking to a child. “You’re not listening. If we spread the word that we know who this man is, his compatriots will go underground. And then we may never be able to stop them.”
Richie remained unimpressed. “How do you know this guy is even involved with anything? I work in Little Pakistan. I’ve seen how these people get implicated, called terrorists, just because somebody doesn’t like ’em and calls in a bum tip.”
Charlson stared at him, incredulous. “You live in New York City and you want to argue with me about whether this sort of threat is real? Where were you on Nine-eleven? Do you know how many funerals I attended that month, detective?”
Reluctantly, Richie backed off
“There are radical Islamic fundamentalists plotting in this city right this moment,” Charlson continued. “Make no mistake: these people will do everything they can to harm us and destroy our way of life. I check my intelligence reports very carefully. And I’m not about to let good information go to waste, as it did in ’ninety-three.” He gripped the edge of his desk. “I can promise you one thing: if something terrible goes down here, it’s not going to be because I just sat back and let it happen.”
Richie leaned forward, ready to go another round, but Jack intervened; he didn’t want the fed to get defensive and shut them out. “So why did this guy kill our deli victim? What was that about?”
Charlson shrugged. “I have no idea. These people are very highly strung. They’re angry—that’s why they become terrorists. Maybe your victim just looked at him the wrong way.”
Jack scratched his cheek, disappointed. He had hoped to at least have the reason for the killing cleared up. “Listen,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying about a need for discretion here. We won’t broadcast the guy’s picture. We won’t even send his name around. But we need to get him off the street. Why don’t you help us out, and we’ll be very tight-lipped about what’s going on, and we’ll bring him in real nice and quiet?”
Charlson frowned. “I don’t think you appreciate the dangers here. Are you equipped to deal with high levels of radioactivity? Do you know what radiation sickness does to a person?”
What Jack knew was that Charlson was eager to get credit for the arrest—typical fed—and he decided to play his bluff. “No problem—we’ll just call our Emergency Services Unit and let them deal with it.”
Charlson didn’t buy it. “You don’t have the proper equipment.”
Richie frowned. “What’s all this stuff about radiation, anyhow?”
Charlson remained impassive; he wasn’t going to give an inch.
Jack was done. “You know what? I’m sick and tired of all this agency rivalry and hush-hush bullshit. We’ll just find this guy on our own. And then maybe we’ll let you know about it, a few days later.” He stood up.
Charlson sat staring at him for a good long time. Finally, he moved closer to his desk and lowered his voice. “All right. You can sit down, detective. I’m going to swear both of you to complete and utter secrecy. If you’re indiscreet and the slightest word of this investigation leaks out, anywhere, I’m going to personally make sure the NYPD takes away your badges. And your pensions. Is that understood?”
Jack and his partner nodded.
Charlson turned to Richie. “Would you please get up and lock the door?”