He sat up with a grunt and glanced at it. It was not his personal cell, but the official mobile phone that the FBI issued to its agents and supervisors. It had the ability to send and receive both cleartext and encrypted mail — and the icon on the screen told him he had just received an encrypted note from S. A. Aloysius Pendergast.
He plucked the phone from the table, ran the email through the decryptor, then read it.
We must speak on a matter of great urgency. Significant breakthrough made. Connections proving far deeper than expected. Secrecy vital. Meet at old King’s Park, Building 44, 2 PM to plan apprehension of perps (sic). Any attempted contact in the interim is inadvisable. Backup is vital; bring Lt. D’Agosta, to whom I have also reached out.
P.S. We are being surveilled.
A.
Longstreet cleared the message from his phone, then replaced it thoughtfully on the nightstand. Perps. The plural was no typo, as the “sic” indicated. More than one. This was indeed deeper than expected. Was it Hightower and others? He tried to parse Pendergast’s shorthand. It seemed he had made a critical discovery about the man. But the message also implied that Hightower’s connections to law enforcement ran deeper than either of them had suspected. Perps. Was Pendergast hinting at a conspiracy within the NYPD? It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, given the NYPD’s old history of corruption. No wonder secrecy was paramount — especially since Pendergast had enough evidence to use the word apprehension.
Pendergast, Longstreet knew, disliked email and rarely sent it. However, in this case the situation was dire enough, the stakes high enough, and the suspected perps well placed enough to make a high degree of caution necessary.
What about this business of being surveilled? Did this mean his work phone was actually at risk? Longstreet found that hard to believe; the FBI had the latest in encryption and protection. Damn that Pendergast and his deliberately inscrutable ways. He found himself tugged with curiosity as to what the agent had uncovered. And also…what was this place, “old King’s Park”?
Reaching for his laptop, he turned it on, fired up the secure Tor browser, and used it to access the Dark Web. This was a highly irregular undertaking for a ranking member of the FBI, he knew, but if his email, phone, and texts were vulnerable, as Pendergast implied, so were his browsing habits. At least now he could make an untraceable search.
It took only a few minutes to learn that King’s Park was a vast, rambling psychiatric hospital on the North Shore of Long Island, built in the late nineteenth century and now abandoned. He downloaded a map of the site and quickly familiarized himself with it. Building 44 was a small warehouse, originally used for depoting food supplies for the enormous complex.
Committing the map to memory, Longstreet closed the browser, then quickly shut down the computer. Why King’s Park Psychiatric Center? But as he considered the matter further, he realized it was an ideal location for a meeting — outside New York City limits, thus curbing the effectiveness of any dirty NYPD surveillance, yet both isolated and easy to get to. And Building 44 had no doubt been chosen for its access to Old Dock Road, which bisected the grounds of the sanitarium.
There was only one more thing to do: reach out to D’Agosta. He would use his regular cell phone for this, just the one call, and keep it banal. He looked through his log of his associates’ contacts, found D’Agosta’s number, and dialed.
Although it was not yet six thirty in the morning, the call was answered on the first ring, and the voice on the other end did not sound sleepy. “Yeah?”
Longstreet noticed the voice did not identify itself. “Lieutenant?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I’m pretty sure you’re the one our mutual acquaintance calls ‘H.’”
“Correct. Please keep your answers as brief as possible. Has he contacted you?”
“Yes.”
“And suggested a place where the two of us should go?”
“No place. Just told me to expect a call from you — urgent and confidential.”
“Fine. I’ll meet you outside your, ah, place of business at noon.”
“Okay.”
“Absolutely confidential.”
“Got it.”
The line went dead.
Longstreet replaced the phone. Despite a long career in covert operations, he could not help feel a quickening of excitement. After years of commanding large assault teams, a small, tactical operation like this was like going back to his roots. That Pendergast — always full of surprises. He had handled this extremely well. Nevertheless, the lieutenant’s involvement would be crucial if this was an NYPD situation.
He lay down in bed, hoping not for sleep — that was now impossible — but for clarity of mind and concentration of purpose. Noon would be at hand soon enough, and the case would enter its final stretch: the takedown. He hoped to God this nightmarish string of serial murders was finally at an end.
He closed his eyes as the breaking dawn light illuminated the bedroom curtains.
49
Bryce Harriman was led by the armed corrections officer down the sterile hallways of the Manhattan Detention Complex, then ushered into a tiny room with a table bolted to the floor, two chairs, a clock, and an overhead light — both fitted with wire screens. There were no windows; he only knew that it was quarter to nine in the morning because of the clock.
“Here you are,” the officer said.
Harriman hesitated, looking at two beefy, shaved-head characters already in the holding cell who were eyeing him as if sizing up a cut of rare roast beef.
“Come on, let’s go!” The guard gave Harriman a light shove. He entered and the door clanged shut behind him, the bolt shooting into place with a clank.
He shuffled in and took a seat. At least he wasn’t wearing leg irons anymore, but the orange prison jumpsuit was stiff and abrasive against his skin. The last many hours had passed in a dreadful kind of blur. The arrest, the trip in a squad car to the local precinct, the waiting, the arraignment and booking for embezzlement, and then the depressingly short ride to the detention complex just a few blocks away — it was over almost before he could process what had happened. It was like a nightmare from which he could not shake himself awake.
As soon as the guard was gone, one of the brawny guys came and stood over him, real close, staring down.
Harriman, not knowing what to do, finally raised his head. “What?”
“My seat.”
Harriman jumped up with alacrity while the man sat down. Two seats: three men. No cot. This was going to be a long day.
As he sat on the floor, back propped against the wall, listening to the yammer and bluster of fellow prisoners up and down the cell block, the mistakes he’d made paraded themselves before his eyes in dumb show. He’d been blinded by overconfidence, reinforced by his recent celebrity — and he’d fatally underestimated Anton Ozmian.
His first mistake, as Ozmian had taken pains to point out, had been to overlook the obvious question: Why had Ozmian beaten up the priest in the first place? Why no repercussions? It had been such an outrageous assault, right in front of an entire congregation, that his reportorial alarm bells should have rung, five-alarm.
His second mistake had been tacticaclass="underline" showing the piece to Ozmian before publishing it. That had not only tipped his hand, but also given Ozmian time to react. With bitter self-recrimination, he remembered all too well how Ozmian’s lieutenant had slipped out for a few minutes early in their meeting — only to return after setting the frame job in motion, no doubt. And then they’d kept him there in the office, talking, while the trap was being sprung. By the time he walked out of the DigiFlood building, flushed with success, he was already dead meat. He recalled, with a fresh wave of frustration and shame, what Ozmian had told him earlier: Our company has many fine programmers, and they created a most lovely digital theft leading back to you. And you simply do not have the knowledge, or the resources, to undo it. That was proving all too true: in one of the few calls he’d been allowed to make, he’d told his editor what had happened to him, how he’d been framed, and how he’d write a hell of a story about Ozmian that would explain it all. Petowski’s response had been to call him a liar and hang up.