Tank passed through the kitchen and entered the dining room. Carlos Cantu lay on the floor facedown, a bullet hole at his temple. Tank knelt to check for a pulse. His friend was dead.
For a minute Tank remained crouched, doing his best to piece together what had happened. A cup of coffee and a half-eaten candy bar sat on the table next to an open laptop. The mug was still lukewarm. Coffee and a Snickers bar were not his idea of a last meal. A phone lay on the floor a few feet away.
When the ache in his arthritic knees became too great, he stood, his joints cracking like a couple of brass doorknockers. From all appearances, Carlos had been working when someone sneaked up behind him and shot him in the head. The gunshot had toppled him from his chair. His eyes were open. He had died unawares, or at least without putting up a fight. But who could walk across this rickety floor without making a noise?
It was Tank’s fault. He knew this at once. It was Tank who’d called Cantu en route to the medical examiner’s office and, later, Tank who’d voiced his brash and all-too-public accusations that neither Joe Grant nor his informant had been killed by a handgun. There were texts. E-mails. And, of course, the pictures. All of it pointing to his coconspirator’s identity.
It was suddenly very important to know who had done this.
Tank picked up Carlos’s phone and checked the call log. He recognized the prefix of the last call Carlos had received, approximately an hour earlier. He thumbed the screen and the phone connected him to the number.
A harried man answered on the fourth ring. “Don Bennett. How you doin’, Mr. Cantu? I hope you’re not calling to weasel out of your interview Monday morning.”
“No,” said Tank. “I’ll be there. Just wanted to confirm the time.”
“Nine a.m. Everything okay?”
“Just fine, sir. I forgot to write down the time.”
Tank hung up. Hearing Bennett’s voice provided a measure of relief. In his rattled state, he was not beyond believing that the FBI had had a hand in killing Cantu. The good news was that you didn’t schedule an appointment with someone you were going to kill. The bad news was that if the FBI hadn’t slain Carlos, the party or parties responsible for killing Joe Grant and his informant had.
Tank rubbed his forehead. Was it more dangerous to stay or to leave? He pulled up Carlos’s texts. The last exchange had taken place at 6:15. It read: “Hey, Carlos, you at home? I’d like to come by. It’s about the pics.”
Cantu: “At home. Come whenever. In for the night.”
“See you in a few.”
Cantu: “Come around back. Front door broken.”
Tank stared at the texts, feeling something close to vertigo. What he saw didn’t make sense. According to Carlos’s phone, it was he, Tank Potter, who had sent the texts. The screen showed his name and his number. The problem was that Tank had thrown his phone into the river two hours earlier.
Radio silence.
His first reaction was anger, then incredulity, then fear. Hacking into a phone to destroy some pictures was one thing. Sending texts from his number-after he himself had destroyed his phone-was a whole different level of magnitude.
Yet despite his fear, he couldn’t help but rejoice just a little. “Oh yeah, Al,” he whispered to himself. “We got ourselves a story.”
He turned his attention to the laptop. He hit the Return key, and a listing on eBay appeared, showing an eighteen-karat gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap. The starting bid was $35,000. The seller was CC Austin Timepieces. “CC” for Carlos Cantu.
Tank spotted the watch in an evidence bag placed on the sideboard, with an identification tag attached to the strap. He removed the timepiece from the bag. The ID tag showed the initials of the owner and the date taken: “H.S. 7/30.”
Carlos had stolen the watch from the morgue the day before. The day after Joseph Grant and his informant were killed.
Tank thought of the body he’d seen lying on the tray. Ample belly, soft hands, manicured fingernails. It was a rich man’s body.
He picked up the watch. A Patek Philippe. Real gold, judging by its weight. A chronograph with day and date. It was a rich man’s watch.
He flipped it over and noted that the case was inscribed “To H.S. Thanks, I.”
Tank replaced the watch in the bag. Who was H.S.? And why had I. given him a wristwatch worth $35,000? More importantly, was H.S. the informant?
Tank didn’t know, and he didn’t think it wise to do his thinking while standing next to a guy with his brains oozing out of his head.
He gave a last look around. The journalist had completed his work. It was time to leave.
–
He saw the shotgun on his way out. It sat on top of a cupboard in the kitchen, the long steel barrels extending over one edge. He took it down and held it in his hands admiringly. Heavy. Weighted to the front to counteract the kick. A double-barrel twelve-gauge as old as the house itself. He broke the chamber and saw that it was loaded. Fresh shells.
Outside, Tank tossed the gun onto the backseat of his Jeep. He owned three shotguns and a variety of handguns and kept them locked up safely. But he wasn’t going anywhere near his home.
On the highway he kept his foot to the floor, urging the Jeep to pick up some speed. The world looked different to him somehow. Clearer, maybe. Less confused. Certainly more dangerous.
He sneaked a look toward the backseat. The sight of the shotgun reassured him, but not for long. Over and over his mind came back to the same fact: whoever killed Carlos Cantu wanted Tank Potter dead, too.
55
ONE 7 touched down on American soil at 7:01 p.m., sixteen hours and forty-seven minutes after departing Israel.
Ian Prince paced back and forth at the foot of the mobile stairwell, watching the plane approach. Until now all had been planning. The acquisition of Merriweather Systems, the upgrading of the Titan supercomputer, the agreement with the National Security Agency, the purchase of Clarus and the wooing of its senior leadership-each action constituted one iteration within a larger plan, no different from a line of software code within an application.
The arrival of the Israelis marked the turning point. Planning was over. The program had been written. The machinery was in place. It was time to hit Return and execute.
Founded in 2002, Clarus was a developer and manufacturer of surveillance systems designed to collect all types of electronic data from the Internet. Its primary product, Clarus Insight, was a supercomputer capable of intercepting voiceover IP (VoIP) calls through services such as Skype, phone and mobile communications that passed through the Internet. Clarus’s proprietary software utilized deep packet inspection to sift through the vast quantities of information traveling over the Internet and permit IP providers and network managers to inspect, track, and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones as it passed through routers. A company press release stated that the Clarus Insight Intercept Suite was “the industry’s only network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing, and reconstruction of webmail traffic…including Google Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and AOL mail.”
And now it belonged to Ian.
The plane reached its parking spot and stopped. The stairwell docked with the fuselage. The door opened inward. The executives of the Clarus Corporation descended the stairs eagerly, faces turned toward the sun, taking deep breaths of the fresh Texas air.
Ian greeted each warmly as he set foot on solid ground. “David,” he said, gripping the hand and arm of David Gold, the firm’s founder and CEO. “Welcome to the new world.”
“Ian, we are pleased to be part of your team.”