CALL ON THE SECURE LINE
RAPTOR
The cover name was an inside joke, a reference to Omnivore, the FBI targeted data-mining program, now on the shelf and collecting nothing but dust. NSA had newer-generation software.
Raptor was a career spook named Felix Soto.
Lydie went into the communications center and signed onto a terminal. It was a dedicated landline to Fort Meade.
Felix picked up at his end immediately. “I bow to genius,” he said.
She laughed. He was teasing, but she was pleased.
“Seriously,” he said. “You’re onto something. I bought some time on the Cray, and we’re showing consistency.” He was talking about one of the half-dozen supercomputers in the bowels of the agency. “How’d you snap to this?”
“Random pattern,” she said. “It was just background noise. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything.”
“Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty hard to miss.”
“How long have we been missing it?”
“You cut right to the chase, kid. We’ll walk the cat back. Hopefully, we can come up with a timeline.”
“It’s not of purely historical interest,” she said.
“You got that right,” Felix said. “We’re working against the clock. You know how much materiel is floating around out there, in transit, or waiting shipment? Any of it falls through the cracks, it’s a raft of grief.” He hung up.
Well. Out of her hands. The national security apparatus would grind into motion. It was unhappy that they were only now playing catch-up ball.
Because here was what Lydie had stumbled across. DOD, the Defense Department, contracted with common carriers, UPS and FedEx, long-haul freight companies like Old Dominion and United Van Lines and R &L, and they were on an approved list. But the other thing was that they all had websites. You could go on the Internet and schedule a pickup, a box of cookies you were sending your mom, for example, or a container cargo of 5.56 NATO, for another. Somebody had hacked into one of the websites and misdirected a shipment. Not your mom’s cookies, either.
How many shipments? she wondered.
According to Tommy’s guy, all you needed was a couple of cans of spray paint and some stencils.
“Containers are labeled,” the guy told him. His name was Kaufman. “Originating shipper, destination, routing logs. It’s written right on the box.”
“Everybody knows what’s inside?”
Kaufman shook his head. “They use an alphanumeric code, referencing the load ticket. The contents are on the manifest, not the container. What gets marked are the transit points. Yokohama to Los Angeles. L.A. to Biloxi. Every time that box transits a freight yard, the yard’s route number goes on it, and then it gets handed off to the next station of the cross.”
“What if the numbers are off?”
“Then it sits in Biloxi.”
Or at JFK. “How often does that happen?” Tommy asked.
“We don’t get many orphans.”
“What happens if you do?”
“You get dispatch to crosscheck.”
“Could something sit there for a week and not be noticed?”
Kaufman shrugged. “We move a lot of cargo,” he said. “The yardmaster has a clipboard full.”
“So the answer is yes.”
“I’ll tell you,” Kaufman said. “You could put a nuclear weapon in a container. You don’t ship it from Dubai, you send it through Singapore. It takes six weeks to get to New York. You fudge the numbers, it sits on a dock, unclaimed. You want I should spell it out any more?”
Tommy had been upstate when the Trade Center went down, but he didn’t need it spelled out for him.
“I don’t know what you’re sniffing around this for, Tommy,” Kaufman said, “but I smell trouble.”
“You know a hood named Viktor Guzenko?” Tommy asked.
Kaufman’s face shut like a door.
The agent from ATF’s New York office was a woman. Babs DiMello had to wonder whether that was just the luck of the draw or they’d sent another woman to soften Babs up. The name on her ID read Phoebe Kreuz. They were about the same age.
“Jeremy Chapin’s been burning up the wires,” Kreuz said.
“You getting any collateralization?”
“Other agencies? Sure.”
“What’s the FBI given up?” Babs asked.
“Well, the Bureau…” Kreuz paused. “You don’t change a culture overnight. They get ahold of something, if they’re the lead agency, they sink their teeth into it. And they’re used to protecting their turf. It’s like Hoover never died.”
“Like trying to turn the Titanic around.”
“More like trying to turn the iceberg,” Kreuz said.
She had a quick smile, and Babs was warming up to her.
“You’d be surprised at what turns up, if you cultivate a relationship,” Kreuz said. “For instance, Jerry Chapin tells me you’re the go-to gal, Brooklyn South.”
“That’s flattering.”
“I didn’t bring a box of chocolates, but I’ve got something to share. We’ve received specific intelligence.”
“FBI?”
Again the quick smile. “NSA,” Kreuz said. “You know what I’m talking about?”
Intercepted communications. “I hear the initials stand for No Such Agency,” Babs said.
“I can’t speak to sources and methods,” Kreuz said. “Plain fact is, I don’t know what their sources and methods are. But here’s what they came up with. War materiel is being rerouted. Somebody’s hacked the websites of the shippers.”
“Chapin said there was no way a container should be at JFK, because an aircraft couldn’t lift that kind of weight.”
“Why did it end up at Kennedy?”
“Ease of access,” Babs said.
“What happened to it?”
“It disappeared.”
“Yeah,” Kreuz said. “We’re having the same conversation everybody else has been having for a week. What’s different is, we know it’s not just a target of opportunity.”
“It’s not accidental. It’s organized.”
“That’s some serious diversion going on. There might be a host of corruption in Baghdad and Kabul, but we’re talking about stuff that never sees the Gulf.”
“Chapin says it’s going to the drug lords in Mexico.”
“I don’t care where it’s going. I want it to stay here, or we keep track of it, and it goes where it’s supposed to go.”
“You and me both,” Babs said. She had a brother serving in the National Guard, posted to Afghanistan.
“What about this Russian gangster, Guzenko?”
“I’m hitting a wall. These guys don’t rat each other out, or if they do, they’re dead before it ever gets to a grand jury. People in the life are terrified of Guzenko.”
“You get anything out of NYPD Organized Crime?”
“Known associates. Involvement in sex slavery, protection, identity theft. But it’s a lock nobody can pick.”
“Identity theft suggests some minimal computer literacy.”
“I see where you’re going,” Babs said. “Hacking the shippers’ websites. It’s not that I don’t make the guy for it, or that he’s not capable of it. The issue is, we’ve got nothing we could take to a judge. There’s no chain of evidence.”
“So we’re still sucking air.”
DiMello’s cell chimed. She looked at the caller ID. Tommy Meadows. “Wait one,” she said to Phoebe Kreuz.
Tommy was at a Starbucks near Prospect Park.
“Be there in ten,” Babs said. She broke the connection.
“Yes, no?” Kreuz asked.
“Maybe we got, maybe we don’t,” Babs said. She took her weapon out of the desk drawer and snapped it on her belt. She stood up. “You down with it?”
Kreuz opened her jacket to show a gun, strong-side carry. It looked to Babs like a steel-frame Sig, probably a.357 or.40 Smith.
“Let’s go buy this guy a cup of coffee,” Babs said.
Porfírio and Hernán were made men, MS-13, stone killers with teardrop tattoos at the outside corner of each eye, a trickle of dark ink, crocodile tears, one for every man they’d murdered. Porfírio was lean and quick, stripped down like a racecar, while Hernán was blocked out like a diesel truck, all the muscle between his ears. They’d met at Attica. They were in their late twenties, and already they had thirty years in the prison system between them, going back to Juvenile. Like other immigrants to the New World, the Italians and the Irish, Latinos and Chinese, some of them had turned to crime, muling drugs and illegals, but the Maras were enforcers. Porfírio and Hernán had never met the Vor, the boss of thieves, but they knew they were taking his money. Guzenko’s chosen intermediary was a man named Iosif Bagratyön, another Georgian.