He gave them a name and a photograph.
“¿Qué tan pronto?” Porfírio asked. How soon?
“As soon as you can,” the Georgian said.
“Does it matter where?” Porfírio asked.
“Near his workplace, or his family. Either one.”
“Are there special instructions?”
“Make it messy,” Bagratyön told them. “Make it hurt. Make it ugly. We want to send a message.”
Porfírio smiled. He enjoyed using a knife.
Brooklyn South liaised with ATF and Port Authority. They didn’t need a warrant. All they needed was enough people to cover the ground and maintain a security perimeter.
“Take it apart,” Babs’s lieutenant said. And they did.
They started at the north end of the cargo terminal and worked their way down. The paved area was three quarters of a mile deep, and the warehouse space was that again, most of it two stories. They checked all of it, cargo trailers, packed goods, pallets, and containers. If the containers were sealed, they opened the seals and locks, over the objections of the yard boss, who was responsible for the safety of shipping.
“I guess you’ve got the advantage of me, ma’am,” he said.
“Yes,” Phoebe Kreuz said. “I do.”
If what Kaufman had told Tommy was right, the container was possibly hidden in plain sight, overlooked and mislabeled.
They found one at the far end of the terminal. There was no matching manifest for the routing codes stenciled on the side of the box. The yardmaster looked embarrassed.
“Where did this come from?” the lieutenant asked him.
The guy looked in his book. “If the numbers are right, the originating shipment was out of Holloman AFB, in New Mexico.”
“Find out what the inventory was, and the date they shipped it.”
“Right.” The yard boss got on his cell phone.
“You think?” the lieutenant asked Babs.
She was looking at the numbers on the container. Holloman would be the first, then transit through Chicago or Atlanta or Louisville, which was a big repple-depple for UPS freight, and a final stateside destination before overseas delivery. It was the last number that must have been altered. You sprayed over the legitimate routing code with Rustoleum, aluminum flavor, or rust red, and stenciled in a bogus number in black. You only had to be off one digit. She didn’t blame the dispatcher. It was a hole in the system. But it had been exploited by somebody on the inside.
“Pick up Tommy’s source, this guy Kaufman,” she told Beeks.
“We need to sweat him.”
The yard boss put his hand over the phone. “Four hundred thousand square feet of AM-2 matting, for temporary airstrips, a load of desert camo, tents, tarps, boots and uniforms, and five million rounds of 5.56 hardball. Shipped ten days ago by common carrier.”
“Crack it open,” the lieutenant said.
They got the bolt cutters.
Phoebe Kreuz was the first one inside. The box was empty.
Lydie Temple had more than one arrow in her quiver. She was gratified when Felix Soto called back from Fort Meade to tell her that her lead had panned out and NSA had developed actionable intelligence to give ATF, but she decided to follow the virtual trail. Jack knows Jill is a single link and means nothing by itself. Likewise if Jill knows Joe. But if Joe happens to know Jack, you’ve squared a circle.
It was an oversimplification, but crudely accurate. You could model the data footprint in any number of ways. More than a few jihadi, for example, posted on Facebook, which made it possible to penetrate their cell systems, supposedly independent of one another. Jack and Jill are careless enough to tag Joe.
Another way to model the footprint was to monitor the servers, which is what Lydie was doing. When you went online, for whatever reason, e-mail, shopping, surfing the Net, you were signed on through an interface, a commercial provider like MSN or AOL, or some other networked facility, be it government, academic, the public library, a private employer. It was open-source, the web address could be tracked. There were in fact programs that could mimic a user’s individual keystrokes. Lydie was fishing in a deep pond.
Her particular target this time around was the crime ring that had hacked the freight shippers’ websites. It didn’t take genius, she knew that from experience. What it took was time, a feel for the world of cybersecurity, and maybe a lucky break. Lydie had the time, and an insider’s confidence she could pick pretty much any lock in virtual space. She was hoping she might catch some luck, like the other guy.
She’d personalized him. It was a convenient fiction, not that he was even necessarily a he, but she thought of him as Little Ivan, and she’d given him a profile. Probably not a career criminal, just some kid who’d been recruited because he was a computer geek. Into video games, built his own systems from generic components, knew enough code to write basic software, had a garage or a basement full of discarded CRT monitors, blown motherboards, old memory chips. Ivan was her own mirror image, the girl she’d grown out of but not outgrown.
She approached the problem from his point of view. To penetrate the websites, you had to reverse-engineer the security protocols, so first she familiarized herself with the navigation tools and began looking for a chink in the armor, but this got her nowhere. Each site was designed around a dedicated platform, which didn’t allow you to skip a step. You had to fill out a series of required fields in each window before you could access the next window. It was intended to idiot-proof shipping procedures, but it was cumbersome. Still, she had to exhaust the obvious. There might be an easy way in. Little Ivan had found it. There wasn’t. Lydie shifted her sights and began the more laborious process of finding the back door.
Kaufman had been turned inside out like a sock, skinned to the bone. At some point he’d lost control of his bladder and bowels, but his bowels had been left in a slippery heap between his knees. The EMTs were shoveling him off the pavement and into a body bag. Babs DiMello had talked to the crime scene techs and gotten no joy. They could give her a time frame, but that was about it.
“No witnesses,” Phoebe Kreuz, the ATF agent, said.
“Fat chance,” Babs told her.
“We know this is related to the hijack.”
Babs shrugged. “How not?” she asked. “Somebody’s cleaning up the loose ends.”
“Guzenko?”
“My guess. But here’s what you have to understand. The guy doesn’t sit on his hands. Even if he had nothing to do with the hijack, he’d circle the wagons. He doesn’t want it walked back to him. He eliminates the chain of evidence. Anything and everybody. Nuns, pregnant mothers, you name it.”
“Collateral damage.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Who’s next on his list?”
Babs glanced at the EMTs scooping Kaufman up. “If it were me they went to work on, I would have given up a name.”
“Any name?”
Babs was thinking Tommy Meadows.