Give me a high-speed pursuit any day, she thought, the tachometer kissing red.
Give me a firefight with a tweaker in East New York, muzzle to muzzle.
Anything but this.
Three yards...
Well, damn it, the slower you go, the longer you’re in here.
Finally she was out, and in a normal-sized corridor. At the end of this passage, she could see the weights, illuminated by light filtering through the hole they’d created. Dust floated around them.
Here, the chemical scent and the irritation, stinging both her throat and her eyes, were worse. Much worse.
Get to the weights. There was a chance that the unsub had left a dot of DNA or a fingerprint when he’d sabotaged the mechanism.
As good as a business card.
Dudley Smits...
She took one step forward and nearly tripped.
Shining her light downward, Amelia Sachs, the woman who rarely gasped, gasped now.
A worker — maybe the one the foreman had sent down here to check for casualties — lay on his stomach. A flashlight lay nearby; it was this beam of light she’d seen.
The man’s eyes were open but unblinking, and it was clear he was dead.
And yet, wait. It seemed his hands were moving. She aimed the beam of her own flashlight at one of them.
And now another raspy intake of breath.
His skin was bubbling and dissolving. The appendage was settling as it liquified.
And the part of his face that rested on the concrete floor was doing the same. From chin to cheek, the flesh was being eaten away and bloody bone and flaps of muscle and ridges of gum were becoming exposed.
Sachs was coughing harder now.
She took a deep breath to clear her lungs...
Mistake.
Bad mistake.
It simply drew in more of the irritant, stabbing her mouth and nose and chest, and she began coughing in earnest.
The searing pain of fire. She had to escape. Fast.
Dropping her gear, Sachs turned and stumbled back into the tunnel. Now the dreaded passageway was her lifeline.
Lurching forward toward the ladder, she tried to push the Transmit button of her Motorola.
She missed.
Her vision was crackling, black on the periphery.
She staggered toward the ladder. The cough had grown into choking.
She took one step forward and, losing yet more of her sphere of sight, realized she was going down.
When she landed, she had a thought: That’s weird. How can I smack the concrete so hard and not feel a—
7
“Detective.” Ron Pulaski was speaking into his phone. On the other end of the line was Lon Sellitto, who was — in the ever-changing structure of the NYPD — Pulaski’s sorta-kinda boss.
But job hierarchy didn’t matter at the moment. Pulaski had called Sellitto because Sellitto was senior and respected, and because the news Pulaski was about to share could not be ignored or lost in a report. Sellitto would make sure it was not.
“Pulaski,” Sellitto said without waiting to hear what the patrolman’s agenda was. “I left a message. Lincoln’s going to need you on the crane case.”
“Okay. But you gotta hear this. A scene I just ran?”
“Yeah, Homicide? East Side?”
Pulaski was outside the warehouse where Fletcher Dalton had died. The tape was still up. The emergency vehicles were gone.
“I have a probable ID. It’s Eddie Tarr.”
“Wait, you mean—?”
“The bomb maker. Yeah.”
“Man. Wasn’t he on the West Coast? That report on the wire, the government building in Anaheim or someplace? Blew the shit out of it.”
Pulaski said, “He’s here now. Well, he’s ninety-two percent here.” He explained about the percentage likelihood of facial recognition. “But I’m thinking of it as one hundred.”
“So the vic, the stock trader — this Dalton — was just a wrong-time/wrong-place guy.”
“Looks like it. Saw something he shouldn’t. Payment transfer, I’m guessing.”
“Just the facial ID? That’s all you got? Nothing else?”
“A maybe else.”
“What?” Sellitto grumbled.
Pulaski reminded himself not to be cute with a veteran like the detective. “There wasn’t any more DAS coverage in the area. But I found a security cam in a clothing boutique.” The patrolman had thought it was a nice place. Normally, he’d have bought Jenny something in it — but not when the time was speeding past, the forty-eight-minute mark left far behind.
“I think Tarr got into a dark red sedan that maybe had Jersey plates.”
“Tarr... I’m just looking him up on NCIC. Jesus. He sells his bombs all over the world. Doesn’t matter what your politics are. You pay him enough he’ll make you an IED, no questions asked. He doesn’t plant them. He just makes them. The Palestinians’ve bought them to blow up Israelis, and vice versa. So, sedan you were saying? Maybe Jersey?”
“I rolled trace from where the tires were. Maybe that’ll give me a lead.”
“Wasn’t it two days ago?”
“Like Lincoln says, ‘The unlikely is better than nothing.’ ”
Sellitto muttered, “I think he said it better than that.”
“He probably did.”
Sellitto said, “I’m going to tell Dellray at the Bureau, and I know a guy at ATF. They’ll want to jump on any leads to Tarr. Says here there’re rewards on his head, half million.”
“I’m going to follow up.”
“The crane, though, Pulaski.”
“I will. But I want this guy.”
“He’s terrorist enabled. And interstate. And international. That makes it fed all the way.”
Pulaski said evenly, “No, not all the way. He killed a vic here. It’s a homicide. And it’s my case.”
A pause. “Fair enough. Listen, something else. I need to talk to you. Won’t take long. Maybe lunch today at Maggie’s?”
“I can do a half hour. That’s it, though.”
“Good. Make it one o’clock?”
“Sure.” Pulaski was staring absently at the door that Tarr — if Tarr was the killer — had kicked open after shooting Dalton in the back of the head.
“Oh, hold on, Pulaski... Got a notice coming through. About your Tarr case.”
His heart thudded.
The detective continued, “Yeah, here it is. You want to write this down.”
“I’m ready.”
“They got a shitload of red cars in Jersey.”
Pulaski started to say, “Very funny,” but Sellitto’d already hung up.
8
Among the places that Charles Hale had stayed were the Plaza Athénée in Paris, the Marquis Reforma in Mexico City, the Connaught in London, the weird but luxurious boat hotel in Singapore.
He’d chosen them, though, not for their ultra-posh décor and disciplined service, but because they were strategically important for his jobs: murdering a Saudi prince, discrediting a casino owner, stealing a valise containing something valuable enough for him to be paid one million dollars to pilfer... and assignments in the same vein.
Hale parked his SUV on a quiet street in Greenwich Village, walked a half block and turned into a dusty cul-de-sac. Here was his temporary New York City residence. It lacked the panache of any of those elegant, excessive places, but was perfect for his mission here.
It was a WillScot construction trailer squatting at the end of Hamilton Court, not far from the Hudson River. This was a spacious model, 480 square feet. A large central area and two smaller offices on either side, one of which was his bedroom. A bathroom — working, if small. Plenty of tables and shelves. It had been broken into months ago and some half-hearted graffiti decorated the walls, but otherwise there’d been no vandalism. Now, with the lights on much of the time, and security cameras aimed around the perimeter, anyone taking the trouble to slip down the cul-de-sac and peek would believe it occupied and depart, looking elsewhere for larceny or walls to spray-paint into bold art.