Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  The faint neon gleam of the motel sign at the lot’s entrance was enough to reveal the shape of Tall Man’s ditched lighter — a plastic Bic — on the ground near the left front tire of the U-Haul.

  Ricci waited a second, alert. No doors opened. No lights came on. Nothing happened to surprise him.

  He crouched, picked up the lighter, and dropped it into the bag. He folded the top of the bag over once, a second time, peeled off the adhesive label, and stuck it on over the double fold to seal it. Then he put the envelope in his coat pocket and quickly backtracked to the fast-food joint’s parking lot.

  Ricci noticed that the guy in the baseball cap and mackinaw had returned to his Buick and seemed to be dozing, leaning against the headrest with his eyes shut, his seat semi-reclined. Instead of going over to his own car, he strode over to where the guy was parked across the lot and rapped his knuckles on the Buick’s roof to get his attention.

  The guy opened his eyes, sat up straight, looked out his window. Ricci put on a smile, gestured toward his own car, made a winding gesture in the air, and he lowered it.

  “Something I can do for you?” the guy said, shifting around behind the wheel to face him.

  Ricci nodded, and as he did, moved slightly closer to the driver’s door and shot a right jab through the open window, getting most of his arm and shoulder into it, connecting hard with the side of his chin. The driver grunted with pain and surprise as his head snapped back, his hand going up to his face.

  “You’re out of your goddamned mind,” he said.

  “Rather be that than the one who got made,” Ricci said, and held out his palm. “Come on, show me your tag.”

  The driver sat there massaging his chin.

  “Up yours,” he said.

  Ricci had kept his hand out.

  “Your tag,” he said. “Either show it to me, or I can run a check on you. But I have to go to the trouble, you better believe I’ll have you busted down.”

  The guy looked at Ricci a second, frowning. Then he dropped his hand from his chin, got a cardholder out of his mackinaw, and passed it out the window.

  Ricci flipped it open, studied the UpLink Security ID card inside, read the name below its holographic Sword insignia.

  “Bennett,” he said, repeating it aloud. “Cousins put you on me, or you pick me up on stakeout over at Kiran?”

  The op stared out the window.

  “You’re so smart, California, figure it out,” he said.

  Ricci looked at him in silence.

  “Atta boy,” he said. “Wouldn’t want a demerit on the report card.”

  “Yeah, well, screw you, too.”

  Ricci’s smile was cutting.

  “Here’s one you can answer,” he said. “That van… it going to stay in sight?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I meant after your shift ends.”

  “I know what the hell you meant.”

  Ricci looked at him another moment, reached into his pocket for the sealed evidence bag, handed it through the window with the cardholder.

  “I want what’s in the bag tested for prints right away… I’m talking first thing in the morning,” he said. “You ever try tailing me again, you might want to be smarter yourself, use a car I won’t have seen in the same req lot where I got mine.”

  Bennett looked at him, flexed his jaw.

  “Thanks for the advice, hump,” he said.

  * * *

  Ricci pulled into a public rest stop shortly before reaching the large barrier toll plaza between I-87 and the southbound Garden State Parkway to Manhattan.

  In the empty parking area outside the visitor’s building, he got his palmtop out of a utility pocket in his tac vest and typed out a brief e-mail, addressing it to a Yahoo mobile account: O.W.K.Ready to meet tomorrow. Where and when — preference?R.

  He sat for perhaps ten minutes afterward, staring at the computer screen, considering whether to hit SEND or DELETE on his keyboard.

  Curtain number one, curtain number two, he thought. You bet your life.

  Finally, his choice made, Ricci brought up the computer’s WiFi interface and zipped off his message.

  He could almost feel the lion’s breath as he did.

  * * *

  Malisse’s elevator was dangerously out of control.

  At first everything had seemed normal. He’d stepped inside alone, pushed the button for the tenth floor, and leaned back against the rear of the car as it rose. To his surprise, it had stopped on the third without opening either its inner or outer doors. When he’d pushed the DOOR OPEN button to get them to retract, his car had plunged down the shaft so sharply his stomach had lurched into his throat, jolted to a halt midway between the first and second floors, then reversed itself and shot up to the fifth. Again the doors had stayed shut, trapping Malisse behind them. Again he pushed ten on the number pad, repeatedly jabbing the button with his finger until his car had seemed to resume normal operation, its indicator lights telling him he’d begun to move up the shaft. Six, seven, eight, nine, and coming level with ten….

  Then another sudden jolt and the elevator overshot his desired floor as if on high-powered thrusters, its hoist cables screaming, sides rattling, its decorative interior panels and mirrors shuddering and crashing down around him.

  Malisse had been thrown about, on the verge of panic. How fast was he moving? Twenty meters per second? Thirty? Struggling to keep his feet under him, convinced the stress of rapid acceleration would break the car apart at any moment, tear it from its cables to send it freefalling down to the bottom of the shaft, he’d staggered toward the control panel and flipped the bright red EMERGENCY STOP switch.

  An alarm bell kicked in at a deafening volume, but still the car kept ascending with rocket speed. On the verge of panic, Malisse wondered if he was a certain goner. What good would it do for someone to hear the racket if the elevator didn’t brake? If the alarm merely rang and rang and rang as it soared up, up, up, past the building’s highest story, staying in one piece only long enough to hit the roof?

  Malisse grabbed the handrail, bracing for the inevitable collision, his ears filled with the clangorous, useless noise of the alarm bell—

  And then he awoke to the ringing of the bedside phone in his room at the Mayfair Hotel.

  Tossing free of his blankets, Malisse yanked off the black satin sleep mask he’d worn to foil the eternal and unspeakably intrusive lights of Manhattan. A moment later he glanced at his alarm clock, blinked twice as he groped for the receiver.

  It was two forty-five A.M.

  What boor, he thought, would call at this mad hour?

  He jammed the phone against his ear.

  “Who?” he demanded angrily.

  “Duncan,” said the voice at the other end. “You sound kind of winded, Delano. I didn’t take you from any nocturnal diversions, did I?”

  “Only my blissful dreams,” Malisse said. He took a calming breath. “Are you aware of the time?”

  “Vaguely,” Duncan said. “We cardholders in the black-bag union keep odd schedules, and I hope you don’t expect any apologies. Fact is, you ought to be appreciative.”

  Malisse sat up, shoved his pillows against the headboard, settled back onto them.

  “I assume you’re about to tell me why,” he said at once.

  “You wide awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Duncan said. “Because I’d hate for you to claim that I didn’t remind you about our meeting tomorrow. Or later this morning, I should say. Seven o’clock, Park Plaza, our usual table near those chess players.”

  Malisse’s pique had melted away into eager curiosity.

  “I don’t recall our having made the appointment,” he said, taking up the tease.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe we didn’t have one before, come to think,” Duncan said. “Anyway, D, I’ve been to a tailor shop that had the coat you ordered in stock. They did while-you-wait al
terations after all… though it took a cart full of my personal chips, and had me in the waiting room until maybe five minutes ago.”

  Malisse straightened, drew an excited breath.

  “Duncan, I truly do appreciate this,” he said.

  “Enough to treat me to breakfast?”

  “Ja, ja… certainly!”

  The FBI man chuckled at the other end of the line.

  “I know you’re sincere when you stutter in Flemish,” he said. “Seven on the nose, Delano. And expect me to eat hearty.”

  SEVEN

  NEW YORK / NEW JERSEY/ INDIAN-ADMINISTERED KASHMIR

  At a little past eight o’clock in the morning, Ricci left his hotel room, took the elevator downstairs, and, as he went past the restaurant’s lobby entrance, saw Derek Glenn stepping out with a cup of takeout coffee.

  Ricci would have walked on toward the street if their paths hadn’t crossed.

  They stopped in front of each other, exchanged glances.

  “Am I early, or you late?” Glenn said with a wooden smile.

  Ricci shrugged.

  “I want to check on some things downtown,” he said. He continued to eye Glenn flatly. “Those are the same clothes you had on when I left there yesterday.”

  Glenn’s expression grew more awkward.

  “If you’re so bothered by it, I’ll just hurry on up to my room and change,” he said. “Meet you at HQ in a while.” And abruptly turned toward the elevators.

  When Ricci got to her office, Noriko Cousins was at her desk behind her computer. She pulled her head up from an open file folder and waved him through the door.

  “I’ve heard you had a busy night,” she said, sounding anything but pleased.

  Ricci went to the corner chair and sat without hanging his coat.

  “Wasn’t the only one,” he said.

  She gave him a look. “Am I supposed to guess the meaning of that?”

  “We’re talking work, it means your frequent spotter at Kiran better learn to be more careful. If I could pick him up, so could the guy in the van,” Ricci said. He shrugged. “There’s some other meaning of ‘busy’ you want to discuss, I’m all ears.”

  Noriko was quiet a moment.

  “I got your advance billing,” she said. “The tough-guy attitude. The lone wolf bit. But I hadn’t heard what a truly pathetic human being you are.”

  Ricci’s smile slashed at her.

  “Guess we’ll stick to talking work,” he said.

  Noriko had kept looking steadily into his eyes, and she still didn’t flinch.

  “I don’t care how you operate in San Jose, or what you’ve gotten away with under people’s noses out there,” she said. “But this is my city, and I’ve got no long leashes for anybody. Heading out on a surveillance last night wasn’t something you should have done without authorization. It wasn’t something you had any right doing in secret… and just so there’s no confusion, my problem isn’t with you getting your neck hacked open without anybody having a clue what’s happened. The important thing is that you could have put our whole investigation in jeopardy.”

  Ricci stared back across the desk, shrugged his shoulders. “I was worried about keeping secrets from you, I’d have gotten myself a Hertz rental car instead of ticketing that one out of the req lot, where I knew you’d make sure somebody would notice.” He shrugged again and gestured toward the file folder that had remained spread open in front of her. “What’s important is if those printouts mean your boy Bennett got any results off the cigarette lighter.”

  Noriko looked at him.

  “Your partner called to say he’d be here any minute,” she said. “I want him in on this, too.”

  It was, in fact, almost five minutes of chilly silence before Glenn arrived at her office. He moved past Ricci with a nod, tossed his coat up on a hook, and stepped toward Noriko’s desk.

  “Good morning,” he said to her, smiling.

  “Getting there,” she said, and flashed him a quick little smile of her own.

  Glenn settled into a chair, waited.

  “Time for us to share and share alike,” Noriko said. She gave him a revelatory look, then shifted her gaze to Ricci. “Starting with what you saw last night out at Kiran, and then afterward.”

  Even as an expression of surprise began spreading over Glenn’s features, Ricci told of his observation of the plant, the loading and apparent unpacking of boxes aboard the U-Haul van, the dark-suits who’d done it, and the Tall Man. Then he went through his tailing the van to the trucker’s motel, his recovery of the tossed lighter in the motel lot, and his passing it on to Bennett for examination… recounting all of it in a precise but dispassionate near-monotone.

  “That’s what I saw,” he said finally. He looked straight at Noriko. “The rest’s with you.”

  There was no hesitation in her nod.

  “We lifted quite a batch of prints off the lighter, ran them through IAFIS courtesy of the access we’re permitted by the Feds,” she said, using the acronym for the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification database. “Every one of them belongs to a man named John Earl Fletcher… or John Earl, as he prefers to be called.”

  “What kind of rap sheet’s he got?” Glenn said.

  “A long and bad one,” Noriko said. She scanned a sheet in her folder. “It starts almost twenty years ago with a string of misdemeanors and minor felonies in Maine. Possession of illegal substances, drunk driving, public nuisance, that sort of thing. There’re several juvie arrests and probations, a conviction for snatching a wallet at knifepoint. Then he does six months in county jail for assault and battery. A year later, he’s slapped with a charge of third-degree murder… a sheriff’s deputy. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in the Maine state penitentiary.”

  “That sounds kind of light for a cop killing,” Glenn said

  “I thought so, too,” Noriko said. “Went ahead and cross-referenced the IAFIS information with other clearanced databases, found that it was ruled accidental… the details in the system are sketchy, but it seems they had a personal background of some sort. Knew each other from high school, the way they do in small towns. Earl was driving a truck for a local fuel company. He and the cop are involved in some kind of shouting match over a routine traffic summons, stupid affair. One thing leads to another, and soon they’re in a fistfight. The cop falls, hits his head, doesn’t get up. And Earl goes into the system for a major stretch, where he becomes a man.”

  “Gets uglier as they get older.”

  “Doesn’t it always,” Noriko said. “When we next catch up with Earl, after his release, he’s changed scenes to Newark, New Jersey, and been arrested in connection with a RICO probe. There’s a charge of interstate travel in aid of racketeering… and worse, multiple charges of murder-for-hire. But a couple of key witnesses change their testimony prior to trial, and the case against him is dropped.”

  Glenn snorted. “Oh, what luck,” he said with an ironic smile.

  Noriko shrugged, glanced down at her folder.

  “There’s nothing else as far as what I’ve dredged out of the computers. John Earl Fletcher — a.k.a. John Earl — seems to exit stage left until he shows up at Kiran with a U-Haul.”

  Ricci had sat in his corner of the office without reacting to what she said, or apparently having done anything but lean back and stare into space. Now he moved his eyes to Noriko and kept them on her.

  “Your lookouts ever see that van at the plant before?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Last night was a first.”

  “And it’s still at the motel.”

  She nodded. “The minute Earl leaves his room, I’ll know about it.”

  “So we’ve got a guy who gets mobbed-up doing hard time, a pro hitter and dirty carrier, moving stuff for Kiran when the lights are off, then parking a mile away like he’s in no kind of hurry to go anywhere with it. That make sense?”

  Glenn scratched behind his ear.

  “Not much,�
�� he said. “Unless maybe he’s waiting.”

  Ricci turned to him.

  “Waiting for what?”

  Glenn shrugged.

  “Somebody to meet or contact him, something to happen, no way for us to know,” he said.

  Silence. Noriko slowly closed the file folder she’d been holding and flipped it onto her desk.

  “I’ve seen something this morning besides the law-enforcement material,” she said. “An e-mail from Lenny Reisenberg.”

  Both men looked at her.

  “The shipping manager who got us mixed up in the Sullivan case?” Glenn said.

  Noriko gave him a nod.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “What might be relevant here is that Lenny’s started to dig into some of Kiran’s shipping records, and a standout he’s already figured worth passing on is that a lot of the dual-use laser components Kiran’s been sending abroad in increased quantities — parts I’ve been wondering about for a while — have been freighted to an offshore distribution outfit in Singapore. That same company has major offices in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo.” A pause, a shrug. “None of it necessarily tells us anything’s fishy, since those countries are considered our diplomatic partners, but—”

  “Those places are also major route-throughs for lots of neighborhood bad guys,” Glenn said.

  She nodded again, and they all sat without speaking for a minute. Then Ricci sat forward in his chair, shifting his eyes from one to the other.

  “We damn well better find out what’s in that moving van,” he said.

  * * *

  John Earl got out of the shower in his motel room, dried himself off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stood half naked and still mostly wet in front of the full-length mirror on the door. He touched the tattoo of the fire-engine-red Mack truck on his neck, thinking of the dream he’d had the night before. In that dream — more of a nightmare, truth be known — he was back in Thomaston, back in his prison cell, and working on the much larger version of the truck he’d painted on its wall over several years, after finally convincing the screws to look the other way… though he knew he hadn’t been the only con at Thomaston they’d let amuse himself with arts and crafts, ’long as he was quiet and did as he was told.