Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (15 page)

Chapter 19

Alan was sporting
a five o’clock shadow when the elevator doors opened and he walked through the bullpen to his office.

Both Lucy and Gant were waiting for him. Gant was holding an envelope in his hand. The back was facing outward. Alan couldn’t read whatever was written on the front.

“You slept,” Lucy said. “That’s good. Now you just need to shower and shave.”

“Can’t have everything. So…what have we got? Was it the post office?”

“It was clean,” Gant said. “They had the bomb squad check it out. Nothing.”

“I was wrong.”

“Not quite.”

Gant handed him the envelope.

“What’s this?” Alan turned the envelope over and read what was written there. His stomach sank. “Where’d this come from?”

“The postal inspector was kind enough to check the contents of McKay’s post office box for us,” Gant said. “There was only a single letter. And you’re holding it.”

“The post office was clean?” he asked, already knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it again anyway.

“What the guys in San Fran are saying.”

Alan’s gaze dropped to the envelope, reading the words again.

Typed on the front of the envelope were two words in all caps: ALAN LAMB.

His name.

And how could that be? How could a piece of mail with his name on it end up in Graham McKay’s P.O. Box in San Francisco?

Because someone is keeping tabs on you,
Alan thought.

“The whole time you thought he was leaving us clues,” Lucy said. “But that wasn’t right. He was leaving them for
you
.”

“Are you going to open it anytime today?” Gant asked.

“What if it’s booby trapped?” Lucy asked. “Or maybe there’s poison inside of it. Anthrax or something.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Alan said and tore the envelope open.

Inside, there was a folded piece of paper. Alan fished it out and unfolded it.

YOU DID NOT KNOW WHERE TO LOOK, AND SO YOU MISSED ALL THAT WAS IMPORTANT.

And below that:

YOURS TRULY,

MORRIE ARTIE

“Remember that?” Lucy said. “That’s exactly the part I pointed out in the Sherlock Holmes story.”

“You were right,” Alan said. “It was me who got it wrong. A post office wasn’t the clue.”

Lucy said, “Sure it was. You were right, too. The clue
was
a post office. He was telling you where to go so you could find this letter. This must be the next clue.”

“It doesn’t tell us anything,” Alan said, but didn’t believe it.

“It tells us,” Gant said, “that this guy has chosen to single you out for some reason.”

“It’s like you said. He’s playing a game, but it isn’t with all of us like we thought,” Lucy said. “He’s playing it with you.”

“Why me? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“When does it ever make sense?” Gant said. “I’m late for my meeting with Deputy Director Strickland. He wants my final disposition on the case.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

Gant shrugged. “I’ll tell him what you told me. That it isn’t over yet. Not that it’ll make any difference. He’s just going through the motions at this point. His mind’s already made up.”

“What do we do?”

“Do what I’ve been telling you from the beginning. Work the case.”

Gant left them.

Lucy snatched the note out of Alan’s hands and read it over. “It’s so cryptic,” she said. “What’s Mr. Arti trying to tell us.”

“He’s not telling us anything. He’s rubbing our noses in it.”

Lucy took the note and sat down behind her desk, smoothing the paper out. She stared at it for a long time.

“Don’t waste your time, Lucy. There’s nothing there to find.”

“There has to be. He’s the one that started this thing. He’s been leaving us clues. Leaving us in the dark now would be…cheating.”

“He’s the bad guy. He doesn’t have to play fair.”

But so far he has,
Alan thought.
At least to some extent. He’s never left us completely in the dark. There’s always been one more clue. He’s always left us one more breadcrumb to follow. Why change the rules now?

“You said yourself that he enjoys playing the game,” Lucy said. “He’s always been ahead of us. I don’t think he’d stoop to cheating. Not in a game he created.”

Lucy read the words typed on the paper out loud. Twice.

“
You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important.
He’s basically telling us that the answer is there, we just aren’t looking in the right place. We just aren’t seeing it.” The printout of
A Case of Identity
was still on her desk, resting under the note from Morrie Arti. “Oh my God! It’s been here the whole time and I didn’t even notice!”

“What?”

“Morrie Arti.”

“Huh?”

“His name. Morrie Arti. Don’t you see, it makes perfect sense!”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Morrie Arti. That’s why he left us the Sherlock Holmes story. I can’t believe I was so stupid. Don’t you get it? In the Sherlock Holmes stories,
Moriarty
was Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy. His nemesis. Moriarty was the greatest criminal mastermind to have ever lived.”

Alan wasn’t a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Had never read the stories, except maybe in high school, when his English teacher had made the entire class read
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. Alan had seen the movies though, the recent one and its sequel starring Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as his faithful sidekick, Dr. Watson. He remembered Moriarty from the movies. Now that Lucy had pointed it out, Alan couldn’t believe that he had missed the correlation, either.

“You’re right,” Alan said.

He read the note over again.

Where’s the clue? We made the leap – or Lucy did at least –but that still doesn’t tell us anything.

“We missed something,” Lucy said. “That’s what he’s telling us. It has to be the name.”

“We know what the name stands for now, but I don’t see how that’s a clue. And why the misspelling? Why didn’t he spell it the way it is in the stories?”

“Because the name
is
the clue. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He basically spelled it all out for us. We didn’t know where to look, so we missed the important thing, and then he put the name. Morrie. Arti. I think he spelled it differently for a reason. Maybe it’s an anagram. Look.”

Lucy grabbed a pen from a dozen that were crowded together in a wire-mesh cup perched on her desk. She wrote all the letters down, leaving an ample amount of space between each of them.

M O R R I E A R T I.

“Now we just scramble them around and see if we can spell something else,” Lucy said.

They both stared at the letters.

Alan tried different letter combinations in his mind, trying to spell out different words.

R I T E

I M R O A R

“I’m rat?”

“This is harder than it looks.”

“Tame…”

“More…”

“…meat…”

“…Oreo…”

“…tire…”

“…more…”

“Rome. R-O-M-E. That spells Rome.”

“It’s a place,” Alan said. “That’s something.”

“That leaves the letters R-I-A-R-T-I.”

“…tar…”

“A-I-R.”

“
Air.”

“Rome and air. But that leaves R-T-I, and that doesn’t mean anything.”

Alan scrutinized the remaining three letters.

Rome Air
, he thought.

R-T-I.

I-R-T.

“That’s it!”

“What?”

“I.R.T. International Rome Travel. Rome Air. Rome Airways. That’s an airline company.”

“You think?”

Alan nodded.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Lucy said.

“You probably wouldn’t have a reason to. They only fly out of New York. New York to Rome.”

“And you know that how?”

“I thought about going there once.”

“Do you think that’s it?”

“It has to be. A clue isn’t any good if it’s too hard to figure out.”

“What do we do?”

“I’m going to talk to Gant. You get on the horn to JFK.”

“What do I say?”

“Tell them someone is planning to blow up one of their planes.”

Chapter 20

Gant hadn’t been
thrilled with the idea of disrupting the operations of the sixth busiest airport in the United States, but he had made the call based on Alan’s insistence that there was a credible threat.

“I hope this doesn’t turn out to be like the post office fiasco,” Gant had said.

“I actually hope it does,” Alan said. “In fact, I hope I’m completely wrong about this. But I don’t think I am.”

Alan didn’t bother arguing that the post office in San Francisco hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Confiscating the contents of Graham McKay’s P.O. Box was what had led them to the letter addressed to Alan, which in turn had led them to the clue regarding Rome Airways.

“Promise me one thing. If this turns out to be another bust, you’ll drop it after this? I know you’re operating under the hunch that this guy is going to keep going, but we can only chase so many dead ends. You at least have to entertain the idea that it’s over.”

“If this doesn’t amount to anything, I’ll leave it alone. I’ll start catching cases again.”

Gant had nodded and made the telephone call to Homeland Security, which became the first step in creating a large spectacle that would either save lives or leave a lot of government officials scrambling to save face. Either way, there were going to be a lot of disgruntled airline passengers.

That had been an hour ago.

Alan was getting ready to leave the office on a flight out of Eppley to LaGuardia. Rome Airways provided a single daily flight from New York’s JFK to Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci International Airport. It departed at 10:00 A.M. seven days a week. It was now 1:00 P.M. Central time, making it 2:00 P.M. in New York, which meant today’s flight had already departed and was probably flying somewhere over the Atlantic by now. So far, no problems had been reported, leading Alan to believe that Morrie Arti had been courteous enough to leave them time to discover the clue he had left as well as the necessary time to solve it.

“What if it’s a trap?” Lucy asked as Alan was gathering his things and getting ready to head out.

“A trap for who?”

“
You
. He’s singling you out. What if he’s trying to trick you.”

“That hasn’t been his M.O. so far.”

“It hasn’t been his M.O. to give us clues ahead of time, either,” Lucy said. Why is he doing it this time.”

“I don’t know. Maybe this is his endgame. Maybe we’re wrong. There’s no use in speculating.”

Alan was being disingenuous and he knew it. He had done plenty of speculating of his own, and was fully aware that he didn’t know what he would be walking into. He had never been an overt risk taker, had never been a gambler, and he was prone to exercising due caution, but he had to admit to feeling a little anxious. Something about this was different. He hadn’t been lying to Lucy when he told her this could be the endgame. Because that was exactly what it felt like: that Morrie Arti’s game was approaching its conclusion. He was winding things down and orchestrating the fall of Graham McKay had only been a small part of that. He didn’t think their man would scurry off into the night. No. He would want to go out on a high note. Every high stakes game had to have a grand finale.

And Alan wanted to be around when that happened. He wanted this man for a number of reasons, simple curiosity among them. He wanted to know who he had been dealing with. It wasn’t every day that he was confronted with an enemy that was as clever as Morrie Arti had turned out to be.

“Call me when you get to the hotel, would you?” Lucy asked. “Just so I know you made it there.”

“You got it, Mom.”

Lucy looked troubled. She didn’t say another word as she watched him walk through the bullpen and into the elevator.

Alan spent a good deal of the flight to New York trying to imagine what the man’s face would look like. It was wishful thinking. He didn’t really believe that Morrie Arti would be waiting for him, but it was something to hold onto. It was Lucy’s assumption that Morri Arti had singled Alan out, that in a game that they had believed to consist of many players, all it really came down to was two men: Alan and his nemesis. Deep down, Alan thought the man might be as curious about Alan as Alan was about him.

Regardless of how hard he tried, Alan wasn’t able to put a face to the man with the fake name. The best his mind could do was to offer up an image of someone wearing a mask. A white mask with a huge fake smile plastered across the bottom of it. It reminded him of the Comedy/Tragedy masks often used to represent the theater. The big fake smile somehow implied that Morrie Arti was smarter than them; that he would always remain one step ahead of the stooges that chased him. And he knew it.

Morrie Arti.
Moriarty.

Of all the agencies involved, of all the individuals working the case, the man had singled Alan out; had left a letter with his name on it.

Why him? Alan didn’t have a clue. It meant, of course, that Good Ole Morrie was following the investigation closely. Almost
too
closely. Alan wasn’t surprised the man was keeping score. He had been dropping clues all along the way to keep his opponents from abandoning the chase, but that he had chosen Alan specifically…

The game’s afoot.

Had he personally selected Alan to play the role of Sherlock Holmes for this particular game of cat and mouse? Alan didn’t think he was too shabby of an investigator, but no one had compared him to Sherlock Holmes. Although he prided himself on being shrewd when it came to the nuances of human behavior, no one had ever accused him of being a genius when it came to deductive reasoning.

There was the familiar jerk of the landing gear falling into place. Alan let the wheel of faces spin over in his mind. This mental slideshow began with the face of Howard Sitka and flicked through the other faces, of the victims/suspects, remembering Deputy Defries, Detective Weathers – recalling all of them. Frank Knowles, Graham McKay, and the mystery man, Darrow.

Darrow. He had meant to follow up on the spook, but that had taken a back seat once they had focused on McKay as their prime suspect. He hadn’t heard anything from Darrow since they had spoken in the casino.

He pulled out his wallet and dug into the card holder. He shuffled through the dozen or so business cards that had accumulated there during the course of the last week. He found Darrow’s tucked into the stack behind the card Lucy had given him for her psychic friend. Only Darrow’s wasn’t really a business card at all. Just a blank rectangle of heavy stock paper with a phone number written on it in blue ink.

Alan pulled out his cell phone. It was still on Airplane Mode. Maybe he would give Darrow a call once he landed. He wasn’t sure what force motivated him, but the urge was a strong one. Alan put his phone away and stuck the business cards back into his wallet for safekeeping.

He felt tired again. Despite having gotten some sleep the night before, he still felt weary with exhaustion.

But there wasn’t time to be tired. The endgame was coming. Alan was sure of it. The mastermind of this game had made Alan a major player; had thrown down the gauntlet and challenged him to an old-fashioned game of wits.

And Alan was determined to win.