The Big Fear (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

NO END OF MISCHIEF

The room was wide and bright, floored with worn wooden planks and walled with stubborn bricks. Broad windows that long ago gave some respite to employees chained to heavy machinery now let in swaths of sunlight. But it was just as hot as it had been outside. The building too old for central air, the room too large for a window unit to do any good, the heat only intensified in the offices of the August 15 Coalition. Leonard could feel the sweat creep through his hair now, his clothing already spent.

Roshni didn’t seem to mind the heat. She was thin beneath the suit, comfortable displaying power. Leonard looked past her into the broad clean office. Across from the iron windows sat a row of four or five computers. Neat workspaces without any workers at them. A bookcase against the rear wall. A broad open hardwood floor, not a speck of dust or a rug to disturb the look. And she seemed to be alone in there.

“The papers said you were in the hospital. That an investigation was ongoing.”

“I was beat up by a cop.” He didn’t have to worry whether she would believe him. “I was in the hospital and the guy who did it was there. I had to run. They have been to my apartment. I don’t know where to go. I know that I sound paranoid.”

“So you figured you’d come to the person you always thought was paranoid?”

She closed the door behind him. The room was too neat, too empty, too clean. His city office was always cluttered with boxes of files destined for storage, unkempt folders on desks. The offices of the Coalition were a museum, the still hum of the four terminals the only sounds.

“Where is your staff, Roshni? Why is it so quiet?”

“I am my staff. Those computers are set to search every publication in the world, in any language, for mentions of police and death. If someone dies in police custody in Kazakhstan, they will find it. And then I make the indictment and put it on the list.”

“There isn’t anyone else?”

“I don’t need anyone else.”

It didn’t sound like much of a coalition to Leonard, but he was in no position to criticize. He walked to one of the terminals and sat in a stern chair. Roshni stood watch. It wasn’t that she was talking down to him exactly. But it sounded as though she was quite convinced she knew so much more than he did.

“You were assaulted by a police officer. You were hospitalized. You have now fled the hospital without being discharged. No wonder they are looking for you.”

“They think that I killed Davenport. Or they want to make it look like I did. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I thought you’d understand.”

One of the computers let out a quick ping; Roshni brushed past Leonard to check on it. She stared deep as she read the news story that had flashed up. A teenage boy in Papua New Guinea had snuck into the cottage of a woman suspected of witchcraft. To please the town’s elders, he had beheaded her in her sleep. The national authorities had swooped in, and sometime between the time he was arrested and set to be arraigned, he had been found unresponsive in his cell. Roshni set to work on a new indictment. Of course, like the rest of them, it was just a piece of paper from her printer. No one in Papua New Guinea was going to arrest a police officer on this woman’s say-so any more than the Brooklyn DA would. She kept speaking to him while she did.

“Of course I understand. But who else will. I came to your meetings every month to tell you what was really going on. And you humored me, but you didn’t really believe me. And I wonder if you believe me even now.”

Leonard slouched into his chair. He fished the flash drive that Veronica had given him out of his pocket. He set it on the cheap folding table in front of him.

“I think I believe you now. I think, actually, it’s worse than you think. We should look at this.”

Roshni finished with her indictment and sent it to print.

“And what is supposed to be on that?”

If it had been anyone else, Leonard would have worried that he’d look crazy if he said what he was about to say. But she already believed things that other people thought were crazy. It’s why he had come here to begin with. “I think these cops are behind the little disasters. I think they are working for a bank. Trying to move the price of stocks through sabotage. Terror for profit. The bank hires them to go sink a water taxi and the bank bets that the water taxi company’s stock will tank. And I think that Davenport was on to them.”

Roshni was massaging her right hand with her left. The hands were lean and smooth. Her teeth were neat. Her eyes were set deep but watched Leonard carefully. She looked at the floor when Leonard was done.

“So maybe it’s true after all.”

“What is?”

“The biggest short. There has always been a rumor. People do plenty of bad things on Wall Street, but there have always been stories that someone is out there making his own destiny. There is an easy fortune in villainy, and men are capable of no end of mischief after all. If you knew when the bad guys were going to strike, or how they were going to strike. Or better yet, if you just became one of the bad guys yourself.”

“A rumor?”

“Going way back. Bhopal. The
Exxon Valdez
. Imperial Sugar. Just weeks before each of them there was a massive short on the company involved. Six days before the Bhopal disaster, someone bet seven million dollars that Union Carbide’s stock would collapse. You can always go back and say something is a coincidence. But you could also imagine that someone is out there betting on catastrophe and then bringing catastrophe to bear.”

She took the flash drive and slid it into the machine. It burst to life, sprouting communications, photographs of targets, and pages and pages of intractable code, asterisks and slashes and nothing resembling words at all.

“It’s going to take me a while to put together what’s going on here. Who gave you this?”

“A friend. Someone who would know. It’s what Davenport was working on.”

“Well, if this is what I think it is, your friend is in danger. Whoever has been doing this has been at it a while.”

Leonard tugged at his bandage. He couldn’t help but rib her. “Sure. A grand conspiracy. Next thing you are going to tell me is that someone bet against the
Titanic
. Or that this pop-up investment firm caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.”

“Leonard, on August 27, 2001, someone placed two large anonymous shorts—one against United Airlines and one against American Airlines. No short of airlines in general. No reason to think those two airlines were going to suffer any particular harm. Unless you were planning to cause that harm. We think that there are people out there destroying the world because they hate our way of life. Or they don’t like our morals. But almost every time, you can trace it back to someone who is making money.”

She dove deep into the screen now, scanning through police personnel files, schematic drawings of a restaurant basement, a license for crane inspections from the Department of Buildings records. The pages swarmed by one after the other. First there were pages of e-mails, all written in code. Then there were pages mapping out what looked like shipping routes, each with a logo and the words “SKS Containers” plastered in a sleek corporate font across the bottom. The next few pages were more coded communications. Then a photograph of a container ship, then a map of its route, pinpointing its final leg across Buttermilk Channel. Roshni sat up.

“They had been planning to sink the ship, Leonard. The one where the cop got shot.”

He held his bandage tight and clipped the fasteners into place.

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to have to decode this. It could take all day.”

Leonard remembered what Veronica had told him. That they needed to find the next target. The container ship had been the last one. She had pulled records from the firm, she had learned what was going on before, but she didn’t know what Davenport had found since. Davenport’s investigation was somewhere. Either in the hands of the people who had killed her, or stashed safe.

“Roshni, I’m going to have to go out. This isn’t complete. Davenport kept searching after this.”

Roshni scrolled through to the final screens. Records of trades. Short sells of the crane manufacturer, the restaurant where the rats had turned up, and the private water taxi line. And of the shipping company. Just two days before Mulino had shot Rowson on the boat. She looked up at Leonard.

“They were planning something on the boat. Rowson was there to sink it; he had killed the deckhand. But Mulino shot Rowson and that was the end of it.”

Leonard nodded. He had been right. Mulino had been on the up-and-up all along. More than that, he had been breaking up something serious. He probably hadn’t even known what it was. Rowson had flashed his gun, had been trying to escape. And once Rowson was dead, why not pin it on the detective. If Leonard had enough to go on, he could bring it to Mulino. But he didn’t have enough to go on yet.

Leonard felt a swift pain in his shoulder. He touched his bandage and felt that it was wet. Probably sweat but he couldn’t rule out blood.

“I need to change. I need to go out.”

“There is a bathroom in the hallway. But be careful if you leave. If whoever is behind this knows what you’re up to, they won’t hesitate. I’m going to try to look at the code.”

Leonard nodded and stood. He walked through the quiet hallway and into the bathroom. Old-fashioned black and white hex tile on the floor fading to gray and gray. Once the developers get ahold of this building, the whole place will be rubble, then glass and steel, and then no one will remember. He took off his shirt and unwrapped the bandage. It wasn’t doing him any good anyway. He changed his clothes. Her story was hard even for Leonard to believe, but at least someone was on his side. At least someone believed him. He had found one ally in Veronica and he now had another surprising one in Roshni.

There was more to do. Veronica had told him that Davenport may have learned something. It was worth a shot. But he couldn’t even stand up without stumbling toward the wall now. His head, neck, and back shouted at him to get some rest. To wait a few hours at least. He would ask Roshni if he could sleep awhile on the floor. He would go back out after sunset.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE
JOHN MARCHI

Ralph Mulino’s knuckles nearly burst as he squeezed the railing of the Staten Island Ferry, looking at the Statue of Liberty and behind it, the morass of the Jersey City shoreline. The impudent clock, ninety feet tall, perched on the edge of the shore proclaiming a single word: Colgate. As though this crowd could be duped into changing their toothpaste in exchange for being told the time. As though anyone on that ferry didn’t know the time down to the minute. Each of these commuters had boarded at six eighteen, as each one had every day of his career, and each would disembark at six fifty-two, no matter what the Colgate Clock did or didn’t say.

It was the first time Mulino had been on the water since the night of the shooting, and he hadn’t started to like it any better. Sure, it was a smooth ride over the harbor, but that did not put him at ease. He was on the
John Marchi
, a new ship brought on when they upgraded the fleet seven or eight years ago. It was named for a Staten Island legend, a man who had served the island as city councilman, state assemblyman, state senator. He’d even beaten John Lindsay in the ’69 Republican primary for mayor, only to have Lindsay double-cross him as an independent in the general. The name reeked of local pride, and reminded everyone on board that while one of the places it docked was lower Manhattan, the other place was home.

It was a bright new boat with sleek modern seats and plenty of room to look over the deck, but Mulino was still on the water, and he still hated being there. If you’re on a boat, there are only so many places you can go. If things turn sour, there is no escaping back into an alley, there is no getting in your car and speeding away. Mulino had learned again just a few days ago how limited your options are on the water.

He scanned the rows of passengers. They planned their breakfast and their workday around the ferry schedule, and huddled alone during their thirty-minute trip. It wasn’t that long ago that most people on the ferry read the tabloids, rustling real leaves of paper in the twilight. But as Mulino looked up and down the ship, he saw that nearly half the commuters were staring at one kind of electronic device or another. The dedicated office drones were settling up their last batches of e-mails while the pure nine-to-fivers updated their fantasy baseball teams or twinkled bright candy or gems into place.

People hated to be disturbed during a ferry ride, a private little reverie taking place in front of a hundred others. But Mulino would do his job. He fished the photograph of Davenport out of one pocket and his detective’s badge out from under his shirt. He straightened his posture and set out for his first victim—a woman whose face was happily buried in an e-reader, glad the other passengers couldn’t figure out what kind of books she was into.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

The woman didn’t look up. A New Yorker’s reaction. If you don’t pay attention to someone, eventually they’ll leave you alone. It works with unwanted men trying to pick you up in bars and with panhandlers. Not so often with the police.

“Ma’am, I’m Detective Ralph Mulino, NYPD. You mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

She snuck a peek to make sure he really had a badge, then looked fearful. Everyone has something they’d just as soon not tell a cop.

“What is it?”

He held out the picture.

“Were you on the six-eighteen on Tuesday? Any chance you remember seeing this woman?”

The lady looked over Davenport’s picture. Davenport stood rigid, the national and state flags draped behind her, smiling too brightly, the way people do in their official work portraits. The lady shook her head.

“No. I was on the boat. I didn’t . . .”

And before she could trail off, Mulino was off to the next one. There were at least three hundred people on the ferry, and it would be docking in only twenty minutes. He didn’t have time to linger with people who had nothing to say.

The next one was a stiff-looking guy in a suit who didn’t want to talk to him and hadn’t seen Davenport. The one after that was wearing flip-flops and had a trim beard and was probably a tourist seeing the Statue of Liberty the cheap way. The one after that was another stiff guy in a suit, as was the next one and the following twenty or so.

Mulino had long ago grown used to the fact that police work, at its essence, was profoundly boring. Asking a hundred or so people the same few questions about the same photograph, only to be told by every one of them that they didn’t know anything, was not even close to the dullest thing he’d done as a cop. Mulino had interviewed witnesses who only remembered the first two letters of a license plate and the fact that the car was maybe gray, leaving him to make six or seven hundred house visits in Forest Hills, New Rochelle, and Throgs Neck. He had called upon two hundred hardware stores in Brooklyn to ask which of them might have sold a couple of rolls of a particular kind of cable exactly six weeks before. At least these people on the boat were as captive as he was. At least he knew he was going to be through with them, one way or another, when the ferry landed.

“Oh, yeah, I saw her.”

It was a woman in a red suit, dark hair short, and an expensive-looking bag at her side. Someone who ranked a little above the middle management functionaries that typically crowded the ferry. Maybe an ad executive or a boutique lawyer. Maybe the kind of person who works downtown, but not the kind that usually lives in the quiet of Staten Island. Mulino couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing on the boat.

“You did?”

“Yeah, it was interesting. She was sitting with a cop. She kept looking over her shoulder, like maybe someone would notice. I thought she was under arrest.”

“A cop?”

“Yeah. He was wearing his uniform. Young guy, dark hair. I don’t know, a cop.” Almost no civilian can tell one rookie cop from the next. Mulino had himself been indistinguishable from a couple of hundred others once, coming out of the academy. You don’t want the world to think of you as an individual; you want them all to see the uniform first, the badge second, and the gun third. You never really want them to see your face at all.

“And what happened then?”

“As the boat slowed down, you know, before we docked, the cop stood up and told her to come with him. She started to push off at first and then he grabbed her.”

“Push off?”

“You know. You see a ton of people in the city. Crazy or whatever. He grabbed her and pulled her in. I don’t remember if he cuffed her.”

She hadn’t been handcuffed. The marks would have been there the next morning when her body was found. Mulino knew just how much a pair of solid handcuffs can drill into the soft tissue. The cop who took her would have known that too.

“What else?”

“I saw one guy get arrested on the ferry once and he fought off the cops and two other guys that were just riding the boat jumped on him and started punching him. Undercovers, I guess. Everyone looked away. This woman didn’t want to be there, but it wasn’t as though she was kicking and screaming. I didn’t think much of it.”

“Thank you.”

He kept going, eventually finding a good half-dozen who had noticed Davenport get removed from the ferry by a cop. Like the first woman, no one had thought anything strange about it. Why would they? No one cared: these little dramas go on all day long in New York, and the audience usually keeps its distance.

Just as the boat was nearing the dock at Staten Island, one final witness, a cheap-looking man in a cheap-looking suit, told him one thing more. He had been at the front of the boat, and had seen her get walked off just as it was about to dock, just like everyone said. He had been up smoking a cigarette himself, hanging just off the front starboard where they might not bother to stop you.

“But then it was really the craziest thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The cop led her away, he gestured to the guys who tie the boat on and he took her down the ramp before it was really steady. He had to duck her into the gate. Just like that. Before anyone else got off. Before the boat was even at the dock all the way.”

The ferry slowed as it pulled into the landing. It nudged gently up against the pier, heaving back a quick little rock of relief. At most, the space under the gate was only about three feet high. The cop would have had to tug her down and duck under with her to get her through. Mulino looked up and saw the camera pointed at the bow of the boat. It doesn’t start recording, though, until the boat locks into place. A little energy-saving measure. In a minute, the gate would spring open and the whole crowd on this Ferry would heave off. Mulino only had a few moments left for questions.

“How did she look as she left?”

The man thought for a second. “She turned around and she just had the widest eyes. She just looked at me. I thought she said something, but I couldn’t make it out. And the cop kind of tugged her around and walked her down the pier.”

“Any idea what she might have said?”

“Like I said, I couldn’t really hear it. And you don’t think, you know, when you see someone get arrested. But at the time the way her mouth moved, what I really thought is that she was calling out, ‘Help me, help me.’ But you know, so many people are just nuts. What are you going to do?”