Threat Level Black (30 page)

“Hey, Colonel, how are you doing?” said the voice on the cell phone when Howe answered.

A very recognizable, if inconvenient, voice.

“I’m very busy right now, Fisher.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“It was my answer,” said Howe.

“Listen, I need some advice.”

“This is a real bad time, Fisher. I’ve had a tough few days and I’d like to relax.”

“Tell me about it. I just missed getting blown up by a nail bomb in New York City.”

“What do you need advice for?”

“If you had an E-bomb, how would you drop it? Would you rent a plane?”

“How do you know it’s going to be dropped?”

“I don’t. That was what the experts said when we were talking about it. You would use it over a set of transformers or a big switching yard, someplace where you can have a big impact. So I’m figuring airplane.”

“Or a cruise missile,” said Howe. “Or a UAV.”

“What’s a UAV?”

“Fisher, where are you?”

“At the moment I’m standing in a hallway of a prewar apartment in Chelsea, watching some crime scene guys pull nails out of the wall.”

“Can you get to a secure phone?”

“If I have to. Take me an hour and a half, though.”

“Call me back on this line with your sat phone, then I’ll call you.”

Howe killed the cell phone. There was a secure phone at NADT he could use, but of course that meant leaving Alice.

She was in the kitchen, clearing the dishes from dinner.

“I’m going to have to go,” he said.

“Now?”

“In a few minutes, yeah. It’s, um…it’s important.”

“And you can’t talk about it.”

He shook his head.

“Is it related to the other day?” she asked.

“No.” His answer was honest—he didn’t think it was at first—but as he thought about it he decided it might be. It was too late to take it back, but the realization made him feel guilty, as if he’d deliberately lied.

“Very mysterious,” she said, closing the dishwasher. Alice walked to him, sliding her arms around his waist to his back, pulling him down to her lips. “When did you have to leave?”

Howe’s story about the UAVs gave Fisher a tenuous connection with the Koreans, but the agent had already used up his quota of tenuous connections on the case.

“You have any evidence there were other UAVs?” Fisher asked as they discussed it over the secure connection. Fisher was using Macklin’s office; he pushed back in the seat and gazed up at his reflection in the overhead mirror.

The man looking down at him frowned. Fisher decided mirrors were overrated.

“No evidence at all,” said Howe.

“How about the CIA or somebody. Would they know?”

“The CIA didn’t even know they existed until I saw them,” said Howe. “One of them was just recovered a few days ago. It’s being shipped back for inspection. One of my guys is going to be on the team looking at it. I mean, one of NADT’s guys.”

“Could they have smuggled one of these UAV things out of the country?”

“If they could get an E-bomb out, sure. They’re pretty small. The North Koreans exported all sorts of weapons, Fisher. They used to sell Scud missiles all over the world. We could’ve stopped them, but we didn’t.”

“Mistake, huh?”

“You have any serious questions?”

“If you had one of these E-bombs, you could drop it from a UAV?” asked Fisher.

“You could. Or you could just fly the UAV to a specific point and altitude, then detonate it. There’s a problem, though, from what I’ve heard. The UAV they found has no engine in it.”

“You can’t just slap a motor in the sucker, huh?”

“It’s harder than you think. Has to be pretty small.”

“Who makes small engines?”

“There are a couple of manufacturers. U.S.”

“Can I get a list?”

“Sure. There’s another problem. You have to control it somehow. Controlling an aircraft over many miles can be pretty tricky. Even something like the Predator—”

“Why do you have to control it?” asked Fisher. “Can’t you just program the course in, if you’re going to blow it up anyway?”

“You could, I think,” he said.

“Who would know?”

“I can find somebody at NADT for you.”

“What’s his number?”

“I’ll have him call you. Won’t be until Monday.”

“Sooner the better.”

“Monday.”

Fisher prodded a cigarette from his pack. He was out of matches and his lighter had no more fluid. He started rifling Macklin’s drawers, but all he found were a few old
Playboy
s.

Left by the drug dealers, no doubt.

“What about a sarin bomb?” asked Fisher.

“Sarin? The nerve gas?”

“Yeah. Could you put that on a UAV?”

“Sure, but there’d be no point,” Howe told him.

“Why not?”

“Has to be used in a closed area if it’s going to be effective.”

While that wasn’t precisely true, it would be much more effective if that was the case. And besides, the canisters they’d found on Staten Island were rigged for high pressure—the experts thought they would attach to a sophisticated dispersion system—but not shaped into bombs.

“Tell you what, Colonel: See if you can hunt down that expert for me before the weekend. If you can, call me. If you can’t, no big de—”

“I can’t,” said Howe before Fisher could finish.

“No big deal unless I call back and say it
is
a big deal.”

Howe hesitated. Fisher smiled at the face he’d be making. “All right.”

“You’re a good man, Colonel. Even if you don’t smoke,” said Fisher, hanging up.

Clarissa Moore, the CIA officer heading the special study group, was waiting for Tyler when he and the others got back to South Korea. Tyler shuffled his feet across the macadam toward her Hummer, his legs so tired they felt as if there were lead weights strapped to his thighs.

“Hey,” he said, climbing into the truck.

“Hey yourself,” said Moore. “Good job up there. I heard about the UAV.”

“Saved a couple of lives in that helicopter,” said Somers, sliding in behind him.

Tyler leaned back against the seat, half-listening as Somers told the story. He recognized bits of the account, but it seemed foreign, as if he hadn’t been there but had only heard the story before.

Moore twisted around to look at him. “You okay?”

“I just need a little sleep,” he said.

“That’s it?”

No, thought Tyler.
I need to escape. I need……Angel’s wings.

“Yeah, I’m beat tired,” he said, forcing as much enthusiasm into his voice as he could, trying to make it sound as if he were laughing at himself.

Blitz squeezed his eyes together, trying to get them to focus. He was used to operating on very little rest, but even for him the past few days had been a real drain. He had worked over the entire weekend, with maybe a total of four hours’ sleep; it was now Monday morning and he was due to leave in an hour to fly up to New York City with the President. The latest draft of the President’s UN speech sat on his desk; Blitz hadn’t even had a chance to look at it.

Mozelle came in with a fresh cup of coffee. Blitz blinked at the coffee, then reached for it.

“Colonel Howe is outside, with one of his technical people from NADT. He says he has information about the Korean UAV.”

Blitz looked at his watch.

“Send him in. But buzz me in ten minutes if they’re not out.”

“I was going to give you five.”

Blitz took a sip of the coffee and rose, willing his body into alertness.

“Colonel, congratulations,” he said as Howe entered. “I understand you and Dick Nelson reached an agreement last Thursday. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to get to you since then, it’s been a zoo here. Has the NADT board voted yet?”

“They gave Mr. Nelson the go-ahead before he spoke to me,” said Howe.

“Congratulations.” Blitz came out from around the desk and shook Howe’s hand.

“That’s not why I’m here.”

Howe introduced Dalton; Blitz had undoubtedly met the scientist before but couldn’t quite place him. He listened for about thirty seconds as Howe went over the UAV’s capabilities, hypothesizing that it could be used to launch an E-bomb. While there weren’t any “hard connections”—he meant real evidence—the juxtaposition of the two technologies represented a real threat.

“Well, certainly,” said Blitz.

“So what are we going to do?” asked Howe.

“First thing, alert the task force investigating the E-bomb,” said Blitz.

“The FBI agent is on that task force,” said Howe. “They’re on it.”

“Good.”

“These UAVs would be very difficult to find by conventional radar systems,” explained Dalton. “We have a solution: Our integrated radar and sensor viewer could be tuned to pick them up.”

“I’m not sure I’m following,” said Blitz.

“We want to make the system available,” said Howe. “We have two.”

“We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” said Blitz. “They didn’t find power plants with those UAVs—or control systems.”

“There are a dozen engines that could be used,” said Dalton. “And the flight could be preprogrammed in.”

“Contracts with NADT have to go through a certain procedure,” said Blitz, pained that he had to explain this to Howe.

“This isn’t about contracts or money,” said Howe. “These units—we’ll give them to the government free. We’re concerned about the threat.”

Mozelle opened the door.

“I’ll tell you what, Colonel: Get with Teri Packard to discuss it,” Blitz said. Packard was an NSC aide who handled terrorism. “She’ll be in touch with the working group. She can talk to the military people. This way, if we need that capability, we’ll have it.”

“The Pentagon is on line two,” said Mozelle, pointing.

“I’m sorry,” said Blitz. “Things are hectic this morning because we’re flying up to New York with the President to address the UN. I’m afraid I have to go.”

Howe knew a blow-off when he experienced one. Still, he followed through dutifully, going over and briefing Packard on the UAV’s potential.

“DIA is pretty sure the E-bomb was just a hoax,” said Packard. “They’re pulling people back from the task force. So is Homeland Security. FBI has only one person still assigned, and his boss wants him back as well.”

“These things are a threat,” said Howe. “They could be shipped into the country in pieces, assembled, then flown off any local airstrip—even a deserted highway in the middle of the night.”

“Granted. But there’s no evidence that they’re here.”

Howe folded his arms.

“But we can get an alert out and have you tied into the review of the UAV’s capabilities,” added Packard, trying to seem conciliatory. “It would be good to have your expertise involved.”

“Great,” said Howe, getting up.

Fisher spent Saturday and Sunday chasing leads from the credit card accounts. The closest he came to anything interesting was a farm run by former hippies in far northern New Jersey; the cows looked as though they were being fed hashish in the barn. Unsure whether that would be a matter for the DEA or the Future Farmers of America, he decided to look the other way.

The visit to Faud’s apartment and the subsequent adventure with the hand grenade had prevented Fisher from following up on Harry Spageas, the man who worked at the florist near Faud’s apartment. With Macklin and the NYPD continuing their interview of the neighbors—and with nothing definitive yet from the crime people checking out the bomb—Fisher headed over to Steve’s Florist on Monday morning to see the store owner and get Spageas’s address. The fact that the owner’s first name was Rose raised certain questions about predestination and parental premonition, but Fisher never got to raise them, for as he walked through the front door he found the proprietor being questioned by a uniformed NYPD officer. Rose had filed a complaint because both of her delivery vans had been stolen the night before.

“One is bad enough,” Rose complained. “But both? It shuts me down.”

Rose was the sort of woman who had begun tinting her black hair blond thirty years before and still did it now that the roots were coming in gray. She had a naturally indignant chin, and though she came up to about Fisher’s chest, she had shoulders a linebacker would spend thousands on supplements to get.

Fisher let the officer continue the interview. Rose thought that the vans must have been stolen by a competitor and gave the men a half-dozen leads.

“I didn’t realize the flower business was so cutthroat,” said Fisher when the cop was done.

“You’d be surprised,” said Rose.

“So they were here last night and they’re missing this morning,” said Fisher. “You’re sure they were here last night?”

“Mira said so, yes. She’s the manager.”

“I met her. You have an employee named Harry Spageas, right?”

“A damn good question,” said Rose. “He didn’t show up Friday.”

“Where does Harry live?” asked Fisher.

Harry
Spaneas
—not
Spageas,
but Greek enough—lived four blocks away from the florist shop on the bottom floor of a three-story row house across from the entrance ramp to the Triborough Bridge.

He didn’t answer his door, or his phone, which Fisher tried from his cell phone. Fisher leaned on the other bells, hoping they would bring some little old busybody out who would know exactly where Harry was. But no one appeared.

“Let’s go look in the windows,” Fisher told the patrolman. “Guy lives on the ground floor, right?”

The ground floor was actually about six feet above street level, and Fisher found it necessary to borrow a garbage can to look through the windows.

“I don’t know about this, if it’s kosher,” said the patrolman. “I better check with my sergeant.”

“Tell him there’s a guy lying on the floor in the hallway that looks a lot like the subject,” said Fisher, pressing his face against the glass. “Tell him there’s a pool of blood around his head.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I only wish I was,” said Fisher, jumping down from the garbage can.

Harry Spaneas had been killed either by a pair of .22-caliber bullets to the face or a similar bullet fired point-blank into his skull from behind. Given that he was lying facedown when they found him, Fisher figured that the bullet in the back of the head had been for insurance or good luck, but he’d leave it to the medical examiner to make the final call.

“Does this connect to Faud or not?” asked Macklin when Fisher called him from Spaneas’s kitchen to tell him what he’d found.

“I don’t know,” said Fisher. “NYPD’s going through the apartment now.”

“How cold was he?”

“Yesterday’s coffee cold,” said Fisher. “But not much of an odor. I’m figuring he was killed sometime yesterday, before the florist trucks disappeared. But maybe not.”

“So they stole the trucks?”

“Could be.”

“Come on, Andy. Of course they stole the trucks, right?”

“Michael, if you already know the answer, don’t ask the question.”

“I don’t. I’m asking. You’re connecting the murder with the trucks?”

“Why not?”

“Well, lack of evidence, for one.”

“He had a spare set of keys, which are not around anywhere,” said Fisher.

Macklin chewed on it for a second, processing the information slowly. “Well, let’s get some bulletins out on them,” he said finally.

“NYPD already has,” said Fisher. “You find anything from the neighbors of that apartment?”

“Nothing.”

Fisher pushed back in the chair. He’d already checked Spaneas’s name against the database of possible terrorists and come up blank, but that wasn’t definitive proof of anything. He wondered if it was possible that Spaneas had let Faud stay with him. There was no evidence that he had: A single coffee cup sat on the washboard, along with one knife and fork and plate. But anyone who took the time to think about what they were doing could set that up to make it look as if only one person, Spaneas, had been there.

E-bombs, night goggles, and nail bombs. Hired killers. Flower trucks.

Kind of a jumble, actually. One half of the operation was very sophisticated; the other half, not so much.

Which argued that he was looking at two different operations.

“Hey, Fisher, are you there or what?” said Macklin.

“I’m here,” he told Macklin. “Is the Washington Heights apartment still sealed?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you get somebody to let me in?”

“Why?”

“I’m running out of straws,” said Fisher.