“Then call Otto in.”
“He’s been here all night.”
“Okay, send him up.” McGarvey picked up the phone and hit the speed dial button for Fred Rudolph’s office over at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “Is everyone else in and up to speed?”
“Since eight,” Adkins said, heading for the door.
“Staff meeting in thirty minutes.”
“You got it, Mac.”
The call was answered on the first ring. “Fred Rudolph.” His voice sounded strained. He had graduated summa cum laude with a law degree from Fordham, and had worked for a couple of years with the army’s Staff Judge Advocate’s office as a special investigator. He’d done the same thing as a civilian for the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Justice until he’d signed on with the FBI about six years ago.
“Good morning, Fred. I read your 22:30 fax, anything new since then?”
“You just get in?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Rudolph said. Sometimes he wished he’d been a banker instead of a cop. “As soon as we got a positive on Yousef we woke up a federal judge and got a search warrant. My people are tossing his apartment right now. We should have something in the next couple of hours or so. But they had a head start, Mac. So unless they get stupid we might come up empty.”
The first twenty-four hours, and especially the first six hours of these kinds of investigations were the most crucial. After that they were just picking up the pieces, because if the shooters were professionals they would be long gone by then.
“What’s your best guess?”
“Probably Cuba. There were two flights to Havana direct out of Orlando that they could have taken. Scott Thompson’s people are looking over the passenger lists, and talking with the baggage handlers and ticket clerks, but both flights are already on the ground in Havana, and won’t turn around until morning. As soon as they get back he’ll talk to them unless your people can get to them down there.”
“We’ll work on it,” McGarvey promised. “What about the weapon?”
“Except for prints it was clean. No serial number, so it could have been purchased almost anywhere. Ballistics is still working on it.”
“How about the van?”
“We lifted some pretty good prints, including Yousef’s, but we’ve come up with nothing on the others yet. Same with hair samples. We’re running DNA identification tests now, but they won’t do us any good unless we can get an arrest out of this.” Rudolph did not sound optimistic. “What about your shop? Can you tell me what Trumble was up to that made him and his family a target?”
“I can’t give you the details, but it involved bin Laden. What can you tell me about Jersey City Trucking?”
“We thought there was a connection, but we ran that operation through a ringer and came up clean last week. There’s just nothing there tying it to any of bin Laden’s other suspected business interests. Not even remotely.” “I thought they had some kind of a financial arrangement with one of bin Laden’s banks.”
“For about two months, and that was over five years ago. It’s another dead end. Everything about the place stinks, we’ll probably close them down under the RICO Act eventually, but there are no terrorists there.”
“Except for Bari Yousef.”
“We’re going to toss the business again, but unless we find something tying Yousef directly to bin Laden through the company, it’ll be another dead end. We have to play by the rules even if they don’t,” he said angrily. “This guy could have been working on his own for some reason, or for somebody else close to bin Laden. It’s happened before.” Rudolph was silent for a moment. “You would know more about that than me.”
“Anything new from INS?” McGarvey asked, sidestep ping the comment. It was hard to focus while blaming himself.
“Nothing other than what I’ve already sent you. Yousef got by them, and so did the other three. It’s another angle we’re working on. We’ll try to find out if anyone else beside him is missing from the business.” Again Rudolph hesitated for a moment. “It would be helpful if we could come up with a motive. I mean, are you laying this on bin Laden’s doorstep?”
McGarvey looked up as Otto walked in. He waved his special operations officer to a chair. “I just don’t know, Fred. On the surface it looks like it, but there’s no reason for him to have ordered the hit. If anything it’s counterproductive for him. Crazy.”
“Yeah,” Rudolph agreed. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”
“Keep me up to date’ McGarvey said.
“It’s a two-way street, Mac. Sorry you had to lose one of your people that way. Especially his family.”
“There will be a payback,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection. He looked at Otto who was sitting cross legged on the chair. “You said lavender.”
“Hardly any impurities,” Rencke replied, almost dreamily. A number of years ago when he was trying to work out the mathematics and physics of a very complicated link between advanced bubble memory systems, he’d struck on what for him was a very simple, but sophisticated notion: how to explain color to a blind person. Using tensor calculus, the same mathematics that Einstein had used for his general theory of relativity, Rencke had come up with a set of equations that he’d tried out on a blind Indian mathematician, who’d made the observation afterward: “Oh, I see,” Reversing the process, Rencke developed a method by which he thought of colors to represent mathematical equations that described highly complex real world variables. Lavender was for very bad.
“Are you talking about the man that Trumble was worried about at his meeting with bin Laden?”
“I came up with a dozen candidates I was going to show him when he came back.” Otto shook his head in sadness. “But that’s not it, Mac. It’s the other thing. The bad, bad thing. Bin Laden didn’t have Alien killed. At least I don’t think so. But one of his lieutenants might have ordered it because bin Laden is probably crazy, and his people want to save their own gnarly hides, ya know.”
“Does he want to negotiate, or what?”
“Oh, he wants to talk to somebody, all right. But his troops, are passing purple peach pits ‘cause they don’t know what he wants to do. They’re playing with serious fire and they’re all wondering if they’re going to get their fingers burned big time.”
McGarvey felt a cold draft on his neck. “Do you have the proof?” Otto was almost always right, but he had to ask.
Rencke took a diskette out of the thick file he’d brought with him. “When it boots up hit any key.”
McGarvey started the disk, and immediately a complicated engineering diagram in 3-D came up on his screen and began to slowly rotate around its long axis. He stared at the device for a long time, his stomach sour, because he knew exactly what it was capable of doing to them.
“I matched the number Trumble gave us with the Russian device.”
Sometimes Rencke amazed even McGarvey. “How’d you come up with that?”
Otto grinned. “The FSB is running its own investigation, and I talked to some friends of mine in Amsterdam who hacked the system. That one was missing.”
“Why didn’t you get in yourself?”
“I wanted to keep it arm’s length this time. No telling what the fallout’s gonna be.”
McGarvey nodded at the obvious understatement. “Where’d it come from?”
“Right where we suspected all along. Yavan Depot.”
“Tajikistan,” McGarvey said. The former Soviet ground forces special storage depot was located about twenty-five miles southeast of the capital city Dushanbe. It had long been suspected, but never proved, that a small Russian maintenance crew, mostly officers, had been left behind to look after their equipment, for which the independent government received money and kept silent. But money, which was not a problem for bin Laden, was tight in Russia so loyalties had blurred.
“I’m going to need more than this,” McGarvey said.
Rencke laid the thick file on the desk. “I made hard copies. I got the names of the four Russian officers under investigation, their contacts, the how and when they got it out of the depot three months ago, the thirty million U.S. they were paid for it, and where it crossed the border at Nizhny Pyandzh into Afghanistan.” Otto
