nothing. He hid among the pallets and began reassembling his phone. With his hands shaking, he replaced the battery and tried to power up.
The phone flickered to life.
Someone was approaching his area.
He shoved the phone into his pocket and moved along the pallets navigating around rotting lumber, drums of trash, some leaking with fluid, eroding concrete columns and vines of wiring flowing from the great ceiling with its aging, broken windows.
As Jeff made his way through the labyrinth of chaos, his ability to hear the voices improved. Men were speaking English and something Slavic, he guessed. Amid the double- and triple-deck rows of neglected and rusted junk, he glimpsed flashes of movement near tables with electronic equipment, yet he was not sure what he saw.
It was difficult to get closer without risking being discovered.
He kept moving along a stretch of tarpaulins draped over vehicles; a long row of them pointed to an interior driveway clear to a ramp and secured garage door.
It looked makeshift.
Jeff moved along the passage quickly.
“Here!”
Jeff flinched, then froze.
The voice on the other side of the paper-thin wall startled him. He stopped and sat with his back to the wall and tried to control his breathing.
“Put the flag here, now!”
Jeff felt the thud of a hammer driving small nails, saw the nails puncture the wall.
Table and chair legs scraped on the floor.
“The camera’s set up, we’re ready.”
Feet shuffled. Jeff noticed the wall did not touch the floor. There was a four-inch gap. He swallowed and lay flat on the floor and saw movement, boots, but nothing to indicate Sarah and Cole.
“I want to do one rehearsal read first.”
Tables and chair legs scraped again.
“Ready?”
“Yes. In five-four-three-two-go.”
A throat cleared, paper rustled.
“‘Greetings from God’s slave to the United Nations. You did not start this tragic war but if you are people with courage, determination and humanity, you will acknowledge our action today as the final call to end it….’ No, stop. I want to change something before we start again.”
Jeff’s heart stood still.
Realizing what was unfolding, he had to do something fast.
He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, knowing that he was exhausted, not thinking clearly. He couldn’t leave until he found Sarah and Cole.
He grabbed his phone and in several quick texts to Cordelli, Jeff alerted him that he couldn’t talk. He’d found the killers in a factory in Purgatory Point in the Bronx. It was extremely urgent that Cordelli give him a number by which he could relay live critical one-way information.
Jeff’s last text ended with:
It’s life and death. Time is running out!
58
“He’s in a warehouse in Purgatory Point,” Cordelli told Brewer.
Brewer was driving.
“That’s five miles from here, we’ll take Major Deegan.” Brewer checked his mirrors, then rolled his unmarked Crown Victoria west out of Tremont, a section of the Bronx once known as a neighborhood of lost causes.
Brewer and Cordelli had come to Tremont to follow Brewer’s lead that a foreign crew was making a film without permits in the Bronx. Brewer’s source, the film location manager, was able to narrow his information to a factory in Tremont but the detectives had found nothing, even after a call to the Forty-sixth Precinct for help. Nothing had surfaced.
Their frustration underscored Brewer’s simmering resentment.
As he knifed through traffic on the expressway, he could not stop considering it punishment that he had been ordered to partner with Cordelli for the rest of this investigation.
Klaver had been assigned to work with Ortiz to help teams completing the canvass of restaurants and various outlets based on Jeff’s recalled details from the van.
Nothing had come out of that aspect of the investigation, either.
Until now, with Jeff’s call, no major breaks had surfaced for anyone, not the Joint Terrorism Task Force, NYPD, Homeland, FBI, Secret Service and the thirty agencies that were going full tilt on the case.
With a threat looming, the fear of being powerless to stop it intensified.
Brewer had to get his anger off of his chest.
“I don’t understand how you could just lose Griffin,” he said. “The last time that happened he made contact with the suspects.”
“The FBI had him. Nobody ‘lost’ him, Larry. He was never in custody.”
“Did they triangulate his phone?”
“They had him leaving Battery Park, then northbound near the Queensborough Bridge. Then they lost his roaming signal.”
“I would have never let him out of my sight.”
“No one can hold a candle to your police work, Larry. Look, we’ve got him again so why don’t you push this ‘my way’ crap aside so we can take Griffin’s lead and work this thing through.”
Brewer swallowed the remnants of his bitterness.
“Call the Fortieth,” Brewer said. “Request some help to meet us at this Vaketa Kitchen, or whatever it’s called, so we can find the warehouse. Better get ESU on standby.”
Cordelli was staring at his phone. Something had come in.
“It’s a text from Griffin,” Cordelli said. “Give me your phone, I’ve got to make a call.”
“What’s he saying?” Brewer passed Cordelli his cell phone and, while reading Jeff’s message, Cordelli called the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center. His call was answered on the second ring.
“This is Detective Cordelli with an urgent request. Is this Renee?”
“That’s right, Renee Abbott, Detective. How can I help?”
“You’re going to get a call from Jeff Griffin. He will leave his phone on for a one-way transmission of critical information, originating from the suspects. Do not respond. Mute your line and patch it through to the task force for processing. Alert them now. Are you ready for Griffin’s number?”
“Ten-four.”
