the instructors passed a piece of paper around to each of us. These detailed everything we’d given away about ourselves. The lists were long. At first no one could understand, because nothing on the sheets corresponded with the recordings of the meetings. Then the real point became clear. The information they’d gathered about us hadn’t been spoken. It had come from our coats, which they’d politely hung up. Our jackets. Briefcases. Anything that had been out of our sight or opened or left in plain view.
The lesson was, information can come from everything people show you.
Whether they mean to, or not.
Tungsten Security had two sets of premises. Their operational base wasn’t in the most promising part of New York. It was built on a scruffy, unfashionable patch of land in Queens that had been clawed back from the marshes when Kennedy Airport was first developed in the forties, but the isolated compound was in no way run-down or neglected. And it hadn’t been starved of money. In fact, the people who’d fitted the place out had burned through an even bigger pile of cash than the decorators at the company’s official headquarters I’d seen on Fifth Avenue. They just hadn’t been as concerned with esthetics.
The line of five drab, olive-green warehouses sat uninvitingly alone at the far end of a long, straight service road. It was easy to find. There were no other structures within five hundred yards in any direction. The reinforced mesh fence separating the buildings from the surrounding land was sixteen feet high, with four gleaming strands of razor wire sloping toward us at the top. Another fence ran parallel to it, twenty yards inside the perimeter, identical except that the wire faced the other way. Nothing taller than a blade of grass grew in between, and posts set at regular intervals on the far side carried an array of floodlights, security cameras, infrared beacons, and motion sensors.
There was no mention of the company name. And no signs to welcome visitors.
The only obvious way in was through a pair of stout metal gates. They were wide enough for heavy trucks to use, so Weston’s Ford felt pretty small as he coasted up to them and stopped inside a hatched area marked on the road with yellow paint.
A small notice on the vertical bars said WAIT.
“What is this place?” Weston said.
“Did I miss something?” Lavine said. “Are we at Gitmo?”
The outer gate slid silently aside and Weston rolled forward until his window was level with an intercom mounted on a steel pillar. A second box was attached higher up, for truck drivers. Weston reached out with his left hand but before he could press any buttons the gate started to close behind us again. The gaps on both sides were blocked with the same mesh and razor wire as the main fences, leaving us completely caged in.
“See?” Lavine said. “A guy will come out, now, with orange jumpsuits for us to wear. You wait.”
“State your name and business,” a voice said through the intercom. It was male, and had an Australian accent.
“FBI,” Weston said. “Kelvin Taylor is expecting us.”
“Building one,” the voice said.
The buildings each had a four-foot-tall number stenciled in white paint above their main door. We emerged through the inner gate in front of building number three. Number one was at the far end, to our left, with a pair of old, battered Toyota Landcruisers and a shiny silver Prius parked outside.
“What do you think these places are for?” Tanya said.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Presumably building one will be their admin block, if that’s where they’re meeting us. And if this is where their people prepare for deployment, they’ll need a warehouse and an armory.”
“There,” Weston said, nodding at number two as we trundled past. “No windows.”
“See the roll-up doors on three?” Lavine said. “That’ll be their workshop. They’ll need to prep their vehicles for different climates.”
“And the others?” Tanya said.
“Didn’t get a good look,” I said. “Accommodations? Briefing rooms? More storage?”
“Who knows?” Weston said.
“Maybe the place is just a front,” Lavine said. “Could be what this whole thing’s about. Could all just be stuffed full of drugs and illegal immigrants.”
“Could be,” I said. “Let’s ask Mr. Taylor…”
The doors to building one swung open automatically, but as we followed Lavine inside I got the impression we’d be dealing with people who weren’t big on hospitality. The space we entered was more like a cell than a reception area. The gray paint on the floor was wearing thin, the walls were bare, unfinished cinderblocks, and the three fluorescent lights on the ceiling had no covers to diffuse their glare.
A plain metal table had been placed in the center. Its legs were bolted to the ground. A man was sitting behind it, keeping one eye on us and the other on an oversized flat-panel monitor. He was wearing shiny black paratrooper boots, sand-colored utility pants, and a matching short-sleeved shirt with fake epaulets. It had a logo on the left pocket-a bold, capital W with some kind of dog’s head superimposed on it-and a stenciled name label stuck to a Velcro patch on the right. It said SMITH. A cordless headset with a boom mike was hooked behind his left ear. When he finally stood up to greet us, you could see a Sig Sauer pistol in a holster on his right hip.
“Good morning, folks,” he said. It was the same voice we’d heard on the intercom. “Still is morning, just about. And Mr. Taylor is already on his way over. Just need to see some ID while we’re waiting…”
He was happy with Weston’s and Lavine’s, but raised his eyebrows when he saw the card Tanya had returned to me in the car along with my wallet and other papers.
“Royal Navy?” he said. “You’re a bit off the beaten track, aren’t you, mate?”
“Telling me,” I said. “Tried to go home this morning, but this lot couldn’t manage without me.”
He was still trying to decide whether I was joking when a door opened behind him and a slender, gray-haired man appeared. He was wearing an identical pseudouniform, but his was a little darker as if it hadn’t seen much outdoor action. The name badge said TAYLOR, which saved him the trouble of an introduction.
If Lesley’s hit man had been a squirrel, this guy was a mouse. It wasn’t that he was particularly small-five eight, five nine at the most-but there was something about the nervous energy in his wiry limbs and tight, pinched face that made him seem jumpy and unsettled. And the impression grew stronger as he guided us through the main office, darting between rows of steel desks like an animal in a laboratory maze. We had a struggle to keep up as he scuttled around the final few banks of metal filing cabinets and disappeared through the door to a meeting room.
The tables in the meeting room were also made of metal. There were four. Each was wide enough for two people. They were arranged in a diamond shape with only their inner corners touching, leaving a square gap in the center. The space had been used to display a Plexiglas sphere. It was two feet in diameter, and was sitting on a wheeled wooden frame like the kind that hold ancient globes in libraries and museums. A chunk of rock was suspended inside. It was a rough pyramid shape, with patches of pitted gray occasionally visible through a thick, uneven crust of white and yellow crystals.
“Interesting,” Tanya said. “It looks like a tiny mountain peak, covered in snow. Maybe the Eiger or somewhere like that.”
“It could have been, once,” Taylor said. “This piece is from Austria, not far from there.”
“What is it?”
“Wolframite. Iron-manganese tungstate. It’s a mineral.”
“Is it valuable?” Lavine said.
“Depends what you value,” Taylor said. “We use it as a symbol.”
“Of what?”
“Wolframite was the original source of tungsten.”
“As in your company name?”
“Exactly. Tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals. Did you know that? Nearly sixty-two hundred degrees. Seems appropriate, given what we do.”
“And convenient,” I said. “If your office ever burns down.”
“Well, let’s hope that never happens,” Taylor said, taking a seat on the far side of the rock. “Now, make yourselves at home. Let’s get down to business. How can I help you?”
“We’re interested in a team of contractors you recently let go,” Lavine said.
“Can you be any more specific?” Taylor said.
