“Checking us out? Who do you think you are?”
“A guy with a cell phone.”
“Meaning?”
“You think people don’t talk, because we’re not in the service now? You think I don’t know six more Tungsten guys got canned, the same as me? And five are dead?”
“Let me see the phone,” Weston said.
Arca took a small silver Motorola from his coverall pocket and put it on the table. Weston picked it up and prodded a couple of buttons.
“It’s not the phone that called Raab,” he said. “But your wife called you. Right after we spoke to her.”
Arca didn’t reply.
“She told you we were coming. That’s why you tried to run. Doesn’t make you look good, Julio.”
“Five guys are dead,” Arca said. “My wife gets a call out of nowhere. You tell her you’re the feds. How does she know?”
“So you set this up with your boss? You’re getting paranoid.”
“He established a viable cover,” I said. “Headed for a populated area. Created a diversion. Observed our reactions. Pretty smart, I’d say.”
“We’ll come back to that,” Lavine said. “But right now, tell me why you got fired from Tungsten.”
“Don’t know,” Arca said.
“You got fired from a job paying you a couple of hundred grand a year, and you didn’t ask why?”
“Oh, yeah, we asked. Fed us some ‘client complaint’ bullshit.”
“Why did the client complain? What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“What about your buddies?”
“Nothing.”
“So they fired you for no reason. How’d that make you feel?”
“Great.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. They gave me fifty-five grand. The chance to retrain. Now I got money in the bank. I don’t have to go overseas to earn a living. And people don’t try to kill me every day.”
“What did you do at the hospital?” I said.
“In Iraq? Premises team.”
“There was more than one team?” Lavine said.
“Right. There were three teams. Premises-that was us. Supplies-they guarded the medicine trucks coming in. And close protection-they went with the doctors when they were off-site.”
“What about the team that just got fired?” I said.
“Premises team, the way I heard.”
“These overseas guys, they have weird traditions,” I said. “They can be very sensitive. Easy to offend. Are you sure…”
“I know about their traditions. We get training before we go over there. I’d been three times, already. And we did nothing wrong. None of us.”
“Then did you see anything strange? Out of place? Maybe something that didn’t hit you till later?”
“No. Nothing like that. It was a hospital. Sick people, funny smell. It was boring. Why are you asking me these things? When are you going to ask me about James Mansell?”
“Why ask about him?”
“Because he killed those other guys.”
“He did? Why? How do you know?”
“Look. Six people get payouts. They go freeriding together. Nothing unusual about that. Lots of guys do after their final tour. But then five of them don’t come back. You do the math. And do it quick. I’m the only ex-Tungsten guy left around here. Don’t want him coming back for my slice of pie.”
Lavine kept himself under control until Arca had disappeared through the trees. Then he slammed his palm down on the table so hard it sent a wave of leftover coffee slopping into his saucer. People glanced at us from other tables. Tanya fidgeted, uncomfortable with the attention, and began to chew her lower lip. Weston stayed still, but I saw his knuckles whitening around the arms of his chair.
“What now?” he said.
Tanya shrugged.
“Anyone got a quarter?” Lavine said.
“Feel a big tip coming on?” I said.
“I’m thinking about James Mansell,” he said. “Heads, he’s in mortal danger. Tails, he’s a mass murderer.”
“But which?” Tanya said. “Or maybe both?”
“Doesn’t matter right now,” Weston said. “Either way, we’ve got to find him.”
“Agreed,” Tanya said. “But how? Arca was useless as a lead. Tungsten was a dead end. And now we’re looking for one guy who could be anywhere in the whole of the United States.”
“Or Mexico,” Weston said.
“Don’t forget Canada,” Lavine said.
“Anywhere in the world, then,” Tanya said. “And that’s some haystack for the four of us to comb through.”
TWENTY-FOUR
When I heard that expression as a kid I always thought it was stupid. How could a needle possibly end up in a haystack? And why would anyone care?
When I got a little older I thought, So a needle’s in there, and we need it back. No problem. Get some matches. Hay burns. Needles don’t.
Later still I thought, Why waste time on a fire? Use a magnet. Make the needle come to you.
Eventually, when I thought about it a little more, I put it all together. It’s not about whether you need matches or a magnet, at all. It’s about knowing where to get the right tools for the job.
Tanya’s phone rang as we were trudging back through the aimless clusters of people still frittering their time away in the fading afternoon sunshine. It was Lucinda, her assistant at the consulate. They’d finished crunching Tungsten’s phone records ahead of schedule and wanted to talk her through the results. Tanya listened intently. A satisfied smile spread across her face. And finally she said if they could knock out five copies in the time it would take us to collect Weston’s car and get over to Third Avenue, she’d stop by and collect them herself.
The detour via the consulate didn’t add much journey time. The traffic was light for a Wednesday, and Weston left the engine running while Tanya ducked inside to pick up the stack of fat manila envelopes. She got back in the car without a word, and no one broke the silence until we were away from the curb and moving again.
“I better call the boss,” Lavine said, taking out his cell phone. “Tell him we’re coming in.”
The call lasted the rest of the way back to the FBI garage.
“Varley’s not here,” he said, after Weston had finished tucking the car neatly into its bay. “He’s gone to sort out some other crisis. So there’s no point going all the way upstairs. May as well just head for the twenty- third.”
Tanya wouldn’t part with the reports until Lavine had collected the chair from his desk and wheeled it into the glass booth with the others.
“You can skip section one,” Tanya said, when everyone had finally opened their plastic binders. “That covers landlines. People have seen too many cop shows to use a regular phone for anything suspicious. They always use their cell phones for that. Psychologically it seems like no wires, no records. The fools.”
“Section two’s just a list of numbers,” Weston said.
“Correct. We pulled out the numbers of all Tungsten’s own handsets. Then we looked at the itemized records
