“I got Johnny ‘No’, as next of kin, to approve the order. He and I agreed it’s better not to put his mom through this.”
“Do you think Peter gave his jacket to someone or do you think it was lifted?”
“It could have gone down like this: the Surete has seen neither hide nor hair of a grifter that operated in the clubs in that part of St. Germain for the past two weeks. Word is he crossed a family member of a very connected Frenchman who wanted him hurt bad for ripping off the man’s nephew. It’s possible Peter had his jacket off in the club, maybe behind a chair, and this guy sees one of the men the uncle sent to break his legs so he quick changes his appearance by grabbing Pete’s jacket, then heads upstairs, but the henchmen catch on and get him on the stairway. They break his legs and stab him for good measure. The creep doesn’t die fast, manages to make it to the street, but goes cold in the gutter and some poor schmuck on his way to make baguettes before dawn runs over his pumpkin. Splat! No identity other than Pete’s papers in the ‘borrowed’ coat.”
“The FBI teach you to talk like that?”
“No, Mr. Garafolo in gym.”
“So everyone just accepts that he’s Peter because he’s got my card and that makes this a case the locals want no part of.”
“So they don’t do the basics and we just accept the body.”
“And poor Anna Remo cries because we tell her she lost her son.”
“Yep.”
“What a way to run a railroad.”
Riding along in the passenger seat of Jamal’s truck, Bridge peered into his satchel. The L.E.D. meter of the radiometer, the latest generation of Geiger counter, was kicking above normal. That almost certainly meant this could have been the truck. Bridge decided to take the risk.
“What kind of loads do you usually work?”
“Used to do a lot of furniture — desks, tables, chairs. Lately, a lot of electronics. I have televisions back there now.”
“Ever carry any dangerous stuff?”
“Like what?”
“Radioactive material.”
“Why would you ask me that?”
Bridge took the Berretta out of his bag and pointed it at Jamal.
“You jackal; are you going to rob me?”
“Pull over. And say nothing.”
“You are a dog, you bastard.”
“I said shut up and pull over.”
Jamal acceded to the gun. He looked at the picture, taped to the dashboard, of his wife and four children.
“Okay, shut it off, hand me the keys, and get out on my side,” Bridge said as he opened the door on his side and back stepped down off the cab. He had his gun trained on Jamal. As Jamal slid across from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat, he looked at the family photo one last time, then down onto the ground. Bridge tossed the keys back to him, “Now open up the back.”
Jamal opened the lock, then pushed the big door up.
Bridge took out the radiometer. With the gun in one hand, he held the device inside the cargo area of the truck. It showed a very high reading.
“I hope you’ve got health insurance my friend. Your truck is hot. Radioactivity. It makes cancer.”
“No, you are wrong! This is a trick.”
“A trick, is it?” He then took a knife and slit the front of a TV box. He pulled down the cardboard and, in the dark of the night, the screen glowed from the residual radiation. “These sets are glowing like your insides must be. The headaches and nausea you are having are from the radiation poisoning.” Bridge was guessing there, but Jamal suddenly placed his hand on his stomach and stood speechless.
“Jamal, I am not here to rob you. But whoever you worked for has robbed you of your health. Let me help you. All you have to do is tell me who hired you.”
“I will be killed.”
“You are dying now, my friend.”
Ross pulled up behind the truck and came over to Bridge. “Wow, the TV is glowing. That must mean one of the cases was leaking even before the operation.” Ross then turned and spoke in Arabic to the driver. “You have been handed a death sentence along with the payment for that shipment.”
It didn’t take long before Jamal told them the entire story. They then escorted the driver to Desert Tango 1 and made sure he got radiation treatment. His truck and the cargo were decontaminated and searched for any other forensic clues. Bridgestone and Ross then left to follow the new trail.
Joey Palumbo was getting more and more pissed off. His initial information concerning the death of Professor Ensiling was starting to become more and more suspect as he personally dug deeper into the case. Being 7,000 miles away didn’t help, but through Bill’s SCIAD net, he was able to get high quality video and stills that allowed him to do his own investigation. The big moment came when he received a street camera’s image taken just seconds before the kill-shot that ended Sonia Hensen’s life. In it, the man standing just beyond the woman on the Denmark street was indeed Professor Ensiling. Although his face was hidden, there was corroborating evidence from his hotel’s security camera that caught the professor leaving that morning in a blue coat with one sleeve button missing. Next to the ill-fated woman was the sleeve of a blue coat with a button missing. It was a dead match. It didn’t solve anything; it could just mean that the professor was there at that time or lent his coat to someone. Circumstantially, though, in the intervening weeks, no crazed lover of this woman, disgruntled employee, or random nut with a gun surfaced to discredit Peter’s claim that the professor, not Sonia Hansen, was the true target. Furthermore, there was nothing in Hansen’s background that suggested anyone would want her killed. The bullet was from a standard rifle, the likes of which were plastered all across Europe. As interesting as this was, with the loose nuke floating around out there somewhere, Joe didn’t have much time to devote to this, so he made a call to his buddy at Interpol. Ten minutes later, Bill walked into the room, and threw down a worn, yellowed, and out of print, hard-covered copy of
“What’s this?”
“I forgot a whole bunch of stuff, which I am going to brain dump on you right now. I had Horace check into this book when Peter first came to me with this cockamamie story.”
“And what did Horace find?”
Bill tapped the old book with his finger. “He ferreted out this book in a used book store. He also found that the author was still alive and that the formulas inside were, as best as he could deduce from the techs he spoke with, bullshit.”
“But…?”
“But Peter’s original galley, which his brother gave me at his house in the Bronx, is 323 pages long. This book is…” he flipped the dust jacketless book to the end page “303 pages long. I spot-checked some of the pages. Much of the text is the same, but all the formulas in Peter’s galley are vastly different from the ones that wound up in this version of the book printed for public consumption. Later today, my SCIAD group is meeting to give their opinions.”
“So all that could mean is that Peter’s formulas are a different, or an older, kind of the same bullshit!”
“Not likely. My guys would have smelled it and we wouldn’t be meeting.”
“Okay, that’s mildly curious, intellectually. But I’m a cop. What else you got, boy?”
“Peter said the publishing company in Hong Kong was burnt to the ground along with all the books and plates and manuscripts and he had the only surviving copy of the book. Check it. Also, he said he was on a secret committee for the U.N. on UFOs; he called it UNCOMUFO. I called the Ambassador, Susan Clark, but she can’t find any record of it. Yet…”
“Yet…” Joey repeated.
Bill handed Joe a letter in a plastic sleeve. “Yet in Peter’s shit was this letter signed by Secretary General U.
