“Sounds belligerent and agitating to me,” he said.
Megan smiled thinly, shrugged, leaned forward across her desk.
“Bow-wow,” she said.
Which Nimec guessed was as good a way as any to call their meeting to an end.
Industrial parks with billowing smokestacks filled Zaheer’s view out the windshield as he turned his leased Mercury sedan off the New Jersey Turnpike just west of Trenton, checked the route directions he’d generated with a free Internet-based mapping service, and went through a quick series of turns and traffic signals. The closeup street map guided him to his desired junction in minutes.
Zaheer drove past long bands of strip malls and fast-food restaurants interspersed with vacant weeded lots, the dead stalks piercing scales of dirty ice and snow to shiver stiffly in the wind. He soon found himself among the sprawling waterfront factories he’d spotted from the highway and read the corporate names above their entrances. The one penned onto his map was over to his left, a fenced-in employee parking area beside the plant’s main building. There were between fifteen and twenty vehicles slotted inside.
Going very slowly, noting the security cameras high up on either side of its otherwise unguarded gate, Zaheer passed the factory and turned up a street that ran back along the width of its parking area. His map coordinates showed that he was headed north, cruising past the east side of the plant. Perhaps halfway down the street a chain-link divider crossed the parking area and restricted admittance to another outdoor site behind it. The perimeter fence had been hung with metal CHEMICAL HAZARD and NO TRESPASSING signs as it stretched on back.
Here Zaheer’s attention was caught by a large number of cylindrical storage tanks. Thirty to forty feet tall, they rose in close groupings from level concrete support platforms, six tanks to a cluster, frameworks of galvanized-steel ladders and handholds climbing up their dull gray sides. He could see tangles of curved, narrow pipelines snaking between the rail-encircled domes of each tank cluster, with a wider pipe leading along the ground from the platform bottom to the factory’s rear wall.
Zaheer slid his car down the block toward a four-way intersection.
With few other vehicles on the road, Zaheer stopped at a red light in the crossing and glanced around. He could see an abandoned gas station directly behind the yard containing the storage tanks, bounded off from it by a planted copse of evergreen trees. The trees looked withered and neglected, their gnarled roots buried in a deep carpet of shed pine needles. Around the intersection’s three opposing corners were the type of satellite businesses that would have deliberately sprung up near the station before it shut down, their owners hoping to attract spillover customers. There was a small Mc-Donald’s on the far side of the exchange. Also across the street, but running off down the sidewalk from the northwest corner, were a coin-operated car wash, an automotive supply shop, and a nameless bar with dark, sooty windows. On Zaheer’s immediate right a U-Haul rental lot filled with trucks and trailers of various sizes occupied the intersection’s southwest corner.
Its advantageous location prompted him to smile with cool satisfaction.
Zaheer turned into the defunct gas station before the light could change, then made a circular inspection of the property. He glided around the island where its uprooted pumps must once have stood, rolled past its empty cashier’s booth and peered into the vacant shell of its refreshment shop as he drove by the front window. Convinced the premises were deserted, he pulled his Mercury up to the screen of evergreens behind the shop, got out, and took a small digital camera from his coat pocket.
Zaheer stood near the trunk of the car and took a quick series of photos of the intersection’s four corners, paying special attention to the U-Haul rental lot. Then he turned toward the dying boundary trees, paused for a cautious glance over each shoulder, and stepped forward under their black, gangly boughs.
Hidden within the copse of pines, Zaheer could see the enormous storage tanks about a hundred and fifty feet ahead of him. Again his camera clicked. There was no fence barring access to the factory grounds from this approach. It would have been premature to assume the site was clear of security, he thought — a guard, or guards, might very well patrol it during certain hours. Almost beyond a doubt there would be an overnight watch in place. Men, perhaps dogs. But if anyone was on shift right now, Zaheer hadn’t noticed. Were it his desire, he could have easily walked right over to the tanks before it was possible to stop him… and when the time came to act, he had full faith there would be no need to get that close.
Zaheer stood there in the trees a while longer, observing the site and taking more than a dozen additional snapshots of the tanks for later reference. Then he returned the camera to his coat pocket and hastened back to the car.
Hasul Benazir would be pleased with the intelligence he had gathered today; all was falling well and neatly into place.
Nimec went down to Rollie Thibodeau’s office and found the door partially open. He knocked and walked through as Thibodeau looked up from his desk.
“Come right on in, why don’tcha?” Thibodeau said.
Nimec pushed the door shut behind him.
“This room been swept recently?” he asked.
Thibodeau met his gaze. He held a can of Diet Coke in his hand.
“Walls are clean, if that’s what you askin’,” he said.
Nimec approached him and sat. The room was windowless, as Thibodeau preferred. Stacks of paperwork hid the desktop. An old-fashioned upright balance scale stood in one corner, flaking pink paint. Thibodeau had once told him it was a memento of some kind from Louisiana.
“We have to talk,” Nimec said.
“Kinda got that sense.”
“Everything we say stays right here. Between us.”
Thibodeau nodded.
“I need you to tell me about Ricci,” Nimec said.
“You mind I use four-letter words?”
Nimec didn’t smile. He watched Thibodeau sip his cola, and then nod toward the water cooler.
“Be more sugar-free in the fridge compartment, you want some,” he said.
“No thanks, hate the stuff.”
Thibodeau patted his reduced stomach.
“Me, too,” he said. “But it works.”
Nimec watched him closely.
“I want to know what happened in Big Sur,” he said. “When Ricci got the boss’s daughter out of that cabin where she was held hostage.”
Thibodeau was silent. Nimec kept watching his face.
“Filed my report four months ago,” Thibodeau said.
“And I read it,” Nimec said. “Back when it was written, and a bunch of times since.”
“Ain’t no detail was left out.”
“No?”
“No.”
Nimec sat there studying his features with sharp interest.
“How about what you personally took from those details?” he said. “Nothing omitted there?”
“Like?”
“Suspicions,” Nimec said. “Possible conclusions.”
Thibodeau looked at him.
“I wrote down what I saw,” he said. “What I knew.”
“Sum it up for me again,” Nimec said.
“Thought you just said you been over the report.”
“Once more, Rollie.”
Thibodeau lifted the soda can to his lips, took a long swallow, and shrugged.
