moans of ecstasy were already loud and clear enough to get
Nimec and Noriko exchanged looks of pained commiseration. Jeff Grolin was one of the most skilled forensic A/V specialists in the country — Megan wouldn’t have snagged him for their organization if he wasn’t — but he was also a vexingly juvenile pain in the buttocks. Was social maladjustment something that people in his field acquired, a sort of professional hazard, Nimec wondered, or some intrinsic characteristic of those with a high degree of technical aptitude?
“Okay, guys and gal, hold onto your cookies,” Grolin said, fiddling with a dial. “It’s Nick Roma’s Big Adventure, alternately titled Badguy Lust. Scene one, take two.”
Their eyes turned toward the workstation’s twenty-one-inch monitor.
On the screen, a door opened into Roma’s office and the woman came in, then stepped toward the lens of the stationary surveillance camera. Her dark hair was pulled back, her lips were parted, and she moved with an apparent awareness of her body and the reaction it elicited from the man she was approaching.
The date/time stamp on the lower left-hand corner of the image read: “01.01.2000 1:00 A.M.”
Nimec studied the woman intently. Though the room’s fluorescents were dimmed, there was sufficient ambient light coming in from the windows to reveal her features without any sort of computer enhancements. In fact, a still image had already been extracted from the video footage and was being cross-indexed with Sword’s file of known and suspected international terrorists.
“You could have knocked,” Roma said through compact Audix speakers. At this point only the back of his head was visible.
“Yes. 1 could have.” Shutting the door.
“There’s a light switch on the wall…”
“Bounce it to where it’s been giving us trouble,” Barnhart said, watching.
“Sure,” Jeff said. His finger stabbed a button with the double-arrow fast-forward symbol on it. “Though I personally get a charge out of the suggestive dialogue during the buildup — cliched as it may be.”
The video zipped ahead.
Grolin hit Play again.
Now the woman was much closer to the desk, her coat partially unbuttoned, unmistakable desire in her expression.
“Why are you here?” Roma said, and then paused. His voice had become husky, dropping to a near whisper.
“Right. Like he’s really that clueless,” Grolin commented. “The guy’s choking on his own drool—”
“It’s still nothing but gobbledygook,” Barnhart said.
“That’s because I haven’t worked my electronic wizardry yet.” Grolin froze the image, then shifted his hands to a smaller console which consisted of more dials and pitch slides, as well as a dozen or so keys the size of the Tab button on a standard computer keyboard.
As his fingers clicked over the keys, a tool bar appeared across the top of the screen and the video image shrank into a window, with graphical level meters and editing controls appearing to its right.
“Now, let’s try it again, giving it a little mid-range gain, eliminating some audio dither.”
Grolin hit Rewind, Pause, then Play.
“Why are you here?” Roma said from the speakers. Paused.
Grolin quickly tweaked a dial, and then another, his eyes narrow behind the intentionally nerdish horn-rimmed glasses.
Roma said, “You know…
Grolin stopped the progress of the virtual image, ran it backward to the point just before Roma’s voice dropped off in volume, started it going forward again.
His fingers clattered over the buttons of his console. Graph lines and status bars rose and fell in the edit window.
“Why are you here?” Roma husked. “You know
“You hear that?” Barnhart jerked his head around toward Nimec, wincing in pain from the abrupt movement. “He’s talking about providing her with papers. Presumably travel documents.”
“I’ll bet,” Nimec said. “That son of a bitch facilitated the attack from beginning to end.”
“Speaking of which,” Grolin said, “one more run-through, and I’ll have every last word on this tape popping out at us like braille.”
Noriko’s fingertips rapped an impatient quintuplet against the back of Barnhart’s chair.
“Come on,” she said. Thinking:
Grolin rewound, paused, played, tinkered with his MIDI controls.
“Why are you here?” Nick Roma said to the woman unbuttoning in front of him. “You know Zachary won’t have your papers ready until tomorrow. And I don’t suppose you’ve just come to say good night.”
“By Jove, and fucking-A, I think we’ve got it,” Grolin said. “Who’s Zachary, by the way?”
Nimic was looking at Barnhart. “You think that’s a first or last name?”
Barnhart shook his head. “Could be either, but I’ll ask around. My guess is he’d be one of Roma’s forgers. Or somebody who works for one of his forgers. Roma’s steadiest, ugliest source of income is the flesh trade. Smuggling desperately poor women from Russia to America as prostitutes… essentially sex slaves… with fraudulent visas and identification. That’s also how the
“The bunch that did the job in Times Square would have wanted out of the country pronto,” Noriko said. “We find this Zachary, seems logical he’d be able to lead us to them.”
“Or steer us in their direction, anyway,” Barnhart said. “And that’s providing we can get him… or her, now that I think about it… to talk.”
“Leave the second part to me,” Nimec said, his eyes still on Barnhart. “How soon can you dig up the information we need?”
“Won’t take long, assuming we’re right about this person’s specialty and connection to Roma. I know G-men, detectives on the NYPD, even people in the Attorney General’s Office, who keep tabs on every player of importance in Roma’s outfit. And who’ll talk to me no questions asked.”
“Make sure that’s the way it is,” Nimec said. “I’ve been pulling strings for two days to see that the record of your ER treatment gets erased before it’s released to the police. I don’t want anybody tumbling to our investigation.”
Barnhart nodded, started to push himself up off the chair, but then sank back into it, obviously hurting.
“If one of you’d give me a hand, I’ll head upstairs to my office and start making some calls,” he said.
“And miss the climax to the flick?” Grolin said. “I plan on repeating it in its prurient entirety.”
Noriko looked at him with sharp irritation.
“Jeff, trust me,” she said. “You’ll have a much better time watching it alone.”
Roger Gordian sat alone, with his cell phone in his hand. With all the chaos at work, with all the emergencies he had to react to, plan for, juggle, and worry about, his home situation was threatening to overwhelm him.
He loved his wife.
His wife had left him.
It had been nearly three weeks, and she hadn’t come home, and she hadn’t called.
Sometimes he felt like marriage was a game in which women made the rules and the poor slobs who married them had to figure those rules out blindfolded.
He still didn’t understand what he’d done wrong.
The things he felt for the woman he married had never faltered from the moment he saw her. They’d changed, but only to become richer and deeper.
