Cure

41

March 27, 2010

Saturday, 1:00 p.m.

We’re ready,” Grover announced after he positioned the IV pole he’d assembled next to the bed. They were in the smaller of the two bedrooms in the Woodside row house. On the bed was a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood about six feet long and two feet wide with a two-foot arm board sticking off one side. A black bag containing an assortment of medication and syringes was on the night table, along with a fresh roll of silver duct tape.

“Time to bring in the guest,” Colt said. He and Grover were wearing latex gloves both for protection and also to avoid leaving any fingerprints around the house, which had been rented under an assumed name with cash up front. The CRT motto was: One could never be too safe.

Returning to the van downstairs, they unrolled Duane, who looked as terrified as they had assumed he would be.

“Come on,” Colt said, pulling the man up to a sitting position. “Let’s head inside to party.”

At first Duane tried to refuse getting out of the van, until Colt produced his gun from under his jacket. Duane immediately changed his mind about resisting, and climbed awkwardly out. With Grover leading and Colt following, they marched the tremulous man out of the oil-scented garage, up the stairs, and into the small bedroom. When Duane saw the board on the bed and the IV, he tried again to hold back.

“No more fighting,” Grover said, giving Duane a push toward the bed. “We’re going to do what we are going to do, whether you fight or not, unless you want to tell us what we need to know.”

Duane made an effort to speak.

“Are you trying to say you’re willing to talk with us?” Grover questioned. Grover looked into the man’s dark eyes as Duane nodded assent.

Grover looked at Colt questioningly. “Give it a try,” Colt said.

Grover reached out, and taking the end of the duct tape plastered across Duane’s mouth, gave it a sudden forceful yank, pulling out a handful of Duane’s whiskers in the process as well as the rag. Duane yelped and gritted his teeth.

“Who are you guys?” he said when he’d recovered.

“I’m afraid that’s not the issue,” Grover said, his English accent suddenly more apparent. “You have two seconds to be cooperative.”

“What does it mean to be cooperative?”

“It means telling us where the child is whom you and your accomplices kidnapped. Tell us where the child is or we’ll make you tell. It’s your call.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“What were you doing sitting in your car on One hundred and sixth Street?”

“I was watching a basketball game in the local park.”

Unhappy with the answer and the accompanying attitude, Grover unleashed a lightning karate chop to the side of Duane’s neck. Initially the man’s knees buckled, and he would have fallen to the floor if Grover had not caught him under the arms. Anticipating each other’s moves, Colt reacted by snatching up Duane’s legs, and together they heaved him onto the board on the bed. Next came the duct tape, which Grover grabbed from the bedside table. While Duane was still in a limp daze from the karate blow, Grover and Colt had succeeded in duct-taping him to the board.

“All right!” Duane said in desperation as soon as he could talk. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a wise guy. I was watching a house to make sure the woman didn’t go out. I swear. That’s all I was doing — making sure someone didn’t come out of her house.”

“Too late,” Grover snapped. “We don’t have time to fool with you.”

With deftness that came with practice, Colt started an IV.

“What the hell are you doing?” Duane cried, struggling vainly against the duct tape. “What are you going to give me?”

“Check my math,” Grover said. “It’s point-seven milligrams per kilogram. What do you say, he weighs about eighty kilograms?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Okay, that means fifty-six milligrams,” Grover continued. “Let’s make it sixty.” Quickly he drew up the medication into a syringe, tapping it to eliminate the bubbles, then handed the syringe to Colt across Duane’s body.

“What the hell are you giving me?” Duane demanded. His eyes were open to their fullest, watching. Colt, unhappy with the fact that there still was some air in the syringe, was holding the syringe upright and tapping the side as Grover had done.

“No, don’t!” Duane pleaded. “What is it? What does it do?”

“It’s called Versed, if you really want to know,” Grover said. “But it’s a waste of time to tell you, because you’re not going to remember any of this. Among other characteristics, the drug is a wonderful retrograde amnestic.”

“What the hell is an amnestic?” Duane clamored.

Both Grover and Colt ignored Duane. Colt used the IV port and injected the drug.

“Jesus Christ in heaven,” Duane yelled, watching Colt resheath the needle with it plastic cover. “What did you...” Duane had tried to ask another question, but his voice trailed off. He was already asleep.

“It amazes me everytime we use this stuff,” Colt said, handing the now empty syringe back to Grover.

“It’s a wonderful drug,” Grover agreed. He took the empty syringe after finishing filling a second syringe with ten milligrams of valium to be used later. “Check and see how easy he is to arouse.”

“Hey, Duane!” Colt called, slapping the side of Duane’s face. “Come on, wake up!” He slapped a little harder before grabbing Duane’s chin and shaking it. “Come on, big guy! Come back to earth.”

Duane’s eyes fluttered open with a befuddled faraway look. “Wow,” he said with a smile lighting up his face. “What...” he began to ask but then forgot what he had been thinking.

For a few minutes Colt asked innocuous questions, which Duane answered with some humor. The only problem was that he had to be awakened repeatedly.

“So what’s going on with this kidnapping?” Grover asked out of the blue. The previous questions Colt had been asking were of a more personal nature.

“Not much,” Duane answered. “We’re all just sitting around waiting for the fun to start.”

“What kind of fun?”

“Trying to figure out how to exchange the kid for the diamonds without getting caught.”

“You sure don’t want to get caught,” Grover agreed. “Where is the kid being held?”

“At Louie’s place.”

“Louie who?”

“Louie Barbera.”

“Where’s Louie’s place?”

“In Whitestone.”

“What’s the address?”

Duane didn’t respond. Colt slapped him several times, and his eyes reluctantly fluttered back open.

“I asked you for Louie’s address,” Grover said. “Louie Barbera.”

“Three-seven-four-six Powells Cove Boulevard.”

Grover quickly wrote the address down.

“Who’s taking care of the kid?” Grover asked.

“Louie’s wife. She’s loving the kid. She wants to adopt him and is giving Louie a hard time about it. Louie wants to move the kid.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know. Someplace on the river. They’re trying to get some heat into an old warehouse.”

Grover and Colt exchanged a knowing look across Duane’s motionless body. “Another reason we have to make a rescue tonight,” Grover said. “We don’t want to do a raid and come up empty-handed.”

“I like to have at least a day to check the place out,” Colt complained.

“We’re going tonight!” Grover said. “We cannot risk losing the opportunity. Now that we have an address, it’s a go. This afternoon will be a chance to do a drive-by.”

“A drive-by is practically worthless,” Colt complained again.

“It’s a problem we’ll have to live with. Do you have any additional questions for our guest?”

“Duane,” Colt called out, slapping the man’s face harder than he had earlier, as if it was his fault Colt was not going to have a full day and evening to reconnoiter. “Does Louie have any dogs?”

“He has two,” Duane said. “Two really nasty Doberman pinschers that run around the grounds.”

“Shit,” Colt said. “I had a feeling this was too good to be true.”

“Look on the bright side. If someone has big guard dogs on the property, the chances are they’ve become lax with their alarm systems.”

“Good point,” Colt admitted reluctantly. “Now let’s wind up here and get out to look the place over.”

They got their equipment and Duane back into the van. Grover made one last sweep around the house to make sure nothing had been left before leaving the keys on the kitchen table.

Heading back to West 106th Street, Grover made it a point to call the office. The line was picked up immediately, as CRT had people available twenty-four-seven, three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days a year.

“Is this Beverly?” Grover asked. Over the years he’d gotten to know most of the receptionists by the sound of their voices.

“It is,” Beverly said cheerfully.

“Are any of the researchers around this morning?”

“Yes, I saw Robert Lyon just a few moments ago.”

“Could you page him and ask him to give me a call on my mobile?”

“Not a problem. I’ll do it right away.”

When Robert returned the call, Grover said, “I need some help today.”

“What do you need?”

“I have an address for a house in Whitestone, New York. I need you to find out all you can about it. Get on the city assessor’s office website and see if they have a floor plan available. Find out who owns it as well, and call me back on this line as soon as you get any details. We’ll be breaking into the house tonight, so we need as much information as possible.” He gave Robert the address and disconnected.

His next call was to Warren.

“We are on our way back,” Grover said when Warren answered, out of breath. “We are definitely going to need some help getting the watcher back into his vehicle. After all the excitement, he’s sleeping rather soundly.”

“No problem,” Warren said. “We’re all here playing basketball as usual. Did you get what you needed?”

“I believe we did,” Grover said. “He was very accommodating.”

“Good,” Warren said. “How long before you’ll be back here?”

“I’d say thirty to forty minutes. Saturday traffic is a relative breeze. We’re coming in from Woodside.”

“See you then,” Warren said and hung up.

Twenty minutes later Colt turned onto Laurie and Jack’s street. He pulled up directly behind Duane’s van to limit the exposure of the group carrying Duane and putting him back in his vehicle. Grover jumped out as soon as Colt came to a halt. To avoid attracting too much attention, Grover jogged over to the basketball court instead of shouting from across the street. He waited for a play to be over before calmly calling through the chain-link fence to get Warren’s attention.

“Flash and I will be right there,” Warren said once he saw Grover waving at him.

With four people involved, there was no problem moving Duane from where he’d been rolled up in the carpet in the back of the van to his vehicle. At Grover’s insistence, he was put in the driver’s seat and draped over the steering wheel.

“He’s really out,” Warren commented. “What did you give him?”

“A drug called Versed,” Grover explained. “And he’s about to get some intramuscular Valium. We want him to sleep for a good long time but make it look like he’s drunk himself into a stupor.” Grover produced a bottle of vodka from the van, and with Colt rousing him, Grover forced the man to take a mouthful of liquor, most of which dripped down the front of Duane’s shirt. “Perfect,” Grover said. He replaced the bottle’s cap and then tossed the half-full bottle onto the front passenger seat. “If his accomplices come looking for him, they’ll find him acting drunk but never guess he’d been dragged off and treated with a tongue-loosening drug.”

“But he’ll remember himself.”

“No, he won’t,” Grover said with assurance as he gave Duane the Valium in his upper arm cavalierly, injecting it directly through his shirt. “Not only does Versed make one particularly talkative, it causes retrograde amnesia. He’ll be lucky to remember getting up this morning.”

“Very slick,” Warren said.

“Could you guys keep your eyes on this vehicle? I’d like to know if his accomplices do show up. I’d also like to get any license plates if it could be done without arousing any suspicions. I don’t want them to know we know they’ve been here.”

“Until when do you want us to watch it?”

“At least until two or three a.m., but I know that’s asking a lot. Yet I’d appreciate it, as long as you guys have the manpower and inclination to do it.”

“Not a problem,” Warren said. “Those bastards killed my cousin and have Laurie and Jack’s toddler. I’d stay up all night myself. We’ll be using the court until early evening. After that, I’ll have the guys who’d been scheduled for today, but weren’t used, watch tonight.”

“With the proviso they don’t let themselves be seen. This point is truly important. If kidnappers feel they are being watched or followed, they get very antsy, which invariably puts the victims in extreme jeopardy. If they start feeling the authorities are closing in, the kidnappers kill their victims and dispose of the bodies, never to be found.”

“Understood,” Warren said simply, and he did.

After leaving the neighborhood and before heading out to Whitestone, Grover and Colt drove down to Midtown to visit the home office. CRT occupied an entire floor on East 54th Street. It was usually a beehive of activity, but since it was a Saturday and since ten of the thirty-nine partners were currently away running ten active cases in eight countries, the place was mausoleum-like.

“Robert told me to say he would be in the lunchroom,” Beverly had said when Grover and Colt first appeared. The so-called lunchroom was a windowless affair more suited for storing cleaning supplies than for serving as a snack room. There were several vending machines and a space for the communal coffee machine. Robert was alone, nursing a coffee while working on his laptop.

“Did you have any luck?” Grover asked.

“Not a lot but some. First, I did have luck with the assessor’s office, which, I might add, was a great idea on your part. They had a rudimentary site plan and better floor plans, as the estate went through a major renovation and reassessment after the current owner bought it about a decade ago.”

“Are you using the word estate literally or figuratively?”

“Literally. There’s over an acre, which is big for the area, with a pool, a tennis court, and a pier.”

“So it’s waterfront property?”

“Yes. It has four hundred feet of frontage on the East River. The house is almost ten thousand square feet, and pretty much covers the site except for the pool and tennis court. In my mind, that’s an estate.”

“I agree,” Grover said. “Let’s see the plans.”

Robert had printed out the plans from the assessor’s office on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper. Colt kept the site plan but immediately handed the floor plan back. “Double the size of the copy. I might have to search for the child, and I need to know the house like the back of my hand.”

“I also have a street map of the town,” Robert said, handing that over as well before running off to enlarge the floor plans.

“Uh-oh,” Grover said after a brief look at the map. Robert had the location of the house marked with a red cross. “It’s on a dead-end street.”

“That’s not a problem,” Colt said. “We’ll approach from the water. We certainly don’t want to be hemmed in by a dead-end street.”

“Approach in what? You are not going to get me in the water again, no way.” About ten years previously, Colt had insisted on using scuba gear to approach another waterfront property in Cartagena, Colombia.

“We’ll rent something like a Zodiac and pull in under the pier. There has to be a marina out there in the area.”

“How did you do researching the owner?” Grover asked Robert when he came back with the blow-ups.

“Not good. It’s listed as being owned by a Panamanian financial company who pays the taxes and utilities. But when I tried researching the Panamanian company, I found it was owned by a Brazilian company, et cetera. You know the story.”

“Shell companies,” Grover said with a nod. “Another sign that this kidnapping involves organized crime.”

Colt checked his watch. “Grover, it’s after two! We have to get our butts out to Whitestone, especially now that we need to locate a boat. And I’m going to need time to put together an operational kit for tonight.”

“All right, let’s do it,” Grover said. “Robert, if you learn anything more about the house or its owner, give me a call on my mobile. This exercise has to go down tonight, so do what you can!”

“Will do,” Robert said.

“Also, Robert,” Colt said, “have you seen anybody from logistics this morning?” Logistics at CRT really meant one man. His name was Curt Cohen, and he was a master of the procurement and maintenance of just about anything in the world, particularly in the arena of electronics and weapons: anything and everything a risk management, ex-Special Forces agent would need to carry out his or her mission as a kidnap consultant.

“Curt himself was here this morning looking for something special for Roger Hagarty, who is in Mexico running a case.”

“How convenient,” Colt said happily. “Could you find him for me and have him call? I’m going to need some special things myself.”

“I’ll be happy to,” Robert said cheerfully.

“Let’s go,” Grover said, grabbing Colt’s upper arm and giving him a shove in the general direction of the elevators. “You’re the one’s been growling about the time.”

On this second trip to Queens, they chose to use the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. As Grover drove, Colt used the time to study the floor plans and commit them to memory.

“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding JJ,” Grover said, aware of what Colt was doing.

“I’m glad you are optimistic. But I don’t want to get in there and be figuratively stumbling around in the dark.”

“It’s always better to be safe than sorry — pardon the overused expression. But if the wife is so fond of the child, I’ll bet you the kid will be smack-dab in the middle of the master bedroom.”

As they emerged back into the daylight from the tunnel, Colt went back to the floor plans, but his cell phone interrupted him.

“It’s Curt,” his caller announced. “Robert said you were in need of some special equipment.”

“I need a gas-based dart pistol loaded with enough ketamine to stop an adult water buffalo in heat. One that has the green laser aiming devices. To be truthful, chances are I’ll be facing a couple of Dobermans.”

“Very funny,” Curt said, “but a humongous dose is not going to help. With ketamine darts, the animal doesn’t instantly fall over, even if I err on the high-dose side. That’s public folklore. The dog is going to stumble around for a few minutes and might still be dangerous. Keep that in mind.”

“So a dog might be able to chew on me for several minutes after I hit him with a ketamine-filled dart?”

“I’m afraid so. It can happen, unless you want to kill the dog.”

“Thanks for the good news. In addition to the dart pistol, I’m going to need my usual climbing kit with several fifty-foot lengths of rope. Also, one window anchor for a fast escape.”

“No problem. What else?”

“Some sort of an over-the-shoulder bag capable of supporting up to forty pounds.”

“How big?”

“About a yard long, twelve to fourteen inches high. Big enough to hold a one-and-a-half-year-old child. And, oh, yeah, an eyedropper.”

“What about any special weapons?”

“Give me something small and light but makes a lot of noise and I don’t have to aim.”

“You mean like an Uzi?

“That’s fine.”

“What else?”

“The usual breaking-and-entering tools, like lock picks, glass suction cups, and glass cutters.”

“Is that it?”

“I believe so,” Colt said. “If I think of anything else, I’ll give you a quick call.”

“When do you want to pick everything up?” Curt asked. “I’ll have it all at the front desk with your name on it. What about night-vision goggles?”

“Thanks for reminding us,” Colt said. “Let me ask Grover.”

“Of course I want night-vision goggles,” Grover said, hearing both sides of Colt’s conversation.

“Tonight’s forecast is calling for clear skies and a gibbous moon,” Curt said. “Just in case you haven’t checked.”

“I still want the night-vision goggles,” Grover said.

“Same with me,” Colt added.

“And I want a sniper rifle with a night-vision scope in case Colt is being chased when he comes out of the house with the kid.”

“Don’t even suggest it,” Colt said.

“It’s better to be...”

“Yeah, I know, ‘safe than sorry.’ Let’s abandon the clichés, will you please!” Colt pleaded.

“What time?” Curt said, interrupting the two agents. “What time do you want this stuff available by?”

“We don’t need it until around eleven. I don’t want to do this break-in until after one a.m., or even later.”

“It will be waiting for you by nine p.m. If you suddenly think of anything else, call me and I’ll do my very best.”

“Thanks, Curt,” Grover and Colt echoed into Colt’s cell phone.