Deadly Heat

NINETEEN

Overhead space heaters recessed into the apartment canopy took the chill out of the morning air on the Upper East Side. Heat and Roach waited behind the potted firs that flanked both sides of the lobby entrance. A black luxury town car sat poised in the circular cut-stone drive with the engine shut off. Detective Feller had replaced the car service driver and the motor block ticked as it cooled. “Lobby now,” he whispered into his walkie-talkie. “Doorman first, suspect behind.”

Raley and Ochoa nodded an acknowledgment to Heat from behind their cypress. She heard the automatic inner door of the vestibule slide open and put her hand on her holster. Then the outer doors parted at the shiny brass frame. The uniformed doorman led the way, waving the town car up for his tenant. As soon as the second man passed by, the detectives stepped in from both sides, bracing and cuffing him.

“Hey! What the bloody hell is this?”

Heat said, “You’ll be riding with us today, Mr. Maggs.”

Carey Maggs sat with his hands clasped before him in a relaxed fashion on the table of Interrogation One. “You can’t simply detain me without cause. I may not be a United States citizen, but I am afforded due process.” He may have possessed the cultured air of Oxford and worn the bespoke threads of a millionaire businessman, but when Nikki responded to his protest with stone silence, the Brit reacted the way they all did when they were dirty, from gang bangers to sous chefs. His eyes roved to the magic mirror, either to wonder who lurked behind it, watching, or to check himself out to see how he was doing-or both. Maggs didn’t appear as uncomfortable with her silence as she would have liked, and he brought it back to her, sounding anything but fazed. “I’ve heard about these sort of bully-boy tactics on the news, but I must say, Detective Heat, I never expected this sort of grot from you.”

“Well, I guess we all hold a few surprises.”

“Perhaps you could end the suspense a bit and tell me why you snatched me up like some common criminal and brought me here.”

Heat held her cards. Experience had taught her not to get ahead of things, to let this interview build, in spite of the crushing time pressure she felt. If she jumped right to the information she needed-the when and where of the bioterror event-Maggs would smell her desperation, and the power balance would tip to him. If she kept him worried about how much she already knew, he might give up more, and sooner. So Nikki didn’t answer his question. Instead, she adopted a detached mode to match his.

A moment passed. She withdrew a photo of Petar Matic from the file in front of her. “When we last spoke on the telephone, and I asked if you could identify the man in this picture, you stated that you didn’t know his name but that you had seen him lurking near your apartment the week Ari Weiss stayed with you. The week my mother was murdered.”

He didn’t bother to look at the picture. “That’s correct.”

“You also said you were suspicious of him and called the police to report it.” He flicked his brows and shrugged, showing agreement. “We’ve run a computer check of records at your neighborhood’s precinct, the Nineteenth. There’s no record of any call, any complaint, any visit to your building.”

“Maybe the police didn’t log it. Or, who knows…?” At last she could see the slightest fissure in the façade of calm as he improvised. “Maybe I didn’t actually call it in myself. I may have left it to the doorman, yes.”

“Which is it, Mr. Maggs?”

He shrugged. “Eleven years is a long time, love.”

Heat smiled at the man across the table she believed had ordered her mother killed after she uncovered his terror plan. “You don’t need to tell me.”

Her smile unsettled Carey Maggs. Heat liked that. But just as she was about to move to her next question, the door burst open and Bart Callan strode in followed by Yardley Bell. “Heat, we’re tagging in,” said Callan.

“Excuse me,” said Nikki, rising. She opened her arms, gesturing them out.

Carey’s eyes widened. “Who the hell are they?”

Nobody left. Anything but. “I’m Special Agent Callan and this is Agent Bell, Department of Homeland Security. We have some questions for you about your terror plot.”

As the words were spoken, she saw the look on Maggs, saw her carefully built sandcastle kicked over, and cursed to herself. “Agents?” she said. “Maybe we should take a moment?”

Bell stood with her arms folded and glowered at Heat. Callan jerked Nikki’s chair over by its back so he could plant one foot on it and lean on his knee, looming over the table. “Let’s start by finding out what your number was doing on the cell phone of a spy we busted in a bioterror plot.”

“Am I to understand you are accusing me of terrorism because someone happened to have my number in a phone?” He turned to Heat. “Fuck this, I want my lawyer.”

Nikki called a time-out. They left Maggs to stew at the table and adjourned to the Observation Room. The shouting began as soon as the air lock closed.

“How about a courtesy heads-up before you barge in on my interrogation?”

Bell said, “You’re talking courtesy? Seriously?”

“I looped you in about the arrest.”

“An e-mail after the bust is not looping in,” said Callan.

“Not looping in is what screwed the pooch at the helipad last night,” added Agent Bell. “We should have been there for the takedown. Not playing catch-up.”

Heat pointed through the glass at Maggs. “His phone number was in Recents on Sharon Hinesburg’s burner cell. I didn’t want to lose him.”

Yardley Bell moved nose-to-nose with Heat. “Bullshit. You made another unilateral decision to cut us from this process. From our own fucking case. Why?”

“Because,” said Nikki, “there are too many moving parts.”

“What’s that mean? You don’t trust us?”

Heat didn’t answer. Just refused to blink. Callan finally spoke, in a more civil tone this time. “Let’s hash all this out later. We have a mission. What have you gotten from him so far?”

Nikki stepped away from Bell. “Feigned innocence. I was just starting to piece him off when you came in.”

Yardley stepped away muttering, “Jesus…”

“All right, let’s be pragmatic,” Callan said. “First, he gets no lawyer.”

“I guess I could invoke an Article Nine and hold him for a psych evaluation,” suggested Nikki. “I’d like to buy some time for my detectives to report back. I’ve got crews tossing his home and business, and Rook’s doing some financial digging.”

“What kind of financial?” asked Callan.

Before Nikki could respond, Bell jumped in. “Why are you farting around with a bogus psych hold, Heat? The National Defense Authorization Act allows federal officers to detain any terror suspect for an indefinite period, period.” She brandished the federal DHS badge hanging around her neck. “Now are we a team?”

In their rekindled, albeit fragile, spirit of cooperation, Special Agent Callan dispatched his top forensic specialists to join Heat’s detectives at Carey Maggs’s apartment atop the Upper East Side high-rise, as well as at his brewery gastropub at the South Street Seaport. Much as in the searches that had been made at Salena Kaye’s SRO in Coney Island, Vaja Nikoladze’s compound upstate, and Sharon Hinesburg’s one-bedroom, they’d hunt for material evidence like computers, mail, and receipts, as well as sniff-sweep for bioagents.

Saying he felt his “asshole puckering by the minute” as noon arrived one day before the bioterror target date, Callan also activated military resources to stop and search every truck coming into Manhattan, augmenting the spot checks NYPD had already initiated at key zones around the island. He also triggered the army and National Guard roll-out of the disaster medical apparatus they had discussed in the bunker at Homeland headquarters. The Fort Washington Armory uptown in Washington Heights plus the two armories at opposite ends of Lexington Avenue were being converted to vast indoor medical triage centers. Underneath the RFK Triboro Bridge, the soccer fields of Randall’s Island would quietly overnight become a military tent city for mass casualties.

Higher-ups held to their decision not to announce the coming threat. “Without specifics, all it would cause is panic.” At that moment, everyone in that precinct knew what that felt like.

They decided to let Detective Heat continue as lead in the interrogation. Unfortunately Carey Maggs decided to continue his pose of indignant innocence. Several hours into his genteel stonewall Detective Rhymer slipped into Interrogation One and passed Heat a file of research he had pulled from his bank canvasses. She perused it and gave Maggs a look of significance. “Let’s talk about Salena Kaye. You recall Salena Kaye, right?”

“By name I do. But only because you’ve been flogging on about her as if we should be mates. Wouldn’t know her if I tripped on her, as I’ve made clear.”

“We know that Salena Kaye was busy lately contacting radical jihadists, searching for volunteers to martyr themselves. I called it volunteering, but she has been offering a hundred thousand dollars to the families of whoever signs up.”

“If you say. I still don’t see how this has bugger all to do with me.”

“One hundred thousand dollars. Where would a registered physical therapist like Salena Kaye get her hands on a spare hundred grand or two?”

“Ask her.”

“She’s dead. And you know it, don’t you?” Maggs kept his eyes passive during the silence that followed. His expression gave away nothing. “I want you to tell me. Whom did she hire and where are they?”

“I guess we’re stumped” was all he said.

Accustomed to the denials, she pressed on and held up a scanned page from the file Rhymer had brought her. “Just got some interesting information here. Salena Kaye’s personal account received a wire transfer for two hundred thousand dollars this week from a bank named Clune Worldwide Holdings.” She set that page down and took out the next sheet. “This is a copy of the receipt from the credit card Salena Kaye used at Surety Rent-a-Car the other day when she tried to rent a box truck. We ran a search and the line of credit was funded through Clune Worldwide Holdings.” She paused. No response, so she produced another page. “The personal bank statement of Sharon Hinesburg.”

“Another name you insist I should know.”

“See these yellow highlights?” She held the statement up; he barely gave it a glance. “These are one-thousand-dollar payments wired electronically into Hinesburg’s account from Clune Worldwide Holdings.”

“And?”

“And,” she echoed, turning another page, “Clune Worldwide Holdings, an offshore bank located in the Cayman Islands-aka Switzerland with palm trees, when it comes to money laundering-is the same bank that happens to maintain the account for Mercator Watch, the charitable organization you fund.”

“Means nothing,” he said. “The bank I use also happens to pay those other people? Lots of banks pay other people. One bank in those TV adverts seems to pay Vikings. Does that make their other customers Vikings, too?” He chuckled.

They allowed Maggs a supervised bathroom break, and when he came back into Interrogation to find Rook seated beside Heat, it took him off balance, if only slightly. He covered with more nonchalance. “Glad, actually, to have an investigative journalist join the proceedings. If they sod me off to Gitmo, I’ll need someone to record the injustice.”

“Full disclosure, I’m not here to chronicle the Free Carey campaign. I’m helping Detective Heat stop you from killing innocent people.”

“Well, at least we understand each other.”

“More and more,” said Heat.

Rook continued, “You might even say that I understand everything, Carey. All of it.” Maggs’s eyes darted to the papers the writer had brought with him. “See, one of the perks of being an investigative journalist is I have this cool list of high-level sources. It’s an interesting relationship. Sometimes I owe them payback for favors, sometimes they owe me. I have a high-level guy at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and, hoo-rah, it was his turn to put out.

“There’s an old Watergate catchphrase. ‘Follow the money.’ It was sort of the ‘What’s in your wallet?’ of its day.” Rook winked. “Now, with my SEC friend’s help, it only took me a couple of hours to follow yours and gather your investment portfolio. I know the entire distribution of your wealth. Well, at least the part you don’t stuff in your shoes when you fly to the Caymans.”

Maggs strained to read the pages upside down as Rook arranged them in the order he wanted before he continued. “Mercator Watch. Your foundation that monitors international child labor abuse. Actually more a fund. Let’s set that aside and look at your investments. All profitable, congratulations.” He turned a page. “Pranco Corporation, European government contracts to build low-cost housing in Third World villages decimated by war. Nevwar Enterprises, multimillion-dollar, multinational manufacturing company employing ex-prisoners of conscience from totalitarian regimes.” He looked up from the page. “It goes on and on like this, Carey. One company after another turning a solid profit on radical ideals and causes.”

“None of that makes me a fucking terrorist, does it?”

“On the contrary, it’s like Brewery Boz being founded on the Charles Dickens principle of exposing social injustice.”

“And corporate greed,” said Maggs in a blurt of anger. “My portfolio is all ethical capitalism, beating the fucking one-percenters at their own game. There’s no crime in that.” It was the first time Heat had seen him worked up.

Rook nodded agnostically and turned to the last page. “All fine. But this one here. This stands out as, I dare say…” He turned to Heat.

“An odd sock?” she asked.

“Let’s see. You are the principal shareholder in a BeniPharm Corporation.” They watched Carey Maggs’s blink rate double. “Now, the odd-sock part is that BeniPharm’s the only investment in your jacket that is not in the radical scheme.” Rook returned to the SEC data. “It says here the company was formed in 1998 with your cash and a token buy-in by minor partner, Ari Weiss, MD… now deceased. The company rolled along and along, operating solely on paper, for all intents, until two years ago when it branded itself with a signature product. Do you want to say what it is, or shall I?”

Maggs cleared his throat and said in a tattered voice, “Smallpox medicine.”

“Interesting,” said Heat.

“BeniPharm’s prospectus says it’s uniquely positioned itself as the world’s leading source for the smallpox antiviral remedy. I didn’t realize it until Detective Heat got hers, but if you get this medicine within five days of exposure, you won’t get smallpox.”

“That’s right,” said Maggs.

Heat asked, “Why throw all that effort into a medicine for an extinct disease?”

“Paranoia,” said Rook. “We live in an era where nuts can unleash bioterror. In fact, according to this, BeniPharm has a contract from the United States government for half a billion dollars’ worth of your company’s smallpox medicine.”

“Nothing wrong with that. I… we… perform a public service.”

Heat said, “And what would happen to your profits if there were a smallpox outbreak?”

“You’re reaching-”

“Or if smallpox were weaponized and released in a terror event? In a major metro area?”

“This is a frame.”

“What would it do?” Nikki asked. “Would your profits double? Triple? Would other countries buy in? Tell me, what would you gain? Ten times the profit?” Heat rose, shouting, slapping a palm on the table. “Is that worth killing thousands of innocent people? Was that the cost of my mother’s life, you son of a bitch?”

Spent, Heat stood there panting. The room grew still.

At last, calmer, she spoke. “Do one right thing, Maggs. Tell me when and where.”

He rocked his head. “I’ll tell you this.” And when he had their attention, he said, “You’re all still guessing.”

Heat flung the door with both hands, and it smacked the wall in the Observation Room. “I can’t break him.”

“You did great,” said Callan.

Bell said to Rook, “You both did great. Couldn’t have played it better.”

Through the window, they saw Maggs slouched in his chair with his head tilted back, eyes closed. He could have been a commuter dozing on the train to Connecticut instead of the prime suspect in a mass terror plot. “He’s got balls,” said Rook. “He comes just to the point you think he’s going to crack, and he sucks ’em up.”

“What’s he got to lose?” said Bell. “You laid it out yourself. An upside of billions, if he keeps his mouth shut; life in prison if he suddenly gets a conscience.”

“After five o’clock,” said Callan. “I say we move off traditional means and take him for a ride to the Black Barn.”

Rook’s face lit up. “You guys really have a Black Barn?”

Callan frowned and looked at Nikki. “Is he for real?”

“Well,” insisted Rook, “do you?”

Nikki said, “He’s not going anywhere. We don’t do that.”

Behind her, Yardley Bell chuckled softly. Agent Callan said to Rook, “She’s right. Sadly, this is US soil. Much as I wouldn’t mind doing a little tenderizing, we’re going to have to keep working him constitutionally.” He walked to the window and said, “Let’s take five. When we come back, I get my shot at this prick.”

Heat found her voice mail stacked with messages when she got back into the bull pen. Lauren Parry had left word she had some interesting postmortem news to share. Nikki saved that one in order to first return Detective Ochoa’s call.

“Where are you guys?”

“Team Roach is currently inside Brewery Boz at South Street. How’s it going with Maggs, anything?”

“Nothing yet. He just keeps acting like he’s going to put me on some Amnesty International list just below North Korea.”

Ochoa said, “Unfortunately we’re not going to be any help. And, trust me, we swarmed his apartment and the brewery like an Indy pit crew. Forensics, too. That includes NYPD and the DHS geeks with their R2-D2 vacuum sniffer things.”

“Everything’s clean?”

“Not just clean. Antiseptic.”

After they hung up, she’d just started to fill Rook in when one of the precinct aides rushed in and interrupted. All she said was, “Rainbow.”

Nikki reached out to grab the phone. Rook surprised her by clamping his hand over hers, holding down the receiver. “Rook.”

“Take your time. Let him wait.”

“I might get something out of him about the attack, I can’t wait.”

“Same as Maggs, if he smells that, you’re dead.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and released his. “Remember what I said. You played his game; make him play yours.”

Heat pondered that, and even though it ran counter to everything she felt-to everything she so desperately needed at the eleventh hour-she agreed. If Rainbow smelled desperation, Rainbow ran the table. She waited a full thirty agonizing seconds before she picked up. “Heat.”

“What? Are you keeping me on hold to run a trace?” She recognized Glen Windsor’s voice and gave Rook a nod to affirm. “I’m not an idiot. I know how to set up a phone so it can’t be pinged.” And then an inspiration struck Nikki that scared the hell out of her. She didn’t examine it, she didn’t weigh it, she simply acted on her impulse.

She hung up on him.

“God damn,” said Rook.

Just as she felt nausea’s burn greeting her with the notion she might have just made a fatal mistake, the line purred again. Heat snapped the record switch on the junction box and let one more ring pass before she answered. Windsor jumped in before she even spoke. “What the fuck was that about?” His voice cracked with agitation. The power of the game, she thought.

“Glen, I’m busy.” It took all her effort to sound detached.

“Fuck you busy. We need to talk.”

“Hang on a sec.” She covered the mouthpiece loosely and called off to nobody, “Just wait for me, OK? Be there in ten seconds. Ten seconds.” Rook clench-pumped both his fists to give her encouragement. Committed to the strategy, she waded in. “Listen, if you want to talk to me, why don’t you come in? Otherwise, you’ll have to wait.”

“Have you lost it?”

“No, in fact, I kind of have a clear head for a change. See, I just don’t have time for you now. I have something bigger to deal with.”

“Bigger?” She could hear his breathing accelerate. “What, that bio plot?”

“You’ll have to wait, Glen. Your moment has passed.”

“You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”

The more he went over the top, the more flat she made her voice. “You know, I really can’t deal with this now.”

“You don’t know shit. You don’t even know where this stuff’s going to be released.”

She waited, just in case he offered. When he didn’t, she said, “No, but I will. I’m going to be there to stop this madness, and when I do, you’re going to be no more than an asterisk.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“It’s not you, Glen, it’s just the way it goes. A bigger fish came along.”

“No, I fucking own this now. At nine tomorrow morning, I’ll be gone, but everyone will know I did it. I’ll make history, and you can live with it.”

“Got to see that. Want to tell me where?”

But he’d hung up.

Heat raced out of the squad room, saying, “Nine A.M. Let’s tell Callan.”

Rook kept pace with her down the hall and said, “Considering that you’re someone who hates to play games, remind me never to cross you.”

Nikki hurried into Observation One and found it empty. A creeping certainty weakened her limbs. She rushed to the glass to look into Interrogation.

The room was empty.

“Maggs is gone,” she said to Rook as she ran back out the door. “And so are Callan and Bell.”

The desk sergeant had seen them lead Maggs out through the lobby but thought nothing of it. Why should he? They were federal agents escorting a prisoner. In a knowing act of futility, Heat and Rook trotted out through the glass doors onto 82nd. All they found was the air-conditioning puddle where Callan had parked his SUV and an empty street between them and Columbus.

“Looks like we have one additional moving part,” said Rook.

Heat spent the next hour working to reach them. The obvious calls came first: to Callan’s cell phone, then to Yardley Bell’s. Heat left voice mails that she knew in her heart would be ignored, if they even were listened to. Rook followed up with e-mails and texts to Bell-even posting a heavily masked Tweet about getting in touch.

The hour stretched into a full night of fruitless outreach. Nikki called every number she had at Homeland Security, her gut telling her that she was hollering down a black hole. She tried NYPD Counterterrorism and managed to get connected to her colleague on the DHS counterterrorism unit at his home. Commander McMains said he’d look into it, which she took as code for letting the feds have at Maggs all they wanted. “We are coming to the brink, Heat, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

In desperation, Rook even called Paris and woke up his Russian spy pal, Anatoly Kijé, just to try to shake loose any private numbers or e-mail addresses he might have. The secret agent cursed in Russian and told Rook to get real; his Rolodex of American spooks was slightly limited.

When they had exhausted their options, they made the same rounds again with nothing in the end to show for it all but lost energy and time. “Know what the hell of this is?” said Heat. “The effort we’re putting into chasing our own people is pulling us away from heading off that event tomorrow.”

Rook checked his watch. “You mean today. It’s after midnight.”

“Excellent.”

“But the other side of the coin is they may do better at heading this off than we will. I mean ethical questions aside.”

Heat snapped at him, “We don’t put ethics aside, Rook. It’s not who we are. It’s not who I am, anyway. Don’t you think I would love ten minutes alone in a locked room with Carey Maggs?”

“You mean to work out your mom stuff, or to stop the smallpox attack?”

She thought about that and said, “I guess I have the luxury of not having to know the answer.” A moment passed and she asked, “What about your mom? Did Margaret get out of town?”

“Oh, yes, Oswego-bound, hours ago. I have a feeling that, at this very moment, Broadway’s ‘Grand Damn’ is in the lounge, on her third Sidecar, and the Drama Festival committee is wondering what they got themselves into.”

“You know, Rook, we’ve done our best. No points off if you want to leave. You have your place in the Hamptons.”

He took both her hands in his, looked into her eyes, and said, “Yeah, I’m outta here.” And after they both laughed at that, they kissed.

Since they were all alone, they made it count.

In the overnight Heat didn’t dare leave her desk. She dozed in ten-minute intervals in her chair and left her cell phone on ring instead of vibrate so she’d be sure to get any calls. Raley and Ochoa checked in just after four when they wrapped Brewery Boz. For the hell of it, she asked them to swing by Varick Street and door-knock the Homeland HQ to see if they could create some movement. They called back an hour later with no joy.

At sunup the commander of NYPD’s counterterrorism unit called from his staging area at the 69th Regiment Armory near Gramercy Park. He didn’t want Heat to think he had dismissed her, and reassured her that he had put calls out through all his sources to learn what he could about the whereabouts and status of the DHS agents and Maggs. Heat told McMains he was a good man and asked him to keep her posted. “And God help us all,” he said.

After too many days and nights in the same clothes, Nikki budgeted herself five minutes for a quick shower in the locker room, which did a world to make her feel sharper for the day ahead. After she toweled off, she smiled, amused that she was actually resorting to changing into her backup bag of backup clothes, and wondered if she should have a backup for that, too. The brown leather jacket she’d been wearing seemed a little warm for the forecast, so when Heat returned to the bull pen, she hung it on the coat rack and got down the blazer Yardley Bell had returned to her after its DHS bioagent sweep.

When she slipped it off the rack, she noticed a clear plastic evidence bag had been looped over the hook of the hanger. Thoughtfully, the Homeland Security scientists had emptied her blazer pockets and returned all their contents with an inventory slip. Nikki looked inside. She found a lipstick, her sunglasses, a notepad and golf pencil, and an open package of Reese’s peanut butter cups. She doubted she would want the remaining candy and took it out to throw away. Her hand froze above the trash can.

“Rook,” she called.

Couch springs groaned from the break room, and he appeared in the door with bed hair and one shirttail out. “What?”

She held up the blazer. “Now I know where I picked up my contamination. Come on.”