Solomon's Gold

CHAPTER 45

On the afternoon of the day before the conference, FBI Agent Jock Silverton was looking for the white van. The rental agency had provided the paperwork for the rental. The New York driver's license used to rent the van had turned out to be a phony. Finding the van had now become a high priority.

Agent Silverton was doing the kind of tedious work that characterized criminal investigations everywhere, looking for a lead. Other agents were reviewing tapes from the hotel interior. Silverton's assignment was to look at surveillance recordings from garages in the area where Dayoud's phone had briefly been active. It was boring and repetitive work. There were hundreds of hours of video and many garages to search through.

It was a long shot, but it was possible the van was parked in one of those garages. One of those cameras might have caught it at some point in time. That was assuming the van was in a garage in the first place, that the cameras in that particular garage were working, and that he'd be able to identify it if it did pass by a camera.

Those were a lot of ifs, but Silverton was used to doing things that often led nowhere. Sometimes if you did enough of those things, an answer appeared.

He paused the recording he was watching and glanced over at the photographs on his desk. One showed a smiling woman lying on a lounge chair on a beach. There were palm trees behind her. She was looking at the camera. The other was a picture of the same woman and two young children. Everyone was laughing.

Looking at the pictures reminded Silverton of why he put up with the boring bureaucracy of his job. He was one of the good guys. What he did helped protect the family he loved, and a lot of other people besides. He could put up with a lot of boring, because of that.

Jock turned his attention back to the monitor. Figuring that the bad guys would want to keep a low profile, he thought the driver would avoid the intense surveillance of Midtown. Silverton had started near the river and begun working up through a grid of streets he'd drawn up to guide his search. He'd been looking at video recordings for most of the day.

There were a lot of white vans in New York, a lot of them parked in garages. The one he was looking for might be on the street somewhere, in which case he'd never find it. The cops were on the lookout for the license plate, but Silverton thought the bad guys would have stashed it in a garage. It's what he would've done, if he were a terrorist. Why risk being towed, or the casual vandalism of parking on the street?

He was looking at recordings from a garage on Avenue B when he saw it. He ran the recording back and forth a few times to be sure, but there was no question. It was the license plate he was looking for.

Silverton called his boss and told him what he'd found.

"You're sure about it, Jock?"

"Yes, sir, I am. It's the right make and model, and the license plate matches the rental contract."

"Is there a sign on it?"

"Yes, sir. It says Azari Brothers, Heating and Air-Conditioning."

"You're sure about the license plate."

"Absolutely."

"Good work, Jock. Would you like to be there when we check it out?"

"Yes, sir, I would."

An hour later Silverton sat in an idling, unmarked car with three other agents, parked a half block away from the entrance to the garage. It was the middle of the afternoon in New York. The Special Agent in Charge was a man named Matthews. The other two agents were Phillips and Dodge. All four men wore blue suits and forgettable ties. Anyone looking at them couldn't fail to mistake them for cops of one kind or another. All of them had hair cropped short in a style that was almost military. They all had the sort of clean-cut look that would have made J. Edgar Hoover proud. Looking at his fellow agents, Silverton had a sudden thought that he'd somehow ended up in a 60s movie with James Stewart. He often had heretical thoughts like that. He quickly suppressed it.

"It's unlikely these guys are anywhere around," Matthews said. "All the same, make sure you're locked and loaded. Everybody set?"

Nods all around.

Matthews put the car in gear and drove forward to the entrance. A sign advertised a special half hour rate at $12.50. Across the way, on the exit side of the garage, a man sat reading a newspaper in a booth. Matthews stopped the car and got out. He walked over to the booth and rapped on the glass.

Matthews showed his badge. The attendant slid a glass panel open.

"This garage is temporarily closed," Matthews said.

"I can't do that," the man said. "What about the customers? What if someone wants their car?"

"We won't be long," Matthews said, "but we need to look at a vehicle in here. We don't want anyone coming in or out."

"Is there going to be trouble?"

"No trouble. But don't let any new vehicles in. Keep people out."

"I gotta call my boss."

"You do that. In the meantime, open the gate for us, and then lock the place down."

"But…"

Matthews gave the man a hard look. "Do it, if you know what's good for you."

He walked back to the car, waited for the gate to lift, and drove into the building.

The garage was large. It had three levels, two of them below ground. Hundreds of cars filled the spaces. Matthews followed a winding path down to the lowest level of the building. Everything was lit with harsh fluorescent light. They reached the bottom level and continued to the back, where the access road turned back toward the upper levels. The van was parked against the back wall, nose in to the corner.

Matthews stopped the Ford in the middle of the road and shut down the motor.

"Jock, take a video while we look. Stream it back to the office."

The four men got out of the car. Silverton made the connection back to the office with his phone and stood a few feet away from the van, recording. He took a close up of the license plate, then focused on Matthews and the others.

Matthews walked to the van and peered inside the driver side window.

"I don't see anything except fast food trash on the floor. I can't see into the back, there's a screen in the way."

He pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and tried the door.

"Locked. Figures."

"How about the back?" Dodge said.

Matthews came around to the back. The van had a double door set up. There were no windows in the doors. He tried the handle. It was unlocked.

"We're in luck," Matthews said.

He pulled open the door.

The explosion blew the doors off and ripped through the roof of the van, hurling razor-sharp shards of steel into the air. One of the doors smashed into Matthews, crushing him against the back wall. The other struck Dodge and almost cut him in half. A vicious tongue of flame and debris caught Silverton and Phillips where they stood, lifting them off their feet and throwing them across the roadway. Their clothes caught fire, but neither man could feel it. Both were dead before they hit the ground.

Sprinklers erupted throughout the garage, raining down on the blazing van and the smoldering bodies of the agents.

Somewhere, an alarm began a frantic ringing.