The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

The Devil to Pay by David Edgerley Gates

FROM Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

TOMMY MEADOWS WAS COMING back down from Riverdale, where he’d gone to see his grandma, who was up there in an assisted living facility since May. Not the worst, either, the nursing staff cheerful, familiar with everybody by name, the meals okay, even if the food was mostly stuff you could gum, and the lawns sloped down to the Hudson, so if the weather was nice, you could take the old girl outside for a turn around the grounds in her wheelchair. But when it was rainy or too cold, all the alter kockers were lined up in the day room, watching Judge Judy, with blankets over their knees and oxygen feeds in their noses.

Better than state correctional, you might say.

Tommy had just done fourteen months in Dannemora, and he was out on probation but living with his mom, so although he had to make the weekly meet with his PO, at least he didn’t have to get an actual job. His old lady was letting him stay in the apartment over the garage, and as long as he forked over four hundred a month, it didn’t bother her where the money came from. She was long past caring how Tommy made the vig. He’d been in and out of Juvie since he was fourteen, and done hard time twice as an adult. For his part, he let her self-medicate with Old Mr. Boston, which was her idea of a hot date, and they got along just fine.

He was in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, the seafood pan-roast combo and a glass of white wine. He’d started out on cherrystone clams and a bloody mary shooter, and he was thinking he’d finish off with a half-dozen local bluepoints.

A couple of stools down, two guys were talking.

“You know what a pack of smokes goes for in New York these days? Ten bucks.”

“You couldn’t buy toenail clippers for less than ten bucks, and that’s cheap,” the other guy said.

“You know what a carton of smokes costs down South, one of the tobacco-growing states? Thirty bucks. You load up a truck, you double your money, you sell it under the counter.”

“If you don’t get caught with North Carolina revenue stamps on the product.”

“I’m just saying.”

“You just keep talking out your ass,” the other guy said.

The first guy dropped his voice. “This is money in the bank,” he said. “You make the investment, pay off the truck and the driver, it’s gonna return fifty large, no downside risk.”

If it’s not your money, Tommy thought.

That’s what the other guy thought, too. “Looks good on paper,” he said. “But the plain fact is, you’ve got nothing but a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.”

“Let me talk to my guy, Jack, see what he’ll do for us.”

“You do that,” Jack said. He got up.

Tommy had made this kind of pitch himself. He knew it was a hard sell. Guys like Jack were at the top of the food chain and didn’t need bottom feeders. It was the same the world over.

Tommy decided to order the bluepoints.

Tommy always had something working, nothing that was going to knock down fifty large, maybe, but it was better to stay under the radar. You got too ambitious, you attracted the wrong kind of attention. Which in fact was why he’d been inside. His brother Roy, rest in peace, had tried for a big score and gotten his dick handed to him. There was serious gang muscle involved and Tommy knew to take himself off the street until the heat blew over, so he pled to a bullshit accessory charge and went up the river for a year and change.

The thing about doing time is, your time isn’t your own. In a max facility like Clinton, you’re on the clock 24/7. So you get with the program. Wake up, chow line, work detail. And no such animal as privacy. Nights, there’s bed check. If you got on the wrong side of the screws, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye.

It was an enormous luxury, then, for Tommy to just lie in bed in the mornings and watch the early light play off the ceiling. No bells, no PA system, nobody with a hard-on and a bad attitude ready to give him grief. He kept to a routine all the same. Brushed his teeth, started the coffee, made the bed. The studio apartment wasn’t much, God’s honest truth, but it was his, and he wanted his self-respect more than he wanted to hook up. Not that it was monastic, but he made the effort to keep it squared away.

The other thing he tried to keep neat was his perimeter. One of the conditions of his probation was that he not associate with known felons. This was, of course, a joke, since pretty much everybody in Tommy’s circle of friends, going back to grade school, had gotten jammed up with the law, one way or another. Mostly petty theft, but a couple of guys in the heavy. He knew to steer wide of them. There was no point in giving his PO reason to violate him. Basically, he was keeping his head down.

Not that he didn’t keep his ear to the ground. There was always some graft you could put your hand to. A week ago, he’d been down in Maryland. He wasn’t supposed to leave the state, not without permission, but what the hey? The old lady expected her rent.

He picked up his beard in Gaithersburg, and they trawled some local gun shops. Browning nines were pricey, Glocks were a glut on the market. Gangbangers were into the Brownings, the more pimped out the better. He even found a nickeled 1911, not his own weapon of choice, if he had to choose, but covering a rough circle of two hundred miles, they picked up two dozen guns Tommy could take back to New York. He cleared fifty a pop with his wholesaler. Easy in, easy out. It wasn’t up to him to meet the buyers. Shooters weren’t always the most pliable clients.

On the low end, he fenced credit cards. This was only good for about forty-eight hours, until the issuing bank closed them down. Still, it was bread and butter. He knew he was coasting.

And then it fell in his lap.

Brooklyn South was sucking hind tit, and Babs DiMello was taking heat from her lieutenant.

“I’m not trying to be a complete jerk, here, Detective,” he asked her, “but why are we stuck on the dime?”

Whenever somebody tells you they’re not trying to be a complete jerk, they probably mean the exact opposite, Babs knew, but she was as frustrated as he was. The problem was the Russians. These days the Russian mob had their hooks into everything from white slavery to identity theft, and they took no prisoners. They were brutal with the competition. A war of attrition with a rival Jamaican posse known as the Dreads was just coming to a long and bloody close, mostly because both sides were exhausted by it, and turf wars were bad for business all around. Somebody, maybe whatever was left of one of the old Mafia families, had brokered a grudging lay-down. The capos had lost much of their juice, but you could still go to them for remediation. They knew from settling scores. Then there were the new kids on the block, Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13, a Salvadoran gang that had interpenetrated the other crime syndicates, with an enormous presence in the federal prison system, where they recruited fresh meat. They hired out as muscle. Unhappily, the learning curve wasn’t steep.

“Babs, tell me, please, that you’ve turned up something, or anything, on the hijack at Kennedy.”

She understood the fork he was in. Homeland Security, the FBI, Port Authority, NYPD’s counterterrorist unit. They were raking the ground. Scorched earth. A shipment of military munitions, 5.56, bound for the Gulf, had been boosted. Not an armed robbery. The entire manifest had simply disappeared. It had to be an inside job. There was a leak, obviously, but who had the ammo now? On the open market, it was worth a million bucks. And there were motivated buyers. But it wasn’t the sellers so much that bothered the feds. The real question was the identity of the end user.

Babs wasn’t the only one to think the Russians had a hand in it, and with a buyer already lined up, but she had absolutely nothing to go on.

“I’m getting hammered,” the lieutenant said.

“I know that,” she said.

“Sorry to take it out on you.”

“Don’t do it, or don’t apologize,” she said.

He smiled. “I should have been looking for that,” he said. “You’re ornery, Babs, but that’s what makes you a good cop.”

“I’ve still got diddly-squat, Lieutenant.”

“I thought you had an inside guy at ATF.”

It was the kind of thing the lieutenant would remember. “Treasury agent named Chapin,” she said, “but he’s probably been shipped off to Missoula, Montana.”

“How come?”

“That thing a year and a half ago. The cell-phone scam. ATF had an oar in the water, and we stepped on their skirts. My guy took the fall for it. Senior in the office.”

“There was a low-end guy, too,” the lieutenant said.

“Roy Meadows.”

“Which started the pissing contest between the Russians and the Dreads.”

“Cleaned out the underbrush,” she said.

“The way I remember it, Roy had a baby brother.”

“Tommy. Went up on a minor accessory charge.”

“Figure he’s out by now?”

“I can find out.”

“Find out first whether your guy Chapin is still assigned to the New York office.”

“And if he is?”

“Oh, for John’s sake. I have to spell it out for you?”

“You want me to squeeze Chapin.”

“What else have we got?”

“We don’t have any leverage,” Babs said. “I can use him as a last resort, but it has to be a quid pro quo.”

“You need something to trade?” the lieutenant asked. “Pick up Tommy Meadows, see if he’ll sing for his supper.”

The operation had the code name Labyrinth. Its objective was simple. Deny the enemy access. The pooh-bahs at DOD didn’t have any real idea what they were up against. If radical Islam had brought the war to our shores, we were going to take it to them.

The “we” here was a private security outfit calling themselves Xynergistics. They had contracts with Defense and State as well as FBI and CIA counterterrorism. Their specialty was cyberwarfare, not physical security. They didn’t provide boots on the ground. They looked for virtual footprints.

Lydie Temple was following what appeared to be an anomaly.

Lydie was one of the senior analysts, although she was only twenty-six. She’d done a tour with Naval Security Group, one of the service cryptologic agencies, and then signed on with NSA, the brass ring, but the money in the private sector was too good to turn down, push came to shove.

There was a lot of that going around. Everything was pieced out these days. GIs didn’t pull KP anymore because outside contractors bid for food service to the military. Companies like Blackwater offered hazard pay to hired guns, protecting diplomats and aid workers in hot zones. CIA used what were known as proprietaries, the first of which had been Air America, in Vietnam, flying morphine base out of the Iron Triangle, to keep the Saigon regime afloat on China White. It was a turning world. Outsourcing was the rule, not the exception, and chief among its virtues was deniability, an advantage much prized by a beleaguered clandestine intelligence community.

Lydie had a marketable skill set, and the fact that her job paid her three times what she could pull down as a GS-25, major medical thrown in, didn’t make her feel dirty. It made her feel necessary.

Computer traffic can be broken down and analyzed any number of different ways. Much of it is simple brute force. The big mainframes at Fort Meade, NSA headquarters, crunched the traffic wholesale. Lydie had developed an algorithm that weeded out the chatter.

Everybody was up against the same problem, the sheer volume of information. Encoded or encrypted, it presented a different set of variables, but most of it was in the clear. Trying to sort it out, classify it by timeliness or perceived risk factor, was like bailing out a sinking ship with a soupspoon. You were overwhelmed, and the boat kept getting lower in the water.

Lydie’s bright idea had been to filter the communications not by red-flagging isolated vocabulary (jihad, say) or the user networks (Al Jazeera’s blog site, for example)-not that these weren’t useful-but by context. In other words, she mined the data for patterns rather than the specific. This allowed her a margin for error, but it also enabled her to build up a baseline, what was known in the trade as an order of battle. It didn’t indicate the individual airline shoe-bomber, unhappily, but it mapped the links between potential events, a schematic of decentralized command-and-control. Her information had led directly to a successful Predator drone strike against a cell in Yemen, and her star was on the rise.

What she was looking at, in the event, wasn’t context. It was odd in that it didn’t call attention to itself. It was out of her immediate field of vision, and it was too specific.

And naturally, she followed where it led.

Tommy’s PO was a hardheaded career court officer named Helen Torchio. Hardheaded, not hardhearted. She wasn’t foolish enough to think Tommy could be entirely reformed, but she had hopes he might be led toward the light. It was a disappointment to her when Detectives DiMello and Beeks showed up.

Tommy’s appointment that morning was at ten. The cops were there at a quarter to.

“He’s no angel,” Helen said to Babs DiMello.

“I was counting on that,” Babs said.

“What are you after?”

“Information.”

“Tommy’s rolled before,” Beeks said. He was the junior partner. Helen thought he was too ready to play the hard guy to DiMello’s soft and easy. Not that she made Babs for soft.

“Ground rules?” she asked.

Babs nodded. “We want to know if Tommy’s heard anything,” she said. “I understand there’s an issue. If he’s hanging with other homies who’ve done time, you could violate him.”

“I’d like not to see that happen,” Helen said.

“Understood,” Babs told her. “But there’s the carrot, and there’s the stick. Tommy gives up something useful, he’s got my marker. The question might arise how he came by it.”

“Makes it awkward,” Helen said.

“Awkward for Tommy,” Beeks said. “It gives us leverage.”

“I meant awkward for me, Detective,” Helen said.

Babs cut him a quick look. “Tommy knows how this game is played,” she said to the PO. “He plays it like a piano, and he doesn’t want to go back in the joint.”

“So you’re the carrot and I’m the stick,” Helen said.

“I don’t say I’m not trying to jam Tommy, but will you work with me on this?” Babs asked.

“We’re on the same team,” Helen said.

“Home-field advantage,” Babs said, smiling.

Tommy was a little taken aback to see the two cops waiting in his PO’s office, but he made a quick recovery. “Hey,” he said to Babs. “Detective DiMello. How you doing? Sorry, man,” he said to Pete Beeks. “I forgot your name.”

Beeks didn’t introduce himself.

“Tommy, we could use a little help,” Babs said.

“Sure.” Eager, disingenuous. It was his strong suit. And it helped that they were coming to him, not the other way around.

This was the tricky part, Babs knew. She didn’t want to give away all the cards in her hand, but unless she got into the details, Tommy wouldn’t know what she was after.

“I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” Helen Torchio said.

Tommy understood what that was about. She was telling him he wouldn’t violate the terms of his release if he gave the cops any of his current criminal associations.

“The way I remember,” Babs DiMello said, after Helen left the room, “your brother Roy had some kind of in with cargo handlers at JFK. Air freight, not passenger baggage. This ring a bell?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy said.

“I think there was some talk he knew more than he wanted to tell about the Lufthansa hit.”

Tommy nodded. Six million bucks, an inside job.

“Not a major player, of course, or he’d be farting through silk,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been working nickel-and-dime rackets like that cell-phone scam.”

“He might still be alive,” Tommy pointed out.

“You want to play with the big dogs, you have to learn to piss in the tall grass,” Babs said. “No disrespect, but Roy was never cut out to be a big dog. He didn’t have the chops.”

“Roy was only half smart,” Tommy said. “We both know it.”

“So don’t be half-assed, Tommy,” Beeks said.

“You haven’t told me what you want,” Tommy said.

“You still got a line into Port Authority?” Babs asked him.

“Their security’s a lot tighter these days, after 9/11.”

“It might leave something to be desired.”

“TSA couldn’t find the crack in their ass with a mirror.”

Babs smiled in spite of herself. “Well, there’s the crack in your ass, and then there’s the mirror,” she said.

“I hear stuff,” he admitted.

“What kind of stuff?” Babs asked.

Tommy shrugged. “I heard of a guy wants to smuggle a tractor-trailer load of smokes up from North Carolina,” he said.

“Useful, but not exactly what we’re looking for.”

“Hey, you wanted a for-instance.”

“For instance, what do you hear about an air cargo heist at JFK?”

“Give me a what, I might know a who,” he said.

So there it was. He had her in a fork. She had no choice but to spell it out. “A container shipment of 5.56 NATO. Going to Iraq. Somebody lost the manifest and made it disappear.”

“That’s some heavy lifting,” Tommy said.

“Somebody with more muscle than brains,” Beeks said. “Seem familiar?”

“I’d only be guessing, but my guess is probably the same as yours,” Tommy said. “Viktor Guzenko.”

No surprise there. Of the Russian gang lords, Guzenko was one of the most feared, both by the other ethnic crime families in Brighton Beach-even the Chechens, who weren’t scared of much-and by the older, more established New York mobs, Irish and Italian. Like the Jamaicans and the brutally violent MS-13, Guzenko settled his scores in blood. He was reported to have survived half-a-dozen assassination attempts by rivals and his own colleagues. If anybody was contemptuous of bringing down federal heat, Guzenko was your man. But it led nowhere. It was an educated guess, as Tommy had said.

“What can you find out?” Babs asked him.

“I’m not going to wear a wire,” Tommy said.

She looked at Beeks, surprised. Neither one of them had even thought to suggest it. Why so quick to say no to something they hadn’t put on the table?

“You think he’s blowing smoke?” Beeks asked her after they let Tommy go.

“Maybe he knows more than he’s ready to tell,” Babs said.

Of course, that was the impression Tommy wanted to leave. He’d played the cops before. They were always a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.

The question was what to give.

Not that Tommy had much to offer. He’d been bluffing Babs, and he knew better than to try and bluff the Russians. He’d gotten away with it once, and nobody had read his handwriting in it, but he didn’t think he’d luck out a second time.

DiMello had given him the lead, though. He knew Brooklyn South would have already squeezed the guys working the terminal, and the feds would have put them through the wringer, too, but you couldn’t get blood from a stone. Tommy figured the cops had drawn a blank, or they wouldn’t be grasping at straws. Thing was, after 9/11, security had tightened up, but more often than not, the new procedures simply made everything more inconvenient and cumbersome. They didn’t address the underlying problem and served to create grievances. The union rank and file didn’t appreciate being taken to task for something that wasn’t in fact their responsibility. Background checks were already strict. The heightened clearance requirements made for bad blood. Loss of seniority because your next of kin came from Pakistan was one step away from a class-action lawsuit.

Tommy had the one arrow in his quiver. Either the cargo handlers knew nothing or they were unwilling to speculate. You didn’t give the FBI the loose end of a ball of yarn, not if you might be open to uncomfortable questions, none of which had dick to do with international terrorism, but you were vulnerable.

Tommy knew a bar in South Ozone. He took the subway out to Queens.

You spring for a round of draft beers, it’s an investment.

Jeremy Chapin, she found out, was now heading up ATF regional out of Phoenix. AIC, agent in charge, so on paper it was a promotion, but if you read the runes, it might just as easily be a career ender.

“Detective DiMello,” he said when Babs got him on the phone. “Good to hear from you.” He sounded as if he meant it, and Babs felt a little guilty, since she’d played an inadvertent part in getting him reassigned from the New York office.

“I’ve got a situation here,” she said. She told him about the Kennedy hijack. “There’s a Russian gangster named Guzenko who might have a piece of it, but nobody’s talking. They’re all either bought off or scared.”

“Georgian, actually,” Chapin said.

“Sorry?”

“Guzenko’s a Georgian, like Joe Stalin.”

“You know him?”

“Not personally, but I hear he’s a ruthless bastard.”

“Who can he sell to, that kind of volume?”

Chapin grunted. “I could point you at some guys,” he said. “Across the border from El Paso, the Juarez cartel.”

“Drug lords.”

“It’s a free-fire zone down there, you hadn’t heard. The gangs are whacking each other ten or a dozen a day. And there’s a lot of collateral damage, civilian casualties.”

“With all due respect, you’ve got a dog in the fight.”

“Sure, it’s my area of responsibility,” Chapin said. “But you’re not going to sell 5.56 NATO to the muj or the rebels in Chechnya. Weapon of choice in that neck of the woods is the AK, 7.62 Soviet. Down in Mexico, it’s the M4.”

The M4 was a slightly shortened configuration of the M16, U.S. military issue. “How come?” Babs asked him.

Chapin blew out his breath. “Think about the provenance,” he said. “Where do the cartels get their guns? They don’t have a source for Warsaw Pact surplus weapons.”

“Right,” she said, catching up. “They smuggle guns in from the U.S.”

“So yeah, I’ve got a dog in the fight,” he said. “All the border states, this is heavy traffic. The hot-button issue is illegals, but that’s bullshit. What comes north is drugs, what goes south is guns and money. You want a market for ammo? You could turn that stuff in forty-eight hours, cash money.”

“How do I get it there?”

“Label it plasma-screen TVs. How the hell do I know? All I know is, it slips through the cracks each and every day.”

“Big crack, for containerized cargo to fall through.”

There was a long hesitation on the Arizona end of the line.

She could picture him frowning. “Containerized?” he asked.

“Yeah, we’re talking a couple of million rounds.”

“What was it doing at JFK?”

“Waiting shipment.”

“No,” he said. “You ship containers by rail or sea. You can’t get something that size and weight on an aircraft, not even a C-5A Galaxy. A container would be across the river, at the docks in Jersey, or downstate, McGuire AFB. And it would be broken down into something manageable, thousand-pound pallets.”

“Not my information.”

“Either your information is mistaken or you’re looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope,” he said. “That container shouldn’t have been at Kennedy. It couldn’t be loaded as air freight.”

She studied the problem. “It would have come in by truck.”

“A semi could haul it. It could go out the same way.”

“Let me get back to you,” she said.

“Keep me in the loop,” Chapin said. He hung up.

He had Washington on speed dial, Babs figured. Maybe this was going to break open. ATF had resources she didn’t. Not that it mattered who made the case. Still, better if she stayed in front of the curve. The container. Where did that lead?

Xynergistics had good computer capacity, but nothing like the big arrays available to the intelligence community. Lydie Temple put her data together and ran it by her boss, and got his approval to forward the package to their NSA contact.

He e-mailed her back two hours later, which was way fast.

CALL ON THE SECURE LINE

RAPTOR

The cover name was an inside joke, a reference to Omnivore, the FBI targeted data-mining program, now on the shelf and collecting nothing but dust. NSA had newer-generation software.

Raptor was a career spook named Felix Soto.

Lydie went into the communications center and signed onto a terminal. It was a dedicated landline to Fort Meade.

Felix picked up at his end immediately. “I bow to genius,” he said.

She laughed. He was teasing, but she was pleased.

“Seriously,” he said. “You’re onto something. I bought some time on the Cray, and we’re showing consistency.” He was talking about one of the half-dozen supercomputers in the bowels of the agency. “How’d you snap to this?”

“Random pattern,” she said. “It was just background noise. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything.”

“Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty hard to miss.”

“How long have we been missing it?”

“You cut right to the chase, kid. We’ll walk the cat back. Hopefully, we can come up with a timeline.”

“It’s not of purely historical interest,” she said.

“You got that right,” Felix said. “We’re working against the clock. You know how much materiel is floating around out there, in transit, or waiting shipment? Any of it falls through the cracks, it’s a raft of grief.” He hung up.

Well. Out of her hands. The national security apparatus would grind into motion. It was unhappy that they were only now playing catch-up ball.

Because here was what Lydie had stumbled across. DOD, the Defense Department, contracted with common carriers, UPS and FedEx, long-haul freight companies like Old Dominion and United Van Lines and R &L, and they were on an approved list. But the other thing was that they all had websites. You could go on the Internet and schedule a pickup, a box of cookies you were sending your mom, for example, or a container cargo of 5.56 NATO, for another. Somebody had hacked into one of the websites and misdirected a shipment. Not your mom’s cookies, either.

How many shipments? she wondered.

According to Tommy’s guy, all you needed was a couple of cans of spray paint and some stencils.

“Containers are labeled,” the guy told him. His name was Kaufman. “Originating shipper, destination, routing logs. It’s written right on the box.”

“Everybody knows what’s inside?”

Kaufman shook his head. “They use an alphanumeric code, referencing the load ticket. The contents are on the manifest, not the container. What gets marked are the transit points. Yokohama to Los Angeles. L.A. to Biloxi. Every time that box transits a freight yard, the yard’s route number goes on it, and then it gets handed off to the next station of the cross.”

“What if the numbers are off?”

“Then it sits in Biloxi.”

Or at JFK. “How often does that happen?” Tommy asked.

“We don’t get many orphans.”

“What happens if you do?”

“You get dispatch to crosscheck.”

“Could something sit there for a week and not be noticed?”

Kaufman shrugged. “We move a lot of cargo,” he said. “The yardmaster has a clipboard full.”

“So the answer is yes.”

“I’ll tell you,” Kaufman said. “You could put a nuclear weapon in a container. You don’t ship it from Dubai, you send it through Singapore. It takes six weeks to get to New York. You fudge the numbers, it sits on a dock, unclaimed. You want I should spell it out any more?”

Tommy had been upstate when the Trade Center went down, but he didn’t need it spelled out for him.

“I don’t know what you’re sniffing around this for, Tommy,” Kaufman said, “but I smell trouble.”

“You know a hood named Viktor Guzenko?” Tommy asked.

Kaufman’s face shut like a door.

The agent from ATF’s New York office was a woman. Babs DiMello had to wonder whether that was just the luck of the draw or they’d sent another woman to soften Babs up. The name on her ID read Phoebe Kreuz. They were about the same age.

“Jeremy Chapin’s been burning up the wires,” Kreuz said.

“You getting any collateralization?”

“Other agencies? Sure.”

“What’s the FBI given up?” Babs asked.

“Well, the Bureau…” Kreuz paused. “You don’t change a culture overnight. They get ahold of something, if they’re the lead agency, they sink their teeth into it. And they’re used to protecting their turf. It’s like Hoover never died.”

“Like trying to turn the Titanic around.”

“More like trying to turn the iceberg,” Kreuz said.

She had a quick smile, and Babs was warming up to her.

“You’d be surprised at what turns up, if you cultivate a relationship,” Kreuz said. “For instance, Jerry Chapin tells me you’re the go-to gal, Brooklyn South.”

“That’s flattering.”

“I didn’t bring a box of chocolates, but I’ve got something to share. We’ve received specific intelligence.”

“FBI?”

Again the quick smile. “NSA,” Kreuz said. “You know what I’m talking about?”

Intercepted communications. “I hear the initials stand for No Such Agency,” Babs said.

“I can’t speak to sources and methods,” Kreuz said. “Plain fact is, I don’t know what their sources and methods are. But here’s what they came up with. War materiel is being rerouted. Somebody’s hacked the websites of the shippers.”

“Chapin said there was no way a container should be at JFK, because an aircraft couldn’t lift that kind of weight.”

“Why did it end up at Kennedy?”

“Ease of access,” Babs said.

“What happened to it?”

“It disappeared.”

“Yeah,” Kreuz said. “We’re having the same conversation everybody else has been having for a week. What’s different is, we know it’s not just a target of opportunity.”

“It’s not accidental. It’s organized.”

“That’s some serious diversion going on. There might be a host of corruption in Baghdad and Kabul, but we’re talking about stuff that never sees the Gulf.”

“Chapin says it’s going to the drug lords in Mexico.”

“I don’t care where it’s going. I want it to stay here, or we keep track of it, and it goes where it’s supposed to go.”

“You and me both,” Babs said. She had a brother serving in the National Guard, posted to Afghanistan.

“What about this Russian gangster, Guzenko?”

“I’m hitting a wall. These guys don’t rat each other out, or if they do, they’re dead before it ever gets to a grand jury. People in the life are terrified of Guzenko.”

“You get anything out of NYPD Organized Crime?”

“Known associates. Involvement in sex slavery, protection, identity theft. But it’s a lock nobody can pick.”

“Identity theft suggests some minimal computer literacy.”

“I see where you’re going,” Babs said. “Hacking the shippers’ websites. It’s not that I don’t make the guy for it, or that he’s not capable of it. The issue is, we’ve got nothing we could take to a judge. There’s no chain of evidence.”

“So we’re still sucking air.”

DiMello’s cell chimed. She looked at the caller ID. Tommy Meadows. “Wait one,” she said to Phoebe Kreuz.

Tommy was at a Starbucks near Prospect Park.

“Be there in ten,” Babs said. She broke the connection.

“Yes, no?” Kreuz asked.

“Maybe we got, maybe we don’t,” Babs said. She took her weapon out of the desk drawer and snapped it on her belt. She stood up. “You down with it?”

Kreuz opened her jacket to show a gun, strong-side carry. It looked to Babs like a steel-frame Sig, probably a.357 or.40 Smith.

“Let’s go buy this guy a cup of coffee,” Babs said.

Porfírio and Hernán were made men, MS-13, stone killers with teardrop tattoos at the outside corner of each eye, a trickle of dark ink, crocodile tears, one for every man they’d murdered. Porfírio was lean and quick, stripped down like a racecar, while Hernán was blocked out like a diesel truck, all the muscle between his ears. They’d met at Attica. They were in their late twenties, and already they had thirty years in the prison system between them, going back to Juvenile. Like other immigrants to the New World, the Italians and the Irish, Latinos and Chinese, some of them had turned to crime, muling drugs and illegals, but the Maras were enforcers. Porfírio and Hernán had never met the Vor, the boss of thieves, but they knew they were taking his money. Guzenko’s chosen intermediary was a man named Iosif Bagratyön, another Georgian.

He gave them a name and a photograph.

“¿Qué tan pronto?” Porfírio asked. How soon?

“As soon as you can,” the Georgian said.

“Does it matter where?” Porfírio asked.

“Near his workplace, or his family. Either one.”

“Are there special instructions?”

“Make it messy,” Bagratyön told them. “Make it hurt. Make it ugly. We want to send a message.”

Porfírio smiled. He enjoyed using a knife.

Brooklyn South liaised with ATF and Port Authority. They didn’t need a warrant. All they needed was enough people to cover the ground and maintain a security perimeter.

“Take it apart,” Babs’s lieutenant said. And they did.

They started at the north end of the cargo terminal and worked their way down. The paved area was three quarters of a mile deep, and the warehouse space was that again, most of it two stories. They checked all of it, cargo trailers, packed goods, pallets, and containers. If the containers were sealed, they opened the seals and locks, over the objections of the yard boss, who was responsible for the safety of shipping.

“I guess you’ve got the advantage of me, ma’am,” he said.

“Yes,” Phoebe Kreuz said. “I do.”

If what Kaufman had told Tommy was right, the container was possibly hidden in plain sight, overlooked and mislabeled.

They found one at the far end of the terminal. There was no matching manifest for the routing codes stenciled on the side of the box. The yardmaster looked embarrassed.

“Where did this come from?” the lieutenant asked him.

The guy looked in his book. “If the numbers are right, the originating shipment was out of Holloman AFB, in New Mexico.”

“Find out what the inventory was, and the date they shipped it.”

“Right.” The yard boss got on his cell phone.

“You think?” the lieutenant asked Babs.

She was looking at the numbers on the container. Holloman would be the first, then transit through Chicago or Atlanta or Louisville, which was a big repple-depple for UPS freight, and a final stateside destination before overseas delivery. It was the last number that must have been altered. You sprayed over the legitimate routing code with Rustoleum, aluminum flavor, or rust red, and stenciled in a bogus number in black. You only had to be off one digit. She didn’t blame the dispatcher. It was a hole in the system. But it had been exploited by somebody on the inside.

“Pick up Tommy’s source, this guy Kaufman,” she told Beeks.

“We need to sweat him.”

The yard boss put his hand over the phone. “Four hundred thousand square feet of AM-2 matting, for temporary airstrips, a load of desert camo, tents, tarps, boots and uniforms, and five million rounds of 5.56 hardball. Shipped ten days ago by common carrier.”

“Crack it open,” the lieutenant said.

They got the bolt cutters.

Phoebe Kreuz was the first one inside. The box was empty.

Lydie Temple had more than one arrow in her quiver. She was gratified when Felix Soto called back from Fort Meade to tell her that her lead had panned out and NSA had developed actionable intelligence to give ATF, but she decided to follow the virtual trail. Jack knows Jill is a single link and means nothing by itself. Likewise if Jill knows Joe. But if Joe happens to know Jack, you’ve squared a circle.

It was an oversimplification, but crudely accurate. You could model the data footprint in any number of ways. More than a few jihadi, for example, posted on Facebook, which made it possible to penetrate their cell systems, supposedly independent of one another. Jack and Jill are careless enough to tag Joe.

Another way to model the footprint was to monitor the servers, which is what Lydie was doing. When you went online, for whatever reason, e-mail, shopping, surfing the Net, you were signed on through an interface, a commercial provider like MSN or AOL, or some other networked facility, be it government, academic, the public library, a private employer. It was open-source, the web address could be tracked. There were in fact programs that could mimic a user’s individual keystrokes. Lydie was fishing in a deep pond.

Her particular target this time around was the crime ring that had hacked the freight shippers’ websites. It didn’t take genius, she knew that from experience. What it took was time, a feel for the world of cybersecurity, and maybe a lucky break. Lydie had the time, and an insider’s confidence she could pick pretty much any lock in virtual space. She was hoping she might catch some luck, like the other guy.

She’d personalized him. It was a convenient fiction, not that he was even necessarily a he, but she thought of him as Little Ivan, and she’d given him a profile. Probably not a career criminal, just some kid who’d been recruited because he was a computer geek. Into video games, built his own systems from generic components, knew enough code to write basic software, had a garage or a basement full of discarded CRT monitors, blown motherboards, old memory chips. Ivan was her own mirror image, the girl she’d grown out of but not outgrown.

She approached the problem from his point of view. To penetrate the websites, you had to reverse-engineer the security protocols, so first she familiarized herself with the navigation tools and began looking for a chink in the armor, but this got her nowhere. Each site was designed around a dedicated platform, which didn’t allow you to skip a step. You had to fill out a series of required fields in each window before you could access the next window. It was intended to idiot-proof shipping procedures, but it was cumbersome. Still, she had to exhaust the obvious. There might be an easy way in. Little Ivan had found it. There wasn’t. Lydie shifted her sights and began the more laborious process of finding the back door.

Kaufman had been turned inside out like a sock, skinned to the bone. At some point he’d lost control of his bladder and bowels, but his bowels had been left in a slippery heap between his knees. The EMTs were shoveling him off the pavement and into a body bag. Babs DiMello had talked to the crime scene techs and gotten no joy. They could give her a time frame, but that was about it.

“No witnesses,” Phoebe Kreuz, the ATF agent, said.

“Fat chance,” Babs told her.

“We know this is related to the hijack.”

Babs shrugged. “How not?” she asked. “Somebody’s cleaning up the loose ends.”

“Guzenko?”

“My guess. But here’s what you have to understand. The guy doesn’t sit on his hands. Even if he had nothing to do with the hijack, he’d circle the wagons. He doesn’t want it walked back to him. He eliminates the chain of evidence. Anything and everybody. Nuns, pregnant mothers, you name it.”

“Collateral damage.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Who’s next on his list?”

Babs glanced at the EMTs scooping Kaufman up. “If it were me they went to work on, I would have given up a name.”

“Any name?”

Babs was thinking Tommy Meadows.

Tommy knew he was on the dime. He’d overplayed his hand with Kaufman, and if word got back to the Russians, they’d be paying Tommy a visit. Tommy didn’t welcome the attention. Last time around he’d managed to stay out of sight, but last time around he’d had a counterweight.

What could he use this time?

Don’t be half-assed, the cops had told him, meaning don’t be a wise guy who wasn’t wised up, like his brother Roy, but Guzenko was sucking all the air out of the room, and Tommy was fighting for breath. There had to be an angle he could play, or a stalking horse, somebody he could throw under the bus.

He caught the train into midtown and went to talk to Nico Constantine. Nico was his wholesaler, the guy he’d gone to Maryland to buy guns for. Nico was down with the Westies, the Irish mob that operated out of Hell’s Kitchen and along the West Side waterfront, but he was equal opportunity. You could be a Mick or an Italian, a Latin gangbanger, a Vietnamese punk, or a Rasta. The only color that mattered to Nico was green.

Tommy knew this was going to be delicate. Word had gotten around about the Kennedy heist, and there was heat from the feds, so he couldn’t come right out and ask. He had to churn the waters. Nico, like a shark, would sniff the bait.

They met at a bar on Eleventh. Tommy stood the drinks, Stoli on the rocks for Nico, Jameson’s and a bump back for himself.

Tommy eased into it. “I’ve got a buyer,” he said. He took a sip of his whiskey and chased it with a swallow of beer.

“Provenance?” Nico asked. He meant, how did they happen on you?

“Couple of guys I met upriver,” Tommy said. “Dirty white boys. Took a fall on a state beef, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer.”

“Retards, in other words,” Nico said.

“Smart guys don’t do hard time.”

“Smart guys don’t get caught. Who are these morons to me?”

“It’s a militia group in the Adirondacks.”

“Oh, real morons. We talking Timothy McVeigh?”

“I don’t think they’re looking to blow up buildings with fertilizer bombs. They want to stockpile guns and ammo, waiting on the end times, civil disorder.”

Nico snorted. “End times,” he said. “Maybe it’ll clean up the gene pool, weed out some of those skinheads.”

“Cash money, all the same,” Tommy said.

“What do they want?” Nico asked him.

“M4s, modified for full auto, 5.56 hardball, mil spec.”

Nico shook his head. “The guns, not that easy, but ammo, I might have a source.”

Tommy veered away. “Why are the guns so hard?”

“Gimme a break,” Nico said. “Selective fire? Weapons like that don’t fall off a turnip truck.”

“What’s your price point?”

“What kind of quantity are we talking?”

“Twenty thousand rounds.”

“Let me do the math,” Nico said.

“Turnaround time?” Tommy asked.

Nico shrugged. “I need to call some people,” he said.

“I need to get back to my guys with a ballpark.”

“You need to give it a rest. We’re not selling Mary Kay.”

Lydie had piggybacked an Internet server that hosted a regional company called Southwest Air Cargo, out of Albuquerque. They were a subsidiary of a larger international freight carrier headquartered in Toronto. Once she’d signed on and created a dummy account, it took her the better part of the day to walk it back to an outfit called CyberResources.com, but their website was firewalled. She e-mailed Felix Soto at NSA. He flagged her back inside the hour with surveillance logs on the target, its physical location, direct contact information for ATF’s New York office, and authorization for a FISA warrant.

“Ten out of ten,” he added in a postscript. “How do I get you back?”

I couldn’t afford the pay cut, she almost answered, but it wouldn’t have been the exact truth. What she’d surrender, if she went back to Fort Meade, was her independence. Lydie enjoyed having her autonomy. She relished the occasional compliment, but she didn’t miss being under NSA authority. Felix Soto was a better than decent boss. What got in the way was politics.

She called ATF. They patched her through to a cell.

“Kreuz.” The voice was a woman’s.

Lydie hesitated.

Agent Kreuz let her hang in the dead air.

“I’ve got the Guzenko computer penetration,” Lydie said.

“Your place or mine?”

“Whichever works.”

“Meet you at Brooklyn South,” the ATF agent said. She rang off.

Not a lot of bedside manner, Lydie thought. She picked up her paperwork and downloaded the rest onto a flash drive. Push comes to shove, do a core dump. The habits of NSA culture.

Bay Ridge, just off the expressway at Sixty-fifth. A neighborhood shopping plaza, shoe repair, manicures, a tanning salon, Chinese takeout, dry cleaning, a liquor store. Mom-and-pop, generic and modest. CyberResources was an end unit. Fax and copy services, computer repair, photo and graphics, web access. The ATF agent, Phoebe Kreuz, had the lead, with Babs and her team in support. They took it down at noon.

There were three people working in the shop, one at the counter up front, for customer service, a tech at the back, trying to recover files from a damaged hard drive, and the boss, in her office. The first order of business was to deny them immediate telephone access, and the cops smothered them like a blanket, no cuffs, all courtesy, but patting them down and confiscating their cells. The woman who owned the business went through the usual boilerplate. Kreuz and DiMello ignored her.

“This isn’t Russia,” the woman protested angrily.

Lydie Temple was fascinated. She knew this to be her Little Ivan, not the avatar she’d imagined, a college dropout obsessed with video games, but a tough, middle-aged pro. Her dossier with Homeland Security identified her as Ludmilla Shevardnadze, a legal immigrant from Tbilisi, with an MBA and a second master’s in computer science. She was on the pad with Guzenko for five large a month. After her initial bluster, she folded almost immediately. She had experience of the security services in her home country, after all. They were the same the world over. You played ball or they dropped you down a well.

“Who’s this guy Bagratyön?” Phoebe Kreuz asked DiMello.

“Joe Bags, he’s Guzenko’s consigliere.”

“I want witness protection,” Ludmilla said to them.

“We’ll negotiate,” Kreuz told her. “You keep talking. The deal comes later.”

“I’ll stop talking.”

“No, you won’t. I can render you back to Georgia inside of seventy-two hours, without a hearing. You’re on a felony beef, toots. You think Guzenko can get to you here? You don’t figure he can get to you while you’re sunbathing by the Black Sea?”

“Suka,” Ludmilla muttered. Bitch.

“You got that right,” Phoebe said to her.

Lydie was exploring the computer array.

“What have we got?” Babs asked.

“She left a big footprint,” Lydie said.

“Can you break it down?”

“Probably, given some time.”

“We don’t have a window,” Kreuz said. “Where’s the cargo?”

Nico thumped the canister on the table. Olive drab. It weighed sixty pounds. One thousand rounds of 5.56, full metal jacket.

“Three hundred dollars,” he said. “Round numbers, if we’re talking twenty boxes, six thousand.”

Tommy looked at Beeks.

Beeks had gone white sidewall. He didn’t have jailhouse tats, but he looked like a high school hockey coach from Saranac Lake, which fit the profile.

“Earnest money,” Tommy said.

Beeks counted it out, uncomfortably, which fit the profile, too. He was supposed to be a rube in the big town.

“When do we do this?” Tommy asked.

“Tonight,” Nico said.

“Your call,” Tommy said.

Beeks had his cell phone out.

“Put that away,” Nico said.

Beeks looked at him, surprised, but he folded it closed.

“No surprises,” Nico said to Tommy.

“Six K, Tommy gets ten percent,” Beeks told DiMello.

Babs nodded. It would be marked money, of course, and Nico wasn’t going to have it for long, but they needed the full amount to make the buy or there’d be no case. “Can we shake it out of 100 Centre?” she asked the lieutenant.

Shorthand for Police Plaza, NYPD headquarters. “It’s worth a shot,” the lieutenant said.

Babs figured the odds were good they’d get it. If they could break the Kennedy heist, there’d be plenty of credit to go around, and everybody involved would be rolling in clover.

“You run the numbers?” the lieutenant asked.

Lydie Temple had downloaded the image from Beeks’s cell. There was a control code stamped on the ammo box, and she compared it to the manifest from Holloman AFB. She got a match. Nico was fencing military supplies.

“Twenty ammo canisters out of five hundred,” the lieutenant said. “Who’s bidding on the rest?”

Babs looked at Phoebe Kreuz. “ATF in Phoenix thinks it’s going to be sold to the Mexican cartels,” she said. “That’s an educated guess.”

“I’m not saying Jerry Chapin’s wrong,” Phoebe said, “but if the cartels were the end buyer, it would be a done deal.”

“I see where you’re going,” Babs said. “Nico Constantine’s not a big enough player to swing a million-dollar sale.”

“If he can lay his hands on it and piece out a part of the shipment, then it’s still in New York.”

“We have surveillance on Nico?” the lieutenant asked.

“We do,” Phoebe said, meaning ATF.

“Either he picks up the munitions or, more likely, arranges a physical meet, because he can’t front the money, he needs his buyer there,” the lieutenant said. “So a warehouse, a pallet on the back of a truck, whatever. He has to make contact.”

“Nice to get a photo op with Guzenko,” Babs said.

“They won’t meet face-to-face, not until the buy, if then,” Phoebe said. “It’ll be the other guy, Guzenko’s bagman.”

“Can you monitor his phone calls?” the lieutenant asked.

“Nico? Not if he’s using a throwaway cell.”

Lydie Temple cleared her throat.

“Ma’am?” the lieutenant asked her.

“I know somebody who might help,” she said.

“And who would that be?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” she told him.

The lieutenant raised his eyebrows.

“Is this the same source that gave us Ludmilla Shevardnadze and the computer shop?” Phoebe Kreuz asked.

Lydie nodded.

“I’d trust it,” Phoebe told the lieutenant.

“Okay,” he said. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, people. We’ve got what’s-her-butt, so we know how they hacked into the shippers’ websites, and she’ll roll over on Guzenko to avoid deportation. We’ve also got Nico Constantine, who’s ready to sell us stolen goods. What we’re missing is a direct connection between Guzenko and the contraband. Let’s find it.”

They broke up to work the phones.

Nico called at seven. Tommy was at a bar off Ocean Parkway, watching a rerun of Highlander on cable, playing with a plate of Buffalo wings and nursing a beer. Nico gave him a location, a time, and very specific instructions. Then he hung up. The chicken wings had gotten cold and gummy. Tommy didn’t have much appetite. His stomach was sour.

Truth be told, he really didn’t want to make the meet. He was setting Nico up, and when it went down, you wouldn’t have to be a particle physicist to read Tommy’s part in all of it. But he didn’t have a choice. The cops had him over a barrel, and who knew from the Russians? Maybe it was back to front, and Nico was the one setting Tommy up. Word on the street was already out about what had happened to Kaufman, turned skinside inside, his guts in his lap, and a Colombian necktie, his throat cut and his tongue hanging out underneath his jaw.

A lesson for a fink. If you eat with the devil, use a long spoon.

No help for it. Tommy pushed the plate of wings away uneaten and settled his tab. On the sidewalk outside, he called Beeks. They had forty-five minutes.

“Is there enough time for you to make this happen?” Lydie asked.

She was on an unsecured line to Felix Soto.

Felix wasn’t happy talking on an open phone, but it was a calculated risk. Chances were nobody was intercepting their conversation, except for NSA, of course. “Satellite uplink,” he said.

“Neither of these guys is going to be wearing a wire.”

“Understood. All we need is a cell phone.”

She gave him Beeks’s number. “They’ll be frisked when they go in,” she said, “and Guzenko’s security will disable the cells first thing. You’ll lose the signal.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Once we triangulate the meeting place, we can monitor the EM radiation. The other guys, cell or landline.”

She knew Felix controlled the technology.

“Any idea of the general neighborhood?” he asked.

“Brighton Beach,” she told him.

“So it’s not the actual handover.”

“Guzenko doesn’t want to buy a pig in a poke.”

“They bury their mistakes, the Georgians,” Felix said.

Café Kavkaz was in the shadow of the elevated tracks, the Q line that took you to Coney Island a couple of stops down.

The restaurant on the ground floor was long and low, with pressed-tin ceilings and old wooden paddle fans that stirred the air only slightly. The lighting was subdued but not dim. At the front, there were booths along one wall, the seats furnished in worn burgundy leather, and a bar along the other. Table seating was toward the back. There was a small stage and a three-piece balalaika band. The room’s acoustics were hard, and the noise level high, the place better than half full.

Nico was waiting at the bar when Tommy and Beeks walked in. He waved them over. He was drinking Moskovskaya, straight up in a chilled glass, with lemon peel. He signaled the bartender for two more. Not that it would have been Tommy’s choice. His guts were churning with anxiety.

They clicked rims.

Nico knocked his drink back. “Check out those two cougars on the prowl,” he said, grinning, lifting his chin.

Tommy glanced over his shoulder.

DiMello and Kreuz looked the part, he thought, sharp pants suits, good haircuts, neither one of them a dog. Kreuz was teasing the bartender, talking the virtues of a flight of vodka, a tasting. DiMello was babbling away mindlessly on her cell.

“We’re not here to talk pussy,” Beeks said.

Nico shrugged. “They’ll still be here when we’re done, and maybe drunk enough by then to handle a twofer.”

If you wanted your back broken and your limp dick handed to you, Tommy thought.

The headwaiter came over. “Your table is ready,” he said.

They followed him. He took them to a stairway next to the kitchen.

“Private room,” Nico said.

The headwaiter tipped his head. They went upstairs without him.

The muscle was waiting for them on the second floor. They patted them down, as Lydie had predicted, and took their cell phones, Nico’s too. They shook out the batteries and handed them back. Nico suddenly seemed less confident about where this was all going. Tommy had no confidence at all.

It was a long railroad corridor. There were in fact a couple of private dining rooms to either side, which they passed, but the office was at the very back of the building, and they went in.

Bagratyön was waiting.

It was very basic. A desk, a phone. No computer. Some old oak filing cabinets that might have dated back to the Truman administration. It wasn’t a command post. It was a trap.

“Your buyer,” Bagratyön said. “Who is he?”

“Six thousand,” Beeks told him. He put it on the table and stepped back.

Bagratyön ignored him. “That wasn’t what I asked,” he said to Nico.

“Tommy’s never played me false,” Nico said, getting some balls, finally. “He comes to me with a deal, you can take it to the bank.”

Tommy wasn’t sure he enjoyed the compliment. Bagratyön was leaning over the desk, his weight on his fists, but there was somebody else in the room, watching from the shadows. It had to be the Vor, the boss of thieves.

“Nothing’s in the bank,” Bagratyön said.

“The money’s right there,” Nico said.

Bagratyön shook his head. “We put our trust in you, Nico,” he said, almost sadly, “but we punish betrayal.”

“What’s going on?” Beeks asked. “Are we doing the deal or not?”

“The answer is not,” Bagratyön said.

“This isn’t right,” Beeks said, turning to Nico.

“We’ll make it right,” Nico said.

Tommy knew it wasn’t going to happen.

Guzenko stepped forward, into the light. He gestured to the two bodyguards. “Take them outside and kill them,” he said.

The SWAT unit went in front and back, on DiMello’s signal. Babs and Kreuz were already at the head of the stairs.

There was a third bodyguard in the hallway, covering the door to the office. He barked something in Russian and drew his weapon.

Kreuz dropped to a crouch and put him down, two center chest, one to the head, the Mozambique drill, so called, in case he was wearing body armor. The shots were incredibly loud in the enclosed space. Babs slipped past Kreuz and took up position on the far side of the door. Kreuz moved up. SWAT was crowding into the stairwell.

“Federál’naya polítsiya,” Kreuz called, to be heard through the closed door. “Bez pomogí.”

It figured the ATF agent would speak Russian, Babs thought. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it meant business.

“Sdavat’sya,” a man’s voice called back from inside.

Kreuz nodded to the lead SWAT uniform, who’d come up behind her, the rest of his team lining the corridor, weapons at the ready. He drove a kick at the lockset, putting his full weight behind it. The jamb splintered and the door sagged open. He ducked away, his M4 at battery, full auto, safety off. Kreuz and DiMello went in and immediately stepped back to either side of the door, so they were out of SWAT’s field of fire.

There were seven guys in the room, six of them with their hands behind their heads. Even the consigliere, Bagratyön, was alarmed by the show of force. Only the one guy, standing a little to the left of the desk, seemed indifferent, his lizard’s eyes almost sleepy. Guzenko. Babs felt a chill.

“Vnizú,” Agent Kreuz snapped at them. “Down,” she repeated in English.

They all hit the deck. Again, except for Guzenko.

“Sergeant,” she said, over her shoulder.

SWAT used plastic flex cuffs on the three Georgians and the three Americans and got them to their feet.

“Where is it?” Phoebe Kreuz asked Guzenko. “Gde est’?”

“Yëb tvoyu mat’,” he told her.

Babs had heard enough Russian to know what he’d said.

“We’ve got you for trafficking,” Phoebe said. “You want to avoid the hard time and a trip back to Tbilisi, your choice.”

He said the same thing again.

“Man of few words,” Phoebe remarked to Babs.

The others had been led out, and the room was empty now but for the three of them.

“We’ve got Ludmilla,” Babs said to him. “And your tough guys will crack, they always do. You give us the cargo, you can plead down. It’s a one-time offer.”

Guzenko didn’t answer her. He stepped over to the desk and began emptying his pockets.

God save us from the hard guys, Babs thought. Usually they folded under pressure, to save their own skins, but Guzenko was immune to threat. She looked at Phoebe. Phoebe shrugged.

Guzenko patted his jacket. He looked at what he’d laid out on the desk. He leaned down and slid open one of the drawers.

“No,” Babs said sharply.

He put his hand inside the desk drawer.

Phoebe Kreuz shot him before he took it out. The.40 Smith caught him in the bridge of the nose. His head snapped back. The exit wound pasted brains and bone fragments to the wall, and Guzenko dropped like a wet bag of sand.

Babs went and looked in the desk drawer. There was no gun. He’d been reaching for a disposable cigarette lighter.

Kreuz reholstered. She looked at the dead man on the floor and then into the drawer. “Oh,” she said. “My bad.”

Bagratyön knew where the bodies were buried, literally. He gave up everything he could in hopes of a reduced sentence. There was the money-laundering trail, and Guzenko’s likely successor in the chain of command, a road map to the crew’s structure and operations, even the two Maras, Porfírio and Hernán, Kaufman’s killers, although they proved impossible to trace. And last but not least, a complete inventory of black-market goods.

It was in a warehouse off the Shore Parkway, near a marina out by Floyd Bennett Field. They found the ammo and the rest of the stolen cargo from Holloman, along with laptops, digital LCD monitors, computer peripherals, unlicensed software, pirated DVDs, Rolex counterfeits, generic pharmaceuticals, power tools, auto parts, and fifty cases of fruit-flavored condoms.

“It’s a good bust, DiMello,” the lieutenant told her.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“Too bad we couldn’t take Nico Constantine down with them.”

“Fortunes of war, Lieutenant.”

“There’ll be a next time. Guy like that, he’ll step on his dick, sooner or later.”

“I’ll forward his case jacket to Manhattan Midtown.”

“You square things with Tommy’s PO?” he asked.

She nodded.

“That kid’s got nine lives,” the lieutenant said.

The issue was, they couldn’t pop Nico without violating Tommy, so they had to maintain the fiction that Nico and Tommy, and Beeks, undercover, in character as the upstate buyer from some Aryan brotherhood, were side cards to the main event. They got a pass. There was no other way to play it.

But it gave Babs a marker she could call in down the road. She had Tommy’s balls in her pocket, and he knew it.

Not that he’s worried. One thing at a time, is how Tommy deals. He’s up in Riverdale again, visiting his grandmother. It’s a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, with just enough breeze off the river that she needs a lap robe. He’s pushing her around the grounds in her wheelchair. The gravel on the path crunches underfoot. He’s telling her a story, full of gangsters and gunrunners. She doesn’t really follow it. Too complicated, too many foreign names, too many people she doesn’t know.

She’s happy enough with the sound of his voice.