The Prince of Risk

13

The call had come in three days earlier.

A woman in Long Island phoned the hotline claiming to have witnessed her neighbor unloading crates of military hardware from his car at three in the morning. The report was verified and a written copy forwarded to CT-26, where it landed on Alex’s desk.

The mention of military hardware graded the call “urgent.” Alex vetted the source herself. The woman was named Irene Turner and lived in Inwood, a scruffy lower-middle-class neighborhood on the southern tip of Long Island. Inwood had plenty of temporary residents, some organized crime, and a significant foreign-born population, but it was the town’s proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, a major international freight hub, that piqued her curiosity and made the hackles on the back of her neck stand up.

“I saw guns,” the woman named Irene Turner explained.

“Really? What kind?”

“Well, actually boxes full of guns.”

“Boxes of guns?”

“They were really crates with markings on them. I’m Russian. The writing was Cyrillic.”

Alex hadn’t caught an accent. “Have you lived here long?”

“Since I was four. My parents were refuseniks. We emigrated in 1982. I have my American passport.”

Alex’s interest ratcheted up a notch. “Please go on.”

“It was past three in the morning. I don’t sleep. I was downstairs in the kitchen making coffee. From my window, I can see into his garage. Of course, he doesn’t know this. Otherwise he would think I’m some kind of crazy for watching him so much.”

“Do you know your neighbor’s name?”

“Oh, no. We don’t speak. He moved in a couple of months back, but I don’t see him much. He’s nice-looking. About thirty. Tall. Fit.” She giggled. “He has a nice behind.”

Alex began to get a picture of Irene Turner. Thirty-five years old. Single. Lonely. A life lived looking through windows. “About the guns…”

“Yesterday night he came home late. He opened the back of his truck and that’s when I saw them. The crates. Green with rope handles…”

“And Cyrillic writing on the side.”

“It said Kalashnikov.”

“Excuse me, Ms. Turner, I don’t mean to be rude, but how can you see that far?”

“The writing on the side was yellow. It was easy to read. I took a picture.”

“A picture?” Alex smiled to herself. The technology these days. Every man a spy.

“With my phone.”

Alex asked her to send the photograph to her own phone. Fifteen seconds later she had it.

The picture was terrible. It was dark and out of focus and of course taken from 50 feet away. Still, there was no mistaking the olive-drab crate with rope handles and some kind of yellow writing on the sides.

Alex considered this. Wooden crates with rope handles. Cyrillic writing. Whatever was inside the box-Kalashnikovs or Tokarevs or little wooden matryoshkas-it sounded as if it were military issue and a resident of Nassau County should not be in possession of it.

Alex ended the call after confirming Turner’s address and that of her neighbor and extracting a promise from Turner to come to the FBI’s office in Chelsea for an interview the following day. After that, she walked into the bullpen and waited until all her young lions raised their heads and gave her their attention.

“Gentlemen and gentlemen,” she announced, with the theatricality she reserved for promising leads, “we have a live one.”