The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 10

  “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, the
y 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.<
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  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.