The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  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.”