Alert michael bennett 8, p.12
Alert: (Michael Bennett 8), page 12
“That’s pretty good, Al. Your delivery needs a little work, but it’s almost happily surprising to see that you have any sense of humor at all.”
That’s when I walked behind him again and took a document and another picture from Emily. I showed him the PayPal stuff along with a photo of him sending funds from the nearby library.
“Last Thursday at three o’clock, you sent money to these two different accounts. I want to know why.”
“What?” he said, peering at the photo.
“You sent money. Why?”
There was a glimmer of something in his face then. Recognition, definitely. Then a little confusion. Then his mask of impertinence was back. After a moment, he gave me a cold yellow smile.
“I want my lawyer,” he said.
I smiled back.
“Don’t worry, Al. A lawyer will be provided for you. That’s what makes our country so great, you see. Free lawyers, stuff like that. Maybe one day you might want to ask yourself why you want to wreck it so badly.”
He started laughing then.
“More amusement, Al?” I said. “I got you all wrong. You’re just a big teddy bear, aren’t you?”
“You’re here about the attacks,” he said. “The mayor, the bombing, the EMP.”
“Why, yes,” I said. “Have you heard anything about these things, by chance?”
“No,” al Gharsi said calmly. “But I must admit, I am quite a fan of whoever is so brilliantly attacking New York City and bringing this corrupt-to-the-core Great Satan to its knees.”
Al started chuckling again.
“You think I have something to do with it. Me! You come up here with your helicopters and men kicking in the door. But you are clueless. You are losing. You are flailing. You don’t even know which direction to duck. Allah willing, you are about to be defeated, I think.”
A minute later, I left the living room and followed Emily out of the house and onto the back porch.
In the farmyard’s sole electric light, thirty yards to the south, some shoeless middle-school-age kids, al Gharsi’s, probably, were kicking a basketball around as troopers interviewed blackclad, burka-wearing aunts and mothers. I wished suddenly that I were home with my own kids.
“What do you think?” I said to Emily.
“I think what you think,” Emily said. “I think we just dug ourselves another dry hole.”
CHAPTER 47
SIXTY-FIVE MILES due south, between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, three glowing windows stood out sharply on the top floor of the Pratt Institute’s otherwise dark North Hall building.
On the other side of the translucent window shades was a large, white-walled lab space that was the showpiece of Pratt’s brand-new robotics facility. At its center, a young man and two young women sat at the largest of the stainless steel lab tables, side by side, working busily.
They had an assembly line going. Aaron started off with the brushless motor controller and flywheel and the flywheel’s braking mechanism. Gia, who had a light touch with the soldering iron, fit in the tiny electronics board and the radio receiver, while Shui popped in rolling-pin-like magnets and put additional magnets onto the face of the small, square white plastic panels.
The finished product was a white-and-silver cube about the size of a quarter. It looked innocuous enough, like a tiny futuristic children’s block.
But these definitely were not Junior’s LEGOs, Shui thought as she clicked on the mini robot’s test software on the iPad.
Immediately there was a whirring sound as the computer-initiated radio signal activated the bot’s interior flywheel. When the computer-dictated amount of RPMs were reached, the flywheel halted suddenly, catapulting the bot across the table. Another whir and flip, and the bot snapped into position onto the end of a line of six minibots that were already arranged in a straight row.
Then, with another click on the iPad, the magic really began as the tiny minibots started leapfrogging each other, moving steadily across the table just as a half-track would roll over a tank. Shui knew she was supposed to place the bots carefully into a foam-lined box at the end of the counter, but the boss wasn’t around, was he? One by one, she made the minibots whir and flip into the box.
“Ah, my aching wrists!” said Gia, a 4.0 junior, as she removed her magnifying goggles. “There has to be a labor law against this. How long have we been at it? Ten hours now? I feel like one of those kids in India forced to hand-roll cigarettes. I mean, I really think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”
“Now, now. Time is money. We’re not getting paid by the hour but by the minibot, remember? Keep rowing the slave boat so Aaron the Baron here can score himself some nice front-row seats at Coachella,” Aaron said, snapping components together and flicking them toward Gia as though they were lunch-table footballs.
“No one is going to get paid a dime if these bots are damaged, damn it,” said Dr. Seth Keshet as he stormed in.
Fresh from running the world-renowned PhD program at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, tall, dark, and cocky Keshet was one of the top three people in the world in digital topology. But with his meticulously tailored casual suits and visible chest hair, he acted more like a scuzzy Eurotrash club lizard than a famous scientist.
“How many?” he wanted to know.
“A hundred and eleven,” said Aaron.
“I need another hundred.”
“Another hundred? We’ve been hitting it since three this afternoon. By when?”
“Six a.m.”
“Six? You’re effing kidding me. We’ve been going ten hours now.”
“Stop whining. We’re on a deadline,” the doctor said, checking his Patek Philippe. “That’s why I pay you the big bucks.”
Aaron pondered this for a moment with a thoroughly depressed look on his face. Then he finally stood.
“I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m done,” he said. “You keep your fifty a bot. I can’t take it anymore. I’m done. Total toast. I’m going to drop right here.”
“Exactly, Seth,” said Shui, with an uncharacteristic defiance in her voice. “We’re not bots, we’re humans. You seem to have lost sight of that.”
“Okay, okay,” the professor said, changing his tune instantly from demanding to charming. “Sorry for being such an ass. I’m under a lot of pressure. I’ll double your pay for tonight. A hundred a bot, but only if you finish.”
Aaron looked at him and blew out a breath.
“Fine,” he said. “But we’re going to need more pizza.”
“And Red Bull,” said Gia.
“As you wish, my children. Daddy will go get the refreshments,” said Keshet as he left the lab.
His iPhone jingled as he hit the school building’s concrete stairwell.
How are we looking? the client had texted.
We’re on target, Mr. Joyce. No worries. Everything will be ready by six as you said, Keshet texted back.
CHAPTER 48
THE SUN BROKE over the top of the trees on the High Line in Chelsea as a dingy white van with the words HARRISON BROS PLUMBING on its side pulled to a stop on West 27th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues.
As the van idled, a waiflike man-child in a designer business suit biked past over the side street’s half-lit, worn pavement. Then a whistling homeless man followed, towing a dirty white leather PING golf bag piled with jingling empties.
Once the men had passed, Mr. Beckett opened the rear door of the van and stepped out onto the street dressed like a plumber.
With the minibots secured, he was there to retrieve the last item on their shopping list. And it was, as the Americans said, quite a doozy.
The plumber’s getup was probably a little overkill, he thought. But his image had to be in the hands of the authorities by now, so every caution was most prudent, he knew, as he hit the buzzer of a familiar faded brick tenement building on the street’s north side.
Upstairs, Senturk, the bodyguard, was already standing in the open doorway at the end of the second-floor corridor. He wore gray slacks and nice Italian shoes and a white silk dress shirt that was just a little too tight for his soda machine of a torso.
Mr. Beckett felt a rare bead of sweat roll down his back as the green-eyed, muscular Turk wanded him with the metal detector. He knew the man had been in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati back when the Turkish version of the CIA had been run by the brutal military. Since then, he had been a bodyguard for Middle Eastern billionaire businessmen and sultans and was a hard man of legendary reputation.
Senturk led him in through a door into the back. The rest of the building was a rotten, dusty dump, but back here, it had been transformed into a posh loft. It was the size of an indoor basketball court, with fabric wallpaper and million-dollar lighting and massive modern paintings on the walls.
Ahmed Dzurdzuk, the young man Mr. Beckett had come to see, was sitting behind an impressive, shining chrome desk that looked like it had been made out of a World War II airplane wing. Dzurdzuk didn’t bother looking up from whatever he was doing on his iMac as Mr. Beckett sat in the midcentury modern chair in front of the desk.
Mr. Beckett sighed silently at this disrespect. These kids today. He’d been doing business with the psychopathic Chechen crook for the last year. The least he could do was acknowledge Mr. Beckett’s existence, but alas, no.
Many people were afraid of the twenty-five-year-old, but Mr. Beckett—not only an experienced connoisseur of dangerous people but also a dangerous person himself—did not fall into that category.
Senturk was a problem, without question, but Ahmed was sloppy, often high, and always distracted.
He could, to borrow an expression from an American book he had once read, swallow the slight, girlish fop with a glass of water.
“Ahmed? Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Beckett finally said after a long two minutes.
“Well, my friend, what brings you by for a face-to-face? You miss me? Ha-ha…of course you do. We still have some of that beautiful new Ecstasy from Denmark. Plenty of it. All you want,” Ahmed said.
Mr. Beckett glanced to his left at Senturk standing back by the inside of the interior door, just out of earshot. Good. He slowly crossed a leg as he leaned back in his chair.
“The Ecstasy was excellent, but I don’t need that. I need what we spoke of on the phone, Ahmed. Remember that item I ordered about three months ago?”
“Come, now,” Ahmed said, frowning. “Please, I told you that that fell through, remember?”
“I remember, Ahmed. I don’t mind if you want to negotiate, but I’m in a hurry, so you win. I’ll double your fee.”
“You don’t understand. It was seized,” Ahmed said as he took a rolled joint out of a cigarette box on his table and lit it with a match.
He tossed the burned match into a filthy crystal ashtray and shrugged.
“That’s the risk,” he said, blowing ganja smoke up at the twenty-foot-high ceiling.
“I know all about risk,” Mr. Beckett said. “I also know that one of your cousins who does your smuggling for you came in on a Nigerian freighter out of the Canary Islands last week. He had a large bag with him when he jumped ship off the coast of Coney Island. It was filled with twenty-seven pounds of C-four plastic explosive. You have it here. Now trot it out, and let’s do business.”
“How do you know this?” Ahmed said in surprise, putting the joint down. “Scratch that. I don’t care. That wasn’t your shipment. That was for another client. I can’t help you. Honestly. You need to be going now. I have some girls coming over.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” said Mr. Beckett calmly as he reached over and took a long puff on Ahmed’s joint. “Here’s what you’re going to do now. You’re going to tell your other client that his shipment was seized, and then you’re going to sell his product to me. Simple, okay? Now get off your ass and go get me what I want like a good little boy.”
CHAPTER 49
AHMED SAT UP in his chair, a dark look on his face, a deeper darkness in his eyes.
“Senturk, can you believe the balls on this fat bastard? No one talks to me like that. Throw this asshole down the stairs. Hard.”
“My apologies,” said Mr. Beckett in fluent Chechen, smiling. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I know the friends you ordered the plastic for. We have the same friends. We are all on the same side here, Ahmed. Don’t you see? I’m the one who bombed the subway and killed the mayor and set off the EMP. That was me.”
The young punk’s jaw dropped.
“You?” said Ahmed in dismay.
Mr. Beckett nodded.
“Yours truly,” he said. “And the plastic is needed to continue our campaign. We are on the same righteous path.”
The kid thought about it. You had to give him that. He sat nodding to himself. He wasn’t that dumb. Then he shook his head.
Mr. Beckett was up and rolling over the desk faster than the kid could kick out from behind it. They went to the floor in a heap. When they stood, Mr. Beckett had the punk by his curly hair and the ceramic knife he’d hidden in his belt to the kid’s throat.
“I’ll cut him!” Mr. Beckett exploded at the bodyguard, who had his gun out and trained. “I’ll open his carotid artery and write my name on this wall in his spraying blood! Get me my explosives now!”
“You’ve made a mistake,” the evil little Chechen hissed. “Cut my throat and Senturk will blow your fat head off and cut off your balls. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”
“That makes two of us, I guess,” Mr. Beckett said as he finally saw what he’d been waiting for.
It was a refreshing sight, all right.
Mr. Joyce, having picked the locks of the building and apartment doors, stood silently behind Senturk with a suppressed Mossberg 500 in his hand.
Mr. Beckett dove to the floor behind the desk with Ahmed again as the shooting started. The report of the suppressed shotgun was almost musical, like a cymbal shaken in a blanket. Mr. Beckett stuck his head back up after four clangs and smiled.
Senturk, the giant, now looked like a pile of bloody laundry dumped on the floor.
“Where is it? You have it here. We know you never leave here. Where the fuck is it, you little twerp?” said Mr. Joyce, putting the hot metal barrel of the shotgun to Ahmed’s forehead.
“Screw you maniacs. I am willing to be martyred!” said Ahmed as he tried lamely to push off Mr. Beckett’s iron grip.
“I thought you might say something like that,” said Mr. Joyce as he shrugged off the backpack he was wearing. He took something bulky out of it and clunked it onto the desk.
“Let us test your faith, shall we?” Mr. Joyce said as he plugged in the home-kitchen meat-slicing machine they’d just bought from Bed Bath & Beyond.
Ahmed pissed himself as Mr. Beckett chocked his hand into the meat holder, inches from the spinning, shining stainless steel circular blade.
“It’s in the bedroom closet!” said Ahmed, weeping. “Please! In the upstairs closet—I swear!”
“What a pigsty, Ahmed. Didn’t your mommy ever teach you how to make your bed?” Mr. Joyce said after he came down from the bedroom with the duffel bag full of explosives a minute later.
“Please, I can help. I have money. Millions in cash. You know that. I want to help you!” Ahmed said as he dropped out of Mr. Beckett’s grip onto his knees.
“You want to help?” Mr. Joyce said.
“Yes, of course. Please,” Ahmed said, still weeping.
“Then don’t move an inch,” Mr. Joyce said, and he raised the shotgun one-handed and shot Ahmed point-blank in the face.
CHAPTER 50
UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, Peter Luger Steak House, an old redbrick Brooklyn landmark, would have been a sight for sore eyes.
But nothing is even close to normal, I thought as I pulled into the parking lot across from its famous brown awning.
Emily and I weren’t there to chow down on some USDA Prime but to meet up with Chief Fabretti. They’d put the mayor in the ground at Queens’s Calvary Cemetery this morning, and a lot of brass and pols had gathered with the mayor’s family at his favorite restaurant after the service.
Still too busy scouring through everything we’d found at al Gharsi’s to attend the service, Emily and I had watched snatches of it broadcast live on TV. Several thousand people had attended, including the vice president.
Watching Mayor Doucette’s bright American flag–draped coffin being brought through the cemetery gates on a horse-drawn carriage, I couldn’t stop shaking my head.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about the rousing speech he’d given right before he’d been shot and how he’d bravely insisted on holding the speech outside to help the city heal. Though the sun was shining, it was one very dark day for the city.
I spotted Fabretti straight off inside the door at the end of the three-deep bar talking to a white-shirted female cop who split as we stepped up.
“Mike, Emily—thanks for meeting here on short notice. Drink?” Fabretti said over the crowd hum.
Fabretti tipped his glass at us ceremoniously after the bartender brought us a couple of ice-cold Stellas.
“First, I want to congratulate you guys on a job well done. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me, Mike.”
Emily and I looked at each other.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to tell those press jackals that we finally have someone in custody,” Fabretti continued as he patted me on the shoulder.
“Whoa, boss,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but this thing ain’t over.”
“What do you mean? You bagged al Gharsi last night, right? He hasn’t escaped, has he?”
“No. Al Gharsi is involved. He obviously knows something about the PayPal thing, but he’s not behind it,” said Emily.
