Fortunately, Devlin was able to breathe without too much pain now. He was able to see out of one eye.
But he was not easy to look at. He’d become a monster. I suppose there was some sort of irony in the fact that his physical appearance, which had defined him for so long, defined him still.
“I assume you know how to retrieve numbers from the call log,” he said. He spoke in a raspy whisper, his vocal cords ruined, and his mouth often made a wet clicking noise, the sound of tissue in the wrong place.
“Even I know how to do that.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“The only phone number on here, dialed or retrieved, is for a mobile phone. That’s probably his contact-whoever hired him to abduct the girl. If anyone can locate the bad guy from his phone, it’s you.”
“Why didn’t you ask the FBI for help?”
“Because I’m not sure who I can trust there.”
“The answer is no one. Why are you working with them, anyway? I thought you left all that government crap behind.”
“Because I need them. Whatever it takes to get Alexa back.”
He breathed in and out noisily. “No comment.”
He despised all government agencies and viewed them with extreme paranoia. They were the enemy. They were all too powerful and malevolent and I think he blamed every one of them for the Iraqi IED that had detonated his Humvee’s gas tank. He didn’t seem to credit the heroic army plastic surgeons who’d saved his life and given him at least some semblance of a face, grotesque though it was. But who could blame him for being angry?
He tilted his head in a funny way to inspect the phone. He preferred to work in low light, even near-darkness, because his eye had become hypersensitive to the light. “Ah, a Nokla 8800. This is no ordinary burner.”
“You mean Nokia.”
He showed it to me. “Can you read, Nick? It says NOKLA.”
He was right. It said NOKLA. “A knockoff?”
He punched out a few numbers on the phone. “Yep, the IMEI confirms it.”
“The what?”
“The serial number.” He slid off the back cover and popped the battery out. “A Shenzhen Special,” he said, holding it up. I leaned close. The battery had Chinese characters all over it. “Ever look on eBay and see a special sale on Nokia phones-brand-new, half price? They’re all made in China.”
I nodded. “If you order mobile phones over the Internet, you don’t have to risk going into Walmart or Target and having your face show up on a surveillance camera,” I said. I immediately regretted the choice of words. What he’d give to be able to walk into a Walmart without encountering the averted looks, the squeamishness, the screams of children.
Devlin abruptly turned to look at one of his screens. A green dot was flashing.
“Speaking of tracking devices, do you have one on you?”
“None that I know of.”
“Didn’t I tell you to take precautions coming here?”
“I did.”
“May I see your handheld?”
I handed him my BlackBerry. He peered at it, set it down on the narrow counter, popped open its battery compartment. Lifted out the battery, then wriggled something loose with a pair of tweezers. Held it up and looked at it aslant. Devlin was no longer capable of facial expressions, but if he were, he’d probably have displayed triumph.
“Someone’s been tracking your every move, Heller,” he said. “Any idea how long?”
48.
I had no idea, of course, how long I’d been followed. But at least now I knew how they were able to track me to Mauricio Perreira’s apartment in Medford. Some “confidential informant.”
“Looks like the FBI put a tail on you. And I thought you were cooperating. Did anyone have an opportunity to meddle with your BlackBerry without you noticing?”
I nodded. I remembered checking my BlackBerry at the FBI’s reception desk in Boston, not once but twice.
“Now even I’m starting to get paranoid,” I said.
He turned to look at me. Instinctively I wanted to look away from that face, so I made a point of meeting his eyes.
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” he said. In the dark still interior of his van, his whisper gave me goose bumps. “I believe I’m quoting Nick Heller.”
“Not original to me.”
“In any case, you’re absolutely correct about the Chinese knockoffs. Buying them over the Internet reduces their risk of exposure, yes. But there’s an even better reason. Something only the best bad guys know about.”
“Okay.”
“The IMEI. The electronic serial number. Every mobile phone has one, even the cheapest disposables.”
“Even Noklas?”
“Yes, even Noklas. But by using Shenzhen Specials, your bad guys make it much, much harder to be caught by traditional means.”
“How so?”
“Put it this way. If the FBI has the serial number of a real Nokia phone, all they have to do is call Finland and Nokia’s going to tell them where the phone was sold. Bad guys don’t want that. But this baby, on the other hand-who’re you gonna call, some factory in Shenzhen? They won’t speak English and they sure as hell don’t keep records and they probably don’t even answer the phone. Good luck with that.”
“So these guys are pros,” I said.
He didn’t reply. He was leaning over the shallow ledge with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers trying to pry something out of the back of the phone. Finally he succeeded and held up a little orange cardboard rectangle.
“The SIM card,” I said. “Chinese too?”
“Uzbek. These guys are really smart.”
“The SIM card’s from Uzbekistan?”
“They probably buy ’em in bulk online, get them shipped to some drop box, end of the trail. Wow. A Chinese knockoff phone with an untraceable serial number and an untraceable SIM card. Know any FBI agents who speak Uzbek?”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Some deep digging.”
“Of what sort?”
“Why don’t you leave that part to me,” he said.
“Because my puny mortal mind cannot possibly hope to comprehend?”
“Here’s your BlackBerry. Clean as a whistle.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “But I’d like you to put the GPS bug back in.”
“That’s… foolish.”
“No doubt,” I said. “But first I’d like you to drain the battery on the tracking bug. Can you do that?”
“It doesn’t draw from your BlackBerry’s battery, so sure, that’s not a problem.”
“Good. I want it to die a natural death in about, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.”
He nodded. “So they’ll never know that you discovered it.”
“Right. I much prefer being underestimated.”
If he could have smiled, he would have. But I heard it in his voice. “You know something, Heller?” he said. “I think I’ve underestimated you. You’re really quite an impressive guy.”
“Do me a favor,” I said, “and keep it to yourself.”
As I returned to the Defender, my BlackBerry was ringing.
“I thought I’d have heard from you by now,” Diana said.
“My BlackBerry was temporarily offline.”
“You didn’t see what I sent you?”
“What did you send me?”
“A photograph of our kidnapper,” she said.
49.
The town of Pine Ridge, New Hampshire, (population 1,260) had a police force that consisted of two full-time officers, two part-time officers, and one police chief.
Walter Nowitzki had been the police chief in Pine Ridge for twelve years. He’d been on the force in Concord before that and grabbed the chief’s job when it opened up. He and Delia wanted to move to a small town, and he wanted more time to hunt. The work here was routine and uneventful, and when it wasn’t hunting season, it was downright slow.