“Once I tried to watch a movie at their house, and the picture kept fuzzing out. Drove me crazy. So I asked them what the problem was, you know, was it always like this, did they call the satellite company to get it fixed, right? And Momma said, oh, that happens a lot, every time a plane flies by overhead. You get used to it. Nothing to do about it. See, they live close to the Charlotte/Douglas airport. Right in the flight path. I mean, the planes are loud. And then I began to notice that, yeah, every time I heard a plane overhead the TV would crap out.”
“Okay,” I said. “If our kidnappers are deep in the woods somewhere, or in some rural area where they don’t even have high-speed Internet, satellite is probably their only way to get online. And you think a plane can break up the signal?”
“Easy. A bad rainstorm can do it too. Satellite works by line-of-sight, so if something gets between the dish and the big old satellite up there in the sky, the signal’s gonna break up. You got a big enough plane, flying low enough, that thing can interrupt the signal. Might only be a fraction of a second, but that’ll screw up the video stream.”
“This is good,” I said. “That noise we’re hearing could well come from a jet engine. So let’s say they’re near an airport. How near, do you think?”
“Hard to calculate. But close enough so when a plane lands or takes off, it’s low enough to the ground to block the path to the satellite. So it depends on how big the plane is and how fast it’s going and all that.”
“There are a hell of a lot of airports in the U.S.,” I pointed out.
“That right?” she said dryly. “Hadn’t thought about that. But if we can narrow down the search, it gets a whole lot easier.”
“I think we can.”
“You do?”
“New Hampshire.” I explained about George Devlin’s cell phone mapping. How we knew that “Mr. X” took Alexa across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire.
She listened, staring into space. After twenty seconds of silence, she said, “That helps a lot. I don’t know how many airports there are in New Hampshire, but we’ve just narrowed it down to a manageable number.”
“Maybe we can narrow it down more than that,” I said. “Does that creepy website CamFriendz stream in real time?”
“They claim to. I’d say yes, within a few seconds. You have to account for slow connections and server lag time and so on. Maybe the times are five seconds off.”
“So we match up those times with the exact flight times in the FAA’s flight database.”
“They have such a thing?”
“Of course they do. We’re looking for airports in New Hampshire-hell, let’s broaden the search, make it Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire, just to be safe-with a flight schedule matching the times of our four interruptions.”
She nodded vigorously.
“And we can narrow it down a lot more,” I said. “Aren’t there two separate interruptions during one of those broadcasts?”
“You’re right.”
“So we have an exact interval between two flights.”
Her smile widened slowly. “Not bad, boss.”
I shrugged. “Your idea.” One of the few things I’ve learned since going into business for myself: The boss should never take credit for anything. “Can you hack into the Federal Aviation Administration’s secure electronic database?”
“No.”
“Well, the FBI will be able to get it through channels. I’ll give Diana a call.”
“Excuse me?”
Jillian Alperin was standing there hesitantly.
“We’re in a meeting,” Dorothy said. “Is there a problem?”
“I forgot to take this out of the printer.” She held up a large glossy color photograph. It was an enlargement of the photograph from Alexa’s iPhone of her kidnapper’s tattoo.
“Thank you,” Dorothy said, taking it from her.
“I think I know what it is,” Jillian said.
“That’s an owl,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”
Then she held up something else, which she’d been holding in her other hand. A slim white paperback. On the front cover was a black-and-white line drawing of an owl.
It was identical to the owl tattoo in the photo.
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s a book of tattoos my brother found?”
She handed me the book. It was titled Criminal Tattoos of Russia.
“Dorothy,” I said. “What time is it in Russia right now?”
64.
One of my best sources in Russia was a former KGB major general. Anatoly Vasilenko was a whippet-thin man in his late sixties with an aquiline profile and the demeanor of a Cambridge don. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he was already cashing in on his access and connections.
I couldn’t say I liked him very much-he was one of the most mercenary men I’d ever met-but he could be affable and charming, and he did have an amazing Rolodex. For the right price he could get you almost any piece of intelligence you wanted.
Tolya always knew who to call, who to bribe, and who to throw a scare into. If a client of mine suspected the local manager of their Moscow plant was embezzling, Tolya could take care of the problem with one quick phone call. He’d have the guy hauled in and interrogated and so terrified he’d be scared to steal a paper clip from his own desk.
I reached him at dinner. From the background noise I could tell he wasn’t at home.
“Have I never taken you to Turandot, Nicholas?” he said. “Hold on, let me move someplace quieter.”
“Twice,” I said. “Shark-fin soup, I think.”
Turandot was a restaurant a few blocks from the Kremlin, on Tverskoy Boulevard, which was the favored dining spot of oligarchs and criminals and high government officials (many of them all three). It was a vast gilded reproduction of a Baroque palace with a Venetian marble courtyard and statues of Roman gods and Aubusson tapestries and an enormous crystal chandelier. Burly security guards gathered out front to smoke and keep a watch over their employers’ Bentleys.
When he got back on the phone, the background clamor gone, he said, “There, that’s much better. Nothing worse than a table full of drunken Tatars.” His English was better than that of most Americans. I didn’t know where he’d acquired his plummy British accent, unless they taught it at KGB school. “That’s quite a picture you sent.”
“Tell me.”
“That tattoo? It’s Sova.”
“Who?”
“Not ‘who.’ Sova is-well, sova means owl, of course. It’s a criminal gang, you might say.”
“Russian mafia?”
“Mafia? No, nothing that organized,” he said. “Sova is more like a loose confederation of men who’ve all done time at the same prison.”
“Which one?”
“Prison Number One, in Kopeisk. Quite the nasty place.”
“Do you have a list of all known Sova members?”
“Of all Sova members?” He gave a low chortle. “If only I had such a list. I would be either very rich or very dead.”
“You must have some names.”
“Why is this of interest to you?”
I told him.
Then he said, “This is not a good situation for you. Or for your client’s daughter, more to the point.”
“Why’s that?”
“These are very bad people, Nicholas. Hardened criminals of the very worst sort.”
“So I understand.”
“No, I’m not so sure you do. They don’t operate by normal rules. They’re… untroubled, shall we say, by conventional standards of morality.”
“How bad?”
“I think you had a very unpleasant incident in the States not so long ago. Do you remember a brutal home invasion in Connecticut?”
He pronounced the hard C in the middle of “Connecticut.” A rare slip.
“Not offhand.”
“Oh, dear. Some wealthy bedroom community in Connecticut-Darien, maybe? Truly a nightmare. A doctor and his wife and three daughters were at home one night when a couple of burglars broke in. They beat the doctor with a baseball bat, tied him up, and tossed him down the basement stairs. Then they tied the girls to their beds and proceeded to rape them for seven hours. After which, they poured gasoline on the women and lit them afire-”