Cordero was looking through some of Sal’s books on the other side of the living room.
“You’re going to want to see this,” Harvath said. “Recognize this young lady?”
There were a series of shots of a Goth-type woman posing around headstones at the Granary Burying Ground. “That’s Brittany Doyle. The one you paid four hundred dollars to for her bracelet cuff.”
“From which we got a full and a partial print.”
“But if those were Sal’s prints, why didn’t we get a hit on them?”
“Because whatever prints the Boston PD has on file for Detective Sal Sabatini, they don’t belong to Sal Sabatini.”
She was about to ask who was capable of making prints disappear from the Boston PD database when her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket. Looking at the caller ID, she froze.
“Who is it?” Harvath asked.
Cordero held the phone up so Harvath could see. “It’s him. Sal.”
CHAPTER 65
Cordero activated the call and waited. She didn’t know what to say. How do you greet the man you’ve just learned is a cold-blooded killer? As it turned out, she didn’t have to say anything. He started the conversation himself.
“I’m sorry to have to do this over the phone,” he said.
“What are you talking about, Sal? Where are you?” she asked. In the background, she could hear what sounded like noises from the harbor.
“I wanted to say goodbye to you and Marco in person.”
“Goodbye? Why? Where are you going, Sal?”
“Lara, I know you’re in my house. That means you must know everything.”
Cordero covered the phone’s mic and quickly whispered to Harvath, “He knows we’re here.”
“We need to get out. There could be a bomb. Keep him talking.”
“Tell me why you did it, Sal,” she said as they moved out of the living room and through the dining room. “Why did you kill all those people?”
“You weren’t supposed to be hurt,” the man replied. “I love you and Marco very much and I’m very angry about what happened tonight. You could have been killed.”
“You act like you didn’t know it was going to happen, Sal.”
“I didn’t. Betsy Mitchell was not my responsibility.”
“Whose responsibility was she, then, Sal?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
“Sal,” Cordero said firmly. “What do you mean, you’ll take care of it? What are you taking care of?”
The man was silent on the other end of the phone as Harvath and Cordero rushed out the kitchen door and into the backyard.
“Sal,” she demanded, “where’s the last hostage? Tell me. You can still make this right. Where’s Jonathan Renner?”
Finally, Cordero removed the phone from her ear.
“Where’s Renner?” Harvath asked. “Did he tell you?”
“No. He just hung up.”
“Damn it.”
“He said he was angry about what happened tonight, that I could have been hurt. He wanted me to know that Betsy Mitchell had not been his responsibility.”
“What does that mean?”
“I think somebody else was responsible for killing her,” she replied.
“Maybe suicide vests are someone else’s job. He didn’t deny killing the other victims, though, did he?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“We’ve got to find him. Where would he go for safety? Where do you think he’d try to hide?”
“I could hear ambient noise behind him,” she said. “I think he was at the harbor.”
“Is he running? Was he catching the ferry for Logan Airport?”
“He said he was going to ‘take care’ of the danger I was put in tonight. It sounded to me like he was going to take care of the person who put me in danger.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“I don’t know,” Cordero replied. “After that, he hung up.”
“He must have had some sort of monitoring system on his house or his computer that alerted his phone when we came in. He’s blown and he knows it. We need to get to the harbor as fast as possible.”
“He could be anywhere.”
“I don’t think so,” Harvath stated as he led her down the driveway and back toward where they had parked her car. “I think they’re out of time and they’re pulling out all the stops. They’re going to kill Renner tonight, too.”
“But where?”
“What’s the last significant historical event that also happens to take place at the harbor?”
Cordero stopped as she realized what it was. “The Boston Tea Party.”
• • •
The pieces were all coming together for her and made so much sense now. How the killer had been able to avoid being picked up on any CCTV cameras, how he’d not left any clues behind at the crime scenes, even the crazy contraption at the Liberty Tree site, as Sal had studied engineering in school before switching to criminology and had remained fascinated by it.
But for every piece that fell into place, it came attached to a thousand questions. Harvath had explained what Swim Club was and even how they may have recruited Sal, but Cordero still didn’t understand why they would be kidnapping and killing people. It didn’t make any sense. And as much as she wanted it to, she knew she had to focus her energies elsewhere. Sal and the people he was working with needed to be stopped.
When she got in her car and the Bluetooth synched with her phone, she pulled into the street and activated the speaker. There was no way they could risk using the police radio or their mobile data terminals. Sal had access to those and she and Harvath didn’t want to tip their hand.
She called her commander and filled him in on everything as she raced toward the harbor. She then told him what they needed and reminded him again to keep everything off the police network. They absolutely had to assume that Sal was listening.
Harvath listened to the conversation, and no sooner had she disconnected the call than his phone rang. It was Bill Wise. He was calling on his cell phone, rather than his blocked landline from D.C.
“Bill,” he said, answering the call. “It’s not a very good time right now.”
“We’ve got a positive ID on the killer. He’s definitely from Swim Club. His name is Salvatore—”
“Sabatini,” Harvath said, finishing the man’s sentence for him. “I know. We just left his house.”
“How did you—”
He cut him off again. “It’s a long story. Listen, where are you? Carlton said you were on your way up here to help us catch these guys.”
“We’re here now. And we’ve already caught one of them.”
Harvath looked at Cordero and said, “They’ve already caught one of them.” Turning his attention back to his phone, he said, “Bill, I’m putting you on speaker with me and Boston PD detective Lara Cordero. She was Sabatini’s partner. You can trust her.”
“Who did you capture?” Cordero asked as Harvath pressed the button and held the phone out between them.
“A CIA operative named Stark,” said Wise. “We’ve been interrogating him, and apparently there are two more operatives with him in Boston somewhere. A man named Vaccaro, and another, the team leader named Tom Cushing.”
“I’ve got news for you, Bill,” Harvath interjected, as he reflected on the model plane in Marco’s room. It was the same model he’d been given after his first flight on the Fed’s Aerion SBJ. “I don’t think these guys are working against the Federal Reserve. I think they’re working for them.”
“You’re right, and wait’ll you hear why. Someone at the CIA named Phil Durkin put all of this together with the previous Federal Reserve chairman.”
“Chairman Sawyer? The one who just died?”
“Yes,” Wise replied. “It’s a long story, but the Saudis blackmailed Sawyer into doing something for them. The only way Sawyer could pull it off was to hire Durkin for the job. Durkin agreed, but only as long as Sawyer would fund several of his black-ops projects. It worked until Sawyer started having second thoughts and, with his tenure at the Fed coming to a close, crafted a list of potential replacements he thought might be able to make things right.”