Not an entirely secret location, thought Canning, sitting back from his monitor. The second part of his contingency plan — hurrying to the Blue Harbor Resort in Sheboygan and implanting Bella Sokolova with the eavesdropping device originally intended for her husband — had gone without a hitch. Canning was able to hear the marshals whisk her and her two daughters to a safe house in Cleveland.
He returned to Thornton’s post. According to one of the blogger’s sources, the FBI was likening the Sokolov murder to the 2006 “neutralization” of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian émigré.
Perfect, Canning thought.
From a computer in his New York apartment, Thornton managed to provide an inside view of the law enforcement and intelligence communities sharper than most insiders’. Canning’s own sources concurred with Thornton’s account of the Bureau’s misdirection. And the director of DARPA, whose post — Flight 89 accident conversation in the Oval Office Canning had listened to, was none the wiser.
Unfortunately, there was more to Thornton’s post. As Canning read on, his satisfaction turned to concern.
It’s also worth considering that the seven-gram bullet was a red herring. Murderers usually aren’t big on leaving clues to their identities. It might be worth taking a look at American operators with service time in Russia or other means of acquiring this bit of Soviet-era arcana.
Canning had indeed learned of “Uncle Joe’s remedy” while serving in Moscow.
The blogger was a loose end.
2
Two months later, the FBI closed the investigative stage of the Sokolov case.
That’s Public-Relations-ese for “hit a dead end,” Thornton tapped onto his keyboard. The development was no surprise to him. The Bureau’s success rate in bringing killers to justice was just 62 percent, a number inflated by cases in which the killers confessed from the get-go. He intended to add that to his column when his phone rang, the caller ID flashing JOHNSON, JANE. He knew no one by that name, but his sources often used prepaid disposable cells, and when entering the minimal user info required, they chose ordinary names. Which made sense. If you’re trying to duck the National Security Agency, you don’t input LINCOLN, ABE.
Thornton answered, “Newsroom”—also known as his spare bedroom/office — and, for the first time in ten years, he heard Catherine Peretti’s voice.
As if it had been only a day or two, she said, “Hey, I’m going to be in town today and I’ve been craving Grumpy. Any chance you can do dinner at eight?”
He leaned his desk chair back and gazed out the window. The dry cleaner downstairs was just opening, illuminating cobblestones on the still-dark West Village block. A call this early wasn’t unusual — everyone knew Thornton always got to work before sunrise, catching up on the world events he’d missed during his four or five hours in bed. Callers from his past were also routine: media coverage was a commodity. It was Peretti’s choice of venue that gave him pause.
Grumpy was her nickname for Gam Pei, a Chinatown restaurant usually filled with tourists. Anyone who lived in Manhattan knew that you could get good Chinese food just about anywhere in the city — except Chinatown. Gam Pei was especially bad, as Peretti had told him when he first took her there on a dinner date. At the time he was captivated by the Chinese mob, and Gam Pei’s front windows offered a singular view of an overt triad hangout called the Goat Club.
The seventh time Thornton took Peretti to Gam Pei for dinner, he watched a taxi pull up to the opposite curb. As he had been anticipating, a Goat Club goon handed an envelope to the passenger, whom Thornton recognized as the judge presiding over the trial of two triad members accused of gunning down a fruit-stand proprietor late with her protection payment. Thornton broke the resulting corruption story on his (then) tiny site. The same story reappeared the next day on the front page of every tristate paper.
Peretti applauded Thornton’s professional success. Grumpy derived from her personal sentiments after a year of dating him. Before leaving his apartment that morning, she said, “I want a boyfriend who’s interested in romantic bistros, or Burger Kings even, so long as I’m his focal point.”
That was the last time he’d heard from her.
But not of her. She was a comer on Capitol Hill, having soared from intern to chief of staff to California senator Gordon Langlind, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She might have a tip now, and it would be a big one given the clandestine means of contact.
Thornton was curious. And, as usual, he had no evening plans — neither the invitation to the Cuban consulate cocktail party nor the Broadway opening had held as much appeal as staying home and fishing for stories online. But he usually ran the other way from stories involving people he knew outside his professional life. Ethics aside, best-case, your friend is pleased with her quotes along with your copy and your editor’s “enhancements.” Which would be a first in the history of journalism. The norm was blowback.
Still, he couldn’t ignore the reason Peretti was calling him. She knew the deal with journalists and their friends and family, let alone ex-lovers. And she interacted daily with legions of journalists who were none of the above, at media outlets compared to which RealStory, a quarter of a million readers notwithstanding, was a flyer left on a windshield.
She was in trouble.
“Love to,” he told her.
3
At 7:39, Thornton climbed out of the Canal Street subway station, close enough to Chinatown that he could smell the salty fish — residents left it on the rooftops to dry in the sun, he’d read somewhere. He soon pushed through the heavy, ersatz bronze door and entered Gam Pei, a dark tunnel after neon-happy Mott Street. As his eyes acclimated, he made out the red and white harlequin floor tiles and the twelve-foot-high pressed-tin ceiling. While adding ambiance, the paucity of light helped hide the wear on the furniture as well as what appeared to be soy sauce splattered on the ceiling.
He had his pick of swivel stools at the bar. He sat facing the octogenarian bartender; Billy was stitched onto his cream-colored tuxedo shirt, its collar several sizes too large for his neck.
“What you have tonight, sir?” Billy asked in a thick Mandarin accent. Guangzhou, Thornton would have bet.
Thornton studied the beer list and ordered one he’d never heard of. “I was wondering how soy sauce could have gotten all the way up there,” he added, indicating the ceiling panel above the corner booth.
Billy looked up, then shrugged — the way actors used to at the vaudeville theater on East 12th Street.
“I know about the shooting,” Thornton ventured.
Billy’s eyes widened. “How?”
You just told me, Thornton thought. “Blood dries black as a result of hemolysis.”
Glancing around the bar, Billy muttered, “You cop?”
“No, but I write about them sometimes.”
“Well, no story here, mister.”
Thornton smiled. “Sometimes a stain is just a stain?”
“Right, stain just stain.” Billy’s forced laugh revealed four gaps where there ought to have been teeth. Not that bad, Thornton thought. When he wrote about CIA dentists pulling officers’ molars and replacing them with cyanide-filled replicas for use in case of capture, he happened on the statistic that adults in the United States were missing 3.28 teeth on average.