And in her eyes, true, there was not a wisp of contrition. It seemed that she had hardly heard of — and certainly didn’t care about — the case against her that had just been laid out.
Spiro and Rossi shared a glance. Then the prosecutor turned. ‘And what, Capitano Rhyme, is your thinking on this matter?’
VII
The Sound of Sense
Monday, September 27
Chapter 58
At 9 a.m., much of the team was assembled once more in the situation room, the basement of the Questura.
Rhyme, Sachs and Dante Spiro, along with Thom, of course, ever-present Thom. Ercole Benelli was in the building, but elsewhere at the moment. Massimo Rossi had ordered him to bundle up all of the physical evidence in the Composer case, now that it was more or less closed, and log it into the Questura’s evidence room.
Rossi himself would join them soon. He was in his office upstairs with fellow inspector Laura Martelli, preparing the documentation to have Garry Soames officially released, verifying the evidence and interviewing Natalia, her boyfriend and others who’d been at the party. Garry had been released from prison but was still being held in a minimum-security facility in downtown Naples, pending the magistrate’s signature.
Stefan was in a holding cell, too, but Charlotte McKenzie was present. No longer saddled with her fake role as a diplo, she was wearing black slacks, a dark blouse and a supple leather jacket. She was still grandmotherly — but she was a grandmother who might practice tae kwon do and enjoy white-water rafting, if not big-game hunting.
A uniformed officer wearing a shiny white belt and holster stood, nearly at attention, outside the door with orders not to let her leave the room.
Before he’d left, Rossi had said to him sternly: ‘Qualcuno la deve accompagnare alla toilette,’ which was pretty clear, even in Italian.
Though Ercole had taken the evidence to storage, the charts were still in place, on the easels surrounding them, and Sachs had created a new one — about their prey, Gianni, the terrorist Ibrahim’s accomplice.
With such a sparse description and no helpful physical evidence — and with Ali Maziq unable to provide details, after the drugging and electroconvulsive treatment — Rhyme, Spiro and Sachs decided that the best way to track him was through phone calls made to and from the mobile of the refugee he’d run: Ali Maziq.
Both the Postal Police and the domestic Italian spy agency had spent the night establishing calling patterns to and from the phones. They could identify Gianni’s phone, from which he’d sent and received calls to and from Maziq, and learned that Gianni had also frequently called and received calls from a landline — a café in Tripoli. It was undoubtedly the phone Ibrahim was using, not a mobile, for security’s sake.
Gianni’s phone, however, was now dead; he’d have a new one. And it was this new mobile they needed to find, so they could triangulate and track it — or at least tap the line and see if he gave away his location or more about his identity in conversation.
Massimo Rossi returned to the office and regarded the occupants, debating a strategy to discover Gianni’s new number. Spiro explained the situation.
Rossi said, ‘A landline, hm. Clever of him. In no small part because there has always been antagonism between Italy and Libya — we occupied them, you know, as a colony. And now our government is angered by their approach to the immigrant crisis — which is no approach at all. No one in Tripoli or Tobruk will cooperate with us.’
Dante Spiro said, ‘I must say I can think of a solution.’
Everyone in the room turned his way.
He added, ‘The only difficulty is that it is in a small way illegal. A prosecutor could hardly suggest it.’
‘Well, why don’t you tell us,’ Rhyme suggested, ‘hypothetically?’
New York has been called the City That Never Sleeps, though in fact that motto applies only to a few isolated establishments in Manhattan, where expensive liquor licenses and early work schedules keep the place pretty well shut down in the wee hours.
Contrast that with a very different burg, a small town outside Washington, DC, where thousands labor constantly in a massive complex of buildings, day and night, no holidays, no weekends off.
It was to one of those workers, a young man named Daniel Garrison, that Charlotte McKenzie had placed a call a half hour before, at Dante Spiro’s coy suggestion.
Garrison had some fancy title within the National Security Agency, which was located in that never-sleeping town: Fort Meade, Maryland. But his informal job description was simple: hacker.
McKenzie had sent Garrison the information about the coffeehouse whose pay phone Ibrahim had probably used to communicate with Gianni about the terrorist plans. Now, with the okay from bigwigs in Washington, Garrison was overseeing the effort of a very earnest, hardworking bot, as ‘she’ (the NSA officer’s pronoun) prowled at lightning speed through the records of Libya Hatif w Alaittisalat, or ‘Telephone and Telecom.’ Theirs was not, Garrison had reported, a difficult ‘switch to run an exploit on. Stone easy. I’m embarrassed for them. Well, not really.’
Soon Garrison’s bot was plucking records of calls between the pay phone in the Yawm Saeid — Happy Day — coffeehouse in Tripoli, where Ibrahim hung out, and mobiles in the Naples area: scores in the past day, many hundreds over the past week. Apparently — and unfortunately — the landline was a popular means of communicating with those in southern Italy.
Ercole Benelli was printing out the lists and taping them to the wall. If there were not too many numbers the Postal Police could trace them. With some luck, one might turn out to be Gianni’s new phone.
As he looked over the numbers, Rhyme was startled to hear a pronounced gasp from beside him.
He looked at Charlotte, actually thinking she was ill, the sound from her throat was so choked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘My God.’
‘What is it?’ Rossi asked, seeing her alarmed face.
‘Look.’ She was pointing to the chart. ‘That outgoing call there — from the coffeehouse in Tripoli to Gianni’s old phone. A few days ago.’
‘Yes. We can see.’ Spiro was staring at McKenzie, clearly as confused as Rhyme.
‘The number above it? The call made from the coffeehouse just before he called Gianni?’
Rhyme noted it was to a US line. ‘What about it?’
‘It’s my phone,’ she whispered. ‘My encrypted mobile. And I remember the call. It was from our asset on the ground in Libya. We were talking about Maziq’s abduction.’
‘Cristo,’ Spiro whispered.
Sachs said, ‘So your asset, the one who gave you the intel about the attacks in Austria and Milan, is Ibrahim, the man who recruited the terrorists in the first place.’
Chapter 59
‘Mi dispiace,’ Dante Spiro snapped. ‘Forgive me for being blunt. But do you not vet these people?’
‘Our asset—’ McKenzie began.
Rhyme, his voice as testy as the Italian’s, said, ‘Not your asset. The man who pretended to be your asset, the man who sold you out. Not to put too fine a point on it.’
‘We know him as Hassan.’ She muttered this defensively. ‘And he came highly recommended. He was accredited at the highest levels — the US Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA. He was a veteran of the Arab Spring. A vocal supporter of the West and of democracy. Anti-Qaddafi. He was nearly killed in Tripoli.’