Those are all the facts he needs to know.
For now.
95
The single glossy sheet looks like a weird heart-monitor graph with uneven columns rising and falling. Certain parts of the readout show dark pairs of numbered codes.
Mitzi’s seen hundreds of genetic fingerprints, but Bronty hasn’t.
‘What am I looking at?’ he asks. ‘I know it’s Dalton’s DNA, taken from the water bottle you stole—’
‘Appropriated.’
‘I stand corrected — that you appropriated from Gwyn’s office. But how do you make any sense of this?’
‘You don’t,’ says Mitzi, taking the print off him. ‘You just find a match for it. Juries love DNA. They don’t understand it either, but they know it’s the blueprint of a human being, they know we’re all different and they trust that genetic fingerprinting is accurate. That’s all that matters.’
Bronty is still intrigued. ‘I get all that, but can you explain the science?’
‘Kind of. I saw it ten years ago before automation, now it all happens in a machine but the process is similar. The lab pulls DNA out of a single cell they’ve swabbed — in our case that would be Dalton’s from the water bottle. Enzymes are used to isolate the critical sections. Those parts are zapped with electricity. This separates them into unique pairs and patterns, then the whole thing is transferred onto a physical print.’
‘That’s really all it is?’
‘Essentially, yeah. But like I say, it’s all done by machines now. You ask some professor and he’ll tie your mind up in knots with dioxy-this and ribonucleic-that and stories about hyper-variable satellite somethingorothers, but in the end, yeah, it’s the way I said.’ She goes back to the desk and taps on her computer. ‘What I’m gonna do now is use our case file database to compare Dalton’s DNA profile with the profile we got from the blood in the diner at Dupont Circle.’
‘And if they match, then Dalton is Deagan’s killer?’
‘That’s a jump too far. We still can’t prove Deagan’s dead — for the moment, he’s down as a “missing-presumed”. One thing for sure, though, it would irrefutably put Dalton at the place Deagan was seen alive.’
They watch the database churn through its records and wait.
‘I worked out once that I spend sixty minutes a week just waiting for computers to process stuff,’ says Mitzi. ‘Four hours a month, forty-eight hours a year. That’s a whole damned working week a year just waiting.’
There’s a ping and the screen freezes.
Two separate sets of columns are displayed. One is superimposed over the other.
The word MATCH punches the middle of the frame.
‘Well, looky here,’ says Mitzi. ‘Seems like I get to go see our new British friends again while you’re off on your sea trip to Spooky Hollow.’
96
CNN plays on one of the screens in Owain’s private office; Sky News and Bloomberg are turned low on two others. All are running post-bombing interviews with government ministers and defence experts.
Owain mutes them all as a call from Gareth Madoc comes in on an encrypted line.
‘Gareth, how are you?’
‘Better, and so will you be. I have some good news.’
‘Nabil?’
‘No. He’s still lying low. But we got to the girl.’
‘And from your tone, it sounds as though she’s cooperating.’
‘She is. Zachra Korshidi’s father Khalid is the principal fundraiser and trustee of the local mosque, and it’s one of the biggest in the States.’
Owain is momentarily distracted by a bottom-of-screen caption on Bloomberg saying the price of Mardrid stock has fallen two per cent after he bought a company in Colombia alleged to have links to Farc, the left-wing rebels. He makes a note on a yellow jotter, then apologizes. ‘I’m sorry; I just had to write something down. Is this girl’s father only a financial player, or is he operationally active as well?’
‘If not operational, then certainly influential. Khalid Korshidi is chairman of New York’s Sharia Council and is known as a hard line fundamentalist. Zachra says he’s too controlling and egotistical to take a back seat to anyone on anything. She’s sure he knows everything that’s going on.’
‘And there’s no love lost between them?’
‘None at all. She hates him. Wants to get as far away as possible.’
‘Then we need to help her, but do you really think this is going to lead us to Nabil and who he reports to?’
‘Our girl says she knows Nabil. I showed her a photograph and she instantly ID’d him as someone who had come regularly to her house over the past year, usually alone or with one other man. Her mother served tea while he talked with her father in the front room. Usually, when they’d finished, they’d say they were going to the mosque and drive off together.’
Owain pieces things together. ‘That means Khalid has Nabil’s trust. Time is against us, Gareth; we can’t afford to simply tail the father and hope we hit the jackpot.’
‘I know. I’ve asked her to copy his cell phone directory. I’ve given her a reader. And she’s going to put a tracker tack into a heel of his shoe. If he sees it, he’ll think he just stood on a bit of metal. Apparently, he only ever wears an old black pair, so we should be on him easy enough.’
‘Can we get eyes and ears in the house, preferably in this front room?’
‘She’s nervous about that, but I’ll push her again once we’ve got the tracker in play and we start working his phone.’
‘Do it within the next twenty-four hours, Gareth. Myrddin is in a sweat and you know what that means.’
‘Visions?’
‘Bad ones. The worst I’ve known him have.’
97
Mitzi takes a black cab over to the CEI offices, while Bronty heads for a train from London to Ilfracombe and then, if he’s lucky, the last ferry out to Lundy.
Mitzi hates boats. She gets seasick just lying in a bubble bath. Nic Karakandez, her ex-partner in the LAPD, had a boat and regularly took the girls out on it, but she always declined and went grocery shopping or holed up in the harbour coffee shop with a book. Karakandez was a great cop and a more-than-decent guy. Handsome enough for her to have a serious crush on him. Had she not hung on to the remnants of her tattered marriage, life might have been different and he might not have spent all his money on that old tug of his, jacked in his job and set off to sail the seven seas.
She thinks about him and the whole world of might-have-been as she waits in the vast CEI reception full of expensive wood, antique leather and people talking English with accents she’s only ever heard on TV.
A glass-fronted lift slides into view and gradually reveals Melissa Sachs’s elegant black shoes, suntanned legs, fashionable orange skirt, white frilly-cuffed shirt and finally a head of perfectly cut shoulder-length dark hair.
By comparison, Mitzi feels like a beaten up bag lady as she heads her way.
‘Lieutenant Fallon, I’m most surprised to see you here.’ The PA flashes a friendly smile but her eyes are full of questions. ‘We don’t have any meetings with you in the diary, so how can I help?’
‘I need to speak to your boss and to George Dalton.’
‘I’ve no idea where Mr Dalton is. I understand you have some numbers for him so you could try those, or go through the embassy.’
‘It’s easier to communicate with the dead than get an answer from an embassy. What about Sir Owain?’