The Promisor is savvy, the Promisor is devious.
And, even though he’s completely gone to the stone, he always has a backup plan.
Chapter 35
Three p.m.
This was the time Lincoln Rhyme and the man he’d texted yesterday, after meeting with Edward Ackroyd, had agreed on for a phone call.
And it was with, no less, a spy.
Lincoln Rhyme had a relationship with the American espionage community. It was ambivalent and infrequent but undeniable.
The reason he’d been unable to participate in the El Halcón case — the Mexican drug lord who was on federal trial for murder and assault — was due to a meeting in Washington, DC, to assist a new U.S. security agency.
Rhyme and Sachs had come into contact with the organization on a recent case. They, on the one hand, and the Alternative Intelligence Service, on the other, had butted heads over a clandestine operation the AIS had run in Naples, Italy. In the end, Rhyme and Sachs had saved the organization’s reputation — and some lives in the process. The director had been so impressed with their forensic work, he’d tried to recruit them.
But working for the AIS would involve considerable foreign travel. Given Rhyme’s physical limitations, he was not inclined to sign on, despite the intriguing jobs the organization promised. Besides, New York City had no lack of challenging cases. Why fish elsewhere? It was also his and Sachs’s home. He had, however, been happy to jet down to DC, to help the AIS set up a new division to use forensics and physical evidence as an intelligence resource.
At the first meeting in DC, one of the congressmen involved in the creation and funding of the AIS had said, “Glad you’re here, Captain Rhyme, Detective Sachs. We know you can help us in our task to parameter a new dynamic for evidentiary intelligence analytics and weaponization.”
Rhyme, who otherwise would have engaged in a bit of verbal fencing about verbosity and about turning “parameter” into a verb, reminded himself he was inside the Beltway, and simply ignored the bullshit. The concept was clever: The new division would employ crime scene and crime lab skills to gather and analyze intelligence... and, yes, to “weaponize” evidence.
Need to identify a mole within the American consulate in Frankfurt, when everybody passes the polygraph? Just find the one employee bearing a molecule of trace evidence that can be matched with a molecule of trace in the Generalkonsulat der Volksrepublik China.
Need a North Korean hit team in Tokyo taken down? Just deliver to the Japanese Keiji-kyoku some trace evidence and shoe prints suggesting they have illegal weapons, and, bang, they’re in jail — for a long, long time. So much more humane than snipers. And more important, somebody other than the U.S. government does the dirty work.
The name would be the EVIDINT Division of the AIS, a word coined by Rhyme himself. As in “evidence intelligence.” Spy-speak. Like HUMINT, human intelligence. Or ELINT, electronic intelligence.
It was the director of the AIS, Daryl Mulbry, whom Rhyme had texted when Ackroyd told him of Unsub 47’s Russian roots. Mulbry’s text suggested a 3 p.m. call.
Espionage apparently engendered promptness and at 3:00:02, his phone rang.
“Lincoln, hello!” The man, Rhyme recalled, was pale and slight and with thinning hair a light shade of brown. To judge by his patois, his roots were the Carolinas or Tennessee. When Rhyme had first met him he’d thought Mulbry was a minor, regulation-bound low-level diplomat. The man’s appearance and self-effacing manner gave no clue that he ran a hundred-million-dollar intelligence operation, including tactical teams, who, if they wanted you to disappear, could fulfill that task with a minimum of fuss.
“So sorry it’s taken this long to get back. Had a brouhaha in Europe. Was a mess. It’s largely — though not completely — cleared up now. But more about that later. What can I do for you? You want to know how your baby, the EVIDINT’s going? Swimmingly. Though that’s not a word I really understand. It’s not all that easy to swim. And one can drown, course.”
“Something else and it’s urgent.”
Mulbry was used to Rhyme’s impatience. “Of course.”
“We’ve got a perp in town, recently, we think. My diagnosis: he’s pretty unhinged. Obsessed with diamonds. Got away with a couple million worth of rough, it’s called. Uncut stones. He murdered some innocents. Tortured, in a couple of cases.”
“Torture? What was that about?”
“Mostly to track down witnesses. But probably for his own amusement too.”
“Details?”
“Not much. Russian national, Muscovite, fluent-ish in English. White. Blue eyes. Average height and build. Fashion choice leans toward dark casual clothing — off the rack — and ski masks.”
“You’re a card, Lincoln. Why the theft? Funding terrorism? Money laundering?”
“This is the odd part. He wants to save diamonds from desecration. Our British consultant describes him as a ‘nutter.’”
“He thinking of heading back home for the Motherland’s borscht or does he have more mischief in mind?”
“Staying put, at least temporarily, we’ll assume.”
“Recently here, you said. How recent?”
“Unknown. But we’ve checked for similar MO in the databases and nothing shows up. So let’s say the past week, ten days. Though that’s a big assumption.”
“Means of dispatching people?”
“Glock, short-barrel thirty-eight and razor knife.”
“My. Any indication of military training?”
“That’d be speculation too. But he’s smart. Careful with CCTVs and evidence.”
“All right and you want to know if I can find any names of Russkies who’ve come to the U.S. in that time. Of questionable backgrounds or circumstances.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, Russian, diamonds, psycho, access to weapons. I’ll see what we can find. I’ll get the kids and the bots on it.” Rhyme heard typing. Fast as train wheels over old track.
Mulbry came back on. “Might be a while... and you might end up with quite the list. We don’t stop them at the border, those Russian folks, you know? The Cold War is over, haven’t you heard?”
Rhyme had to laugh at this.
“Now, Lincoln, as long as I have you, let me pose a question.”
Rhyme recalled what the man had said a moment ago.
More about that later...
“Hm?”
“That incident I was talking about. We wrapped up a radical cell in the suburbs of Paris. All good. But in the process our team vacuumed up some unrelated digital traffic that caught our attention. It was between Paris, Central America and New York City. That triad rings terrorist profile bells.”
Rhyme said, “Must be about a million emails a day along those routes.”
“You bet there are. But these were different. They were encrypted with duodecimal algorithms. Virtually unbreakable. Which makes us a tad nervous.”
Rhyme, who had a science background, knew the duodecimal numbering system, also called base 12 or dozenal. The binary system has two digits only, 0 and 1. The decimal has ten: 0 through 9. Duodecimal has twelve, 0 through 9 plus two extra symbols, usually 
and .
Mulbry continued, “The encryption package is so ‘righteous’ — that’s what the geeks say — that we’re treating the software as a weapon. It’s considered munitions under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, State Department. Since New York is one of the points of origin of the messages, I’m curious if anybody at NYPD has ever run across duodecimal encrypted emails or texts.”
“No. Never heard of it.” He looked up at Cooper. “Mel, any duodecimal encryption in cases you’ve run?”