His rampaging thoughts were interrupted by the needle as it jabbed into his neck and delivered the syringe’s contents directly into his vein. He quickly felt a strange warmth flood through his body and, as his consciousness started to fade, he heard the man drop the syringe on the metal table then walk around it and bend down so he was staring into Rosetti’s eyes.
The journalist found himself looking into the man’s face. There was nothing that unique about him, nothing vaguely memorable. Just an expressionless mannequin, a blank template for a male human specimen.
The man nodded, gently. “I believe you.”
Rossetti tried to find some solace, some hope, in the words as his eyes closed on the man’s dead stare and he slipped into unconsciousness.
His hopes were to prove unfounded.
The next time he opened his eyes, his entire body would be engulfed by flames.
TUESDAY
1
Allentown, New Jersey
I really didn’t want to be here. Then again, who would?
Three o’clock in the morning, me and my partner Nick Aparo, in our unmarked SUV, parked on a dark street in the middle of nowhere with the engine off, freezing our nuts off, watching, waiting for the go signal, making sure our target didn’t vaporize before we nabbed him.
Don’t get me wrong. This is my job. I do it by choice. I do it because I believe in it, because I think what we do, as special agents of the FBI, is important. And the guy in our crosshairs on this particular night deserved our full attention, no question.
It’s just that I had bigger fish to fry. White whales, in fact, ones neither Nick nor the Bureau could know about. But more on that later.
Right now, all I can tell you is that we’d spent countless hours staring through the condensation-clouded windscreen and the snow flurries outside at the single-story house up and across the street, the one with the hypnotic, mind-numbing Christmas lights twinkling along the edge of its roof, and I was exhausted. We’d been at it for days.
Whatever our target was doing inside his house, he was doing it in considerably more warmth than us poor saps who were sworn to bring him to justice. We were sitting in north of a hundred thousand dollars of customized FBI vehicle and the heated seats had still managed to conk out, leaving the two of us shivering like we were being continuously tasered. Running the engine while the whole street slept was not an option. Not unless we wanted to give our target a clear heads-up.
On the positive side, at least no one could see us. In terms of discretion, sitting in a snow-covered vehicle in a line of snow-covered vehicles was pretty much ideal. It just meant we had to rely on the four video feeds on our laptop, the ones coming from cameras we’d managed to set up on our target.
The blizzard had stopped an hour ago, adding a more substantial covering to the inch that had refused to thaw. Now it was snowing again. This cold front was definitely winning in terms of historic meteorological bragging rights. I’ve got to admit, it was exhausting. The body burns up energy trying to stay warm, and at three in the morning, after several nights of this, I was running low on juice.
I watched my breath billowing out in front of my eyes as I zipped up my FBI parka, the cold metal of the zip reaching its endpoint against my nose. Any more coffee and there was zero chance of sleep when I finally made it home-in time to watch the sun rise as I zoned out against a deeply asleep Tess.
Nick, on the other hand, had no such concerns and was pouring himself yet another mug from the five-liter flask before sipping the steaming, bitter liquid like it had been lovingly made by his favorite barista. He looked ridiculous in his big, Russian-style fur hat, the flaps of which he had pulled right down over his ears, but nothing I said was going to make him lose it. At least he was watching the house with me and not sitting there flicking through an endless array of female Tinder offerings while subjecting them to the incessant vocal critique that usually accompanied his left- and right-swipes, which was his MO on previous stakeouts. Small mercies, I guess.
The subject of our impromptu igloo huddle was called Jake Daland.
Daland was an interesting target, a nice change from the Jihadist scumbags hogging our work load. He was the founder and head honcho of Maxiplenty, which had taken over from Silk Road after we shut down that online drugs marketplace and arrested its kingpin. Like Silk Road, Maxiplenty was a bazaar that sat in the hidden part of the internet, the dark net, but it was bigger and better, and it had one crucial innovation: it was a barter-only site. Daland had come up with a neat way to try to avoid the fate of Silk Road by avoiding financial transactions altogether: no cash, no checks, no credit cards, no Bitcoins. At Maxiplenty, you could do anything you wanted-get hold of drugs, guns, explosives, launder money, or have someone killed-provided you had something you could trade for it. Despite its tongue-in-cheek name, a Daland twist on a Newspeak term from George Orwell’s 1984, Maxiplenty had become a virtual clubhouse for the depraved, a hub for some pretty nasty stuff. Which is why we were here, waiting for word that power had been cut to Daland’s house before we stormed in and shut him down.
Fingering Daland was as the man behind the curtain wasn’t easy. Maxiplenty used a highly sophisticated network of servers located around the world along with a seemingly infinite process of IP spoofing to disguise both the site itself and those using it. When two of his users successfully swapped murders, the US Attorney’s Office went into overdrive. It took the techies at Quantico’s Cyber Division lab weeks to finally crack his invisibility cloak and secure enough evidence to ensure an arrest stuck. Evidence we now finally had, as of four hours ago, along with the signed confessions from both murderers. Which is why we were here, waiting for word that power had been cut to Daland’s house before we stormed in.
We weren’t alone. The whole team, including a couple of specialists from Cyber Division, was waiting close by, equipped with night vision goggles and, with a bit of luck, a little less frozen than us. The aim was to disconnect all the computer equipment-along with any battery backups-before we turned the power back on and began the bagging and tagging. I didn’t want Daland to have the tiniest window in which to hit some kind of nuke switch and wipe his hard drives.
So here we were, poised, waiting for the engineers from Jersey Central Power & Light to tell us they were ready to hit the switch. They were fairly used to being called out at ungodly hours this time of year. The bad weather and overloading from seasonal light displays meant they had to be available 24/7. Still, it was taking longer than I expected.
“Heads up, Reilly,” a voice announced through my earpiece. “Looks like it’s feeding time at the zoo again.”
I looked out through the near whiteout on the other side of the windows and saw the now-familiar pizza delivery car with half a plastic forty-eight-inch pepperoni sticking out of the roof glide past.
“More pizza?” Nick grumbled, peering out through the windshield. “How in God’s name can he eat so much pizza and stay so thin? Bastard.”
I turned to face him, a slight grin on my face. “Maybe he doesn’t chase it down with a bowl of lasagna.”
My partner was fairly legendary for his appetites, particularly when it came to Italian food and generously proportioned blonds. The former had provided something of a distraction when the latter ended up getting him divorced. Nowadays, he was happy to indulge in both, having finally come to terms with the court-appointed bi-weekly weekends with his eleven-year-old son. He’d also stuck with the spinning classes. I lost that bet, along with most of Twenty-six Federal Plaza.