“Uh — I thought I called Karen.”
“You did. She’s driving.”
“Oh, you law abiding citizens you. So I lifted fingerprints from the Eastern Market crime scene. You know the perps crashed into the building with the armored car and then got out and started firing their AK-47s, right? Well, they sprayed the place pretty well before blowing themselves up. I had our techs collect every single shell casing. We just got through testing all of them. The heat of the firing destroys DNA, so that was a dead end. And the heat burned off the body oils we usually need to lift a print so we used gun bluing and found 159 prints. Of the ones where we were able to get a significant number of points, we got matches on all of them.”
“Meaning?” DeSantos asked.
“Meaning the same two guys loaded all the magazines. The prints weren’t from bystanders who picked up the casings and tossed ’em down.”
Vail moved into the middle lane, then leaned closer to the phone. “Did we get a hit?”
“How about, ‘Nice work, Tim. Not many techs could’ve lifted those prints.’ You really have to know what you’re doing with gun bluing or you screw it up — the whole cartridge would’ve turned black. And we did it 159 times.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Uzi said. “If I wasn’t holding the phone and if Karen wasn’t driving we’d give you a round of applause.” Vail and Uzi shared a grin. They enjoyed yanking Meadows’s chain. “So that hit — yes or no?”
“No. I can work miracles but I can’t create data where it’s not. The perps are not in AFIS.”
“Email the prints to me. I’ll have Hoshi send them to Interpol. I’ll get them over to Mossad too.”
“And Tim,” Vail said, “You’re the best. You know we love you.”
“And we love giving you a hard time,” Uzi added.
“Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual.” Meadows waited a beat, then added, “The part about giving you a hard time.”
Their next call was to Knox. They were not on a secure line so they refrained from discussing names.
“The lab lifted two sets of latents off the spent shell casings at our most recent crime scene in your neighborhood,” DeSantos said from the backseat.
“Do we have IDs?”
“Nothing in AFIS,” Uzi said. “We’re checking elsewhere.”
Vail signaled to exit the expressway and merged into the adjacent lane. “There’s something else we need you to look into.” She summarized the salient points of what the rabbis had told her regarding the Aleppo Codex. “We’ve got some disagreement as to whether or not we should pursue this and how it might or might not be related to the offender who’s calling the shots.”
“Understood,” Knox said. “I’ll look into this and see what I can find out. There are some things going on behind the scenes and I have a feeling this could be related. I’ll keep you posted.”
Uzi hung up and turned around in his seat to face DeSantos. “Not sure I like that—‘things going on behind the scenes’?”
DeSantos snorted. “There are always things going on behind the scenes. We just don’t always find out about them.”
28
Vail exited onto the Brooklyn Bridge, a 130-year-old neo-Gothic span that was the first steel-wire suspension bridge ever built. The brown bolt-and-steel structure that connected the borough to Manhattan was majestic and internationally recognizable.
“I’ve always liked the Brooklyn Bridge,” Vail said. “You know that a woman played a major role in its construction.”
DeSantos glanced out the side window at the Manhattan Bridge. “Yeah, right.”
“Seriously. The engineer got injured while they were building it and couldn’t leave his apartment. So he taught his wife the complex mathematics involved in bridge building and she supervised construction for ten—”
“I see something.” DeSantos pointed. “Up ahead.”
Yeah. I see something too. Red taillights. Traffic.
Vail thought of exiting at Park Row South but changed her mind and continued on to Centre Street. “I’ll get as close to the police barricade as possible.”
But before they could approach, the flow of cars along the two lane road slowed — and then stopped.
Uzi sat forward in his seat and bobbed his head side to side. “There it is.”
Vail saw it too. A knot of first responder vehicles was visible up ahead, their flashing lights flickering through the barren trees. “Whatever it is, it looks pretty major. They’ve got that huge emergency response vehicle there.”
They made it to the forty-story Manhattan Municipal Building, one of the largest and most picturesque government buildings in the world. Above its tall, columned facade, engravings in the stone trumpeted the city’s three names and the years that it began using those monikers: New Amsterdam, 1625; New York, 1664; and Manhattan.
Vail nosed the car up to the barricade near the secured entrance to the arched cobblestone driveway, where a deserted guard booth stood.
They got out and started toward the NYPD vehicles when a cop emerged from behind a cruiser and yelled at them to stop.
“FBI,” Uzi called back and held his creds high above his head as they wove between the cars and walked toward the wall of police vehicles ahead of them.
They made their way past the various officers and federal agents who lined the street.
“Russo here?” Vail asked, her credentials now folded inside out and protruding from the pocket of her jacket.
“Don’t know a Russo,” the tall black man said.
“Captain, NYPD.”
“Yeah. Still don’t know him. Lotta brass onsite.”
Vail lifted her Samsung and started to text him when she heard her name called. Russo was weaving his way through the crowd of personnel.
“Good thing your red hair is easy to spot in a crowd.”
“Yeah, it’s like a beacon. Lucky me. Good thing I don’t do undercover work.” Oh, wait, I do.
“So what do we got?” Uzi asked.
“One of our mobile radiological sensors tripped going over the bridge. We traced it using the domain awareness system to an overnight delivery truck. Had a team pull it over and ESU got the driver out with a bit of a fight. Wish I could show you but Hazmat’s got control of the scene. They think it’s contained but they’re taking readings as—”
Russo’s phone buzzed. He answered, listened a second, then said, “Be right there.” He reholstered his phone and waved them forward. “We’re clear. No leakage of the material. It’s safe to approach.”
Russo led the way along Centre Street, past the massive columns of the municipal building, to the secured area.
“What’d he have in the truck?” DeSantos asked.
“Strontium, forty kilocuries.”
“Whoa. So they really were gonna set off a radiological bomb.”
Vail elbowed his side. “Did you question my interrogation skills?”
DeSantos shrugged. “We had doubts. No offense.”
“We?”
“Me and others.”
Uzi sheepishly looked away.
“Offense taken.”
“Because of that phone call,” Russo said, “what you told me, I had them turn on all the sensors in the city, double the number of sweeps.”
Uzi turned to Vail. “You told him what we got from Ghazal?”
“The president hadn’t yet raised the alert. And even if he had, I doubt they’d be thinking dirty bomb. Calling Russo was the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do was to have my office tell the JTTF in New York and have them deploy what they felt was necessary.”
“My way was faster,” Vail said. “And it worked, so don’t give me shit.”