“They’re about to assault,” Eddie said.
The aerial shot went sideways as the news copter left.
I heard the magnified sound of bullhorns ordering the men inside to come out, hands up.
“Sound diversion,” Eddie said.
I imagined SWAT guys moving in through a rear garden. I imagined them with a battering ram and assault rifles, moving onto the front porch. Over the iPhone came the faint but unmistakable snap-snap of M4s firing.
Then one of the cameras showed the house again, only from a straight-on angle. The camera crew must have talked their way into a house across the street. Eddie and I had assaulted homes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and my heart was in my throat for the safety of the attack team. We heard the muffled report of an explosion. The camera violently shifted to show a carpet. The FBI must have realized they were being filmed and found the cameraman. No, wrong, because the shot adjusted and I saw the house again, from across the street. The front door was open, and flames erupted from inside. A black-clad FBI agent lay on the lawn. A figure appeared in the doorway, singing, right hand up, holding something, torso bundled up under his shirt. His thumb is pressed to a detonator.
He blew himself up just as shots drove him back.
“Ray?”
Ray had hung up.
The front doorway was now gone, a jagged oval of hanging wood bits and plaster. The upper windows had blown out.
Eddie sighed. “Well, Ray got ’em. Should we turn around and go back, Joe?”
“I hope you’re right. But we keep going.”
We crawled forward and reached the source of the two-mile-long traffic jam. The chanting demonstrators blocked all lanes but one. Their waving signs read, GOVERNMENT LABS KILL OUR CHILDREN WITH DISEASE; RELEASE SPRAY SUPPLY; MAYOR DOESN’T CARE; TEAR DOWN WALL STREET; and FUCK THE RICH. Six-lane Flatbush Avenue was clear ahead. We finally sped up.
“Six, seven minutes,” Detective Jamal al-Azawi said.
Aya called, on the way, with news.
“Joe, I did what you said. I tried to get anything more I could find on a Tom Fargo.”
“Did you sleep at the Bureau again last night?”
“Don’t start with me. Mom asked the same thing. She’s still in Newark and no one else is home so who cares where I sleep as long as I do? You said that a good investigator never gives up. You said it! Gives one hundred and one percent!”
“They go home at night after that.”
“Did you go home last night? I bet you didn’t.”
Actually, I’d gone to Izabel’s apartment, so this line of reasoning was counterproductive. I heard my own testy voice, as demanding as Ray Havlicek’s, short-tempered and exhausted. I wasn’t her father. I don’t know why I felt responsibility for her. I calmed and asked, as if speaking to any adult researcher, “What did you find out, Aya?”
“That’s better! I found an address!”
“For the shop? You already gave us that.”
“No. Different! Maybe where he lives!”
I sat up straighter. We were on Flatbush now, moving at a brisk clip toward Park Slope. “How?”
“Well,” she said, bragging now that she had my attention, “first I had his social security number. From his passport. So I cast the net, went to all databases.”
Which, at the FBI, she’d have wide access to. “And?”
“And it turns out he bought a car when he went back to visit his mother last year, in Denver, after he was overseas. So he needed to register it. His car is a six-year-old yellow Subaru. I have the VIN number. Colorado license plates are green and white and they show the Rockies, but don’t have a slogan.”
I was smiling. “No slogan.”
“Don’t make fun of me! Maybe you want me to stop.”
“Sorry.”
“He got a ticket! A parking ticket, in New York! I have this friend, see? Her name is Grace? She moved to Washington from New York when her parents divorced? Well she told me last month that there are all these stupid parking laws in New York, like, you can’t leave your car on blocks for more than two days in a row, like, because they clean streets. Like, if you don’t move your car or sit in it double-parked for like hours you get these expensive tickets, over a hundred dollars. And he got one!”
“He got a ticket,” I repeated, very alert now.
“The ticket doesn’t say his name, because the person writing the ticket wouldn’t know that? But it has the license plate? And the address where the car was? So I thought, last night when you wanted me to waste time sleeping, that maybe the address will turn out to be where he knows someone, or even where he lives?”
“Didn’t your mother tell you not to make statements like they’re questions?”
“You sound like Mom. You should date her. You have a lot in common. Like telling me what to do. If you want to be my stepfather, marry Mom. Otherwise stop it!”
“I give up.”
“Anyway, LIKE, I decided to check the address, and it turns out that address is a co-op building.”
Aya gave me the address of the building.
“I got a phone number for the building.”
“I told you specifically not to make phone calls, Aya.”
Sweetly, she said, “I didn’t. Don’t I always do what you say?”
“Yeah. Always.”
Aya giggled. “Okay, now I’ll go get some sleep; that is, if a certain someone thanks me for all the effort.”
“Thank you, Aya. I mean that.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and hung up.
Izabel Santo mused, “Maybe that whole thing in Chicago is a… How do you say it? A trick? A diversion!”
We looked at each other.
“I have no idea. Keep going,” I told Jamal.
The folk art shop was closed, even on a weekday morning at 10 A.M., even though the HOURS OPEN sign on the grated-in front door said opening should have been half an hour ago.
“Other shops on this block are open,” Eddie said.
Across the street, I saw a hole-in-the-wall diner, a leather goods shop, a Thai restaurant, a candy store/newsstand, a shoemaker. Next door to the art shop on one side, a Comfort Sofa shop, showing couches in the window. On the other side, a drugstore, Duane Reade.
As Izabel waited at the art shop, Eddie and I split up and visited the other stores, asking questions and hearing the same answers that I got from a cranky, mustached man named Ian Crossgate, manager of the convertible sofa store.
“Do you know where Tom Fargo lives?”
“Is that his last name? I know Tom’s the first name, but I never knew the last.”
“Do you know where he is this morning?”
“He was there when I got in at eight, getting a delivery. I guess he went somewhere after that.”
“A delivery from where?”
“How do I know?”
“Did he have a car here?”
“I had a car and got sick of paying tickets! The Mayor wastes our taxes and then sends fascist ticket agents to steal more, ticketing our cars! No! I didn’t see any car! Tom’s probably too smart to own one.”
I pulled out the blowup satellite face shot that Kyle Utley had provided. “Is this man Tom Fargo?”
“Him? That guy has a beard, and Tom doesn’t.”
“Pretend there’s no beard.”
“Pretend? Whaddaya mean? The whole shape of the face is different. And this guy is Muslim. I can see from the hat. Tom’s Christian. And Tom has a scar on his face, I think.”