The Kill Room

one nail into another. Stop it, she told herself. Dug a bit harder and wiped the blood on her black jeans.
    “And after this?”
    Farada told her, “I drove them back to the hotel. The woman got out with him but they went different ways. He went inside and she walked east.”
    “Did they hug?”
    “Not really. They brushed cheeks. That was all. He tipped me and he tipped well, even though it’s included.”
    “All right, let’s head back to Queens.”
    He put the car in gear and made his way east through the dense rush-hour traffic. The time was around 7 p.m. As they plodded along she asked Farada, “Did you get any sense that he was being followed or watched? Did he feel uneasy? Did he act suspicious or paranoid?”
    “Hm. Ah. I can say he was cautious. He looked around frequently. But there were never any specific concerns. Not like he said, ‘That red car is following me.’ He seemed like somebody who tried to be aware of his surroundings. I see that much. Businesspeople are that way. I think they must be nowadays.”
    Sachs was frustrated. She’d learned nothing conclusive about the man’s sojourn in New York. Even more questions than answers now floated. And yet she couldn’t shake the sense of urgency, thinking of the STO naming Rashid as the next target.
    We do know that NIOS’s going to kill him before Friday. And who’ll be the collateral damage then? His wife and children? Some passerby?…
    They were on the Williamsburg Bridge when her phone rang.
    “Fred, hi.”
    “Hey, Amelia. Listen, gotta coupla things. Had our people look through SIGINT down in Venezuela. Snagged one of Moreno’s voice from ’bout a month ago. Might be relevant. He was saying, ‘Yes, May twenty-fourth, that’s right…disappearing into thin air. After that, it’ll be heaven.’”
    The 24th was less than two weeks away. Did he mean he was planning some attack and he’d have to vanish, like Bin Laden?
    “Any ideas about that?” Sachs asked.
    “No, but we’re still checkin’.”
    She told the agent what Farada had explained about this being Moreno’s last trip to New York and his mysterious meeting in the vicinity of ground zero.
    “That’d fit,” Dellray said. “Yeah, yeah, could be he’s got something nasty in mind and is going to ground. Makes sense—’specially when you hear the other thing I’m about to tell you.”
    “Go on.” Her notebook was on her lap, pen poised.
    The agent said, “ ’Nother voice-call trap. Ten days before he died. Moreno was saying, ‘Can we find somebody to blow them up?’”
    Sachs’s gut clenched.
    Dellray continued, “The tech geeks think he mentioned the date May thirteen, along with Mexico.”
    This was two days ago. She didn’t remember any incident but Mexico was largely a war zone, with so many drug-related attacks and killings that they often didn’t rate a mention on U.S. TV news. “I’m checking t’see if something happened then. Now, lastly—I said coupla things; I meant three. We got Moreno’s travel records. Ready?”
    “Go ahead.”
    The agent explained. “On May second Moreno flew from New York to Mexico City, maybe to plan for the bombing. Then the next day on to Nicaragua. The day after that to San José, Costa Rica. He stayed there for a few days and then flew to the Bahamas on the seventh, where—coupla days later—he had his run-in with the fine marksmanship of Mr. Don Bruns.”
    Dellray added, “Some casual surveillance was conducted on him in Mexico City and Costa Rica, where he was spotted outside the U.S. embassies. But there was no evidence that he was lookin’ like any kinda threat, so your boy was never detained.”
    “Thanks, Fred. That’s helpful.”
    “I’ll keep at it, Amelia. But gotta tell you, I ain’t got oodles of time.”
    “Why, you have something big going down?”
    “Yup. I’m changing my name and moving to Canada. Joining the Mounted Police.”
    Click.
    She didn’t laugh. His comment had struck too close to home; this case was like unstable explosives.
    A half hour later Tash Farada parked in his driveway and they got out. He struck a certain pose, unmistakable.
    “How much do I owe you?” Sachs asked.
    “Well, normally we charge from garage to garage, which isn’t fair for you. Since the car was here. So it will be from the time we left to the time we arrived.” A look at his watch. “We left at four twelve and we’ve now returned now at seven thirty-eight.”
    Well, that’s some