The Twelfth Card

delivery van. Find out if there are any restaurants around the exchange that serve Middle Eastern food and, if so, who makes deliveries and when. And what kind of van they use.”
    Dellray shook his head. “Half the city eats that stuff. You can get gyros and falafel on every street corner in the city. They . . . ” The agent stopped talking as his eyes met Rhyme’s.
    “Pushcarts!”
    Sellitto said, “There were a half dozen of them around the museum yesterday.”
    “ Perfect for surveillance,” Rhyme snapped. “And what a cover. He delivers supplies to them every day, so nobody pays attention to him. I want to know who supplies the street vendors. Move!”
    *   *   *
    According to the board of health, only two companies delivered Middle Eastern food to the pushcarts in the blocks around the jewelry exchange. Ironically, the largest of them was owned by two Jewish brothers with family in Israel and who were active in their temple; they were hardly suspects.
    The other company didn’t own the carts but soldgyros, kabobs and falafel, along with the condiments and sodas (as well as the heathen but ever-profitable pork hot dogs), to dozens of carts in Midtown. The operation was based out of a restaurant/deli down on Broad Street, whose owners hired a man to make the deliveries around town.
    With Dellray and a dozen other agents and cops surrounding them, these owners became extremely—almost tearfully—cooperative. The name of their deliveryman was Bani al-Dahab, and he was a Saudi national, here on a visa long expired. He’d been a professional of some sort in Jeddah and had worked as an engineer for a time in the U.S. but after he went illegal he’d taken what work he could—cooking occasionally and delivering food to pushcarts and other Middle Eastern restaurants around Manhattan and Brooklyn.
    The jewelry exchange had been evacuated and swept—no devices were found there—and an emergency vehicle locator was out on al-Dahab’s delivery van, which, according to the owners, might be anywhere in the city; the man was free to set his own delivery schedule.
    It was at moments like this that Rhyme would have paced, had he been able to. Where the hell is he? Is the man driving around with a van full of explosives at the moment? Maybe he’d given up on the jewelry exchange and was going after a secondary target: a synagogue or an El-Al airlines office.
    “Let’s get Boyd down here, put some pressure on him,” he snapped. “I want to know where the hell this guy is!”
    It was at that moment that Mel Cooper’s phone rang.
    Then Sellitto’s, followed by Amelia Sachs’s.
    Finally, the main laboratory phone began to chirp.
    The callers were different but the message was virtually the same.
    Rhyme’s question about the bomber’s whereabouts had just been answered.
    *   *   *
    Only the driver died.
    Which considering the force of the explosion and the fact that the van was in the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Fifty-fourth, surrounded by other cars, was pretty miraculous.
    When the bomb went off, the direction of the blast was mostly upward, through the roof, and out the windows, scattering shrapnel and glass and injuring a score of people, but the main damage was confined to the interior of the E250. The burning van had lurched up on the sidewalk, where it slammed into a light post. A crew from the fire station up the street on Eighth Avenue got the flames out fast and kept the crowd back. As for the driver, there was no point in even trying to save him; the two largest pieces of his remains were separated by several yards.
    The Bomb Squad had cleared the scene and the main job of the police now was to wait for the medical examiner tour doctor and the crime scene crew.
    “What’s that smell?” the detective from Midtown North asked. The tall, balding officer was creeped out by the stink, which he took to be burnt human flesh. The problem was that it smelled good.
    One of the detectives from the Bomb Squad laughed at the green-faced detective. “Gyros.”
    “Gear-o, what?” the detective asked, thinking it was short for something—like FUBAR, meaning “fucked up beyond all recognition.”
    “Look.” The Bomb Squad cop held up a chunk of burnt meat in his latex-gloved hands. He smelled it. “Tasty.”
    The Midtown North detective laughed and didn’t reveal how close to puking he was.
    “It’s lamb.”
    “It’s—”
    “The driver was delivering food. That was his job.