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Time to call it a night.
He flipped through the report about the shoot-out on Canal Street. It was mostly finished but he knew he'd have to revise it tomorrow. Dellray enjoyed writing and he was good at it (under a pseudonym he'd contributed to various historical and philosophical magazines on many different topics over the years) but this particular opus was going to require some serious massaging.
Hunched over the desk, he glanced at the pages, compulsively jotting changes here and there and all the while wondering why exactly he was working on GHOSTKILL.
Frederick Dellray, with degrees in criminology, psychology and philosophy tucked under his belt, eschewed brainy law enforcement. He was to undercover work what Rhyme was to criminalistics. Known as the Chameleon, he could portray anybody from any culture, provided, of course, that the role could be played by someone well over six feet with skin dark as an Ethiopian's. Which still left an amazing range of parts for the agent--crime being perhaps the only aspect of society where one is judged solely on skill and not on race.
Dellray's talent, and lifelong passion for law enforcement, however, had proved his undoing. He'd been too good. In addition to working undercover jobs for his own outfit, the FBI, he'd been borrowed regularly by the Drug Enforcement Administration; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the police departments in New York, L.A., Washington, D.C. Bad guys have computers, cell phones and email too, of course, and little by little Dellray's reputation spread within the underworld. It became too dangerous to put him into the field.
He was promoted and put in charge of running undercover agents and CIs, confidential informants, in New York.
For his part, Dellray would've preferred a different assignment. His partner, Special Agent Toby Doolittle, had been killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the death had sent Dellray on a perennial quest to be reassigned to the bureau's antiterrorist unit. But he reluctantly recognized that a passion to collar a perp wasn't enough to excel at that area of law enforcement--look at Alan Coe, for instance--and so he was content to remain where his talents lay.
Being assigned to what would become GHOSTKILL had confused Dellray at first; he'd never run any human smuggling cases before. He'd assumed that he was recruited because of his extensive undercover network in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn--where the Chinese-American communities in this area were located. But Dellray soon learned that his traditional techniques for running snitches and undercover agents didn't work. A viewer of thoughtful movies, Dellray had seen the famous film Chinatown, which made the point that the namesake neighborhood in old-time Los Angeles operated outside of Western laws. This, he found, wasn't a scriptwriter's device. And it was true about New York's Chinatowns as well. Justice was administered through the tongs, and the number of calls to 911 and to the local police stations in Chinese communities of New York was much lower than in other neighborhoods. Nobody snitched to outsiders, and undercover agents were sniffed out almost immediately.
So, with GHOSTKILL, he found himself running a complicated operation dealing with a type of crime he had little experience with. But after his efforts tonight at the office he felt much better. Tomorrow he was going to meet with the special agents in charge of the Southern and Eastern Districts and one of the assistant directors from Washington. He'd get himself named supervising special agent, which would open up a lot of the bureau's resources to him and the GHOSTKILL team. As SSA, he'd bully and connive his way into getting what they needed for the case: the FBI's--i.e., his--complete jurisdiction, the SPEC-TAC team in town and the INS relegated to an exclusively advisory role, which meant virtually cutting them out of the case altogether. Peabody and Coe would be pissed but that was just too bad. He'd already framed his argument. Yes, the INS was vital in gathering intelligence about snakeheads and smuggling operations and interdicting their ships. But now GHOSTKILL was a full-out manhunt for a killer. That was the bureau's expertise.
He was confident the brass would buy his pitch; undercover agents like himself, Dellray had learned, are among the best persuaders--and extorters--in the world.
Dellray snagged his office phone and called his own number, his apartment in Brooklyn.
"Hello?" a woman's voice answered.
"I'll be home in thirty," he said softly. With Serena he never used the unique patois he'd developed working on the streets of New York and slung about as his trademark on the job.
"See you then, love."
He hung up. No one in the bureau or the NYPD knew a single thing about Dellray's personal life--nothing about Serena, a choreographer with the Brooklyn Academy of Music he'd been seeing off and on for years. She worked long hours and traveled. He worked long hours and traveled.
The arrangement suited them.
Walking through the halls of the bureau's headquarters, which resembled the digs of a big, moderately unsuccessful corporation, he nodded at two agents in shirtsleeves, ties loose in a way that the Boss, J. Edgar Hoover, would not have tolerated (just as, Dellray reflected, he himself wouldn't have been tolerated by the old G-man, now that he thought about it).
"So much crime," Dellray intoned as he stalked past them on his long legs, "so little time." They waved good night.
Then down the elevator and out the front door. He crossed the street, heading for the federal parking annex.
He noticed the scorched frame of a van that had burned earlier in the evening, still smoldering. He remembered hearing the sirens, wondered what had happened.
Past the guard, down the ramp into the dim garage, which smelled of wet concrete and car exhaust.
Dellray found his government-issue Ford and unlocked the door. He opened it and tossed in his battered briefcase, which contained a box of 9mm ammunition, a yellow pad filled with his jottings, various memos on the Kwan Ang case and a well-read book of Goethe's poems.
As Dellray started to climb inside the Ford he noticed on the driver's side of the car the window weather stripping was unsealed, which told him immediately somebody had wedged the window to open the door. Shit! He glanced down and saw the wires protruding from under his seat. He lunged for the top of the door with his right hand to keep from putting all his weight on the seat and compressing what he knew was the bomb's pressure switch.
But it was too late.
The tips of his long fingers flapped against the open door frame and slipped off. He began to fall sideways onto the seat beneath him.
Save your eyes! he thought instinctively, lifting his long hands toward his face.
Chapter Twenty-seven
"The Changs're somewhere in Queens," Sachs said, writing this bit of information on the whiteboard. "Driving a blue van, no tag, no make."
"Do we have anything specific about it?" Rhyme muttered. "Cerulean, navy, sky, baby blue?"
"Wu couldn't remember."
