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He snaps right to. “What police officer?”
Denise turns and looks down Broadway. “I dunno. I guess he left. We just went around the corner of the building for a sec, that’s all.”
“Why did he want to talk to you?”
“He said it was important.”
“Denise…how many times have we told you, no talking to strangers?”
She rolls her eyes. “He wasn’t a stranger. He was a police officer. And you and Mom always said if I ever got lost or got into trouble, find a man or woman police officer. Or somebody else in uniform.”
The line of students starts moving through the open gate. He puts his hand on her shoulder just above her backpack and says, “You weren’t in trouble.”
“But he wanted to talk to me.”
He stops as the line ahead keeps moving. “What did he say?”
Denise says, “Dad, the line is moving. We’ve got to keep up.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “What did the police officer say?”
Denise says, “He told me to give you this. He said it was very important.”
His daughter hands over a folded piece of white paper, which Tom unfolds. In clear, hand-printed capital letters—it appears to have been traced with a pen and ruler to mask the handwriting—the note says:
TOM—YOU WERE LUCKY THIS TIME. DON’T EVER LEAVE YOUR GIRL ALONE LIKE THAT, EVER AGAIN.
He crumples the note and Denise says, “Dad, we’re gonna be late.”
Tom grabs her hand and they catch up to the students, teachers, and chaperones. His unknown watchers are talented indeed, now pretending to be NYPD.
“No, we won’t,” he says.
Chapter49
THE SUNis starting to come up in this alleged bucolic corner of France, and my mood has improved a bit since I found my missing shoe a few hours earlier. But not by much.
The runway is pretty busy this morning for a place that is an abandoned afterthought, and I’m sticking by Jeremy as the place gets crowded with additional DGSE personnel, medical responders, and red-and-yellow fire trucks from the localsapeurs-pompiers.Earlier Jeremy and I had received a severe dressing-down from a well-dressed older woman who I gather was Victor’s boss, but her angry Parisian French overwhelmed my translating abilities, so all I got from her was that she was one very angry woman.
Now Jeremy and I are observing a preliminary forensic examination of the destroyed van. We stand in front of what’s left of the cab, containing two charred lumps of what were once human beings, but the flesh has turned to dark charcoal and the fused arms have folded back, almost fetus-like, as if in their last few moments of agony in life they were trying to return to the safety of the womb.
Jeremy says, “I doubt any one of those two are Rashad.”
“Agreed,” I say. “Easy to hire two unemployed migrants or local men to act as passenger and driver.” I walk closer and a forensics tech in a white jumpsuit barks at me, but I ignore him. I pick up a charred piece of honeycombed plastic, rotate it in my hand, show it to Jeremy.
“Thermal protective barrier,” I say. “You can hide two guys in the van while the drones pick up only the driver and passenger. Simple thing to quickly switch places when the trade was made after the Cessna landed…then you leave the side door open, and when the van heads out to the runway, the original two occupants—Rashad and his friend—roll out and slip into the woods. The drones would be tracking the van, and they would easily miss something like that.”
I toss the plastic back into the wreckage. Jeremy says, “I got a quick word with one of the investigators. Two of the Kazakh men are dead. The other was wounded…and all he knew was that he was flying here to drop off a very valuable package and pick up some diamonds.”
“There’ll be some real diamonds in whatever package they were using,” I say. “The rest will be cubic zirconia. Guaranteed.”
I walk around to the crumpled rear of the van, where two more forensic types in bright yellow protective radiation gear, respirators, gloves, and face masks are examining some straps; a charred, square-shaped canvas knapsack big enough to hold a refrigerator; wires; and a number of dull-gray tubes.
“Gamma-ray source,” I tell Jeremy. “Medical device, small-scale radioactive processing machine—something similar. Shield it so it’s covered. At a certain point, pull off the shielding, gamma-ray radiation starts emitting, and if you think a suitcase nuke is coming your way, this will make your detection devices start screaming.”
I step back, knowing that whatever’s being emitted there is low dose and not too dangerous, but why take chances?
Damn, it feels good having shoes on.
