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CHARLES HALE GAZEDup at the tower crane that Simone had mentioned as they sat in the Harlem coffeehouse.
The jib was weather-vaning in the wind; the slewing plate had been released so it could turn and keep pressure from the wind off the mast. A huge American flag flapped noisily two hundred feet up. He’d think that might affect performance, but it wasn’t his concern.
He turned and glanced at the building west of the one Simone had rented as a drop site. He’d half-expected the police, investigating how the young man who lived there had come to overdose on an anesthetic cocktail.
But no. He had the street to himself.
With the key she’d given him in the “gift bag,” he opened the door. Coincidentally, the key was the same as he used in all his safe houses, including the one here. It was of an unusual design, a short length of chain. The lock it fit into was as unpickable as one could be.
Inside, hand near a weapon in his waistband, he clicked on thegreen-tinted overheads and walked to the box containing the device she’d had made. He looked down at the printing on the cardboard side.
KitchenAid Bread Maker Deluxe
He was amused at the camouflage. He knelt and opened the lid, looking inside.
The device was of quite the compact design, resembling a generator of the sort you’d buy at a home improvement store. A burnished metal base, on top of which sat an array of metal and black carbon fiber boxes and tubes and fixtures and wires. To one side were large batteries. The top was the business end: a brushed aluminum tube, two feet long and six inches in diameter.
Most devices of destruction appear haphazard. True IEDs are just jumbles of wires and circuit boards and chunks of explosives. No order, sloppy and tangled.
What Simone had created, however, was stylish, elegant, even sensuous. German Bauhaus design of the early twentieth century came to mind.
He ran his hand slowly over the top, regretting the necessity for latex gloves. He would have liked to feel its texture on his skin.
As a watchmaker by avocation, Hale was talented with tools and had the ability to construct any number of things—the acid delivery systems for the cranes, for instance, or the one that killed the witness in Queens.
But this was different. This was special, beyond his skills.
All the more reason for respect. Then he sealed the box back up and wheeled the bulky thing out to the back of the SUV. He wrestled it in.
He then returned to the apartment and found the cardboard box that Simone had mentioned in the note she’d given him in Harlem. Inside were what appeared to be a bag of flour and a canof Crisco. Hale dumped the contents of the bag—a metallic-shaded powder—onto the floor near where Simone’s device had rested. He opened the can and poured the brown gelatin inside over the floor in a trail from the door to the powder.
The last thing he extracted from the box was a Fourth of July sparkler.
At the doorway, he turned and lit it, dropping it on the gelatin, which ignited immediately. The mix of gasoline, naphthalene and palmitate—napalm—caught fire immediately and began to burn toward the powder, which was iron oxide rust and aluminum, also known as thermite. The napalm burned at about 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to do considerable damage, but the thermite would reach a temperature of 4,000 degrees, guaranteeing that not a molecule of DNA remained.
Hale returned to the SUV and drove down to Greenwich Village. There, near the Hamilton Court cul-de-sac, he left the vehicle in a garage one of his companies had rented and returned to the trailer.
His security app told him that no one had breached either the cul-de-sac nor the safe house, which he entered. Closing the door, he shut off the security system, then walked into the bedroom, stripped off the outer garments he was wearing and hung them in the small closet. The suit jacket and trousers had been specially made and had neoprene linings. He was always careful when planting the acid but, of course, accidents happen, especially with such an unstable chemical.
In the minuscule bathroom, he opened the medicine cabinet door and removed the jar of Penotanyl, prescribed by the doctor who had done the cosmetic surgery. Unscrewing the top, he rubbed the white substance on his face from forehead to chin. The slicing and rearranging to alter him had been so extensive that the ointment was necessary to keep the skin from drying and cracking.Hale was a man of iron discipline, but even he found it hard to resist rubbing during the bouts of itching.
Another glance at the stranger in the mirror. Still startling.
He replaced the medicine and then dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt and a sweatshirt. His sidearm, a smaller Glock, a model 43, went into the holster inside his belt. No silencer for this weapon. In close combat, you want noise.
Logging on to his computer, he typed in a local news station’s URL. Hale was one person who did not regret the demise of print journalism. Oh, he read news voraciously. He had sixteen anonymous subscriptions—ranging from theNew York Timesto the BulgarianState Daily—but he needed the immediacy of online editions.
DECORATED NYPD DETECTIVE KILLED ON LOWER EAST SIDE
The story reported that Andrew Raymond Gilligan, a sixteen-year veteran, had been shot gangland style. It was likely that the killer had been a mob enforcer, shooting Gilligan to stop an organized crime investigation he was working on. The police, though, had no suspects in mind.
“He was a good cop and a good man,” his brother, Mick Gilligan, 43, said. “He didn’t deserve this.”
He continued to scan several other sources and found nothing of the acid attack on Garry Helprin and his wife. Which meant they were dead. Their bodies would be discovered eventually; with luck, though, he’d be gone by then.
Hale closed out of the site. He brewed a cup of coffee and, after scanning the security monitors, sat back and sipped the hot beverage.
He reflected on the story about Gilligan’s death. It was illuminating. The theory that he’d been killed by an OC hit man wasnonsense—a murder like that bought gang leaders far more trouble than it prevented. No, the story was floated as a smoke screen. Andthatmeant that Lincoln and the others knew about the connection between Gilligan and him, and that Hale was the shooter.
