The Steel Kiss

Sachs said, “Let’s find out if he’s done this before… ” She went online and began a search. A few minutes later, “Nothing in NCIC.” The National Crime Information Center compiles warrants and profile information on tens of thousands of suspects throughout the United States and some foreign nations. Sachs added that the popular press had reported no activist groups mounting attacks that were in anyway similar to what Unsub 40 had done. Nor were there any references to “the People’s Guardian.”

Juliette Archer, Rhyme realized, had wheeled away from the others and was looking over a computer screen. She called, “I’ve got it.”

“What?” Rhyme asked bluntly, irritated that there were no new leads in a case in which the unsub was possibly targeting more victims right at the moment.

“The controller company. CIR Micro?” She returned to the others and nodded at the screen she’d just called up. “That’s the CEO’s direct line, Vinay Chaudhary.”

“How’d you get that?” Sachs asked, seemingly irritated that the NYPD assistance she’d requested hadn’t been as fast as an amateur.

“Just a little detective work,” Archer answered.

“Let’s talk to him,” Rhyme said.

Sachs typed the number into her phone and apparently got Chaudhary’s assistant, from what Rhyme could deduce. After an explanation, Sachs’s body language, registering surprise, suggested she was on with the CEO himself. It appeared he wasn’t resistant to talking with them, though—she explained after disconnecting—he wasn’t free just now. He could speak to them in about forty-five minutes.

Presumably, after he had his lawyers assembled around him, circling the wagons when hostiles appeared on the bluffs over their heads.

CHAPTER 22

Whatta we got, Sarge?” The question slipped smoothly through the officer’s headset.

The DSS tactical surveillance van, plumbing today, was parked directly across from the bar and NYPD Sergeant Joe Reilly had good eyes on the inside of the dive. He replied, “Both of ’em, sitting, hanging. Drinkin’ beers. No cares in the world.” A paunchy, gray-haired officer in Narcotics, Reilly had been a supervisor with the Drug Street Sweep program since it had started years ago; back then radios crackled like wadded-up waxed paper. Amazing they could coordinate the busts at all. Now it was all high-def digital, as if the tactical team officer he was speaking with was only feet away, not in a restaurant up the street in this scruffy Brooklyn ’hood.

Reilly wasn’t alone in the van. Beside him, operating the camera controls, was a prim and proper stocky young African American officer, a whiz with the electronic eyes and ears, though she wore too much perfume for the sergeant’s taste.

“Any weapons?” the voice in his ear asked. The undercover tac team was a half block away from Richie’s bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant and they damn well better’ve ordered the calzone Reilly had told them to get for him. And no spinach. Ham and Swiss. Period. Soda. Diet.

Reilly peered at the screen image of the two beer drinkers under surveillance. The woman officer shook her head. Reilly said, “Negative presenting.”

Which didn’t mean the two men they were watching weren’t armed to the teeth.

“Just the two of them?”

Woulda said three, it’d been three. Four, four.

“Yeah.” Reilly stretched. Hoped this wasn’t a damn waste of time. There’d been good intel that a senior asshole from one of the Dominican Republic crews was meeting a local punk in Richie’s. Maybe transferring something big. But the DR guy was late and the punk—skinny, twitchy—was just hanging with some unknown, a white male, youngish, acting kind of twitchy himself.

The tac officer on the radio took a sip of something, slurping, and said, “How late is Big Boy?”

The Dominican was not only high up in the crews but tipped the scales at three hundred plus.

“Half an hour.” Reilly looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”

“He ain’t gonna show,” the tac cop muttered. He was now chewing.

The gangbanger’s absence probably wasn’t cold feet, Reilly guessed. Drug suppliers at the Dominican’s level are just very, very busy.

“You sure the unknown with him isn’t with the DR crew?”

Reilly laughed. “Not unless times’re so hard they’re hiring choirboys. White ones. And times ain’t that hard.”

“Any idea who?”

“Nup. Descrip is blond, six feet, fucking piss-me-off skinny.” Reilly scanned the guy’s face close up. “You know, he’s looking funny.”

“What’sat mean?” the take-down guy said, between bites.

Fuck that. I want my calzone.

“Nervous.”

“He made you, Sarge?”

“I’m sitting in a fucking plumbing van on a street in Brooklyn that’s filled with plumbing supply stores. The camera lens is about the size of your cat’s dick.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“No, he didn’t make me. Just, he doesn’t want to be with our boy.”

“Who would?”