The Watchmaker’s Hand

Real estate, however, might be involved.

The news story he’d seen was about how the freeze on construction was affecting the market. He’d explained, “I like the idea of the Watchmaker coming up with a plan to game the system.”

“How?”

“Hale’s hired by a developer. He comes up with a plan to tip cranes over. The market plummets. The anchors love that word, don’t they? ‘Plummet.’ I heard it four times this morning. Then they buy up the devalued property. Or buy shares in something called REITs. Real estate investment trusts. Thom found out about them. They’re like a mutual fund for property, not stock. And one story said that with the work stoppage, builders’re going to fall behind schedule and miss milestones. The financing bank can foreclose. Then the perps buy up the property for cheap.”

Thom had come up with a list of six developers, four in Manhattan, one in Queens and one in Brooklyn. Their companies were private, more likely to break the law than publicly traded ones.

Rhyme split the list, half to Sachs, half to Lyle Spencer, and sent them out for reconnaissance.

She now motored into the garage attached to the high-rise office building where the man first on her list had his company. Rasheed Bahrani — worth only $21 billion, falling low in the net-worth catalog.

As she cruised up and down the ramp in the expansive garage, she was searching not for the man, but for his car.

She’d borrowed an MPH-900 license plate reader from the Traffic division and mounted it — with duct tape — to the driver’s-side window of her Torino. The lens of the LPR scanned each plate as she drove past.

Bahrani owned four cars and she certainly could have manually looked for the make and model of the vehicles. But that would be slow — and given the deadline, they couldn’t afford the time. The LPR could read the plates instantly and so she could drive as fast as the geography of the garage would allow and still get a ping when the device spotted one of the tags.

The engine growled loudly under the low ceiling as she pushed ahead in second gear. And as in every garage on earth, any turns produced an alarming — and, to her, addictive — squeal.

Two levels, three, seven, ten, twelve... She caught a whiff of scalding tire tread.

She got to the top floor, skidded in a smoky circle and started down, foot off the pedals, letting the gears do the braking.

At floor nine, she had a hit and skidded to a stop.

There it was.

Bahrani’s Bentley Mulsanne. One of the most luxurious cars in the world.

She didn’t roll in those circles, but guessed the tag was north of a quarter million dollars and the iron under the hood topped 500 horsepower. A turbocharger had to be involved. There were probably ways to break into a new Bentley, but the technique would surely need the computer power of Emery Digital Solutions. Picking a mechanical lock — the relatively easy way of breaking into her Ford — was not an option.

But without access to the interior (she had no warrant anyway), she would settle for the dirt on the ground under the four doors — in the places the developer and any passengers, ideally the Watchmaker himself, had stood upon climbing out of the vehicle.

She shifted into first, killed the engine and set the parking brake, fixing the car in place on the steep incline. A few hits of oxygen. From the backseat she took a backpack. Concerned that, if Bahrani were behind the sabotage, he or a security man might be keeping an eye out for just such surveillance. She walked to the fish-eye lens camera covering this level and blasted it with nitrogen gas. The frosting would last about ten minutes and then thaw. She’d be gone and the system would be functioning once more to protect against muggers and carjackers.

Latex gloves on, she hurried to the car and used electrostatic sheets to pick up footprints, and, with a portable vacuum, collect trace. These samples went into four separate bags — one for the concrete beneath each door. She jotted the make and plate on each bag and the location of the samples. She took samples too from under the trunk. The bags all went into a milk crate she kept in the back.

Then on the trail again.

There were no other hits in this garage, and fifteen minutes later she was on to Suspect Two. No luck here. The Mercedes, Rolls and Ferrari he owned weren’t in the lot that serviced the office of Willis Tamblyn (who came in at a respectable $29B).

She pulled into traffic and headed to the Upper West Side to hit the third suspect’s building, the richest of the group. It seemed incongruous that any of these men, as wealthy as they were, would come up with a deadly and destructive plan like this for the sake of earning yet another hundred million or so.

But maybe the perp didn’t have as much money as the press and Wikipedia reported. Look at Bernie Madoff.

Or maybe collecting property and wealth were a compulsion to him. And he was like any other addict, always needed more, more, more.