“We can’t reach him anywhere. He’s not answering his cell or home phone. Neither is his driver.”
“What about the office?”
“Closed for the day.”
“Call Marv Shank. He’s Bobby’s best friend. He’ll know where he is.”
“Will do,” said Mintz. “There’s something else. Jan sent him a text ordering him to 26 Federal Plaza at five. He didn’t show.”
Alex was worried. Bobby might disobey her command to get his butt down to Federal Plaza. He would not disobey Janet McVeigh’s. If his meeting had run long, he would have called to explain his tardiness. She tapped the captain on the shoulder. “What’s our ETA?”
“Two hours, but we have a problem. A line of thunderstorms is coming down the Hudson Valley toward the city.”
“How bad?”
“Bad. It extends all the way into western Pennsylvania. The forecast is calling for four to six inches of rain. The storm could shut down every airport in the vicinity until dawn.”
Alex squinted to read the flight instruments. “You got any more juice left in this bird?”
“We’re pushing 500 knots and that’s with a headwind.”
“My Charger goes faster than that.”
“I can get you another fifty knots. Any more than that and we’ll be landing on fumes.”
“Step on it.”
79
“I’m not here,” said Jeb Washburn.
“Definitely not,” said Mike Grillo.
“I am way off the reservation.”
“Different county entirely.”
“County? I need to be in a different country. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Anyone finds out I’m helping you, Grill-O, I am done.”
“You can come work for me.”
“Lord help us both, then.”
The men were parked in Washburn’s car at the corner of 44th and Eleventh across from a Ray’s Pizza. Washburn had exchanged his blazer and flannels for jeans and a bowling shirt that nicely hid his .45 but couldn’t quite make his paunch disappear. Grillo had dressed as casually as he would allow himself, in pressed slacks, a navy polo shirt, and deck shoes. The Shermans were gone, too, replaced by a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth. He always smoked Cubans on ops.
Grillo glanced down the street, focusing on a three-story brick building a third of the way along. It was a neighborhood of row houses and tenements, one built next to the other. Number 3415 was more run-down than its neighbors, with concrete stairs leading to a glass-paned entry. Among the thirty or so men, women, and children who called it home was a man named Paul Lawrence Tiernan. Grillo preferred to think of him as Palantir.
“You ready to roll?”
Washburn shook his head. “I can’t believe I am doing this for you.”
“’Cause I’m one of the good guys, remember?”
“Better not forget those shoes.”
“Size seven.”
Washburn slipped his gun free and put it on the center console. “You going to recognize him?”
“You think there are other guys like him in there?”
“Wouldn’t doubt it, all the boys that got hurt over there.”
“Amen,” said Grillo. “Let’s roll.”
Washburn put the car into gear and slowly cruised down the block. It was 10 p.m. and the sky was black with clouds, the air buzzing as it does before a storm. A few people walked along the sidewalk, heading toward Times Square.
“Hey, man,” said Grillo. “Whichever way it goes, thanks.”
A fist bump between friends.
It had required all the pieces of the puzzle to locate Palantir. The agenda, the credit card bills, the phone records, and finally the Skype address that had tied it all together. It was not, as it turned out, the first time the NSA had seen Cassandra99.ru. The same address had turned up in a search a few years earlier in a request from DARPA asking to investigate a cyberattack against its server. At that time two phone numbers were associated with a credit card used to pay for the Skype account. One of the numbers matched a phone Palantir had used to contact Edward Astor. By means of triangulation, the NSA had narrowed down Cassandra99’s location to one of two areas. Using Edward Astor’s credit card receipts from last Friday morning, when he had ventured to midtown to meet Palantir, Grillo was able to offer an educated guess as to which location was more likely to be Palantir’s home. The triangulation was accurate to 10 feet as far as latitude and longitude were concerned. It did not, however, offer much help in terms of altitude. Number 3415 was a three-story tenement. It required a human’s gumshoeing to find out who lived inside the building. In this case, Grillo had slipped the postman a twenty to let him look at the names of all those receiving mail at the address. Paul Lawrence Tiernan fit the bill. The military records Grillo obtained afterward confirmed that he had his man, as well as the probable reasons for Palantir’s grudge against the United States government.