Fatal Error, page 8
“And what do I publish in the meantime?”
“Don’t give me that, Carter. You’ve got a dozen of my articles in hand.”
“I always want the latest thing, you know that.”
Jess grunted. She heard a slap. The sound of a heavy pen thumping on a thick pad. Carter was done writing. “So what have you got?”
He laughed. “On my pad? One word. And it’s nothing about what you’re doing, whatever it is.” He cleared his throat. “The word is danger.”
She laughed. “You worry too much.”
“When it comes to my top reporters, no amount of worrying is too much. Any hint of danger and you get in touch. I’ll do whatever it takes. Understand?”
Her phone bleeped. She looked at the display. “Hey, I’ve got another call. Talk to you later.”
Carter said goodbye as she swapped calls. “Morris?”
“Where are you?”
“Near where we had lunch.”
“Be standing outside the embassy in five minutes. I’ll swing by and pick you up. The tracker on the suitcases just triggered. No clue why it triggered now and not before. But the good news is we have a location.”
Jess started jogging. “I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jess stood by the iron fence in front of the American Embassy. A dark blue Alfa Romeo with “Carabinieri” painted on the sides in huge red letters rounded the corner, lights flashing and tires squealing. For some unknown reason, Jess had heard Italians call these carabinieri cars “Gazzella.” The car looked nothing like a gazelle to her.
Two unmarked white Subaru sedans followed close behind the gazzella. The three screeched to a halt in front of the embassy, drawing the attention of the marine guards at the main gate.
The rear door opened in the middle Subaru, and Jess dived inside. The cars accelerated away hard, momentum slamming the sedan’s door behind her.
Morris was already seated opposite her in the rear seat. She struggled to secure her seatbelt as the sedan fishtailed around a corner.
“What do you know?” she said.
“The tracker only worked for a moment, but we got a fix. It’s like someone got inquisitive, and activated it. Briefly.”
“You think it’s real? It could be Enzo Ficarra?”
“Hard to say. It’s an encrypted signal. Very difficult to fake.”
“But what if it’s a decoy?”
Morris shrugged. “Nothing much we can do about that until we check it out.”
The man in the front passenger seat turned around. It was Vanelli. His jaw was hard set and his lips pressed into a thin line. “And when agent Morris says until we check it out, he means until the law enforcement agencies check it out. There will be plenty of time for reporting afterwards. Is that clear?”
Jess took a deep breath. Too many people were telling her what to do. Having included her in this thing, they needed to stop worrying about her welfare, and get on with their jobs.
People saw her as petite, and she was, but her height didn’t make her helpless. Her skill set was formidable. Experience proved her best response was to let the comments slide and simply show her capabilities when the time came.
She smiled, and nodded toward Vanelli. “You’ll barely even know I’m here.”
She turned back to Morris.
“Where is the luggage located?”
“We don’t necessarily know it’s the location of the luggage. Someone may have taken the tracker out. But as far as we can tell, it’s in an industrial unit north of the city.”
“A run down area.” Vanelli shrugged. “Old buildings. Mostly abandoned. It’s not likely Enzo Ficarra would be there.”
The uniformed carabiniere driver turned off the flashing lights, and slowed to the pace of the everyday traffic. “Two miles,” he said.
“We’ll set up observation first. See what happens. Who’s there? How many?” Vanelli said. “Once we know the answers then we will know how to proceed.”
The blue carabinieri gazzella ahead pulled over, and joined a line of Polizia police cars. Jess felt a familiar mix of excited fear course through her. The FBI and two Italian agencies working together could mean that Enzo Ficarra was close. The Grantly case could be closed today.
“My men will secure the area. A broad perimeter.” Vanelli pointed to the carabinieri vehicles. “We will be going closer for observation.”
The road looped around a series of dilapidated signs advertising auto repair shops and vinyl window manufacturers. Behind the signs were tired looking buildings. Overflowing dumpsters set at odd angles. Only the occasional window was illuminated. Roll-up doors were closed. Layers of grime indicated it’d been a long time since business boomed in the area.
They turned into a parking lot, their driver dodging debris on the tarmac. Vanelli pointed to a doorway and the carabiniere parked beside it.
Jess looked out of the window at the sorry building. “The tracker was here?”
Morris clicked open his door. “This is the observation point.”
Jess, Morris, Vanelli, and their driver piled out to join the others. Now that she had a chance to look at him, the driver seemed younger than she’d expected. His name badge identified him as “Nicci.” The name meant “victory.” She certainly hoped so.
Vanelli’s carabiniere made short work of the padlock on the building’s door. The interior was long, wide, and high, a cavernous empty space.
There was no electric light inside, only the daylight coming through the windows. The air was hot and stale. It smelled of oil and something rotten. Every sound they made echoed off the corrugated iron walls.
Two carabinieri strained to lift the roll-up door. The white Subarus were moved inside, and the door closed.
Jess took pictures with her phone as Vanelli and Morris found a way up onto a gantry that ran along the uppermost windows.
Vanelli’s men lifted camera gear and long-range lenses from the trunks. Jess followed them up to the gantry.
In less than a minute, they had the camera set up on a tripod and a laptop showing the feed from its powerful lens.
The view looked across an empty parking lot, and over a road to a building that looked much as the one they had entered. The walls were a faded tan. Windows circled the upper part of the corrugated iron walls.
There were two loading docks with doors secured by thick iron bars. On the left, the entrance was covered in graffiti. Jess guessed the building had windows, but the paint was so thick it was hard to be sure.
Morris adjusted the camera, tracking it from window to window. Stopping at each.
Jess leaned down to study the picture on the laptop screen. “Looks empty.”
“More than that, the windows haven’t been used in a long time. See how they’re all closed? It’s hot, and these places don’t have air conditioning. If you were inside over there for long, you’d at least open a window.”
She nodded. Morris continued to track from window to window.
Vanelli’s men set up a second machine on a tripod. It looked like a very sleek camera but there was no lens, only two small, silvered mirrors. Vanelli donned a headset, and plugged it into the back of the machine.
“Laser microphone,” Morris said.
Her eyes searched out of the window. “Where’s the beam?”
“Infrared. Not visible.”
Jess nodded, and watched as Vanelli moved the microphone from window to window, just as Morris had done with the camera.
Vanelli worked back along the windows, and shook his head. “I hear noise, but…”
He handed the headset to Morris.
Morris scanned the microphone across the windows. “I hear noise at every window.”
“Exactly.” Vanelli explained for Jess’s benefit. “If someone is talking in the building, noises would be louder by the window closest to the conversation.”
“Maybe they’re standing in the middle of the building?”
Vanelli shook his head. “It would still sound louder in the middle of the building.”
“What’s that noise?” Jess asked.
“Voices. Very muffled.”
Vanelli’s men carried folding chairs up to the gantry. The group sat down.
Jess felt faintly ridiculous, sitting on a lawn chair, thirty feet in the air, staring out of a grimy window in an abandoned factory.
Morris unplugged the headphones. One of Vanelli’s carabinieri plugged in a speaker, and turned up the volume. They listened to a mumbling voice booming around the empty warehouse across the parking lot.
Jess’s Italian wasn’t good enough to keep track of the conversation. She leaned back in her chair.
The mumbling voice stopped. There was a moment of silence.
They looked at each other, questioningly. Music blared out from the speaker. A rapid fire jingle, with a voice talking over the top. Vanelli shook his head. Morris rolled his eyes.
Jess laughed. “The local radio station?”
Nicci, Vanelli’s young carabiniere driver, ran down the gantry and began searching stations on the car’s radio. He found a match and turned off the radio. “The Rome Word,” he called.
Vanelli nodded. “Local talk show.”
Jess gazed out of the grimy window. “Does that explain why you hear it from all windows equally?”
Morris shook his head. “Even a radio has a point source.” He paused in thought, then groaned. “The sound isn’t in the building.”
He knelt by the microphone, and scanned it around the surrounding buildings. The radio station suddenly jumped louder from the speaker. “The car shop on the right has the radio on. The sound is reflecting off the building.”
“So, there’s no sound inside that building we’re interested in at all?” Jess said.
Morris shrugged. “Can’t tell with so much ambient noise being reflected.”
Vanelli zoomed the camera out until it framed the whole building. “We need to be patient.”
Patience. Not something Jess was comfortable with or good at, but she seemed to be the only impatient one here.
Jess watched shadows cast by the sunlight as they tracked their way across the floor and up the wall as the afternoon wore endlessly on.
Morris chewed gum.
Vanelli received sporadic calls from the Polizia stationed on the perimeter of the area, but nothing that moved him to action.
After a while, Vanelli pulled out his phone and opened an app Jess recognized. Warped Words. She played it often herself. She wouldn’t have guessed Vanelli was a wordplay genius.
But she watched him play the anagram game expertly, moving up to higher and higher levels in record time with very few mistakes. If she challenged him to a contest, he might actually win. Ouch. She winced.
He must have felt her watching because he glanced her way.
“I love that game.” She flashed a sheepish smile.
He shrugged. “Passes the time on stakeouts. This is the English version. Helps me to practice my language skills.” He narrowed his gaze. “You might want to try the Italian language version.”
Double ouch. She nodded. “Right.”
He turned his attention back to Warped Words.
Okay, so the guy wasn’t her biggest fan. She didn’t feel a lot of warm fuzzies for him, either.
Jess stood, walked the length of the gantry, and sat down again so many times she’d lost count. Stakeouts were incredibly boring. This one was no more interesting than the others she’d experienced. She’d taken dozens of pictures on her phone. For something to occupy her time, she thumbed through them.
She noticed two bright dots on the images of the windows under surveillance. She flipped to another picture. Same again. The laser. Had to be.
“Take a look at these.” She handed the phone to Morris.
“Some cameras can see into the infrared.” He shrugged. “Some can’t.”
“But if I can see the lasers, so can they.”
He smiled. “If they’re looking.”
She took several more pictures, making sure to emphasize the laser. With no cameraman, she’d be forced to use her own images in her article. She had the time to get the best shots possible under these conditions. Cameras that recorded invisible infrared were the kind of detail her readers would appreciate.
As the light through the dirty windows turned golden, Vanelli put away his phone. He scanned the microphone from window to window again. The same muffled talk show emanated from the speaker.
He grunted. “We’ve waited long enough. If there is anyone in there, they’ll be getting tired. The end of their day.”
“Tired time is the best time,” Morris said.
Vanelli made a call, then led the way down the stairs and back to the gazzellas. His carabinieri pulled guns and bulletproof vests from the trunks.
Jess stood to one side as they checked weapons and secured vests for the best coverage and freedom of movement. With the bulky vest on, Morris looked even larger than normal.
The carabinieri lifted the roll-up door and drove the cars out. Two more gazzellas were waiting outside, more carabinieri inside them. But the cars were dwarfed by the vehicle beside them, a dark blue monster of flat panels and angled metalwork painted with the same huge red “Carabinieri” on both sides.
“MRAP,” Morris said. “Mine resistant ambush protected vehicle. Specifically designed to withstand improvised explosive device attacks and ambushes. Virtually indestructible. Their military has probably been shedding them same as ours. U.S. police can pick them up for a fraction of what they originally cost Uncle Sam.”
The intimidating look of the MRAP was enhanced by a battering ram across the front. The man inside the vehicle gave Vanelli a thumbs up. Vanelli talked to the men in each car before coming back to Morris and Jess.
Vanelli gestured to the MRAP. “We’ll go in through the roll-up door. If there is room, the MRAP will continue into the building, if not he’ll reverse out. Don’t be deceived, it’s quick for its size. My men go in next.” He pointed to Jess. “You don’t go in until I call the all clear. There will be firepower and nervous people in there. I don’t want any accidents.”
Jess looked at the MRAP. “What about that?”
Vanelli barely glanced at the towering vehicle. The driver sat about nine feet off the ground. “Nothing’s going to damage that.”
“Exactly. So why don’t I go in there?”
He scowled at her.
She raised her eyebrows. “Nothing’s going to damage that, you just—”
He spun on his heels, waving to the man in the MRAP’s cab.
She hurried after him.
The door to the MRAP popped open, an electric motor driving it outward. Vanelli shouted something to the driver, and walked off.
Jess hauled herself up a series of flat metal steps using a handrail. Despite the vehicle’s size, she ducked her head as she stepped through the doorway, and sat in the passenger seat.
Her arm naturally fell on a square box snugged between her and the driver. “I’m Jess Kimball,” she said.
“Angelo Graza,” he said and pointed to a four-point harness. She buckled herself in, tightening the straps to their end stops.
Light green painted metal was everywhere. The dashboard was covered with lights and gauges. The switches were huge. Several had red covers that prevented accidental operation.
Graza flipped up one of the red covers, and pushed the switch underneath. Jess’s door whirred closed, latching with a heavy thump and the ratcheting of metal.
The rear of the vehicle had two empty rows of seats. She and Graza were the lone occupants.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Graza talked into a headset, and nodded. He gunned the engine. The noise was loud, but not as bad as Jess expected.
The view from the flat windscreen was so far from the ground the motion of the vehicle disoriented her. The carabinieri’s gazzellas were lost behind the square metal of the engine compartment.
Graza twisted the steering wheel with confidence. The MRAP skirted around where she imagined the cars were parked, and headed down the length of the parking lot.
The scale of the vehicle dwarfed her senses. It took her several seconds to realize they were traveling fast.
She twisted around. There was no window in the back. Graza tapped a screen, and flipped a switch. A rear-view camera activated. The white sedans were close behind the MRAP.
The end of the building loomed ahead. They slowed. But not much.
The vehicle shook as Graza spun the wheel. Her senses swam as they turned. From the MRAP’s height, the distance between the buildings didn’t seem like much, but she wasn’t concerned. She had the feeling knocking down a wall would be simple for the metal monster.
They emerged from the buildings, the corners whipping by so quickly she realized just how fast they were going. They covered the parking lot in seconds.
Graza veered a little left to race through the inbound lane, eschewing the out lane for speed. She fired off a couple of shots from her camera. They crossed the road and the second building’s parking area in moments.
Graza switched on a bank of headlights. The loading dock loomed ahead. She glanced at the rear-view camera.
The carabinieri vehicles had split either side of the MRAP. Obviously keeping well clear in case Graza changed direction. She doubted they would feel anything as insubstantial as a gazzella inside the vehicle if the MRAP reversed over it.
She gripped her seat. The roll-up door on the loading dock ahead had an awning. She instinctively ducked her head. Despite the MRAPs height, it passed underneath.
Graza braked and the MRAP slowed to a few miles per hour.
She glanced at Graza. He was intently peering between the windshield and a monitor that showed views of either side of the vehicle.
The nose of the MRAP hit the door. It strained and buckled and bent. The vehicle continued its slow, relentless progress.
The door snapped from its mounting points, dropping onto the hood.
She saw the whole event without feeling a thing inside the MRAP. Metal struck metal, but there had been no noise, no jarring crash, and no rocking motion. It was as if she had watched on television. The detachment was surreal.
