Suspect, p.33
Suspect, page 33
“But we need your help to make sure we get the target’s side of the conversation. The closer you can place the second recorder to the target—”
“You mean Ritz,” the Chief says. Mulligan is like an actor who can’t break role, and her Bureau-speak is irritating, especially to a local like the Chief, who hears it as part of the FBI’s We’re-So-Special horseshit.
Mulligan more or less growls but nods, and the Chief says, “Just checking. Okay, second device as close as possible to the Ritz. What else?”
“Keep your voice up, as much as you can.”
“I will, but Moritz is a low talker.”
“Well, we have some ideas about dealing with that. We’re going to ask you to go to the meeting wearing these.” She slides a pair of behind-the-ear hearing aids out of the envelope.
Lucy pulls her mouth around dubiously.
“Won’t Ritz find it strange that I’m suddenly wearing these?”
“Who says it’s sudden?” asks Mulligan. “Your hair is long enough that you could have been wearing them for months with no one noticing. You just need to be ready to explain that you damaged your hearing somehow when you were younger, and recently it’s gotten worse. Did you like rock concerts?”
“Not much,” says the Chief, “and nothing headbanging. But I was detailed to the gun range as an instructor when I was still in Kindle County.”
“Perfect,” says Mulligan. “So the ear protection they gave you turned out to be defective. Right?”
“Typical low-grade Kindle County crap,” answers Lucy.
“The other point with the hearing aids is that the surveillance expert probably won’t let you keep them on. He’ll take any electronic device you’re carrying away from you, or he’ll remove the batteries, probably both, if he’s as good as we believe. Supposedly, the CS guy won’t be alerting the target to our equipment, so he may let you hold on to the aids with the batteries pulled, which is great, because the high-frequency radio we’ve installed in the right hearing aid has a secondary power source. If CS keeps them, don’t worry. The radio will probably get blocked under that bridge anyway, and our principal means of keeping track of you will be a laser microphone that we’ll begin using as soon as you get in the target’s vehicle.”
“Is it worth bothering with those if they’re going to get confiscated?” the Chief says, nudging one of the hearing aids with a polished nail.
“Yes,” says Mulligan, “because if they take away your hearing aids, you’ll have a reason to demand that the target speak up—which will help us overcome the sound machine. So make a fuss, however CS decides to disable them.”
“Ah.” The Chief grins.
“Also,” Mulligan says, “pay attention to the sound machine the target uses. It will have to be in plain view, because he won’t want to muffle it in any way. If we can identify it, we can reproduce its signal range afterwards, which will help us remove the interference digitally from what we’ve recorded.
“As I said, our principal means of overhearing the conversation as it’s taking place will be a laser microphone.” Mulligan asks the Chief to sign a consent form, so that use of the laser mike doesn’t violate the federal wiretapping law, then takes a second to explain how the tap works. They’re betting Ritz will park where he has before, and have already positioned a laser on a lamppost. There will also be one in an FBI tail car in case Vojczek surprises them and stops somewhere else. Apparently, the Bureau’s machines emit some additional beam that hides the laser from the devices that can ordinarily detect them.
“Remember,” Mulligan says, “the first purpose of these listening devices is your safety. If you scream louder than his sound machine, we’ll hear you. Your safe word will be ‘Nazi.’ And if he makes a second sweep for bugs, you say ‘spaghetti.’”
“‘Nazi’ and ‘spaghetti,’” the Chief repeats. I’m glad to hear this part. The Chief has been impressively unconcerned for her physical safety, but in the academy, I was taught that anybody who is within nine feet of you can kill you with a knife before you can draw your weapon. So she’ll be in the danger zone, sitting in a car with Vojczek, especially unarmed. But no matter what Ritz does, she should have time to scream.
“For his initial sweep of you, the CS guy is probably going to use an electromagnetic field detector, which will alert him to any active electronic device—like your hearing aids or cell phone. Assuming the target or his people are close enough to see the indicator lights go off, the CS guy will have to play that straight. Once he’s used the field detector, he has to turn it off, because it will just keep up that high-pitched alarm in response to the sound machine running. He might test the vibrations on the car’s windshield, too, but we don’t expect the target to go riding around with dampers on the glass that would interfere with the laser tap. That’s a known trick for dope peddlers, which means it’s an invitation for a police stop.”
“Yeah,” says the Chief. “Heaven forbid Ritz looked like a dope peddler.”
Mulligan responds with a tight smile.
“In order to get through the electronic field detector, everything we’re equipping you with can be turned on and off. The hearing aid radio is controlled by the battery door. When that’s open, the radio will go off. But the recorders I just showed you, the key and the card, will require you to activate them manually after the search.” Mulligan shows the Chief the buttons on the center of the car key and the logo on the key card. The switches are heat as well as pressure sensitive, so it won’t require a lot of manipulation for the Chief to turn each recorder on again with a casual motion.
Mulligan asks the Chief to practice with the buttons. She does it twice but waves her hand at more maneuvers. When Lucy started as a patrol officer in Kindle County, Narcotics tapped her frequently to work undercover. She wasn’t known to the dealers as a narc and her Spanish was perfect. She rolled up half a dozen of those dudes. ‘I was pretty good,’ she’s told me, meaning she freaking killed it. She said it was like running sprints on a high wire, but she loved the whole deal—the acting, the danger, the improvisational reactions. She’s confident she still has the same chops.
On the way out, Don Ingram stops me.
“Your guy made a great deal here. He’s smart enough not to try to have it both ways, right?”
“He keeps his word,” I answer.
Once I’m in the Cadillac, I’m sort of amazed by what I said, my faith in Koob as this upright individual, given all the plays we ran on one another. Can you be an honest spy? But I meant it.
I’m happy to think he’s at my place, waiting for me, but of course he’s not. There’s a note on my table—maybe the first time I’ve seen his handwriting, which is very neat, almost like calligraphy.
‘Better I leave,’ it says. I consider the grammar for a second, unsure if it’s shorthand or a leftover from the way his mom spoke English. Better you stay, I think, and then immediately decide it’s not, he’s right. It’s easy to feel a little swindled because Koob is still enmeshed with his wife, whether he knows it or not, but it’s the wrong time on both sides.
I know they say that people change for love, and I’ve seen it. I went to high school with a woman named Randi Berkowitz, who fell for this Pakistani guy. I ran into her at the mall, and she had on this hijab that draped down over her shoulders, and a floor-length skirt with four little kids clinging to the hem. And she definitely seemed happy. Living by these rules, which she’d probably never even heard of when she was in high school, felt right to her—a way to express her true self, the person she’d chosen to be.
But deep inside, I know I’m still not ready for just one person and may never get there. The most I can take away from the whole thing with Koob is that maybe the idea is getting a little more tempting.
After looking at the note another second, I fold it up and place it carefully in my top desk drawer. I’m sure I’ll take it out and hold it for a minute now and then.
37. The Meet
A little before eight a.m. on Tuesday morning, Tonya calls me and says, “It’s on.” Ritz’s assistant at work has phoned the Chief’s cell and told her that Mr. Vojczek wants to meet with Lucy in thirty minutes at the tables outside a coffee shop on Madison, about a block from the Vojczek Management office.
Rik and I will not be allowed to observe anything on the street, since we could interfere unwittingly, but given what’s at stake for the Chief, Toy has gotten us seats at the Greenwood County off-site, which will be the communications center for the operation today. With half an hour to get there, I dash out the door without remembering to pee, and I spend the entire drive waiting out every light with my foot tapping.
I beat Rik by a few minutes, and what I walk in on looks like a low-rent version of Mission Control. There are four huge computer monitors set up on a long folding table, and two men and two women with headsets are seated on stackable plastic outdoor chairs in front of the screens. Dan Feld is in a metal folding chair, rocking back and forth against the wall. He tosses me a tiny wave.
Toy comes to greet me and to explain what we’re watching.
“Ritz has Walter and a couple of his other guys shadowing the Chief to be sure she isn’t being followed,” Toy says. “Which is kind of a hoot, because we’re way ahead of them.” She points to one of the monitors where I can see an overhead view of the Chief’s Camry on its way from the station, just pulling onto Madison.
“A drone?” I ask.
It turns out the FBI has a long-standing arrangement in Highland Isle and Kindle County to share the feed from the cities’ 4K CCTV surveillance cameras that hang over many intersections. The legend is that the cameras are so powerful that in good light you can read the date on a dime lying on the street.
The Chief parks right across from Coffee Kingdom. “Here goes,” she says to herself when she grabs the door latch. She knows she has an audience. The output from the tiny radio in her right ear is exceptionally clear so far, broadcast in here on a couple speakers on standards at either end of the table.
On-screen, the Chief walks into Coffee Kingdom and comes out with a latte. She’s left the jacket of her uniform, with its rows of buttons, and her star, back in her car. Ingram recommended that, figuring Ritz would be concerned that the uni would draw attention to the unexpected sight of the two of them together. Instead, she’s wearing the straight blue skirt that has no markings, which she says she prefers to pants in the August heat, and the teal tunic, without decoration at the shoulders, that she puts on for dress occasions, when there’s no chance that she’ll remove her jacket. She looks pretty much like a civilian.
A minute later Ritz passes by on foot, with his greasy duck-assed do and his big-heeled cowboy boots. A pair of jeans hang loosely over his bony behind, and he’s got on his standard tweed sport coat. Although I should have realized it a while ago, it finally dawns on me that Ritz wears that coat to hide a gun.
Passing the Chief, he does not look back, but Koob, as is his way, seems to appear from nowhere. I don’t realize for a second that it’s him. He’s disguised so that the FBI or whoever doesn’t learn what he really looks like. He’s got on a full fake beard, big shades, a baseball cap and a broad phony nose. But his air is relaxed. He’s in a pair of khakis and a long-sleeve shirt and is wheeling a good-sized rolling briefcase behind him. Very business casual. Just another guy going to work. He walks straight up to Lucy.
“Chief, would you mind joining me down the block?” He points her to Ritz’s big black SUV, a Lincoln Navigator, parked a few spaces ahead of them. The CCTV cameras are better in low light than I thought, and the two techs working across the room enlarge and brighten the image of the Chief and Koob as they climb into the back seat together. In the meantime, Tonya catches my eye. She’s shaking a limp hand in front of her chest and mouths the word, “Da-a-a-ng,” obviously referring to Koob, disguise and all. I flip her off. Rik, who’s been in the seat beside me for a few minutes, is laughing.
“Turn towards me, please, Chief,” Koob says and frisks Lucy deftly. He motions for her to remove her cell phone and her keys, which she’s carrying in the two pockets of her blouse, and he appears to place them on the back seat of the car between them. At that point, Koob reaches into the big briefcase and takes out a machine I’ve seen in magazines. It’s about a foot square and a few inches tall and is called ‘The Hunter,’ a black box with lights. It deploys several different kinds of countermeasures, including electromagnetic field detection and lens finding. Koob looks right out the back of the SUV, so I know the machine has picked up the 4K cameras, but he’ll tell the Ritz that’s normal.
Next he finds the Chief’s hearing aids and asks her to remove them, extracting the batteries as soon as they are in his palm. He looks down at them for a second, long enough to make me think he’s on to something. She picks the left one out of his hand—the one without the radio—to put in front of the machine. She opens and closes the tiny battery door a couple times, and there is no audible response from the Hunter. She’s demonstrating that it’s solely a hearing device, with no power without the battery. Koob smiles so faintly that probably only I notice. He’s heard a great deal about the Chief, and I take it that he’s impressed by her utter nonchalance in attempting to foil the machine and cluing him about which hearing aid to test.
He picks up her cell phone next, handing her back the case as he removes the device from it. Using a couple jeweler’s tools, he extracts the SIM card from the side and then cracks the back off the phone and jimmies out the battery. Finally, he picks up her car key and the fob that’s attached, whose yellow buttons open her trunk and lock the Camry’s doors. He uses the same tools to remove the watch battery from the fob. He holds the physical key in his hand a second—he’s sensed something there, too, I suspect—but he lays it down.
Koob then turns off the Hunter and puts it aside, staring down at the car seat. Through the back window, we can’t see Koob or the Chief below the waist, but I know what he’s set on the rear bench—the hearing aids, the Chief’s car key, the open fob, and the various pieces of her phone. He probably would have bet from the start that this was a law-enforcement operation, but now he seems to be calculating. In the end, he picks up her car key and hands it back to her but holds on to the cell phone and the hearing aids. After another second’s hesitation he closes the battery doors on the aids so that the radio comes back live.
“I need those,” the Chief says. “I’ll be deaf without them. And I’m not letting my cell phone out of my sight. There’s too much confidential stuff on there.”
Koob studies her. He has to figure that she knows about his deal, but he’s trying to decode her communication.
“I think Mr. Vojczek will keep all these until after your meeting. Okay?”
“Well, make sure he’s careful with the hearing aids,” she says. “They cost five grand. And keep this with the phone, I don’t want to lose my credit cards.” She snaps the case, with the cardholder attached, onto the body of the cell phone. She makes it look like a tough fit, but I know she’s activating the recorder in the entry card.
“Nice to meet you, Chief,” Koob says, as he slides toward the car door.
“You too,” she says. “But please do us both a favor and stay the fuck out of my city in the future.”
He raises a hand to his temple in mock salute.
The man and woman operating the camera hanging over the intersection on Madison pull it back so that we can see Koob heading toward Ritz. The radio in his hand makes little clicks as it knocks against the other hearing aid.
“She’s clean,” he tells Ritz. He’s speaking English, rather than Mandarin. I guess Ritz and he have agreed that when they’re out on the street, English will attract less attention from passersby than a white guy rattling on in Chinese. The Bureau is prepared with some AI translation software, and a woman on the other side of the table must be in charge of that, because she sulks as soon as she hears the English.
“Lenses?” Ritz asks.
“Nothing but the CCTV over the intersection.”
“Laser?”
“The machine picked up nothing.”
The Ritz nods and thinks. “So you think I’m okay?”
“That is what the equipment indicates.”
“Good.”
“Are you all right from here?” Koob asks.
“If you did your fucking job.”
Koob extracts his own phone from his back pocket and scrolls through it for a second. At first, I can’t believe he’s reading his texts right there, then I realize what he’s looking for. Apparently, Darnell has confirmed that the money Ritz owed them has been paid.
“I’ll be going now,” Koob says.
“Maybe I’ll call you again.”
“I apologize, but you should know that we will not accept repeat customers when there have been payment issues.”
Ritz shrugs. “It was a misunderstanding, but suit yourself.”
“Just a policy,” says Koob. He turns and turns back, as if he had forgotten something.
“I told your guest in your back seat that you would be holding on to these until the end of the meeting.” He hands over the hearing aids and the cell phone—with the activated recorder still in the credit card sleeve on the back.
“You checked all this?”
“The batteries are out of everything. They’re dead. She’s afraid you may misplace her hearing aids, but to be safe, I would not give them back until you’re finished.” Ritz nods, clearly satisfied with Koob’s cautiousness. The Ritz drops the small collection of items into the inside pocket of his jacket right over his heart. An agent in front of the last monitor on the right stands straight up, shaking his fists over his head in a pantomime of cheering wildly.
