Terminal Rage (7 page)

SEVEN

Saturday, November 5, 2011—7:02 p.m.
Manhattan, NY

L
iam Nishimura took center stage to start the briefing. The young agent was attached to the FBI
’
s Critical Incident Response Group. He had kicked off his career supporting the Computer Analysis and Response Team with his natural talents in digital forensics, but was reassigned to the CIRG to beef up its tech resources with young, fresh talent.

His face was boyish but his body strong and athletic. His sense of style seemed to work for him, with his fine wiry hair spiked and the way he wore the standard-issue black FBI suit with the sleeves turned up. The kid sure had stage presence.

Blackwell must have crossed paths with him at the Academy when Nishimura was still a rookie cadet. His face was familiar.

At the academy, special agents of all ranks eat in the same cafeteria, and use the same fitness center, swimming pool, laundry service, and post office. Sometimes after hours they gather for beers and light snacks at the Boardroom, a popular hangout. The kid had done well for himself, to be working a case this big. But if he was as smart as his eyes implied, he
’
d get the hell out of Monica
’
s orbit.

Monica and Blackwell sat around the conference table with three experts who had been assembled to provide intelligence, analysis, and language and psych profiling.

Robert Slant, the senior counterterrorism analyst in the room, was a former CIA badass Blackwell had liaised with right after 9/11. Back when inter-agency cooperation was all the rage. He crossed over to the FBI as an employee a few years before Blackwell left it.

Next to Slant, Special Agent Natasha Shaker was as stiff now as when Blackwell last needed her linguistic expertise five years ago.

And at the far end of the table, Eddie Grove, a rising star in the psych profiling world, had joined the Bureau as a long-term consultant after Blackwell had left it.

They had less than an hour to get Blackwell up to speed before they established contact with the abductor.

Nishimura clicked a tiny remote control and displayed a photo of a woman with chestnut hair and an infectious smile. Her apple-green eyes challenged Blackwell to look away from her. It took him a few seconds to realize it was Julia Price. She looked nothing like the proof-of-life video Carter had shown him on the chopper. In this photo, her confident gaze was oblivious to a future where she would be stripped naked and tied to a chair, pleading for her life to the anonymous camera lens of her ruthless captors.

“Julia Price. Nabbed in Rome. Kosher—no priors, no drugs. Lady hasn
’
t held down an honest job in more than six years, though. And she sucks big time at relationships. Including her parents. Especially dad. She could have gone missing for months and they wouldn
’
t have noticed. They just throw money at her and I guess it takes care of whatever parental guilt they may be harboring.”

Blackwell delved deeper in Julia
’
s eyes to search for hints of estrangement with her parents. “Who reported her missing?”

Nishimura clicked again to replace Julia
’
s picture with a photo of another woman
’
s pouting face, on the cover of
Italian Vogue
.

“Her friend, Alessia di Lorenzo. She last saw Julia at twenty-two hundred on Friday, October twenty-first. They were at the San Calisto bar having drinks. A hip little joint in a central neighborhood of Rome called Trastevere.”

Blackwell scribbled on a legal pad the first entry of a timeline of Julia
’
s abduction. His investigative mind was coming back to life. He observed the regal nose and fiery red hair of Julia
’
s Italian friend on the screen.

“Di Lorenzo is a renowned painter and a socialite.” Nishimura clicked again.

Alessia
’
s photo was replaced with an image of one of her paintings,
The Penance.
A naked woman lying in a poppy field with her legs spread open, orgasmic eyes, and a fighter plane lodged in her vagina, blood splattered on her thighs and belly. Blackwell had seen it before and it had stuck in his mind. Melanie was an art critic for the
Washington Post
and had dragged him to endless galleries of “interesting” European artists with “deep artistic messages.”

“I
’
m sure you haven
’
t seen one of those in many years Mr. Blackwell, but that thing between her legs, in that painting—” The other agents started to giggle.

“That
’
s a German Junkers Ju 87, German dive bomber.” Nishimura winked at Blackwell.

“Di Lorenzo told Italian police Julia went out for a smoke and was approached by a man whom she described as of Middle Eastern appearance. She couldn
’
t give a more accurate description. When we showed Di Lorenzo the footage from this morning, she wasn
’
t able to positively ID our hostage-taker as the guy who had kidnapped Julia.”

Nishimura continued to explain that according to Di Lorenzo
’
s testimony, the man outside the bar asked Julia for a light and chatted with her. They then kissed and it looked as if he had picked her up on the spot. Julia signaled to Alessia she would call her later and left with the man. She forgot her purse with her wallet and her phone at the bar.

“Julia was scheduled to fly to Boston at eleven o
’
clock on Saturday morning. Alitalia 614. She had checked out of her hotel and left her luggage and her passport at Alessia
’
s apartment.”

The airline records the FBI had subpoenaed were displayed on the screen.

“She never took that flight.”

Blackwell understood that Julia
’
s erratic lifestyle hadn
’
t fazed her parents. But why did it take a week for the Italians to inform the FBI a senator
’
s daughter had gone missing on their soil? He quizzed Nishimura.

“Alessia had no idea who Julia was. They
’
d only met a week earlier. She had Julia
’
s passport when she filed the report and Italian police made a copy of it. The law prevents Italian authorities from sequestering foreign passports, even that of a criminal.”

The implication was clear to Blackwell. The Italians don
’
t make use of machine-readable passports to identify persons of interest at the local police level. So they must have assumed Julia was one of many Americans reported missing each year, only to turn up drunk in Florence or Siena a few days later.

“When were we first notified?”

“Wednesday afternoon.”

Blackwell observed how Monica and the other three agents listened to the case details being rehashed for him. They had probably endured at least three other brain-numbing sessions identical to this one. No one in the room seemed to mind, but Blackwell used to loathe having to deliver or listen to a briefing more than once.

“On the same night Julia was reported missing, another incident occurred close to the bar.” Yet another click and a satellite map of the scene of the crime appeared on center screen.

Nishimura fiddled with the remote control like it was an extension of his fingers, to zoom in the map by a few factors.

“The blue dot you see there is the bar in question in the San Calisto square, a lively area. But if you move six hundred feet away—right where you see the red dot here on Via di San Francesco a Ripa—the scenery changes dramatically. Very quiet and residential. The red dot is the location of a small bank with an ATM machine. The same night Julia disappeared, an elderly lady who lives across from the bank reported hearing a woman screaming at around ten forty-five.”

Blackwell scribbled hard on his makeshift timeline. Nishimura played the audio from the security cameras at the bank. Julia
’
s chilling scream echoed in the room. Even the most jaded of the other agents, like Slant, seemed as disturbed as Blackwell was by the raw fear in Julia
’
s voice.

“That
’
s all we got from the ATM cameras at the bank. Nothing happens on the video. By the time the elderly woman looked out of her window, the screaming was drowned out by loud music.”

A 3-D reconstruction of the scene of Julia
’
s abduction replaced the map on the screen.

“According to the witness, she saw a white van with a man standing outside, his back to her. There was another dude inside the vehicle wearing what she described as a Venetian mask—”

Monica interrupted him. “We don
’
t know for sure it
’
s a Venetian mask, Liam. The old lady said the mask was smiling—that makes a world of difference.”

Blackwell caught Nishimura discreetly rolling his eyes. There was a rift between him and Monica. The kid had balls. Good.

The young agent continued without acknowledging his superior
’
s interjection. He explained that the man in the mask saw the older woman spying on them and formed an imaginary gun with his right hand, which he pretended to fire at her face in a menacing way. She retreated, then filed a police report on Saturday morning at the same station where Alessia Di Lorenzo had reported Julia missing. A police car dispatched to the scene found a silver pendant on the ground, near where the woman had seen the van the night before.

A close-up image of the pendant came on screen. The phrase
The Price of Freedom is the Freedom of a Price
was engraved around it.

“This exhibit was ID
’
d by the senator as his daughter
’
s pendant. It
’
s a family thing they all wear. The women have pendants and the men have rings.”

“What happened next?”

“On Wednesday morning, the station clerk was logging evidence exhibits from the previous week and was baffled by something she found. The keyword
Price
was showing up on two separate cases filed on the same day, just a few hours apart. One, the last name of the missing American woman, and another on the pendant found near where the old woman had reported suspicious activity.”

Blackwell considered this. “So she figured it was a careless error?”

“Right. She reported the anomaly to the Commissioner, and that
’
s when he realized the two events were connected. Our Consulate in Rome was alerted and they ran Julia
’
s passport details from the copy the Italians had. When they figured out who she was, we got involved.”

Monica thanked Nishimura and motioned for him to take a seat.

Blackwell scanned the group to get a sense of whether there was a cohesive theory on who was behind all of this. “Any idea who we
’
re dealing with?”

Monica took the lead. “The official line is it
’
s anybody
’
s to claim. The Iranians, organized crime, a homegrown option, and even Anonymous, the hacktivist group—if the guy in the van was indeed wearing a smiling Guy Fawkes mask. Overall though, nothing
’
s spiked in the intel chatter to suggest one over the other. Which brings us to the unofficial assessment, Alex—we have no fucking idea.”

Robert Slant raised his hand to speak. Blackwell found it incredible that the most experienced person in the room felt he needed permission to give his two cents
’
worth. Slant had been out there trailblazing the CIA
’
s counteroffensive against the global threat of Islamic Jihad back when Nishimura wasn
’
t old enough to wipe his own snot.

At just over sixty now, Slant was a little rounder on the edges than when Blackwell had first met him nine years ago at a joint task force of the federal agencies. His square jaw now had jowls, but his sapphire eyes were still impenetrable. They were his windows to all the mayhem in the world he must have seen to turn every hair on his head white.

“It
’
s not politically correct these days to point the first finger at the Middle East option, but this is
not
the work of organized crime, let alone a bunch of hackers. This has Islamic Jihad written all over it. There, I said it.”

Blackwell usually trusted Slant
’
s intuition. But it made no sense to just focus on phantom suspects when they didn
’
t have anything concrete to go on. At this stage, background on the targets of this offensive—Senator William Price and his younger brother Mark would be just as good of a place to start. Without understanding the motives of the criminal, there could be something to learn by scrutinizing the victims. And he doubted this was about Julia—she was just a means to an end. It was her father or uncle they were after. Or both.