Chapter 5: Fiery Yet Peaceful
Something you have to understand about police work is that it’s annoying. Not only with the rules and the limitations placed upon us (while most people still expect faster, more immediate results), but how many blind alleys there are.
In this case, the annoying part about the case was that we had no leads. Saying that Shadow Mart had stashed Zmirak in New York City was like saying that he had been stashed in Vermont or California. To be precise, the triangle between Staten Island, the Rockaways, and the Bronx-Westchester line was around 400 square miles. If someone wanted to kill Zmirak, and show New York City was the crime scene, the filming could be shot almost anywhere. There were parts of Long Island where one could see Manhattan in the background. That was true for the other four boroughs, New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and probably multiple other locations. They could have beaten Zmirak half to death, gotten him to say whatever they wanted, and then transported him for execution at any number of places, including several cemeteries (Mount Olivet in Maspeth comes to mind), or Saint John’s University (the highest point in Queens) with Manhattan in the background, and then shot him in the back of the head with little difficulty.
Thankfully, we had two MIT graduates with degrees in computer and mechanical sciences to start trolling through the dark web.
According to how Jeremy and Lena explained it to me, if they found Shadow Mart, it wouldn’t necessarily be where Zmirak was. It technically didn’t even need to be where the owner of Shadow Mart lived. If they found something through their internet searches, what they would have found was actually the servers for the dark website. And the servers could have been operated remotely.
The gold standard for getting an ID or location would be the address of the seller. But considering the dark web made that difficult, we had to hope that they were stupid or we got lucky.
Not only that, but Shadow Mart could have bought an internet address to be misleading. With the right sort of firmware hacking, Shadow Mart could spoof an address, use a burner device, or a bot network completely unrelated to the owner. Further, having a physical internet address that stayed in one place was, considering how popular on-the-go computing was slightly more problematic. Shadow Mart would have even cloned someone else’s phone and use that to spoof both internet addresses. Technology was getting to the point where it was almost as murky as magic.
When I asked for a translation, Jeremy and Lena explained that everything they were doing was just the first step, assuming they could even find the servers.
There were a few additional resources that we could call in on this, including friends Lena had made in Agency classes. They were former operators who had been wounded and had joined ICE to hunt down child porn and other abusers of children, like NetFlix.
Considering that such perversion was on offer for Shadow Mart, it was right up their alley.
Unfortunately, all of what they were doing left the rest of us with nothing to do. Intelligence services had tracked Shadow Mart for years. I had no idea what Lena, Jeremy, and their friends could do that hadn’t been done already. That was one of the major problems we faced.
The CIA and FBI couldn’t catch up to this. How could we?
Why not look into trucks that have come to New York City? Keep in mind, I-95 is one of the primary roadways for any and all trucks going from New Jersey and west into New England. It went through the Bronx, creating a clogged artery in the city. Without researching the exact numbers at the time, I knew offhand easily hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks went through New York every day. And it wasn’t like we could go through hundreds of thousands of Chinese living in the city. The last time I had checked, we had at least three Chinatowns in three different boroughs.
It would have been easier if the truck had taken Zmirak to a plane traveling to New York. That would have left us with checking out Newark Airport (New Jersey), La Guardia and JFK Airports (in the city), or even MacArthur (out on Long Island). That would have narrowed down our options. The airports themselves would have been nightmarish to secure and search, but it would have been a start.
Right now, there was no such starting point. The search area encompassed over seven million people in New York City, at the top end of the population in the areas I’d already mentioned. There were no daily updates from the kidnappers. No one had started agit-prop, boasting that the People’s Republic of China was bringing justice to one of the enemies of the state and reeducating him in real time.
However, I could do nothing.
More importantly, I had a sick wife at home.
I was about to leave early, when Lermon said, “We’re going to be in the hotel down the street. You know the one?”
I blinked. “Which direction? There are two hotels like that.”
“I only saw one on this block.”
I nodded. “Understood. Red Roof? Red Carpet?”
Lermon flashed a smile. “Somethin’ like that.”
I frowned, thinking it over a moment. “You sure you’re going to be good as far as coffee? I don’t recall it having many amenities. It’s not like they have a Starbucks in the lobby. And I can’t imagine that a hotel-room Keurig would be up to your standards.”
Lermon blinked, shocked that I would even suggest such a thing. “They’re not. It’s why I pack my own. Baracus’ private jet just happened to have plenty of the good stuff.”
I chuckled as I rose from behind the desk. “Yeah. He could afford it. Strictly speaking, I can afford it, too, if you want me to order something in.”
Lermon shrugged. “It’s an idea. I’ll let you know if I run out. I only brought enough for a week.”
I laughed. “So, only one suitcase full?”
“Two,” he admitted.
I smiled as I stepped past him on my way out the door. I glanced at his massive 64-ounce travel mug. “A good start.”
He saluted me with the mug. “True enough.”
I grabbed my top coat and my blue NYPD baseball cap, then moved out to the office. Lena and Jeremy were hard at work. She was on a Bluetooth headset while she worked the keyboard. He was simply focused on the work. Aaron was over in the interrogation room on the phone; he had his back to us, so it was clear he didn’t want to be interrupted.
Lena’s desk faced my office, so I waved in her direction, and she waved back absently, just barely acknowledging my departure. She reached over and knocked on Jeremy’s desktop, then pointed my way. Jeremy glanced over at me and gave me an impromptu wave before turning back to his computer.
I knew the feeling. The retrieval of missing persons was a life-and-death situation with a hard deadline. The window was smaller for children. This was a special case, though. The deadline would depend solely on the arrival time of the Chinese operators, and how long it took to break Zmirak.
There were too many ways this case could go bad.
I stepped out into the building’s parking lot, and took a deep breath, hoping to catch a whiff of good, crisp October air.
I caught a whiff of smoke instead.
I sniffed the air a few moments to get an idea of where the house was. I followed it out to the sidewalk and looked up and down Jamaica Avenue. I didn’t see anything on fire.
A motion caught the corner of my eye. Instead of turning left or right, I looked up, over the buildings across the street. A wisp of smoke.
Without thinking about it, I darted down the sidewalk. The corner was only a dozen paces away, so I could look down 222nd Street at the intersection. Firetrucks blocked the street over a block down from me. A house was on fire, the flames burning brightly. They were so intense, the heat distorted the air around and above the block.
I was in the street in a heartbeat. I didn’t even notice if there had been cars in the street. Count it as another miracle that I wasn’t killed.
With someone my height and build, even the firefighters saw me coming. I had out my NYPD badge, flashing it in the air as I approached. One stepped forward, holding up a hand to stop me. I did my best to stop and had to throw myself into a set of bushes in front of a house sixty feet down the street. It helped the deceleration.
Despite being twenty yards away, the heat had already turned the fall air into a warm spring. I glanced around at the firefighters in the street. None of them moved to put out the fire.
I pointed at the inferno as I said to the firefighter who stopped me, “Don’t you guys get paid to put those out?”
The firefighter shook his head. “The house is a lost cause. We’re just here to make sure the fire doesn’t spread.”
I sighed and shrugged. I guess it doesn’t matter. Lives matter. Houses can be rebuilt. If it’s beyond hope now, nothing in the building will survive.
I never subscribed to a police-versus-firefighter rivalry. It never made any sense to me, unless it went back to ancient history, and it was a case of warring immigrant groups (Irish versus Italians) entering two similar lines of work (police and fire, respectively). But if that were the case, how did we explain the rivalry in the rest of the country?
I shrugged, about ready to move on. I was happy to let the firefighters just do their job. They knew what they were doing.
Then I heard the scream from inside the house.
I snapped back to the house, slamming into the firefighter. I glanced around. No one looked concerned. In fact, they looked bored in the heat.
“Someone’s still in there!” I roared.
I pushed forward. The firefighter held up his ax to block me, pressing it against me like a bar at a red carpet.
So I decked him.
He dropped, and I lunged over his prone body. I burst out into the street and darted past the line of firemen. The hose was being used to water down the surrounding houses and grounds. One of the crew on the hose spotted me and broke loose, running to intercept me before I could go in.
I shrugged out of my jacket and top coat, throwing both at his face. “Hold this. Thanks.”
My clothes landed on the fireman like a net. Blinded, he tripped and stumbled on the uneven lawn.
I turned onto the house walkway and charged. I took the stairs in a leap and kicked the hot metal door.
I recoiled the kick quickly, just far enough from the door as the flames burst out, reaching for me. Before I could move back from the flames, or before I could be cooked, the hose hit me with enough water to slap me into the banister for the front steps.
The firemen were still stopping me from going in.
I twisted my body to reduce my profile. It changed the angle at which the water hit me and deflected into the house.
The only way to escape the hose was to retreat or go into the house.
I leaped into the fire.
Jeremy Nolan waited an additional thirty seconds after his father left, just to make certain that Tommy didn’t forget something and come back to the office. The last thing Jeremy needed was for his father to be distracted by what they were going to do.
Jeremy didn’t want to take time away from Dad being with Mom than was strictly necessary. When the tumor had first appeared, his attitude was to wait and see before coming to a conclusion. In the first weeks, he wasn’t worried for his mother. But in the weeks, months, years that followed, he had to come to accept that it wasn’t going away. Perhaps he was more cynical than his father, but the last three years had felt like a death watch. If the Soul Ring keeping the tumor in check failed, what happened? Would there be time to recharge it? Would it recharge fast enough? Or would his mother be dead immediately after the ring’s charge was depleted?
It was best that Dad spent all the time with her that he could.
Stop being maudlin, Jeremy thought. Time to go to work.
Jeremy turned to Texas Ranger Lloyd Lermon. “So, Ranger, how do you feel about a little expedition into the concrete jungle?”
Lermon reached under his hat to scratch at his hairline. “Does that mean you intend to take me out on a night on the town?”
Jeremy chuckled darkly. “After a fashion.”
Lena look up from her computer keyboard and put her current phone call on mute. “That is not what he means,” she said.
Jeremy nodded. He glanced at the observation room. Aaron Nolan (Grandpa? he thought. Nah. Alex is closer to that) was still on the phone, trying to politic his way to some new position or working the right favor, or whatever else a Rear Echelon MF like him did. Jeremy knew the Agency had men like that. Mercifully, neither he nor his wife stayed near enough to an office to meet those losers.
Lena said to Lermon, “We’re going to beat the bushes and see what comes out of the woodwork.”
Lermon cocked an eyebrow. “Interesting metaphor blend. What do you figure we can do tonight that no one else has been able to do in the last few years?”
Lena laughed. It was a musical sound that brought a smile to Jeremy’s face. “Because we listen to craziness and take notes.”
Jeremy nodded. “We really do. We encourage crazy. And crazy encourages us.”
Lermon scoffed, amused. “Sure. But it’s a big city. Where are you gonna go?”
With a final glance at the observation room, Jeremy stood and leaned over the rail. “Hey, Alex, close up for us?”
Alex glanced up from his novel and nodded. “Of course. You kids have fun.”