Джеймс Паттерсон - The 19th Christmas

Then I wandered the hall until I found the vending machine. After three bottles of water had plunked down the chute, I picked them up and returned to the box.

I pushed a bottle of water across the table to Wallace, handed one to Conklin. Then I sat down next to my partner and just kept quiet while he ran the interview. Wallace appeared to be responding to him.

Wallace told Conklin, “It was my brother, Sam. He’s the one who got me into this airport job.”

Conklin encouraged Ben Wallace to keep talking. The story he told was this: Ben’s brother, Sam, age thirty, had once been arrested for an unarmed liquor-store shoplift, caught with a bottle of ten-dollar hooch under his jacket. He was arrested, pleaded guilty, got bail, and immediately fled. There was a warrant out for Sam Wallace’s arrest, but he wasn’t one of the top ten, or even one of the top ten thousand, most wanted. So he was free, doing odd jobs, living with whoever would put him up, including Ben, but most often living on the street.

Ben went on to say that last week he’d gotten a call from his brother about a man named Russell—whether that was a first name or a last name, Sam didn’t say—who worked with Mr. Loman, apparently as an agent or deal broker. Through Sam, Russell was offering Ben fifteen thousand dollars to be part of a robbery crew. He would be given a uniform and a gun, and all he had to do was put on that uniform and meet up with the three others in the crew at the airport outside the International Terminal. The uniforms would get them through security, and after they were in, they were supposed to take the AirTrain out to the cargo terminal.

He went on to say, “Once we got to cargo, we had to look for a wooden box about one cubic yard in size.”

He tried to show us, but the cuffs gave him only about twelve inches of range. “The box was, like, marked with Japanese letters, and some canvas bags of papers were inside. We were told that the papers were none of our business.

“Once we had the bags, we were supposed to leave the cargo area and go outside to the parking lot. Russell was going to pick us up in his van and take us to a drop-off, I don’t know where.

“It was supposed to be easy-breezy,” Wallace said, sniffling and crying now. “Look like airport cops, act like airport cops. Take the train. Grab the bags. Get the hell out. A half day’s work for fifteen K. I’m happy to make fifteen thousand a year.”

I believed that Ben Wallace hadn’t questioned his thirdhand instructions. He hadn’t doubted what he’d been told, that the job was a no-brainer.

But I couldn’t contain myself. I had to jump in.

“What about the guns ?” I said. “What did you think about having a loaded gun in your possession?”

“It was just for show,” he said.

“But you fired it,” I said.

He nodded miserably.

Guns for show. Tell that to the former US Marine with a gut shot that might kill him.

I’d been keeping my temper in check, but I was tired and I was convinced that Wallace knew where Loman was and how to find him.

I said, “Ben, that’s a nice story, and I feel bad for you. You were used. But none of what you’ve told us gets us to Loman or even to his second in command. I’ll bet one of your dumb-ass crewmates might have some information for us. Maybe even be smart enough to throw you to the Feds and take any kind of deal in exchange for revealing Loman’s whereabouts.”

After pausing to let that sink into his muscle-bound head, I said to Wallace, “Speak now, or I’m going to call, ‘Next,’ and interview one of the others on your crew. Ralph Burgess looks ripe to spill. And I’m going to launch an APB to grab up your stupid brother. There’s a warrant out for Sam. I think we can wring the truth out of him.”

Conklin said, “I like that idea, Sergeant. Ben? Anything else you’d like to say?”

Ben Wallace shook his head no.

Conklin and I got up from our chairs. Conklin started to drag Wallace to his feet, but he twisted, bucked, started yelling, “Okay, okay. Please. I have a pacemaker. I could die right here.”

I believed that. Steroid abuse could do major damage to vital organs.

Conklin and I sat him back down. Gently.

Wallace exhaled, said, “I need a deal.”

“No promises,” I said, “until we have Loman.”

“I’ll tell you everything I know,” said Wallace.

Chapter 79

Wallace said, “But first I gotta go.”

While Conklin escorted him to the men’s room, I sat there in the airless airport interrogation room thinking about our interview a few days ago with Julian Lambert.

Lambert had told us a credible story and we’d believed him. He’d said that he’d heard Loman’s name on the street, that he was just a bit player, and that he didn’t know Loman at all.

Now he was dead.

Like Lambert, Ben Wallace claimed to be a pickup player. Also like Lambert, Wallace seemed entirely disposable. There was every chance that if he’d gotten out to the parking area, he and his crewmates would have been executed at the drop-off.

In the last hour the airport had been closed. Flights had been canceled. Travelers had been evacuated. News outlets carried the story of a foiled terrorist attack.

Our job was to find Loman, and right now the only living lead to him was Benjamin Wallace. Briggs and Rafferty had been charged with possession of unregistered firearms and drugs—the coke they’d had stashed in their cookie jar. They had a lawyer now and hadn’t said a word about Loman.

Wallace was shaky. Was he ready to give it all up?

The door opened, and Conklin settled Wallace back into the plastic chair across from us. Then Conklin started asking questions about Loman’s recruiter, Russell. Had Wallace ever met him? Wallace said he had, once. Conklin asked him what Russell looked like, what he sounded like, when he’d said he would pay Wallace his fifteen thousand dollars.

Wallace answered that Russell was above-average height and had dark hair, a pointed nose, and unaccented speech. That he seemed nice. And smart. And that Russell was going to pay everyone off when they got to the van.

I studied everything about Wallace.

I listened to his vocal inflections and observed his body language, eye movements, looking for tells, for lies. I was checking him against all the hundreds of interrogations I’d done, trying to discern if he was telling us the truth.

“This job we were doing,” said Wallace, “was supposed to be a whatchamacallit… a head fake.”

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. A head fake was a ruse. A diversion. A diversion from what?

“How so?” Conklin asked.

“There wasn’t supposed to be any trouble. It was supposed to be cut-and-dried, a robbery at the cargo terminal and then out. Loman was doing a different job. I think so, anyway. And it was all going as planned until Leonard went rogue.”

What had Wallace said?

Was Loman’s big heist still in play?

Wallace took off on a little side road then, talking about how he should have just kept to his lame job, minded his own business, not listened to his dopey brother.

I picked up my water bottle and pounded it once on the table to get his attention. “You said ‘head fake,’ Ben. That you thought Loman was ‘doing a different job.’ Dig deep. Tell us about that.”

“I don’t know,” Wallace whined. “I told you five times already, we were just supposed to go to the cargo terminal, open the box, take the bags, and get to the parking lot. Look. Everything that went wrong was Leonard’s fault.”

“Leonard was the red-haired one,” I said. He was the fake cop whose brains were spattered inside the shuttle train.