Michael Ledwidge: Alert

I’d actually buzzed back my own seat to catch a little sleep when my aggravating brain started bringing stuff up. Stuff like how though we’d finally put some points on the board, this wasn’t over. How it wouldn’t be over until the bombers were dead or behind bars. Mostly I couldn’t stop thinking how my kids, along with everyone else in New York, were still extremely vulnerable, and soon my finger found the seat switch and I was heading back into the upright position again.

I asked the flight attendant for some coffee and took out my laptop. A moment later, I had my e-mail open and for the tenth time started reading through the detailed brief that the excellent Cape Verde Judicial Police had put together about the island guide Armenio Rezende.

Police divers had found Rezende dead in the surf on the southwest side of the volcanic island about three miles away from the cliff he’d jumped off, and what they recovered from his pocket chilled me every time I thought about it.

Four twelve-volt garage door opener batteries.

So our theory was actually true: Rezende had tried to set off the bombs. He’d been dead set on killing himself and all of us there.

And only the Lord knew how many other innocent people would have died had the entire mountain shaken loose and crashed down into the sea.

I thought about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that had killed 230,000 people. Five Yankee Stadiums of human beings, old and young, innocent after terrified innocent, suddenly caught in the flood. Schoolchildren washed out of their desks and drowned in their classrooms. Commuters on trains looking up from their papers to see the ocean coming in the window. Mothers made to watch as their babies were whisked away in the flood or crushed by debris.

And someone wanted that? Rezende wanted that? I thought as I glanced out the dark circle of the plane’s window. He wanted countless homes and factories and churches and cities and towns destroyed? He wanted 230,000 last gulps of breath from people he didn’t even know? How? Was Rezende a space alien? A zombie from a crypt? Because it didn’t compute, that much hate. Not in human terms. How could a human be okay with a quarter million murders on his soul?

Yet it was true. Rezende did want it. Had in fact died trying to make it happen. Rezende had wanted it, along with whoever else was involved.

Because it was obvious that Rezende wasn’t the mastermind. We’d sat down with the Cape Verde cops before we left, and they told us Rezende didn’t even have a passport and that he had never been anywhere — let alone New York City.

No, Rezende was low-level, I thought, going over the report. He had several assault arrests as a young man, some domestic violence incidents, a 2010 burglary charge that didn’t stick. He definitely didn’t have any industrial or military experience with explosives.

What he did have, though, was a recent radical conversion to Islam. On his computer, they found records of time spent on jihadist websites. Time spent in chat rooms known to be frequented by people from al Qaeda and ISIS.

I thought about the low-level American criminal turned to Islam who recently beheaded a woman in Oklahoma. Maybe that was where all the hate was coming from. Islamic jihad was certainly no stranger to inhuman acts of barbaric violence these days.

That wasn’t all. What was even more curious was the fact that Rezende had an uncle on his father’s side who was one of the most violent of the revolutionaries during the Cape Verde independence movement.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cape Verde, along with the African continental nation of Portuguese Guinea, fought for independence from Portugal in a bloody jungle guerrilla war that many people called Portugal’s Vietnam. The Marxist rebels, led by Amilcar Cabral, had about a third of the troop strength that the Portuguese had, but the rebels were heavily supported by the Soviet Union with supplies and weaponry, including jet aircraft.

We’d learned from the Cape Verde cops that Rezende’s late uncle, Paulo Rezende, who raised him, was a colonel in that rebel army and was actually trained to fly MiGs in Russia.

The Russians again, I mumbled at the screen. It keeps coming back to the Russians.

“Who am I kidding?” Emily said, suddenly sitting up across from me. “I can’t sleep, either, with these maniacs still running loose out there. Is there any coffee left, Mike?”

“Let’s run through it again from the very beginning,” I said after the flight attendant, Patricia, had poured a coffee for Emily.

“Okay,” Emily said, tucking her stockinged feet underneath her. “We land at Rezende’s village.”

“We land at Rezende’s village,” I repeated with a nod. “What I don’t understand is, if he was planning to detonate the bombs by the deadline, why wasn’t he on Árvore Preta already?”

“That’s an excellent point, Mike,” Emily said. “According to the deadline described in the video threat, he should have had all the batteries in place already — had everything ready to go.”

“But he didn’t,” I said, drumming my fingers along the edge of my Toshiba laptop. “We definitely seem to have surprised him. His attempt to manually set off everything with the batteries proved that. All the meticulous planning and money and expertise required to wire up the mountain came down to some sloppy and desperate last-ditch ploy to insert the batteries? No way. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“So what happened? Rezende was definitely involved in the planting of the explosives,” Emily said, biting her lip. “Did he wake up late? There was some communication screwup? Why the hell was he surprised if the deadline was only two hours away?”

“Maybe...” I said, tapping my forehead as I stared down at my socks.

“Maybe what?” Emily said after a moment.

I snapped my fingers as I looked up.

“Maybe the people who set the bombs up weren’t the ones who called for the ransom. Maybe we’re looking at two different groups.”

“What do you mean? How? The guys on the phone actually sent a video of the bombs being set up.”

“True, they sent a video, but did they make the video?” I said.

“You’re losing me.”

“I keep thinking about our initial read that the bombing campaign is the idea of one person — one very angry, very motivated, very meticulous person — who is solely out to terrify and to destroy the city. That still makes the most sense to me.”

“Me, too,” Emily said with a nod. “The first thing the Unabomber told us out in Colorado was spot-on: ‘They’re going to destroy New York City — you know that, right?’”

“Precisely,” I said. “The ransom-money play never corresponded to that. What if someone found out about the plot, found the video of the real people setting it up, and decided to try to make money off of it?”

“A piggyback!” Emily said. “That’s entirely possible. Someone co-opting it.”

“Somebody Russian or who runs around in Russian circles,” I said.

“You’re right,” Emily said, putting her coffee down. “The mayor’s sniper had Russian ties, there were Russian explosives on the island, and now the direct Russian connection to Rezende through his uncle.”

I glanced out at the cloudy night rushing past the large porthole window beside me again as I racked my brain. Then it hit me. Right between the eyes, forty thousand feet above the dark Atlantic.

“Dmitri Yevdokimov!” I yelled, suddenly sitting up. “The Russian we had in custody. Not only can we place Yevdokimov at the drop where the video was picked up, he’s also a computer expert.”

“That’s it,” said Emily excitedly. “Yevdokimov must have hacked the real Russian bomber, copied the video, and cooked up the ransom deal!”