Rick Mofina - They Disappeared

Jeff went in and was greeted with the smells of boiled cabbage, cooked meat and spices. High-backed red vinyl booths lined the sides; about a dozen wooden tables and chairs filled the dining room floor that led to a dark wooden front counter and the kitchen.

Jeff took a booth on the left. The place was about a third full with a dozen customers. Old travel posters of the Caucasus Mountains had been taped to the wall. Soft, mournful violin music flowed from ancient speakers. The atmosphere was sleepy, akin to an outdoor cafe or gathering spot, where people passed time with idle talk. The pieces of conversation he picked up were not English. Given the restaurant’s specialty, he figured them for Eastern European.

The staff: a couple of women and men were deep in conversation behind the counter. No one came to take Jeff’s order. He noticed a spread of newspapers near the counter. It gave him reason to get closer to search for the take-out logo. He went to the counter and sifted through the papers-most were foreign, Russian, he guessed-before glancing around for a stack of take-out coffee cups.

“You would like something to eat?” asked one of the women, a heavyset babushka with an apron and head scarf.

“Yes-” Jeff had to buy time “-coffee to go and something to eat here.”

“Sit, sit. I bring you menu.”

Moments later she came to his table with a cracked laminated menu that listed a few dishes, none of which he understood.

“Maybe you like to try our soup? We make very good.” She smiled.

“Yes.”

“I bring you today special cream of potato, the best in New York.”

“Yes and coffee to go in a take-out cup, please?”

She nodded and returned with the coffee, creamers and sugar. Jeff’s attention flew to the logo and his heart skipped.

It bore a stylized V with blue letters spelling Vakhiyta’s Kitchen.

“Excuse me.” Jeff tried to stay calm. “Is this the only Vakhiyta’s Kitchen in New York? Do you have more at other locations anywhere?”

The woman held up a single, thick finger.

“Only one in the world,” she said.

When she left, Jeff took a few slow breaths. I should call Cordelli and Brewer, alert them. He struggled to understand what he had. He carefully withdrew one of Detective Chu’s pictures from his pocket, unfolded and turned it so the L resembled a V. He compared it with the logo on his take-out cup.

This is it. This is definitely it!

Jeff was convinced the killers had been in this restaurant, had bought coffee and food here, because he’d seen the containers in the van.

Okay, what now?

Think.

Were the killers just passing by? Or were they near?

He took slow inventory, assessing the customers, searching for anything to help him. He saw a young well-dressed couple he’d figured for Russian tourists. He took note of some old men playing chess. A group of other men were talking about matters they pointed out in the newspapers. Issues in the old country? Before Jeff could continue, a bowl of soup and slab of homemade bread with butter were set before him.

“You will like,” the babushka said.

In the time the soup came, Jeff ate it, liked it and continued eyeing the customers. After the woman took his bowl away, he continued his vigil. He declined more food and eventually feared that his investigation had stalled. He felt the futility, the weight of all his failures, come crashing down on him.

He called Cordelli, got his voice mail but hesitated. He didn’t leave a message. He couldn’t risk being overheard.

It can’t all end here.

Jeff glanced at the well-thumbed copies of the New York papers and reports of the investigation, the headline Murder-Abduction Trigger Terror Plot Fears, at his photo and those of Sarah and Cole. He touched his fingertips to their faces.

I can’t give up.

What if I am close?

Jeff was so lost in the faces of his wife and son he hadn’t noticed the man who’d entered the restaurant. His age was difficult to determine but from his body and posture, he had to be in his early thirties. He was about six feet tall, medium build. He wore a dark sweatshirt with the hood up, dark pants and work boots.

The man was standing at the counter near the cash, waiting as the babushka lady packed up a take-out order of coffee and food. He was solemn, engrossed in the newspaper reports on the “terror plot.” The chime of the register pulled Jeff from his thoughts in time to notice the man walking by his booth with his take-out order.

Jeff glanced down at the man’s boots. They were dark boots that covered the ankle. They had rounded toes and a thin bright red line where the top was stitched to the sole.

Jesus.

Jeff swallowed, fumbled for cash and tossed a few bills on the table.

He left his booth and, keeping a safe distance back, followed the man along the street, his heart hammering.

That fucker is one of them.

Darmstadt, Germany

“The game is going ahead as scheduled. Our team is favored to win.”

The American intelligence officer sat up in his chair at his computer monitor and used both hands to press his headset to his ears.

He quickly reread the notes the traffic operator, the linguist and the cryptologist had provided, then he replayed the recording.

“The game is going ahead as scheduled….”

The officer worked in a corner of a listening station that was part of a U.S. military complex hidden in the forests of the Rhine region, less than an hour’s drive south of Frankfurt. It was an ultrasecret tentacle of the National Security Agency’s foreign intelligence surveillance operations that few people knew existed.

Code name: HUSH.

The system had grown from ECHELON, a Cold War communications network operated by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Since then it had emerged to monitor activities of pariah countries, insurgency, organized crime and terrorist plots.

HUSH went beyond monitoring satellite telecommunications traffic. It also used an advanced network of secret listening stations around the world that were strategically placed near major switching bases for fiber-optic communications.

In this sector, the path of much of Europe’s internet communications traveled through a critical exchange point near Frankfurt International Airport. Here, through its Darmstadt station, HUSH had been running a long-standing operation of tracking, capturing, decrypting and analyzing the phone and web traffic of scores of terror groups.

In most cases the targets used untraceable disposable phones, or encrypted satellite phones, or coded internet communication. HUSH’s experts drew upon information harvested from captured suspects and equipment. They also relied on the work of intelligence officers in the field whose sources and informants provided key but ever-changing numbers, codes, positions and data.

Intelligence operators and traffic analysts had to contend with some seventy languages and dialects. Linguists where often challenged understanding everything they’d heard. So much could be lost if one didn’t understand the cultural contexts. All intelligence operators, despite listening in on targets for months, feared they could miss something. They used technology and human resources to sort through millions of intercepted calls, decode keywords for further analysis.

The intelligence officer continued concentrating and replayed the fragment of captured communications several more times.

“The game is going ahead as scheduled. Our team is favored to win.”