Линкольн Чайлд - City of Endless Night

“It all revolves around the anomaly of the first beheading — why wait twenty-four hours? The other two happened almost before the victims were dead.”

“You’re still evading my question.”

“Another item I find interesting. No matter how violent or messy the murders may be, the beheadings were done with great fastidiousness. This would argue against the first murder being done by a different killer. On top of that, the first body appears to have been — unlike the others — deliberately concealed.”

Longstreet grunted. “Interesting, as you say — but on its own, inconclusive.”

“We’re in a logical bind. It could, as the police are assuming, be a copycat situation, especially since murders two and three have numerous points of congruency not found in the first. However, equally logically, the coincidence of three beheadings in the space of a week would strongly suggest a single killer. We suffer from a paucity of evidence.”

“You and your ‘paucities’ and ‘logical binds,’” Longstreet growled. “It almost got us killed by that recon party of Ugandan mercenaries — remember?”

“And yet we’re sitting here today, are we not?”

“True — that we are.” He reached over and pressed a buzzer on a nearby intercom. “Katharine? Please bring an Arnold Palmer for Agent Pendergast.”

Anton Ozmian sat behind his vast desk of black granite, staring out the south-facing windows in his corner office, his gaze taking in the myriad lights of Lower Manhattan reflected in an overcast winter sky.

He looked past the bulk of the Freedom Tower, past the buildings of the Battery, and over New York Harbor toward the dark outline of Ellis Island. His grandparents, coming by ship from Lebanon, had been processed there. Ozmian was glad that some self-important, xenophobic bureaucrat had not tried to Americanize the name to Oswald or some such nonsense.

His grandfather had been a watchmaker and repairer of clocks, as had his father. But as the twentieth century drew to a close, it became a dying profession. As a child, Ozmian had spent hours in his father’s workshop, fascinated by the mechanical movements of fine watches — the fantastically tiny systems of springs, gears, and rotors that made visible that ineffable mystery called “time.” But as he grew, his interests turned to complex systems of another sort: the instruction registers, accumulators, program counters, stack pointers, and other elements that made up computers — and the assembly language that governed them all. This system was not unlike a fine Swiss watch, in which the ultimate goal was to make the greatest use of the least amount of energy. That was how assembly language coding worked — if you were a true programming acolyte, you constantly strove to shrink the size of your programs and make each line of code do double or triple duty.

A young man who’d grown up in the outskirts of Boston, after college Ozmian had passionately immersed himself in a number of unusual hobbies — composing, cryptography, fly fishing, and even, for a time, big-game hunting. But his hobbies fell by the wayside when he discovered a way to blend his interest in music and ciphers with his fanaticism for tight code. It was this marriage of interests that helped him develop the streaming and encoding technologies that would become the backbone of DigiFlood.

DigiFlood. He flushed at the thought of his company, whose stock price had soared for years, now being hammered because of the unauthorized leak of its most valuable proprietary algorithms onto the Internet.

But now — as happened so often — his thoughts returned to the killing of his only daughter... and the filth about her that had been exposed by that motherless ass-fucker of a reporter, Bryce Harriman.

A distinctive triple rap on the door of his office interrupted these free-flowing thoughts.

“Come in,” Ozmian called out without turning his gaze from the window.

He heard the door open; the soft tread of someone entering; the door closing again. He did not look around; he knew very well who had just stepped inside. It was his most unusual and enigmatic employee with the noble, ancient, and unusually long name of Maria Isabel Duarte Alves-Vettoretto. Over the years Alves-Vettoretto had worked for Ozmian in many capacities: aide-de-camp, confidante, expediter — and enforcer. He sensed her presence come to rest a respectful distance from his desk and he turned to face her. She was compact, athletic, and quiet, with a tumbling mane of rich mahogany hair, dressed in tight-fitting jeans and an open silk blouse with pearls. In all his years, he had never found anyone quite so remorselessly efficient. She was Portuguese, it seemed, with antique notions of honor, vengeance, and loyalty, whose ancestors had been involved in Machiavellian intrigue for eight hundred years. In her, the art had been honed to perfection.

“Go ahead,” Ozmian said, turning his gaze away from her intense face to stare out the window as she spoke.

“Our private investigators have submitted a preliminary report on Harriman.”

“Give me the short version.”

“All reporters are of questionable character, so I’ll leave out the minor sins and peccadillos. Aside from being a muckraking, ambulance-chasing, rumormongering, backstabbing journalist, the man is a straight arrow. A preparatory school product who comes from old, old money — money that is petering out with his generation. The bottom line is that he’s clean. No prior convictions. No drugs. He used to be a reporter for the Times , but then — for reasons that aren’t relevant — he made a lateral move to the Post . While that might seem like a career killer, he did very well for himself at the Post . There isn’t anything in there that will give us traction.” A pause. “But... there is one piece of information worthy of special note.”

“Go on.”

“His girlfriend — they had been dating since college — died of cancer about three years ago. He was very active in trying to help her fight it. And after her death, it became a crusade for him. He wrote articles about cancer awareness and possible new cures, and he gave a lot of visibility to various nonprofit cancer prevention groups. Also, even though he doesn’t make much money as a reporter, he made a variety of donations to various cancer causes, some of his own money and some from family trusts, over the years: especially the American Cancer Society. He also set up a small charitable foundation himself in the name of his deceased girlfriend.”

Ozmian waved his hand dismissively. Harriman’s good works held no interest for him. “Why do you say of special note?”

“Only that this interest suggests a point of entry for... extreme leverage. Should the need arise.”

“Has he written anything else about my daughter?”

“No. All his most recent articles have focused on the subsequent killings. He’s milking them for all they’re worth.”

There was a pause while Ozmian contemplated the cityscape beyond his windows.

“How would you like me to proceed?” Alves-Vettoretto asked.

For a long moment, Ozmian remained silent. Then he fetched a deep sigh.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “If these new murders are working him into a lather, maybe he won’t publish any more shit about my Grace. That’s my concern. Fighting this rogue release of our proprietary code is consuming all my time — if he’s no longer a problem, I’d rather not get distracted if I don’t have to.”

“Understood.”

And now, for the first time, Ozmian wheeled around in his chair. “But keep an eye on him — and on what he writes. If necessary, we’ll squash him like the roach that he is: but only if necessary.”