Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

“That’s awesome, all right,” Devlin said. “Though, I have to say, I never heard of you until Rae pulled me in on this.”

They were overnight at the Watergate and took the early train into Manhattan’s Penn Station and caught a taxi to the Grand Hyatt above Grand Central Station. On the way, Lucas took a call from Mallard, who said, “You get your way.”

“I hope you were sweetly persuasive.”

“No more than a gentle whisper in the AIC’s ear,” Mallard said. “A virtual zephyr.”

Manhattan always smelled like week-old sour buttered popcorn to Lucas, but he usually visited in late spring or early autumn; on this day in January, with the temperature hovering around twenty, it smelled like week-old sour cold-buttered ice.

Lucas and Devlin grabbed sandwiches at the Hyatt’s deli and took the elevator to the twelfth floor to meet with the Manhattan assistant agent in charge, whose name was Loren Duke. Weaver and two other supervising agents were waiting with Duke. The room was small and stuffy, and one of the agents stood next to a drawn window shade, peering past the shade as if he might actually see something important on the street below. Weaver looked like he was suffering intense gas pains.

Duke: “I’m here for the AIC. He hates you two, by the way. You sicced Louis Mallard on him and the conversation was not a pleasant one. Ten or twenty kilos will probably make it on the street because of you guys and I’d be surprised if a couple people didn’t die from it.”

“Nobody’s forcing anyone to shoot up that stuff. If they do and die, well, tough shit, what did they expect?” Lucas said. “The important thing is, we’re following the money. That’s what we’re doing, right?”

“If we can spot the prime distributors before they spot us,” Duke said.

“They better not spot you,” Lucas said, “or Mallard will rip your AIC a new one. Mallard’s got some exposure here, too. He’s the one who approved the whole task force.”

“We have some damn good FBI surveillance guys down in Florida,” Devlin chipped in. “They could handle that. Are your people less good?”

“Our people are good,” Duke snapped. “None better. But we’re doing this the hard way, and we’re putting some of our people at risk.”

“Sort of like the junkies. This is what they signed up for,” Lucas snapped back. “So—since we’re going after the money, what’s the plan?”

“We’re watching the hearse. It’ll be coming in . . .” Duke looked at his watch. “. . . what, two, three hours from now.”

The agent who wasn’t looking out the window said, “They’re still south on I-95, not in any big hurry. Slow lane only. We expect they’ll take the 440, the Outerbridge Crossing, onto Staten Island. Or they could go on further north on 95 and take 278 onto the island, because most of Sansone’s assets are in Port Richmond, which is way up at the north end of the island.”

Lucas: “I thought Sansone was out of the Newark area . . .”

“He is, but they won’t take the heroin to his house,” Duke said, with a hint of sarcasm. “If they did, we’d be all over them.”

“Is Sansone in town? Right now?”

“Yes. He has an office in the back of one of his donut shops in Newark. So: what are you two planning to do?”

“We want to hook up with your Staten Island task force. You identify the distributors. We’ll pick out the one most likely to take a deal, and approach him.”

“You’re welcome to ride along,” Duke said. “Even though the AIC is grinding his teeth to a very fine powder. Keep in mind that our people know what they’re doing: don’t get in their way.”

“How do we hook up?” Lucas asked.

“Go downstairs to Grand Central, get on the 4 subway to Bowling Green, which will get you to a quick walk to the Staten Island Ferry. You can’t see exactly where you want to go when you come out of the Bowling Green station, so use your phone maps. We’ll have somebody meet you on the Staten Island side.”

“I’m heading back to Florida,” Weaver said. “We need some further discussion here. Doesn’t involve you guys.”

“That sounds unpleasant,” Lucas said.

“Could have done without the call from Mallard,” Weaver said. “May all the saints bless his slightly soiled soul.”

Duke was right about getting lost coming out of the Bowling Green station, and they did resort to Google phone maps, although Devlin thought it unmanly. Lucas sat inside for the twenty-five-minute trip, having ridden the ferry with all of his children at one time or another. He could see small, mean snow pellets whipping across the harbor, but Devlin had never been, and went outside to look at the shrinking Manhattan skyline and then the Statue of Liberty, which, to Lucas, always looked smaller and greener than it should. After taking iPhone pictures of Liberty, Devlin came back inside, his face as rigid as a chunk of ebony, and said, “It’s colder than Prancer’s dick out there.”

“I think Prancer’s a girl,” Lucas said.

“No fuckin’ way,” Devlin said. He went to Google on his iPhone, and a minute later said, “Damn! All of Santa’s reindeer are girls. Even Rudolph.”

An agent named Dillon Koch picked them up at the Staten Island terminal in a Chevy Equinox, a small gray SUV picked, Koch said, for its anonymity. “You look at it, and you don’t see it,” he said.

Koch himself was a small gray man, balding, bespectacled, dressed in a dark blue parka, a blue oxford cloth shirt, and black jeans, as unnoticeable as the Equinox. A member of the FBI’s Special Surveillance Group, he mostly worked street surveillance for the antiterrorism squad in Washington, now temporarily forwarded to the Sansone task force.

“Where are we going?” Lucas asked.

“The Hilton. We’ve got a big business suite,” Koch said. “Some of the agents are staying there, at the Hilton, some are next door at the Hampton Inn. They divided us up so . . . there wouldn’t be so many FBI-looking people at the same hotel.”

“How many agents are working this deal?” Devlin asked from the backseat.

“I’m not sure exactly, but I’d guess a dozen or so, here on the island, most of them SSG singles in a bunch of different rented Camrys and Civics and these Equinoxes. We’re not tailing the hearse directly, it’s all indirect, and we’re watching the tracker you guys planted on it. It’s on the island, by the way. They’re headed for the Clean N Go car wash up in Port Richmond. We’ve got a truck a half block away, parked on the street, with a good view of the entrance and exit. They’re spotting and filming people as they come and go.”

“Hope to Christ nobody is spotting and filming the truck,” Lucas said.

“Naw, it looks exactly like a Penske rental,” Koch said. “The way it’s positioned . . . you’d have to see it to understand it, I guess. They have a good view of the Clean N Go, but from the Clean N Go, you have to look between a couple of evergreen trees to see it, and then you only see the top of it. The top is where our guys are at, but you’d never know it from the outside. Looks like an ordinary moving truck.”

“Any way we can watch?” Devlin asked.

“Not directly. You can’t go to the truck,” Koch said. “But you can see what their cameras are seeing, from the task force suite.”

“How far is the hotel from the car wash?”

“Ten, twelve minutes. Three or four miles. The word from the top is, we don’t want anything to give us away. Everybody stays back, except for us surveillance guys. We’re online with the mob specialists in Washington, they’ll call out Sansone’s people when they go through the car wash . . . assuming that any of them go through the car wash, and we’re not barking up the entirely wrong tree.”