The Kill Room (Lincoln Rhyme 10)

Though occasionally noisy.

He walked to the back bedroom door and knocked, then opened it. One of the enforcers with the cartel, a heavyset unsmiling man named Norzagaray, nodded a greeting.

Rashid looked over the cartel's hostages: The husband and wife, both native Mexican and stocky, their teenage son and little girl sat on the floor, in front of a TV. The father's and wife's hands were bound with bell wire, loose enough so they could drink water and eat. Not so loose they could attack their kidnappers.

In Rashid's opinion, they should have bound the wife's more tightly. She was the danger; she had the rage. It was obvious as she comforted her daughter, a slim child whose head was crowned with dark, curly hair. The husband and boy were more frightened.

Rashid had been told by his contacts here that he could use the house but he would have to share it with these hostages, who'd been here for eight or nine days. The man's small business had been spending that time struggling to raise the two million dollars in ransom the drug lords had demanded--because of the man's defiance of the cartel.

Rashid said to Norzagaray, "Could you turn the volume down please?" A nod at the TV, on which a cartoon was playing.

Their guard did so.

"Thank you." He looked the family over carefully now, taking no pleasure in their terror. This was crime for profit; he didn't approve. He regarded the teenager and then a soccer ball in the corner. The colors were those of Club America, the pro team in Mexico City.

"You like football?"

"Yes."

"What do you play?"

"Midfield."

"I did too when I was your age." Rashid didn't smile. He never did but his voice was soft. He looked at them a moment more. Though they did not know it yet, Rashid had been told the negotiations were nearly complete and the family would be released tomorrow. Rashid was pleased at this. These people were not the enemy. The father wasn't working for an American company that was exploitative and amoral. He was just a small businessman who'd fallen on the wrong side of the cartel. Rashid wanted to reassure them that they would survive the ordeal. But this wasn't his concern.

He closed the door and returned to the diagrams he was working on. He reviewed them for long moments. And finally concluded: First, no one could possibly survive being in the proximity of the device they described. And second--he allowed himself the immodest thought--the drawings were as elegant as the finest zellige terra-cotta tiles, a cornerstone of Moroccan art.

CHAPTER 64

LINCOLN RHYME WAS SAYING, "And the same evidence we thought exculpated Shales by placing him in New York at the time of the shooting now helps implicate him: the phone calls from his mobile to the South Cove Inn to verify when Moreno was checking in, the metadata that placed him at NIOS headquarters in New York at the time of the death. We'll need more, though. We need to place him at the joystick of the drone. UAV, excuse me, rookie. How can we do that?"

"Air traffic control in Florida and the Bahamas," Sachs said.

"Good."

Sachs called their federal liaison, Fred Dellray, with the request and had a lengthy conversation with him. Finally Sachs disconnected. "Fred's calling the FAA here and the Civil Aviation Department in Nassau. But he gave me another idea." She was typing on her computer.

Rhyme couldn't see clearly. It appeared that she was examining a map. "Well," she whispered.

"What?" Rhyme wondered.

"Fred suggested we ought to try to get a look at the Kill Room itself."

"What?" Sellitto barked. "How?"

Google apparently.

Sachs smiled. She'd called up a satellite image of the block in which NIOS headquarters was located in downtown Manhattan. Behind the building itself was a parking lot, separated from the street with an impressive-looking security fence and overseen by a guard station. In the corner was a large rectangular structure, like a shipping container--the sort you see bolted to decks and cruising down highways behind tractor-trailer semis. Next to it a ten-foot antenna pointed skyward.

"That's the Ground Control Station, Fred told me. GCS. He said most of the UAVs are controlled from portable facilities like that."

"The Kill Room," Mel Cooper said.

"Perfect," Laurel said briskly to Sachs. "Print that out, if you would."

Rhyme could see Sachs bristle, hesitate and then with a thumb and finger--with a dot of dried blood behind the nail--tap hard on the keyboard. A printer began to exhale.

When the document was disgorged, Laurel slipped it from the tray and added it to her files.