Foreign Influence_ A Thriller - Brad Thor [50]
As the mechanic had no Chicago family that would be looking for him, Vaughan and Davidson decided to let his coworkers think he’d been arrested. After cleaning up his road rash they drove him down to the Department of Revenue and searched every four-digit cab license with a three in it until their eyes were bleeding and they had come up with their man, Mohammed Nasiri.
With Nasiri’s full name and cab number, they approached the owner of his cab, Yellow Cab Company.
Because of his position with Public Vehicles, Paul Davidson was fairly well known by the cab operators. He was also, because of his no-BS, take-no-prisoners style, fairly disliked.
He wasted no time in going straight to the top at Yellow, calling the director of operations at his home and waking him up. After Davidson threatened to enact a crackdown of epic proportions on Yellow Cabs across the city, the director agreed to meet him the next morning at their corporate offices.
When Davidson and Vaughan showed up, the director was there, along with the company’s corporate counsel, who quickly and repeatedly pointed out that their cooperation was in no way an indication of liability on their part. Rather, in the interest of being a good corporate citizen, Yellow want to help in the investigation in any way it could.
Davidson gave them a list of things he wanted, and within the hour he and Vaughan left Yellow Cab not only with Nasiri’s personnel file, but also with the dispatch logs and GPS coordinates that placed his cab right in the vicinity of the accident that evening.
They were golden. Now all they needed to do was collar Nasiri. Vaughan didn’t need to subpoena the phone records of the three stooges at the Crescent Garage, as he had taken to referring to Fahad, Jamal, and Ali Masud, to know that Nasiri had already been tipped off. If they were willing to fabricate a new logbook to protect him, there was no question that they would call and warm him that the police were closing in.
The question at this point was whether Nasiri was still in Chicago. For all they knew, he had hotfooted it back to Pakistan. And if that was the case, their investigation was as good as dead.
With his address in hand, they drove to Nasiri’s heavily Pakistani Devon Avenue neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. As it was Saturday, the sidewalks and streets were crowded with people doing their shopping. Cars were double-parked and those that were moving were committing so many traffic violations, Vaughan and Davidson could have handed out tickets all day long.
As a car blew a stop sign and almost hit them, Davidson commented, “Some day, I’m going to read the Qur’an. But if I’ve learned anything in the Public Vehicles Division it’s that it doesn’t contain anything about the proper operation of a motor vehicle.”
Vaughan chuckled and kept his eyes peeled for Nasiri’s cab. The neighborhood looked like any other immigrant neighborhood in the city. People dressed differently and he couldn’t read any of the signs. He didn’t feel here the way he did in other immigrant neighborhoods. He was an obvious outsider. He could read that in the people’s faces and it was more than just about being a cop. This world was alien to him, much the way Iraq had been. The culture couldn’t have been any more different from his own. It wasn’t like driving through Chicago’s Polish or Mexican neighborhoods. This one put him on edge and he didn’t like it. It was how he had felt when they operated outside the wire in Iraq. He wasn’t supposed to feel like that here in America. The little voice inside his head, the same one that had told him something wasn’t right on that assignment in Tikrit, was trying to tell him something again. But it wasn’t clear enough for him to understand. He wondered if maybe he was just being stupid. This wasn’t Iraq, after all. This was Chicago.
Shaking it off, he refocused on the search for Nasiri’s vehicle. Two blocks later, they found it.
“This means he’s gotta be close, right?