Spider - Michael Morley [82]
‘And the black felt-pen too,’ said Orsetta.
‘That too,’ added Jack.
‘He’s pulling us all over the place,’ conceded Benito.
‘He’s trying to,’ said Jack. ‘The courier story Roberto told us is probably old news and common knowledge. I’ve heard about students being used as couriers, it’s been going on for a few years in the States. Like Roberto said, kids even get free holidays by babysitting boxes on flights all over the world. I think BRK will have wanted us to think our package was delivered by a real courier company in Milan, hence the label. If we got through that test, then I reckon he was sure we’d come across the widespread use of Milanese students as couriers and would have wasted even more time chasing that dead end.’
‘Which means he really may have delivered the package in person,’ said Orsetta, believing that the killer would no doubt get an enormous kick out of such an act.
Jack didn’t think it likely. ‘Remember that this guy is not a risk-taker, so I’d bet against it. No, I suspect Roberto’s friend is partly right, but I think BRK used a student courier in Rome not in Milan.’
Benito volunteered another piece of the puzzle. ‘Because in Rome he could pay the student on return, with nothing upfront, and be sure the package wouldn’t be tampered with.’
‘Which means,’ said Jack, ‘that our man flew to the States from Rome, not Milan, and that he probably left on the evening of the twenty-fifth of June or sometime during the twenty-sixth.’
‘Maybe later,’ said Benito. ‘If he was confident that we’d be chasing around in Milan, he could wait in Rome until the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth and catch a transatlantic flight that would have him arriving in the USA and getting to the cemetery in Georgetown on June the thirtieth. We’ll check all Rome flight details as well.’
They paused for breath and looked at each other. Each and every one of them knew that, for the first time, they’d picked up the real scent of BRK’s trail.
‘One final thing,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t want to rain on our parade, but let’s check for recent student deaths in Rome as well. You know how our guy likes to tidy up as he goes along.’
52
Pan Arabia News Channel, New York
Crime editor Tariq el Daher was beginning to wonder whether he had made the biggest mistake of what he had once been told was a highly promising career. Just over a year had passed since he’d left his job at Reuters and joined the controversial Dubai-based station Pan Arabia to beef up their newly launched English language network.
At first, major technical problems had seriously delayed the station’s long-awaited debut transmission and hugely undermined their credibility as a news outfit. But those difficulties had faded into insignificance compared with the vitriolic criticism unleashed upon them by competing Western media groups once they did get on air. Sitting in his New York office, scanning the digital airways to check the content of competing channels, Tariq consoled himself by recalling that neither he nor his bosses had been under any illusion that they were in for an easy ride.
As a Muslim, he didn’t just understand the facts and figures of minority life – he lived them. Of New York’s twenty million people, fewer than two per cent followed the doctrines of Islam and fewer than two per cent were Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs. But behind those figures were the earthquake tremors of a massive change that wasn’t yet visible. While New York is home to a quarter of all America’s Jews, it has also quietly become the chosen land for a quarter of all America’s Muslims.
Ask Tariq whether he loved Islam more than America and the devout 35-year-old would dismiss your question as naïve and ask you if you loved your child more than your wife or husband. His love for both Islam and America was equally passionate but subtly different and, because he didn’t view them as mutually exclusive, when the chance came to join the New York bureau of one of the Middle East’s largest