Killer Instinct - James Patterson Page 0,65

Pritchard had told us, explaining his preference for blackboards in strategy sessions. “That’s all we use here. It makes everything you write more emphatic.”

Emphatically written across the two blackboards was everything we knew so far. And everything included a few things only some of us in the room should’ve been allowed to know. But there was simply no time for parsing security clearances. The clock was ticking. The Mudir had literally said as much.

My old friend and operative Ahmed Al-Hamdah had infiltrated one of the Mudir’s cells. He gave his life trying to prevent the Times Square bombings. In doing so, he spooked the Mudir to the point of thinking there could be other moles in his cells. In his effort to find them, the Mudir somehow found a path that led directly to me. He literally knocked on my front door.

Only days before that, Professor Jahan Darvish’s corpse had been discovered in his Manhattan hotel room. His toxicology report, filed by a city coroner, was initially viewed under the pretense of an accidental death. A second—and secret—report, issued by the CIA, had no such pretense but still couldn’t prove foul play. While the combination of drugs in Darvish’s system may have precipitated his cardiac arrest, two of the three had been prescribed for him.

Now, in reexamining the report, what appeared to be an inadvertent overdose was most likely anything but. As for the mini bottle of Jim Beam in his actual butt, well, that was just clever to the point of genius. Classic misdirection of the mind. Professor Darvish just had to be the only person in the room given something like that, right?

Wrong. Sadira Yavari either killed him herself or paved the way for someone else. Because she’d used Halo to conceal her identity, my initial thought was that she was CIA. Foxx, as the Agency’s New York section chief, would almost certainly know if she was an operative. But he swore up and down that she wasn’t. And while the first rule of being with the Agency is Trust no one, I had no reason not to believe him. Especially when he revealed that Darvish had been a CIA informant.

There you have it. A terrorist attack and a murder in a hotel room. Two seemingly unrelated events that would’ve stayed unrelated were it not for a certain Russian art dealer, Viktor Alexandrov. Professor Darvish had been receiving additional money beyond what the Iranian government was paying him, and Alexandrov had been the cryptocurrency point man. Turned out, he also had been a point man for the Mudir on some type of shipment that had yet to clear customs.

Which, over the span of two rectangular blackboards, brought everything full circle. The Mudir and Darvish were somehow connected, courtesy of Alexandrov. Unfortunately, out of those three, two of them were dead.

So was a young man named Gorgin, as well as the guy with a pointed beard who killed him when it became clear that Gorgin was going to help Elizabeth. Gorgin, whoever he was, saved Elizabeth’s life.

Now, with a little luck, he would end up saving the lives of countless others. That was why, at three in the morning, we were all still up and waiting.

The speakerphone on the conference room table suddenly crackled with the sound of Julian’s voice. “Found it!” he said.

The waiting was over.

CHAPTER 81

HOURS EARLIER, Chase Bank had provided us with the security footage from its branch at Penn Station. Matching up the time stamp from the ATM withdrawal slip Elizabeth had taken from the shirt pocket of the guy in Gorgin’s house with the pointed beard, we were able to see him enter and leave the branch.

What we weren’t able to see—or learn—was his name. According to Chase, the account he withdrew money from belonged to a Priscilla H. McManus. Miss McManus had reported her card stolen one day after making an ATM withdrawal from a branch in Jersey City.

Suffice it to say, larceny was probably the very least of our guy’s sins.

“So where did he go after the bank?” asked Foxx. “Did he catch a train? Was he meeting someone?”

Foxx was the only one in the room who had just learned of Elizabeth having the ATM receipt. We all turned to him. Damn. Good question.

There were a lot of sharp minds around the table, and we’d all been focused on who this guy was, not what else he might have been doing besides getting cash. Psychologists like to call that tunnel vision. I