Chapter 11 - The Black SUV

The engineer lived in Queens. Police found his door broken and the SUV gone.

They found him breathing, wedged between the refrigerator and the kitchen wall. He had a cut above his eye and two broken fingers, but he'd hidden the basement plans inside a cereal box before the attackers got in.

"They wanted the paper," he told Simone from his hospital bed. "One of them kept asking where the original tunnel ran."

"Did you recognize either man?"

"No. But one had orange cleaner on his jacket. I could smell it."

Claire Weston, Simone thought. The same cleaning solution Sophie had noticed on the woman in the video. It was probably a product from Northline's supply carts, a small clue that linked two frightened witnesses.

Back at the station, Nico sat across from an investigator from the joint task force. He had turned over his phone and signed consent forms for the account records.

"My lawyer is going to hate this," he said.

"Your lawyer doesn't have to like you," the investigator replied. "He has to represent you."

Nico almost smiled.

Simone entered holding the restored plans. "The tunnel connects to a service ramp behind a shuttered printing plant. We have officers there now."

"And the port?" Nico asked.

"We're working with New Jersey authorities on that. Crossing a state line doesn't make a warrant appear faster."

"Mara doesn't have that kind of time."

"Then help me find a fact instead of making a speech."

Nico remembered the photograph of Gideon in the loading bay. On the wall behind him was a hand-painted symbol: a white triangle over a red line. It belonged to an old Rivas shipping company, shut down after a dockworker's death.

"Gideon reopened the wrong warehouse," he said.

He pointed to the mark on the photo. "The Riverton office is a decoy. That symbol was painted at Pier 18, on the old cold-storage building."

Simone called the New Jersey team to redirect them.

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An officer answered over the radio, breathing hard.

"We've got movement at Pier 18. They're loading a sealed truck. And there's someone banging from inside."