According to the Talmud, an unholy entity must be “conducted” into the physical world by a mortal being. It needs someone to escort it. In the literature this “conductor” is often a female. A mother figure, a sister . . . frequently unwitting.

Manning is interrupted by a follow-up call from Uribe. It comes in over my phone; I take it for him. Our ME is heading home, he says, after this long, grim day. The final item of intel Uribe imparts is that he has, just five minutes earlier, received a message from the Queens impound lot, where Rachel’s Hi-Top van was being held.

URIBE

Your girl’s vehicle has been released per Gleason’s order. Someone picked it up. Every item we had impounded as evidence has been replaced aboard. The van itself is back in Brownsville now, “under the steel.”

I relay this to Manning. Ben-David moves off to the rear of the room, takes a seat beside his sister. The young rabbi is called away to other duties.

I’m standing beside Manning with the Icelandic video on my phone and Uribe’s message about Rachel’s van echoing in my ears.

My right hand, seemingly acting under its own direction, catches Manning’s sleeve. From my mouth I hear the following:

ME

The Hi-Top. Let’s toss it.

21

UNDER THE STEEL

A “DIRT-BOX” is a police cell interceptor. It’s like a wiretap but for cell phones, illegal as hell without a warrant. I’ve got one in our car’s equipment compartment, along with a password randomizer and other homemade and off-the-shelf hacking gear. With these, we can pick off any incoming calls and crack (I hope) any security protecting Rachel’s drop phones or laptops.

We go.

It’s fun.

Our Maglites have blue filters. Their beams can’t be seen by an observer unless they shine straight into his eyes. With them Manning and I scour the innards of Rachel’s home on wheels.

Her Uzi has been confiscated for mandatory destruction. It’s not here. But I find handwritten journals and trip diaries. Rachel wasn’t lying about traveling to Dusseldorf and São Paulo, not to mention two dozen other overseas cities.

Her journals are in Hebrew. I photograph the first three pages of four notebooks and dispatch them to DivSix’s professional translation software. They come back fast—ninety seconds—but as mathematical gobbledygook, a pigpen code like the Freemasons used. I see the trick. Rachel is using the principles of gematria. I ask the software, “How long to crack?” Answer: “3–4 wks.”

I order the computer to break the files down by the first five most frequently used words, figuring that one of them might be “Instancer,” from which I might to able to extrapolate integers and get a start on decryption. But this too comes back as a jumble.