by John Altman
No further complaints from outside the door. The man had moved on, he guessed, to find another public restroom in the park.
He added a layer of translucent face powder. Then some broken veins, using a coarse sponge. A dark brown pencil intensified the shadows beneath his lower lip, focusing on the center to imply fullness, creating a small, well-rounded mouth that gave the impression of bitterness and age. He considered his efforts, wiped off the pencil, and tried again. Better.
White lining color on a mascara brush lightened his eyebrows. He applied the color against the grain, thickening and fluffing.
Now the hair.
He used whitener with a tinting brush. False hairpieces, he knew, raised suspicion. If one was looking for a man in a disguise, wigs and handlebar mustaches were liable to catch the eye. Instead he worked with what nature had given him, striving for subtlety. Gray around the temples; a few streaks on top. He used gel to pull the hair away from his forehead, emphasizing the slight receding hairline. Late middle-age, not old age. Don’t overdo it, he thought.
When he’d finished with the hair, the cipher in the mirror looked back at him levelly.
He pressed the latex piece into position. The nose was larger than his own, with a bulb on the tip. The man he was playing was a habitual drinker, he decided. A wealthy man, a city dweller. Going upstate for a fishing trip, more likely than not—an excuse to drink during the day. He trimmed away the excess latex, keeping the outline of the nose as irregular as possible. Straight edges would be difficult to camouflage.
A thin film of spirit gum went around the false piece. He fit it carefully over his face and used a dampened paper towel wrapped around his fingertips to press down the edges. He dabbed liquid latex adhesive along the joints, then paused to let it dry.
When he looked at himself again, a stranger was looking back. But the stranger was clearly a construct. He slowly and painstakingly applied light makeup to the false nose, blending it into the mottled complexion. Better.
Three moles of Derma Wax—two by his mouth, one in the center of his right cheek.
He looked away, then looked back. His eye picked out flaws in the disguise: uneven coloring, too smooth skin. He fixed it.
At last the face in the mirror looked almost genuine. Seen from a slight distance, under less-than-direct light, it would suffice.
After leaving the cab he spent ten minutes watching the door of his room at the Arlington Motel. Then he found his courage, and moved forward.
Inside was no evidence of intrusion. He gathered together his laptop computer and the few belongings not already in the bag. Two minutes later he was outside again, walking rapidly away. He hailed another cab, slipped inside, and hesitated. He had nowhere to go—but he could not stay here.
“Leonard Street,” he said, pulling the address from thin air. “Greenpoint.”
The driver reached for his meter. They drove for about eight minutes, past laundromats and fast food joints. Then they were passing elevated railroad tracks; a weedy cul-de-sac beneath a trestle caught the assassin’s eye. He would be safe there long enough to figure out his next move. He let a few more seconds pass. As they drew up to a stoplight he told the driver, “I forgot something—let me out here, please.”
Then he backtracked toward the cul-de-sac. The place smelled of urine and rotting garbage. Before entering, he searched the darkness for vagrants. Then he advanced, crouching to avoid cobwebs, and found a fairly dry spot to sit among empty bottles and cans—an old wooden platform, rotting but stable.
The twenty-ninth of April, he thought as he sank down onto the dirty wood.
He could not pick up the Honda until tomorrow. If he even could do it then. What if Sal Santiori had seen a newspaper? Then it would not be safe to show his face, disguise or no.
The post office box was under watch. Ajami’s building was under watch; the chances of the second payment being delivered seemed slim. His face was known. It would be trouble enough just getting out of this country without being arrested. Why go ahead?
Because he needed to prove something. To himself, more than anyone else. At the temple he had been known as little mouse. Yet he was capable—more capable than the others there.
The difficulty of the assignment had been a large part of its appeal. He would not pretend to be more than he was, but nor would he pretend to be less. He was indeed little mouse. And that would be enough—if he was true to himself.
Once he had proven his value, the accomplishment would show on his face. Inner peace created outer power. Once he had completed the challenge, his face no longer would blur into indistinctiveness. Then when he finally did find Rana again …
… she would be stepping out of a limousine, he thought, on a shopping trip of some kind. Her husband would be extraordinarily wealthy; she would be attended by servants and chauffeurs. But the trappings of money would not make her happy inside. Rana was too complicated for that, too good.
When she first saw him, she would not remember. To the assassin, she had been the one person who had given him kindness in a cold world. But to Rana, he had been just another urchin. She would not remember; but she would be impressed by the bearing of this man, who would approach her as she stepped out of her limousine, asking for a moment of her time. She would see, even without the riches brought by the second payment, that this man before her was a greater man than all others. He never even would remind her that they had met once before, decades earlier, in a world of squalor and misery …
… it was too fragile. Thinking about it would make it go away. Then he would be left with nothing.
He focused on concrete things, on the immediate future.
He needed to pass another night in the city. With the disguise, he could manage it. He would avoid motels and public thoroughfares. He would become, however briefly, a part of the community of drifters. Then he would pick up the Honda. That in itself was hardly a risk-free proposition. Would Sal have reported his illicit customer to the authorities? Or would that have put Sal himself in a bad light? The nature of their business, after all, had been illegal.
Somehow he would manage it. Then he would get out of the city. He would need to hear another weather report before proceeding. Without proper cover—without a guarantee of twenty-four hours of rain—he would not attempt to penetrate the compound.
First, however, he needed to get through tonight. That was the priority.
A sound from outside the cul-de-sac. A wino—even from here reeking of body odor. He was peering owlishly into the gloom. “Who’s there?”
The assassin took his bags and stood. “Just moving on,” he said.
“That’s right,” the man said, with tattered arrogance. “Just keep right on moving.”
He did—stepping outside and then pacing the train tracks, looking for a place secluded enough to settle for the night.
Thomas Warren II lay on a queen-size bed in the brownstone’s parlor studio, trying to block out the noise from the next room so he could grab some sleep.
When he had spoken with the director earlier that day, he had expected to be chastised for letting the operation grow out of control. But it seemed the director now was less concerned with blowback—negative publicity resulting from clandestine operations—than with results. On his own initiative, the DCI had put in calls to the Defense Secretary and the National Reconnaissance Agency, securing surveillance planes and satellites to lend a hand with the hunt.
The director’s efforts to secure recon assets was doubly reassuring. He must have been feeling more heat than he had let on, during their meeting at Langley. Evidently he wasn’t at all certain that he would be able to throw the blame for a botched operation into Warren’s lap; and so now, at last, he was extending himself.
Elsewhere in the brownstone, someone was watching a tennis match on television. Warren could hear the faint sounds of the game:… pop … pop … pop … applause. He found himself slipping into an uneasy doze. Perhaps he would achieve a few mi
nutes of real sleep, after all. The rhythm of the tennis was soothing—the long, suspended pause of the ball over the net, then the pop of the racquet making contact. A rhythm like that, he thought vaguely, could help a man fall asleep.
One of the voices from the next room was talking about the body they had found in the carriage in Central Park. A young mother named Liz Halloway; identification had been made by her husband. Their target had used the woman’s body as camouflage, slipping out of the park right under their noses.
A nice trick, Warren thought. But the last nice trick the man would manage. Thanks to the DCI, they had access to twenty-four military reconnaissance satellites traveling in six orbital planes, with four satellites focused on any part of the world at any given moment, flashing images to the NRO at 186,000 miles per second. They had two PR9 Canberra aircrafts equipped with SYERS. The Senior Year Electro-Optical Relay System cameras possessed a range of over one hundred miles, allowing the Canberra to travel at altitudes that guaranteed it would remain out of eye- and earshot of civilians. With so many resources, the man would need to be a true magician to escape them.
But he was a magician, Warren thought. Look at the tricks he had played already. Despite everything, the man would manage yet another feat of sleight of hand, and leave them with nothing.
That was exhaustion talking. Sleep would cure that nagging voice. Even just a few minutes’.
Two other voices—he recognized them as belonging to Nathan Hoyle and Anthony Cass—were discussing the media. The media wanted to know if the incident at Central Park had involved a terror suspect, and how it had turned out.
Cass made an executive decision: no statement at the present time. He asked if Hoyle had contacted the State Police yet. Hoyle confirmed that he had. Roadblocks had been established at twenty-mile intervals, feeding out from the city in every direction. They were reluctant to keep the roadblocks up for more than four hours. Six at the least, Cass answered, and don’t take no for an answer.
Good man, Warren thought. He listened to the tennis match. Pop … pop … pop. A suspended moment; then applause.
A ringing phone. Hoyle made more executive decisions, audibly. The husband of the dead woman—Liz Halloway—was to be given their sincere condolences, but no further explanation. Searches of area motels should continue. Warren was to be disturbed only in the event of a major breakthrough.…
He rolled over. The tennis match continued. For the first time he wondered: Who the hell was watching tennis?
A magician, he thought. He pictured a rabbit coming out of a hat. The small man in black, holding it by both ears, thrusting it forward. And for my next trick, ladies and gentlemen—
“Now?” Hoyle was asking.
Something in his tone made Warren’s eyes open.
Then Hoyle was in the doorway, a cell phone at his ear. “Tom,” he said, but Warren already was out of the bed.
13
The owner of the Arlington Motel was a man named Ted Mudgett. In the thirty-odd years he had run his establishment, he had seen a lot of things. But he never had seen anything like the activity he had witnessed in the past twenty minutes.
The activity had begun when a tall man in an ill-fitting jacket stepped into his office and showed him a photograph. The tall man, Ted understood, worked with the government. He hadn’t needed to see any identification to understand this plain fact. He had seen it in the man’s brusque demeanor, in his self-important air, and in the bulge that fanned up the ill-fitting jacket just above the right buttock. Ted had taken one look at the photograph and then nodded, slipping the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Yeah,” he said, and then leaned forward to check his registry. As his finger moved over the names, the toothpick switched back to the other side of his mouth. “John Wilson. Room twenty-one.”
That had been twenty minutes before. Since then, Ted Mudgett had seen a great many things that he previously had seen only in movies. The government agent had gotten on some kind of glorified walkie-talkie and spoken a cryptic string of words. Within four minutes, the first van had appeared on the street outside the motel. VERIZON, the van read between blacked-out windows. By then the government agent had shucked off his ill-fitting jacket, revealing the holster on his right hip, and replaced it with a Kevlar vest.
By the time ten minutes had passed, two other black vans had joined the first by the sidewalk. Ted Mudgett stayed behind his desk, the toothpick switching steadily from one side of his mouth to the other, taking it all in. From each van came an emissary. They clustered around his desk, poring over blueprints of his motel.
They were going to break into John Wilson’s room, of course. He had seen enough movies to recognize a SWAT team when he saw one. Remotely, he wondered what John Wilson had done to deserve such attention. He also wondered who had put in a call to report John Wilson’s presence at the motel. Ted Mudgett had not seen a recent newspaper.
Then the government agents were working out a plan of approach, right in front of his eyes. The tall one announced his intention to make the primary entrance himself. Backup teams would cover possible routes of escape. One would be stationed in the alley behind the motel; another, with rifles, on the rooftop across the way.
“What’s the best way onto that roof?” the tall man asked Ted.
Ted shrugged. “Fire escape, I guess.”
They ignored him again.
Seventeen minutes after the tall man had stepped into the motel office, the black vans opened their doors at precisely the same moment. Men armed with riot guns streamed out, splitting into two streams—one heading into the alley, the other for the fire escape of the building across the way. The two who had been poring over the blueprints were putting on their own Kevlar vests. As he watched, Ted realized he had chewed the end of the toothpick to a pulp. He tossed it into a trash can, then took a fresh one from the pack in his desk drawer.
The tall man produced a shotgun, into which he fit a three-inch Magnum shell.
Ted Mudgett followed them onto the sidewalk. He watched the ensuing drama from a spot a few feet in front of the first van, the one marked VERIZON.
The three men climbed the stairs to room 21. Two, including the tall one, put themselves to the right of the door. The other stood to the left. On the rooftop across the way, a sniper’s scope flashed in the sun. Ted caught a brief glimpse of the sniper himself, half-concealed behind a billboard featuring Joe Camel.
Then the tall one hefted the shotgun, stepped forward, and emptied it into the door at the height of the knob.
The boom rolled into the alley and then back onto the street. By then the tall man had kicked in the door.
It was exciting, Ted Mudgett thought from his spot on the sidewalk. It may have been the most exciting thing he had ever seen. He was so excited that it didn’t even occur to him to worry about the property damage.
The men entered the room. A woman in 24 peeked her head out, then vanished. The men who had gone into 21 reappeared. The tall one spoke urgently into his fancy walkie-talkie. Even from the sidewalk, Ted could surmise that the room had been empty.
His fresh toothpick was already pulped. He spat it out, watched the agent yell into his walkie-talkie for another moment, then went back to the office and opened the desk drawer. As he was digging for the pack, he suddenly realized that they had kicked in a perfectly good door, when he’d had a passkey right at hand.
He frowned. His excitement diminished with surprising rapidity, as he tried to figure out how in hell he was going to get money out of these men.
Sal Santiori began his last day on earth by meeting a new client from Baltimore.
They went through the usual preliminaries, sipping coffee and feeling each other out while sitting in the grungy front office of the garage. They discussed the game last night, then the neighborhood around the garage, then the weather. It had been a hard fucking winter and a bad fucking spring, the client from Baltimore said. Raining almost nonstop. Sal politely
agreed. But the last couple of days hadn’t been so bad. And April showers, he remarked, brought May flowers.
They traded stories of the man who had put them in contact. The stories were delivered in an offhanded manner, as if they were coming to mind only as they were spoken. In fact, they were carefully calibrated to indicate that both realized the nature of their business would be illegal.
With such bona fides established, Sal assured the man that they could work together. His team could strip a vehicle’s serial number and give it a new identification, down to forged computerized chips and bar codes, with a turnaround time of under forty-eight hours. For twenty minutes, they discussed volume and percentages. Then Sal leaned back in his chair, letting a pensive look come into his eye. He snapped his fingers. “You know,” he said. “Long as you’re here …”
He brought the man out back, where the modified Honda was waiting. He leaned into the backseat, searching for the loose corner of upholstery.
“I did the work myself,” he said. “I like a challenge, every once in a while. Guy who commissioned this tells me he wants a compartment so long by so wide. Give me a Chrysler, I say, no problem. Big cars are filled with wasted space. But it has to be the Honda, he says. Because compacts aren’t going to catch your profiler’s eye, you know. State troopers are looking for a sedan or a van, when they’re looking for contraband. You take a little car like this, nobody looks twice. You can’t hide anything in there, they think. But voilà …”
He lifted the corner of upholstery, worked loose the screws on the panel, and removed it to reveal the hidden compartment.
