by Lee Child
Jake didn’t reply.
I said, ‘And then I approached her.’
‘And?’
She flipped. She thought I was about to arrest her. Right then and there, the game was over. She was at the end of the road. She was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. She was trapped. Whatever threats they were using against her were going to come to pass, and she was going to jail.’
‘Why would she think you were going to arrest her?’
‘She must have thought I was a cop.’
‘Why would she think you were a cop?’
I’m a cop, I had said. I can help you. We can talk.
‘She was paranoid,’ I said. ‘Understandably.’
‘You don’t look like a cop. You look like a bum. She would more likely have thought you were hustling her for spare change.’
‘Maybe she thought I was undercover.’
‘She was a records clerk, according to you. She would have known what undercover cops look like.’
‘Jake, I’m sorry, but I told her I was a cop.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought she was a bomber. I was just trying to get through the next three seconds without her pushing the button. I was ready to say anything.’
He asked, “What exactly did you say?’ So I told him and he said, ‘Jesus, that even sounds like internal affairs bullshit.’
I think you tipped her over the edge.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
* * *
For the next few minutes I was getting it from all sides. Jacob Mark was glaring at me because I had killed his sister. The waitress was angry because she could have sold about eight breakfasts in the time we had lingered over two cups of coffee. I took out a twenty dollar bill and trapped it under my saucer. She saw me do it. Eight breakfasts’ worth of tips, right there. That solved the waitress problem. The Jacob Mark problem was tougher. He was still and silent and bristling. I saw him glance away, twice. Getting ready to disengage. Eventually he said, ‘I got to go. I got things to do. I have to find a way to tell her family.’
I said, ‘Family?’
‘Molina, the ex-husband. And they have a son, Peter. My nephew.’
‘Susan had a son?
‘What’s it to you?’
The IQ of Labradors.
I said, ‘Jake, we’ve been sitting here talking about leverage, and you didn’t think to mention that Susan had a kid?’
He went blank for a second. Said, ‘He’s not a kid. He’s twenty- two years old. He’s a senior at USC. He plays football. He’s bigger than you are. And he’s not close with his mother. He lived with his father after the divorce.’
I said, ‘Call him.’
‘It’s four o’clock in the morning in California.’
‘Call him now.’
‘I’ll wake him up.’
‘I sure hope you will.’
‘He needs to be prepared for this.’
‘First he needs to be answering his phone.’
So Jake took out his cell again and beeped through his address book and hit the green button against a name pretty low down on the list. Alphabetical order, I guessed. P for Peter. Jake held the phone against his ear and looked one kind of worried through the first five rings, and then another kind after the sixth. He kept the phone up a little while longer and then lowered it slowly and said, ‘Voice mail.’
FIFTEEN
I said, ‘go to work. call the LAPD or the USC campus cops and ask for some favours, blue to blue. Get someone to head over and check whether he’s home.’
‘They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.’
I said, ‘Just do it.’
Jake said, ‘Come with me.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.’
‘You’ll never find them.’
‘They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.’
* * *
We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop.
I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half expecting buried deep inside the Daily News. The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.
I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge. Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.
I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.
Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the three guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.
* * *
They approached me a block south of Madison Square Garden and the big old post office. Construction on a corner lot shunted pedestrians along a narrow fenced-off lane in the gutter. I got a yard into it and one guy stepped ahead of me and one fell in behind and the leader came alongside me. Neat moves. The leader said, ‘We’re prepared to forget the thing with the coat.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Because I already did.’
‘But we need to know if you have something that belongs to us.’
‘To you?’
‘To our principal.’
‘Who are you guys?’
‘I gave you our card.’
‘And at first I was very impressed by it. It looked like a work of art, arithmetically. There are more than three million possible combinations for a seven-digit phone number. But you didn’t choose randomly. You picked one you knew was disconnected. I imagined that’s tough to do. So I was impressed. But then I figured in fact that’s impossible to do, given Manhattan ’s population. Someone dies or moves away, their number gets recycled pretty fast. So then I guessed you had access to a list of numbers that never work. Phone companies keep a few, for when a number shows up in the movies or on TV. Can’t use real numbers for that, because customers might get harassed. So then I guessed you know people in the movie and TV business. Probably because most of the week you rent out as sidewalk security when there’s a show
in town. Therefore the closest you get to action is fending off autograph hunters. Which must be a disappointment to guys like you. I’m sure you had something better in mind when you set up in business. And worse, it implies a certain erosion of abilities, through lack of practice. So now I’m even less worried about you than I was before. So all in all I’d say the card was a mistake, in terms of image management.’
The guy said, ‘Can we buy you a cup of coffee?’
* * *
I never say no to a cup of coffee, but I was all done with sitting down, so I agreed to go-cups only. We could sip and talk as we walked. We stopped in at the next Starbucks we saw, which as in most cities was half a block away. I ignored the fancy brews and got a tall house blend, black, no room for cream. My standard order, at Starbucks. A fine bean, in my opinion. Not that I really care. It’s all about the caffeine for me, not the taste.
We came out and carried on down Eighth. But four people made an awkward group for mobile conversation and the traffic was loud, so we ended up ten yards into the mouth of a cross street, static, with me in the shade, leaning on a railing, and the other three in the sun in front of me and leaning towards me like they had points to make. At our feet a burst garbage bag leaked cheerful sections of the Sunday newspaper on the sidewalk. The guy who did all the talking said, ‘You’re seriously underestimating us, not that we want to get into a pissing contest.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘You’re ex-military, right?’
‘Army,’ I said.
‘You’ve still got the look.’
‘You too. Special Forces?’
‘No. We didn’t get that far.’
I smiled. An honest man.
The guy said, ‘We got hired as the local end for a temporary operation. The dead woman was carrying an item of value. It’s up to us to recover it.’
‘What item? What value?’
‘Information.’
I said, ‘I can’t help you:
‘Our principal was expecting digital data, on a computer chip, like a USB flash memory stick. We said no, that’s too hard to get out of the Pentagon. We said it would be verbal. Like, read and memorized.’
I said nothing. Thought back to Susan Mark on the train. The mumbling. Maybe she wasn’t rehearsing pleas or exculpations or threats or arguments. Maybe she was running through the details she was supposed to deliver, over and over again, so she wouldn’t forget them or get them confused in her stress and her panic. Learning by rote. And saying to herself, I’m obeying, I’m obeying, I’m obeying. Reassuring herself. Hoping that it would all turn out right.
I asked, ‘Who is your principal?’
‘We can’t say.’
‘What was his leverage?’
‘We don’t know. We don’t want to know.’
I sipped my coffee. Said nothing.
The guy said, ‘The woman spoke to you on the train.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She did.’
‘So now the operational assumption is that whatever she knew, you know.’
‘Possible,’ I said.
‘Our principal is convinced of it. Which gives you a problem. Data on a computer chip, no big deal. We could hit you over the head and turn out your pockets. But something in your head would need to be extracted some other way.’
I said nothing.
The guy said, ‘So you really need to tell us what you know.’
‘So you’ll look competent?’
The guy shook his head. ‘So you’ll stay whole.’
I took another sip of coffee and the guy said, ‘I’m appealing to you, man to man. Soldier to soldier. This is not about us. We go back empty, sure, we’ll get fired. But Monday morning we’ll be working again, for someone else. But if we’re out of the picture, you’re exposed. Our principal brought a whole crew. Right now they’re on a leash, because they don’t fit in here. But if we’re gone, they’re off the leash. No alternative. And you really don’t want them talking to you.’
‘I don’t want anyone talking to me. Not them, not you. I don’t like talking.’
‘This is not a joke.’
‘You got that right. A woman died.’
‘Suicide is not a crime.’
‘But whatever drove her to it might be. The woman worked at the Pentagon. That’s national security, right there. You need to get out in front of this. You should talk to the NYPD.’
The guy shook his head. ‘I’d go to jail before I crossed these people. You hear what I’m saying?’
‘I hear you,’ I said. ‘You’ve gotten comfortable with your autograph hunters.’
‘We’re the kid gloves here. You should take advantage.’
‘You’re no kind of gloves at all.’
‘What were you, in the service?’
‘MPs,’ I said.
‘Then you’re a dead man. You never saw anything like this.’
‘Who is he?’
The guy just shook his head.
‘How many?’
The guy shook his head again.
‘Give me something.’
‘You’re not listening. If I won’t talk to the NYPD, why the hell would I talk to you?’
I shrugged and drained my cup and pushed off the railing. Took three steps and tossed the cup into a trash basket. I said, ‘Call your principal and tell him he was right and you were wrong. Tell him the woman’s information was all on a memory stick, which is right now in my pocket. Then resign by phone and go home and stay the hell out of my way.’
I crossed the street between two moving cars and headed for Eighth. The leader called after me, loud. He said my name. I turned and saw him holding his cell phone at arm’s length. It was pointing at me and he was staring at its screen. Then he lowered it and all three guys moved away and a white truck passed between us and they were out of sight before I realized I had been photographed.
SIXTEEN
Radio Shacks are about a tenth as common as Starbucks, but they’re never more than a few blocks away. And they open early. I stopped in at the next one I saw and a guy from the Indian subcontinent stepped forward to help me. He seemed keen. Maybe I was the first customer of the day. I asked him about cell phones with cameras. He said practically all of them had cameras. Some of them even had video. I told him I wanted to see how good the still pictures came out. He picked up a random phone and I stood at the back of the store and he snapped me from the register. The resulting image was small and lacked definition. My features were indistinct. But my overall size and shape and posture were captured fairly well. Well enough to be a problem, anyway. Truth is, my face is plain and ordinary. Very forgettable. My guess is most people recognize me by my silhouette, which is not ordinary.
I told the guy I didn’t want the phone. He tried to sell me a digital camera instead. It was full of megapixels. It would take a better picture. I said I didn’t want a camera, either. But I bought a memory stick from him. A USB device, for computer data. Smallest capacity he had, lowest price. It was for window dressing only, and I didn’t want to spend a fortune. It was a tiny thing, in a big package made of tough plastic. I had the guy open it up with scissors. You can ruin your teeth on stuff like that. The stick came with a choice of two soft neoprene sleeves, blue or pink. I used the pink. Susan Mark hadn’t looked particularly like a pink type of woman, but people see what they want to see. A pink sleeve equals a woman’s property. I put the stick in my pocket next to my toothbrush and thanked the guy for his help and left him to ditch the trash.
* * *
I walked two and a half blocks east on 28th Street. Plenty of people were behind me all the way, but I didn’t know any of them, and none of them seemed to know me. I went down into the subway at Broadway and swiped my card. Then I missed the next nine downtown trains. I just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and let them all go. Partly to take a break, partly to kill time until the rest of the city’s businesses opened up, and partly to check I hadn’t been followed. Nine sets of passengers came and
went, and nine times I was all alone on the platform for a second or two. No one showed the slightest interest in me. When I was done with watching for people I started watching for rats instead. I like rats. There are a lot of myths about them. Sightings are rarer than people think. Rats are shy. Visible rats are usually young or sick or starving. They don’t bite sleeping babies’ faces for the fun of it. They’re tempted by traces of food, that’s all. Wash your kid’s mouth before you put it to bed and it’ll be OK. And there are no giant rats as big as cats. All rats are the same size.
I saw no rats at all, and eventually I got restless. I stood up and turned my back on the track and looked at the posters on the wall. One of them was a map of the whole subway system. Two were advertisements for Broadway musicals. One was an official notice prohibiting something called subway surfing. There was a black and while illustration of a guy clamped like a starfish on the outside of a subway car’s door. Apparently the older stock on the New York system had toe boards under the doors, designed to bridge part of the gap between the car and the platform, and small rain gutters above the doors, designed to stop dripping water getting in. I knew the new R142As had neither feature. My crazy co-rider had told me so. But with the older cars it was possible to wait on the platform until the doors closed, and then jam your toes on the toe board, and hook your fingertips in the rain gutter, and hug the car, and get carried through the tunnels on the outside. Subway surfing. A lot of fun for some, maybe, but now illegal.
I turned back to the track and got on the tenth train to pull in. It was an R train. It had toe boards and rain gutters. But I rode inside, two stops to the big station at Union Square.
I came up in the northwest corner of Union Square and headed for a huge bookstore I remembered on 17th Street. Campaigning politicians usually publish biographies ahead of election season, and news magazines are always full of coverage. I could have looked for an internet café instead, but I’m not proficient with the technology and anyway internet cafés are much rarer than they were. Now everyone carries small electronic devices named after fruits or trees. Internet cafés are going the same way as phone booths, killed by new wireless inventions.
