by Mitch Silver
Scott got pink, then red in the face and started to get up. Amy could see what Scott couldn’t: that Devlin had Macken’s gun in his left hand. It too was under the table, and it was pointing right at Scott’s crotch.
“Scott, don’t! Sit down!” Amy had finally found her voice.
Devlin was all sweetness and light. “That’s right. Sit down. If anything happens here, you two will be dead and I’ll be the man from Scotland Yard, working on a case of the highest security.”
Amy finally understood that smile. It was evil.
“And speaking of a case, we want those papers in yours, Dr. Greenberg.” He’d spoken softly, so no one in the surrounding hubbub of the bar could hear. Now he dropped his voice even more, so Amy could barely make out what he said. “Tell your fiancé we wouldn’t want anything to go amiss on your wedding night.”
Scott sat back down. He couldn’t see the gun under the table, but he knew he couldn’t get to the knife fast enough to save Amy. Meanwhile, Amy leaned to her right to pick up her black nylon case from the floor next to her chair. Devlin’s leg was pressing down on hers, hurting it.
Devlin had left the blade of the stiletto exactly where it had been, so when Amy straightened up again with the computer case in both hands, the metal point stuck into her blouse and broke the skin. He grinned, enjoying the pain it caused.
“If I give this to you,” she said, “how do I know you’ll let us go?”
“You don’t. But look at it my way. Some damaging material has been out in the open for twenty-four hours and it was my job to retrieve it. Now that I have it”—he looked at his watch, twisting his gun hand to read the time—“and my colleagues have by now purged the bank’s records and erased the videotape, you have no proof of anything. Except that a man tried to mug you and you killed him somehow. Without the papers, who’s going to believe you? All the Irish bankers are dead. Still, if it makes you feel any better, I’d rather not kill you. I’m a sentimentalist when it comes to marriage.”
Amy wanted to see it his way, and what choice did she have? A professional with a gun and a knife beat anything two amateurs could come up with. She opened the computer case and took out the thick wad of papers.
Devlin looked at the cover sheet. “Provenance, by I. Fleming. Too bad for you it wasn’t written by Ira Fleming.”
He took the manuscript from Amy with his right hand and stood up. The stiletto was already back in his pocket. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. The RAF don’t like to be kept waiting.”
He was still holding the gun in his left hand, but now the hand was hidden in his jacket pocket. He jiggled the pocket a little to call attention to it. “I’m walking right out the front door of this place. Don’t try to follow me, or I really will use this on you.”
And then he was gone. Scott made a move to go after him, and it was all Amy could do to hold him back, literally. The waiter was at their table. “Will there be anything else?”
Chapter 55
Sign the check.” Amy heard the harshness in her voice and made a mental note to work on that when they were married. “Please, Scott, let’s go.” She looked at her watch. The next train to New Haven would leave in a quarter hour. Too much time.
Scott finished paying and saw that Amy had her coat on and the somewhat slimmer computer bag slung over her shoulder. “What’s the rush? We’re practically in Grand Central already.”
“Don’t ask questions. Hurry.” She hustled them out of the bar and back along the service corridor and around a partition to the old elevator. She pushed the button as hard as she could, to make it come faster. It was still there from the trip up. The doors opened right away.
Once they were heading down, Amy blurted out, “I’m worried about him coming back.” Some explanations don’t explain anything.
“But why?” Scott asked.
The elevator came to a stop and Amy pushed through the door into the vestibule. “I’ll tell you when we’re safely on the train.” The vestibule door is always unlocked on the Club side. Amy turned the knob and they were back in the station.
Macken’s body hadn’t gone anywhere, still crumpled in a corner to her right. She couldn’t look, but Scott did. “Oh my God! Is that the guy? Oh my God!”
Scott must have had no idea how loud his voice was, reverberating off the tunnel walls down here. Now every homeless person living in Grand Central would know something was up. “You’re sure he’s dead?” Thankfully, Scott had lowered his voice. “Maybe we should—”
“He’s dead! He died in my arms. We’ve got to go!” For the second time in about an hour, Amy thought her right arm was going to be dislocated as she pulled her reluctant fiancé away from Macken and toward the public part of the terminal.
They made their way across the tracks, onto the abandoned platform and up some more steps to the No Trespassing door. It opened and Amy and Scott were back on the parapet above track 117, back in the world of commuters.
From here, they could see several trains with wide blue stripes running the length of the cars. These were bound for either central Westchester along the Harlem Line or the county’s river communities on the Hudson Line. The trains they wanted weren’t blue but the red of the New Haven Line.
Back on the Lower Concourse, Amy searched the departures monitor. The 5:38 express to New Haven was on the upper level, leaving two minutes ahead of a train to Stamford.
“Scott, I’m going upstairs to get my suitcase. I’ll meet you inside the entrance to track twenty-five. Inside the entrance.”
He just stood there. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Amy was getting impatient, and she knew it was irrational. Scott just wanted to protect her. “Sweetie, there’s something I need you to do. Outside the station, across the street where the airport buses stop, there’s a limo with my name in the passenger window. At least, there was an hour ago. I need you to get the card: it may be the only proof we’ll have that any of this happened.”
“Should I ask the driver for it?”
“He’s the dead guy.”
Scott still wasn’t moving. “Shouldn’t we call the police? At least to get the body?”
Scott seemed to be getting agitated and Amy couldn’t tell if he remembered her instructions. “Please, sweetie, the card. We’ll call the police from the train.”
“All right.” Just like that, Scott was off at a run, taking the stairs up to the main level two at a time. Amy headed in the opposite direction, toward the escalators. Less conspicuous.
Three minutes later, Amy Greenberg was standing next to her American Tourister bag just within the imposing arch that announced Tracks 25 & 26, out of view of any prying eyes in the enormous main hall of Grand Central. Five minutes. Seven minutes went by. A watched Scott never comes. And then there he was, out of breath.
“It must have been towed.”
So much for that idea. “Thanks anyway, dear.”
Amy was holding the handle of her suitcase, but Scott took it from her. “Let me.”
They hurried toward the train. Straight ahead was a platform a couple of city blocks long. The wide red bands running along the train cars on either side created in Amy’s mind’s eye a kind of forced perspective, mentally leading all the way out of the terminal eighty miles to the end of the line at New Haven. The vanishing point.
The New Haven express on their left was filling up fast, though there were plenty of people getting on the Stamford train as well. Scott hurried ahead of Amy, peering into the windows of the 5:38 for two seats together.
It was all Amy could do to catch up to him. “No, honey, the other train.”
“But—” Now Scott was totally confused. “This is the one going to Yale. I checked the monitor in the station.”
She commandeered the suitcase with Scott still holding it and executed a 180-degree turn across the platform. “I know. That’s why we’re going to Stamford. Get in here, quick.” She seemed to have spent the last quarter hour just giving Scott o
rders.
Scott had never known Amy to be so insistent, so abrupt. But he let her hustle them onto the 5:40. There were still seats together facing forward, but Amy dropped her purse and computer case on the window seat of a pair that faced back toward the station and sat down with her face as close as possible to the glass.
Scott shoved the suitcase onto the luggage rack over their heads and sat down beside her. “What are you looking for?”
“Not what. Who.” Amy pointed with her finger, jabbing the heavy glass of the window. “Him.”
Scott leaned toward her to see what she saw. Brian Devlin was frantically running past the train across the way, peering into the windows as Scott had just done. He had almost reached the spot where they had been standing when the conductor called, “All aboard!”
Devlin took another look back along the platform toward the terminal, then up toward the head of the train. There were four more cars he hadn’t checked. Then, unexpectedly, he pivoted and looked behind him, right toward Amy and Scott. She pulled the man she loved away from the window a little too hard.
Devlin still had the manuscript in his hand and the bulge in his jacket pocket. Amy prayed for him to get on the other train. And he did.
As it pulled out of the station past them, Amy could see Devlin walking a little awkwardly up the aisle toward the head car, keeping his jacket pocket forward and looking left and right. They’d dodged a major bullet.
Scott was speechless. Or at least, stuttering. “How—What—How—?”
Amy realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it out with a gasp. “The manuscript I gave him at the Yale Club?”
“Yes?”
“It wasn’t the real one.”
Now Scott was beyond speechless. He was stumped. “You mean…what? It was forged?”
She took both of his hands in hers and stroked them gently. “Not forged. Copied.” She opened her black bag and showed him Fleming’s papers inside. “These are the originals.”
Scott’s eyes went from Amy’s face to the papers and back again, like a child’s. She went on. “When I called you from the Delta Lounge, I saw that they have Xerox machines there next to the phones. Ten minutes and I had a copy. Then I switched the title pages, so the real cover sheet was on the copied documents. And that’s what I handed to Devlin.” She took the papers from her computer case and showed him the photocopied cover.
“But why make a copy at all?”
“Sweetheart, the man who died next to me on the plane? He was there to protect me, protect the pages, I think. And someone killed him. A stewardess—who maybe was the killer—tried to steal them from me. I think the dead man back there in the station wanted to give them to the IRA to blackmail the English with. And Devlin and the British have some secret they don’t want even their allies to know. They want to destroy the manuscript to keep its secret. This thing is sending out a signal: “Come and get me.” Making a second manuscript was the only plan I could come up with. And it would have worked…as long as Devlin didn’t have a chance to inspect what he had. But if he did, he’d know they were phonies…and that we’d be on that train.”
“How would he know that, exactly? And what’s the big secret, anyway?”
Amy paused. After all the conspiracy theories she’d developed in her mind, was Scott really an innocent in all this? “Macken said it’s all about Churchill killing Rudolf Hess and a lot of prisoners of war. But I don’t think so.” She touched her computer bag. “Macken didn’t know about all the stuff on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in here.”
Now Scott really looked lost. “The Duke and Duchess of…huh?”
“I’m still trying to figure it out. I haven’t finished reading everything.”
“Then just tell me this,” Scott asked. “How did Devlin know we’d be on that other train?”
“I told him at the Dublin airport that I teach at Yale. If he’s any good at detecting, once he knew the pages were copies, he’d have enough time to come after us. So now, we’ll go the slow way and change at Stamford for the next New Haven train.”
By this time Scott had reversed roles and was rubbing her hands. They were ice cold. “Darling, you’re amazing. You’ve thought of everything.”
Amy looked out the window. They were still in the tunnel under Park Avenue. “As soon as we can get in cell phone range, we’ll call the Metro-North police. Because if they don’t stop him, he’ll be up at Yale waiting for us.”
Chapter 56
All three Metro-North rail lines climb out of the Park Avenue tunnel at Ninety-seventh Street, and Scott’s phone acquired a signal about ten seconds later. Within a minute, his call to 911 had been answered by a police operator and routed to the transit cops, the unit responsible for Grand Central, Penn Station, the surface trains, and the subways. The man on the other end of the call listened to Scott. Then he said, “This guy you say was stabbed in Grand Central? You sure he’s dead?”
Scott didn’t have to look over at Amy. “Positive.”
“Then you don’t want us. You want Homicide. Hold on.”
This time, the original dispatcher listened long enough for Scott to describe “a dead man in Grand Central Station” before transferring the call again. Twenty seconds of dead air—no ringing, no hold music—and Scott was sure the call had been dropped. They were just leaving the Harlem station at 125th Street.
“Homicide. Spezio.”
It was a woman’s voice. For just an instant, Scott wondered if “spezio” was street talk for “speak.” You never know in this country. “Detective Spezio, a man has been stabbed to death.”
“It’s Officer Spezio, but thanks for the upgrade. Name?”
“I don’t know his name. Wait and I’ll—”
“No. Your name.”
Amy had been listening, her ear next to the phone across from Scott’s. Now she looked him in the eye and silently mouthed, “No.”
Officer Spezio waited a moment before saying, “Caller ID is showing you as Brown comma Scott. Mr. Brown, I need you to confirm that this cell phone hasn’t been stolen.”
“I’m Scott Brown.”
“That’s better. Location?”
“I’m on a train.”
“No, the body. Where is it?”
Scott told her and added, helpfully, “There’s a No Trespassing sign on the door.”
“No Trespassing. I see.” Was she entering this into a computer?
“The door wasn’t locked.”
“I see.” Scott could hear typing. “And where are you now?”
“We’re on the train to—”
Amy clapped her hand over Scott’s mouth so suddenly it stung her hand. She realized she could have accomplished the same result by covering the phone instead of Scott. So she did. “Sweetie,” she whispered, “don’t say where we’re going.”
Scott gave her a questioning look as Officer Spezio came back on. “Never mind, Mr. Brown. I’m showing that this incident has already been called in. Units are responding as we speak. Hmm. Are you traveling with an Amy Greenberg?”
Amy reached over and pressed the End button, squishing Scott’s pinky finger in the process. He didn’t seem to notice, saying, “It was already called in.”
Devlin. Amy’s mind was off to the races again. “Do the police phones have that satellite system, that tracking thing, you know…”
“GPS. Global positioning system.” He said it like an objective, technological fact. “The Times had a story on it…I think they call it ‘Enhanced’ nine-one-one.” Scott didn’t see the implications.
Amy did. “Only one person knows I’m with you.”
“Oh.” Scott was catching up.
“What if he said I…we…did it? Killed Macken? He’s Scotland Yard and we’re…nobody. And they know we’re on a train.”
Scott came to life. “Damn, the phone.” Amy had only ended the call; now Scott shut the phone. They both watched the little Samsung window go dark. Amy was thinking, And he’s up ahead
of us with a knife, a gun, and a badge.
Chapter 57
They were just leaving the Rye station in Westchester on the way to Stamford. Scott had been clutching Amy’s hands in both of his the whole way. It was sweet, but it made it impossible for her to reach into her bag and pick up the manuscript so she could read it. She made a little move to take her hands away from his and thought better of it immediately. Isn’t this what she had wanted, had prayed for? A man to hold her and make her feel safe?
The little movement she’d made must have registered with Scott, because he turned slightly to her and started to speak. “Sweetheart, there’s something I have to tell you.”
Amy burrowed her hands more deeply between his. “Don’t. Not now. I just want to stay this way. With you.”
They stayed exactly that way until the train pulled in to the Stamford station. No police were waiting on the platform. Maybe they hadn’t got their act together. Maybe they were farther up the line. Amy turned to Scott. “How much money do you have?”
“On me? About forty-five dollars.”
She opened her purse. She still had three twenties she’d never changed into Irish euros. And some singles. “Let’s splurge.”
A couple of cabs were waiting to take local commuters home. Amy tried to get the first guy to drive them to New Haven.
“Sorry. I got an airport run in half an hour. No can do.”
The second cabbie, a woman, was more obliging. “Fifty each way. I’ll be driving back empty.”
“Sold.” Amy got in with her computer bag and purse while the woman popped the trunk lid and Scott dumped her American Tourister on some dirty rags and tire irons.
When they pulled away from the curb, the cabbie said, “Call me Sonja. Mind if I smoke?”
Scott talked to Sonja’s image in the rearview mirror. “As a matter of fact, we do.”
Sonja went on. “It’s about fifty minutes up Ninety-five from here. How ’bout I grab a butt around Bridgeport while you two get a coffee or something? I’m a two-pack-a-day girl.”
