The 4 Phase Man

by Richard Steinberg

  But instinct and experience make for impassable arguments and waking nightmares of the bad old days.

  Getting out of the car, he put aside the contradictions, the questions, looked around, then sighed.

  He hadn’t intended to come here, in fact had promised himself he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t all that surprised that he’d ended up in front of the old apartments built above the storefronts.

  Pulling his cap down low over his large sunglasses, he started down the street.

  As a black Lincoln pulled to a stop a half-block back, the passenger snapped pictures of him through a telephoto lens.

  “I’ll be right with you, the teenage boy behind the counter said as he finished with some paperwork.”

  The small printing shop was largely empty. An old man was copying a Lost Cat poster on the Xerox machine; an overnight courier was emptying the drop-off box. Somewhere behind the thin partition that separated the lobby from the shop, a heavy press could be heard running, and the smell of warm ink and toner filled the place.

  “What can I do for you? The boy was seventeen, maybe older, and smiled a familial smile.”

  “I’m looking for Sarah Goldman.”

  The boy looked mildly curious. “This about an order?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Filotimo.”

  The boy looked him over carefully, then hesitantly stepped behind the partition. After locking the cash register. A minute later a woman in her mid-thirties in jeans and a sweatshirt came out.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  He took off the sunglasses.

  She froze. “My God,” she whispered. “My God. Sarah quickly looked around, not frightened … careful,” then gestured toward the street. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Bradley. She followed Xenos out before the boy could form the obvious question.”

  They walked together silently for half a block, Sarah openly staring at Xenos, shaking her head but saying nothing.

  “Is it safe for you here?” she finally asked. Xenos shrugged. “There is no safe.”

  “Jesus,” she mumbled. “Jesus.”

  They turned into a small park, walking over to the swings, where some small children were playing.

  “If this creates a problem for you,” Xenos said after another awkward moment, “I’ll leave.”

  “No!” Sarah almost yelled in a panic.

  Xenos smiled, looked around, took off his shades and cap, and held his arms wide. A moment later he held her tight against him in a hug he hoped would never end.

  “Twelve years is too goddamned long, big brother.” Sarah weeped as she kissed him. “Where you been, huh?”

  Xenos hesitated, then indicated a nearby bench. “Don’t ask questions like that.” He smiled bitterly.

  “Dope,” she said with an equally large grin.

  “Princess,” he shot back, trying to ape her human emotion and warmth.

  She stroked his face. “I have so much I want to ask, need to say.”

  “Later.”

  She looked doubtful. “Will there be a later?” There was the slightest hint of accusation in her tone.

  “I’ll try.”

  For the next ten minutes Sarah talked of her life, her son, her ex-husband, all the meaningless things that she could think to avoid the thing that was always there on the rare moments that they saw each other.

  Xenos feigned interest, responded with generalities about the Greek islands, France, with no specifics intended or asked for.

  Finally, painfully, the inevitable lay before them.

  “Will he see me?”

  “He hasn’t changed,” she said glumly. “And I’d bet my last dime—if I had a dime to bet—that you haven’t either.”

  Xenos concentrated on the street. “You might be surprised.” His look turned solemn. “I really need him to see me.”

  “Jerry”—she took his callused hand in hers—“it’s sixteen years.”

  The big man moved his mouth, nothing came out. Then a deep breath. “Seventeen. I just need him to see me, to talk to me. His eyes followed a cable TV truck as it slowly moved past.”

  “Why now?”

  And his nightmare demanded attention. “I, well, he’s getting old. I can’t let him go before I …”

  Sarah hugged him. “I’ll try, Jerry. That’s all I can do, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  They started walking back to the shop.

  “So where can I reach you?”

  “I’ll call you when I can.”

  Sarah laughed bitterly. “I know what that means.”

  He thought for a moment. Analysis: she needs something, some human reaction to reassure her that everything’s going to be all right. A simple, distinct gesture of reassurance.

  “Always remember,” the instructor had droned on, “that simple eye contact is one of the most powerful tools in the perfect lie. Combined with intimate, nonsexual physical contact, it defeats all doubts and suspicions. Assuming your tone is reflective of the act.”

  He looked at the one student in the room. “Goldman! Demonstrate!”

  Jerry got up, walked to the front of the room, then turned to the instructor. “Uh, what do you want me to…”

  “Lie to me.”

  “Big lie,” Herb called out from the back of the otherwise empty classroom, where he and five other instructors were watching.

  The young man turned to the instructor, nodded, then smiled. A thing that exploded across his face and out of his eyes.

  “God, I love these classes!” He reached up, stroked the instructor’s cheek as his voice dropped low and sincere. “Seriously, I love them.”

  Herb applauded. “Good. Be a little less forceful, though, and don’t repeat yourself, son.” He winced at the thought. “Repetition reeks of falsity.”

  The boy nodded, then turned back to his instructor.

  Xenos took Sarah’s chin in his hand, lifted her tearing eyes to look into his, then softly stroked her cheek. “It means, I’ll call.”

  Another kiss, a rib-rattling hug, and he was gone.

  Sarah Goldman watched her older brother, the idol of her early years, walk down the street, wave, then get into his car. Wondering all the time if this time, for the first time, he would stay long enough to help repair their shattered family. Silently crying, she watched him start the car and drive off.

  Not noticing the black Lincoln pull out behind him.

  “Where’d he go? Where’d he go?”

  “I don’t see him. But relax. In this traffic he’s probably as stuck as we are.”

  The two men in the black Lincoln stared through their windshields at the ocean of yellow cabs and town cars that surrounded them. They’d followed Xenos back into Manhattan, through Columbus Circle into midtown. But now, in the late afternoon traffic, they were separated from their target.

  “I’m getting out.” The passenger opened his door and hurried up Fifty-third Street, scanning the traffic as he went. Suddenly he saw Xenos’s car double-parked across the street. He dodged the barely moving traffic, crossing over to examine the empty car.

  “Shit!” He looked all around, then started as he recognized Indigo One casually walking down an alley. He pulled out his cell phone and hurried behind.

  “Seven-one.”

  “He’s headed across to Fifty-fourth.”

  “Stay on him. I’ll swing around and pick you up when I can. Report back every five minutes.”

  “Yeah, yeah!” He shut the phone and continued on. But when he looked up again, Xenos had disappeared. “Shit!”

  The man ran down the alley, desperate to get to the Fifty-fourth Street side in time to see where his target had gone. Ten feet from the alley’s exit, he was suddenly pulled from his feet and slammed into the side of a Dumpster.

  Then an iron hand grabbed him by the neck and smashed his face into a brick wall.

  “I don’t know you, friend,” Xenos said coldly as he shoved
the broken, bleeding man behind the Dumpster. “But I’m going to.”

  Twenty minutes later, as the driver slowly cruised Fifty-fourth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues for the third time, cursing the traffic, his partner, and anything else he could think of, he dialed a number on his cell phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Seven-one,” I think we have a problem.

  “You do,” Xenos said to himself in the next car back as he listened on earphones attached to a small parabolic microphone mounted on the dashboard. “You most definitely do.”

  It took the better part of an hour for the driver of seven-one to make his way across Manhattan and into Queens. He finally pulled into a key-entry subterranean garage in a sixteen-story office building. Xenos parked across the street at a hamburger stand, bought a burger, and sat, watching the building.

  It seemed ordinary enough. Doorman, concierge desk just inside the lobby. Gold-tinted, shaded windows. Usual aerials on top. But there was little traffic in and out of the building, no cars or cabs pulled up, and uniformed, armed security guards patrolled the exterior, seemingly on a fifteen-to-twenty-minute orbit around the building’s perimeter.

  Ten minutes after they’d arrived, the car and driver he’d followed from Fifty-fourth Street pulled out of the garage. But Xenos never moved. The man in the alley—most likely now in the emergency room of a hospital—had merely been a surveillance agent. Who for and why, he didn’t know, would definitely have told if he had.

  So Xenos had followed the man’s partner, assuming something as important as an operative’s disappearance would have to be reported in person. Xenos was now interested in the building, not the other man.

  “Big goddamned haystack,” he mumbled as he plugged a cell phone into a laptop. He quickly brought up the program he needed, then prepared to speed-dial Paolo’s apartment. If his electronic hunter had worked, the laptop would dial in, retrieve the data, then activate an electronic bullet that would fry the circuits of whoever was listening.

  If it didn’t work, well, he’d probably change hotels anyway.

  He pressed the enter button on the phone and laptop simultaneously, then watched the display.

  Connecting

  Connected

  Retrieving data

  Shot fired

  Connection terminated

  Working…

  Tracer tone activated at 1437:39

  Tracer killed at 1437:58

  Xenos smiled spasmodically. Somewhere, someone was going to be real pissed. If they didn’t need a doctor for the blood coming out of their ears when his cybernetic sniper sent a 500 dB shrill squeal through the phone line before destroying the circuitry of any listening device on the line, then they sure as Hell would need a new tracer.

  He waited patiently while the slow laptop processed the information it had retrieved from the device in Paolo’s apartment.

  40°45.57′ N

  73°49.90′ W

  135′

  It took less than a minute for the tracking program to plot the coordinates and display it on a map.

  13520 39th Ave

  Flushing, Queens, NY

  The building Xenos was watching.

  Somewhere on the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth floor of the building was the location of the tracing device.

  Ten minutes later, after parking his car behind a deserted car wash, he casually crossed the street.

  Valerie Alvarez also watched the building. Sitting in her car a half-block down, she stared up at the eleventh floor and sweated. She knew what was going to happen, and knew there was nothing she could do about it.

  Now.

  But if there was a God—and she was long past blind acceptance of that fact—there would come a time, a place, a moment when she could release the pent-up anger, frustrations, and animal fury that she held so tightly checked.

  And then… God (if he existed) help them! Because there were two things Valerie knew well. One was people.

  And the other… getting even!

  A sigh then a check of her watch. Five minutes to three. Time to go.

  She dropped the car in gear and drove to the building’s garage intercom. She pressed the numbers and waited.

  “Yes?”

  “Hyacinth, she said in as strong a voice as she could muster. The next few hours would not be pleasant. They would be filled with psychic pain, humiliation, and bone-crushing fear. But she’d be damned if she’d let them know it.”

  “Pull up by the elevators, level six. You’ll be met.”

  The gate rolled up and she drove in.

  Four men were standing by the elevator banks on the bottom level of the garage. Three she’d never seen before; but then they seemed to have almost unlimited personnel. The other she knew too well.

  She got out of her car, leaving the door open and the engine running, as she knew would be expected.

  “Congresswoman,” the fourth man said politely.

  “Smith.”

  They stood there for five minutes while two of the men covered every inch of her car. They searched, probed, used monitors of some kind, as they examined it all. Finally they were done. One of the men got in and drove away, while the other returned to them.

  Smith walked to the end elevator, punched in a code on a keypad, then motioned her in as the doors opened. The four of them rode up one and a half flights, then the elevator was stopped.

  “I believe you know the procedure, Ms. Alvarez.”

  She took a deep breath, stared daggers at Smith, then spread her legs shoulder width apart and held her arms out to her sides. While two of the men began to strip her—examining her clothes closely as they went—she never blinked or reacted in any way, except by maintaining the icy stare.

  “Lovely, as always,” Smith said politely as he was handed her bra.

  “Go to Hell.”

  Smith smiled. “Perhaps, one day. Perhaps after you take me to Heaven?”

  She simply stared on.

  Valerie ignored the leers, the lingering gropes, the mumbled comments as the men finished their thorough search of her. Then she dressed quickly as the elevator restarted.

  “Have you been working out, Congresswoman?” Smith smiled.

  “Felt like it,” one of the men whispered to another.

  Valerie turned toward him. “Get a life or an inflatable girlfriend, asshole,” she snapped out. Then she turned back to Smith. “You’ve had your show. Now give me mine!”

  “Making demands?”

  She took a step toward Smith. “I don’t say another word—to anyone—until I see it, she said in low tones.”

  If the notion hadn’t been so absurd, Smith thought Valerie might be ready to tear out his throat with her teeth. He slowly reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a photograph.

  “You’ll recognize today’s Times headline, he said as she took it from him.”

  She studied the picture, her expression softening as she looked at the small frightened faces, at the huge bruise on the boy, at the all-too-recognizable pain in the girl’s eyes.

  “Bastards,” she mumbled.

  The rest of the ride was accomplished in silence.

  They trooped out on the eleventh floor and moved down the corridor to their left, Valerie never looking up from her photo.

  None of them noticing a thin, blue-sheathed fiber-optic cable slide up and out of the elevator’s ceiling.

  Crouching on top of the one private elevator in the building, Xenos ignored the whirring of gears and cables rushing by. He sat there calmly, riding up and down several times without realizing it. His body might be trapped by the confines of the elevator shaft, but his mind was elsewhere, wandering through the more-complex-by-the-moment problem. Reviewing what had happened. Analyzing, interpreting.

  Planning.

  The doorman and concierge might have been easy marks, might have been people of high integrity. He’d never bothered to find out. But a security guard—now lying handcuffed and unconscious
in some landscaping by the side of the building—had been another issue.

  The man was more than run-of-the-mill minimum-waged security. He’d been sharp, obviously trained, carrying a backup piece on his ankle and cell phone in place of a radio. But men like that were anachronistic to Xenos; dinosaurs trained to think and react with one-dimensional thinking.

  And Xenos lived in a three-dimensional world.

  The man’s uniform had been a close enough fit, and his keys easily interpreted. Xenos had let himself in through a garage fire door, then made his way to the lobby by a back hall. Pulling his hat low against the closed-circuit cameras that seemed to be everywhere, he casually waited for the first up elevator, then pressed the buttons for floors nine through fourteen. Noticing that eleven wasn’t listed on this elevator’s control panel.

  He left the elevator between the seventh and eight floors.

  Jumping from elevator to elevator while in motion required not only timing but luck. Like moving through a maze, he waited to leap lightly from his up to the next down. To the next up. Finally landing crouched and ready for detection and flight on the secured elevator.

  From on top he could easily see the camera installation that monitored the inside of the car, so he never considered getting in. Just rode up and down for fifteen minutes, waiting.

  He knew that the guard would be missed at some point—with no idea exactly when that would be. But the road led from the apartment to the tracer; from the tracer to the men, from the men to here.

  Next stop, the eleventh floor.

  He’d witnessed the humiliating search of the congress-woman. Had heard the words, noted the tensions. But he’d noted much besides.

  The men—though vulgar and coarse—had restrained themselves to a large extent.

  The man in charge—Xenos thought “Smith” as an alias showed a lack of imagination and he stored that fact away—was far from the casual air he exuded. He was a man under careful control, born from someone else’s orders. A greeter and deliveryman—not a boss.