by Lee Child
Which I was, basically. I had no real clue as to what I was doing. Finding any concealed hideout is difficult. Finding one in a densely-populated big city is close to impossible. I was just quartering random blocks, following a geographic hunch that could have been completely wrong to start with, trying to find reasons to narrow it further. The Four Seasons Hotel. Not adjacent, but comfortably proximate. Which meant what? A two-minute drive? A five-minute walk? In which direction? Not south, I thought. Not across 57th Street, which is a major cross-town thoroughfare. Two-way, six lanes. Always busy. In the micro-geography of Manhattan, 57th Street was like the Mississippi River. An obstacle. A boundary. Much more inviting to slip away to the north, to the quieter, darker blocks beyond.
I watched the traffic and thought: not a two-minute drive. Driving implied a lack of control, a lack of flexibility, and delays, and one-way streets and avenues, and parking difficulties, and potentially memorable vehicles waiting in loading zones, and license plates that could be traced and checked.
Walking was better than driving, in the city, whoever you were.
I took 58th Street, and walked to the hotel’s back entrance. It was just as splendid as the front entrance. There was brass and stone and there were flags flying and porters in uniform and doormen in top hats. There was a long line of limousines waiting at the curb. Lincolns, Mercedes, Maybachs, Rolls-Royces. Well over a million dollars’ worth of automotive product, all crammed into about eighty feet. There was a loading dock, with a gray roll-up door, closed.
I stood next to a bell boy, with my back to the hotel door. Where would I go? Across the street was nothing but a solid line of high buildings. Mostly apartment houses, with the ground floors leased to prestige clients. Directly opposite was an art gallery. I squeezed between two chrome bumpers and crossed the street and glanced at some of the paintings in the window. Then I turned and looked back from the far sidewalk.
To the left of the hotel, on the side nearer Park Avenue, there was nothing very interesting.
Then I looked to the right, along the block as it approached Madison, and I got a new idea.
The hotel itself was recent construction on an insane budget. Neighboring buildings were all quiet and prosperous and solid, some of them old, some of them new. But at the western end of the block there were three old piles in a row. Narrow, single-front, five-story brick, weathered, peeling, spalling, stained, somewhat decrepit. Dirty windows, sagging lintels, flat roofs, weeds along the cornice, old iron fire escapes zigzagging down the top four floors. The three buildings looked like three rotten teeth in a bright smile. One had an old out-of-business restaurant for a ground-floor tenant. One had a hardware store. The third had an enterprise abandoned so long ago I couldn’t tell what it had been. Each had a narrow door set unobtrusively alongside its commercial operation. Two of the doors had multiple bell pushes, signifying apartments. The door next to the old restaurant had a single bell push, signifying a sole occupier for the upper four floors.
Lila Hoth was not a Ukrainian billionaire from London. That had been a lie. So whoever she really was, she had a budget. A generous budget, certainly, to allow for suites in the Four Seasons as and when necessary. But presumably not an infinite budget. And townhouses in Manhattan run to twenty or more million dollars to buy, minimum. And multiple tens of thousands of dollars a month to rent.
Privacy could be achieved much more cheaply in tumbledown mixed-use buildings like the three I was looking at. And maybe there would be other advantages, too. No doormen nearby, fewer prying eyes. Plus maybe a presumption that an operation like a restaurant or a hardware store would get deliveries at all hours of the night and day. Maybe all kinds of random comings and goings could happen without attracting much notice at all.
I moved down the street and stood on the curb opposite the three old piles and stared up at them. People pushed past me in a continuous stream on the sidewalk. I stepped into the gutter, to get out of the way. There were two cops on the far corner of Madison and 57th. Fifty yards away, on a diagonal. They were not looking my way. I looked back at the buildings and reviewed my assumptions in my head. The 6 train at 59th and Lexington was close by. The Four Seasons was close by. Third Avenue and 56th Street was not close by. That’s not close to me. Anonymity was guaranteed. Cost was limited. Five for five. Perfect. So I figured maybe I was looking for a place just like one of the three right in front of me, located somewhere within a fan-shaped five-minute radius east or west of the hotel’s back door. Not north, or Susan Mark would have parked in midtown and aimed to get out of the subway at 68th Street. Not south, because of 57th Street’s psychological barrier. Not somewhere else entirely, because they had used the Four Seasons as a front. Somewhere else entirely, they would have used a different hotel. New York City does not lack for impressive establishments.
Impeccable logic. Maybe too impeccable. Confining, certainly. Because if I stuck with the assumption that Susan Mark would have gotten out at 59th Street and aimed to approach from the north, and that 57th Street was a conceptual barrier to the south, then 58th Street was the whole ballgame, right there. And cross-town blocks in Manhattan take about five minutes to walk. Therefore a five-minute radius left or right out of the hotel’s back door would end on either the exact block where I was currently loitering, or the next one to the east, between Park and Lex. And tumbledown mixed-use properties are rare on blocks like those. Big money chased them away long ago. It was entirely possible I was looking at the only three left standing in the whole of the zip code.
Therefore it was entirely possible I was looking at Lila Hoth’s hideout.
Entirely possible, but most unlikely. I believe in luck as much as the next guy, but I’m not insane.
But I believe in logic too, probably more so than the next guy, and logic had led me to the spot. I went over it all again, and ended up believing myself.
Because of one extra factor.
Which was that the same logic led someone else there, too.
Springfield stepped down into the gutter next to me and said, “You think?”
Chapter 60
Springfield was wearing the same suit I had seen him in before. Gray summer-weight wool, with a silky weave and a slight sheen. It was creased and crumpled, like he slept in it. Which maybe he did.
He said, “You think this is the place?”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy checking all around me. I looked at hundreds of people and dozens of cars. But I saw nothing to worry about. Springfield was alone.
I turned back.
Springfield asked the question again. “You think this is it?”
I asked, “Where’s Sansom?”
“He stayed home.”
“Why?”
“Because this kind of thing is difficult, and I’m better than he is.”
I nodded. It was an article of faith with NCOs that they were better than their officers. And they were usually right. Certainly I had been happy with mine. They had done plenty of good work for me.
I asked, “So what’s the deal?”
“What deal?”
“Between you and me.”
“We don’t have a deal,” he said. “Yet.”
“Are we going to have a deal?”
“We should talk, maybe.”
“Where?”
“Your call,” he said. Which was a good sign. It meant that if there was going to be a trap or an ambush in my immediate future, it was going to be improvised, and therefore not optimally efficient. Maybe even to the point of being survivable.
I asked him, “How well do you know the city?”
“I get by.”
“Make two lefts and go to 57 East 57th. I’ll be ten minutes behind you. I’ll meet you inside.”
“What kind of a place is that?”
“We can get coffee there.”
“OK,” he said. He took one more look at the building with the old restaurant at its base and then he crossed the street diagonally through the traffic
and turned left onto Madison Avenue. I went the other way, just as far as the Four Seasons’s back door. The Four Seasons’s back door was right there on 58th Street. It was a block-through building. Which meant its front door was on 57th Street. At 57 East 57th, to be precise. I would be inside about four minutes ahead of Springfield. I would know if he had brought a crew. I would see whether anyone came in before him, or with him, or after him. I walked through to the lobby from the rear and took off my hat and my glasses and stood in a quiet corner and waited.
Springfield came in alone, right on time, which was four minutes later. No time for hurried deployment out on the street. No time for conversation. Probably no time even for a cell phone call. Most people slow their walk a little, dialing and talking.
There was a guy in formal morning dress near the door. A black tail coat, and a silver tie. Not a concierge, not a bell captain. Some kind of a greeter, although his title was probably much grander. He started toward Springfield and Springfield glanced at him once and the guy ducked away like he had been slapped. Springfield had that kind of a face.
He paused a moment and got his bearings and headed for the tea room, where I had once met the Hoths. I stayed in my corner and watched the street door. There was no backup. No plain sedans stopped outside. I gave it ten minutes, and then added two more, just in case. Nothing happened. Just the regular ebb and flow of a high-end city hotel. Rich people came, rich people went. Poor people scurried around and did things for them.
I walked into the tea room and found Springfield in the same chair that Lila Hoth had used. The same dignified old waiter was on duty. He came over. Springfield asked for mineral water. I asked for coffee. The waiter nodded imperceptibly and went away again.
Springfield said, “You met the Hoths here, twice.”
I said, “Once at this exact table.”
“Which is technically a problem. Associating with them in any way at all could be classed as a felony.”
“Because?”
“Because of the Patriot Act.”
“Who are the Hoths, exactly?”
“And running across the subway tracks was also a felony. You could get up to five years in the state pen for that, technically. So they tell me.”
“I also shot four federal agents with darts.”
“No one cares about them.”
“Who are the Hoths?”
“I can’t volunteer information.”
“So why are we here?”
“You help us, we’ll help you.”
“How can you help me?”
“We can make all your felonies disappear.”
“And how can I help you?”
“You can help us find what we lost.”
“The memory stick?”
Springfield nodded. The waiter came back with his tray. Mineral water, and coffee. He arranged things carefully on the table and backed away.
I said, “I don’t know where the memory stick is.”
“I’m sure you don’t. But you got as close to Susan Mark as anyone. And she left the Pentagon with it, and it isn’t in her house or her car or anywhere else she ever went. So we’re hoping you saw something. Maybe it didn’t mean anything to you, but it might to us.”
“I saw her shoot herself. That was about all.”
“There must have been more.”
“You had your chief of staff on the train. What did he see?”
“Nothing.”
“What was on the memory stick?”
“I can’t volunteer information.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“Why do you need to know?”
I said, “I like to know at least the basic shape of the trouble I’m about to get myself into.”
“Then you should ask yourself a question.”
“What question?”
“The one you haven’t asked yet, and the one you should have, right at the start. The key question, you dumbass.”
“What is this? A contest? NCOs against officers?”
“That battle was over long ago.”
So I spooled backward to the beginning, looking for the question I had never asked. The beginning was the 6 train, and passenger number four, on the right side of the car, alone on her eight-person bench, white, in her forties, plain, black hair, black clothes, black bag. Susan Mark, citizen, ex-wife, mother, sister, adoptee, resident of Annandale, Virginia.
Susan Mark, civilian worker at the Pentagon.
I asked, “What exactly was her job?”
Chapter 61
Springfield took a long drink of water and then smiled briefly and said, “Slow, but you got there in the end.”
“So what was her job?”
“She was a systems administrator with responsibility for a certain amount of information technology.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means she knew a bunch of master passwords for the computers.”
“Which computers?”
“Not the important ones. She couldn’t launch missiles or anything. But obviously she was authorized for HRC records. And some of the archives.”
“But not the Delta archives, right? They’re in North Carolina. At Fort Bragg. Not the Pentagon.”
“Computers are networked. Everything is everywhere and nowhere now.”
“And she had access?”
“Human error.”
“What?”
“There was a measure of human error.”
“A measure?”
“There are a lot of systems administrators. They share common problems. They help each other. They have their own chat room, and their own message board. Apparently there was a defective line of code which made individual passwords less opaque than they should have been. So there was some leakage. We think they knew all about it, actually, but they liked it that way. One person could get in and help another person with minimum fuss. Even if the code had been correct, they would probably have deleted it.”
I remembered Jacob Mark saying, She was good with computers.
I said, “So she had access to Delta’s archives?”
Springfield just nodded.
I said, “But you and Sansom quit five years before I did. Nothing was computerized back then. Certainly not the archives.”
“Times change,” Springfield said. “The U.S. Army as we know it is about ninety years old. We’ve got ninety years’ worth of crap all built up. Rusty old weapons that somebody’s grandfather brought back as souvenirs, captured flags and uniforms all moldering away, you name it. Plus literally thousands and thousands of tons of paper. Maybe millions of tons. It’s a practical problem. Fire risk, mice, real estate.”
“So?”
“So they’ve been cleaning house for the last ten years. The artifacts are either sent to museums or trashed, and the documents are scanned and preserved on computers.”
I nodded. “And Susan Mark got in and copied one.”
“More than copied one,” Springfield said. “She extracted one. Transferred it to an external drive, and then deleted the original.”
“The external drive being the memory stick?”
Springfield nodded. “And we don’t know where it is.”
“Why her?”
“Because she fit the bill. The relevant part of the archive was traced through the medal award. HRC people keep the medal records. Like you said. She was the systems administrator. And she was vulnerable through her son.”
“Why did she delete the original?”
“I don’t know.”
“It must have increased the risk.”
“Significantly.”
“What was the document?”
“I can’t volunteer information.”
“When was it dug out of the box room and scanned?”
“A little over three months ago. It’s a slow process. Ten years into the program and they’re only up to the early 1980s.”
“Who does the work?”
“There
’s a specialist staff.”
“With a leak. The Hoths were over here more or less immediately.”
“Evidently.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“Steps are being taken.”
“What was the document?”
“I can’t volunteer information.”
“But it was a big file.”
“Big enough.”
“And the Hoths want it.”
“I think that’s clear.”
“Why do they want it?”
“I can’t volunteer information.”
“You say that a lot.”
“I mean it a lot.”
“Who are the Hoths?”
He just smiled and made a circular once again gesture with his hand. I can’t volunteer information. A great NCO’s answer. Four words, the third of which was perhaps the most significant.
I said, “You could ask me questions. I could volunteer guesses. You could comment on them.”
He said, “Who do you think the Hoths are?”
“I think they’re native Afghans.”
He said, “Go on.”
“That’s not much of a comment.”
“Go on.”
“Probably Taliban or Al Qaeda sympathizers, or operatives, or flunkies.”
No reaction.
“Al Qaeda,” I said. “The Taliban mostly stay home.”
“Go on.”
“Operatives,” I said.