Which reduced the impact a little.
Which left them both on their feet.
Which gave me a little more work to do.
I spun back instantly and clubbed the short guy with an enormous roundhouse right to the ear. No style. No finesse. Just a big ugly punch. His ear flattened against his head and took some of the force away, but plenty more went straight on through the crushed gristle into his skull. His neck snapped sideways and he hit his other ear with his own far shoulder. By that point I was squelching back the other way in my lousy footwear and driving my elbow deep into Leonid’s gut. Same place I had hit him in Penn Station, but ten times harder. I almost popped his spine out of his back. I used the bounce to jump in the other direction, to the short guy again. He was hunching away and ready for a standing eight count. I put a low right in his kidney. That straightened him up and spun him around toward me. I bent my knees and drove forward and butted him between the eyes. Explosive. Whatever bones my elbow hadn’t broken gave way and he went down like a sack. Leonid tapped me on the shoulder with his knuckleduster. He thought it was a punch, but in his depleted state a tap was all he could manage. I took my time and wound up and aimed carefully and dropped him with an uppercut to the jaw. His jaw was already broken from my elbow. Now it got broken a little more. Bone and flesh spattered out in a lazy red arc and showed up quite clearly in the streetlights. Teeth, I figured, and maybe part of his tongue.
I was a little shaken. As always. Excess adrenaline was burning me up. The adrenal gland is a slow son of a bitch. Then it overcom-pensates. Too much, too late. I took ten seconds to get my breath. Ten more to calm down. Then I hauled both guys across the sidewalk and into a sitting position against the wall where I had been standing. Their hooded sweatshirts stretched a yard long as I was hauling on them. Cheap clothes. Disposable, in case they had gotten soaked with my blood. I got the two guys positioned so they wouldn’t fall over and choke and then I dislocated their right elbows. They were both right-handed, and the odds were that I would be seeing them again. In which case I wanted them out of action. No permanent damage. Three weeks in a light cast would fix them up, good as new.
They had cell phones in their pockets. I took both of them. Both had my picture. Both call registers were blank. There was nothing else. No money. No keys. No material evidence. No clue as to where they had come from. No likelihood that they would be in a position to tell me anytime soon, either. I had hit them too hard. They were out for the count. And even when they woke up there was no guarantee they would remember anything anyway. Maybe not even their names. Concussion has unpredictable effects. Paramedics aren’t kidding around when they ask concussion victims what day it is and who the president is.
No regrets on my part. Better to err on the side of safety. Guys in fights who think ahead to the aftermath usually don’t get that far. They become the aftermath. So no regrets. But no net gain, either. Which was frustrating. Not even the brass knuckles fit my hand. I tried both sets on, and they were way too small. I dropped them down a storm drain twenty feet away.
Their car was still idling at the curb. It had New York plates. No navigation system. Therefore no digital memory with a base location. I found a rental agreement in the door pocket made out to a name I had never heard and a London address that I assumed was fake. In the glove box I found instruction manuals for the car and a small spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. The notebook had nothing written in it. I took the pen and walked back to the two guys and held Leonid’s head steady with my left palm clamped down hard. Then I wrote on his forehead with the ballpoint, digging deep in his skin and tracing big letters over and over again for clarity.
I wrote: Lila, call me.
Then I stole their car and drove away.
Chapter 54
I drove south on Second Avenue and took 50th Street all the way east to the end and dumped the car on a hydrant half a block from the FDR Drive. I hoped the guys from the 17th Precinct would find it and get suspicious and run some tests. Clothes are disposable. Cars, not so much. If Lila’s people had used that Impala to drive away from the hammer attack, then there would be some trace evidence inside. I couldn’t see any with the naked eye, but CSI units don’t rely on human vision alone.
I wiped the wheel and the shifter and the door handles with the tail of my shirt. Then I dropped the keys down a grate and walked back to Second and stood in a shadow and looked for a cab. There was a decent river of traffic flowing downtown and each car was lit up by the headlights behind it. I could see how many people were inside each vehicle. I was mindful of Theresa Lee’s information: fake taxis, circling uptown on Tenth, down on Second, one guy in the front, two in the back. I waited for a cab that was definitively empty apart from its driver and I stepped out and flagged it down. The driver was a Sikh from India with a turban and a full beard and very little English. Not a cop. He took me south to Union Square. I got out there and sat on a bench in the dark and watched the rats. Union Square is the best place in the city to see them. By day the Parks Department dumps blood-and-bone fertilizer on the flower beds. By night the rats come out and feast on it.
At four o’clock I fell asleep.
At five o’clock one of the captured phones vibrated in my pocket.
I woke up and spent a second checking left and right and behind, and then I fumbled the phone out of my pants. It wasn’t ringing. Just buzzing away to itself. Silent mode. The small monochrome window on the front said: Restricted Call. I opened it up and the big color screen on the inside said the same thing. I put the phone to my ear and said, “Hello.” A new word, recently invented. Lila Hoth answered me. Her voice, her accent, her diction. She said, “So, you decided to declare war. Clearly there are no rules of engagement for you.”
I said, “Who are you exactly?”
“You’ll find out.”
“I need to know now.”
“I’m your worst nightmare. As of about two hours ago. And you still have something that belongs to me.”
“So come and get it. Better still, send some more of your guys. Give me some more light exercise.”
“You got lucky tonight, that’s all.”
I said, “I’m always lucky.”
She asked, “Where are you?”
“Right outside your house.”
There was a pause. “No, you’re not.”
“Correct,” I said. “But you just confirmed that you’re living in a house. And that right now you’re at a window. Thank you for that information.”
“Where are you really?”
“Federal Plaza,” I said. “With the FBI.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your call.”
“Tell me where you are.”
“Close to you,” I said. “Third Avenue and 56th Street.”
She started to reply, and then she stopped herself immediately. She got no further than an inchoate little th sound. A voiced dental fricative. The start of a sentence that was going to be impatient and querulous and a little smug. Like, That’s not close to me.
She wasn’t anywhere near Third and 56th.
“Last chance,” she said. “I want my property.” Her voice softened. “We can make arrangements, if you like. Just leave it somewhere safe, and tell me where. I’ll have it picked up. We don’t need to meet. You could even get paid.”
“I’m not looking for work.”
“Are you looking to stay alive?”
“I’m not afraid of you, Lila.”
“That’s what Peter Molina said.”
“Where is he?”
“Right here with us.”
“Alive?”
“Come over and find out.”
“He left a message with his coach.”
“Or maybe I played a tape he made before he died. Maybe he told me his coach never answers the phone at dinnertime. Maybe he told me a lot of things. Maybe I forced him to.”
I asked, “Where are you, Lila?”
“I can’t
tell you that,” she said. “But I could have you picked up.”
A hundred feet away I saw a police car cruising 14th Street. Moving slow. Pink flashes at the window as the driver moved his head right and left.
I asked, “How long have you known Peter Molina?”
“Since I picked him up in the bar.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Come over and find out.”
I said, “You’re on borrowed time, Lila. You killed four Americans in New York. No one is going to ignore that.”
“I killed nobody.”
“Your people did.”
“People that have already left the country. We’re fireproof.”
“We?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“If your people acted on your orders, then you’re not fireproof. That’s a conspiracy.”
“This is a nation of laws and trials. There’s no evidence.”
“Car?”
“No longer exists.”
“You’ll never be fireproof from me. I’ll find you.”
“I hope you do.”
A hundred feet away the police car slowed to a crawl.
I said, “Come out and meet with me, Lila. Or go home. One or the other. But either way you’re beaten here.”
She said, “We’re never beaten.”
“Who is we?”
But there was no answer. The phone went dead. Nothing there, except the dumb silence of an empty line.
A hundred feet away the police car stopped.
I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket.
Two cops climbed out of the car and headed into the square.
I stayed where I was. Too suspicious to get up and run. Better to sit tight. I wasn’t alone in the park. There were maybe forty people in there with me. Some of them seemed to be a permanent population. Others were temporary strays. New York is a big city. Five boroughs. Journeys home are long. Often easier to rest along the way.
The cops shone a flashlight beam in a sleeping guy’s face.
They moved on. Lit up the next guy.
And the next.
Not good.
Not good at all.
But I was not the only person to reach that conclusion. Here and there around the square I saw shapes rising up from benches and shuffling away in different directions. Maybe people with outstanding warrants, dealers with stuff in their backpacks, surly loners who didn’t want contact, helpless paranoids wary of the system.
Two cops, an acre of ground, maybe thirty people still on benches, maybe ten newly mobile.
I watched.
The cops kept on coming. Their flashlight beams jerked through the nighttime haze. Long shadows were thrown. They checked a third guy, and then a fourth. Then a fifth. More people stood up. Some left altogether, and others simply moved from bench to bench. The square was full of shapes, some inert, some moving. Everything was in slow motion. A tired, lazy dance.
I watched.
New indecision in the cops’ body language. Like herding cats. They approached the people still on benches. They turned away and jerked their beams on the people moving out. They kept on walking, bending, turning. No pattern. Just random movement. They kept on coming. They got within ten yards of me.
Then they quit.
They played their flashlight beams one last time around a token circle and then they headed back to their car. I watched it drive away. I stayed on my bench and breathed out and started thinking about the GPS chips in the captured cell phones in my pockets. Part of me said it was impossible that Lila Hoth would have access to tracking satellites. But another part of me focused on her saying, We’re never beaten. And we is a big word. Only two letters, but a large implication. Maybe the bad guys from the Eastern bloc had grabbed more than oil and gas leases. Maybe they had taken over other kinds of infrastructure. The old Soviet intelligence machine had to have gone somewhere. I thought about laptop computers and broadband connections and all kinds of technology I didn’t fully understand.
I kept the phones in my pockets, but I got up off the bench and headed for the subway.
Which was a bad mistake to make.
Chapter 55
The Union Square subway station is a major hub. It has an entrance hall as big as an underground plaza. Multiple entrances, multiple exits, multiple lines, multiple tracks. Stairs, booths, long rows of turnstiles. Plus long banks of machines for refreshing Metrocards, or buying new ones. I used cash and bought a new card. I fed two twenty-dollar bills edge-first into the slot and was rewarded with twenty rides plus three free as a bonus. I collected my card and turned around and moved away. It was close to six o’clock in the morning. The station was filling up with people. The work day was starting. I passed a newsstand. It had a thousand different magazines. And squat bales of fresh tabloids ready for sale. Thick papers, piled high. Two separate titles. Both headlines were huge. One had three words, big letters, plenty of powdery black ink: FEDS SEEK TRIO. The other had three words too: FEDS HUNT TRIO. Practically a consensus. On balance I preferred seek to hunt. More passive, less committed. Almost benign. I figured anyone would prefer to be sought than hunted.
I turned away.
And saw two cops watching me carefully.
Two mistakes in one. First theirs, which was then compounded by mine. Their mistake was conventional. The federal agents at 22nd and Broadway had put the word out that I had escaped by subway. Whereupon law enforcement generally had assumed that I would escape by subway again. Because given the choice, law enforcement always fights the last battle one more time.
My mistake was to walk straight into their lazy trap.
Because there were booths, there were supervisors. Because there were supervisors, there were no high entry-exit turnstiles. Just regular thigh-high bars. I swiped my new card and pushed on through. The plaza changed shape to a long wide walkway. Arrows pointed left and right and up and down, for different lines and different directions. I passed by a guy playing a violin. He had positioned himself where the echoes would help him. He was pretty good. His instrument had a solid, gutty tone. He was playing a mournful old piece I recognized from a movie about the Vietnam War. Perhaps not an inspired choice for early commuters. His violin case was open at his feet and not very full of contributions. I turned casually as if I was checking him out and saw the two cops step over the turnstile behind me.
I turned a random corner and followed a narrower passageway and found myself on an uptown platform. It was crowded with people. And it was part of a symmetrical pair. Ahead of me was the platform edge, and then the line, and then a row of iron pillars holding up the street above, and then the downtown line, and then the downtown platform. Two sets of everything, including two sets of commuters. Tired people, facing each other numbly, waiting to head out in opposite directions.
The live rails were back to back either side of the central iron pillars. They were shrouded, like live rails are in stations. The shrouds were three-sided box sections, open on the sides that faced the trains.
Behind me and far to my left, the cops pushed their way onto the platform. I checked the other way. To my right. Two more cops pushed into the crowd. They were wide and bulky with equipment. They moved people gently out of their way, palms against shoulders, short backhand moves, rhythmic, like swimming.
I moved to the middle of the platform. I edged forward until my feet were on the yellow warning stripe. I moved laterally until I had a pillar directly behind me. I looked left. Looked right. No trains were coming.
The cops kept moving. Behind them four more showed up. Two on one side of me, two on the other, threading through the crowd slowly and surely.
I craned forward.
No headlights in the tunnels.
The crowd moved and bunched beside me, pushed on by new arrivals, disturbed by the ripples of the cops’ relentless progress, pulled forward by the subliminal certainty any subway rider feels that the train must be coming soon.
; I checked again, over my shoulders, left and right.
Cops on my platform.
Eight of them.
No cops at all on the platform opposite.
Chapter 56
People are scared of the third rail. No reason to be, unless you plan on touching it. Hundreds of volts, but they don’t jump out at you. You have to go looking for them, to get in trouble.
Easy enough to step over, even in lousy shoes. I figured whatever my rubber footwear would subtract in terms of precision control, it would add in terms of electrical insulation. But even so, I planned my moves very carefully, like stage choreography. Jump down, land two-footed in the center of the uptown line, right foot on the second rail, left foot beyond the third rail, squeeze through the gap between two pillars, right foot over the next third rail, left foot on the downtown track, small careful mincing steps, then a sigh of relief and a scramble up onto the downtown platform and away.
Easy enough to do.
Easy enough for the cops to do right behind me.
They had probably done it before.
I hadn’t.
I waited. Checked behind me, left and right. The cops were close. Close enough to be slowing down and forming up and deciding exactly how they were going to do what would need to be done next. I didn’t know what their approach would be. But whatever, they were going to take it slow. They didn’t want a big stampede. The platform was crowded and any kind of sudden activity would put people over the edge. Which would lead to lawsuits.
I checked left. Checked right. No trains were coming. I wondered if the cops had stopped them. Presumably there was a well-rehearsed procedure. I took a half-step forward. People slipped in behind me, between me and the pillar. They started pressing against my back. I braced the other way against them. The warning strip at the edge of the platform was yellow paint over raised circular bumps. No danger of slipping or sliding.
The cops had formed up into a shallow semicircle. They were about eight feet from me. They were moving inward, shoveling people outward, collapsing their perimeter, slow and cautious. People were watching from the downtown platform opposite. They were nudging each other and pointing at me and going up on tiptoe.
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