Second choice, I figured.
I was standing right next to the only other option.
The clock in my head was ticking past two-thirty in the morning. I stood in the shadows and waited. I wanted to be neither early nor late. I wanted to time it right. Left and right I could see traffic heading up on Sixth and down on Seventh. Taxis, trucks, some civilians, some cop cars, some dark sedans. The cross-street itself was quiet.
At a quarter to three I pushed off the wall and turned the corner and walked to the hotel door.
Chapter 73
The same night porter was on duty. Alone. He was slumped on a chair behind the desk, staring morosely into space. There were fogged old mirrors in the lobby. My jacket was puffed out in front of me. I felt I could see the shape of the MP5’s pistol grip and the curve of its magazine and the tip of its muzzle. But I knew what I was looking at. I assumed the night porter didn’t.
I walked up to him and said, “Remember me?”
He didn’t say yes. Didn’t say no. Just gave a kind of all-purpose shrug that I took to be an invitation to open negotiations.
“I don’t need a room,” I said.
“So what do you need?”
I took five twenties out of my pocket. A hundred bucks. Most of what I had left. I fanned the bills so he could see all five double-digits and laid them on his counter.
I said, “I need to know the room numbers where you put the people who came in around midnight.”
“What people?”
“Two women, thirteen men.”
“Nobody came in around midnight.”
“One of the women was a babe. Young. Bright blue eyes. Not easy to forget.”
“Nobody came in.”
“You sure?” “Nobody came in.”
I pushed the five bills toward him. “You totally sure?” He pushed the bills right back.
He said, “I’d like to take your money, believe me. But nobody came in tonight.”
I didn’t take the subway. I walked instead. A calculated risk. It exposed me to however many of the six hundred federal agents happened to be in the vicinity, but I wanted my cell phone to work. I had concluded that cell phones don’t work in the subway. I had never seen anyone using one down there. Presumably not because of etiquette. Presumably because of a lack of signal. So I walked. I used 32nd Street to get over to Broadway, and then I followed Broadway south, past luggage outlets and junk jewelry stores and counterfeit perfume wholesalers, all of them closed up and shuttered for the night. It was dark down there, and messy. A micro-neighborhood. I could have been in Lagos, or Saigon.
I paused at the corner of 28th Street to let a taxi slide by.
The phone in my pocket started to vibrate.
I backed into 28th and sat down on a shadowed stoop and opened the phone.
Lila Hoth said, “Well?”
I said, “I can’t find you.”
“I know.”
“So I’ll deal.”
“You will?”
“How much cash have you got?”
“How much do you want?”
“All of it.”
“Have you got the stick?”
“I can tell you exactly where it is.”
“But you don’t actually have it?”
“No.”
“So what was the thing you showed us in the hotel?”
“A decoy.”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“A hundred.”
“I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars.”
I said, “You can’t get on a bus or a train or a plane. You can’t get out. You’re trapped, Lila. You’re going to die here. Don’t you want to die a success? Don’t you want to be able to send that coded e-mail home? Mission accomplished?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“A hundred.”
“OK, but only half tonight.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“You’ll have to.”
I said, “Seventy-five, all of it tonight.”
“Sixty.”
“Deal.”
“Where are you?”
“Way uptown,” I lied. “But I’m on the move. I’ll meet you in Union Square in forty minutes.”
“Where is that?”
“Broadway, between 14th Street and 17th.”
“Is it safe?”
“Safe enough.”
“I’ll be there,” she said.
“Just you,” I said. “Alone.”
She clicked off.
I moved on two blocks to the north end of Madison Square Park and sat on a bench a yard from a homeless woman who had a shopping cart piled high like a dump truck. I fished in my pocket for Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. I read it in the dim glow of a streetlight. I dialed her cell number. She answered after five rings.
“This is Reacher,” I said. “You told me to call you if I needed you.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Am I still off the hook with the NYPD?”
“Absolutely.”
“So tell your counterterrorism people that forty minutes from now I’ll be in Union Square and I’ll be approached by a minimum of two and a maximum of maybe six of Lila Hoth’s crew. Tell your guys they’re theirs for the taking. But tell them to leave me alone.”
“Descriptions?”
“You looked in the bag, right? Before you delivered it?”
“Of course.”
“Then you’ve seen their pictures.”
“Where in the square?”
“I’ll aim for the southwest corner.”
“So you found her?”
“First place I looked. She’s in a hotel. She paid off the night porter. And put a scare in him. He denied everything and called her room from the desk the minute I was out of the lobby.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she called me less than a minute later. I like coincidences as much as the next guy, but that kind of timing is too good to be true.”
“Why are you meeting with her crew?”
“I set up a deal with her. I told her to come alone. But she’ll double-cross me and send some of her people instead. It will help me if your guys grab them up. I don’t want to have to shoot them all.”
“Got a conscience?”
“No, I’ve got thirty rounds of ammunition. Which isn’t really enough. I need to parcel it out.”
* * *
Nine blocks later I entered Union Square. I walked all around it once and crossed it on both diagonals. Saw nothing that worried me. Just somnolent shapes on benches. One of New York City’s zero-dollar hotels. I sat down near the statue of Gandhi and waited for the rats to come out.
Chapter 74
Twenty minutes into my forty I saw the NYPD’s counterterrorism squad begin to assemble. Good moves. They came in beat-up unmarked sedans and confiscated minivans full of dents and scrapes. I saw an off-duty taxicab park outside a coffee shop on 16th Street. I saw two guys climb out of the back and cross the road. Altogether I counted sixteen men, and I was prepared to accept that I had missed maybe four or five others. If I didn’t know better I would have suspected that a long late session in a martial arts gym had just let out. All the guys were young and fit and bulky and moved like trained athletes. They were all carrying gym bags. They were all inappropriately dressed. They had on Yankees warm-up jackets, or dark windbreakers like mine, or thin fleece parkas, like it was already November. To hide their Kevlar vests, I guessed, and maybe their badges, which would be on chains around their necks.
None of them eyeballed me directly but I could tell they had spotted me and identified me. They formed up in ones and twos and threes all around me and then they stepped back in the dark and disappeared. They just melted into the scenery. Some sat on benches, some lay in nearby doorways, some went places I didn’t see.
Good moves.
Thirty minutes into my forty I was feeling pretty optimistic.
Five minutes later, I wasn
’t.
Because the feds showed up.
Two more cars stopped, right on Union Square West. Black Crown Vics, waxed and bright and shiny. Eight men stepped out. I sensed the NYPD guys stirring. Sensed them staring through the dark, sensed them glancing at each other, sensed them asking, Why the hell are those guys here?
I was good with the NYPD. Not so, with the FBI and the Department of Defense.
I glanced at Gandhi. He told me nothing at all.
I pulled out the phone again and hit the green button to bring up Theresa Lee’s number. She was the last call I had made. I hit the green button again to dial. She answered immediately.
I said, “The feds are here. How did that happen?”
“Shit,” she said. “Either they’re monitoring our dispatcher or one of our guys is looking for a better job.”
“Who takes precedence tonight?”
“They do. Always. You should get the hell out of there.”
I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket. The eight guys from the Crown Vics stepped into the shadows. The square went quiet. There was a faulty letter in a lit-up sign to my left. It sputtered on and off at random intervals. I heard rats in the mulch behind me.
I waited.
Two minutes. Three.
Then thirty-nine minutes into my forty I sensed human movement far to my right. Footfalls, disturbed air, holes in the darkness. I watched and saw figures moving through shadows and dim light.
Seven men.
Which was good news. The more now, the fewer later.
And which was flattering. Lila was risking more than half her force, because she thought I would be hard to take.
All seven men were small, and neat, and wary. They were all dressed like me, in dark clothes baggy enough to conceal weapons. But they weren’t going to shoot me. Lila’s need to know was like body armor. They saw me and paused thirty yards away.
I sat still.
In theory this should have been the easy part. They approach me, the NYPD guys move in, I walk away and go about my business.
But not with the feds on the scene. At best they would want all of us. At worst they would want me more than them. I knew where the memory stick was. Lila’s people didn’t.
I sat still.
Thirty yards away the seven men separated. Two stood still, anchored half-right of my position. Two scooted left and looped around and headed for my other flank. Three walked on, to get around behind me.
I stood up. The two men on my right started to move in. The two on my left were halfway through their flanking maneuver. The three behind me were out of sight. I guessed the NYPD guys were already on their feet. I guessed the feds were moving too.
A fluid situation.
I ran.
Straight ahead, to the subway gazebo twenty feet in front of me. Down the stairs. I heard feet clattering after me. Loud echoes. A big crowd. Probably close to forty people, all strung out in a crazy Pied Piper chase.
I made it into a tiled corridor and out again into the underground plaza. No violinist this time. Just stale air and trash and one old guy pushing a broom with a threadbare head a yard wide. I ran past him and stopped and skidded on my new soles and changed direction and headed for the uptown R train. I jumped the turnstile and ran onto the platform and all the way to the end.
And stopped.
And turned.
Behind me three separate groups followed one after the other. First came Lila Hoth’s seven men. They raced toward me. They saw I had nowhere to go. They stopped. I saw looks of wolfish satisfaction on their faces. Then I saw their inevitable conclusion: too good to be true. Some thoughts are clear in any language. They turned suddenly and saw the NYPD counterterrorism squad hustling right behind them.
And right behind the NYPD guys were four of the eight federal agents.
No one else on the platform. No civilians. On the downtown platform opposite was a lone guy on a bench. Young. Maybe drunk. Maybe worse. He was staring across at the sudden commotion. It was twenty minutes to four in the morning. The guy looked dazed. Like he wasn’t making much sense out of what he was seeing.
It looked like a gang war. But what he was actually seeing was a fast and efficient takedown by the NYPD. None of their guys stopped running. They all piled in yelling with weapons drawn and badges visible and they exploited their big physiques and their three-to-one numerical advantage and simply swamped the seven men. No contest. No contest at all. They clubbed all seven to the ground and threw them on their fronts and slammed cuffs on their wrists and hauled them away. No pauses. No delays. No Miranda warnings. Just maximum speed and brutality. Perfect tactics. Literally seconds later they were gone again. Echoes clattered and died. The station went quiet. The guy opposite was still staring but suddenly he was seeing nothing except a silent platform with me standing alone at one end and the four federal agents about thirty feet from me. Nothing between us. Nothing at all. Just harsh white light and empty space.
Nothing happened for the best part of a minute. Then across the tracks I saw the other four federal agents arrive on the downtown platform. They took up position directly opposite me and stood still. They all smiled a little, like they had made a smart move in a game of chess. Which they had. No point in more cross-track exploits. The four agents on my side were between me and the exit. At my back was a blank white wall and the mouth of the tunnel.
Checkmate.
I stood still. Breathed the tainted underground air and listened to the faint roar of ventilation and the rumble of distant trains elsewhere in the system.
The agent nearest me took a gun out from under his coat.
He took a step toward me.
He said, “Raise your hands.”
Chapter 75
Nighttime schedules. Twenty-minute gaps between trains. We had been down there maybe four minutes. Therefore arithmetically the maximum delay before the next train would be sixteen minutes. The minimum would be no delay at all.
The minimum delay didn’t happen. The tunnel stayed dark and quiet.
“Raise your hands,” the lead agent called again. He was a white man of about forty. Certainly ex-military. DoD, not FBI. Similar type to the three I had already met. But maybe a little older. Maybe a little wiser. Maybe a little better. Maybe this was an A-team, not a B-team.
“I’ll shoot,” the lead agent called. But he wouldn’t. Empty threat. They wanted the memory stick. I knew where it was. They didn’t.
Median delay before the next train, eight minutes. As likely to be more than less. The guy with the gun took another step forward. His three colleagues followed. Across the tracks the other four stood still. The young guy on the bench was watching, vacantly.
The tunnel stayed dark and quiet.
The lead agent said, “All this hassle could be over a minute from now. Just tell us where it is.”
I said, “Where what is?”
“You know what.”
“What hassle?”
“We’re running out of patience. And you’re missing one important factor.”
“Which is?”
“Whatever intellectual gifts you have, they’re hardly likely to be unique. In fact they’re probably fairly ordinary. Which means that if you figured it out, we can figure it out too. Which means your continued existence would become surplus to requirements.”
“So go ahead,” I said. “Figure it out.”
He raised his gun higher and straighter. It was a Glock 17. Maybe twenty-five ounces fully loaded. By far the lightest service pistol on the market. Made partly from plastic. The guy had short, thick arms. He could probably hold the pose indefinitely.
“Last chance,” he said.
Across the tracks the young guy got off his bench and walked away. Long inconsistent strides, not entirely in a straight line. He was prepared to waste a two-dollar Metrocard swipe in exchange for a quiet life. He made it to the exit and disappeared from sight.
No witnesses.
Median delay
before the next train, maybe six minutes.
I said, “I don’t know who you are.”
The guy said, “Federal agents.”
“Prove it.”
The guy kept his gun aimed at my center mass but nodded over his shoulder at the agent behind him, who stepped out and moved forward into the no-man’s-land between us. He paused there and put his hand in his inside jacket pocket and came back with a leather badge holder. He held it eye-height to me and let it fall open. There were two separate pieces of ID in it. I couldn’t read either one of them. They were too far away, and both of them were behind scratched plastic windows.
I stepped forward.
He stepped forward.
I got within four feet of him and saw a standard Defense Intelligence Agency ID in the upper window of the wallet. It looked genuine and it was in date. In the lower window was some kind of a warrant or commission that stated the holder was to be afforded every assistance because he was acting directly for the President of the United States.
“Very nice,” I said. “Beats working for a living.”
I stepped back.
He stepped back.
The lead agent said, “No different than you were doing, back in the day.”
“Back in prehistory,” I said.
“What is this, an ego thing?”
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