by Andrew Grant
“So where are we, then?” I said to Weston when he finally opened the rear doors, twenty minutes later. “Saigon?”
He didn’t answer.
“Quantico, maybe?” I said.
He gestured for me to get out.
“Federal Plaza, at least?” I said, looking over his shoulder at the parallel rows of square pillars and grimy, oil-stained floor. “Because I’ve got to tell you, I’m not impressed with the decor.”
Weston reached into the van and leaned forward to grab my arm. His jacket gaped open and the rough black polymer grip of his service weapon stood out against his clean white shirt. I let him tug impatiently at my sleeve for a moment, then shuffled toward him until I could swing my legs around and get my feet on the ground.
I stepped away and saw we were in the corner of a large, rectangular basement garage. There were only four other vehicles. Identical Ford sedans, standing in line to the side of the van. They looked new and shiny. They were much larger than European cars, but even with all the empty spaces each one was parked neatly within the yellow lines.
There were no other people. Apart from the two agents and me, the place was deserted. No one to witness anything that could happen there. A notice on the wall said the owners-some bank-denied responsibility for any damage that may be caused. I couldn’t see which bank because someone had taped a piece of cardboard over the name with JUDAS handwritten in large red capitals. Next to the sign were the remains of a metal bracket. It was like the one above the door in the police interview room. A short length of wire was dangling from it, neatly cut at its end. I looked around the rest of the garage. Similar brackets had been mounted on the pillars at regular intervals.
Now, they were all empty.
Maybe the cameras had been recovered by the bank when it abandoned the building. Maybe they’d been stolen while it was lying derelict. Or maybe they’d been removed for another reason.
I backed up against the side of the van, just in case.
Lavine broke the silence.
“Hey,” he said, standing in front of a pair of turquoise wooden doors set into the wall. “Will you hurry it up?”
Weston turned to look at his partner, and that gave me a decision to make. My eyes were drawn to his neck. Cervical vertebrae are notoriously delicate. Even wearing handcuffs, I could sever his spinal cord with one sharp snap. Then I could reach down under his arm and take his gun. A Glock 23 holds thirteen rounds, but I wouldn’t need that many. One would be enough. Two, if I went by the book. Lavine would be finished before he could take his own weapon out of its holster.
I passed.
If all I was supposed to have done was kill a tramp, why was the bureau so interested in me? What made it worth trampling all over the NYPD and dragging me away to this building? There was too much I didn’t understand.
So you can call it curiosity. Or professional courtesy. But either way, I decided to play along.
SIX
There were always plenty of books in the house when I was a kid.
A lot were borrowed from the library. Others had been inherited from relatives. But a few had been bought for me. I remember the first one my parents ever gave me, after I’d learned to read for myself. It was a collection of proverbs and fables. Some of them seemed pretty old-fashioned, even in those days. Some didn’t make much sense. Some I’ve forgotten the detail of.
And others, I should have paid more attention to.
Ones like Curiosity killed the cat…
The turquoise doors were the only way I could see to get out of the garage, other than the vehicle ramp at the opposite side. They had obviously been heavily used. The paint was worn and peeling, and the corner of the right-hand door scraped on the ground when Lavine pushed it open. Weston and I followed him through into a small concrete-walled lobby. There was an elevator to our right, but Lavine ignored it. He kept going and disappeared up a set of stairs at the far side. They only went up one level. We trudged along behind him and caught up just before he reached a heavy gray door at the top. He held it open for us and we emerged into a large, bright, open space.
I paused to check my new surroundings, but Weston grabbed my arm and hauled me past a deserted reception counter that ran along the left-hand wall. It would have been wide enough for three people to work behind, but now I could only see one chair. All the usual receptionists’ paraphernalia was missing-sign-in books, visitors’ badges, telephone switchboards, computer screens-and there was no other furniture in the whole area. It must have been some time since the place was occupied. A layer of dust covered the floor, making the marble tiles feel a little greasy underfoot, and a few small spiderwebs clung to the angles of the tall window frames.
The bottom six feet of glass had been covered up with sheets of coarse blockboard. One section was boarded up on the inside, as well. It was next to the far end of the counter, in line with a semicircle of black textured rubber set into the floor. It looked like the remains of a revolving door. It would have led to the street, but now the thick wooden panel blocking the opening was braced with two stout planks. Each was held in place by six heavy steel bolts. You’d need some decent tools to get through there, now. Or a little C4.
Weston didn’t release my arm until we reached a line of shiny silver posts. There were five, dividing the reception area on one side from a twin bank of elevators on the other. I guess they would have originally held hinged panels-probably glass, judging by the brackets-to control access into the building. Now their fittings were broken and there was nothing to fill the spaces between them. We walked through, past a double door leading to some offices, and headed toward the elevators. A door in the far corner was labeled STAIRS. For a moment I thought Lavine was going to make us climb again, but he reached out and pressed the call button instead. The indicators above three of the elevators were blank, but the fourth one was already showing GROUND. Its doors parted, and the three of us filed inside.
The elevator had buttons for twenty-four floors. Lavine hit the one labeled “23.” The doors closed gently, and almost imperceptibly we began to ascend. The elevator’s walls were covered by some sort of rough sacklike material hanging from small metal hooks near the ceiling. I pulled back the edge of one of the sheets and found it was protecting a mirror. I presume it was the same on the other walls. If so, I was glad they were hidden. I didn’t need an endless sea of those agents’ miserable faces reflecting all around me.
The display gradually wound its way up to 23. We stopped moving and the doors silently slid apart. Weston pushed me out first. He guided me around to the right, away from the elevators, and then steered me along the corridor until we reached an enormous open-plan office. Two lines of storage cabinets were laid out along the center of the room, forming a kind of pathway to a glass supervisor’s booth that jutted out from the end wall. The cabinets were low-less than waist height-and a gap after each third one gave access to groups of desks on either side. They were pushed together in fours to form parallel rows of identical crosses. These were arranged alternately one against the cabinets, one against the windows all the way down the room. The nearer ones were completely bare, except for a tangle of wires spilling out from the exposed cable trays at the back. Farther away several computer keyboards were scattered around, all with their leads neatly coiled up, and I could see a handful of old telephone headsets mixed in among them.
The last couple of desks on the right looked as if they hadn’t been cleared yet, and the ones at the far end on the left had been moved out of position. They’d been pushed aside, and the space between them was filled with chairs. At least a hundred. They were piled high on each other at impossible, drunken angles. Some had their arms hooked together to hold them in place. Others had fallen off and were lying on the floor, blocking the entrance to the booth.
Lavine flipped a couple of the fallen chairs onto their wheels and rolled them through the glass doorway. I had to stand aside as he came back out for another one, and I ended up squash
ed against the last desk on the right. I could hardly see any of its surface. It was covered with pizza boxes, Coke cans, coffee mugs, newspapers-all kinds of junk. The next desk was clinical in comparison. It held neat piles of papers and folders, several pens, a cell phone charger, and a pair of laptop computers. The screensavers had kicked in on both of them. One had a floating FBI shield that rippled as it moved. Homer Simpson was showing his backside on the other.
Two maps were pinned to the wall behind the desks, completely filling the space between a pair of windows. At the top was a large-scale street map of Manhattan. Clusters of red dots and blue triangles had been marked on it, along with a series of times and dates from the previous week. Below that a color-coded linear diagram was superimposed on an outline of the United States. The key said it was a schematic of the national railroad network. A set of black-and-white photographs had been stuck around the top right-hand border. They showed men’s faces. I counted five. All of them would be in their mid to late thirties. They looked scruffy and unkempt, but basically cared for. Certainly not a pack of tramps. Arrows had been drawn connecting them to points on different railroad lines. All the points were on routes that fanned out from New York.
And all the men in the photos looked as if they were dead.
I sat right at the rear of the booth. Lavine had pushed my chair all the way in, so my back was literally against the wall. The agents sat facing me. They were shoulder to shoulder, pressing forward, blocking me in, trying to make me uncomfortable.
No one spoke for eleven, maybe twelve minutes. Then the fingers on Lavine’s left hand started to drum against his thigh. He fought it for another minute, and then his mouth got the better of him.
“How’re your veins?” he said. “Good?”
“Hope they’re not,” Weston said. “Hope they have to really dig around in there, trying to find one big enough.”
“You know you’re looking at the needle,” Lavine said. “New York’s a death penalty state. Being English won’t save you.”
“But hey,” Weston said. “That’s what you get when you start snapping people’s necks.”
I allowed myself a little smile.
“Snapping necks?” I said. “Didn’t the NYPD tell you? The guy I found in the alley had been shot.”
“The guy in the alley had been,” Lavine said. “But the other five guys all had their necks broken.”
“What five guys?” I said. “The NYPD were only trying to frame me for one. What is this? Rollover week at the bureau?”
“The guys who were found by the railroad tracks,” Lavine said. “I saw you looking at their pictures, outside.”
“I’ve never been near one of your railroads.”
“Don’t waste my time. We’re not here for a confession. Forensics will take care of that. We’re here for something else.”
“Truth is, we don’t know when things started going wrong for you,” Weston said. “We don’t even know for sure if they did. Maybe you just killed those guys ’cause you liked it.”
“But either way, we don’t care,” Lavine said.
“So why are we talking?” I said.
“Because you have something we want,” Weston said.
“A name,” Lavine said. “Help us with that, and we can take the death penalty off the table.”
“We can save your skin,” Weston said. “And we’re the only ones who can.”
“The only ones,” Lavine said. “You need to understand that. You need to be real clear. Take a moment. Think about it.”
He leaned back, his fingers moving faster now.
“You want help with a name?” I said. “Why? Is one of you expecting a baby?”
“Michael Raab,” Lavine said. “Who gave him up to you?”
“Who told you how to contact him?” Weston said. “Who he was? How to recognize him?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You’re not thinking straight,” Weston said. “We have you. We can bring the hammer down any time we like.”
“And believe me, we would like to,” Lavine said. “The only thing we want more than you is the name. Who gave Michael Raab away?”
“Are we on to weddings, now?” I said.
“He went to that alley specifically to meet someone,” Weston said.
“The alley where you were found,” Lavine said.
“Someone with an English accent,” Weston said.
I shrugged.
“You called him,” Lavine said. “You set the meeting up.”
“Wasn’t me,” I said.
“We heard the 911 tape,” Lavine said. “You didn’t pick him at random. You targeted him. Why? How did you know who he was?”
“Someone gave him away,” Weston said. “Who?”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” I said. “The only people in that alley were me, and the tramp. And he was already-”
“Not ‘the tramp,’ ” Lavine said. “Mike Raab.”
“No,” I said. “The tramp’s name was Alan McNeil. I saw his Social Security card. His number was-”
“No idea where that came from,” Lavine said. “Something he must have picked up. We’ll look into it. But get this straight. His name wasn’t McNeil. It was Michael Raab.”
“And he was no tramp,” Weston said.
“He looked like a tramp,” I said. “Smelled like one, too.”
“Because he was undercover,” Weston said.
“Michael Raab was a Special Agent,” Lavine said. “I knew him for twelve years. He was my partner. And my friend.”
SEVEN
One year my father organized a fete at the local community center.
That would have been OK, except that he made me help. It meant he wouldn’t let me buy anything until the customers had finished picking over the stalls, leaving behind only mangled piles of worthless rubbish. He didn’t believe in gambling, so the raffles and lotteries were out of the question. The only thing I could do, apart from wander around spotting thieves and pickpockets, was the single game in the place that involved skill rather than chance. And even that was stretching the point. All you had to do was throw Ping-Pong balls into empty toilet bowls. You got three shots for five pence. I remember wondering why they bothered. It would have been easier just to hand over the prizes at the start.
I had a go anyway, and went home with three goldfish. They spent the next few months cooped up in a bowl in the kitchen, between the sink and the toaster. None of them did anything. They just floated aimlessly around while people stared in at them through the glass.
I never really gave them much thought, once they were home.
But after the next hour, I knew how their lives must have felt.
The agents withdrew from the booth without saying another word and for fully sixty minutes they hung around outside, observing me. Some of the time they were sitting, tinkering with their PCs or muttering to each other. Some of the time they were on their feet, standing still or wandering about aimlessly. But all the time, at least one of them had his eyes glued to me, watching me waste even more of my time.
Eventually Lavine’s cell phone rang. He answered quickly, as if he’d been expecting the call. He talked for a minute, gesturing with his free hand even though it was obvious the other person couldn’t see him, and then spun abruptly around to look at me. His face seemed to turn a shade paler, and as he listened I could see his expression change from surprise to bewilderment and finally something close to disgust.
Weston just looked angry when Lavine spoke to him after the call ended. They talked for another minute, then drew their handguns and Lavine stepped cautiously toward the booth. He pushed the door open with his free hand, keeping to the side so that his body was never between Weston and me.
“Stand up,” he said. “Get out.”
This time they did everything by the book. It was as though their actions were being scrutinized by a hidden assessor and they were determined not to get a bad score. W
e went back through the main office, around to the elevator lobby, and across to a door in the far corner. It led to a staircase. There was no corporate decor, here. Just a gray floor, gray walls, gray handrails, and a gray ceiling. Different sizes of gray pipes were attached to the walls by plain, functional brackets. The place was cold and it echoed, a little like the inside of a battleship.
We went up one level, to the top floor. Two men were waiting for us. They were wearing neat gray suits like Weston and Lavine, and both were holding guns. As we approached they backed off through a door at the top of the stairs and took up defensive positions on the far side.
This floor had the same basic layout as the one below, but instead of passing through an open plan area, the corridor led us between two groups of more modest-sized rooms. There were individual offices on the right, and meeting rooms on the left. Several of the office doors still had name plates. I saw PETER MOULDS, NIGEL GOWER, DEREK WOODS . That one was open. I looked inside. The furniture was gone, but the carpet was a different class and there were outlines on the wall where pictures would have hung.
We continued along the corridor until we reached a pair of wide doors at the far end. The pale veneer was richly polished, and a plaque on the right-hand side read PRINCIPAL BOARDROOM. Lavine knocked lightly, twice, just below it.
“Come,” a male voice said.
Lavine pushed the door halfway open and Weston bundled me through the gap into a large, square room. It was the full width of the building, and all three external walls were floor-to-ceiling glass. There were no blinds, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the tiny people milling around, far below. We were so high there was no sense that the building could be rooted in the same streets. It felt more as if we were floating above them, completely disconnected from everyday life.