Zero Hour pp-7

by Tom Clancy

  After he’d left the building — immediately afterward, in fact — Hoffman had paused at its near corner within eyeshot of Malisse and briefly appeared to stand against a lamppost for support, bracing himself with a hand as if he’d suffered a spell of weakness or dizziness. He had seemed to recover within moments, even to use his cellular before continuing on his way, but Malisse had committed this to his mental notepad, as he did with all observations relating to his cases. One never knew what grain of information might turn out to be important in the long run… though he supposed Hoffman, a very busy fellow, also must be a very tired fellow indeed. The clip of his perambulations this morning already had Malisse’s joints aching with fatigue.

  Hoffman’s rapid footwork over the hard pavement had quickly resumed, leading Malisse back uptown, his Duncan in hand. Past the stone lions guarding the library entrance he had tracked his man, and then onto 42nd Street, where he had lagged behind Hoffman as he turned into the door of what Malisse’s subsequent walk-by had disclosed was a Chase Manhattan bank.

  And there inside that bank Hoffman was still, presumably conducting transactions that might be all or none of Malisse’s affair.

  Malisse sighed and gave the handsome humidor in the window another longing glance.

  Perhaps when his work was completed, he would return here to inquire about its cost.

  In the meantime, he would do what he did best, which was wait, watch, and weigh what he saw of Hoffman’s activities.

  Like Ahab on his determined pursuit, Delano Malisse was resting for the rush.

  * * *

  Avram had no sooner been ushered from the vault by a security guard when his cellular rang.

  He pulled it out of his coat pocket, flipped it open, and moved to an unoccupied counter space on the main banking floor, keeping firm hold of his briefcase with one hand. Heavy as it had just gotten, he was not about to rest it anywhere out of his grasp.

  “How’s my timing, Avram?” Lathrop said in his ear.

  “It’s what I’ve come to expect.” Unusually thirsty for the past few minutes, Avram ran his tongue over his lips, but it was without moisture. “I have what’s called for, and now only need know where I am called.”

  “Twenty-sixth and Broadway, over by the flower market,” Lathrop said.

  “That far downtown—?”

  “You’ll see a place with plastic containers of spray-painted branches in front. Universal Florists.”

  Avram sighed. He looked around for a water cooler, didn’t see one, and decided he might have to stop for a drink on the way to his destination

  “The dance exhausts me,” he said, expelling another breath.

  “Don’t bellyache,” Lathrop said. “I’ll do you a favor and try to keep it short today.”

  * * *

  Having left his motel room to get some breakfast, John Earl was emerging from the McDonald’s across the road with an order of scrambled eggs and hash browns to go when he noticed the guy parked in the fast-food joint’s customer lot.

  Earl had no clear idea what it was about the guy that raised his suspicions. There was nothing funny about the car he was in, a new-ish Pontiac or Buick — Earl couldn’t tell the difference at a glance, and didn’t want to look too hard and call attention to himself. Nothing funny about how the driver looked, which was like anybody with a head, a face, two shoulders, and a winter parka. And nothing funny about what the driver was up to, namely sipping coffee through the lid of a paper cup.

  Off the top, there wasn’t a reason in the world Earl figured he ought to pay him a second thought.

  Still, he wasn’t the sort to ignore his intuition. He’d spent almost half his life in the pen with a bunch of psycho hardcases for housemates, men who’d be as apt to kill as cornhole him the minute he let his guard down… and spent just about all the rest of his life doing things that would put him right back inside with them if he wasn’t careful. He’d been hunter and hunted, sometimes both at the same time, and you didn’t fare too well at either end of the chase without having high-frequency reception on your shit antennas.

  Earl strode past the car toward the crosswalk to the motel court, not once glancing straightaway in its direction.

  Probably it wasn’t anything he needed to be on the sharp about, but careful were as careful did, as somebody or other had told him once upon a year in Maine, and he didn’t know of any words in the world with a truer ring. Careful had kept him rolling easy for a while now—ayuh, ayuh—and the occasional ditch, bump, and roadblock aside, he’d done okay avoiding the kind of blowout that could set you skidding out of your lane into a total loss.

  Walking by the U-Haul, key-card in hand, Earl had already decided he was going to play it safe.

  The minute he returned to his room, he’d give Zaheer a buzz at Kiran and tell him to be sure to bring along reinforcements when he showed up.

  * * *

  To Avram’s abounding surprise, Lathrop had been truthful about wanting to shorten their dance. And while he did not believe Lathrop ever did anything as a favor to anyone, he would nevertheless regard the accelerated pace of their final round a parting courtesy.

  In keeping with its desirable spirit of brevity, Avram hustled toward the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on Sixth Avenue and 23rd from the flower market a few blocks north, another false sign-in name committed to memory (Mr. Landon), and another room number (twenty-seven) attached to it in his head. He was running early, or at least felt as though he was, since Lathrop never gave a precise time of arrival for himself. But perhaps that had more to do with his own state of exhilaration… an emotional peak that had for the moment lifted him past weariness, anxiety, and fatigue.

  Soon enough — within half an hour, Avram expected — he would pay Lathrop for his entire lot of stones with the cash extracted from his safe-deposit box at Chase. And then he would be on his way. Urbaniak would set the large Kashmir in his Raymond Yard homage. Katari, charmed by blue fire, would be eagerly waiting to purchase it. And he, Avram…

  For him there would be freedom, emancipation, liberation. Were there any better words to describe what he was gaining? Was it blasphemous to think of Lathrop’s stones as his own gift of p’solet, holy chips of immense value bringing him a transcendence he had only ever fantasized about having in a material world?

  Avram saw the hotel midway down the block ahead of him and stepped it up. Ah, fuzzgrenade.com, softgel.net, or whatever that guitarist’s name had been, Avram thought. Ah, yes, what his splendid music meant. Someday in the near future Avram would look the kid up on the Internet, find him aboard the shuttle, drop him a huge money bonus, and look him in the eye without a shred of envy, but rather a bond shared only by those who let themselves become unbonded, who—

  The pain in Avram’s chest took him all at once. Seized him around the heart like a crushing vice. He stopped on the sidewalk, his briefcase dropping from his numb left hand to the sidewalk, his hands going to a throat that had suddenly locked tight against his efforts to draw breath.

  Then the city spun around him and he was on his back looking into the cold blue winter sky without air, a jetliner flying high overhead, people’s faces looking down at him, one man’s closer than the rest. The man was shouting something to them about an ambulance… about calling an ambulance…

  Avram grabbed his wrist, or thought he did, he wasn’t sure, his confusion was too great. He was becoming distanced from himself, Avram and not Avram, two-dimensional, almost without substance, whatever sliver was left of him pressed between constrictive walls of pain.

  He tried to remember something, couldn’t, and tried to ask the man whose face had come so close to his own whether he might know the answer.

  But then the face was wiped away. In Avram’s eyes the blue sky above it momentarily turned a burning, searing red, then sheeted over with a bright blank flash of white.

  And in the end, there was nothing but darkness.

  * * *

  At the northeast corner of Sixth and
23rd, waiting for his light to turn green so he could cross to the west side of the avenue, Malisse saw his quarry crumple to the pavement almost a full block up ahead.

  His face a mask of dismay, he glanced over his shoulder at an approaching onslaught of headlamps, bumpers, and grilles, took a shaved moment to time his lunge, and then dashed forward across the stream of uptown traffic with a prayer to wing-footed Mercury… ignoring the Roman god’s alternate reputation as a guiding messenger of thieves.

  Horns blared, tires skidded, profanities slapped against his ears.

  “Gratuitous!” a young woman shouted from the curb behind him, offended by a bus driver’s particularly vile oath. But Malisse was already three-quarters of the way to the other side and feeling appreciative.

  He took the corner with a bound and continued to race toward the fallen Hoffman, around whom a small crowd of pedestrians had begun to gather. Then he was pushing through them, scooping them aside with both arms to kneel over the broker’s prostrate form.

  Malisse saw the blue-tinged lips and fingertips and livid cheeks, heard the tortured wheezing for breath, and immediately thought heart attack.

  “Ambulance!” he shouted, looking around at the confusion frozen onlookers. “Someone here call an ambulance!”

  And then Hoffman’s cyanotic fingers grabbed hold of his wrist, pulling, pulling him down.

  Malisse saw his lips move, heard nothing but the surrounding barrage of street noises, leaned close, close, closer.

  “My father’s name?” Hoffman rattled. His eyes widened, their pupils enormous. “My… father’s name?”

  Malisse looked down at him with a sudden pang of sorrow, wishing he could answer Hoffman’s question as the eyes rolled back in their sockets and the hand slid limply from his arm.

  Then he heard the sirens… and knowing he had done what he could as a man, remembered that he was also an investigator and glanced around for the dropped briefcase.

  Unnoticed in the confusion, it lay on the ground almost against his ankle.

  Malisse grabbed its handle and got to his feet. Would anyone know it wasn’t his?

  A look from a man in the crowd told him at least one among them did.

  Malisse met his gaze for just an instant. Dark-haired, wearing a long, cloaklike outback coat, he prompted a sudden jolt of recognition… and Malisse thought he saw a similar awareness in the pair of eyes that had become locked with his own. Where else besides this place had Malisse seen him? Where and when had they seen each other?

  The man was gone, vanished into the growing crowd, before he could begin to remember.

  And then, aware he too must move quickly, Malisse turned and hurried off down the street with the briefcase.

  * * *

  Ted Bristow swore under his breath, trying to figure out what to do about the long Ford trailer truck — the words OAK LEDGE TRANSPORT written on its side, for whatever it was worth — that had jockeyed into the Super 8’s parking court about four minutes earlier, stopping lengthwise across his line of sight with its engine rumbling, completely blocking his view of the U-Haul and motel room he was supposed to keep under constant watch.

  It would be way too easy for the man with the van to mark him as a spotter if he shifted his car around the McDonald’s lot and shot for an angle that would let him see behind the truck. Easier yet to mark him if he actually got out of the car and started nosing around. Which Bristow supposed left him caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

  He didn’t like it one bit, and Noriko Cousins would like it a whole lot less. Because anything could happen while he was stuck blind… any damned thing at all.

  A frown wrinkled Bristow’s forehead. He’d been on lookout in the parking lot for about three hours when Earl came across the road to buy himself breakfast, passing Bristow’s Grand Prix once as he’d approached the restaurant’s entrance, and then again as he’d carried his bagged Egg Mc-Something back to the motel room.

  At the time Bristow hadn’t thought he’d been made, but you never knew for an absolute certainty. Almost three years with Sword, a six-spot with the FBI prior to that, he had plenty of experience with surveillance gigs. The thing was, your evil counterparts often as not had comparable experience from their side of a stakeout, and the smart and competent ones wouldn’t let on for an instant that they’d had their suspicions alerted.

  In fact, Bristow thought, the really competent ones might just roll a truck up in front of their opposite numbers as convenient cover when they were going to pull a move. There were front and back exits to the motel court, and right now he couldn’t see either of them.

  Bristow’s frown deepened. What the hell was he supposed to do here? The support cars he’d been expecting from Manhattan were stuck in a typical weekday morning logjam on the George Washington Bridge, and, guessing from their last radioed status report, he’d be lucky to see them pull up inside an hour, or realistically ninety minutes. Obviously, he couldn’t wait that long for an assist. Couldn’t wait period without taking some kind of action. But any action he took could blow an operation that had gained whole new degrees of urgency literally overnight, and he wasn’t about to make any impulsive decisions on that score… which brought his hurried thought process on the matter all the way back to square one. Or did it?

  Bristow lifted his third coffee of the morning to his lips and hesitated before sipping. Its loathsomeness aside, there might be another reason to put it down. He couldn’t dance rings around the truck without becoming a spectacle. But he could step out for another cup, make a relatively inconspicuous attempt at updating the status of the man with the van on his way to and from the McDonald’s. If that wideass truck still presented a complete obstruction to him, so be it. It beat doing nothing.

  Bristow lowered the coffee cup to the floor of the car, got out, turned toward the restaurant, and was about to take a kind of wide, ambling path toward its entrance when the longhauler’s engine suddenly throbbed into gear behind him.

  Bristow froze mid-step. Five minutes that truck had sat there in the motel court. Nobody exiting to make a pitstop at the restaurant. And now it was simply leaving.

  In his considered opinion that stunk to the fucking moon.

  Casting off subtlety, Bristow whipped his head around, looked across the road as the truck began angling out of the lot—

  And knew he’d been beat.

  The U-Haul van was already gone.

  * * *

  They had arranged to meet at the south side of Washington Square Park on one of the benches facing the large dry fountain area and the arch, and that was where Tom Ricci sat watching him approach from between the wind-stripped trees to his right. There weren’t many people around on this cold January morning, just small, scattered groups of college kids from New York University, and some pigeons and squirrels looking for handout crumbs.

  He waited as the man in the outback coat settled onto the bench at his side, then half turned his head toward him and waited some more in silence.

  “Ricci,” the man said. “Suppose it was nicer weather last time we got together in the park.”

  Ricci looked at him fully.

  “You’ve got my name,” he said. “Give me one I can call you.”

  The man sat there a moment with his lips slightly parted, his head canted to the side.

  “Lathrop,” he said after a moment.

  “That a first or last?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ricci saw a smile touch his lips.

  “I’m not in the mood to play games,” he said. “Why the hell did you bring me here?”

  “I told you in my e-mail to San Jose.”

  “You told me you had something about one of our competitors had to do with laser research. Some information we might want for ourselves.”

  “Thought I used the word plans instead of information,” the man said. “And wrote East Coast competitor.”

  “Which one?”

  “Is this for you or for UpLink?�
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  Ricci looked at him again.

  “Which one?” he repeated.

  A brief hesitation. Then a shrug.

  “Kiran.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “Okay, Lathrop,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  “You don’t really think that comes free, do you?”

  “I think I need to know more about what you’re selling before I worry about value.”

  Silence. Two squirrels with jet-black fur skittered down a tree trunk to the waterless fountain, one chasing the other. The first squirrel gained a slight lead, perched on its lip a second with its tail twitching as if to bait its pursuer, then leaped off along a flagstone path and up another tree as their capering resumed.

  “This is the only place in the city they have black squirrels,” Lathrop said. “Always thought they hibernated in winter, but that was before I got to New York.”

  Ricci’s eyes shifted back to Lathrop from where they had watched the squirrels climb in excited contest.

  “Maybe things are different here,” he said.

  “Or maybe I didn’t know as much as I figured I did about squirrels.”

  Ricci smiled a little, waited.

  Lathrop sat back with his hands in his pockets.

  “I move around a lot,” he said. “Been doing that for a while now. Get a little bit going, make what I can of it, move again once the going looks to be heading toward the rocks.” He paused. “Always does sooner or later, you know.”

  Ricci considered that.

  “This later?” he said.

  Lathrop faced him, dark eyes meeting his pale blue ones.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me about half an hour ago,” he said. “Lost an important briefcase.”