watching her, and she believed them. It meant that they were there, lurking somewhere in the darkness surrounding the medical center. Although where she was at that moment, near the corner of Broadway and 168th Street, was lit and crowded with commuters, looking west down 168th Street was neither.
Holding her umbrella in the crook of her neck, Pia got out her cell phone, which she’d turned off before going into the OCME. She switched it on. Immediately she saw she had more than ten missed calls and three voice mails. She called George, but he didn’t answer. Instead she left a voice message of her own: “George, it’s me. It’s about six forty-five. I’m at the hospital entrance to the subway at 168th Street. Can you come get me so we can walk back to the dorm together? Okay, I’ll be waiting here.”
52.
HAVEN AVENUE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 6:59 P.M.
George had not meant to fall asleep, but he had. It was a legacy from the soporific lecture. There was also the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping as well as usual with everything that was going on. Not only was he asleep, he was in the deepest stages such that he didn’t hear his cell phone emit its cricket chirping. The phone was on his desk not ten feet away. He didn’t hear it again when it chirped fifteen minutes later. But that call brought him up from where he’d been such that when the phone chirped a third time, he got up and answered: “Hello.”
“George, it’s Grandma. I tried you before, but I missed you. How are you?”
George was suddenly wide awake. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, and he fumbled for his watch, checking the time. It was almost seven, and he panicked. Where the hell was Pia?
“Grandma, I’m good, but I’ll have to call you back, okay?”
“Oh, okay, George. Make sure you do now. We haven’t talked in a while. Is everything good?”
“Everything’s good. I’ll call soon! Gotta go!”
George saw he’d missed two calls and listened to the message Pia left the first time. He checked his watch. Shit, she’d been waiting fourteen minutes. As he pulled on a pair of shoes, he tried calling her but got her voice mail. He then raced out into the hall, heading for the elevators.
Prek and Genti sat in the front of the van anxiously scanning passersby through the windshield. Neri was perched uncomfortably on the milk crate, just a little behind and between them. What had been easy earlier, checking out the students as they passed, was now much more difficult. There was a streetlamp at the corner of Fort Washington and Haven, but it was far enough away not to be of much help. It was still raining and much darker. They had been there long enough to be stiff and sore, and in foul moods.
“Where the fuck is she?” Prek questioned morosely. He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. “This is turning into a bitch.”
Neri, as the most inexperienced, was suffering the most. He’d been so keyed up with excitement, and now that he had had to wait he felt let down, depressed. Although his role was going to be the easiest in that he was going to do the hit, he’d never actually killed anyone before. He had his right hand in his jacket pocket holding his military-issue Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol with the thumb safety on. He’d fired the gun hundreds of times in practice and considered himself a good shot. But shooting a man in the head at point-blank range was a very different proposition from hitting static targets at twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred feet. Yet he knew he had to do it to rise within the crew. Like Prek and Genti, he had his wool balaclava in his lap, ready to pull it over his head and swing into action.
An NYPD cruiser drove by, and all three reflexively crouched down. Prek watched it disappear in his side mirror. Then another NYPD cruiser went past, and Prek tensed up further. He watched that one disappear as well.
“You see that?” he said.
“Of course,” Genti said. “It’s Friday night. I wouldn’t give it much thought.”
“I don’t like to see cops in the area when we’re doing a job. Where the hell is this bitch?”
“It’s getting harder and harder to see these kids’ faces until they’re right on top of us,” Genti said.
A group of three students in lab coats walked past the van, followed by a couple of people walking alone. One of them caught Genti’s attention, and he leaned forward and picked up his balaclava. A minute later he slumped back in his seat. It was yet another false alarm.
Pia had been walking back and forth along the side of the subway stairs, waiting for a call from George, trying to figure out where he could be. They had definitely planned on getting together when she got back from the OCME. More than once, she had resolved to quit waiting for George and walk back to the dorm by herself, at least until she looked down 168th Street and saw that it was darker and more deserted than it had been fifteen minutes earlier. Pia had been about to call George for the third time when she’d been frightened by a hand on her shoulder. Spinning around, she had had to restrain herself from lashing out at her attacker. But it wasn’t an attacker. It was Will McKinley, who’d come up from the subway and caught sight of her pacing back and forth. After initial small talk and mutual sympathies about Rothman’s and Yamamoto’s passing, Pia had latched onto him for company back to the dorm. As an enticement, as if she needed it, she had offered to share her umbrella.
After reminding each other about the deaths, they’d each regressed into their own worlds. They walked in silence until beyond the 168th Street hospital entrance. Pia wondered what Will might say if she told him what she now knew. She thought he probably wouldn’t believe her.
“I was surprised to see you,” Will said. “Did you come out of the subway like I did?”
“I did,” Pia admitted. She tried to think of what to tell him if he asked where she’d been, so she changed the subject. “Have you seen George at all today?”
“Wilson? No, but I haven’t been around since lunch. Lesley and I still haven’t found a home for our month’s research elective. I took the opportunity to do a little shopping.” He held up a shopping bag.
Pia spotted a police cruiser heading in their direction along 168th Street. She tilted down the edge of her umbrella to keep her face from being seen, which Will noticed immediately as it bumped into his forehead. She had reacted reflexively. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the police were looking for her. Although being picked up by the police was surely not something she wanted to happen, at least not yet, she was the first to admit it would be far better than being confronted by her attackers again.
“What, are you a fugitive from justice?” Will quipped, unknowingly interpreting Pia’s gesture correctly.
“Hardly,” Pia said with a fake laugh. Another police car was coming, so she kept the edge of the umbrella angled down.
They reached Fort Washington Avenue and waited for the traffic light to change. There were only another couple of hundred yards to the dorm. Pia relaxed a degree. They had not seen any men in Columbia Medical Center security uniforms. She was looking forward to getting to the relative safety of George’s room.
Genti was the first to spot Pia and Will coming around the corner heading right for them, backlit by the corner streetlight.
“There, in front, fifty yards.”
“Both of them!” Prek voiced with delight. “Fantastic! D-day. Wait for my word. You okay, Neri?”
“Sure!” Neri said with more bravado than he felt. He slipped off the safety on his pistol and pulled on his balaclava as Prek and Genti did the same.
Neri looked out the van’s rear window to see if anybody was coming in the opposite direction.
“Wait!” he said. “Who’s this coming from the dorm? Is that him?”
“Who?” said Prek. He swung around to look at George. Then he flipped open his cell phone and studied the picture Buda had sent him. The only illumination in the van was from the dim streetlights and it was a small photo. He swung back around to look at the man walking with Pia. They could have been twins in the misty half-light. “It has to be the guy with Pia. What is this, the Swedish Olympic team? Everybody is blond.”
