coat, just as he’d arrived nearly an hour before.
“We’re almost through,” he breathed into a mike on his coat. “Solomon is leaving,” he explained, using the code name for Vladimir.
She’s decided to let him leave first, he thought, and after trying to find any significance attached to that, dismissed it as one of those unnecessary complexities that plague an operative and fog an otherwise transparent situation.
He put his weight on the other foot and waited.
After nearly ten minutes he began to be agitated and radioed to the point man at the bus stop to get himself inside the cafe.
There was another wait.
Finally the words came through. “She must be in the bathroom,” the point man said. “Her coat’s here.”
But it was the words “must be” that alerted Larry’s senses to a complexity that, this time, might be worth taking notice of.
“I’m coming over.”
He entered the cafe, saw the coat, and immediately sensed something missing other than her.
“Where’s her hat?” he said.
“Her hat?”
“Yes, where’s her fucking hat?” He checked the pockets of her coat and found nothing. Without waiting for an answer, he pushed his way past and into the corridor towards the kitchen and bathrooms. He found the ladies’ bathroom and roughly pushed open the door, to find it empty. He immediately radioed the operative outside the gym.
“Get up north on Broadway. Fast. She’ll be on the sidewalk. No coat, just a hat and whatever she was wearing underneath.” He realised he couldn’t remember.
He then radioed the man in the taxi, ordered him to get out four streets up and come back down Broadway in the other direction, and gave the same description.
Larry went past the bathrooms, opened a door into a back room, and saw the metal door on the far side. He yanked it open and saw footsteps in the crystalline snow, leading to a fire escape.
He ignored the man who seemed to be asking what the hell he thought he was doing and ran across the yard and up the stairs two at a time until he found where the steps entered an office.
Chapter 29
BURT SAT AT A desk in one of the anterooms at the apartment. He was mystified and—for the first time— troubled now by Anna’s behaviour. There seemed no reason for her disappearance. He’d given her everything she asked for.
He was surrounded by activity, but deep in thought. Electronic surveillance monitors were up and running within half an hour of her disappearance. Young men in T-shirts and with headphones over long, unkempt, and in some cases dirty hair pored over data that crept in multicoloured lines, like cracks in a rock, across half a dozen screens.
Burt himself was a river of apparent calm among the choppiness of his many tributaries. He sat puffing on a cigar that choked up his immediate surroundings, and if anyone objected, you couldn’t tell. Working for Burt Miller was an honour his employees equated with working for one of the more public legends of the American dream. He didn’t demand anything from these men and women except an almost holy dedication, but for them, it was also a secret pleasure to belong to Burt.
“Anything?” he barked across the room in a voice that travelled right through the apartment.
“We think we have her cell phone,” a voice came from the room next door.
Burt hauled himself out of the chair and walked next door, cigar clamped between his teeth and his jacket swinging as if he had a cosh in the pocket.
“Where?” Burt demanded.
The young man in green combat pants and yellow T-shirt with “Animal Lighthouse” written on it replied without taking his eyes away from the screen, even though the information was coming through headphones.
“It seems she dropped it down a drain when she came out on Broadway,” he said.
Good girl, Burt thought, and damned her gently in the same thought.
“Do you want it retrieved? is the message, sir.”
“Not now. It won’t tell us anything. I want everyone on standby, on every block from Ninth down,” Burt said.
Bob Dupont came up behind Burt.
“Have we got more resources?” Burt asked him.
“We’ll have over two hundred men on the streets before nightfall,” he said. “And then more as the night goes on.”
Burt didn’t answer.
“Why this area, Burt?” Dupont said.
“She’ll have to stay somewhere,” Burt replied. “Even though she’s Russian, she doesn’t seem the type who sleeps on the streets. Anywhere north of here, there’ll be nowhere that’ll take anything but a credit card. We have to narrow it down to the ethnic districts, the places where being American doesn’t mean much more than wearing a baseball cap and flak pants. And where they’ll take her cash, no questions asked, unless they think they can earn more by turning her in.”
“It’s a long shot.”
“Of course it’s a long shot, Bob. But they’re always the big prize bets.” Burt grinned at his security chief, who, not for the first time, found his boss’s eternal enthusiasm and optimism something he would never understand.
“You think she’ll meet Mikhail?” This time Dupont whispered in Burt’s ear.
As he had done several times that afternoon, Burt erupted with laughter, but he didn’t say it was because a whisper in a room full of detection devices, albeit aimed out there, was what amused him.
“She will,” he said loudly.
“Why?”
“Because she needs me as much as I need her.”
“The kid,” Dupont said in agreement.
“If you wish to be so indelicate,” Burt replied.
At just after five thirty that afternoon, when darkness had descended over the city—“She’ll wait for the darkness,” Burt had prophesied—a call was picked up from a monitor in one of the smaller rooms. A twenty-two- year-old female graduate from Columbia, wearing an impossibly short skirt, called it through. It was relayed at once to the ops room.
But before Burt answered, he walked the corridor, exhorting his troops to work like they’d never even dreamed of working.
“Find the location, children,” he said. “Think ‘bonus,’ the size of which is beyond your wildest dreams.”
When he returned to the ops room, she’d been on the line for nearly a minute. Burt took a pair of phones. A coin box, Burt thought, not three miles from here I’ll bet.
“I’ll do the talking,” she said.
“Sure,” Burt answered.
“We’ve a minute less thanks to your delay. I know about Logan and the photographs. I know of your deception in France. I know the Russians never had my boy. So from here we have a shared aim. I’ll follow through with Mikhail tomorrow, and then we make a deal.”
One of the kids from the corridor room ran in with a slip of paper, which was a zeroed map with a large “X.” Burt thrust it at Dupont, who ran from the room, all sixty-three years of him rejuvenated into a silver-haired sophomore athlete.
Burt remained silent.
