“The deal is that whatever Mikhail says goes to the CIA,” she said. “Immediately.”
“Mistake,” Burt said, but she had already gone.
“Coin box on Ninth, right next to the subway,” Dupont breathed. “They all have it. All of them out there.”
“Jesus,” Burt said. “She’s stayed right on top of her exit point, just as we fanned away from it.”
They identified the subway station. Burt looked at the single line that ran north to south.
“That’s where she’ll head,” he said. “Somewhere down that line.” His finger followed the subway line downtown. “She’s going there. She’s picked a route with only a north and south, one line. No exit route to Brooklyn, just Manhattan. I guess she doesn’t know the New York subway.”
“We don’t know that,” Dupont said. “Maybe she’s been studying it for months.”
“I don’t think so, Bob. She’s improvising.”
“That’s the worst,” Dupont replied.
Then everyone in the room fell silent at Burt’s raised arm command, and in everyone’s mind, there was a picture of teams descending towards the Ninth Street subway from all directions.
They waited. Dupont had left the room. He was setting teams at the stations to the south and north, three to the north and every single one to the south, as Burt had ordered.
Eleven men on foot and three cars arrived at the subway almost simultaneously. They began to fan down the blocks in four directions. Others arrived and hurled themselves down the stairs under the street. She’d picked the commuter hour, and the platforms were five deep.
Larry was the sole figure who entered the phone box. He didn’t expect to find anything and was surprised to see, among the cards and phone numbers of hookers, a new one written in bold handwriting that just said, “Logan, watch your back. That is where I’ll be.”
Larry grinned, for the first time in days. He flipped the card into the pocket of his coat; a souvenir of her for now, and one he would take great pleasure in delivering to Logan personally.
Anna stepped into the waiting cab. She knew she had a minute or so, maybe less. She told the driver to take her east, and then after several blocks to chase uptown along Park, all the way to midtown and beyond, until they reached the Carlyle Hotel.
They would look for her back there, at the downtown end of Manhattan, in the poor areas near where she’d telephoned. She could have easily found a place for the night back there, and she trusted they’d fall for that.
A doorman opened the back door of the cab, and she stepped out, giving him a tip the way she’d seen Logan do at the apartment two nights before when they were met by the porter. She walked up to the main door and tipped the uniformed flunkey, who smiled and spoke a welcome.
Once inside, she made her way across the lobby to the bathrooms, where she spent twenty minutes ironing out the afternoon’s activities from her dishevelled appearance. Then she walked across the marble lobby to the long bar, looking at nobody, until she reached a suitable table, as she saw it, where she took a seat and ordered a glass of champagne.
The bar was more than half full at this hour, and it was a large area. She looked around, without stopping on any of the faces.
Don’t look at any of them, she thought. Wait for the one that comes to you.
By six thirty she had turned down two offers and had then been invited to join a table of three businessmen away from the bar.
She was, she told them, a beautician from Paris, on her first visit to New York, who had always wanted to see the Carlyle. Two of the men insisted they all have dinner, and she declined. She wanted just a quiet evening. She had an early start next day.
But when the pecking order of her preference from among the three of them had been silently and subtly established, the other two left and the lucky winner, unable to believe his good fortune, suggested they dine alone. After a lengthy preamble, he finally suggested his room, a dinner for two, another bottle of whatever she wanted. Russian men would have taken half the time to get there, she thought.
“Are you married?” she said, having already seen the ring.
“Does it matter?” the man said.
“I don’t want this unless you’re attached,” she said. “I’m not the committed type.”
Ten minutes later she was in his room, with his key, while he picked up another from the concierge.
Ten minutes after that, he was lying on the floor, bound and gagged with the cord that tied back the drapes. She just had time to drag him into the bathroom and switch on the shower when the dinner he’d ordered downstairs arrived.
She ate from both plates, drank a bottle of water, and had the trays removed before dragging him back into the room. She checked his breathing, put a pillow under his head, and told him that if he moved from the floor in the night she’d kill him.
Then she slept for nine hours.
Chapter 30
THE SUN CAUGHT THE half-sunken pier on Seventieth Street, and the flat dawn light whited out the glass of the high-rises across the Hudson River.
Water dripped with a steady, pulsating monotony from the concrete pillars that supported the highway above her, and she jogged slowly in the damp, pillared arcade, observing with a steady eye the other, infrequent figures along the path: a couple of vagrants, another jogger, a man taking pictures in the dawn light who at first alerted her suspicions but was clearly on some project that didn’t include her. She knew she was alone, as much as it was possible to know.
The river walk to her right was punctuated with steel benches, four seats to a bench, and a few ferries and harbour vessels plied the river beyond.
She wore jogging pants and shoes and a hat and earmuffs she’d bought the day before with Vladimir’s money—less than a hundred dollars from a closeout sale on the Bowery for the whole ensemble—and, having jogged for a mile now, she was warm enough in the frozen morning that was breaking over New York City.
She was where she needed to be—and where no one else but Mikhail would find her. But she would jog for another half mile and then return to the fourth bench beyond the pier, which she’d passed a few minutes earlier. That way she could see the signs of anything untoward.
On the way back, vigilant to both changes and similarities in the faces and behaviour of the few people she observed, she was satisfied that she could make her approach. The fourth bench was just visible about a hundred yards away. She could see nobody anywhere near it. She checked her watch. It was time.
She jogged up to the bench and continued to jog on the spot, as she took a water bottle from her belt and drank. She then sat on the second seat from the left for a minute or so. The metal seat was icy through her jogging pants. After a few minutes had passed, she got up and moved to the seat on the far right. That was the signal.
She began to wait, looking out across the river, her back to the highway and the arcade beneath it. The steam of her breath puffed in clouds around her in the still-freezing air. Before her body temperature dropped, she took a fleece jacket that had hung around her waist and put it on.
After just over four and a half minutes, a man sat down on the seat at the far end. She saw him only in her peripheral vision, caught sight of a man’s coat, a man’s hands emerging from the pockets and being placed on his knees.
“It’s not a morning for sitting still,” he said. She recognised the voice.
“I have to keep walking,” she replied.
The exchange was as arranged. She immediately got up from the seat and half walked, half jogged away from the view of the river and back into the concrete pillared arcade. Once there, she turned left and walked at a steady pace.
There was the small workman’s hut Mikhail had told her about in his message. It was built of composite
