Zero Hour

Malisse sleeved between clots of pedestrians, dodged a bicycle messenger, was almost struck by some cretin motoring past on a Segway at a higher speed than the cars in the avenue—here was a threat to human life exceeding any posed by tobacco.

Now he’d almost caught up with his man, who had stopped on the corner of 58th Street, waiting for a traffic light to change. As the red shifted to green and the man started across the street, Malisse hustled to outstrip him and get a look at his face, edging to his right amid the surrounding crush.

A glance over his left shoulder dashed Malisse’s short-lived flirtation with luck. The man was not Hoffman. Beardless, years older, wearing no glasses, he did not bear any resemblance to Hoffman. Well, there was the hurried walk, the style of dress. Malisse was disappointed, yes, but would not thrash himself for having made his bid.

He slowed to a halt as the man was absorbed by the ceaselessly kinetic crowd. Shoulders bumped his arms, elbows poked his side. On his immediate left near a bank entrance, a dark-haired fellow in an outback coat stood dropping coins in one of those ubiquitous public UpLink Internet terminals Malisse had seen springing up everywhere lately in cities throughout Europe, including the streets of his native Brussels. Malisse looked at him a second, thinking he was the only person in sight besides himself who wasn’t moving in step with the herd. Malisse wondered with droll humor whether he ought to tap him on the shoulder and suggest they form a brotherhood of some kind.

Then the man turned from the terminal’s screen and shot a glance back over at Malisse, appearing to sense his attention. His face was expressionless as their eyes momentarily touched. Malisse felt a little embarrassed — was he now to become both an intrusive nuisance to strangers and partner to muddlers?

Malisse turned back downtown without lingering another second, leaving the man to his private affairs. After a few steps he began to prop up his spirits by thinking positively, and soon had recovered his optimism, deciding he might yet salvage something of practical benefit from the otherwise wasted effort of having sped from his warm, comfortable booth in the cafe.

Here on the street, one could at least have a good smoke.

Malisse reached into his coat for a Gitanes, girding for whatever excuse Jeffreys meant to offer for his surprising incompetence.

* * *

Standing at the public-access Internet terminal, Lathrop waited as the guy who’d briefly looked his way on the sidewalk moved on uptown. He’d had the misplaced, distracted look on his face of someone that had taken a wrong turn and wasn’t quite sure of his bearings — probably nobody to worry about. Still, Lathrop kept a cautious eye on him, following his progress a bit before he turned back to the screen.

Lathrop fed the rest of his coins into the terminal’s pay slot, used its touchpad to access his fictitious Hotmail account, and then punched in a short message for Avram, who had stepped aboard the bus downtown on his instructions minutes earlier.

The message read: Get off 42nd Street stop, enter Grand Central Station at Vanderbilt entrance, wait on west balcony.

After sending it to Avram’s wireless e-mail address, Lathrop cleared the terminal’s screen, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked briskly south toward the station.

* * *

“The pinhole suns,” Lathrop said to Avram over the cellular. He’d called rather than e-mailed now for reasons Avram didn’t pretend to know. “You see them?”

“I see them,” Avram said to his own surprise. He’d never lived anywhere but New York City — couldn’t have begun to count the number of times he’d been through Grand Central Station — and now here he was again. Yet he had never before been aware of those bright circles of sunlight laid out in east-west alignment on the tiled marble floor of the main concourse. He looked up at the sky ceiling from where he stood on the west balcony, tried to locate their source, didn’t find anything, and wondered if they might be projecting from the ornate window grills beneath the ceiling’s mural of Zodiac constellations.

“Avram.”

“Yes?”

“Admire the scenery later,” Lathrop said. “I want you to go down to the concourse, head toward the east side of the terminal. Walk straight along those suns until I call back.”

The phone went dead.

Avram paused before descending the staircase. His eyes moved left to the circular bars and dark wood booths of the Michael Jordan Steak House angling off in a kind of L along the terminal’s north balcony, and then shifted toward the Cipriani Dolci restaurant that occupied the smaller balcony on the south wall. Avram didn’t spot Lathrop in either place. He looked out over the concourse to Metrazur on the opposite balcony, where he could remember the giant Kodak Colorama billboard taking on soot for decades before the terminal’s renovation, but it was too far away for him to tell whether Lathrop might be seated among the elegantly dressed professionals meeting there for coffee and pastries. And say he was. Avram didn’t know how he could manage to see across to this balcony with the unaided eye. Would he be playing the role of a tourist and holding binoculars? Taking photographs with a zoom camera? Or might he find another cover for himself, a different lookout? All Avram knew for certain was that Lathrop had to be somewhere in the midst of the thousands upon thousands circulating about the great rail terminal. Somewhere nearby, watching, observing him. Maybe he was down below, blended in with the clusters of people at the ticket windows and indicator boards, or the travelers around the glassed information kiosk. But Avram could not see him. Knowing Lathrop had tracked his progress since he’d left the Diamond Exchange on 47th Street, he couldn’t see him. Hadn’t once caught a glimpse of him during his walk downtown. And never had while on any of their previous tangos around the city.

Avram tried not to let that bother him, but he was only human. And strangely enough the idea of being watched by Lathrop made him less uncomfortable than his sure knowledge of how much Lathrop would enjoy watching him. The smug confidence he would exude. He was unsurpassed in his ability to see without being seen, gliding like a phantom among the masses. And he was just as good a choreographer of others’ movements. A master of the dance, with all the conceit of one. Though Avram accepted the need to follow along, and could not dispute its wisdom given the stakes, he could have very easily lived without being put through his complicated paces on this bitter winter morning — street by street, station to station. Yes, of course, the dance had been expected. But Avram sometimes wondered if Lathrop took it to excessive lengths, led him through some twists and turns for no reason other than his own amusement.

Avram did his best to suspend these thoughts, and pushed off the balustrade. Then he went downstairs and followed the path of miniature suns to where the escalators ran between the MetLife tower’s lobby and the concourse.

His phone bleeped again and he stopped to answer.

“Okay,” Lathrop said in his ear. “The ramp to the East Side IRT’s just ahead toward Lexington. You know the one.”

Avram remained at a standstill as waves of men and women parted around him, sweeping in from every direction, moving toward the escalators and various railway gates.

“I know it,” he said, glancing at the passage.

“Wait two minutes after I sign off, use that big brass clock over the information booth to count down,” Lathrop said. “Then walk to the ramp… not too fast, not too slow. When you reach the stairs—”

“You’ll get back to me,” Avram said.

* * *

At five minutes to eight, San Jose time, Pete Nimec zipped down from his office on the top floor of UpLink’s Rosita Avenue headquarters to enter a secure conference room in its underground bowls, where he found Megan and Roland Thibodeau, one of his two Global Field Supervisors, already seated at its boardroom-style table.

“Where’s Ricci?” he asked, noting the absence of Thibodeau’s equal in rank with annoyance.

Megan shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.

“Ain’t seen him,” Thibodeau said. Attired in a midnight-blue Sword uniform shirt and pants — his optional preference over a business suit — he ran a hand across his walrus mustache, the bristling remnant of a full brown beard that he had recently whittled off in obvious but unexplained correlation with his diminishing, if still