considerably padded, waistline.
Nimec motioned at the room’s large wall-mounted plasma screen.
“We’re about to have a video hookup with New York,” he said. “He knew about it Friday afternoon. I told him before we left.”
“So did I,” Thibodeau said. His throaty Cajun accent made the word “I” come out sounding like
Nimec frowned.
“Either of you try reaching him on his cell?”
“More than once,” Megan said.
“Got his voicemail, that’s about it,” Thibodeau said.
Nimec’s frown deepened. This was clearly not turning out to be his morning.
“We need him here for the meeting,” he said. “It’s too important for him to miss.”
“Could give you plenty examples of Ricci not being around when we need him of late, except you’d know about most of ’em before I opened my mouth.” Thibodeau glanced down at the table, still swiping at his mustache. “Some men does dead before they time,” he said in a near undertone.
Nimec looked at him from where he stood inside the doorway.
“What are you telling me, Rollie?” he said.
Thibodeau lifted his gaze, turned it slowly and heavily onto Nimec’s.
“I’m tellin’ you not to wait,” he said.
Avram descended the stairs to the subway, paid his fare with a Metrocard, and went over to the compass rose at the center of the mezzanine floor, a connecting hub for multiple northbound, southbound, and crosstown lines that was the second busiest in Manhattan, surpassed in usage only by the station where he was headed. Even now, past the morning rush hour, there were riders bustling around him, turnstiles clacking in his ears, trains rumbling toward and away from the platforms a level below.
He stood against the compass’s round focal pillar and faced north — the only cardinal point marked on the rosette.
His cellular beeped twice — the alert tone for another e-mail. Avram called the new message up on the display and opened it.
TAKE THE UNDERPASS TO YOUR RIGHT, it read.
Back in the coffeehouse with his cell phone to his ear, Malisse was going through the requisite formality of asking how it happened.
“Help me to understand, please,” he said in a quiet voice, his words carrying a faint Flemish accent. “Why would you vacate your post when you knew our man was in the building, and could
“Who says I vacated?” Jeffreys replied. “Did
“I believe,” Malisse said, “you did.”
“Uh-uh, no way you heard me say it. Because that’d mean the post was unattended when I stepped out, and I can tell you it ain’t so. Never been so in all my years here. Never will be, either.”
Malisse sighed over his mug… steam rising from an ordinary but full-bodied Italian roast this time.
“I’m merely trying to determine what went wrong—”
“That’s fine,” Jeffreys said. “But stick to what I told you and don’t twist my words around. This spy business feels lousy enough without me havin’ to be insulted by your accusations.”
“No disrespect was intended.”
“Fine,” Jeffreys repeated. And took an audible breath. “What went wrong is I went on a ten-minute break fully thinkin’ our man would be up in the big room a while.”
“Waiting for his appointment.”
“Uh-huh. What he called an
“But he didn’t wait for it.”
“No, he didn’t. And since my spotter don’t know anything about my snoopin’, and you and my bosses don’t want nobody told about it, I couldn’t very well have him question our man about where he was goin’. Bein’ none of our security team’s affair, it’d make
“But our man did leave behind a note.”
“For his customer, right.”
“Katari.”
“Right,” Jeffreys said. “Two, three sentences. Just to apologize for runnin’ out like he did, explain some emergency came up that wouldn’t take long, and ask him to sit tight in the Club till he got back.”
“Which he… Katari, that is… continues to do as we speak.”
“Right again,” Jeffreys said.
Malisse remained silent as a group of people at a nearby booth cleared out and filed past him toward the door. What was he to comment? Crude at best, Plan A was at least out of the way, albeit disposed of sooner than anticipated. Already well formulated in his mind, Plan B would be far more elegant and effective. Expensive, too, alas… but Lembock had put no restrictions on his budget, and his years in the
“I’d like to ask one more question,” he said. “Without casting any blame or insult at you, but rather for future reference. So we can decide how to best adjust our methods of working together.”
“Shoot.”
“Is this morning break of yours something regular?”
“Regular as my sixty-five-year-old ass startin’ to hurt,” Jeffreys replied. “Also regular as me havin’ an urge to smoke a cigarette, which the law says I got to do on the goddamn
Malisse smiled ruefully, and told himself he should have known it all along.
His ears filled with the metallic rattle and squeal of an arriving train, Avram trotted from the mouth of the underpass to the wide 42nd Street shuttle station, where the S line between Times Square and Grand Central operated on four tracks. The two trains currently waiting were on Track 1 and Track 3. Though the train on Track 1 was almost packed, its doors had been left open for additional riders to squeeze aboard. A lighted sign above the platform said it would be the next out.
Avram presumed the train he’d just heard clanking to a stop was on Track 3 to his right. It sat empty, its doors closed. The conductor would open them for passengers once its alternate was about to move, and close them again moments after receiving the signal that the other had begun its return trip from Times Square, providing a continuous and, by the standards of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, impressively punctual service loop between the stations.
Avram reached the platform with ample time to catch the train on Track 1, but let it go without him. Lathrop had directed him to board the third car of the second train to leave the station.
And so Avram did, dancing to his lead.
Among the first of the passengers through the train’s retracting doors, he saw plenty of unoccupied seats inside. A rare thing in itself, their availability was a distinct lure, but he felt too charged with nervous energy to take one. Instead he chose to stand, gripping a hand rung as the car loaded up with people. That the choice was his own, and not another shot called by Lathrop, made it all the more desirable.
The train idled with its doors wide open for several minutes. As he waited for it to get underway, Avram found himself listening to a scrawny, long-haired kid who’d strolled aboard playing an acoustic guitar riotous with decals and hand-painted decorations. A donation can in front of him, he’d launched into a Mexican-flavored instrumental that was a fierce tease to Avram’s memory, something he recognized but couldn’t quite place, but associated with summer nights of another, distant time. Ten, eleven years old, a portable transistor radio hidden under his pillow, he’d spent so many of those nights listening to top-forty rock and roll in violation of his father’s rigid decree, alone with the secret pleasure that only came when youth came into contact with the forbidden.
WABC AM, he thought. Cousin Brucie playing all your favorite hits.
