Zero Hour

support cars he’d been expecting from Manhattan were stuck in a typical weekday morning logjam on the George Washington Bridge, and, guessing from their last radioed status report, he’d be lucky to see them pull up inside an hour, or realistically ninety minutes. Obviously, he couldn’t wait that long for an assist. Couldn’t wait period without taking some kind of action. But any action he took could blow an operation that had gained whole new degrees of urgency literally overnight, and he wasn’t about to make any impulsive decisions on that score… which brought his hurried thought process on the matter all the way back to square one. Or did it?

Bristow lifted his third coffee of the morning to his lips and hesitated before sipping. Its loathsomeness aside, there might be another reason to put it down. He couldn’t dance rings around the truck without becoming a spectacle. But he could step out for another cup, make a relatively inconspicuous attempt at updating the status of the man with the van on his way to and from the McDonald’s. If that wideass truck still presented a complete obstruction to him, so be it. It beat doing nothing.

Bristow lowered the coffee cup to the floor of the car, got out, turned toward the restaurant, and was about to take a kind of wide, ambling path toward its entrance when the longhauler’s engine suddenly throbbed into gear behind him.

Bristow froze mid-step. Five minutes that truck had sat there in the motel court. Nobody exiting to make a pitstop at the restaurant. And now it was simply leaving.

In his considered opinion that stunk to the fucking moon.

Casting off subtlety, Bristow whipped his head around, looked across the road as the truck began angling out of the lot—

And knew he’d been beat.

The U-Haul van was already gone.

* * *

They had arranged to meet at the south side of Washington Square Park on one of the benches facing the large dry fountain area and the arch, and that was where Tom Ricci sat watching him approach from between the wind-stripped trees to his right. There weren’t many people around on this cold January morning, just small, scattered groups of college kids from New York University, and some pigeons and squirrels looking for handout crumbs.

He waited as the man in the outback coat settled onto the bench at his side, then half turned his head toward him and waited some more in silence.

“Ricci,” the man said. “Suppose it was nicer weather last time we got together in the park.”

Ricci looked at him fully.

“You’ve got my name,” he said. “Give me one I can call you.”

The man sat there a moment with his lips slightly parted, his head canted to the side.

“Lathrop,” he said after a moment.

“That a first or last?”

“Yeah.”

Ricci saw a smile touch his lips.

“I’m not in the mood to play games,” he said. “Why the hell did you bring me here?”

“I told you in my e-mail to San Jose.”

“You told me you had something about one of our competitors had to do with laser research. Some information we might want for ourselves.”

“Thought I used the word plans instead of information,” the man said. “And wrote East Coast competitor.”

“Which one?”

“Is this for you or for UpLink?”

Ricci looked at him again.

“Which one?” he repeated.

A brief hesitation. Then a shrug.

“Kiran.”

Ricci nodded.

“Okay, Lathrop,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“You don’t really think that comes free, do you?”

“I think I need to know more about what you’re selling before I worry about value.”

Silence. Two squirrels with jet-black fur skittered down a tree trunk to the waterless fountain, one chasing the other. The first squirrel gained a slight lead, perched on its lip a second with its tail twitching as if to bait its pursuer, then leaped off along a flagstone path and up another tree as their capering resumed.

“This is the only place in the city they have black squirrels,” Lathrop said. “Always thought they hibernated in winter, but that was before I got to New York.”

Ricci’s eyes shifted back to Lathrop from where they had watched the squirrels climb in excited contest.

“Maybe things are different here,” he said.

“Or maybe I didn’t know as much as I figured I did about squirrels.”

Ricci smiled a little, waited.

Lathrop sat back with his hands in his pockets.

“I move around a lot,” he said. “Been doing that for a while now. Get a little bit going, make what I can of it, move again once the going looks to be heading toward the rocks.” He paused. “Always does sooner or later, you know.”

Ricci considered that.

“This later?” he said.

Lathrop faced him, dark eyes meeting his pale blue ones.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened to me about half an hour ago,” he said. “Lost an important briefcase.”

“This later?”

Lathrop breathed, exhaled.

“Zero hour,” he said. “Time to move or crash.”

Another pause. Ricci held Lathrop’s gaze.

“I need more,” he said.

“You’re getting to where it costs.”

“We can take care of that part between us,” Ricci said. “Come on. Talk about the part I need right now.”

Lathrop sat there for a very long moment, then finally nodded.

“There’s a weapon,” he began. “A serious weapon.”

* * *

Ricci phoned Glenn on his cellular from a coffee shop bubbling with students on West 4th Street, opposite the broad stone steps of NYU’s Tisch Hall.

“Ricci,” Glenn said, his semi-distracted voice that of someone glancing at a caller ID display. “I was just gonna contact you.”

“You out of the cop’s office yet?” Ricci paused, absorbing Glenn’s words. “Hold it, contact me about what?”

“Something’s gone down upstate,” Glenn said. Speaking quickly now. “Earl shook our guy at the motel before his support could get there.”

Ricci took a snatch of breath.

“Shook him in the U-Haul?”

“Yeah, looks like some kind of setup,” Glenn said. “Noriko got word over the phone and cut the meeting with Ruiz short—”

“You give him anything on Earl or Kiran?”

“No, not yet. We didn’t know how much to share, wanted to figure out what to do next—”

“Never mind figuring,” Ricci said. “Just hurry up and meet me at headquarters.”