Throughout the entire unpleasant train ride Pia had acted like a zombie, seemingly impervious to her environment. A few people, mostly men, tried to talk to her, but she didn’t respond in the slightest. She was in a daze, going over and over the events since Rothman and Yamamoto had fallen ill. It was as if she were experiencing a living nightmare. Having her suspicions corroborated at the OCME afforded her no satisfaction in the slightest. All it had done was cement her fears and sense of dread. She didn’t know specifically if the lethal agent that had been given to Rothman and Yamamoto was polonium, but her intuition told her it was. What to do now was the question for which she had no answer. Maybe she should just run and hide someplace until all the pieces fell wherever they were going to fall. The reality was that she had certainly opened the floodgates at the OCME. Whether she liked it or not or intended it or not, the police were now going to be involved, along with every other law enforcement agency. In her vernacular, the shit was about to hit the fan.
Pia’s intention when she got out of the subway was to hurry back to the dorm. She felt her only resource was George. Even though she was under no illusion that George would know what to do, she hoped she could use him as a sounding board. The fact was, she had no one else. She’d thought briefly about involving the two other stalwarts in her life-Sheila Brown and the mother superior-to get their advice, but the story was much too long and complex and more important, Pia was reluctant to put either of them at risk. In the current situation, knowledge was dangerous.
Although Pia was desperate to get to the dorm, she was also terrified. The moment she’d emerged from the relative safety of the subway, she felt inordinately vulnerable. The men who had attacked her said they would be watching her, and she believed them. It meant that they were there, lurking somewhere in the darkness surrounding the medical center. Although where she was at that moment, near the corner of Broadway and 168th Street, was lit and crowded with commuters, looking west down 168th Street was neither.
Holding her umbrella in the crook of her neck, Pia got out her cell phone, which she’d turned off before going into the OCME. She switched it on. Immediately she saw she had more than ten missed calls and three voice mails. She called George, but he didn’t answer. Instead she left a voice message of her own: “George, it’s me. It’s about six forty-five. I’m at the hospital entrance to the subway at 168th Street. Can you come get me so we can walk back to the dorm together? Okay, I’ll be waiting here.”
52.
HAVEN AVENUE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 6:59 P.M.
George had not meant to fall asleep, but he had. It was a legacy from the soporific lecture. There was also the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping as well as usual with everything that was going on. Not only was he asleep, he was in the deepest stages such that he didn’t hear his cell phone emit its cricket chirping. The phone was on his desk not ten feet away. He didn’t hear it again when it chirped fifteen minutes later. But that call brought him up from where he’d been such that when the phone chirped a third time, he got up and answered: “Hello.”
“George, it’s Grandma. I tried you before, but I missed you. How are you?”
George was suddenly wide awake. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, and he fumbled for his watch, checking the time. It was almost seven, and he panicked. Where the hell was Pia?
“Grandma, I’m good, but I’ll have to call you back, okay?”
“Oh, okay, George. Make sure you do now. We haven’t talked in a while. Is everything good?”
“Everything’s good. I’ll call soon! Gotta go!”
George saw he’d missed two calls and listened to the message Pia left the first time. He checked his watch. Shit, she’d been waiting fourteen minutes. As he pulled on a pair of shoes, he tried calling her but got her voice mail. He then raced out into the hall, heading for the elevators.
Prek and Genti sat in the front of the van anxiously scanning passersby through the windshield. Neri was perched uncomfortably on the milk crate, just a little behind and between them. What had been easy earlier, checking out the students as they passed, was now much more difficult. There was a streetlamp at the corner of Fort Washington and Haven, but it was far enough away not to be of much help. It was still raining and much darker. They had been there long enough to be stiff and sore, and in foul moods.
“Where the fuck is she?” Prek questioned morosely. He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. “This is turning into a bitch.”
Neri, as the most inexperienced, was suffering the most. He’d been so keyed up with excitement, and now that he had had to wait he felt let down, depressed. Although his role was going to be the easiest in that he was going to do the hit, he’d never actually killed anyone before. He had his right hand in his jacket pocket holding his military-issue Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol with the thumb safety on. He’d fired the gun hundreds of times in practice and considered himself a good shot. But shooting a man in the head at point-blank range was a very different proposition from hitting static targets at twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred feet. Yet he knew he had to do it to rise within the crew. Like Prek and Genti, he had his wool balaclava in his lap, ready to pull it over his head and swing into action.
An NYPD cruiser drove by, and all three reflexively crouched down. Prek watched it disappear in his side mirror. Then another NYPD cruiser went past, and Prek tensed up further. He watched that one disappear as well.
“You see that?” he said.
“Of course,” Genti said. “It’s Friday night. I wouldn’t give it much thought.”
“I don’t like to see cops in the area when we’re doing a job. Where the hell is this bitch?”
“It’s getting harder and harder to see these kids’ faces until they’re right on top of us,” Genti said.
A group of three students in lab coats walked past the van, followed by a couple of people walking alone. One of them caught Genti’s attention, and he leaned forward and picked up his balaclava. A minute later he slumped back in his seat. It was yet another false alarm.
Pia had been walking back and forth along the side of the subway stairs, waiting for a call from George, trying to figure out where he could be. They had definitely planned on getting together when she got back from the OCME. More than once, she had resolved to quit waiting for George and walk back to the dorm by herself, at least until she looked down 168th Street and saw that it was darker and more deserted than it had been fifteen minutes earlier. Pia had been about to call George for the third time when she’d been frightened by a hand on her shoulder. Spinning around, she had had to restrain herself from lashing out at her attacker. But it wasn’t an attacker. It was Will McKinley, who’d come up from the subway and caught sight of her pacing back and forth. After initial small talk and mutual sympathies about Rothman’s and Yamamoto’s passing, Pia had latched onto him for company back to the dorm. As an enticement, as if she needed it, she had offered to share her umbrella.
After reminding each other about the deaths, they’d each regressed into their own worlds. They walked in silence until beyond the 168th Street hospital entrance. Pia wondered what Will might say if she told him what she now knew. She thought he probably wouldn’t believe her.
“I was surprised to see you,” Will said. “Did you come out of the subway like I did?”
“I did,” Pia admitted. She tried to think of what to tell him if he asked where she’d been, so she changed the subject. “Have you seen George at all today?”