“Anything?” he barked across the room in a voice that travelled right through the apartment.
“We think we have her cell phone,” a voice came from the room next door.
Burt hauled himself out of the chair and walked next door, cigar clamped between his teeth and his jacket swinging as if he had a cosh in the pocket.
“Where?” Burt demanded.
The young man in green combat pants and yellow T-shirt with “Animal Lighthouse” written on it replied without taking his eyes away from the screen, even though the information was coming through headphones.
“It seems she dropped it down a drain when she came out on Broadway,” he said.
Good girl, Burt thought, and damned her gently in the same thought.
“Do you want it retrieved? is the message, sir.”
“Not now. It won’t tell us anything. I want everyone on standby, on every block from Ninth down,” Burt said.
Bob Dupont came up behind Burt.
“Have we got more resources?” Burt asked him.
“We’ll have over two hundred men on the streets before nightfall,” he said. “And then more as the night goes on.”
Burt didn’t answer.
“Why this area, Burt?” Dupont said.
“She’ll have to stay somewhere,” Burt replied. “Even though she’s Russian, she doesn’t seem the type who sleeps on the streets. Anywhere north of here, there’ll be nowhere that’ll take anything but a credit card. We have to narrow it down to the ethnic districts, the places where being American doesn’t mean much more than wearing a baseball cap and flak pants. And where they’ll take her cash, no questions asked, unless they think they can earn more by turning her in.”
“It’s a long shot.”
“Of course it’s a long shot, Bob. But they’re always the big prize bets.” Burt grinned at his security chief, who, not for the first time, found his boss’s eternal enthusiasm and optimism something he would never understand.
“You think she’ll meet Mikhail?” This time Dupont whispered in Burt’s ear.
As he had done several times that afternoon, Burt erupted with laughter, but he didn’t say it was because a whisper in a room full of detection devices, albeit aimed out there, was what amused him.
“She will,” he said loudly.
“Why?”
“Because she needs me as much as I need her.”
“The kid,” Dupont said in agreement.
“If you wish to be so indelicate,” Burt replied.
At just after five thirty that afternoon, when darkness had descended over the city—“She’ll wait for the darkness,” Burt had prophesied—a call was picked up from a monitor in one of the smaller rooms. A twenty-two-year-old female graduate from Columbia, wearing an impossibly short skirt, called it through. It was relayed at once to the ops room.
But before Burt answered, he walked the corridor, exhorting his troops to work like they’d never even dreamed of working.
“Find the location, children,” he said. “Think ‘bonus,’ the size of which is beyond your wildest dreams.”
When he returned to the ops room, she’d been on the line for nearly a minute. Burt took a pair of phones. A coin box, Burt thought, not three miles from here I’ll bet.
“I’ll do the talking,” she said.
“Sure,” Burt answered.
“We’ve a minute less thanks to your delay. I know about Logan and the photographs. I know of your deception in France. I know the Russians never had my boy. So from here we have a shared aim. I’ll follow through with Mikhail tomorrow, and then we make a deal.”
One of the kids from the corridor room ran in with a slip of paper, which was a zeroed map with a large “X.” Burt thrust it at Dupont, who ran from the room, all sixty-three years of him rejuvenated into a silver-haired sophomore athlete.
Burt remained silent.
“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.