Gilea stood there in silence, her dark brown eyes trained on the crates.
“I want to have a look,” she said.
Nick gave Kos a nod.
Kos lifted the crowbar, slid its flat edge between the lid and the upper corner of the box, and began prying it open. While he waited, Nick glanced over at Gilea. Her eyes had narrowed, and the tip of her tongue was gliding back and forth across her bottom lip.
The lid finally came loose. Gilea bent over the crate and reached inside, her hand burrowing through a layer of Styrofoam packing material.
The crate was filled with mirrored globes of the sort that would throw off whirling spangles of light in theaters and dance halls. Each was about the size of a grapefruit. Nick had a much larger one suspended from the ceiling in his own club and usually referred to it as a “disco ball.”
“Give me the crowbar.” Gilea extended her hand toward Kos, still looking raptly down into the wooden box.
He passed her the tool without a word.
She studied the reflective globes a moment, then lifted one of them out of the crate and brought the edge of the crowbar sharply down against it. A crack spread across its circumference. She hit it again, splitting it into several pieces, letting them drop to the floor in a small avalanche of glitter dust.
Leaving only the smuggled contents of the globe in her hand.
The flat, rectangular packet had Chinese markings on one side. Its transparent wrapping contained a white, waxy substance that resembled a stick of modeling clay.
“The plastique,” Gilea said. She closed her eyes and stood with her head cocked back, her lips trembling a little, her fingers tightly gripping the packet.
Watching her, Nick thought she almost looked like a woman in ecstasy.
“You do nice work,” she said, turning to him after a long moment. Her eyes gleamed.
He smiled and met her gaze with his own.
“Always,” he said.
Nick Roma watched through the window in his office and waited. Finally Kos stuck his head inside the door and confirmed what Nick already knew. Gilea and her henchman had gone. He nodded to Kos. Kos left, shutting the door behind him.
It was time to check his insurance.
Nick walked across to his mirror, pulled his comb from his back pocket, and straightened his hair. He’d mussed it bowing over the beautiful hand of a dangerous lady.
Then he put his comb up and pressed a small button on the lower left panel of his mirror — a button so completely unobtrusive you had to know it was there to see it.
The giant mirrored panel slowly opened before his eyes. Behind that panel were banks of VCRs, each recording its assigned sector of the building. The tapes in the machines were endless loops, recording for twenty-four hours, then overtaping onto the previous material. That way, he only had to pull them if something worth saving was likely to be on them.
Like insurance.
He reached into the cavity behind the mirror and pulled the tape that recorded events in his office. That tape — of Gilea opening the disco ball and rubbing the C-4 inside like it was a sex toy she couldn’t wait to take home and try out — was a keeper. Not that he’d ever be caught. But if he was, he was betting that that tape, and a library of tapes much like it that he’d stashed in a very secret location, would buy him a really nice “get out of jail free” card.
After he reloaded the tape machine with a new blank tape, he pushed a button inset in the mirror’s inner frame. He watched a giant ultra-thin TV screen pop out of the ceiling at the back of his office, along with eight Bose speakers placed at strategic points throughout the room. Nothing but the best for Nick Roma. As he waited, he couldn’t help thinking of the other uses his mirror could be put to with such a beautiful lady. It made for a very pleasant picture.
Unlikely as such a scene was, a man needed his fantasies.
They kept him young.
He popped the tape into the VCR/DVD reader inset behind a hidden panel in his office wall, then settled back in his desk chair to watch the show.
Halfway across the city, in an abandoned warehouse whose ownership was shrouded by so many shell companies that even the most motivated searcher would never sniff it out, a remote feed of the very same footage that Nick was watching loaded itself in digital format into a powerful computer. Stamped electronically with the date the footage was taken and the location it was taped from, the information existed quietly, secretly, almost invisibly. Nick’s system performed its job perfectly.
In its own way, the scene just recorded, and all the others like it stored on the hard drive, were as explosive as the C-4 Nick had just sold Gilea.
Information, like plastique, could kill.
And, soon, it would.
ELEVEN
Police commissioner Bill Harrison could hardly wait for the Titanic to sink so he could hurry home to his report.
In general, he hated musicals. Just didn’t get them. And the one he was watching right now had to be the most confusing one he’d ever sat through. The worst maritime disaster in history, maybe fifteen hundred people drowned, eaten by sea creatures, God only knew, and somebody’d gotten the idea to turn it into a Broadway spectacle. He really didn’t see the entertainment value in such horrendous human tragedy. What was everybody singing and kicking up their heels about? They were all going down with the ship!
He glanced over at his wife, who was in the seat beside him gazing intently at the stage. She seemed to be enjoying herself. No, not seemed to be. Was. He could tell from the tilt of her chin, the faint dimples at the corners of her mouth. When two people were married as long as they’d been, it got so you could read each other at a glance. Later, over coffee and cake, she would speak appreciatively of the sets, the score, the choreography, the staging. And he would study her with something akin to the love-struck awe he’d felt thirty years ago on their first high school date, admiring her lively, intelligent features, her smooth coffee-brown skin, the way she put together her clothes, and the graceful movements of her hands as she commented on the various aspects of the show, marveling at everything about her for that matter, and wondering what he had ever done to deserve the constant support she had given him throughout their marriage, a faith and perseverance that helped lift him from the tough streets of Harlem to the highest post in the New York Police Department.
But later was later, and now was still Act One of a maddeningly incomprehensible songfest about a magnificent wreck whose passengers had suffered a cold, airless death. Harrison glanced at his watch, wondering how much longer his own torment would last. Nine P.M. An hour to go. Maybe more. Didn’t some plays run until ten-thirty or eleven?
Harrison felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment. That was something the city’s top cop really should know, wasn’t it? He damn well hoped he wasn’t losing touch. You could dress Times Square up all you wanted, you could even push the sex shops off the strip to make room for the wonderful world of Disney, but the hands under those bright white Mickey Mouse gloves would always have grimy fingernails, and it would always be a place where vice and violence could reach out of the shadows and drag you down like those dancing fools onstage. So much fuss had been made about the neighborhood’s renaissance in recent years, one could sometimes forget that a decrease in crime did not necessarily mean the criminals had packed their bags and gone south. In fact, it was only an intensified and very visible police presence in the area that held the bump-and-run muggers, junkies, hookers and other lowlife at bay. There were still pockets of darkness amid the lights of the Great White Way, and people needed to be aware of them. Especially the PC.