It was Ralph Brackman, Lamont realized. The DNA false-positive.
Except his hair was longer and he appeared to have gained weight in the few days since the visit to his house in Jersey. And hair didn’t grow that quickly. Muscles either. Were the changes an illusion, a function of his stiff woolen peacoat, or shadow play? In any event, it was definitely Brackman. Lamont would have recognized that grin through the most elaborate disguise.
Brackman kept walking; Lamont kept following. If Brackman recognized Lamont, he hadn’t shown it. From half a block away, so far out of context, maybe he wouldn’t.
“Mr. Brackman,” Lamont called out.
Brackman either didn’t hear or continued ahead for some other reason. Lamont could only guess why: The Central Harlem blocks between here and 125th represented the five boroughs’ greatest concentrations of brothels and illicit gambling parlors — places you left keeping your head down as a matter of course. You would pretend not to notice a friend or, of all people, a Fed.
A moment later, though, Brackman turned back. He looked right past Lamont, tracking the spray of approaching headlights to a taxi. The medallion number on the roof was dark — the cabbie already had a fare.
Shoulders sagging, Brackman tramped on.
Which was greater, Lamont wondered, the odds of Brackman being here now or those of a DNA false-positive?
Jogging to catch up, Lamont shouted, “Mr. Brackman.”
The man stopped in the center of a cone of streetlight. Turning, he said, “You got me mistaken for somebody else, man.” The voice was different, too — deeper, and smoky.
The guy could be Brackman’s cousin, Lamont thought, or brother even, if he had one. Then he remembered: Ralph Brackman was the only surviving child of lifelong New Yorkers Arthur and Penny Brackman. Lamont revised his odds, taking into account the likelihood of a mistake in government death records and a hit man faking his own death: Seeing this man here wasn’t such a long shot after all. Because monozygotic twins had identical DNA sequences.
Reaching for his holster, Lamont got out, “Sir, I’m Special Agent Warren Lamont with the F—”
— before the guy bolted across Lenox Avenue, narrowly missing the cab barreling around the corner from 112th.
The cab driver pounded both his horn and his brakes. His tires shrieked. His passengers, two young men, both screamed. Lamont threw himself backward, landing on the curb, its rough cement tearing into his palms. The taxi missed his feet by inches, continuing uptown, leaving behind only faint echoes.
Shaking the lingering taillight glare out of his eyes, Lamont sprang up and sprinted across the street and tried to close the block-long gap between him and the Brackman look-alike. The guy needed three strides for every two by Lamont. Perhaps cognizant of his disadvantage, he took a sharp turn up into yet another bodega. Headed for a rear exit?
Trying to dodge him, the young attendant stumbled into the plastic sheet fronting the fruit. Lamont charged past her, drawing his Glock, entering the bodega in time to see the guy’s boots as he dove behind the cash register counter, scattering a boxful of little energy drinks.
The store’s three aisles were jammed floor to ceiling with most every household item that could fit in a grocery sack. Need for cover drove Lamont into the aisle farthest from the counter, just as the guy popped up, blasting a pump-action shotgun. Uncooked rice erupted from a sack beside Lamont, the grains nicking his face, as buckshot blew past him, shattering a glass freezer door. His hearing was replaced with a whine.
The store settled, the air filled with a haze of cocoa powder and something resembling cat litter. Lamont dropped to a prone position, reducing the target area he offered. He reached his Glock out from the aisle, burning the side of his left hand against the gritty steel belly of a giant soup kettle. Good luck, he thought. The kettle offered him a better chance than bullets at the man behind the counter.
He laid cover fire for himself, turning a few packs of cigarettes on a shelf behind the counter into confetti. The Brackman look-alike dropped to the floor. Lamont used a small sack of rice as a potholder for his left hand and his gun to protect his right. He gripped either side of the nearly full giant kettle, hefted it chest high, then shot-putted it.
The kettle left a trail of vapor as it hurtled across the bodega and boomed onto the countertop before skidding into the cash register and falling onto its side. Steaming soup gushed over the far side of the counter, resulting in a bestial scream.
Lamont started toward his victim. The man stood up, shotgun leveled. His face was purple, one eye swollen shut, the other eye about to be. He fired again. The shot turned a ceiling tile into a flurry of cheese-board particles. The soupy forestock slid out of his grip before he could get off another shot.
25
Thornton found himself in the fetal position on a freezing floor mat, his hands flexicuffed in front of him, ankles bound, mouth gagged with a rag that tasted of petroleum. His head, in dire need of painkillers, had been stuffed into a tight hood. He had no sense of whether it was night or day, whether he’d been out for minutes or hours. When he inhaled, prickly fabric drifted into his nostrils. He heard only a light breeze — white noise, he realized, emitted by noise-canceling headphones. There was no negating the tug of gravity, though. He felt wheels turning over smooth road surface, and, when the road turned bumpy, the abrupt rises and drops of a vehicle in need of new shocks.
He worked himself into a seated position without his head hitting anything — so he wasn’t inside a trunk. The vehicle took a sharp left. Centrifugal force flung him to the right, into an unpadded metal wall. A few more turns and he’d gathered that he was alone in the back of a cargo van, separated from the cab by a metal wall. Possibly Mallery rode up front in the cab; he couldn’t get a sense of who was up there — no traces of cologne or perfume or perspiration, nothing at least that penetrated the exhaust fumes or the hood filled with his own sour breath.
The van took an extraordinary number of turns, traversing every manner of road. If the driver’s objective had been to utterly disorient Thornton, he had succeeded ten turns ago.
Eventually the van slid to a halt. Front doors opened and closed — or so it felt. Thornton suspected the side cargo door opened too, when icy air hit him. Hands clamped onto his shoulders, others onto his ankles, and he was dragged from the vehicle, then propped into a standing position on flat pavement. The view inside the hood stayed as black as ever: It was still nighttime — or an overcast day. A cold wind buffeted him, the air carrying waxy fumes of aircraft hydraulic fluid. Despite his headphones, he heard the wheels tear into a runway, along with the whine of jet engines, which grew closer.
His handlers plucked off his shoes, then unsnapped, unzipped, and yanked off his jeans, along with his boxers. Before he could guess what degradation was on the agenda, they stepped him, one leg and then the other, into a pair of tight-fitting, foamy shorts. To take the place of trips to the lavatory on a long flight ahead, he figured. This was shaping into a textbook rendition, a benign term for kidnapping with the purpose of detention and interrogation.
Two handlers prodded him up shaky stairs, pressed his head down — presumably to avoid a whack from the fuselage on the way through the door — then dropped him into a seat in the warm cabin. The door thudded shut, shaking the whole plane. So not such a big plane. The scream of the engines cut through the white noise. The aircraft lurched forward, taxied, then sped up. The cabin throbbed as the jet jumped into the sky, thrusting him backward in his seat.