Hoover shook his head, startled. “I thought you’d gone somewhere.”
“Standing right by your side.” Guilfoyle lowered himself to a knee. “What do you have?”
“A restaurant at Sixteenth Street and Union Square West called the Coffee Shop. Bolden called the place twice the same day that Miss Dance visited the pharmacy. He used an ATM right around the corner at twelve-sixteen P.M. Oh, and they don’t take credit cards.”
“The Coffee Shop,” said Guilfoyle. “Good work.” He hurried to his desk overlooking the operations center and picked up his cellular phone. Unlike standard-issue models, this phone carried a sophisticated scrambling device rendering his transmissions a collage of squawks and beeps and indecipherable white noise to surveillance devices. The phone he called was equipped with a similar device, capable of unscrambling the transmission in real time.
“Sir,” answered a deep, unsatisfied voice.
“I have some good news.”
“I’ll believe it when I hear it,” said Wolf.
“We’ve pinpointed where Bolden will be at noon. The Coffee Shop at Union Square.”
“You’re sure?”
Guilfoyle peered over his desk at the lines of technicians busy at their consoles. Heads bowed, hands racing furiously over keyboards, they brought to mind the galley slaves of ancient Greece. Men enslaved by machines. “Cerberus is,” he answered. “I want you to take in a full field team.”
“How many men do we have in the vicinity?”
“Eight, not including you and Irish. They can form up on your location in twelve minutes.”
“Any shooters?”
Guilfoyle ran a mouse over the red pinlights indicating his men’s locations on the wall-mounted map. In turn, the name of the operative and his field grade appeared in a box beneath it. “Jensen,” he said. Malcolm Jensen. A former marine sniper. “I want you to act as his spotter.”
“His spotter… but sir-”
“Jensen will need someone who knows what Bolden looks like. We can count on him being in some kind of disguise. You’ll have to keep a sharp eye.” Wolf began to hesitate, but Guilfoyle cut him off. “I can’t have you in the middle of things. Bolden knows your face by now. We can’t risk spooking him. That’s final.”
“Yes sir.”
“I think Mr. Bolden’s given us enough of a run for our money. Don’t you?”
32
The Blackberry, thought Bolden.
By law, every cell phone possessed a GPS chip-a chip that broadcast the phone’s location to within a hundred feet. His pager number was published in HW’s directory. That number, in turn, could be traced to a service provider-in his case, Verizon Wireless. But to pinpoint the signal-to actually get a read of the GPS coordinates, so many minutes and seconds longitude and latitude-required getting inside the phone company. Being able to tap into their transmission networks and track down a specific number.
Bolden clutched the device in his palm, pedestrians passing to either side of him, as if he were a stone in a stream. The phone was a homing beacon. He’d made it so easy for them. Hurrying to the nearest corner, he tossed the BlackBerry into a trash bin. The signal turned green. People flooded the crosswalk. Bolden stepped off the curb, hesitated, then returned to the trash bin.
“Taxi!” he called, raising a hand in the air.
A moment later, a cab pulled over.
Bolden opened the door and stuck his head and shoulders inside. “How much to Boston?”
“To Boston? No, no…” The Sikh cabbie thought about it for a second. “Five hundred dollars plus gas. Cash. No credit card.”
“Five hundred? You’re sure?” As Bolden pretended to consider the offer, he slipped the BlackBerry into the pouch behind the passenger seat.
The Sikh nodded vigorously. “Ten hours driving. Yes, I am sure.”
“Sorry, too steep. Thanks anyway.” Stepping back to the curb, Bolden watched the cab disappear into traffic.
At Lexington and Fifty-first, he ran down the stairs of the subway, then hugged the wall and watched dozens of men and women file in after him. Five minutes passed. Satisfied he was no longer being followed, he jumped the turnstiles and descended the stairs to the south platform.
He was safe. No GPS signal to hone in on, no office to stake out. While he had no doubt that Guilfoyle had been monitoring his home phone, he hadn’t mentioned the name of the restaurant where he intended to meet Jenny. It was their inadvertent secret.
He boarded the local train, and ten minutes later, got out at Sixteenth Street.
Jenny slid into the booth, huddling against the wall. Keeping her eyes in front of her, she unwrapped the scarf from her neck and loosened the buttons on her overcoat. She’d tucked her hair into a black beret, and that she kept on.
They were here. Bobby Stillman had promised her that. Bobby didn’t say how many of them there might be, if they were men or women, or how they could have known. Just that they were here. It was a fact you had to count on, Bobby had said. A tenet of faith. And if they weren’t, you’d better pretend they were, because they sure as hell would be there the next time. Amen.
The Coffee Shop was boisterous and bustling. Every table was taken, the aisles cluttered with waiters and waitresses shuttling back and forth between the dining room and kitchen, refilling coffee cups, ferrying trays piled high with meat loaf and burgers and grilled-cheese sandwiches. It was the kind of place that served lunch on thick porcelain plates and coffee in chipped enamel mugs, and where the staff hollered to one another across the room.
They’re here.
Just like in Poltergeist. They’re here but you can’t see ’em. Jenny pushed her mug out for some coffee. After it was poured, she added two packets of sugar and warmed her hands on the mug. Turning her wrist, she saw that it was already 12:05. Tom was five minutes late. She started to look over her shoulder, then caught herself. It’s only five minutes. He’ll be here any second. He got caught in the office. There were always delays at the bank, last-minute corrections, meetings that went long. Except that Thomas was never late. For Thomas, “on time” meant ten minutes early. He was a disaster as a boyfriend. He never learned that dates should arrive five minutes late, and that parties didn’t really get going until an hour after they began. All of which meant he’d be a wonderful father.
She took a sip of coffee, letting her eyes flit around the restaurant. She looked at the two guys inhaling their hamburgers while insisting on talking at the same time. The older man engrossed in his crossword puzzle. The table of executives sipping iced tea and pretending to be enthralled by what the big boss had to say. And why not women? Shouldn’t she be suspicious of them, too? Maybe it was the two blondes picking at their salads. Or the gaggle of college students strewn across the booth like pieces of clothing. Or… Jenny dropped her eyes to the pool of black liquid. It could be any of them. Why not all of them? She stopped herself. It was infectious. Bobby Stillman’s paranoia had gotten to her, too.
Where was Thomas?
Guilfoyle stared intently as the blue pinlight made a stop-and-go circuit around the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was moving much too fast for someone on foot. The pinlight circled a block, then stopped for a few minutes. It zoomed ten blocks uptown and then ten blocks back. Presently, it was making a beeline across the Triborough Bridge. An airport fare, Guilfoyle said to himself. It was the cabby’s lucky day.
“Hoover,” he called.
“Yessir.”
“Cancel tracking Bolden’s BlackBerry signal.”
The pale, washed-out face turned to him in concern. “Did we get him?”
“Other way around, I’m afraid. Bolden’s on to us.”
Guilfoyle allowed himself a private laugh as he watched the blue pinlight negotiate the wilds of Queens and finally disappear off the map. To his eye, it was all the more proof that Bolden was headed in the opposite direction. Downtown. To Union Square.