Rain ran down his window, turning the car into a lonely pod. A quick glance told him that the glass partition was up. He usually left it that way. The chauffeur didn’t need to know all his business, especially not tonight.
Ash made a call on his secure phone, one he’d hoped he’d never have to make, but Geezer had brought this on himself. He entered Geezer’s real name, his address and the number zero. The man on the other end would eliminate Geezer, and it would look like an accident. An extreme measure, but he couldn’t let his connection to Spooky become public knowledge.
The car was stuck in traffic, barely inching along. If he didn’t mind getting wet, he could walk faster. But he did mind getting wet, so he stayed put.
With a few quick movements he brought up the tracking app on his phone. The tag was working. A strong green dot dashed forward a few meters, then back again. The app said it was in the concourse of Grand Central, but the dog was probably a hundred feet below playing fetch. How pathetic — Joe Tesla, multimillionaire, was playing fetch with a dog in a tunnel.
Maybe he’d join the Vanderbilt Tennis and Fitness Club at Grand Central and invite Joe to a friendly game. They could go out for a juice after, talk about things. Joe hadn’t been secretive about the automaton — he trusted Ash.
Ash intended to keep it that way.
His driver stopped in front of the 72nd Street entrance to The Dakota. The old stone building looked grand in the fading light. Because Ash loved it, Rosa had taken it in the divorce. She’d had other options, of course, but had taken his favorite apartment as a matter of course.
“Give me an hour,” Ash said. Mariella fell asleep early.
The doorman nodded to him as he hurried by on his way to the elevator. He was watching the numbers flicker by when he got another text, this one on his non-secure phone, from Rosa.
Mariella went to bed early. No bedtime stories tonight.
He sighed. The simplest thing to do would be to take the elevator right back down to his car, but he never did the simplest thing.
A minute later he stood in front of Rosa as she lounged on the sofa. The housekeeper who had seen him in mumbled an excuse and backed away, clearly not wanting to be part of whatever came next.
“Were you in the elevator when I texted?” Rosa tucked her waist-length hair behind her shoulder.
“Based on the timing, you knew that before you texted.”
“Mariella is asleep,” Rosa said. “Surely you don’t wish to wake her.”
He very much wished to wake her, so that he could at least say good night, but Mariella was a poor sleeper and might be awake for hours if he did. He couldn’t let her suffer — something else that Rosa knew.
“She’s been unavailable for the last three visits,” he said.
“A cold, a meeting with her therapist. I told you the reasons.” Rosa’s brown eyes opened wide and guileless. That look had gotten her full custody from the male judge. He couldn’t blame him. It had gotten her a lot more out of Ash.
“You did.” He’d logged each missed meeting with his lawyer, in the hopes that he might be able to use them as evidence that Rosa was deliberately keeping him from his daughter, but it would be a hard sell. Colds, therapy, early bedtime — those were all reasonable excuses, even if they did pile up. “But if I go a month without seeing her, she barely seems to recognize me.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that.” Rosa set her book down on the green velvet and crossed her arms. “Maybe you shouldn’t skip visits.”
The last visit he’d missed was six months before. Like him, she’d probably logged it. “No matter how busy I am, I almost always keep to my scheduled visits.”
“Such a busy man you are.” Her eyes narrowed. “Cleaning up the whole wide world.”
“I’m trying to protect other children, so they don’t end up damaged like Mariella.” He was going to make the world a better place for his daughter. Even if she would never know or understand it.
“She is not damaged!” Rosa lowered her voice. “She is who she is. She’s not some kind of rifle sight — something you can use to aim yourself at a cause.”
Ash didn’t bother to respond.
Rosa unfolded her long, slim legs and stood in front of him. “You use her as an excuse to be ruthless, a way to justify not caring about anyone or anything that might get in the way of your goals.”
She must have seen the homeless-shelter protest on the news. She claimed to care about the fall of every sparrow, never once stopping to take in the big picture. Hard to believe that he’d once found her so appealing.
His secret phone buzzed in his pocket, so he cut the familiar argument short and retreated to the elevator, texting his driver on the way down.
Spooky didn’t disappoint him. Spooky understood about disruption, about risk, about sometimes sacrificing the proverbial sparrow to the greater good.
Chapter 20
Joe set his teacup on the coffee table, then plopped next to Edison in the parlor, watching the dog snooze in front of the fire. They’d played for a long time, and the dog was worn out. They’d stayed inside the tunnel in front of the house because Joe hadn’t felt safe enough to go play in their usual spot after the incident on the train.
He cracked open his laptop and wrote up the details of his encounter with the man by the clock — how he reminded Joe of the man who’d attacked him, how he’d followed him onto the platform and boarded the train. He didn’t mention when he’d gotten off the train, just that he had. Deciding that was enough, he sent the email to Detective Bailey and blind copied Vivian. They could track the man in the outside world, and he would track him underground.
Time to get started with that. He took a sip of tea and hacked into the surveillance footage for Grand Central. He’d done this often enough in the past that he could get in, back out, and cover his tracks in his sleep. He pulled up footage from Track 42 (green, blue) and followed the man back in time across other surveillance cameras. He had been wandering around in the concourse for hours before Joe spotted him. But he seemed to know exactly where the cameras were placed, and every single shot caught him looking away — head turned so far that his face was unrecognizable, or head tilted so far down that his face couldn’t be seen. The guy was clever.
Joe pulled up the footage from the evening when the man had tried to take his suitcase. That man wore large sunglasses and a hat, plus he was moving too quickly to register properly. Pellucid’s facial recognition software wouldn’t be able to produce an identification.
That left his experimental gait detection software. He loaded up clips of the man walking calmly, before he grabbed the suitcase and compared them to the man walking toward track 42 (green, blue). A match — both men had identical stride lengths and leg lengths, and their arms and feet moved in the same way when they walked or ran. Not enough to hold up in court, but enough to tell him that he hadn’t been paranoid — he’d been in danger. Still, an identification would have made everything a lot easier.
He carried the automaton into his billiards room, the spot where he had built him, set him on the table’s green felt surface, wound him up, and watched him wave his pointer around. This creation was at the center of everything. His father’s warning had been attached to its blueprints, and the man on the train had come after him twice. But why?
The automaton wound down, and Joe wound it up again, watching his waving arm. What if he was pointing at something, like a teacher at a blackboard? If Joe could figure out what the tiny man was pointing at, maybe he could figure out why his father had wanted him to build this automaton in the first place.