He kept Edison close and let the crowd draw them along the platform toward the exit. He couldn’t see the policemen and hoped that he wasn’t visible to them, either. As for Edison, all those many legs on the platform would conceal him. With luck, the policemen weren’t watching the departing crowd too closely. If they spotted him, he still had a good chance of getting away before they worked their way through the crowd.
Joe and Edison reached the main floor without incident. Joe led the way up the stairs to the west balcony. From on high he took a quick look at the people moving through the giant room below. None seemed to notice him and wouldn’t even see Edison from down there. Good.
He headed over toward the elevator by The Campbell Apartment. He hated taking the elevator, with its camera, but he didn’t think that anyone would be monitoring that camera. They probably hadn’t expected him to get past the platforms. He made it safely to the elevator and pressed the button to go to the floor of the Vanderbilt Tennis and Fitness Club, his workout facility.
Once he got into the gym, Joe felt safer. Inside, it looked like any other gym — a counter at the front to sign in and receive a towel and locker rooms to the right for men and left for women. Across from those were the weight room and tennis courts.
The young man at the desk, Brandon, recognized him. Nothing in his greeting seemed different from any other day. Brandon looked like Joe — the same height and build with the same short dark hair and blue eyes. Brandon, too, was a programmer, working his way through college, and Joe had arranged an internship for him at Pellucid the following summer. He wore a bright blue Pellucid baseball cap to work every day.
“You’re up early, Mr. Tesla.” His accent was pure Bronx.
“I’m busy later,” Joe said. “I thought I’d better get a workout in while I can.”
Brandon nodded. Joe normally kept strange hours, dropping in at any time from when they opened at six a.m. to when they closed at one a.m. He was grateful for that now. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
On the desk next to the sign-in sheet rested Brandon’s phone. It was the same brand as Joe’s, but without a cover. If Joe could switch their phones undetected, the phone might inadvertently trick the police into following Brandon. Joe rejected the idea. The switch might get the young man into trouble, and the police would know about Joe’s connection to the health club.
“Could you do me a favor?” Joe asked.
“Always, Mr. Tesla.”
Joe slid two twenties across the desk. “Get me a bagel and coffee for breakfast and get Edison a steak from Ceriello? You can keep the change.”
Not that there would be much change. Ceriello steaks were expensive.
Brandon put a “back in a minute” sign on the desk and headed out.
Joe made for the locker room, dropping the towel over his shoulder. He unlocked his locker and took out shampoo, shaving cream, and a razor. He lingered longer than he probably should have under the water, loving how it washed away the smells of night on the floor with the dog and how the hot water relaxed his tense muscles. Plus, under the shower he could pretend that this was just another ordinary day.
After he got out and dried off, he had to face the reality that, among other things, he had no clean clothes. He sniffed his workout shirt and then the shirt he’d been wearing all night. No contest. The workout shirt smelled better. He pulled it over his head, wishing for clean clothes. No luck there, but what the gym had, which was better than clean, was Wi-Fi. After all, the fully connected businessman had to be able to access the Internet between sets.
Clean and dry, he sat on the wooden bench in the locker room and logged into the Wi-Fi with Edison curled on the tile floor at his feet. He’d gotten through a couple of computers to hide his location by the time Brandon came back with breakfast. He even brought a plate for the steak and a bowl of water for Edison. A good kid.
In a few minutes he had hacked into the Grand Central video surveillance archive. This time he wasn’t searching for Vivian Torres’s embarrassing rescue. He was searching for Rebar, trying to figure out when he’d come through the terminal, or if he’d come through the terminal at all on his way down to the tunnels. There were hundreds of other entry points — old access doors, the platforms at the subway stations, and who knew where else? Still, it was a place to start.
Joe could download surveillance footage before the approximate time that he’d seen Rebar and then work back in hourly increments to look for a man who’d climbed off one of the platforms and into the tunnels. With forty-four platforms (double greens), it was a lot of footage, but he could automate most of that work.
He started it up, then let it run in the background while he searched for news of himself. Nothing. It was hard to believe that they’d blanketed the place with police without explaining anything to the public.
His stomach tightened. Whatever they wanted him for, it must be important and top secret. What secrets had Rebar uncovered?
Joe carried the laptop into the weight room and watched a couple of businessmen play tennis while he tried to think. The men ran across the blue court, each returning the ball with a grim concentration that said it was more war than game. He felt like that right now himself. With a sigh, he went back to the locker room and reclaimed his spot on the bench and searched for news on Rebar’s murder.
He started with the New York Post’s web site. It didn’t skimp on coverage of bizarre murders. The web site featured a brief piece about a body found deep under Grand Central, but it mentioned neither the presidential train car nor the other skeletons. So, the police must not have released those details to the press. If they had, the Post would have shouted it far and wide. It was too strange not to, but the reporter made little of the murder — hinting that it was a homeless man probably bludgeoned by another homeless man, identity of both unknown. That meant that the media didn’t have the juicy details.
The site gave its biggest headlines to the story of a policeman killed by a train while investigating an incident in the train tunnels. Rebar’s murder, perhaps? The police called it “a tragic accident.” The dead man left behind a wife and six-month-old baby, poor guy. Maybe it was murder, and committed by the man who had almost shot Joe. It was too easy to get paranoid.
A bong from his computer drew his attention to the Pellucid window. He tabbed over. The video showed a tall man in a camouflage jacket climbing off the end of Platform 23. A crush of people filled the platform behind him, but no one seemed to notice his actions. No one threw him a curious glance. The anonymity of the big city had worked to Rebar’s advantage.
Joe moved his legs to let a tennis player walk by to the showers. He looked out of place working in the locker room, but he hoped that big-city indifference might help him, too.
It didn’t. The man glared at him. Though Joe ignored him, a seed of worry started. What if the guy complained about him or, after reading the news, mentioned the weird guy with a dog and a laptop at the gym?
Probably nothing to worry about. He was just being paranoid, but Joe worked faster anyway. He went back to the picture of Rebar. He couldn’t see his face in the shot. He painstakingly backed the video up from that point and switched through other cameras in the station, hoping to find Rebar captured in one of them.
Bingo. He tilted his laptop’s screen forward to get a better view. Edison cocked an ear in his direction, sensing his excitement, but didn’t lift his head.
Joe moved the video forward a frame at a time. A man in a camouflage jacket entered the concourse with determined long strides, a shadow indicating stubble on his chin. What looked like crumpled papers overflowed from the pockets of his jacket. He walked with the erect posture of the man Joe had met in the tunnel. It might be the same man, but he couldn’t get a positive ID unless he could see at least part of his face.