Seven Grams of Lead (18 page)

Thornton felt a measure of contentment. “I’ve seen the CIA’s old evasive-driving instructional film—it’s on YouTube.”

“I’ve got to check that out before I have to drive in LA again.” She sat back as they continued downtown.

A few blocks later, she asked, “So which spooks have a station in New York?”

“All of them,” he said. “There’s an old joke that UN is really short for United Network of Foreign Intelligence Agencies.”

“So you think these guys are from a foreign intelligence agency?”

Thornton turned right onto a clear 107th Street. “American services don’t usually whack Americans on American soil, if only because of the ever-increasing likelihood of getting caught.”

“There’s nothing
usual
about this business, though.”

“I agree. And it wouldn’t be the first time that someone or some organization, convinced that the ends justified the means, placed a higher value on a secret than on human lives. They could be from any
number of domestic services, maybe an entity operating off the books, afraid that we know enough to incriminate them.”

“Officer Logan seemed as American as apple pie, though.”

“He could have been born in the USA and gone on to be an Eagle Scout, then got duped by a foreign service into expunging law-abiding citizens.” Thornton turned left at an uncrowded Columbus Avenue, sending them downtown. “There are also Russian and Swedish and even Chinese operatives trained to pass as Americans to the point that they land jobs at the CIA and FBI.”

“I get that a foreign intelligence agency running a sophisticated eavesdropping operation might want to keep tabs on someone who might throw a wrench in their plans. But why would they get mixed up in a California Senate election?”

“Maybe to continue getting ‘product’ from Gordon Langlind. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has access to a lot of goodies. Maybe he was coerced.”

“If he’s an ideal candidate for anything, it’s blackmail.”

“Catherine Peretti could have learned about the arrangement.”

“And made the mistake of taking the story to a journalist who happened to have one of the devices in his head?”

Thornton shook his head. “That would be too coincidental. Alternatively, the eavesdropping operation is massive.”

He turned right at West 79th Street, which led to a ramp up to the West Side Highway. The bright glow from the top of the ramp gave him pause. He couldn’t put a finger on why before it was too late to turn back, or turn anywhere except into the traffic clotting the highway’s southbound lanes. He braked hard to avoid rear-ending a Volkswagen. His forward progress was so slow, the speedometer needle didn’t budge from its cradle. Two more cars fell into place behind him.

“What is this?” Mallery asked.

“People coming home from the weekend.” He planned to add that an accident ahead of them had probably brought the traffic to a standstill, but motion drew his attention to his rearview mirror.

Three men appeared, ascending the narrow sidewalk alongside the 79th Street on-ramp. They wore NYPD uniforms. Logan brought up the rear, apparently no worse for the anesthesia. The trio waded into the stalled traffic and split up, disappearing into the brake-light-tinted fog of exhaust fumes. They would find the bright orange 1973 BMW in another minute, Thornton thought. Or less.

“See them?” Mallery said.

“Yes. Time to get that cab.”

She nodded. Sliding the dome light switch to off, he cracked his door. Inching forward in his seat until
the top of his head dipped below the headrest, he pushed the door out just enough to slip onto the highway, then ducked beneath the window line. Wind off the river rattled the elevated stretch of road.

Mallery followed him, this time without hesitation. Staying low to the pavement, they left the bullet-riddled ’02 and scurried past twenty or thirty vehicles.

Apparently unseen by the purported cops on the opposite side of the highway, they gained the 79th Street ramp. They ran down its sidewalk, until rounding a curve and nearly colliding with the two Columbia security guards on Segways.

Which Thornton and Mallery could outrun. “Come on,” he said, springing toward the opposite sidewalk.

One of the campus security guards had fired a Taser, Thornton realized, after its projectiles caught him by the cheek. Their sharpened electrodes knifed into his flesh, deluging him with searing pain and body slamming him against the pavement.

The other man corralled Mallery, cuffing her wrists behind her. Logan ran up, followed by his two cohorts. One of them had a gun, the other a black tube the size of a paper towel core that he aimed at Thornton.

Lamont’s world snapped
from black and white to Technicolor as the details came over the phone. He clicked off the Knicks game, threw on a dress shirt, and jumped into a pair of suit pants. From the sounds of it, Musseridge was in the midst of the same process in Brooklyn while relaying the news of the guns-blazing high-speed chase, the overturned UPS truck containing the NSA guy’s body, NYPD impersonators, and the disappearance of Thornton and a billionairess. Still buttoning his shirt, Lamont ran out of his apartment, his jacket and overcoat bunched under an arm. Reaching the elevator landing, he pounded the
DOWN
button.

Should have taken the stairs, he thought a long ten seconds later. He paced the dimly lit eleventh-floor
corridor, the Alphabet City building silent but for wind howling in the elevator shaft. It started to feel like Musseridge’s call had been a dream.

After a fifteen-minute taxi ride, Lamont took in what the handful of curious passersby on West 111th Street believed to be the aftermath of a spectacular traffic accident. Another five minutes and he was hoofing it crosstown on 110th, deployed by a supervisor to the pond in Morningside Park. Odds were, like the UPS truck, the submerged vehicle was recently stolen. The Bureau hoped that, in their haste to avoid drowning, the passengers left behind clues beyond the muddy footprints leading away from the pond.

Lamont turned uptown on Manhattan Avenue, then into the park, passing a metal swing set, ivory in the spill of headlamps aimed at the adjacent pond by four NYPD squad cars and a chunky mobile lab belonging to the Bureau’s Emergency Response Team. Two of the team members were debating whether to wait until arc lights were strung before hauling out the car—evidence in water degrades by the second.

After apologizing to Lamont that the paper cup in her hand represented the last of the coffee, the Bureau supervisor on the scene briefed him: Three hours had passed since the orange, 1970-something BMW burst out of the park. In the interim, fifteen members of the ERT had sealed the area and sixteen cops fanned out in search of perps whom not a single person had seen. About what Lamont had anticipated. If you’re a perp,
which escape route would you choose, a dark and deserted park or a well-lit New York City street full of eyewitnesses?

Sure enough, the supervisor tasked Lamont with finding better witnesses. A dead-horse beating, Musseridge termed this kind of gig. Judging caffeine an operational prerequisite, Lamont wandered up Manhattan Avenue in search of a bodega, a local term for the little grocery stores that averaged one per block. The darkness masked a century’s worth of deterioration, restoring grandeur to the Italianate brown-stones originally built as mansions, now subdivided into at least ten apartments apiece. On 112th, Lamont found bodegas at either end of the block, both fronted by thick transparent plastic sheets to protect walls of fresh fruit and cut flowers from the elements. Outside the nearer store, an elderly Asian man sat on an upturned plastic pail. He dipped a spoon into a thermos, steam billowing from the hot contents.

In front of the far bodega, there was just a steaming thermos set beside an identical upturned pail. The attendant must have gone inside to ring up a sale, Lamont thought, when a middle-aged white man stepped out of the shop, tearing the wrapper from a candy bar. Rather than dropping the wrapper in the trash can two feet away, he let it fall to the sidewalk. If he hadn’t littered, Lamont probably wouldn’t have given him another thought. But now, watching the guy shove chocolate into his mouth, Lamont
thought he looked familiar. Someone from the Bureau maybe?

Curious, Lamont followed, doubling his pace. Old sodium streetlights tinged the next block orange and showed no one else around. The area was silent, or, rather, playing Manhattan’s version of silence, the low murmur that’s a sum of steam banging through heating ducts, subway cars racing underground, thousands of motor vehicles in traffic, and millions of people no good at staying still. As if in response to Lamont’s rapid footfalls, the guy he was following glanced back. He appeared wary—understandably, this late on a near-deserted Harlem block. Lamont noticed that his mouth was permanently set in a grin.

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.

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.