The Identity Man (29 page)

Funny, he thought, he had done all this to escape from death row and yet here he was. But then what did you expect in the long run? In the long run, it was all death row. There was only one way out of the world.

Foster and the slick agent stayed with him through the night. Mostly, they sat silently in the metal folding chairs. Once or twice Foster went into the enclosure. Shannon could hear him in there, murmuring into his cell phone, but couldn't make out what he said. After a while, Foster left the loft altogether. A few hours later, he came back and the slick agent left. Shannon figured they were going somewhere to get some sleep.

Shannon himself slept now and then. He would doze off and then wake with a start, realizing the morning was now that much closer. He figured it was just as well to sleep since the waiting was awful, but still, the end was that much closer, and the suspense and the sickness of inevitability grew worse.

Finally—suddenly—he saw blue dawn at the loft windows and figured he'd dozed off again. There was something lingering in his mind as if it had come to him while he was asleep. It was a story someone had told him a long time ago, when he was a little boy. He must've been very little, because he couldn't remember who had told him the story. He only had the sense that it had been a woman and he'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor looking up at her and she had been very kind. It was strange the things that came back to you and the things that didn't.

As for the story itself, it was about a boy who went to a magical country in his dreams. Shannon couldn't remember the details of it, only that the boy had met a magical fairy and she had given him a golden ring. Then, at the end of the story, the boy woke up in his bed and realized it had all been a dream—but when he looked down in his hand, there was the ring. It was still there. As a little boy, Shannon had been very impressed by the story and had found the ending wonderful.

He lay there on the cot for a moment, gazing out the window at the lightening sky, sick with the waiting and inevitability. He hadn't thought about that story in a long time, but he sort of understood why it had come back to him now. It was
his
story in some sense. What had happened to the boy had also happened to him. He had had a dream, too—a dream that he could have a new life with a new name and a new face in a new city—and now he was awake and it had only been a dream, but he had met Teresa there, and the way he felt about her was like the gold ring in the story.

Who was it who had told him that story, he wondered. It seemed to him he should remember someone who had been kind to him when he was a boy...

The loft door opened and Foster came in. Shannon had not realized he was gone. He was carrying a bag with him from a local diner. Shannon could smell coffee.

"Let's get ready," Foster said.

Shannon swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

He was glad the waiting was over.

Now it was full day. Shannon was sitting in one of the metal chairs in the main part of the loft. He had his elbow propped on the card table to steady his arm. He was holding the handset of an old-fashioned landline phone to his ear, the kind with a coiling wire. His grip on the handset felt weak. His palm was sweaty.

He looked at Foster. Foster sat next to him, leaning toward him. He had an earpiece in his ear, wired to the phone so he could listen in. He fiddled with the earpiece and with the wire and tapped at a nearby computer keyboard. The phone was hooked to the computer, which was running some kind of program that Foster said would foil a trace, fooling the electronic switching system into thinking the call had come from somewhere else.

Shannon waited for Foster to finish with the keyboard and give him the go-ahead. He was growing more and more nervous by the second. The other two agents stood over them, pretending to be nonchalant, but watching the whole thing intently.

Now finally, Foster drew a breath and nodded at him. Shannon pressed the buttons on the phone. He waited. The phone started ringing. Shannon listened. He licked his lips to wet them. His heart was beating hard. The phone rang again. Foster tapped at his keyboard. Shannon switched the handset to his other hand. He wiped his wet palm on the leg of his jeans.

The phone began to ring again—then it broke off. Shannon's breath caught. Foster stared at him. The weaselly agent and the slick agent stood straighter. There was silence on the other end of the line. Then a voice:

"Yes?"

Foster nodded. It was Ramsey. It was a moment before Shannon could speak.

"Hello?" Ramsey said.

"You know who this is?" said Shannon.

"Yeah," Ramsey said. "I know."

"You want to meet me, I'll be at Betsy's Café at noon."

"No. That's no good for me."

"You're not in charge of this," said Shannon gruffly.

"We've both got to feel safe."

There was a pause. Shannon didn't know what to answer.

"You know Anatomy?" Ramsey said. "It's public, crowded. We can sit in plain sight and talk it out. Everyone goes home happy."

Shannon glanced at Foster. Foster shrugged and nodded.

"Yeah," said Shannon. "That's all right. Noon."

"I'll be there."

The phone line went dead.

Shannon hung up. He let out a long breath. "All right. What's Anatomy?"

"Restaurant downtown. Ground floor of One CC—One City Center. It just reopened about a week ago. They'll be booked solid—that's why he picked it. The place has strong connections with the city machine—obviously, or it wouldn't have that location. We won't be able to get a man in there without Ramsey knowing. You'll be on your own."

"But if it's crowded like he said, he can't just kill me."

"Oh, he'll kill you, Shannon."

"But not just right there with everyone looking."

"Maybe. Or maybe he'll just shout, 'Everyone get down, there's a cop-killer' and open fire. I don't know."

Shannon wiped his hand on his jeans again. "I don't think he'll do that."

Foster took out his earpiece and tossed it down on the table. "That must be nice for you," he said. "But believe me, he'll find a way."

THE BUSINESS DISTRICT
had been hit hard on the night of the disaster. Water had damaged luxurious lobbies and atria. Rioters had smashed massive storefront windows. Mobs had marauded through skyscrapers, ransacking offices at random. There had been fires everywhere.

No one knew exactly what had destroyed the upper floors of One City Center. Its distinctive spire had somehow been torn free of its moorings and had speared down forty-five stories through the flaming night before piercing the floodwaters, hurling great waves in every direction, and pulverizing itself on the pavement underneath. What was left of the building's top windows had been shattered. Its offices had been gutted by flames. From a distance, the building now seemed a looming charred-black tower rising to a jagged, mangled confusion of light and shadow. It darkened the whole skyline with an aura of malevolence and ruination.

Below, at the building's base on Center Street, there were still rows of boarded windows. There were lobbies and offices still filled with debris. But there were lights on, too, a checkerboard of lighted panes. Revolving doors were turning, people going in and out. The banks and financial and legal businesses had opened again wherever they could. So had the restaurants that served them. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks and cars passed hesitantly under the sporadic traffic lights, edging around the barriers protecting the broken place in the street where the tower had crashed.

Foster and his agents had found an office directly across from the restaurant Anatomy. The office was abandoned, all the furniture removed, the walls torn up, the insulation underneath exposed. The paneling was gone from the ceiling, too. Wires hung down and light fixtures dangled. The floors were covered with dust.

Shannon and Foster stood together at a filthy window, looking out. They were on the second floor. They could see the front of the restaurant below, but they couldn't see inside through the tinted window. The slickster and the weasel were there behind them, each sitting on a metal chair. A laptop computer was set up on a third chair.

Shannon kept his hands in the pockets of his jeans. They were unsteady and he didn't want Foster to see them shake. It was annoying. In his mind he was pretty calm now that the waiting was over. In his mind he was thinking:
What the hell, right? Everybody dies.
But his body was afraid and unsteady.

"Need another look?" Foster said. He held his cell phone out in front of Shannon. There was a photograph on the phone's screen: Lieutenant Brick Ramsey. He was a solidly built man with a serious, oval-shaped face and a thin moustache. He seemed to have a sort of stillness and dignity about him. He looked like an upright guy, the kind of upright guy every tough neighborhood needs. The priest, the cop, the coach—the kind of father fi gure they need in these neighborhoods where there are no fathers, where it's all women without virtue and men without honor, like Applebee had said. If this had been one of those old black-and-white movies he had watched back in the white room, a guy who looked like Ramsey would've been the hero of the picture, except for his being black and all.
But the real world was different from the black-and-white movies,
Shannon thought.
The real world was always right on the brink of falling completely the fuck apart.

"I've got it," Shannon said. "I'll recognize him."

Foster put the phone back in his pocket.

"And you'll be able to hear me, right?" said Shannon. He just said it to say something because he was nervous. He didn't really want to know how the whole thing was going to work.

"Maybe," said Foster. "We may be able to hear you. We sent a text message to Ramsey's cell phone. When he picked it up, it downloaded a Trojan horse—malware—software—that turned his phone into a listening device."

"Really? You can do that?"

"Maybe. I guess we'll find out."

"Hell, if you can do that, why didn't you just do it before? Why do you need me?"

"Because every warrant we've ever gotten in this city, the target's been alerted within forty-eight hours."

"Great. So what's different now?"

"We got the warrant twenty minutes ago. We may have some time before he finds out."

"But what if...?" Shannon started to say.

"If the Trojan horse doesn't work? Or he turns off his phone or he somehow spots the download or the warrant's already been blown or any of another million ways we can be fucked? Then we'll be fucked. That's just the kind of fly-by-night operation it is, dog."

Shannon's hands clenched in his pockets. "My tax dollars at work," he muttered.

"If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't be working for the government, believe me. We'd make our own damn money."

Shannon glanced at a clock that stood above the boarded storefront of a bank. It was nearly noon.

Foster said, "All right. Let's go."

It was during the next few moments that Ramsey had his revelation. Until then, there had just been his burgeoning, amorphous dread and superstition, an increasing sense of persecution by unseen forces too powerful to resist and an increasingly desperate idea that none of it mattered anymore anyway. Ever since his meeting with Super-Pred, he had felt like that. He had felt vague and distant, indifferent, dead. When the phone call from the gangster reached him, when he heard that Teresa and her family had escaped, that this plan, too, even this one, had been foiled by the forces arrayed against him, he accepted the news with a sort of spit of laughter, as if to say,
What else could you expect in this unfair world?
He no longer seemed to care whether or not he saved himself. He didn't even feel as if he
was
himself any longer. He was just the sullen vessel of his own resistance to the inevitable end. But the end was inevitable all the same.

So he sat in the booth, waiting. Anatomy was an upscale Italian restaurant. It had soft lighting and yellow walls. There were square tables under white tablecloths throughout the open room. There were booths with brown leather seats against one wall. Hanging on that wall between the sconces here and there were large plaster sculptures of body parts. That's what gave the restaurant its name. There were enormous arms and hands hanging up there, huge legs and feet and an oversized torso. And there was one table under a gigantic woman's breast and another under a gigantic pair of buttocks. That's where Ramsey was sitting—in the booth under the giant ass.

There were people at almost every other table, and the empty tables had signs on them marking them reserved. The crowd was mostly men in suits, but there were some women, too. Everyone was talking and the room was filled with voices and laughter.

Where Ramsey sat—under the plaster buttocks—he had a clear look at the front of the place. The bottom half of the long window was blacked out and there were venetian blinds on the top half. The blinds were partially open, so he could see the people passing on the street. The door was clear glass. He would be able to see anyone approaching.

He sipped from a glass of water, set the glass down, and checked his watch. It was nearly twelve. When he lifted his eyes, he looked out through the front door. He spotted Henry Conor crossing the street.

Ramsey hadn't realized until then that he despised Conor and was afraid of him. Maybe he'd denied it to himself because he didn't like to think he was afraid of any man. But now he felt the full force of it. This nemesis that he sensed was dogging him—this evil fate he'd got himself all worked up about in his mind—what was it, in the end, but Conor really? Conor inspired by the Reverend Skyles as Patterson had been inspired by Skyles. Conor coming after him to avenge Patterson like he was Skyles's vengeance or the vengeance of God. Conor killing Gutterson. Getting the drop on Super-Pred and his g's. Conor and Patterson and Skyles and God and his mother—it had all gotten wrapped up together in Ramsey's mind until it felt like the work of some persecuting power. But now that he saw the man in the flesh he realized: it was just this man, this one man. All he had to do was get rid of this one man and his problems would be over and he'd be free.