THE OVERTON WINDOW (7 page)

“Aw, come on, man, what are we doing on Park Avenue?”

Over the years Noah had confirmed many times that there truly is such a thing as a bad night. When these doomed evenings arrive you can’t avoid them. The jinx comes at you like a freight train, and by the time you’re caught in the glare of those oncoming lights it’s far too late to avoid the disaster. The best you can do is make your peace with doom and ride out the curse until sunrise.

If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that bad nights that don’t kill you can sometimes make you a little bit smarter. For instance, he’d learned that when the situation starts to go downhill it’s often due to avoidable errors in judgment, always involving things you should have foreseen but didn’t, and that those errors usually come in threes. A pilot will tell you the same thing; a plane crash is rarely the result of a single failure. It starts small, an innocent mistake or a bad decision that leads to another one, and then another, and before you know it you’re at the bottom of a smoking hole wondering what in the hell just happened.

Take this night, for example: Noah’s first mistake had been opting to hail a cab instead of waiting a few minutes for a limo from the
company motor pool. Then he’d become immersed in his BlackBerry just after the ride got under way. Minutes later when he looked up, the road ahead was a sea of twinkling red brake lights. The pre-weekend traffic was stacked bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. That was his second mistake.

As the windshield wipers slapped in and out of sync with the beat of some atonal Middle Eastern music blaring from the radio, the man at the wheel launched into an animated flurry of colorful epithets in his native tongue. He seemed to be deflecting all blame for the gridlock onto his GPS unit, the dispatcher, the rain, the car ahead, and especially the yellowed ivory statuette of St. Christopher glued cockeyed to the dash.

“Look, forget it, just head west.” Noah rapped on the cloudy Plexiglas and caught the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“West.”
He pointed that way, assuming a serious language barrier, and spoke with exaggerated clarity. “Get us off Park Avenue, shoot crosstown to the West Side Highway, then just take it south all the way down to Chambers Street.” To ward off any protest he took a twenty from his money clip and passed it through the flip-door in the bulletproof divider. “I’m late already. Let’s go now, okay?
Step on it”

Those last three magic words were his third mistake.

The shifter slammed into reverse, the steering wheel cranked to its stop, and the engine roared. On instinct Noah turned to look behind, so it was the side of his head instead of his face that thumped into the divider as the cab lurched backward. The Lexus to the rear somehow squeaked out of harm’s way with maybe an inch to spare.

They were nearly a full city block from the intersection in a solid traffic jam and there was absolutely nowhere to go, but that couldn’t limit a man with this kind of automotive imagination. Apparently at whatever driving school he’d graduated from there was only one rule of the road: Anything goes, as long as you keep at least two tires on the pavement.

Noah braced himself against the roof and the door as the cab
mounted the curb and surged forward at a twenty-degree tilt, half on and half off the street, threading the needle between a hot-dog cart and a candied-nut wagon on the sidewalk and the line of incredulous fellow drivers to the left. The right-side mirror clipped a corner bus shelter as the driver pulled a full-throttle, fishtailing turn onto East Twenty-third.

And then he slammed on the brakes and everything screeched to a stop.

A soldier in desert camouflage and a rain slicker was standing right in front of the cab, his left hand thrust out flat in an unambiguous command to halt. His other arm was cradling an assault rifle, which, while not exactly aimed at the cab and its innocent passenger, wasn’t exactly pointed elsewhere, either. Other men in uniform came up beside the first and were directed with a muzzle-gesture to positions on either side of the taxi.

It immediately became obvious that this cabdriver had seen a military checkpoint or two in his former homeland. With no hesitation the ignition was killed and both his hands were raised where the armed men outside could see them. Noah had no such prior experience to guide him. All he felt was the Lenny’s hot pastrami sandwich he’d enjoyed at lunch suddenly threatening to disembark from the nearest available exit.

Two sharp taps on the window, and through the glass he heard a single stern word.

“Out.”

Noah laid his umbrella on the seat, took a deep breath, and got out.

Though the soldier he faced looked to be all of nineteen years old, his bearing was far more mature. He had a command in his eyes that made his rifle and sidearm seem completely redundant. It wasn’t just the steely calm, it was readiness, a bedrock certainty that whatever might happen next in this encounter, from a perfectly civil exchange to a full-on gunfight, he and his men would be the ones still standing when all the smoke had cleared.

“Sir, I need to see your ID.” The words themselves were courteous but spoken with a flat efficiency that made it clear there would be no discussion of the matter.

“Sure.” Despite his earnest desire to cooperate, for several tense seconds Noah’s driver’s license refused to slide out of its transparent sleeve. Another man in uniform had come near and, after watching the struggle for a while, he stepped up, held open a clear plastic pouch, and gave an impatient nod. Noah dropped the entire wallet into the bag, and after another wordless prompt from the man with the rifle, emptied his remaining pockets as well. The bag was zipped closed and passed to a nearby runner, who trotted off toward an unmarked truck parked up the block.

The rain had been light and sporadic but as if on cue, now that he was outside the shelter of the car, a downpour began.

The young soldier across from him didn’t seem to take any notice of the deteriorating weather. He was watching Noah’s face. It wasn’t a macho stare-down, nothing of the kind. There really wasn’t any engagement at all on a man-to-man level. The soldier kept his cool, stoic attention where he’d been trained to keep it, on the eyes, where the changing intentions of another first tend to show themselves.

A low roll of thunder made itself heard over the city sounds, not close by, just a deep tympani rumble off in the distance. Noah pulled his coat together, one hand clenched at the collar.

“How about this rain, huh?” he said idiotically, as if blowing some small talk was the perfect way to play this out.

No answer. Not a twitch.

He heard a
whump
and a scuffle behind and to his left. When he looked that way he saw his cabdriver being forcibly subdued with his hands held behind him, bent over the hood of the car. He started yelling a plea of some kind over and over, held facedown by one uniformed man as a second went through his pockets and two more set about searching the trunk and interior of his car.

There was a faraway siren somewhere to the south, then more of them, and soon up the street a few blocks away a noisy line of police cruisers sped through the intersection headed uptown, followed by a series of stretch SUVs, all black, late-model, identical.

Of course, that was it—both presidential candidates had flown into town today for a full weekend of campaigning in the run-up to the November election. That meant hundreds of politicians, bigwigs, and assorted hangers-on from both parties were here, too. On top of that, he seemed to recall that some emergency faction of the G-20 was meeting downtown in response to the various calamities boiling over in the financial district. Along with all those high-rollers comes high security; all the cops and evidently some division of the armed forces must be out combing the streets looking for trouble.

Times had certainly changed, seemingly overnight, though Noah hadn’t yet seen anything quite as intense as this. Fourth Amendment or not, with all the fears of terrorism in recent years, the definition of probable cause could become pretty blurred around the edges. People were getting used to it by now; a law-abiding citizen could easily get stopped and frisked for taking a cell-phone video of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building, never mind riding in a high-speed taxicab that had just jumped the curb to avoid a roadblock.

The soldier on his right touched a free hand to the side of his helmet, squinting as though listening to a weak incoming communication, and then looked up and motioned for Noah to walk with him toward the truck where his pouch of belongings had been taken earlier.

This vehicle was the size and shape of a generic UPS truck but instead of dark brown it was matte black with deep-tinted windows. At a glance the logo on the side looked official, though he didn’t immediately recall any government agency to which it might belong.

Inside it was warm and dry, the interior dimly lit only by a desk lamp and the glow of computer screens arrayed around a central workstation. The man who’d escorted him left, the side panel door slid shut with a
clank, and Noah was alone with a woman sitting behind a metal desk in front of him.

“Have a seat, Mr. Gardner.” She was fortyish, stocky, severe, and clearly wrapped too tight, with prematurely gray hair trimmed like a motel lampshade. Some people just seem like they hatched from a pod at a certain drab midlife age and have never been a single minute younger. Sitting there was a textbook example. Her suit was dark and from the ultraconservative bargain bin, and while it wasn’t a uniform, her manner suggested there might be some military discipline in her background. “I just need to ask you a few questions, and then I’m sure you can be on your way.”

Noah sat in the straight-back chair across from her. “What’s this about? I mean, I understand the traffic stop—”

“One second.” She left-clicked the mouse on a pad to her right and a few seconds later Noah’s photo appeared within an onscreen form on one of the monitors. There were still some blanks in the form but most of the information fields were already filled in.

“Now hold on a minute,” he said.

“Just a few questions, all right? It’s just routine, and it’s required.”

He blinked, and sat back. “Could you show me some identification?”

“Of course.” She took out a leather wallet, flipped it open, and held it out under the desk light so he could see. No actual badge, but the gilded crest from the side of the van was there again on her card, along with her embossed name and a title of Senior Field Investigator. And then he remembered where he’d seen that logo before.

Several months earlier Doyle & Merchant had pitched for the international PR business of this company. They’d been in the market for a complete image makeover in the face of some major allegations in the news, the growing list of which ranged from plain-vanilla war profiteering, graft, and smuggling all the way up to serial rape and murder. Noah and his creative team hadn’t won the account, but ever since the pitch
he’d followed the developments when related stories happened to hit the Internet.

This woman, her hairdo, and her truck were from Talion, the most well-connected private military consulting firm in the foreign and domestic arsenal of the U.S. government.

“Look,” Noah said, “I’m aware of who’s in town tonight, and I know the whole tristate area’s on red alert or whatever, but I was a passenger in a taxi with an overzealous driver, and that’s it. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

“Are you acquainted with this man who was driving?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“I don’t know anything about him. There are twenty thousand cabs in this city. I hailed one and he pulled over.”

The woman was taking her notes on a keyboard beneath the desk with her eyes on one of the monitors. “And where were you coming from tonight?”

“From work.”

“And where were you going?”

His heart rate was picking up; adrenaline will do that whether you like it or not. Before he’d been afraid, but now he was getting angry. He didn’t answer right away, waiting until she acknowledged the silence and looked over to him. Then he spoke. “Do I need to call an attorney?”

“I don’t see why you’d want to do that.”

“Am I being detained here?”

“Well …”

“Am I being detained.”

“No.”

“So I’m free to go, then.”

“I’m not sure I understand your reluctance to speak with us—”

“Thanks for everything,” Noah said, and he got up. “Good night.”

“Is this where you’re headed this evening?”

She held out the meeting announcement from the break room that he’d folded up and brought along in his pocket.

From some lecture in his first doomed semester of pre-law at NYU, a wise bit of counsel came back very clearly:
The first thing you tell your clients when they call you from custody, innocent or guilty, is don’t say a word: never, ever talk to the cops.
But for good advice to work, you’ve got to take it. And besides, this stiff was no cop.

“I’m just dropping in to meet someone there, and then we’re going somewhere else.”

“What do you know about this group, Mr. Gardner?”

“Absolutely nothing at all. Like I told you—”

“They have ties to the Aryan Brotherhood,” she said, having begun to thumb through a file folder on her desk, “and the Lone Star Militia, the National Labor Committee, the Common Law Coalition, the Earth Liberation Front—”

“Hold it, wait up,” Noah said. “The National Labor Committee? The National Labor Committee is a little shoestring nonprofit that busts sweatshops and child-labor operations. You want my advice, lady? You people had better update your watch list if you don’t want to get laughed out of this nice truck. And, like I told you, I don’t know anything about this group or what they do or who you think you’ve linked them to. I’m meeting someone there and then we’re going somewhere else. Believe me, I wouldn’t have many friends in the Aryan Brotherhood.” He pointed to her computer screen. “But you’ve probably checked out my record by now, and you know that already.”