HEAD OF THE meeting, Vesper and I had an errand in Bryant Square Park.
In the center of the green square, I made a cut a few inches deep in the grass with a small tactical shovel. We sent a text message from one unused burner phone to another. After the text showed on the screen I put the receiving phone in a baggie and sealed it tight. Then I slid it edgewise into the thin slit I’d made in the turf.
We stuck a few twigs and matchsticks in the earth with barely half an inch showing above the surface. I couldn’t believe this was going to work, or that we wouldn’t get arrested trying. I told Vesper as much on the way, but it all went fine. The baggie was slightly visible in the grass, but it just looked like trash. The twigs and matchsticks, too.
There was a pattern, but I had to admit, there was a good enough chance that no one would spot it if they weren’t looking for it. Our biggest worry was that we hadn’t got there early enough and that we would have been observed. Nothing we could do about that now, though, except to hope.
Then we headed on to Fifth Avenue. The street was mobbed with Brazilians. Well, I assumed they were Brazilian. They draped themselves in Brazilian flags. A lot of them had their faces painted in the colors of the flag. They all seemed pretty happy, but mostly they were also extremely drunk, especially for so early in the day.
As we hustled through the crowd, Vesper pointed at a street seller with t-shirts, flags on sticks and a whole lot of other Brazilian stuff.
“Go and get us two Brazilian flags. The biggest he’s got.”
“What?”
“And find out what this is all about, if you can.”
When I asked him, through his thick Portuguese accent, the street vendor told me, “It’s a big football match. What you call ‘soccer’ here.”
“Is Brazil playing the US?”
“Sure. But we’re here for the party. Brazilians love a party.”
“Oh, you don’t think Brazil have much chance of winning?”
He looked at me pityingly. “You don’t know anything about football, do you.” It wasn’t a question. He was right and I shrugged with a grin.
With the hooded jackets, baseball caps, reflective shades and now wrapped in Brazilian flags, we made our way through the New York Public Library.
“Isn’t the idea to make ourselves inconspicuous?” I asked her, as quietly as I could.
“No, the idea is for us not to be seen. It isn’t the same thing. If you’re trying to hide from the public, you need to dress in as dull and inconspicuous a way as you can. Blend in.
“With professionals that’s what they’re trained to spot. We need to show them something that tells them, ‘These are not the droids we’re looking for.’ Get it?”
I stopped and looked at her. “Star Wars quips? You are full of surprises.”
“Everybody’s seen that.” she brushed it off with a wave of her hand.
“Not everybody’s going to make a joke of it on the way to a situation like this.”
“Hush.”
“So the idea is for us to attract attention with these flags?”
“No. It’s to tell a story. Like when the spooks set up outside someone’s house, they might pretend to be telephone engineers, so you don’t have to wonder who they are.”
“You’d still have to wonder when the telephone engineer stunt last fooled anyone.”
“Cool. Well, you can spend your time worrying about whether the soccer fan stunt is going to work. Meanwhile, I have actual work to do. Concerning, you know, making sure we don’t get killed?”
We made our way to the terrace at the rear and took a table by the railing with a good view of the park behind the library. We weren’t the only people outside wearing Brazilian flags. But we were the only ones who weren’t drinking beer and shouting. I told her that and she nodded then thought for a moment.
“It’s a good point. Hunch. Look tired. And we’ll order a pitcher of beer anyway.”
“Does that mean we have to drink it?” I said with a grin.
She looked at the planters either side of the table. “No, the bay trees can have that pleasure. Be discrete about it, though.“
“That’s a skill that hostesses in clip joints have. It’s not one that I ever practiced.”
“Amazing what girls will do for money.” She looked at me across the tops of her big, bug-eyed reflective shades. “Of course, it’s usually only their tips that depend on it. Not their lives.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll play.”
We waited. I saw her tense up and I was about to spin round to see why. “Don’t move. He hasn’t seen me, I’m almost sure.”
“Who?”
“Damian Crane. My SAC. He’s at the other end of the terrace.”
“Coincidence?” I tried to keep the sarcasm from dripping too heavily off my voice.
“Not necessarily,” I could tell that she was shaken. “We’re both FBI trained, so we’d be likely to look for the same observation point.”
We sat in the sun and played the game of looking weary while we pretended to drink the beer.
“You should consider coming over to the light side, Horse. We could get you trained up.” I loved her looking playful like that. Under the circumstances, it was bittersweet. I wondered how long we might have together.
“You could try the dark side,” I said, looking over the shades at her. “Although you’d be hopeless at it.”
She looked annoyed, like a girl finding a wasp on her ice cream. “You think that your fraternity has skills I couldn’t master?”
“An attitude. A state of mind.” I told her. “It radiates off you.”
I tried to make it funny. I couldn’t help it.
The appointed time came and went, but that was no surprise. This was the kind of party that no one’s ever going to want to be early to.
Then, a guy in a heavy raincoat lumbered toward the spot. Big guy. And that raincoat couldn’t have made him look more like a spy in an eighties movie. He looked nervous as he checked around him, but he went straight to the spot where we had buried the phone in the dirt.
He saw the little sticks that we had used to mark the spot. Judging by his weight, his bearing and the speed of his movements I said, “I’m willing to bet that’s not the guy who calls himself ‘El Guapo.’”
“But you’ve never see him, right?”
“No. I only spoke to him on the phone, but I can’t picture it being this guy.”
“Wait…” she gripped the table, “That looks like… ” her eyes were wide. “It can’t be.” She frowned. “It is. That’s Schultz.”
“Who’s Schultz?”
“He’s a colleague. A Special Agent in the AC office.”
Did they ever not say ‘Special Agent,’ I wondered.
“Oh, well it can’t possibly be one of your guys. Obviously.”
“It can’t be that one.”
The man looked around him again as he got down onto one knee. He pulled the little baggie with the phone in out of the ground without any trouble. Leaving it in the baggie, he tapped in the code to get in and read the text message.
“So, if that’s not him,” I raised an eyebrow at her, “Where the phone was and the lock code, those were two pretty lucky guesses, right? He’s an agent who really is Special.”
Two men in black moved swiftly in from the far corners of the square park. When they got within about twenty feet of the man in the raincoat, they both pulled out large pistols with fat suppressors. Both men fired twice. Straight at the guy’s head. These were pros. Before he hit the ground, they’d turned. From a window a floor up at the far end of the library, came two sharp cracks. The snaps of a high-velocity sniper’s rifle. Noah.
The two men in black both pitched straight forward and fell face down. “The SAC!” Vesper didn’t move but her voice was urgent, “He’s making a hasty exit.”
I hoped that Noah had his own hasty exit plan. People all over the park were getting up and fleeing. Customers on the library terrace knocked over tables to escape the area.
Like something from a battle scene in a cop drama, from behind the shrubs and bushes along all three sides of the park, a swarm of men in SWAT gear rose up and clustered toward the library building.
A thick sense of panic rose with the noise in the crowd. As we got up to follow Vesper’s SAC, a cluster of drunk soccer fans stumbled in front of us. Vesper grabbed one of them and I took hold of another and we rushed them to the entrance back in through the library building.
I saw the man in the G-man suit that Vesper was watching. We ditched our drunks and followed not too far behind him. He went down the edge of the wide stone steps and slipped along, heading north, close to the library wall.
He turned into Forty-Second Street. We followed him.
His pace quickened. Vesper stopped and grabbed my arm. She stopped by a brown sedan. “That’s Schultz’s car.”
“The guy we just saw shot in the park?”
She nodded.
Without thinking I said, “Well, his family are going to have a whole lot of tickets to pay.”
She flinched and I was sorry. Battlefield humor sometimes leaks out. She said, “But that just it. It’s his own, personal car. Why would he bring it on Bureau business?”
Our target had hurried to a black Escalade. A SWAT team rushed by us.
She reached for the back passenger door and it opened. Vesper looked up at me as if she’d found a stash of treasure.
She got in the back and climbed over into the front seat. She beckoned me in and I went around to the front passenger door. It was locked, but she let me in. She was fishing in the glove box and she hauled out a key with what looked like a memory stick on the fob.
“You don’t think he might have been freelancing? Being El Guapo may not have been a Bureau duty.”
She hit me in the arm. “It wasn’t him. He wasn’t El Guapo, I know he wasn’t.”
I was going to say something, probably the wrong thing. “Schultz knew something was going to happen.”
“Well, he would have…” her eyes flashed at me.
“He left his car for me to find”
I struggled to keep the, Oh, really?, from reaching my eyebrows. The look on Vesper’s face told me that I hadn’t succeeded. She dangled the fob. “I bet this is some pretty solid evidence.”
“I bet it’s some pictures of his family.” Her lips pursed and she scowled at me. Like an idiot I went on, “Or some of his favorite hookers.”