'OK,' I said.
'You're ex-military, right?'
'Army,' I said.
'You've still got the look.'
'You too. Special Forces?'
'No. We didn't get that far.'
I smiled. An honest man.
The guy said, 'We got hired as the local end for a temporary operation. The dead woman was carrying an item of value. It's up to us to recover it.'
'What item? What value?'
'Information.'
I said, 'I can't help you:
'Our principal was expecting digital data, on a computer chip, like a USB flash memory stick. We said no, that's too hard to get out of the Pentagon. We said it would be verbal. Like, read and memorized.'
I said nothing. Thought back to Susan Mark on the train. The mumbling. Maybe she wasn't rehearsing pleas or exculpations or threats or arguments. Maybe she was running through the details she was supposed to deliver, over and over again, so she wouldn't forget them or get them confused in her stress and her panic. Learning by rote. And saying to herself, I'm obeying, I'm obeying, I'm obeying. Reassuring herself. Hoping that it would all turn out right.
I asked, 'Who is your principal?'
'We can't say.'
'What was his leverage?'
'We don't know. We don't want to know.'
I sipped my coffee. Said nothing.
The guy said, 'The woman spoke to you on the train.'
'Yes,' I said. 'She did.'
'So now the operational assumption is that whatever she knew, you know.'
'Possible,' I said.
'Our principal is convinced of it. Which gives you a problem. Data on a computer chip, no big deal. We could hit you over the head and turn out your pockets. But something in your head would need to be extracted some other way.'
I said nothing.
The guy said, 'So you really need to tell us what you know.'
'So you'll look competent?'
The guy shook his head. 'So you'll stay whole.'
I took another sip of coffee and the guy said, 'I'm appealing to you, man to man. Soldier to soldier. This is not about us. We go back empty, sure, we'll get fired. But Monday morning we'll be working again, for someone else. But if we're out of the picture, you're exposed. Our principal brought a whole crew. Right now they're on a leash, because they don't fit in here. But if we're gone, they're off the leash. No alternative. And you really don't want them talking to you.'
'I don't want anyone talking to me. Not them, not you. I don't like talking.'
'This is not a joke.'
'You got that right. A woman died.'
'Suicide is not a crime.'
'But whatever drove her to it might be. The woman worked at the Pentagon. That's national security, right there. You need to get out in front of this. You should talk to the NYPD.'
The guy shook his head. 'I'd go to jail before I crossed these people. You hear what I'm saying?'
'I hear you,' I said. 'You've gotten comfortable with your autograph hunters.'
'We're the kid gloves here. You should take advantage.'
'You're no kind of gloves at all.'
'What were you, in the service?'
'MPs,' I said.
'Then you're a dead man. You never saw anything like this.'
'Who is he?'
The guy just shook his head.
'How many?'
The guy shook his head again.
'Give me something.'
'You're not listening. If I won't talk to the NYPD, why the hell would I talk to you?'
I shrugged and drained my cup and pushed off the railing. Took three steps and tossed the cup into a trash basket. I said, 'Call your principal and tell him he was right and you were wrong. Tell him the woman's information was all on a memory stick, which is right now in my pocket. Then resign by phone and go home and stay the hell out of my way.'
I crossed the street between two moving cars and headed for Eighth. The leader called after me, loud. He said my name. I turned and saw him holding his cell phone at arm's length. It was pointing at me and he was staring at its screen. Then he lowered it and all three guys moved away and a white truck passed between us and they were out of sight before I realized I had been photographed.
SIXTEEN
RADIO SHACKS ARE ABOUT A TENTH AS COMMON AS Starbucks, but they're never more than a few blocks away. And they open early. I stopped in at the next one I saw and a guy from the Indian subcontinent stepped forward to help me. He seemed keen. Maybe I was the first customer of the day. I asked him about cell phones with cameras. He said practically all of them had cameras. Some of them even had video. I told him I wanted to see how good the still pictures came out. He picked up a random phone and I stood at the back of the store and he snapped me from the register. The resulting image was small and lacked definition. My features were indistinct. But my overall size and shape and posture were captured fairly well. Well enough to be a problem, anyway. Truth is, my face is plain and ordinary. Very forgettable. My guess is most people recognize me by my silhouette, which is not ordinary.
I told the guy I didn't want the phone. He tried to sell me a digital camera instead. It was full of megapixels. It would take a better picture. I said I didn't want a camera, either. But I bought a memory stick from him. A USB device, for computer data. Smallest capacity he had, lowest price. It was for window dressing only, and I didn't want to spend a fortune. It was a tiny thing, in a big package made of tough plastic. I had the guy open it up with scissors. You can ruin your teeth on stuff like that. The stick came with a choice of two soft neoprene sleeves, blue or pink. I used the pink. Susan Mark hadn't looked particularly like a pink type of woman, but people see what they want to see. A pink sleeve equals a woman's property. I put the stick in my pocket next to my toothbrush and thanked the guy for his help and left him to ditch the trash.
I walked two and a half blocks east on 28th Street. Plenty of people were behind me all the way, but I didn't know any of them, and none of them seemed to know me. I went down into the subway at Broadway and swiped my card. Then I missed the next nine downtown trains. I just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and let them all go. Partly to take a break, partly to kill time until the rest of the city's businesses opened up, and partly to check I hadn't been followed. Nine sets of passengers came and went, and nine times I was all alone on the platform for a second or two. No one showed the slightest interest in me. When I was done with watching for people I started watching for rats instead. I like rats. There are a lot of myths about them. Sightings are rarer than people think. Rats are shy. Visible rats are usually young or sick or starving. They don't bite sleeping babies' faces for the fun of it. They're tempted by traces of food, that's all. Wash your kid's mouth before you put it to bed and it'll be OK. And there are no giant rats as big as cats. All rats are the same size.
I saw no rats at all, and eventually I got restless. I stood up and turned my back on the track and looked at the posters on the wall. One of them was a map of the whole subway system. Two were advertisements for Broadway musicals. One was an official notice prohibiting something called subway surfing. There was a black and while illustration of a guy clamped like a starfish on the outside of a subway car's door. Apparently the older stock on the New York system had toe boards under the doors, designed to bridge part of the gap between the car and the platform, and small rain gutters above the doors, designed to stop dripping water getting in. I knew the new R142As had neither feature. My crazy co-rider had told me so. But with the older cars it was possible to wait on the platform until the doors closed, and then jam your toes on the toe board, and hook your fingertips in the rain gutter, and hug the car, and get carried through the tunnels on the outside. Subway surfing. A lot of fun for some, maybe, but now illegal.