The man had stopped at a cart for a sandwich. He opened the bread like it was booby-trapped, and inspected the interior. After wolfing the sandwich down, he’d skittered to the subway entrance. Jeremy slipped his Metro Pass from his pocket, followed the man into the ground.
Next stop Chambers Street …
The train slowed. Jeremy saw his quarry’s hands tighten on the bar, ready to exit, but not wanting anyone to know. The wheels squealed to a halt. Doors snapped open. People entered and exited. At the last possible moment, the man jumped from his seat and slipped through the closing doors.
Jeremy was already outside, waiting in the shadows. The man walked east for a dozen blocks, entering a neighborhood of expensive high-rise apartments and condos.
Jeremy slipped ahead with the stealth of a cat, appearing at the man’s side.
“Keep walking,” Jeremy growled. “Walk or die. Don’t make a sound.”
The man moaned. Jeremy steered him to a paved area outside an empty dog run. A dirty streetlamp turned the twilight into yellow haze. Jeremy’s finger jabbed the man toward a bench.
“Sit,” he demanded.
The man sat and held up the briefcase like a shield. “I-I have c- copies. If anything h-happens to me, copies g-go to the New York Times, the Wuh-Washington Post, the Chicago T-Tribune and the R-Rocky Mountain News.”
“Shut up or I’ll slice your throat. Show me what you have.”
The man fumbled at the locks with trembling fingers. The open case revealed hundreds of tattered pages. He selected what seemed an important page, names and dates linked by colored arrows. He pushed the page at Jeremy.
“You c-can’t hurt me. It’s all backed up. I have c-copies.”
Jeremy moved beneath the streetlamp. He studied arrows and lines snaking from Trilateral Commission to Ronald Reagan to the House of Saud to GW Bush. The Bay of Pigs was represented, as were the Kennedys. Each name was followed by a half-dozen exclamation points.
Jeremy stepped to the man’s side. Shook the page in front of the man’s eyes. “How long have you known about this?”
“T-Twenty-two years.”
Jeremy replaced the anger in his face with calm. He surprised the man by gently squeezing his shoulder.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it? They used hidden speakers to fill my house with noises at night. They were always sneaking up on me, dressed as repairmen. They put things in my food to make me sick.”
The man’s eyes widened. “You’re …one of us?”
Jeremy looked from side to side, whispered, “They were after me for a decade, but I managed to get free.”
“HOW?”
Jeremy put a finger to his lips and pointed to an approaching jogger, a man in white sweats, MP3 player wire running to his ears. The jogger shot an uninterested glance as he padded past.
“He saw us,” the man gasped. “Do you think he’s one of Them?”
“He’d been wired for sound,” Jeremy said. “Did you notice one wire was black, the other one white?”
The man’s hand swept to his mouth. “Oh Jesus …”
Jeremy crouched to look the man in the eyes. “Things are falling apart in Washington. They might be willing to forget you. I made them forget me.”
“TELL ME HOW! I’ll do anything!”
“Shhhhh. I bribed them. And I was free.”
“The NSA takes bribes? The CIA?”
Jeremy rubbed his fingers in the money-whisk motion. “It’s Washington, everything slides on the green grease.”
“What do they want?”
“What can you give them?”
The man’s brow wrinkled in furious thought as his fingertips drummed his briefcase. “Paper money’s going to be worthless soon. I can get my hands on Krugerrands, gold coins. Most gold is radioactive, but the South Africans make Krugerrands immune to the rays. I can’t get many – seventy or eighty thousand dollars worth or so.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing to Them.”
“They’ll soon be the only currency left. Give them half. It’s what I did.”
The man’s wary eyes returned. He pulled the briefcase to his chest, pages spilling across the pavement. “You could be one of Them. You’ll steal from me and still follow me.”
Jeremy patted the man’s forearm, one friend to another. “If I was after your money, wouldn’t I ask for all of it?”
The man absorbed the information, sighed with relief. “I don’t want to meet them. Can you take the gold for me?”
Jeremy straightened, put his hands in his pockets, shot furtive looks from side to side.
“I’ll have to catch the red-eye to DC tomorrow. Can you get the gold tonight? And maybe some cash to tide them over?”
The next morning I entered the detectives’ room to a heavy smell of sweat and adrenalin. Bodies were moving fast, papers shuffling, phones ringing. Cluff was on the phone and staring down at his fax machine. I watched a heavyset detective cross the room with a cup of coffee, enter a cubicle a dozen feet away, start talking with a colleague.
“Too freakin’ much,” the chunky guy said, laughing.
“What?”
“Len and me just got back from a condo in Tribeca. Ritzy place, owned by a husband and wife, the guy manages an investment firm. Good people, they keep a room for the wife’s brother, Gerald. Gerald’s forty-two, got a few head problems, mainly he’s paranoid-schizo. Gerald does OK until he skips his meds, then he weirds out, hides from the Feds, that sort of thing. The boys in blue track him down a couple times a year, bring him home.”
“Conspiracy type?”
“In spades. Seems Gerald came home last night, snuck in the husband’s office safe and grabbed forty-seven grand worth of Krugerrands the investment guy had stashed.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yep. By the time Mr Investment finds the shiny coins missing this morning, Gerald’s given them away, plus twenty-six thou in cash. Said he was buying his freedom from the CIA.”
A laugh. “Who’d Gerald give the stuff to? He say?”
“Won’t say anything, except he’s finally free and they’re all safe. He’s a happy camper. Showed us some backward scribbles on a piece of cardboard, claimed it was his receipt from the CIA …”
I shook my head and walked away, seeing Waltz arriving, opening the door of his office, tossing his hat to the corner of his desk. I crossed the floor, making my face benign, guileless. I had chosen duplicity over truth and there was no turning back.
My fear of discovery wasn’t overwhelming. I’d gone to a fair amount of trouble to wall myself off from my past. Except for paying a computer-savvy friend to delete items from a college database, it was mostly legal, changing my name and spreading carefully chosen rumors. Unless the few who knew of my connection to Jeremy Ridgecliff pointed my way, anyone looking for the missing brother of a blighted family might think the guy boarded a steamer and fell beneath the horizon, never seen again.
“What’s up, Shelly?” I asked, poking my head through his door.
“Cluff dug up tax records from Ms Dora Anderson. She wasn’t born a realtor,