The 4 Phase Man Part 4

And there was the tap.

Only a professional, someone very good, would've thought to replace a door that had been kicked in or forced. The doors in the building were flimsy at best, easily manhandled. But would just as easily show the violence done to them.

Maintaining a tracer tap on a line that had no phone or modem attached was also a pro's touch.

Take someone by force or guile, expunge all physical evidence, then leave an active tap in place. Not to listen to calls that could never be placed, but to determine who might be calling the young student. And, by extrapolation, who might be looking for him.

It was a thing Xenos might've done, had done, in his not-distant-enough past.

He pulled out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel shaking his head.

"There's got to be another answer," he mumbled as he looked around. "Got to be."

Ten minutes later he pulled to a stop on Linwood Avenue, convincing himself that he was looking for conspiracies out of habit, not evidence. Paolo DiBenetti was born to the Brotherhood, whether he was an active member or not. He was a law student at one of the top law schools in the world, so he was not only intelligent but sharp. He could have thought it through as part of an elaborate scheme to steal the nearly $100,000 the Brotherhood had given him for his education.

Xenos wanted to believe that, desperately! It would've removed all pressures, made the job easier. It would've allowed him to avoid that part of his personality-which he'd exiled to a tightly bound place within himself-to stay tautly under control. For him to maintain at least the counterfeit peace that he'd so barely established in the last years.

But instinct and experience make for impa.s.sable arguments and waking nightmares of the bad old days.

Getting out of the car, he put aside the contradictions, the questions, looked around, then sighed.

He hadn't intended to come here, in fact had promised himself he wouldn't. But he wasn't all that surprised that he'd ended up in front of the old apartments built above the storefronts.

Pulling his cap down low over his large sungla.s.ses, he started down the street.

As a black Lincoln pulled to a stop a half-block back, the pa.s.senger snapped pictures of him through a telephoto lens.

"I'll be right with you, the teenage boy behind the counter said as he finished with some paperwork."

The small printing shop was largely empty. An old man was copying a Lost Cat poster on the Xerox machine; an overnight courier was emptying the drop-off box. Somewhere behind the thin part.i.tion that separated the lobby from the shop, a heavy press could be heard running, and the smell of warm ink and toner filled the place.

"What can I do for you? The boy was seventeen, maybe older, and smiled a familial smile."

"I'm looking for Sarah Goldman."

The boy looked mildly curious. "This about an order?"

"It's personal."

"Got a name?"

"Filotimo."

The boy looked him over carefully, then hesitantly stepped behind the part.i.tion. After locking the cash register. A minute later a woman in her mid-thirties in jeans and a sweats.h.i.+rt came out.

"You wanted to see me?"

He took off the sungla.s.ses.

She froze. "My G.o.d," she whispered. "My G.o.d. Sarah quickly looked around, not frightened ... careful," then gestured toward the street. "I'll be back in a few minutes, Bradley. She followed Xenos out before the boy could form the obvious question."

They walked together silently for half a block, Sarah openly staring at Xenos, shaking her head but saying nothing.

"Is it safe for you here?" she finally asked. Xenos shrugged. "There is no safe."

"Jesus," she mumbled. "Jesus."

They turned into a small park, walking over to the swings, where some small children were playing.

"If this creates a problem for you," Xenos said after another awkward moment, "I'll leave."

"No!" Sarah almost yelled in a panic.

Xenos smiled, looked around, took off his shades and cap, and held his arms wide. A moment later he held her tight against him in a hug he hoped would never end.

"Twelve years is too G.o.dd.a.m.ned long, big brother." Sarah weeped as she kissed him. "Where you been, huh?"

Xenos hesitated, then indicated a nearby bench. "Don't ask questions like that." He smiled bitterly.

"Dope," she said with an equally large grin.

"Princess," he shot back, trying to ape her human emotion and warmth.

She stroked his face. "I have so much I want to ask, need to say."

"Later."

She looked doubtful. "Will there be a later?" There was the slightest hint of accusation in her tone.

"I'll try."

For the next ten minutes Sarah talked of her life, her son, her ex-husband, all the meaningless things that she could think to avoid the thing that was always there on the rare moments that they saw each other.

Xenos feigned interest, responded with generalities about the Greek islands, France, with no specifics intended or asked for.

Finally, painfully, the inevitable lay before them.

"Will he see me?"

"He hasn't changed," she said glumly. "And I'd bet my last dime-if I had a dime to bet-that you haven't either."

Xenos concentrated on the street. "You might be surprised." His look turned solemn. "I really need him to see me."

"Jerry"-she took his callused hand in hers-"it's sixteen years."

The big man moved his mouth, nothing came out. Then a deep breath. "Seventeen. I just need him to see me, to talk to me. His eyes followed a cable TV truck as it slowly moved past."

"Why now?"

And his nightmare demanded attention. "I, well, he's getting old. I can't let him go before I ..."

Sarah hugged him. "I'll try, Jerry. That's all I can do, you know?"

"Yeah."

They started walking back to the shop.

"So where can I reach you?"

"I'll call you when I can."

Sarah laughed bitterly. "I know what that means."

He thought for a moment. a.n.a.lysis: she needs something, some human reaction to rea.s.sure her that everything's going to be all right. A simple, distinct gesture of rea.s.surance.

"Always remember," the instructor had droned on, "that simple eye contact is one of the most powerful tools in the perfect lie. Combined with intimate, nons.e.xual physical contact, it defeats all doubts and suspicions. a.s.suming your tone is reflective of the act."

He looked at the one student in the room. "Goldman! Demonstrate!"

Jerry got up, walked to the front of the room, then turned to the instructor. "Uh, what do you want me to..."

"Lie to me."

"Big lie," Herb called out from the back of the otherwise empty cla.s.sroom, where he and five other instructors were watching.

The young man turned to the instructor, nodded, then smiled. A thing that exploded across his face and out of his eyes.

"G.o.d, I love these cla.s.ses!" He reached up, stroked the instructor's cheek as his voice dropped low and sincere. "Seriously, I love them."

Herb applauded. "Good. Be a little less forceful, though, and don't repeat yourself, son." He winced at the thought. "Repet.i.tion reeks of falsity."

The boy nodded, then turned back to his instructor.

Xenos took Sarah's chin in his hand, lifted her tearing eyes to look into his, then softly stroked her cheek. "It means, I'll call."

Another kiss, a rib-rattling hug, and he was gone.

Sarah Goldman watched her older brother, the idol of her early years, walk down the street, wave, then get into his car. Wondering all the time if this time, for the first time, he would stay long enough to help repair their shattered family. Silently crying, she watched him start the car and drive off.

Not noticing the black Lincoln pull out behind him.

"Where'd he go? Where'd he go?"

"I don't see him. But relax. In this traffic he's probably as stuck as we are."

The two men in the black Lincoln stared through their winds.h.i.+elds at the ocean of yellow cabs and town cars that surrounded them. They'd followed Xenos back into Manhattan, through Columbus Circle into midtown. But now, in the late afternoon traffic, they were separated from their target.

"I'm getting out." The pa.s.senger opened his door and hurried up Fifty-third Street, scanning the traffic as he went. Suddenly he saw Xenos's car double-parked across the street. He dodged the barely moving traffic, crossing over to examine the empty car.

"s.h.i.+t!" He looked all around, then started as he recognized Indigo One casually walking down an alley. He pulled out his cell phone and hurried behind.

"Seven-one."

"He's headed across to Fifty-fourth."

"Stay on him. I'll swing around and pick you up when I can. Report back every five minutes."

"Yeah, yeah!" He shut the phone and continued on. But when he looked up again, Xenos had disappeared. "s.h.i.+t!"

The man ran down the alley, desperate to get to the Fifty-fourth Street side in time to see where his target had gone. Ten feet from the alley's exit, he was suddenly pulled from his feet and slammed into the side of a Dumpster.

Then an iron hand grabbed him by the neck and smashed his face into a brick wall.

"I don't know you, friend," Xenos said coldly as he shoved the broken, bleeding man behind the Dumpster. "But I'm going to."

Twenty minutes later, as the driver slowly cruised Fifty-fourth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues for the third time, cursing the traffic, his partner, and anything else he could think of, he dialed a number on his cell phone.

"Yes?"

"Seven-one," I think we have a problem.

"You do," Xenos said to himself in the next car back as he listened on earphones attached to a small parabolic microphone mounted on the dashboard. "You most definitely do."

It took the better part of an hour for the driver of seven-one to make his way across Manhattan and into Queens. He finally pulled into a key-entry subterranean garage in a sixteen-story office building. Xenos parked across the street at a hamburger stand, bought a burger, and sat, watching the building.

It seemed ordinary enough. Doorman, concierge desk just inside the lobby. Gold-tinted, shaded windows. Usual aerials on top. But there was little traffic in and out of the building, no cars or cabs pulled up, and uniformed, armed security guards patrolled the exterior, seemingly on a fifteen-to-twenty-minute orbit around the building's perimeter.

Ten minutes after they'd arrived, the car and driver he'd followed from Fifty-fourth Street pulled out of the garage. But Xenos never moved. The man in the alley-most likely now in the emergency room of a hospital-had merely been a surveillance agent. Who for and why, he didn't know, would definitely have told if he had.

So Xenos had followed the man's partner, a.s.suming something as important as an operative's disappearance would have to be reported in person. Xenos was now interested in the building, not the other man.

"Big G.o.dd.a.m.ned haystack," he mumbled as he plugged a cell phone into a laptop. He quickly brought up the program he needed, then prepared to speed-dial Paolo's apartment. If his electronic hunter had worked, the laptop would dial in, retrieve the data, then activate an electronic bullet that would fry the circuits of whoever was listening.

If it didn't work, well, he'd probably change hotels anyway.

He pressed the enter b.u.t.ton on the phone and laptop simultaneously, then watched the display.

Connecting

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