Ding was dressed in warm-up pants and a light sweatshirt, and he jogged at a leisurely pace south and west of the dim sum restaurant. While he listened in his headset to Sam call out news from his static surveillance up the street, he circled over to Columbus Park and made his way through pedestrians, all the while ready to head back and take the eye if Sam ran into any problems.
With only three men in the team there wasn’t a lot of room for error, but Clark was back at the safe house on the Upper West Side, both monitoring the team’s movements on the computer and working directly with the analysts in Alexandria on developing a better target picture on the UN bureaucrats involved in the Sanctions Committee vote.
Just after nine-thirty p.m. a woman wearing a beige raincoat walked past Dom’s position on the corner of Canal and Mott, and then she turned to head south. She was one of a hundred pedestrians he’d tracked in the past ten minutes, so she barely stood out and he hadn’t gotten a close look at her face, but two minutes later when Sam described a woman entering the dim sum restaurant alone, Dom recognized her as a person who’d passed his static point.
And when Sam confirmed that the woman had sat down at Edward Riley’s table, Dom said, “She came on foot from the west on Canal. She either parked up there somewhere or else she came up out of the subway.”
“Roger,” said Ding. “Sam, we need her ID’d as soon as possible.”
“Working on it,” replied Sam. His digital Nikon had a 500-millimeter lens. With this equipment and at this range he knew he should be able to catch her through the window and get a good headshot. Unfortunately, however, the conditions on the street were less than ideal. All the neon signs around were reflecting off the glass, so Sam couldn’t get a perfect sightline of her face. So far he could just tell she had dark brown or auburn hair, it was pulled back in a bun, and she appeared to be in her forties. He said, “Only two females on the committee.” He opened a small notebook on the passenger side of the car and thumbed through the images.
He found the first female profile. “This is definitely not Noreen Paige from the USA…” He turned two pages and found the other. “But this could well be Marleni Allende from Chile. Can’t be sure yet, though. I’ll have to wait for her to move to get a better line of sight.”
As soon as he said this he saw movement at the table; he’d been looking for any exchange of property between them, but this wasn’t that. Instead, the woman was speaking with her hands, and Riley was lolling his head back, clearly in some frustration.
Sam spoke for the benefit of the rest of the detail. “Our boy looks pissed. This should be fun.”
Ten minutes into his meeting with the UN official from Chile, Edward Riley finally began to accept her words at face value. This was no bluff.
The bloody bitch had changed her mind.
Riley had brought the twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars with him. They’d agreed on this amount in an early conversation, that one while making the harbor crossing on the Staten Island Ferry several days earlier. She’d come up with an excuse to cancel the first meet for the exchange, two days after that, but she’d agreed on tonight without hesitation. Now Riley realized he should have been more concerned that the lady was getting cold feet about taking money for her vote.
He’d always known this could happen. So far he’d managed to bribe two of the nine officials, and he’d coerced an agreement out of two more by threatening them with scandalous revelations, but he had thought he had Marleni Allende in the bag already.
Allende had a problem with money. She was a middle-class woman back home, an international law professor who, through merit alone, worked her way into a respectable but not terribly high-paying job in New York City, and here she was surrounded by men and women who made more money and lived better for it. Over time her resistance to running up her credit cards had weakened; it was easy to spend lavishly here in New York, and she’d put herself twenty thousand dollars in debt.
As soon as Riley and the rest of Sharps Partners identified her as a target they snooped around her bank accounts, and in minutes he had his attack vector sorted. He approached her, shocking her greatly, but she certainly seemed excited by the prospect of a financial lifeline.
But now it looked like he’d overestimated her concern for her financial problems, or else he’d underestimated her dedication to her organization.
And this led him to a new problem. He needed her no vote, but more than that, he needed her discretion. If she revealed the scheme to bribe UN officials, Riley himself would be the one facing the threat of a scandal.
He sipped his Tsingtao beer, taking a minute to regroup. Then he spoke, sticking with his Kincaid legend, the NYPD detective. With a Brooklyn accent he said, “Look, Marleni, you came here tonight on foot, you wanted to meet me in this out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall. You’re dressed like you’re in a frickin’ Sam Spade novel, for cryin’ out loud. You don’t look to me like a woman who doesn’t want to go along with the plan. Just tell me what it is you want and I’ll do my best to make it happen.”
Allende shook her head. “Nothing. I want nothing. I came like this because I am ashamed to be meeting with you again. If someone I know sees me… I want the money, of course, but I am no criminal. I have a duty to my organization. I cannot do this. I will not.”
Riley gave her a challenging look. “How are you going to feel when the vote fails anyway because many of your colleagues don’t share your bright and shining sense of mission? You are going to be the only one who doesn’t benefit.”
“I know you have approached others. I can see it on their faces around the office. They all want to know if others in the committee know about their secret. I am sure they hope everyone knows, so everyone will go along quietly.”
Riley raised an eyebrow, but Marleni Allende lifted a hand quickly; on her face she had an expression of worry.
“I will go quietly, don’t doubt this. I will not say a word about anything that has happened. It is not my place to hurt my friends and coworkers. But I will not join in this… corruption.”
She stood. “I am sorry, Mr. Kincaid. Good night.”
Without another word she turned and headed for the door.
Allende was still in the restaurant when Driscoll noticed the new arrival to the neighborhood. A small black SUV with its lights off pulled up to the curb some twenty-five yards north of his position on the corner of Bayard and Mott. He could just see one person behind the wheel, but he wasn’t sure with all the reflecting neon from the Chinese character signs running up and down both sides of the street.
Marleni Allende — Sam had confirmed her identity when he got a perfect shot of her face during her meeting with Riley — stepped out of the dim sum place and began walking up Mott Street, in the direction of the black SUV.
Sam had not seen anything passed between Riley and the UN woman, and now, watching the way she had spun away and marched off, he read it as a show of resolution. He got the distinct impression she was turning her back on Riley, figuratively as well as literally.
Sam said, “Listen up. The woman is not going to play ball with Riley, and she is on the move, heading northbound on foot. A suspicious vehicle just pulled up on the corner.”
Ding called back. “I’m en route from the south.”
Dom said, “I’m in position if she comes all the way to Canal Street.”
Sam just sat in his dark car. As much as he wanted to tail the woman leaving on foot immediately, he wouldn’t reveal himself by firing up his engine right now. Instead, he sat and watched while she crossed the street. While she did so the SUV started to move forward, directly facing her. But a passing Audi sedan honked its horn and swerved to avoid a collision with the SUV, then it turned right onto Mott.