“Better go,” she said to dampen Logan’s enthusiasm, and as she’d expected, she just increased it.
Logan hesitated without moving towards the waiting car.
“Why not walk for a bit?” he said.
“We should go back,” she replied. “Won’t they cut our privileges if we disobey?” she added in a tone of mockery.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said, slowly revealing intentions that were beginning to be insistent.
She returned his open gaze. “Look, Logan, if you want to sleep with me,” she said, “why don’t you just say so?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s about it. I do.”
“Only it isn’t very convenient, is it. Not right now.”
“That’s a not a no, then,” he said, and gave her a broad smile.
“It isn’t a yes either.”
She put her arm through his, and from the corner of her eye watched as Larry scowled at them.
“But if it ever did happen,” she said carefully, “I’d rather we had a situation that was a bit more relaxed than this, don’t you think?” She laughed.
She felt him squeeze her arm in his. The warmth of the movie theatre was fading fast out here on the sidewalk.
She looked around casually at the watchers. “I’ve no doubt I could evade all of them,” she said easily. “But could you, Logan? Burt says you’re the best. But are you really that good?” She smiled up at him with the challenge, and he laughed, the tension easing between them.
“Are you kidding?” he said.
“The Mercer Hotel in half an hour. Make your own way. Alone, or you’ve blown it. And I bet I beat you.”
“How much?”
She looked him in the eyes. “You never know your luck.”
Then suddenly she was gone, not onto the street, but straight back into the movie theatre. She didn’t look back.
She knew she only had a few seconds. Six pairs of eyes were on her. But she crossed the foyer at a brisk walk, and when she turned, she saw that the watchers were only just moving towards the doors outside.
She pushed through the doors to the interior. The auditorium was lit only by dull wall lights high up. There was nobody there, no staff or stragglers from the movie still left behind. When she was through the door, she snatched a fire extinguisher from the wall on the inside, fed the hose through the two handles of the doors so that it gripped them shut, and placed the end of the hose behind the lever, so that when the doors were pushed, it would set off the extinguisher.
She ran now—down the side aisle, through a fire door to the right of the screen, slamming the door shut behind her. She looked down the dimly lit concrete corridor, took one of the wooden doorstops from the inside pocket of her coat, and beat it into the foot of the door with the hammer. Once it was jammed as far it would go, she ran down the corridor. It might give her a few extra seconds, perhaps, longer than the task had taken at any rate, but those might be the seconds that counted.
She came to another fire door. Pushing it gently, she saw the street. She had come out at the side of the theatre.
She looked to the left and exited in front of a group of three men who were passing. She didn’t look back, but walked in front of the men, letting them screen her. In another long few seconds she reached the end of the block, half walked, half ran straight across the street, dodging hooting cars, and kept running.
Outside the theatre, by the waiting car, Larry saw Anna turn almost as she did so and watched her begin to walk back inside. He hesitated, then walked fast towards Logan.
“Where’s she going?”
“Ladies’ room,” Logan said.
Larry whistled, and the two watchers on either side of the theatre came up fast towards him.
“She’s gone back inside. Ladies’ room—so he says,” Larry added, and scowled at Logan. “Stay with her.” He looked at Logan. “You. Get in the car.”
“Sure.” Logan walked to the car and looked from the sidewalk in through the front passenger window at the driver. He tapped on it.
“We’re almost there. Just waiting for her,” Logan said through the fractionally opened glass. The driver didn’t acknowledge he cared either way.
Logan walked around the trunk at the back of the car and made for the door to the back seat on the street side. He opened the door. When he saw a bus coming fast and pulling out to pass their stationary car, he stepped in front of it and ducked through, feeling the rush of air as it passed behind him. There was a loud blast of its horn.
He dodged a car into the next lane with inches to spare. Then he ran across the three remaining lanes, inviting angry blasts from half a dozen cars, and reached the sidewalk on the far side.
Larry was watching him like a hawk. He saw him approach the car, speak to the driver, inexplicably walk around the rear instead of getting in from the sidewalk, and then open the door. He saw the sudden jerking movement as he leaped across the path of the bus, and knew that things were falling apart. He shouted to one of the three remaining watchers to get inside the theatre.
“She’s making a break! Get her!”
They ran inside and found their colleagues waiting in the lobby, uncertain what to do. But it seemed it was dawning on them that something was going wrong.
“She’s making a goddamn run!” one of the new arrivals shouted.
All three ran for the interior doors. They came up against the crude obstruction of the thick rubber hose jammed through the handles on the other side, and smashed their way through them, to be met by a flailing fire extinguisher that was shooting violently from side to side in the corridor and firing streams of foam.
Fifty pounds of reinforced steel spinning at high speed caught the edge of the wall, whirled away at higher speed still, and smashed into the ankle of the man in front. He collapsed howling, then fell to the floor clutching his ankle and shouting obscenities.
The other three didn’t stop, but ran on two sides down the aisles of the auditorium, two on one side, one on the other, and came up against the fire doors that flanked the screen.
“Jesus. What’s she got on the other side of this?” one shouted.
On the sidewalk, Larry shouted at the remaining two watchers, one to cross the street to the far side and hunt down Logan, the other to head in the opposite direction, up to the left of the theatre.
He himself stepped straight off the sidewalk in front of the waiting car and ran across the four lanes of the street, dodging cars, slipping once almost to his death in front of a truck that refused to brake, until he reached the far side. He would kill Logan if he found him now.
Anna caught her breath after running for three blocks. She saw a cab rank on the far side of the road, crossed the street quickly, and stepped into the darkness of the rear seat.
“The mail office on Fifty-fifth and Broadway,” she said, and the cab pulled out and headed uptown.
Her mind raced back over the years to her training at the Forest. Three or eleven, those were the Moscow Rules. When you had a dead drop, a number, you added either three or eleven to the number, and if neither of those came right, you began to count up from three towards eleven.
The box number Burt had chosen was 3079. Therefore Mikhail would place anything for her in 3090 or, in the event of that being incorrect, in 3082. He would work on Moscow Rules. He would know that’s how she would work.
If neither of those numbers were true, she would have to begin from 3083 and work upwards.
The cab reached the mail office in less than ten minutes. She gave the driver the fare and a twenty-dollar bill on top, and told him there’d be a hundred dollars if he waited for her. Before stepping out of the cab, she wrapped a scarf over her head and carried her coat rather than wearing it. Then she opened the door and, leaving the car behind her, walked into the mail office.