But how to discreetly brief him, Thornton wondered on the cab ride home from Penn Station, trying his damndest all the while to keep his hands off the lump behind his ear. An eavesdropping device of some sort, he suspected. In which case it was a good bet that his phones and computers were being tapped too.
At his apartment, he texted O’Clair, “It’s been too long since the last meeting of the Crossain’Wich Club.” O’Clair would probably suspect something was up. There was no Crossain’Wich Club. The two of them had never gotten together for a Crossain’Wich. Or breakfast of any kind.
At ten o’clock the next morning, the friends sat across from each other in a booth at a now-quiet Burger King two blocks from the National Security Agency’s offices in downtown Manhattan. O’Clair had been a cross-country runner at West Point fifteen years ago and never lost his string-bean physique. He attempted to counter his boyish face with a wide mustache. It made him a hard read. He had to be wondering why Thornton was now going on and on about the Knicks’ defense, or lack thereof.
When the restaurant momentarily emptied, Thornton said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to hit the head.”
Rising, he nudged across the table a small piece of water-soluble white paper that he’d purchased at a drugstore near his apartment. Hobbyists commonly use water-soluble paper as a dissolvable base for embroidery. Thornton had tossed a twelve-sheet package into his basket along with — for cover’s sake — a bunch of other items. In preparation for his meeting with O’Clair, he jotted onto one of the sheets the details of the lump he’d found beneath his scalp and his related suspicions, including an explanation of how the assassin knew to wait in ambush at Au Bon Pain. Thornton hoped that as soon as O’Clair read the message, he would drop it into his coffee. After all, it had been O’Clair who told Thornton the story of the young clandestine operations officer who made the mistake of trying to dissolve water-soluble paper in a martini.
Thornton walked to the men’s room, pushed through the door, did three laps of the overly bright stalls, flushed a urinal, and walked out.
Biting back a grimace as he lowered himself back into his seat, he saw that his message was gone, in all likelihood responsible for the bubbles on the surface of O’Clair’s coffee.
“So, dude, I was thinking it would be good for you to get in some fresh air, bag some endorphins,” O’Clair said. “Princess Sarah’s got Nathan this afternoon. What do you say to a hike?”
The thought of it caused a flare of pain in Thornton’s rib cage.
“Sounds great,” he said.
The overcast morning became a sunny and mild afternoon. After crunching for a mile through crisp blond and russet leaves alongside Riverside Park’s jogging path, O’Clair turned sideways to fit into an opening in the three-story brick wall behind the West 103rd Street soccer field. Thornton traipsed after O’Clair into a space so dark he could see nothing beyond a rusty staircase, and he saw that much only because of O’Clair’s powerful flashlight. Fifty degrees tops, the air reeked of mold and rodents. O’Clair explained that he had learned of this place while supervising an NSA-funded research project at nearby Columbia University.
At the muddy base of the stairs, he swung the flashlight to show the remnants of a pair of railroad tracks. Weeds as big as bushes hung from the three-story ceiling. Segments of the concrete retaining wall were scattered all over, like building blocks left behind by giant children. There were no signs of people — just rats, scampering away from the flashlight beam.
“My ex-brother-in-law still lets me have the family discount on weed,” O’Clair said, setting the flashlight on a cement ledge twenty feet in, illuminating the close vicinity and throwing giant shadows of the two of them onto the far wall.
“Is it okay …?” Thornton opened and closed a hand in imitation of the movement of a mouth.
O’Clair shook his head emphatically. “Oh yeah, totally. You’re gonna love this shit.”
He eased off his hiker’s pack, produced an iPod connected to a small speaker, then balanced them atop the ledge. When he flipped a switch icon, reggae reverberated through the tunnel.
From his wallet, he drew a card-size magnifying glass with a built-in flashlight. “Okay, let’s party.”
Thornton bowed his head and submitted to an examination of the lump behind his left ear. Again gesturing for Thornton to keep quiet, O’Clair tugged an appliance from his pack that resembled a compact personal fax machine. He used a rubber-coated coil to couple it with an instrument similar in configuration to a handheld hair dryer.
“Remind me to grab a quick shower later,” he said, fitting the mouth of the blow-dryer over Thornton’s lump. “If the princess smells the smoke when I pick up Nathan, she’ll speed-dial the civil court.”
Thornton was impressed by his friend’s performance.
O’Clair pushed a button on the face of his fax machine. An LED panel glowed green and the image of a small capsule formed at its center. Data streamed along the base of the panel. “So is this good shit or what?” he asked, exhaling from an imaginary joint.
“Incredible.” Thornton’s incredulity required no acting.
O’Clair sang along with a recording of Bob Marley—“Buffalo Soldier”—while continuing to scan Thornton’s body. The monitor yielded uniform green-gray surfaces that Thornton took for muscle and bone.
Setting the scanner down, O’Clair rifled once more through his pack and handed over a pair of headphones. Thornton slid the big foam cups over his ears, covering the area over the implanted device.
“Now we can talk,” O’Clair said.
“Wasn’t that the idea of coming to a subterranean cavern in the first place?”
“Actually, this is a New York Central Railroad tunnel, or it was until 1937. Theoretically it blocks transmission, but the capsule in your head has an onboard microphone that’s still recording. On our way out of here, the instant it gets reception, it’ll transmit all the audio it captured here, in a single burst. As far as I can tell, it captures every vibration of your left eardrum, meaning that whoever receives the transmission hears every word you hear or say.”