The nun reached into her pocket and pulled out the heavy metal ring. “I am sorry, sir. But it’s time for you to go.”
Gabriel tried to hide his excitement as he followed Sister Teresa back upstairs. A moment later he was standing on the sidewalk. The sun had fallen below the trees in Hyde Park and it was getting cold. He unlocked the Blue Monster and rode the bicycle up Bayswater Road toward the roundabout.
Glancing in the rearview mirror welded to the handlebars, he saw a motorcycle rider wearing a black leather jacket about a hundred yards behind him. The rider could have roared up the street and disappeared into the city, but he held back, staying close to the curb. The rider’s tinted helmet concealed his face. His appearance reminded Gabriel of the Tabula mercenaries who had chased after him in Los Angeles three months ago.
Gabriel made a quick turn onto Edgware Road and checked the mirror. The rider stayed behind him. The road was clogged with rush-hour traffic. Buses and cabs were only a few inches from one another as they traveled east. He turned onto Blomfield Road, bumped onto a sidewalk, and began to zigzag through the crowd that was leaving office buildings and hurrying to the underground. An older woman stopped and scolded him. “On the street-please!” But he ignored the angry looks and headed around the corner to Warwick Avenue.
A butcher’s shop. A pharmacy. A restaurant advertising Kurdish food. Gabriel skidded to a stop and tossed the Blue Monster behind some bales of discarded cardboard boxes. Moving quickly, he returned to the sidewalk and passed through the electric door of a supermarket.
A shelf stacker glanced at him as he grabbed a shopping basket and hurried down an aisle. Should he return to Vine House? No, the Tabula might be waiting for him. They would kill his new friends with the same cold efficiency they had used on the families at New Harmony.
Gabriel reached the end of the aisle, turned the corner, and saw that the motorcycle rider was waiting for him. The rider was a tough-looking man with massive shoulders and arms, a shaven head, and smoker’s lines in his face. He held the tinted helmet in his left hand and a satellite phone in his right.
“Don’t run, Monsieur Corrigan. Here. Take this.”
The rider extended his hand, offering the satellite phone. “Talk to your friend,” the man said. “But don’t forget to use soft language. No names.”
Gabriel took the phone and heard a faint crackle of static. “Who is this?” he asked.
“I’m in London with one of our friends,” Maya said. “The man who gave you the phone is my business associate.”
The motorcycle rider smiled slightly, and Gabriel realized that he had been tracked down by Linden, the French Harlequin.
“Can you hear me?” Maya said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” Gabriel said. “It’s good to hear your voice. I just found out where my father is living. We have to go find him…”
18
Hollis ate breakfast at a coffee shop, then walked down Columbus Avenue to the Upper West Side. It had been four days since Vicki and the others had left for London. During that time, Hollis had moved into a shabby single-residency hotel and found a job as a bouncer at a downtown club. When Hollis wasn’t working he had offered bits of information to surveillance programs that fed into the Vast Machine. Each clue was supposed to convince the Tabula that Gabriel was still hiding in the city. Maya had given him a Harlequin slang word for what he was doing. It was called chumming-a fisherman term for throwing bait into the water to attract sharks.
The Upper West Side was filled with restaurants, nail salons, and Starbucks coffee shops. Hollis had never been able to figure out why so many men and women spent the day at Starbucks sipping lattes as they stared at their computers. Most of them looked too old to be students and too young to be retired. Occasionally, he had glanced over someone’s shoulder to see what project took so much effort. He began to believe that everyone in Manhattan was writing the same movie screenplay about the romantic problems of the urban middle class.
At the Starbucks at Eighty-sixth Street and Columbus, he found Kevin the Fisherman sitting at a table with his laptop computer. Kevin was a slender young man, very pale, who ate, slept, and occasionally washed his armpits at Starbucks around the city. He had no home but Starbucks and no reality other than the coffee shop’s WiFi access. If Kevin wasn’t taking a nap or pushing his shopping cart to a new Starbucks, he was online.
Hollis grabbed a chair and pulled it up to the table. The Fisherman raised his left hand and wiggled his fingers to acknowledge the presence of another human being. His eyes focused on the computer screen while his right hand continued to type. Kevin had hacked into the files of a casting agency and downloaded the digital photographs of handsome-but unknown-New York actors. Using these photographs, he created profiles on Web sites for singles. The actors were turned into physicians, lawyers, or investment bankers who wanted to take long walks on the beach and get married. All over the world, hundreds of women were typing away, desperately trying to get Kevin’s attention.
“What’s up, Kevin?”
“Rich lady in Dallas.” Kevin had a high-pitched, nasal voice. “She wants me to fly to Paris and meet her for the first time beneath the Eiffel Tower.”
“Sounds romantic.”
“Actually, she’s the eighth woman I’ve met on the Internet who wanted to meet in either Paris or Tuscany. They must all watch the same movies.” Kevin glanced up from the screen. “Help me out here. What’s a good astrological sign?”
“Sagittarius.”
“Good. That’s perfect.” Kevin typed a message and hit the send button. “You got another job for me?”
The Vast Machine had created the need for an untraceable way to send and receive Internet communications. Whenever someone used a computer to send e-mail or access information, the signal was identified by the Internet protocol address unique to that particular machine. Every IP address received by the government or a large corporation was retained forever. Once the Tabula had an IP number, it gave them a powerful tool to track Internet activity.
For day-to-day anonymity, Harlequins could use Internet cafés or public libraries, but a Fisherman like Kevin provided a different level of security. Each of Kevin’s three computers had been bought at a swap meet, and that made them difficult to trace. The Fisherman also used special software programs that bounced e-mails off routers all over the world. Kevin was occasionally hired by Russian gangsters who lived in Staten Island, but the majority of his clients were married men who were having affairs or who wanted to download specialized pornography.
“How would you like to make two hundred dollars?”
“Two hundred dollars is good. You want me to send out more information about Gabriel?”
“Go into chat rooms and put comments on blogs. Tell everyone that you heard Gabriel give a speech against the Brethren.”
“Who are the Brethren?”
“You don’t need to know.” Hollis pulled out a pen and wrote some information on a paper napkin. “Say that Gabriel is going to meet his followers tonight at a dance club downtown called Mask. There’s a private room upstairs and he’ll use it to give a speech at one o’clock in the morning.”
“No problem. I’ll get on it right away.”
Hollis handed Kevin the two hundred dollars and got up from the table. “Do a good job on this and I’ll give you a bonus. Who knows? Maybe you’ll make enough to fly to Paris.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“You could meet the woman at the Eiffel Tower.”
“That’s no fun.” Kevin returned to his computer. “Real flesh is too much trouble.”