Sipping his drink, he drove along Beacon and turned left into Clarendon, parking just before the intersection with Boylston Street. He took his gym bag from his car and walked the hundred yards to Boston Sports Club.
He entered the BSC-or at least attempted to-at the exact moment that a slim man wearing a fedora tried to do likewise. After the socially acceptable number of “sorrys” and an immaculately polite “no, excuse me,” the fedora-wearing man deferred and stepped aside, eventually following Padley inside the building.
This exchange caused Padley to wonder why men no longer wore hats as a matter of course. His grandfather had always worn a Homburg and had told the young Ralph that a man’s choice of hat said much about him, but as young Ralph had still been somewhat conflicted about what he wanted to say about himself, he had chosen not to wear a hat. He now had something to offer the world, something of which he could rightly be proud, and wondered whether it wasn’t the time to choose a form of headwear. As things stood, he favored an ivy cap, perhaps in corduroy or wool-anything but Harris Tweed, he mused, thinking it would definitely send out the wrong signal-though he reserved the right to change his mind and opt for something more flamboyant.
He changed, draining the final few drops of his latte as he placed his gym bag inside the locker, then headed straight for the basement pool, which was twenty-five meters long with three lap lanes. At this hour, on a weekday, there was plenty of space for him to swim a hundred lengths of the fluid, rhythmic crawl that had many younger men watching in admiration.
He slipped into the water.
He did a couple of lengths, enjoying the feel of the water sliding around him, feeling the adrenaline light up his body.
Then he felt something else.
A twanging sensation in his chest.
Having self-administered every possible test for heart function many times over, he dismissed this and powered on toward the end of another length.
As he came out of a perfectly executed flip turn, he felt a sharp pain in his left ventricle.
His ability to self-diagnose offered him a brief, albeit illusory, moment of control. But as he passed the ten-meter line, he realized with no little surprise that he was in ventricular fibrillation.
Impossible.
He couldn’t breathe, and gasping for air only made him inhale a lungful of chlorinated water. He was helpless. His entire body, including his head, was now under the surface.
At the edges of his perception, Padley felt the water being displaced as a lifeguard dived into the pool. Within seconds, he was being dragged toward the pool’s edge, where another lifeguard helped pull him out of the water.
The first lifeguard began CPR, but Padley had by now retreated into his oxygen-starved brain and was entirely unaware of what was going on around him. He knew he was now asystolic, which triggered the thought-absurd though it seemed-that the research he had entrusted to the CIA all those years ago had somehow come back to him with interest.
With his body now lost to him, his mind experienced a second moment of clarity as he at last realized that for several years now, his wife had been screwing his neighbor behind his back.
As his heart became still forever, its current, or the dearth of such, only “funny” now to an absurdist, Ralph Padley smiled inside at how beautifully circular was the nature of his death.
Indeed, if he had been able to tell anyone, he would have said he was quite convinced he saw his brother’s angelic face before everything went dark and he entirely forgot who he was and how he fitted into anything at all.
10
Times Square, New York City
One o’clock came and went, and no one turned up.
When I say no one, I don’t mean it literally. People were there. Tons of them. It seemed like nothing short of a serious hurricane could keep the hordes away from the chaotic maelstrom that was Times Square, anytime of day or night. But of all the people there, no one approached or made contact with me.
Which surprised me.
My instincts had been pulling for the guy to be real, either way: whether he was a deep throat, or bait. Either one could help me find out more about my dad and Corrigan. I’d somehow reached the conclusion that it was going to happen, and I was leaning toward him being the real deal and genuinely having some critical information to share with me. And if that was the case, and he hadn’t shown up, it would mean two things: either he got spooked, or someone got to him first.
I mean, I was there. I got there early, scoped the place out. It was packed, as always-in fact, more so. This close to Christmas, it gets even crazier than normal. The square, particularly that part of it, the pedestrianized area by the TKTS tickets booth, was like a condensed mini-Vegas, heaving with people, music, car horns, monster LED screens and neon lights, a relentless assault on the senses, which pretty much summed up most of Manhattan these days. I ended up standing there for over half an hour, scanning the area while my eyes and ears suffered its total onslaught. And in the midst of all that chaos, between the daze of wide-eyed tourists, harried locals, gawkers, hawkers, Elmos and Captain Americas and guitar-playing rhinestone cowboys, it was almost impossible to tell if anyone was watching me. Which was one of the reasons why Times Square was a favorite for unorthodox meetings like this. That, and the multiple routes through which to slip away.
I was annoyed. I wanted him to be here. I needed to hear what he had to say about my dad. Up until his call, all I’d had were my suspicions, based on seeing his initials in that file Corrigan was mentioned in, along with ‘Azorian’ on his desk. The coincidence was too big to ignore, but on the other hand, it would have been great to discover there was actually no connection between my dad and my bête noire.
The phone call had kind of nuked that possibility.
By one thirty, it was time to move on. I checked my phone yet again. Nothing. And it was a thirteen-block walk down to Penn Station, where Tess and our Acela fast train to DC were waiting for me.
Seated on the bleachers above the TKTS booth while feigning to surf through an iPad, Sandman observed the federal agent who was waiting for the meeting that wouldn’t happen.
The iPad was a great prop for this kind of surveillance. Despite the cold and despite the swarm of activity all around him, everyone there, it seemed, was lost in some kind of handheld device, teleported to some alternate social realm-even those who weren’t sitting alone. This new norm was actually quite a boon when it came to shadowing targets. It gave operatives like Sandman something to do with their hands, which, he knew, was something aspiring actors always worried about. Many years and many deaths ago, he’d taken an acting course. Not that he ever wanted to be an actor. He just knew it would help him be more convincing while in character. He’d inhabited many personas in the course of his work and, despite all those kills, he was still a faceless ghost that hadn’t appeared on a single police report or sketch artist’s portrait.
His attention focused on Reilly, he casually scrolled through the pages of The Huffington Post, his default site. It always gave him a perverse thrill to glance at the opinions of people who thought that what they expressed in blogs and comments had any impact on what actually happened. He knew the real power in the world was beyond the reach of these naïve souls. He had probably done more to affect the flow of recent history than all of the site’s bloggers combined.
Another of Sandman’s targets was about to fall asleep forever.
He’d altered his look for the occasion, as he frequently did. Today, he sported a short black beard, some thick-rimmed glasses, and a beige Gant cap over a thick navy blue reversible jacket and faded jeans. He knew how to pass unnoticed, how to keep changing positions while keeping an eye on his quarry. He was a master at surveillance, so much so that not even a well-trained, talented agent would spot him.