Yasmin passed the bed on which she had dropped the key stolen from the housekeeper. The woman lay dead in a hall utility closet, the cheap pen bearing the Hotel Pennsylvania logo that was plucked from her cleaning cart still stuck a good 4 inches into her carotid artery. Less mess would have been ideal, but there just hadn’t been enough time. She glanced at the mirror to muss her hair and assume a look of panic, then grabbed her garment bag and rushed into the hall. Security here was little more than a few cameras, and it didn’t matter if they had captured her likeness. They would know who was responsible for this.
That was the point, she thought-though the thought was not her own. All the young woman had to do was keep from being caught.
She was in the stairwell and on the nineteenth floor before the first police officers reached the room. She was in the lobby and then on the street before the block had been surrounded. She did not see the men whose attention she had been sent to attract. She did not know who they were, only that the spotter in the station had called her cell phone and told her to start.
Yasmin walked over to Broadway to catch a cab headed downtown. She kept the garment bag with her for the ride downtown, instead of putting it in the trunk. She wanted the gun handy, just in case.
The gun and the marble set in a bracelet on her left wrist.
The hotel lobby was jammed with people who had come in from the street. They stood awaiting some kind of instruction, from anyone. Mobs were like that: big, burly, and impotent until someone struck a match.
Kealey knew it was probably safe, but he wasn’t going to be the one to tell them so. Not because he thought they were safer here-they might not be; the gunman could have herded them here to set off a bomb-but because Bishop had a job to do.
“Stay here and look for your cargo,” Kealey said. Bishop had caught up to him as Kealey started weaving through the packed room.
“How certain are you that she’s the one?”
“Call it a strong hunch,” he said. It was a little more than that: the way the line of fire had skipped them during the sweeping barrage was a hallmark of her precision work. “I doubt she’ll come out this way, but we need to be sure.”
Bishop agreed as Kealey literally shoved his way through.
He asked a bellhop for directions and took the stairs. He felt that would be his best chance of running into her, or at least of finding anything she’d discarded. He drew his Glock and held it close to his ribs as he ascended.
Breathless, his legs aching, he reached the twentieth floor and entered the hallway. He had approximated within a floor in either direction that that was where the shots had come from. He was right. Apparently alerted by guests who saw blood seeping from a utility closet, hotel personnel had just discovered the housekeeper’s body.
Kealey stopped and looked around.
“I need the key to that door,” he said to one of the young executives. He was pointing to a door at the end of this section of hallway.
“Is that your-”
“It’s where the sniper was,” Kealey said. “Let me have the key.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for-”
Kealey showed his Glock. “Give me the goddamn key.”
The man obliged. Kealey ran over. He felt the wall to the side of the door. It seemed solid enough. He leaned against it as he swiped the plastic key. The lock clicked. There was no gunfire. Relatively certain she would not be inside, Kealey nudged open the door with his foot. It swung in to reveal the dead flight attendant lying in her underwear on the blood-soaked carpet and the broken window.
“Oh Christ!” someone shouted from behind him.
Kealey shut the door. He didn’t have long before the police arrived, and he didn’t want to answer questions. Still breathing heavily, he looked around the body without disturbing it. Killed from behind, bled out from there. He walked over to the window. It was an old-fashioned type, wood framed, but a lock had been added at the top, so it opened only a crack. Rather than unscrew the little metal piece, she had smashed the window. He looked around. Saw shards on a discarded pillowcase.
With her fist inside that. He looked out. Large pieces of glass were lying on the scaffolding. She had kicked those out, no doubt.
He took the pillowcase, turned it inside out, crumpled it in a ball, and left the room. The police sirens were screaming from directly below. He tucked the room key in his pocket so he wouldn’t leave prints behind, put the gun back in his belt, and went to the stairs. He ran up to the twenty-first floor and took the elevator down. He did not encounter any police until he reached the lobby. They were directing people to leave by the side doors. The front of the building was a cordoned-off crime scene.
Kealey found Bishop standing on the north side of Thirty-Third Street, watching for him. He had both of their travel bags. Traffic had been stopped on the side street, and Kealey crossed. He cocked his head toward Broadway, and they hooked up as they continued east. The street was a wall of stalled traffic and people either flowing west or staring east. Heads had emerged from windows to look at the carnage. Kealey glanced back. The police were already out on the scaffolding.
“She was in the room of a flight attendant, probably picked her out in the lobby and followed her,” Kealey told Bishop. “Killed a maid to gain entrance, then took the flight attendant’s clothes to get out.”
“So we’re looking for a-”
“No,” Kealey said. “She’d stay in the uniform only for as long as it took to get away from the hotel. And then only for a short subway or probably cab ride. She knows the cops will be looking for a flight attendant.”
“Right.”
“What’s more significant is that our killer had an accomplice on the ground,” Kealey asserted.
“How do you know?”
“She broke the window in the hotel room instead of taking time to unscrew the lock,” Kealey told him. “That meant she didn’t have a lot of time. A dime, a nail file would have done the trick. Someone saw that our train had arrived, eyeballed us, told her we were coming, and she started firing as soon as we came up for air.”
“So she was already in the hotel.”
“Yes.”
“How did they know we would come out this side?” Bishop asked. “We could have gotten out on Eighth Avenue.”
“Not likely,” Kealey said. “They knew either that we were booked in that hotel or that we were going to catch a cab headed downtown.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly. This was for us, to tell us they know we’re here.”
“But they couldn’t kill us,” Bishop added. “They couldn’t afford to have another dead agent.”
“That, plus making it seem random is going to have a major chilling effect on transportation,” Kealey pointed out.
“To what end?” Bishop asked. “I mean, I understand the theory of it. Terror.”
“This wasn’t terror,” Kealey said.
“That’s my point,” Bishop said. “Assuming this action is related to Baltimore, and accepting that they were sending us some kind of message, why pile one atop the other? What’s their endgame?”
“That, obviously, is what we need to find out,” Kealey said. He didn’t add, “Quickly.” They both knew that.
“Those poor innocents,” Bishop thought aloud as they reached Broadway.
Kealey also hurt for the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time victims. But he couldn’t think about them now.
Who knows we are here? Kealey thought. Everyone in the president’s office and the people who made the travel plans. Whoever sent Bishop data on his missing cargo. The NYFO personnel they were supposed to meet and, most likely, everyone in their office.