“Oh Jesus,” the other guy said. “No one’s sticking a razor blade in my earlobes, no thanks. Or a scalpel.”
“It’s crazy, man, the shit people do to their bodies. They call it body modification. It’s, like, disgusting. So she comes back with a tattoo of a turtle on her arm and I’m friggin’ grateful. She played me, man.”
The two men laughed gustily as a train came into the station and you couldn’t hear anything else.
And Tanner found himself thinking about razor blades and scalpels and body modification, and he had an idea. He realized suddenly what he had to do.
He turned around and left the platform and ran up the nearest exit steps. He had to catch the green line.
As far as he could tell, no one followed him.
Half an hour later he exited the subway aboveground in Allston.
The tattoo parlor was where he remembered it being, on the second floor of a prominent rounded-front building at the busy, windswept intersection of Harvard Avenue and Cambridge Street. The name, Mustang Creations Body Art, was painted in circus-style lettering.
Inside it was surprisingly big and well lit. The walls were lined with framed designs for what Tanner assumed were tattoos. There were wooden cases of body jewelry. In one corner was an ATM. Seated at the counter was an attractive woman of around forty with a head of blond curls.
She was talking to a young black woman who said, “I’m here to get a new nose ring put in.”
“You want an actual hoop? Or just a stud?”
“A stud.”
“A little gem or something?”
When it was his turn, Tanner said, “Is your piercing guy here?”
“Stefan is in and he should be available in about... five minutes. Have you decided on what kind of piercing you’re interested in?”
“I want to discuss it with Stefan.”
He sat on a small couch and looked mindlessly through a loose-leaf binder of tattoo photos. He wondered whether the NSA had already grabbed Will Abbott, whether they’d found out by now that he didn’t have the laptop with him. And how soon it would be before they came for Tanner.
The door to a small office came open and a small man, a young guy with a spiky punk haircut and a ring in his nose, emerged. “Michael?”
The piercing room was immaculate and surgical-looking: a hospital bed covered with white paper, a rolling metal table with packaged needles on top, a metal sink.
He introduced himself as Stefan and said, “So what holes of happiness are we putting in you?” He smiled, showing a large gap between his front teeth.
Tanner explained what he wanted.
“I’m not allowed to use a scalpel.”
“But do you have one?”
Stefan said nothing.
Tanner took out a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet. “Can we make this a cash transaction?”
Stefan closed the door and then removed a sterile packaged scalpel from a desk drawer.
Tanner, sitting on the hospital bed, took off his jacket and then his shirt and turned around.
“Pretty bad infection,” Stefan said.
“That’s the spot,” Tanner said.
“This is going to hurt a little. Are you okay with pain?”
“I’ll be okay.”
Stefan deftly sliced a small cut in the infected area on his lower back. Tanner winced. The pain, white-hot, surprised him.
“There is something back here,” Stefan said.
Tanner felt Stefan dig something out of the throbbing wound. Quickly, Stefan placed a small, bloody object on the metal table. “This must be what caused the infection. What do you think it is?”
A GPS tracker. A micro-transponder. “Who knows.”
Stefan’s eyes widened. “Whoa. How’d it get there, man?”
“I don’t know,” Tanner said. But he had an idea. He remembered when Earle’s men grabbed him and he fought back and broke one of the guy’s noses. They’d jabbed him with something, some kind of tranquilizer that had knocked him right out. That was when they’d done it, inserted the GPS chip or whatever it was.
Tanner picked it up. It was a cylinder, not much longer than an inch, made of some kind of light-colored metal. This explained how the Theta team always seemed to know where he was, even though they weren’t nearby. He didn’t know how it worked, but it must have sent out a signal they were able to track.
“What do you want me to do with it?” asked Stefan.
75
The house had been on the market for almost a year. According to Sarah, no one bothered to show it anymore. It was an ugly little wood-frame hovel on a spectacular piece of land, right on the ocean, northeast of Boston. It was vastly overpriced, something to do with a brother and sister who had jointly inherited it and were at a standoff about whether to sell it or not. No one had lived in it since the original owner, the mother, had died, two years ago.
It also smelled bad, like a dead animal. Maybe a mouse had died somewhere inside the walls. He opened all the windows to let it air out, to let the bracing sea air in.
He had several hours to kill, and he knew he should grab sleep when he could. But for a long while he was too revved up. He needed to distract himself from what was about to happen: there was simply nothing more he could do about it. So he thought about Blake Gifford and City Roast, and he decided to make a call to his sales director.
“Karen,” he said, “I need you to listen really carefully to what I’m about to tell you. I want you to call the Lockwood Hotels Group in California and offer them the following deal.”
“But Lockwood isn’t bidding their coffee out. City Roast has it—”
“Just listen,” he said.
She did. When Tanner was finished, Karen said, “But... we’d lose money on that!”
“I don’t care. Do it.”
“Michael, that’s crazy. In six months we’d go bankrupt.”
“Just do it,” Tanner said, “and text me when it’s done.”
He ended the call. Then he called Sal Persico, his roaster, to see whether he’d done the errand.
Sal had met Tanner at the tattoo place in Allston and had taken the tracker to the last house for sale Tanner had stayed in, the mansion in Chestnut Hill.
The NSA would probably figure Tanner was staying at a friend’s house. If Tanner was right, anyway, that he’d found a tracker and removed it. Because if he was right, and he’d temporarily disappeared from the NSA’s radar screen, that would explain why they hadn’t yet grabbed him. He needed more time to get them what they wanted. It was a low-trust situation. He’d have to have something solid to hand Earle or they’d just lock him up. Or worse.
It wouldn’t be much longer.
He was about to call Sal when his burner phone emitted a musical sound. He’d received a text message.
It was from his sales director. It said only, Done.
He called Sal and asked him how it was going. “You’re all set,” Sal said.
“Thanks. And I’m sorry to bother you with this at night.”
“Not a bother at all,” Sal said.
He finished making calls about an hour later. Then the burner rang: it was Lucy Turton. “There’s a guy who’s, like, desperate to reach you.”
“It’s after business hours.”
“Not in California.”
“Who is it?”
“Blake Gifford with City Roast.”
“Ah.”
“Is it something I can handle, or...?
“Did he leave a number?”
Tanner had disappeared, but Will had an idea about how to find him.