“I won’t change my mind.”
“Cizinio says he cannot help you. You must understand this. Examining his son will get you no different answers.”
“I understand. Let’s go to my hotel and get my medical bag, and then we will go to the hospital, now.”
Cizinio sat back. Then he tilted his head so as to look over the balcony, and I followed his gaze and my pulse sped up. Below, Anasasio was standing on the path with three policemen. Anasasio was gesturing with urgency, and the policemen split up, one heading for the parking lot, one for the bowling alley, and one for the building in which we sat.
I turned to glance across the balcony. The man and the woman who had been in the corner were gone. Then I saw them, below, walking toward Anasasio.
Rooster said, reaching for his wallet, “Cizinio says you should not go back to your hotel tonight. He says that we should leave, now. He says he believes you. Otherwise those men would not be after you. He says that if they find you, maybe you will be next to disappear.”
SEVEN
Tom Fargo was sealing the fifth pipe bomb, as he thought of them, when the doorbell rang. He froze, standing in the red light of the darkroom. He expected no visitors, and the doorman was supposed to alert him if one showed up. He made sure that the cardboard tube was sealed, retrieved his loaded Sig P226 combat pistol from the overhead shelf, racked the slide, locked the door behind him, and walked quietly but swiftly into the sunlit loft, toward the front door, without getting in front of it. If it blew inward, he’d be on the side.
If the FBI is here, they will have ordered the doorman not to call up. Combat vests on, they’d be prepping like the U.S. Marines who used to come into villages back home.
Tom Fargo’s pulse raced.
He told himself that God would not allow his efforts to fail just as he was to start a new attack. The first planting had occurred days ago, and results should hit the city as early as tonight. If so, by tomorrow, New York news announcers would be leading their programs with it. Later would come the national news and the world.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me! Rebeca!”
He did not relax, because soldiers might be with her. They might have told her to knock and trick him into opening up. He peered into the spy hole, heart hammering as fast and hard as it had five years ago, in combat, when he crawled over boulders and through rocky wadis with brother fighters, face camouflaged with dirt, dun-colored rags blending in with thorn bushes, as he moved to ambush U.S. Rangers. The feeling was adrenaline, not fear… the same sensation that had preceded his shooting of the female American diplomat in Rio.
Dr. Cardozo had told him after that, Your passport has been used innocently and regularly since you came to us. Anyone checking your movements will think you’ve been traveling in Europe for the past six years. A rich kid killing time. Your idea is sound. We want you to contact your mother. You will go to western Brazil for a few weeks, train, and return to the U.S.
Tom leaned into the peephole and saw her smile, which looked hopeful. There was no guile in Rebeca, so the expression told him that he was, for the moment, safe. Relief came as a warm feeling in his knees and a throbbing at the base of his neck. Allah could protect you only so much. After that, you helped yourself.
She must have seen his eye in the hole. Voice muffled, she called out gayly, “We’re having a party tonight. Greg won a big commission! You have to come, Tom!”
Magnified, her face was elongated as in a fun house mirror, but the smile was at odds with the busted blood vessels on the right cheek, a sullen patchwork of purple. It wasn’t love he felt for his neighbor’s girlfriend, or attraction. It was worse. Sympathy. She was smart and funny and had a good job as an engineer advisor on the new Panama Canal. He could not fathom why she stuck with Greg. Tom Fargo put the gun in a drawer by the door, swung it open, and kept his gaze off the bruise. But it was hard.
“Can’t come, Rebeca. I’ll be out riding tonight.”
“You live half your life on that bicycle,” she responded playfully, disappointment plain on her face. She was tiny, with a dancer’s taut body, blue-black hair in a bun, muscles toned from yoga and weekend 10K runs to raise money for wounded U.S. veterans. Her Battery Park firm paid her a good salary. She could have dated a thousand guys who desired her each day on the street. But she stuck with the jerk across the hall.
“The city is peaceful from a bike,” he said. “Our club rides around all summer. Night rider. That’s me.”
“Can’t you make an exception tonight?”
“I’ll try to get back,” he said. But he had deposits to make.
She probably knew he was lying, but didn’t make an issue of it. “Five questions, then,” she said, grinning.
“I’m busy just now, Rebeca.”
“Pshaw! Asking takes only sixty seconds!”
He sighed. She was studying for her U.S. citizenship exam, and had asked him to help her prep. There was something perverted about it that he enjoyed, as he prepared to attack this place.
He asked, “What is the supreme law of the United States?”
“The Constitution! Ask something harder.”
“If the President can no longer serve,” he said, considering that soon likely, “who takes over?”
“The Vice President?”
“What major event happened on September 11, 2001?”
“Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center,” she said, the grin dying as she envisioned it. “All those poor people. It must have been awful.”
As if his tongue moved by itself, he heard himself say, “What happened to your face?”
The hand that rose to her cheek was small and dainty, and she wore a white gold ring on the mid finger and a thin silver watch and pearl necklace. She tended to dress in tight-fitting dark-colored business suits during work hours, black or gray, that made her look professional but sexy. Tom Fargo was not like many men with whom he’d fought in the Caliphate. He was not offended if women showed parts of their bodies in public. In summertime Rebeca often went barefoot and wore white shorts that showed her skinny legs. She usually smelled of coconut shampoo and lavender soap.
“I fell while walking Cleon,” she said. “What a klutz.”
“You should teach that dog to heel.”
“I will! We’ll have a lot of food at the party. And live music. Greg knows the band. So try to come, okay?”
He’d seen her around the building but never spoke to her for the first three months he lived here. Then he’d been out running one day on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, finishing a twenty-miler, and he’d looked down to see the tiny woman matching his gait, moving her twiggy legs faster to keep up, not panting, grinning, his cap reflected in her sunglasses, her round, cocoa-colored face flushed, her almond/black eyes merry beneath a red sweatband.
“You live across from Greg. I’m Rebeca,” she said.
After that, a word exchanged in an elevator. A chance brush in the fruit market on High Street. The week he got a terrible flu and the doorman must have told her because she started ringing the bell and leaving quarts of steamy specialty soups on his mat: Tuscan Beef with Polenta, Vietnamese Pho Rice Noodle with Beef. Then the night when she and Greg wandered into the shop he managed in Park Slope, during an opening of Nicaraguan art, and Greg pretended not to see him, while Rebeca made conversation.
After that he’d started noticing her on the street more, in a bike shop, the shoe repair place, the seafood market. Had she always been there? Or had his antenna incorporated her into what he paid attention to?