“The pinhole suns,” Lathrop said to Avram over the cellular. He’d called rather than e-mailed now for reasons Avram didn’t pretend to know. “You see them?”
“I see them,” Avram said to his own surprise. He’d never lived anywhere but New York City — couldn’t have begun to count the number of times he’d been through Grand Central Station — and now here he was again. Yet he had never before been aware of those bright circles of sunlight laid out in east-west alignment on the tiled marble floor of the main concourse. He looked up at the sky ceiling from where he stood on the west balcony, tried to locate their source, didn’t find anything, and wondered if they might be projecting from the ornate window grills beneath the ceiling’s mural of Zodiac constellations.
“Avram.”
“Yes?”
“Admire the scenery later,” Lathrop said. “I want you to go down to the concourse, head toward the east side of the terminal. Walk straight along those suns until I call back.”
The phone went dead.
Avram paused before descending the staircase. His eyes moved left to the circular bars and dark wood booths of the Michael Jordan Steak House angling off in a kind of L along the terminal’s north balcony, and then shifted toward the Cipriani Dolci restaurant that occupied the smaller balcony on the south wall. Avram didn’t spot Lathrop in either place. He looked out over the concourse to Métrazur on the opposite balcony, where he could remember the giant Kodak Colorama billboard taking on soot for decades before the terminal’s renovation, but it was too far away for him to tell whether Lathrop might be seated among the elegantly dressed professionals meeting there for coffee and pastries. And say he was. Avram didn’t know how he could manage to see across to this balcony with the unaided eye. Would he be playing the role of a tourist and holding binoculars? Taking photographs with a zoom camera? Or might he find another cover for himself, a different lookout? All Avram knew for certain was that Lathrop had to be somewhere in the midst of the thousands upon thousands circulating about the great rail terminal. Somewhere nearby, watching, observing him. Maybe he was down below, blended in with the clusters of people at the ticket windows and indicator boards, or the travelers around the glassed information kiosk. But Avram could not see him. Knowing Lathrop had tracked his progress since he’d left the Diamond Exchange on 47th Street, he couldn’t see him. Hadn’t once caught a glimpse of him during his walk downtown. And never had while on any of their previous tangos around the city.
Avram tried not to let that bother him, but he was only human. And strangely enough the idea of being watched by Lathrop made him less uncomfortable than his sure knowledge of how much Lathrop would enjoy watching him. The smug confidence he would exude. He was unsurpassed in his ability to see without being seen, gliding like a phantom among the masses. And he was just as good a choreographer of others’ movements. A master of the dance, with all the conceit of one. Though Avram accepted the need to follow along, and could not dispute its wisdom given the stakes, he could have very easily lived without being put through his complicated paces on this bitter winter morning — street by street, station to station. Yes, of course, the dance had been expected. But Avram sometimes wondered if Lathrop took it to excessive lengths, led him through some twists and turns for no reason other than his own amusement.
Avram did his best to suspend these thoughts, and pushed off the balustrade. Then he went downstairs and followed the path of miniature suns to where the escalators ran between the MetLife tower’s lobby and the concourse.
His phone bleeped again and he stopped to answer.
“Okay,” Lathrop said in his ear. “The ramp to the East Side IRT’s just ahead toward Lexington. You know the one.”
Avram remained at a standstill as waves of men and women parted around him, sweeping in from every direction, moving toward the escalators and various railway gates.
“I know it,” he said, glancing at the passage.
“Wait two minutes after I sign off, use that big brass clock over the information booth to count down,” Lathrop said. “Then walk to the ramp… not too fast, not too slow. When you reach the stairs—”
“You’ll get back to me,” Avram said.
At five minutes to eight, San Jose time, Pete Nimec zipped down from his office on the top floor of UpLink’s Rosita Avenue headquarters to enter a secure conference room in its underground bowls, where he found Megan and Roland Thibodeau, one of his two Global Field Supervisors, already seated at its boardroom-style table.
“Where’s Ricci?” he asked, noting the absence of Thibodeau’s equal in rank with annoyance.
Megan shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.
“Ain’t seen him,” Thibodeau said. Attired in a midnight-blue Sword uniform shirt and pants — his optional preference over a business suit — he ran a hand across his walrus mustache, the bristling remnant of a full brown beard that he had recently whittled off in obvious but unexplained correlation with his diminishing, if still considerably padded, waistline.
Nimec motioned at the room’s large wall-mounted plasma screen.
“We’re about to have a video hookup with New York,” he said. “He knew about it Friday afternoon. I told him before we left.”
“So did I,” Thibodeau said. His throaty Cajun accent made the word “I” come out sounding like ahh. “Don’t appear to have done no good.”
Nimec frowned.
“Either of you try reaching him on his cell?”
“More than once,” Megan said.
“Got his voicemail, that’s about it,” Thibodeau said.
Nimec’s frown deepened. This was clearly not turning out to be his morning.
“We need him here for the meeting,” he said. “It’s too important for him to miss.”
“Could give you plenty examples of Ricci not being around when we need him of late, except you’d know about most of ’em before I opened my mouth.” Thibodeau glanced down at the table, still swiping at his mustache. “Some men does dead before they time,” he said in a near undertone.
Nimec looked at him from where he stood inside the doorway.
“What are you telling me, Rollie?” he said.
Thibodeau lifted his gaze, turned it slowly and heavily onto Nimec’s.
“I’m tellin’ you not to wait,” he said.
Avram descended the stairs to the subway, paid his fare with a Metrocard, and went over to the compass rose at the center of the mezzanine floor, a connecting hub for multiple northbound, southbound, and crosstown lines that was the second busiest in Manhattan, surpassed in usage only by the station where he was headed. Even now, past the morning rush hour, there were riders bustling around him, turnstiles clacking in his ears, trains rumbling toward and away from the platforms a level below.
He stood against the compass’s round focal pillar and faced north — the only cardinal point marked on the rosette.
His cellular beeped twice — the alert tone for another e-mail. Avram called the new message up on the display and opened it.
TAKE THE UNDERPASS TO YOUR RIGHT, it read.
Back in the coffeehouse with his cell phone to his ear, Malisse was going through the requisite formality of asking how it happened.
“Help me to understand, please,” he said in a quiet voice, his words carrying a faint Flemish accent. “Why would you vacate your post when you knew our man was in the building, and could leave the building at any time?”