Gone Tomorrow

aisle and slipped out the back of the store.
    Next stop was a diner four blocks north. I walked on the right-hand sidewalk with my back to the traffic. In the diner I ate pancakes and bacon that someone else had shopped for and cooked. More my style. I spent another forty minutes in there. Then I moved on half a block to a French brasserie. More coffee, and a croissant. Someone had left a New York Times on the chair across from me. I read it from end to end. No mention of a manhunt in the city. No mention of Sansom’s Senate race in the national section.
    I split the final two hours four separate ways. I moved from a supermarket on the corner of Park and 22nd to a Duane Reade drugstore opposite and then to a CVS pharmacy on Park and 23rd. Visible evidence suggested that the nation spent more on hair care than food. Then at twenty-five minutes to ten I stopped shopping and stepped out to the bright new morning and looped around and took a good long careful look at my destination from the mouth of 24th Street, which was a shadowed anonymous canyon between two huge buildings. I saw nothing that worried me. No unexplained cars, no parked vans, no pairs or trios of dressed-down people with wires in their ears.
    So at ten o’clock exactly I stepped into Madison Square Park.
    I found Theresa Lee and Jacob Mark side by side on a bench near a dog run. They looked rested but nervous, and stressed, each in their own way. Each for their own reasons, presumably. They were two of maybe a hundred people sitting peacefully in the sun. The park was a rectangle of trees and lawns and paths. It was a small oasis, one block wide and three tall, fenced, surrounded by four busy sidewalks. Parks are reasonably good places for a clandestine rendezvous. Most hunters are attracted by moving targets. Most believe that fugitives stay in motion. Three of a hundred people sitting still while the city swirls around them attract less attention than three of a hundred hustling hard down the street.
    Not perfect, but an acceptable risk.
    I checked all around one last time and sat down next to Lee. She handed me a newspaper. One of the tabloids I had already seen. The HUNT headline. She said, “It claims we shot three federal agents.”
    “We shot four,” I said. “Don’t forget the medical guy.”
    “But they make it sound like we used real guns. They make it sound like the guys died.”
    “They want to sell papers.”
    “We’re in trouble.”
    “We knew that already. We didn’t need a journalist to tell us.”
    She said, “Docherty came through again. He was texting messages to me all night long, while the phone was off.”
    She lifted up off the bench and took a sheaf of paper out of her back pocket. Three sheets of yellowed hotel stationery, folded four ways.
    I said, “You took notes?”
    She said, “They were long messages. I didn’t want to keep the phone on if there were things I needed to review.”
    “So what do we know?”
    “The 17th Precinct checked transportation gateways. Standard procedure, after a major crime. Four men left the country three hours after the likely time of death. Through JFK. The 17th is calling them potential suspects. It’s a plausible scenario.”
    I nodded.
    “The 17th Precinct is right,” I said. “Lila Hoth told me so.”
    “You met with her?”
    “She called me.”
    “On what?”
    “Another phone I took from Leonid. He and a pal found me. It didn’t work out exactly how I wanted, but I made some limited contact.”
    “She confessed?”
    “More or less.”
    “So where is she now?”
    “I don’t know exactly. I’m guessing somewhere east of Fifth, south of 59th.”
    “Why?”
    “She used the Four Seasons as a front. Why travel?”
    Lee said, “There was a burnt-out rental car in Queens. The 17th thinks the four guys used it to get out of Manhattan. Then they ditched it and used that elevated train thing to get to the airport.”
    I nodded again. “Lila said the car they used no longer exists.”
    “But here’s the thing,” Lee said. “The four guys didn’t head back to London or Ukraine or Russia. They were routed through to Tajikistan.”
    “Which is where?”
    “Don’t you know?”
    “Those new places confuse me.”
    “Tajikistan is right next to Afghanistan. They share a border. Also with Pakistan.”
    “You can fly direct to Pakistan.”
    “Correct. Therefore either those guys were from Tajikistan, or from Afghanistan itself. Tajikistan is where you go to get