Gone Tomorrow

send that coded e-mail home? Mission accomplished?”
    “Seventy-five thousand.”
    “A hundred.”
    “OK, but only half tonight.”
    “I don’t trust you.”
    “You’ll have to.”
    I said, “Seventy-five, all of it tonight.”
    “Sixty.”
    “Deal.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Way uptown,” I lied. “But I’m on the move. I’ll meet you in Union Square in forty minutes.”
    “Where is that?”
    “Broadway, between 14th Street and 17th.”
    “Is it safe?”
    “Safe enough.”
    “I’ll be there,” she said.
    “Just you,” I said. “Alone.”
    She clicked off.
    I moved on two blocks to the north end of Madison Square Park and sat on a bench a yard from a homeless woman who had a shopping cart piled high like a dump truck. I fished in my pocket for Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. I read it in the dim glow of a streetlight. I dialed her cell number. She answered after five rings.
    “This is Reacher,” I said. “You told me to call you if I needed you.”
    “What can I do for you?”
    “Am I still off the hook with the NYPD?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “So tell your counterterrorism people that forty minutes from now I’ll be in Union Square and I’ll be approached by a minimum of two and a maximum of maybe six of Lila Hoth’s crew. Tell your guys they’re theirs for the taking. But tell them to leave me alone.”
    “Descriptions?”
    “You looked in the bag, right? Before you delivered it?”
    “Of course.”
    “Then you’ve seen their pictures.”
    “Where in the square?”
    “I’ll aim for the southwest corner.”
    “So you found her?”
    “First place I looked. She’s in a hotel. She paid off the night porter. And put a scare in him. He denied everything and called her room from the desk the minute I was out of the lobby.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because she called me less than a minute later. I like coincidences as much as the next guy, but that kind of timing is too good to be true.”
    “Why are you meeting with her crew?”
    “I set up a deal with her. I told her to come alone. But she’ll double-cross me and send some of her people instead. It will help me if your guys grab them up. I don’t want to have to shoot them all.”
    “Got a conscience?”
    “No, I’ve got thirty rounds of ammunition. Which isn’t really enough. I need to parcel it out.”
    * * *
    Nine blocks later I entered Union Square. I walked all around it once and crossed it on both diagonals. Saw nothing that worried me. Just somnolent shapes on benches. One of New York City’s zero-dollar hotels. I sat down near the statue of Gandhi and waited for the rats to come out.

Chapter 74
    Twenty minutes into my forty I saw the NYPD’s counterterrorism squad begin to assemble. Good moves. They came in beat-up unmarked sedans and confiscated minivans full of dents and scrapes. I saw an off-duty taxicab park outside a coffee shop on 16th Street. I saw two guys climb out of the back and cross the road. Altogether I counted sixteen men, and I was prepared to accept that I had missed maybe four or five others. If I didn’t know better I would have suspected that a long late session in a martial arts gym had just let out. All the guys were young and fit and bulky and moved like trained athletes. They were all carrying gym bags. They were all inappropriately dressed. They had on Yankees warm-up jackets, or dark windbreakers like mine, or thin fleece parkas, like it was already November. To hide their Kevlar vests, I guessed, and maybe their badges, which would be on chains around their necks.
    None of them eyeballed me directly but I could tell they had spotted me and identified me. They formed up in ones and twos and threes all around me and then they stepped back in the dark and disappeared. They just melted into the scenery. Some sat on benches, some lay in nearby doorways, some went places I didn’t see.
    Good moves.
    Thirty minutes into my forty I was feeling pretty optimistic.
    Five minutes later, I wasn’t.
    Because the feds showed up.
    Two more cars stopped, right on Union Square West. Black Crown Vics, waxed and bright and shiny. Eight men stepped out. I sensed the NYPD guys stirring. Sensed them staring through the dark, sensed them glancing at each other, sensed them asking, Why the hell are those guys here?
    I was good with the NYPD. Not so, with the FBI and the Department of Defense.
    I glanced at Gandhi. He told me nothing at all.
    I pulled out the phone again and hit the green