Gone Tomorrow

very noticeable. There were six hundred agents on the streets. The only other hotel option I knew was way west of even the Eighth Avenue line. A fifteen-minute walk, maybe more. Too big a risk of exposure.
    So, the subway, but to where?
    New York City. Three hundred and twenty square miles. Two hundred and five thousand acres. Eight million separate addresses. I stood there and sorted possibilities like a machine.
    I drew a blank.
    Then I smiled.
    You talk too much, Lila .
    I heard her voice in my head again. From the tea room at the Four Seasons. She was talking about the old Afghan fighters. Complaining about them, from her pretended perspective. In reality she was boasting about her own people, and the Red Army’s fruitless back-and-forth skirmishing against them. She had said: The mujahideen were intelligent. They had a habit of doubling back to positions we had previously written off as abandoned .
    I set off back to Herald Square. To the R train. I could get out at Fifth and 59th. From there it was a short walk to the old buildings on 58th Street.

Chapter 77
    The old buildings on 58th Street were all dark and quiet. Four-thirty in the morning, in a neighborhood that does little business before ten. I was watching from fifty yards away. From a shadowed doorway on the far sidewalk across Madison Avenue. There was crime-scene tape across the door with the single bell push. The left-hand building of the three. The one with the abandoned restaurant on the ground floor.
    No lights in the windows.
    No signs of activity.
    The crime-scene tape looked unbroken. And inevitably it would have been accompanied by an official NYPD seal. A small rectangle of paper, glued across the gap between door and jamb, at keyhole height. It was probably still there, untorn.
    Which meant there was a back door.
    Which was likely, with a restaurant on the premises. Restaurants generate all kinds of unpleasant garbage. All day long. It smells, and it attracts rats. Not acceptable to pile it on the sidewalk. Better to dump it in sealed cans outside the kitchen door, and then wheel the cans to the curb for the nighttime pick-up.
    I moved twenty yards south to widen my angle. Saw no open alleys. The buildings were all cheek-by-jowl, all along the block. Next to the door with the crime-scene tape was the old restaurant’s window. But next to that was another door. Architecturally it was part of the restaurant building’s neighbor. It was set into the ground floor of the next building along. But it was plain, it was black, it was unlabeled, it was a little scarred, it had no step, and it was a lot wider than a normal door. It had no handle on the outside. Just a keyhole. Without a key it opened only from the inside. I made a bet with myself that it let out of a covered alley. I figured that the restaurant’s neighbor was two rooms wide on the ground floor, and three rooms wide above. At the second floor level the block was solid. But below that, at street level, there were passageways leading to rear entrances, all of them discreetly boxed in and built over. Air rights in Manhattan are worth a fortune. The city sells itself up and down, as well as side to side.
    I moved back to my shadowed doorway. I was counting time in my head. Forty-four minutes from the time Lila’s guys had been due to grab me up. Maybe thirty-four from the time Lila had expected their mission-accomplished call. Maybe twenty-four from the time she had finally accepted that things had not gone well. Maybe fourteen from the time she had first been tempted to call me.
    Lila, you talk too much .
    I pressed back in the darkness and waited. The scene in front of me was absolutely deserted. Occasional cars or taxicabs on Madison. No traffic at all on 58th. No pedestrians anywhere. No dog walkers, no partygoers staggering home. Garbage collection was over. Bagel deliveries hadn’t started.
    The dead of night.
    The city that doesn’t sleep was at least resting comfortably.
    I waited.
    Three minutes later the phone in my pocket started to vibrate.
    I kept my eyes on the restaurant building and opened the phone. Raised it to my ear and said, “Yes?”
    She asked, “What happened?”
    “You didn’t show.”
    “Did you expect me to?”
    “I didn’t give it much thought.”
    “What happened to my people?”
    “They’re in the system.”
    “We can still deal.”
    “How? You can’t afford to lose any more men.”
    “We can work something out.”
    “OK. But the price