Gone Tomorrow

she wouldn’t forget them or get them confused in her stress and her panic. Learning by rote. And saying to herself, I’m obeying, I’m obeying , I’m obeying . Reassuring herself. Hoping that it would all turn out right.
    I asked, “Who is your principal?”
    “We can’t say.”
    “What was his leverage?”
    “We don’t know. We don’t want to know.”
    I sipped my coffee. Said nothing.
    The guy said, “The woman spoke to you on the train.”
    “Yes,” I said. “She did.”
    “So now the operational assumption is that whatever she knew, you know.”
    “Possible,” I said.
    “Our principal is convinced of it. Which gives you a problem. Data on a computer chip, no big deal. We could hit you over the head and turn out your pockets. But something in your head would need to be extracted some other way.”
    I said nothing.
    The guy said, “So you really need to tell us what you know.”
    “So you’ll look competent?”
    The guy shook his head. “So you’ll stay whole.”
    I took another sip of coffee and the guy said, “I’m appealing to you, man to man. Soldier to soldier. This is not about us. We go back empty, sure, we’ll get fired. But Monday morning we’ll be working again, for someone else. But if we’re out of the picture, you’re exposed. Our principal brought a whole crew. Right now they’re on a leash, because they don’t fit in here. But if we’re gone, they’re off the leash. No alternative. And you really don’t want them talking to you.”
    “I don’t want anyone talking to me. Not them, not you. I don’t like talking.”
    “This is not a joke.”
    “You got that right. A woman died.”
    “Suicide is not a crime.”
    “But whatever drove her to it might be. The woman worked at the Pentagon. That’s national security, right there. You need to get out in front of this. You should talk to the NYPD.”
    The guy shook his head. “I’d go to jail before I crossed these people. You hear what I’m saying?”
    “I hear you,” I said. “You’ve gotten comfortable with your autograph hunters.”
    “We’re the kid gloves here. You should take advantage.”
    “You’re no kind of gloves at all.”
    “What were you, in the service?”
    “MPs,” I said.
    “Then you’re a dead man. You never saw anything like this.”
    “Who is he?”
    The guy just shook his head.
    “How many?”
    The guy shook his head again.
    “Give me something.”
    “You’re not listening. If I won’t talk to the NYPD, why the hell would I talk to you?”
    I shrugged and drained my cup and pushed off the railing. Took three steps and tossed the cup into a trash basket. I said, “Call your principal and tell him he was right and you were wrong. Tell him the woman’s information was all on a memory stick, which is right now in my pocket. Then resign by phone and go home and stay the hell out of my way.”
    I crossed the street between two moving cars and headed for Eighth. The leader called after me, loud. He said my name. I turned and saw him holding his cell phone at arm’s length. It was pointing at me and he was staring at its screen. Then he lowered it and all three guys moved away and a white truck passed between us and they were out of sight before I realized I had been photographed.

Chapter 16
    Radio Shacks are about a tenth as common as Starbucks, but they’re never more than a few blocks away. And they open early. I stopped in at the next one I saw and a guy from the Indian subcontinent stepped forward to help me. He seemed keen. Maybe I was the first customer of the day. I asked him about cell phones with cameras. He said practically all of them had cameras. Some of them even had video. I told him I wanted to see how good the still pictures came out. He picked up a random phone and I stood in the back of the store and he snapped me from the register. The resulting image was small and lacked definition. My features were indistinct. But my overall size and shape and posture were captured fairly well. Well enough to be a problem, anyway. Truth is, my face is plain and ordinary. Very forgettable. My guess is most people recognize me by my silhouette, which is not ordinary.
    I told the guy I didn’t want the phone. He tried to sell me a digital camera instead. It was full of megapixels. It would take a better picture. I said I didn’t want a camera, either. But I bought a memory stick from him. A USB device, for computer data. Smallest capacity he had, lowest price. It was for