Gone Tomorrow

life at all.
    The bedrooms were the same. The beds were still made, but they had suitcase-sized dents and rucks on them. The closets were empty. The bathrooms were strewn with used towels. The shower stalls were dry. I caught a faint trace of Lila Hoth’s perfume in the air, but that was all.
    I walked through all three rooms one more time and then stepped back to the corridor. The door closed behind me. I heard the spring inside the hinge doing its work and I heard the deadbolt tongue settle against the jamb, metal on wood. I walked away to the elevator and hit the down button and the door slid back immediately. The car had waited for me. A nighttime protocol. No unnecessary elevator movement. No unnecessary noise. I rode back to the lobby and walked to the desk. There was a whole night staff on duty. Not as many people as during the day, but way too many for the fifty-dollar trick to have worked. The Four Seasons wasn’t that kind of a place. A guy looked up from a screen and asked how he could help me. I asked him when exactly the Hoths had checked out.
    “The who, sir?” he asked back. He spoke in a quiet, measured, nighttime voice, like he was worried about waking the guests stacked high above him.
    “Lila Hoth and Svetlana Hoth,” I said.
    The guy got a look on his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about and refocused on his screen and hit a couple of keys on his keyboard. He scrolled up and down and hit a couple more keys and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find a record of any guests under that name.”
    I told him the suite number. He hit a couple more keys and his mouth turned down in puzzled surprise and he said, “That suite hasn’t been used at all this week. It’s very expensive and quite hard to rent.”
    I double-checked the number in my head and I said, “I was in it last night. It was being used then. And I met the occupants again today, in the tea room. There’s a signature on a check.”
    The guy tried again. He called up tea room checks that had been charged to guest accounts. He half-turned his screen so that I could see it too, in the sharing gesture that clerks use when they want to convince you of something. We had had tea for two plus a cup of coffee. There was no record of any such charge.
    Then I heard small sounds behind me. The scuff of soles on carpet, the rattle of drawn breath, the sigh of fabric moving through the air. And the clink of metal. I turned around and found myself facing a perfect semicircle of seven men. Four of them were uniformed NYPD patrolmen. Three of them were the federal agents I had met before.
    The cops had shotguns.
    The feds had something else.

Chapter 42
    Seven men. Seven weapons . The police shotguns were Franchi SPAS-12s. From Italy. Probably not standard NYPD issue. The SPAS-12 is a futuristic, fearsome-looking item, a semi-automatic 12-gauge smooth-bore weapon with a pistol grip and a folding stock. Advantages, many. Drawbacks, two. Cost was the first, but clearly some specialist division inside the police department had been happy to sign off on the purchase. Semi-automatic operation was the second drawback. It was held to be theoretically unreliable in a powerful shotgun. People who have to shoot or die worry about it. Mechanical failure happens. But I wasn’t about to bet on four mechanical failures happening all at once, for the same reason I don’t buy lottery tickets. Optimism is good. Blind faith is not.
    Two of the feds had Glock 17s in their hands. Nine-millimeter automatic pistols from Austria, square, boxy, reliable, well proven through more than twenty years of useful service. I had retained a mild personal preference for the Beretta M9, like the Franchi also from Italy, but a million times out of a million-and-one the Glock would get the job done just as well as the Beretta.
    Right then the job was to keep me standing still, ready for the main attraction.
    The fed leader was in the exact center of the semicircle. Three men on his left, three on his right. He was holding a weapon I had seen before only on television. I remembered it well. A cable channel, in a motel room in Florence, Texas. Not the Military Channel. The National Geographic Channel. A program about Africa. Not civil wars and mayhem and disease and starvation. A wildlife documentary. Gorillas, not guerillas. A bunch of zoological researchers was tracking an adult male silverback. They wanted to put a radio tag in its ear. The creature weighed