Gone Tomorrow

work with me.”
    The guy shrugged and used his fingertip and pulled the stick back into line, and then he moved the phony business card and Leonid’s cell phone both forward an inch, like he was moving pawns on a chessboard. He said, “You’ve been working for Lila Hoth. The card proves you were in communication with the crew she hired, and your phone proves she called you at least six times. The Four Seasons’s number is in the memory.”
    “It’s not my phone.”
    “We found it in your pocket.”
    “Lila Hoth didn’t stay at the Four Seasons, according to them.”
    “Only because we told them to cooperate. We both know she was there. You met her there twice, and then she broke the third rendezvous.”
    “Who is she, exactly?”
    “That’s a question you should have asked before you agreed to work for her.”
    “I wasn’t working for her.”
    “Your phone proves that you were. It’s not rocket science.”
    I didn’t answer.
    He asked, “Where is Lila Hoth now?”
    “Don’t you know?”
    “How would I know?”
    “I assumed you scooped her up when she checked out. Before you started shooting darts at me.”
    The guy said nothing.
    I said, “You were there earlier in the day. You searched her room. I assumed you were watching her.”
    The guy said nothing.
    I said, “You missed her, right? She walked right past you. That’s terrific. You guys are an example to us all. A foreign national with some kind of weird Pentagon involvement, and you let her go?”
    “It’s a setback,” the guy said. He seemed a little embarrassed, but I figured he need not have been. Because leaving a hotel under surveillance is relatively easy to do. You do it by not doing it. By not leaving immediately. You send your bags down with the bellman in the service elevator, the agents cluster in the lobby, you leave the passenger elevator at a different floor and you hole up somewhere for two hours until the agents give up and leave. Then you walk out. It takes nerve, but it’s easy to do, especially if you have booked another room under another name, which Lila Hoth certainly had, for Leonid, at least.
    The guy asked, “Where is she now?”
    I asked, “Who is she?”
    “The most dangerous person you ever met.”
    “She didn’t look it.”
    “That’s why.”
    I said, “I have no idea where she is.”
    There was a long pause and then the guy moved the phony business card and the cell phone back into line and advanced Theresa Lee’s card in their place. He asked, “How much does the detective know?”
    “What does it matter?”
    “We have a fairly simple sequence of tasks in front of us. We need to find the Hoths, we need to recover the real memory stick, but above all we need to contain the leak. So we need to know how far it has spread. So we need to know who knows what.”
    “Nobody knows anything. Least of all me.”
    “This is not a contest. You don’t get points for resisting. We’re all on the same side here.”
    “Doesn’t feel that way to me.”
    “You need to take this seriously.”
    “Believe me, I am.”
    “Then tell us who knows what.”
    “I’m not a mind reader. I don’t know who knows what.”
    I heard the door on my left open again. The leader looked across and nodded some kind of consent. I turned in my seat and saw the guy from the left-hand chair. He had a gun in his hand. Not the Franchi 12. The dart gun. He raised it and fired. I spun away, but far too late. The dart caught me high in the upper arm.

Chapter 44
    I woke up all over again, but I didn’t open my eyes immediately. I felt like the clock in my head was back on track, and I wanted to let it calibrate and settle in undisturbed. Right then it was showing six o’clock in the evening. Which meant I had been out about another eight hours. I was very hungry and very thirsty. My arm hurt the same way my leg had. A hot little bruise, right up there at the top. I could feel that I still had no shoes. But my wrists and my ankles were no longer fastened to the rails of the cot. Which was a relief. I stretched lazily and rubbed a palm across my face. More stubble. I was heading for a regular beard.
    I opened my eyes. Looked around. Discovered two things. One: Theresa Lee was in the cage to my right. Two: Jacob Mark was in the cage to my left.
    Both of them were cops.
    Neither one of them had shoes on.
    That was when I started to worry.
    If I was right and it was six o’clock in the evening, then Theresa Lee had been hauled