Gone Tomorrow

didn’t already know. And there are so many cell antennas in New York that triangulation is difficult. A ballpark location is helpful out in the sticks. Not so much in the city. A target area two blocks wide and two deep can contain fifty thousand people and take days to search.
    So we moved on and found an ATM in a bright blue bank lobby and I withdrew all the cash I could, which was three hundred bucks. Apparently I had a daily limit. And the machine was slow. Probably on purpose. Banks cooperate with law enforcement. They sound the alarm and then slow down the transaction. The idea is to give the cops time to show up. Maybe possible, in some places. Not very likely, with city traffic to deal with. The machine waited and waited and waited and then it coughed up the bills. I took them and smiled at the machine. Most of them have surveillance cameras built in, connected to digital recorders.
    We moved on again and Lee spent ten of my new dollars in a deli. She bought an emergency cell phone charger. It operated off a penlight battery. She plugged it into Leonid’s phone and called Docherty, her partner. It was ten after ten, and he would be getting ready for work. He didn’t pick up the call. Lee left a message and then switched off the phone. She said cell phones had GPS chips in them. I didn’t know that. She said the chips bleeped away every fifteen seconds and could be pinned down within fifteen feet. She said GPS satellites were much more precise than antenna triangulation. She said the way to use a cell on the run was to keep it switched off except for brief moments just before leaving one location and moving on to the next. That way the GPS trackers were always one step behind.
    So we moved on again. We were all aware of cop cars on the streets. We saw plenty of them. The NYPD is a big operation. The largest police department in America. Maybe the largest in the world. We found a noisy bistro in the heart of NYU territory after skirting north of Washington Square Park and then heading east. The place was dark and packed with undergraduate students. Some of the food it sold was recognizable. I was hungry and still dehydrated. I guessed my systems had been working overtime to flush out the double dose of barbiturate. I drank whole glasses of tap water and ordered a kind of shake made of yogurt and fruit. Plus a burger, and coffee. Jake and Lee ordered nothing. They said they were too shaken to eat. Then Lee turned to me and said, “You better tell us what exactly is going on.”
    I said, “I thought you didn’t want to know.”
    “We just crossed that line.”
    “They didn’t show ID. You were entitled to assume the detention was illegal. In which case busting out wasn’t a crime. In fact it was probably your duty.”
    She shook her head. “I knew who they were, ID or no ID. And it’s not the busting out that I’m worried about. It’s the shoes. That’s what’s going to screw me. I stood over the guy and stole his footwear. I was looking right at him. That’s premeditation. They’ll say I had time to reflect and react appropriately.”
    I looked at Jake, to see whether he wanted to be included, or whether he still figured that innocence was bliss. He shrugged, as if to say in for a penny, in for a pound. So I let the waitress finish up serving my order and then I told them what I knew. March of 1983, Sansom, the Korengal Valley. All the details, and all the implications.
    Lee said, “There are American troops in the Korengal Valley right now. I just read about it. In a magazine. I guess it never stops. I hope they’re doing better than the Russians did.”
    “They were Ukrainians,” I said.
    “Is there a difference?”
    “I’m sure the Ukrainians think so. The Russians put their minorities out front, and their minorities didn’t like it.”
    Jake said, “I get it about World War Three. At the time, I mean. But this is a quarter-century later. The Soviet Union isn’t even a country anymore. How can a country be aggrieved about something, if it doesn’t even exist today?”
    “Geopolitics,” Lee said. “It’s about the future, not the past. Maybe we want to do similar stuff again, in Pakistan or Iran or wherever. It makes a difference if the world knows we did it before. It sets up preconceptions. You know that. You’re a cop. You like it when we can’t mention prior convictions in court?”
    Jake said, “So how big of a deal do you think this is?”
    “Huge,” Lee said.