Strangers

contents with trembling hands. Not a single bill was missing.
        Jack was not even slightly relieved. Though his money was still there, the presence of the other object proved that his false identity had been penetrated, his privacy violated, and his freedom jeopardized. Someone knew who "Gregory Farnham" really was, and the item that had been left in the box was a bold notification that his elaborately constructed cover had been penetrated.
        It was a postcard. There was no writing on the back, no message; the presence of the card itself was message enough. On the front was a photograph of the Tranquility Motel.
        The summer before last, after he and Branch Pollard and a third man had burglarized the Avril McAllister estate in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and after Jack paid a profitable visit to Reno, he rented a car and drove east, stopping the first night at the Tranquility Motel along Interstate 80. He had not thought about the place since, but he recognized it the instant he saw the photograph.
        Who could possibly know he had stayed at that motel? Not Branch Pollard. He'd never told Branch about Reno or about his decision to drive back to New York. And not the third man on the McAllister job, a guy named Sal Finrow from Los Angeles; Jack had never seen him again after they had split the take from that sour job.
        Then Jack realized that at least three of his phony IDs had been penetrated. He rented this safe-deposit box as "Farnham" but he stayed at the Tranquility Motel as "Thornton Wainwright." Both noms de guerre were now blown, and the only way anyone could have linked them was by connecting Jack with his "Phillipe Delon" identity, under which he resided at his Fifth Avenue apartment, so that name was blown as well.
        Jesus.
        He sat in the bank cubicle, stunned but thinking furiously, trying to decide who his enemy might be. It could not be the police or the FBI or any other legitimate authority, for they would simply have arrested him once they had accumulated this much evidence; they would not play games. Nor could it be any of the men with whom he ever worked on a heist, for he took great care to keep his acquaintances in the criminal underworld well out of his life on Fifth Avenue. None of them knew where he really lived; in the event they scouted a job requiring his planning skills and special knowledge, they could reach him only through a series of mail drops or through a chain of pseudonymously listed phone numbers backed up by answering machines. He was confident of the effectiveness of those precautions. Besides, if some hoodlum had gotten into this box, he would not have left the twenty-five thousand bucks untouched; he would have taken every dollar of it.
        So who's on to me? Jack wondered.
        He focused on the fratellanza warehouse robbery that he and Mort and Tommy Sung had pulled off December 3. Was the mafia after him? When they wanted to find someone, those boys had more contacts, sources, determination, and sheer perseverance than the FBI. And the fratellanza would most likely not have taken the twenty-five thousand, leaving it as dilominous notice that they wanted more than the money he had stolen from them. It was also in character for the fratellanza to leave a teaser like the postcard, because those guys enjoyed making a target sweat a lot before they finally pulled the trigger.
        On the other hand, even if the mob tracked him down, then somehow searched back through his criminal career to see who else he had hit, they would not have gone to the trouble of acquiring cards from the Tranquility Motel just to put the fear of God in him. If they had wanted to leave an upsetting teaser in the safe-deposit box, they would have left a photo of the warehouse that he had robbed in New Jersey.
        So it was not the mafia. Then who? Damn it, who?
        The tiny cubicle began to seem even smaller than it was. Jack felt claustrophobic and vulnerable. As long as he was in the bank, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He stuffed the twenty-five thousand into his overcoat pockets, no longer intending to give away any of it; suddenly, it had become his escape money. He put the postcard in his wallet, closed the empty box, and rang the buzzer for the attendant.
        Two minutes later, he was outside, drawing deep breaths of the freezing January air, studying the people on Fifth Avenue for one who might be