The Hardest Thing

cuffs. Instead, they treated me like a celebrity. Straight into the back of a cruiser, personal medical attention, all that was missing was a minibar. Patched through to operation HQ at NYPD where a very excited inspector wanted to hear all about it. First of all, however, I had a question for him.
    “What day is it?”
    “Thursday.”
    “And when’s Marshall’s pretrial hearing?”
    “Tomorrow morning.” He coughed. “If we can find him.”
    “You mean he’s run?”
    “We’re monitoring all the airports.”

    “Great.” That’s really going to work, isn’t it? “Where’s the money?”
    “He’s shifted a large amount of Marshall Land’s capital to an account in Liberia.”
    “So what’s the plan?”
    “Well, Major Stagg… We’re kind of relying on you.”

    I returned to Manhattan with more style than I’d left it. Jack Rendell of Parker-Rendell put his vast office at my disposal, and it was here that I received senior officers from New York’s finest. I was assigned to the operation as a civilian expert—but nobody objected when I said I wanted to be on the front line. New clothes were waiting for me, chosen and bought by Martin Kingston. I guess it was a guilt-offering; his daughter Linda, a thirtysomething mother of two who lived on Long Island, had never been in the slightest danger, and if he’d bothered to call her before rushing out of the apartment I might have been spared a beating and a armful of whatever shit they shot me up with.
    The two immediate objectives were simple: first, secure and detain Julian Marshall, and second, provide sufficient evidence at the pretrial hearing on Friday morning. Simple, but not easy. Marshall had disappeared, the hearing was less than twelve hours away, and the key witness, Jody Miller, alias Brian Cooper, alias Stirling McMahon/McMasters (the list went on) was on a life-support machine in an intensive care unit in Trenton, New Jersey. Of course I could tell the judge what Jody had told me—but that wasn’t going to stand
up in court. There was the small matter of abduction and torture to discuss—enough, perhaps, to put Enrico Ferrari behind bars for a couple of years. But Marshall had been careful. Nothing connected him to Ferrari; there was no one by that name on the Marshall Land payroll. I had never seen them together. Ferrari never told me who he was working for. Damn it, nobody could even connect him with Trey Peters. Without Jody, and without Marshall, the party was off.
    Ferrari was in police custody, but I’d done rather too good a job of smashing his face in to make him much use as a witness just yet. By the time the doctors let him talk to anyone, Marshall would be sitting on a pile of gold somewhere in the tropics. I’m sure the Liberian boys would do very well by him.
    New York City is a big place with an awful lot of airports within striking distance. The last confirmed sighting of Julian Marshall was Martin’s interview with him the previous Tuesday—the day I’d been hit by a car on the sidewalk, the day of the bogus kidnapping of Martin’s daughter and the all-too-real kidnapping of yours truly. Financial records showed that he’d been busy in that time, but it was impossible to say where he was. Marshall Land had gone into lockdown; the staff couldn’t even get to their desks on Wednesday morning, and the boss wasn’t answering any of his usual phones. His addresses in Manhattan and Connecticut were unoccupied.
    A needle in a haystack, then—and short of closing down the entire city we were never going to find him.
    So what do you do when the combined forces of law and order can’t lay their hands on Public Enemy
Number One? I’ve had a little experience of this myself, between my service record and some of the hopeless manhunts I’ve been involved in over the last few years. When you’ve searched every place you can think of, when your quarry still evades you, you set a trap.
    There are three things you need for a trap. Intelligence, to locate your prey and understand its habits. Mechanism, the spring that catches the mouse, the concealed pit that catches the bear, the phalanx of heavily-armed cops that suddenly surrounds the absconding criminal. And last but not least, you need bait.
    At the moment we had none of those things, and our only possible informant was lying on an operating table while surgeons attempted to salvage his once-perfect, Italian, movie-star profile. But we had the whole night ahead of