The October List

made a sound like a disagreeable transmission. This one came from his throat, not his belly.
    ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’ The Public Affairs officer scooted out.
    Why the hell does that kid wear a sidearm? Kepler thought.
    Barkley turned to the two detectives, sitting at a battered fiberboard table, and barked, ‘Jesus.’ He nodded toward Kepler’s copy of the release.
    Fred Stanford Chapman, 29, … gunshot wound …
    Then the boss changed direction. ‘Now, her .’
    He didn’t need to say Gabriela. There were no other women causing them so much anxiety at the moment.
    ‘I told you yesterday I wanted her under surveillance. Twenty-four seven. What the hell happened? You were at her place, right? Cameras, microphones.’
    Her.
    Brad Kepler shrugged. ‘She tipped to us. I don’t know. And then started using evasive tactics.’
    ‘The hell does that mean? Sounds like something from a bad cop movie.’
    ‘But,’ Kepler said, ‘we’re still on her.’ A glance at his partner. ‘Right?’
    Surani called Surveillance, had a discussion, then clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Barkley and Kepler, ‘We’ve got officers close. It’s righteous.’
    Which sounded like something out of an even worse cop movie.
    Righteous?
    The captain asked, ‘How’d you manage the tail, if she slipped you at her place?’
    Surani explained, ‘Brad got a GPS on her.’
    ‘How the hell you do that?’ The captain gave one of his broad frowns that he used for emphasis, a gesture several of his detectives had developed pretty good imitations of, Brad Kepler included.
    ‘She was distracted. It was chaos, weapons, screaming, diving for cover. I got the thing into her jacket pocket.’
    Barkley was pleased, Kepler could tell, but his nature required him to ask, ‘You think that was a safe idea?’ The captain could never just say, Good job.
    ‘Safe idea?’ Kepler asked. He didn’t know what that meant. ‘I frankly didn’t think about it. It was just something I had to do: Get the tracker onto her then back off.’
    Surani, his gray complexion even grayer under the inhumane lights in the dismal operations room, said, ‘It was pretty good, pretty smooth. She doesn’t have a clue.’
    ‘Microphone?’ The captain brushed his trim, white hair – senior congressman’s hair – twice, then a third time. He seemed to look Kepler up and down, as if approving of his impressive tan. Or disapproving.
    ‘No, just a tracker. We lost her for a bit in the subway.’
    The New York city metro system was huge and fast and efficient, and that meant it could transport Gabriela anywhere within a several-hundred-square-mile area. And GPS trackers wouldn’t work there.
    ‘But then she surfaced. CCTV got a facial recognition exiting a station in Midtown. The signal’s been solid since then.’
    ‘Unless she decides to hop on the A train again.’
    ‘She can’t live in the MTA,’ Surani said. ‘The food sucks down there. And the showers? Forget about it.’ This drew a hard glance from Kepler because the joke was beyond stupid. It wasn’t even a joke.
    ‘And she was with the guy?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Stay on her. But I want everybody tailing to be invisible. You follow me? If Surveillance gets made, then people could get killed. That’s not happening on my watch.’
    And why not? Kepler wondered, of the dramatic pronouncement. You can protect all the innocents in New York City, can you now, boss? A lot of people have died on your watch over the years, when you think about it.
    But Surani said only, ‘We’ve told the teams to stay back. They’re near but not too close.’
    One of the deputy chiefs stuck his head in the doorway. ‘Hey, sorry, gentlemen. Need to commandeer this room.’
    ‘What?’ Barkley snapped. ‘Move the op center? Again? You gotta be kidding me?’
    The white-haired, rotund brass shrugged, looking only slightly contrite. ‘Got a terrorist tip and we need an ISDN line. They’re not up and running in the other rooms.’
    ‘Terrorist. We get a thousand terrorist tips a year. Why’s this one a big deal?
    ‘Bureau’s running it. Pretty serious, it seems. And could be going down in two, three weeks, so it’s prioritized. Infrastructure target, that sort of thing. You got ten minutes to find new digs.’ He disappeared. Kepler glanced at Surani and he knew that his partner was just barely refraining from giving the empty doorway the finger. They swapped smiles.
    Sighing, Barkley