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 seal 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.
FORTY-FOUR
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 weren't 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 in from home. And Jacob Mark had been brought in from work. They were both looking at me. Lee was standing behind her bars, about five feet away. She was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt. She had bare feet. Jake was sitting on his cot. He was wearing a police officer's uniform, minus the belt and the gun and the radio and the shoes. I sat up on my cot and swung my feet to the floor and ran my hands through my hair. Then I stood up and stepped over to the sink and drank from the faucet. New York City, for sure. I recognized the taste of the water. I looked at Theresa Lee and asked her, 'Do you know exactly where we are?'
She said, 'Don't you?'
I shook my head.
She said, 'We have to assume this place is wired for sound.'
'I'm sure it is. But they already know where we are. So we won't be giving them anything they don't already have.'
'I don't think we should say anything.'
'We can discuss geographic facts. I don't think the Patriot Act prohibits street addresses, at least not yet.'
Lee said nothing.
I said, 'What?'
She looked uneasy.
I said, 'You think I'm playing games with you?'
She didn't answer.
I said, 'You think I'm here to trap you into saying something on tape?'
'I don't know. I don't know anything about you.'
'What's on your mind?'
'Those clubs on Bleecker are nearer Sixth Avenue than Broadway. You had the A train right there. Or the B or the C or the D. So why were you on the 6 train at all?'
'Law of nature,' I said. We're hardwired in our brains. Middle of the night, full dark, all mammals head east instinctively.'
'Really?
'No, I just made that up. I had nowhere to go. I came out of a bar and turned left and walked. I can't explain it any better than that.'
Lee said nothing.
I said, 'What else?'
Lee said, You have no bags. I never saw a homeless person with nothing. Most of them haul more stuff around than I own. They use shopping carts.'
'I'm different,' I said. 'And I'm not a homeless person. Not like them.'
She said nothing.
I asked her, 'Were you blindfolded when they brought you here?'
She looked at me for a long moment and then she shook her head and sighed. She said, 'We're in a closed firehouse in Greenwich Village. On West 3rd. Street level and above is disused. We're in the basement.'
'Do you know exactly who these guys are?'
She didn't speak. Just glanced up at the camera. I said, 'Same principle. They know who they are. At least I hope they do. Doesn't hurt for them to know that we know, too.'
'You think?'
'That's the point. They can't stop us thinking. Do you know they are?'
'They didn't show ID. Not today, and not that first night either, when they came to talk to you at the precinct.'
'But?'
'Not showing ID can be the same thing as showing it, if you're the only bunch that never does. We've heard some stories.'
'So who are they?'
'They work directly for the Secretary of Defense.'
'That figures,' I said. 'The Secretary of Defense is usually the dumbest guy in the government.'
Lee glanced up at the camera again, as if I had insulted it. As if I had caused it to be insulted. I said, 'Don't worry. These guys look ex-military to me, in which case they already know how dumb the Secretary of Defense is. But even so, Defense is a Cabinet position, which means ultimately these guys an' working for the White House.'
Lee paused a beat and asked, 'Do you know what they want?'
'Some of it.'
'Don't tell us.'
'I won't,' I said.
'But is it big enough for the White House?'
'Potentially, I guess.'
'Shit.'
'When did they come for you?'
'This afternoon. Two o'clock. I was still asleep.'
'Did they have the NYPD with them?'
Lee nodded, and a little hurt showed in her eyes. I asked, 'Did you know the patrolmen?'
She shook her head. 'Hotshot counterterrorism guys. They write their own rules and keep themselves separate. They ride around in special cars all day long. Fake taxis, sometimes. One in the front, two in the back. Did you know that? Big circles, up on Tenth, down on Second. Like the B-52s used to patrol the skies.'
'What time is it now? About six after six?'
She looked at her watch, and looked surprised.
'Dead on,' she said.