Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  Nimec saw him spin one of the large thirty-five-pound weights on its post with both hands, and almost winced as he pictured it slipping off to drop straight down onto his foot.

  “Chris,” he said. “Don’t mess with that.”

  The boy didn’t answer, but kept rotating the plate on its metal post.

  Nimec wondered if the steady rat-a-tat of the speed bag had drowned out his voice, called out at a louder volume.

  Chris was oblivious. Or seemed to be. Ignoring Nimec, he gave the weight another turn, climbed onto the bench, and then stretched out on his back, sliding under its rack to grip the barbell resting across its uprights.

  “Hey, Chris, get away from there!”

  Nimec had shouted at him this time, starting toward the bench, no longer contemplating what would happen if a single plate clunked down on the kid’s big toe. He’d been pressing two hundred pounds with that bar — about double Chris’s weight — and didn’t want to imagine the consequences of it somehow falling on his chest.

  Behind him, Megan had cut short her exercise and turned to see what was going on. Standing near the bag, she watched Chris sit up, slowly toss his legs over the side of the bench, and hop off onto the floor, as if only then having become aware of Nimec.

  “Chris, did you hear me?” Nimec stood crossly in front of him. “You know the rules.”

  And he did. In fact, Nimec thought, he’d always shown impressive maturity in the gym after being cautioned about its do’s and don’ts, staying away from its equipment when unsupervised, earning a fair amount of latitude while hanging around to observe Nimec’s workouts. This wasn’t in the least bit like him.

  Nimec stood waiting for an answer, instead got a blank stare and silent shrug.

  He looked at Chris with equal parts anger and confusion, not knowing what to make of his unresponsiveness. And the kid’s wooden attitude wasn’t exclusively reserved for him. He’d gone from fawning over Meg to acting as if she wasn’t there.

  “Okay if I go downstairs?” Chris asked. His tone flat, not a jot of defiance or stubbornness in it.

  “I think you’d better,” Nimec said.

  Chris went past him to the elevator, touched his index finger to the biometric access control pad beside its door, and entered like a sleepwalker.

  Nimec stood alongside Megan as the car descended, tugged confoundedly at his chin.

  “You have any idea what that was about?” he asked.

  Megan groped for something to say that would offer a bona fide insight.

  “None, Daddy-O,” she replied, giving up. “But you might want to consider changing the code on that lock till after the kid is past puberty.”

  * * *

  “Throne’s all yours, Collins,” Jeffreys said, and rose from his stool to make room for his young reliever.

  It was nine-twenty-five according to Jeffreys’s wristwatch, which he set against the official clock in the big room upstairs at least once a week just to stay on the ball. The hour between nine and ten was when things were slowest in the building. The first wave of traders was over, these men being mostly relics around his own age who were programmed to show up early, looking for some other graybeards to bargain with in person, or maybe check their office answering machines, devices they still saw as being the latest in high-tech gadgets. The second wave wouldn’t start till eleven, eleven-thirty, when the younger dealers came in from their home offices after they got through doing whatever it was they did to earn money over the Internet.

  A quiet time, Jeffreys thought, and a good one for him to stretch his legs for a few minutes, pick up a coffee at the corner doughnut stand, argue some Middle Eastern politics with Musaf the vender, and have a smoke out on the sidewalk. You couldn’t do that last thing anywhere else nowadays, not without getting slapped with a fine, or even risking arrest and a thirty-day jail term. Made you feel like some punk kid sneaking out of the house to toke up on happy weed, thank you Mr. Mayor, and hope your high-toned friends fancied the expensive cigars they smoked out there in those private golf clubs in Aruba, Acapulco, Hawaii, or whatever other hideaways you’d zip ’em off to on your private jet every single weekend. Ran this town like a Puritan, his personal life like an Arab sheik. According to the newspapers, his Eminence even had “sin rooms” for his guests to slink into at some of the parties he’d thrown in his Park Avenue townhouse before taking office.

  Jeffreys stepped down from the guard platform, mentally praising himself for having voted for the other clown in the last election.

  “Anything you want me to bring back?” he asked the relief man.

  “Yeah,” Collins said. “Halle Berry.”

  “Cream cheese or butter?”

  “Butter.” Collins grinned. “That much woman, you better ask for lots extra on the side.”

  “If I can get her for under a buck, she’s yours.”

  Jeffreys hitched up his trousers by the belt, slipped on his jacket, and patted it down for his cigarettes. Much as he hated to admit it, he did feel a little conscience-stricken about smoking, not because the current boss of City Hall had done everything under the sun, moon, and stars to make him feel that way, but because his wife had asked him to quit the habit as a kind of New Year’s resolution. He’d tried sticking to it for Rosie’s sake, and done an okay job this past month or so. Might even have succeeded better if it wasn’t for the heavy-duty stuff on his mind, having to be a tattler for that investigator from Belgium… which reminded him of something.

  “There ought to be somebody name’a Katari showin’ up any minute,” he said, pointing to the note he’d jotted in the margins of the guest book. “African guy from Israel, can’t speak English.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t ask,” Jeffreys said. “He gets here, you need to page Avram Hoffman in the main room and show him along.”

  Nodding, Collins took his place on the stool behind the guard podium.

  A moment later Jeffreys turned and left the building.

  * * *

  Avram was back in the main hall, his morning worship concluded, the prayer shawl and phylacteries returned to their pouch in the cloakroom. Activity seemed to be picking up at the tables, though hardly by leaps and bounds.

  Avram glanced at the row of wall clocks over the glass booth near the passage from which he’d emerged. They displayed the time in each of the world’s major trading centers, and served as reminders to check his cell phone, which he’d turned off before entering the chapel forty-five minutes earlier. There was a voice message from Katari, a courtesy call in jumbled English and Hebrew to say he was en route from his hotel on Madison Avenue. E-mail messages from business contacts in Antwerp, Tokyo, and Mumbai. Also a couple of missed calls in the past ten minutes, their numbers blocked to his caller ID display. Avram had a hunch about their source, and delayed checking the e-mail to wait for his unknown caller to try him again.

  He heard the cell phone ring within minutes and thumbed the TALK button.

  “Yes?”

  “Good of you to answer.”

  Avram recognized Lathrop’s voice in an instant.

  “I was at morning services,” he said. “You understand.”

  “Sure. A pause to cleanse your soul.”

  “Improve it,” Avram said. “There are rabbis, Talmudic sages, who give the opinion that man is superior to the angels. In the sense that God made them as perfect as they can be, wholly spiritual beings, while we who possess dual spiritual and material natures have the ability to transcend what we are. To refine ourselves.”

  “Gems in the rough.”

  “Something like that, right.” Avram shrugged. “I’m always searching for betterment on all fronts.”

  “Then you’ll be happy to take a look at the best.”

  Avram’s pulse quickened.

  “What have you got for me?”

  “I said take a look.”

  Avram stepped to the side as several of the others who’d been in the synagogue moved past.
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  “I have an important appointment this morning,” he said.

  “Cancel it.”

  “I can’t, it’s too late to postpone. The buyer’s already on his way here, and I can’t reach him… ”

  “Put him off. Or have him wait for you. There’s a limited window of opportunity, and you’ll have customers lined up to eat out of your hand in the long run.”

  Silence. Avram could feel ripples of eagerness and excitement under his skin.

  He found a vacant seat away from the other men sprinkled around the room, stared out at the rooftops uptown through its large glass wall.

  “How and where do you want to meet?”

  “You know the program, Avram,” Lathrop said. “Get going and keep your phone on, I’ll fill you in along the way.”

  * * *

  “Where’s the movie star babe I ordered up for breakfast?” Collins asked, watching Jeffreys approach the guard platform.

  “Too expensive, plus I couldn’t fit her in here.” Jeffreys rattled the small white bag he’d brought from the vender’s cart. “Got you a bagel instead.”

  “Buttered?”

  “Like you wanted, my man.”

  Collins reached for the bag with a mock frown. “Guess I’ll have to settle.”

  Jeffreys unzipped his jacket, shook off the outer chill that still seemed to be clinging to him.

  “Any happenings to report?” he said.

  “No.” Collins rose from the stool. “Well, actually, that guy showed. Katari.”

  “You see he got upstairs okay?”

  “Yeah. He’s there now, but isn’t too happy, let me tell you.” Collins shrugged. “Came in right after the dealer he was supposed to meet left the building.”

  Jeffreys looked at him.

  “Left?” he said.

  “Not more than a minute or two after you did,” Collins said, and tapped a slip of paper that lay beside the guest book. “Must’ve had somewhere important to go… dropped this in front of me, hustled straight out the door in a big rush.”

  His brow furrowing, Jeffreys reached for the paper and read what Avram Hoffman had written on it.

  Goddamn, he thought.

  * * *

  Malisse had expected Plan A to be bungled, although not even he had thought the bungling would commence at this earliest introductory stage.

  He stood on the corner of 47th and Fifth, pausing to catch his breath, feeling thwarted and foolish as he looked about the avenue. His eyes scanned the sidewalk, the intersection, the passing taxicabs and busses. According to Jeffreys, almost five minutes had elapsed since Avram Hoffman had exited the DDC building behind him, and trying to guess which direction he’d taken amid the streams of vehicular and foot traffic seemed futile, idiotic, a matter of going through the motions. Jeffreys’s reliever wasn’t even certain he’d noticed him turn toward Fifth, and why should he have? He knew nothing of the ongoing surveillance.

  Frowning, Malisse turned right on his heels toward the IRT subway station three blocks uptown. It was an instinctive choice. Hoffman could have dropped a trail of bread-crumbs, and the filthy pigeons infesting these streets would have pecked it up by now. But he had left the DDC suddenly, unexpectedly, and with obvious haste. If he meant to get somewhere in a hurry, it stood to reason he would take the fastest available mode of transportation, and in this city that would be the train… assuming he hadn’t simply needed to walk some short distance. And why assume that or anything otherwise? It was all a toss-up.

  Malisse’s frown deepened. Idiotic. Everything had been botched. Better he’d stayed in the warmth of the coffeehouse, with its pleasant wafts of the brewed and baked….

  The thought broke off as he noticed a man in a charcoal overcoat and light gray snap-brimmed fedora in the crowd about halfway up the block, his back to him, walking at a brisk pace. Malisse gave him a moment’s look. His size matched Hoffman’s. His stride. And the outer clothes resembled what he’d seen Hoffman wear the past two days. His hat had been herringbone tan, though. His coat a brown tweed. But yesterday was yesterday. Nothing said a man couldn’t change his colors — and these were still well coordinated.

  Malisse quickly turned to follow. Perhaps it was a stretch to hope he’d been fortunate enough to spot his quarry. But better to chase after hope than stand arrested with futility, he thought. If nothing else it would get his blood going, take some sting out of the cold.

  Malisse sleeved between clots of pedestrians, dodged a bicycle messenger, was almost struck by some cretin motoring past on a Segway at a higher speed than the cars in the avenue—here was a threat to human life exceeding any posed by tobacco.

  Now he’d almost caught up with his man, who had stopped on the corner of 58th Street, waiting for a traffic light to change. As the red shifted to green and the man started across the street, Malisse hustled to outstrip him and get a look at his face, edging to his right amid the surrounding crush.

  A glance over his left shoulder dashed Malisse’s short-lived flirtation with luck. The man was not Hoffman. Beardless, years older, wearing no glasses, he did not bear any resemblance to Hoffman. Well, there was the hurried walk, the style of dress. Malisse was disappointed, yes, but would not thrash himself for having made his bid.

  He slowed to a halt as the man was absorbed by the ceaselessly kinetic crowd. Shoulders bumped his arms, elbows poked his side. On his immediate left near a bank entrance, a dark-haired fellow in an outback coat stood dropping coins in one of those ubiquitous public UpLink Internet terminals Malisse had seen springing up everywhere lately in cities throughout Europe, including the streets of his native Brussels. Malisse looked at him a second, thinking he was the only person in sight besides himself who wasn’t moving in step with the herd. Malisse wondered with droll humor whether he ought to tap him on the shoulder and suggest they form a brotherhood of some kind.

  Then the man turned from the terminal’s screen and shot a glance back over at Malisse, appearing to sense his attention. His face was expressionless as their eyes momentarily touched. Malisse felt a little embarrassed — was he now to become both an intrusive nuisance to strangers and partner to muddlers?

  Malisse turned back downtown without lingering another second, leaving the man to his private affairs. After a few steps he began to prop up his spirits by thinking positively, and soon had recovered his optimism, deciding he might yet salvage something of practical benefit from the otherwise wasted effort of having sped from his warm, comfortable booth in the café.

  Here on the street, one could at least have a good smoke.

  Malisse reached into his coat for a Gitanes, girding for whatever excuse Jeffreys meant to offer for his surprising incompetence.

  * * *

  Standing at the public-access Internet terminal, Lathrop waited as the guy who’d briefly looked his way on the sidewalk moved on uptown. He’d had the misplaced, distracted look on his face of someone that had taken a wrong turn and wasn’t quite sure of his bearings — probably nobody to worry about. Still, Lathrop kept a cautious eye on him, following his progress a bit before he turned back to the screen.

  Lathrop fed the rest of his coins into the terminal’s pay slot, used its touchpad to access his fictitious Hotmail account, and then punched in a short message for Avram, who had stepped aboard the bus downtown on his instructions minutes earlier.

  The message read: Get off 42nd Street stop, enter Grand Central Station at Vanderbilt entrance, wait on west balcony.

  After sending it to Avram’s wireless e-mail address, Lathrop cleared the terminal’s screen, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked briskly south toward the station.

  * * *

  “The pinhole suns,” Lathrop said to Avram over the cellular. He’d called rather than e-mailed now for reasons Avram didn’t pretend to know. “You see them?”

  “I see them,” Avram said to his own surprise. He’d never lived anywhere but New York City — couldn’t have begun to count the number of times he’d be
en through Grand Central Station — and now here he was again. Yet he had never before been aware of those bright circles of sunlight laid out in east-west alignment on the tiled marble floor of the main concourse. He looked up at the sky ceiling from where he stood on the west balcony, tried to locate their source, didn’t find anything, and wondered if they might be projecting from the ornate window grills beneath the ceiling’s mural of Zodiac constellations.

  “Avram.”

  “Yes?”

  “Admire the scenery later,” Lathrop said. “I want you to go down to the concourse, head toward the east side of the terminal. Walk straight along those suns until I call back.”

  The phone went dead.

  Avram paused before descending the staircase. His eyes moved left to the circular bars and dark wood booths of the Michael Jordan Steak House angling off in a kind of L along the terminal’s north balcony, and then shifted toward the Cipriani Dolci restaurant that occupied the smaller balcony on the south wall. Avram didn’t spot Lathrop in either place. He looked out over the concourse to Métrazur on the opposite balcony, where he could remember the giant Kodak Colorama billboard taking on soot for decades before the terminal’s renovation, but it was too far away for him to tell whether Lathrop might be seated among the elegantly dressed professionals meeting there for coffee and pastries. And say he was. Avram didn’t know how he could manage to see across to this balcony with the unaided eye. Would he be playing the role of a tourist and holding binoculars? Taking photographs with a zoom camera? Or might he find another cover for himself, a different lookout? All Avram knew for certain was that Lathrop had to be somewhere in the midst of the thousands upon thousands circulating about the great rail terminal. Somewhere nearby, watching, observing him. Maybe he was down below, blended in with the clusters of people at the ticket windows and indicator boards, or the travelers around the glassed information kiosk. But Avram could not see him. Knowing Lathrop had tracked his progress since he’d left the Diamond Exchange on 47th Street, he couldn’t see him. Hadn’t once caught a glimpse of him during his walk downtown. And never had while on any of their previous tangos around the city.