Adrenaline (7 page)

It was like life in a cage. But it wasn’t the stone prison cell. I wondered how long Howell’s men would keep an eye on me, and, if I didn’t draw out Lucy’s kidnappers, if they’d shutter me back behind bars.

I thought about how to escape. I would do myself no favors by rushing. I was still in a cage, but a cage where I could move. I did not want to be back in the Polish prison.

And when I wasn’t serving drinks, I thought about Lucy and The Bundle.

One day in late March, I arrived a bit hurt. A bicycle courier had sideswiped me while crossing a street and I’d fallen, scraping my forearm. My shadows did nothing to help me. I rolled up my sleeve to keep the shirt clean and went into the front; it was early afternoon on a Saturday and only one customer sat along the bar.

She was a few years older than me, maybe thirty. Pretty but with eyes of hard quartz, a slash of a mouth. Her cheekbones would have made a photographer contemplate a next great shot. She wore black slacks and a dark sweater. Her hair was blondish, the color of fresh straw, and cut to just above her shoulders. She picked up her neat whisky, drank it carefully. She moved with precision.
She was not looking at me but I thought she was entirely aware of me. My first thought was:
She’s major trouble
.

“Do you have a first-aid kit?” I asked Ollie.

“Yes, in my office.” Ollie sounded irritated. I’d interrupted a discussion between him and the woman. He jabbed a thumb at me. “This one. Runs like a maniac, bouncing off stairs and buildings and such. He’ll fall and break his neck and then I’ll be out a halfway decent bartender.” Ollie felt self-esteem to be overrated.

The woman surveyed me. “
L’art du déplacement
?” Her voice was low and cool, like a summer breeze coming out of a tree’s shadow, and she had an odd accent I couldn’t quite decipher. She was beautiful to look at—although I had no real eye for any woman but Lucy—but I did not like her.

But she’d used the original French name for parkour running. I nodded. “Are you a
traceur
?” I asked. A term for parkour runners, drawn from the French term for a special kind of bullet that leaves a trail.

“Oh, no. I used to live in Paris. I used to watch the kids trying parkour, running along the edges of buildings, throwing themselves from rooftop to rooftop, amazed that they didn’t break their legs.” She smiled the slash-smile again. “I wished I had their nerve, their fleetness.”

“I say if you want to run an obstacle course, get on a track.” Ollie poured more whisky in the woman’s glass, although she hadn’t asked.

“But life’s an obstacle course,” the woman said. “The runners run in the world we live in, not an artificial one.” She turned back to me. “I always thought they looked like animals.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“In their grace. Wolves on the street. Hunters. The runners looked to me like a pack, closing on prey.” The woman sipped her whisky. “I have a fondness for wolves.”

It was exactly the sort of bizarre comment you hear in a bar that would make no sense anywhere else but seems reasonable in dim light with the sting of booze on your lips. Ollie stared at the woman, auditioned an unsure smile, and decided to end the discussion of wolves with introductions. “Hey, Sam, this is Mila.”

Mila offered a hand. I shook it. “Are you a regular, Mila? I’m still learning who’s who in Ollie’s kingdom.”

“She’s a wandering regular. Stops in when she’s in town, which is only like three times a year. And then I can’t get rid of her for a week.” Ollie grinned. “She keeps wanting to buy the bar from me but you know I will never sell.”

“I can work on him for you,” I said with a polite bartender smile. “I’m sure he wants to retire to Florida.”

“Oh, God, no,” Ollie said. “New York till I die.”

“He won’t sell, but he listens to my proposals because he sells me a bottle’s worth of Glenfiddich during that week.” Mila kept her hands folded on the bar in front of her, primly.

“Nice to be able to travel,” I said.

“The world is a smaller place these days. Much smaller.” Mila shrugged—a small, elegant gesture. “Be careful on your parkour runs, Sam. Ollie will not spare the whip if you’re on crutches.”

“Sam I don’t need to whip. The others, Jesus, Mila, you can’t believe it. How hard is it to pour neatly and quickly and accurately into a glass? To pour? Gravity does the work. This is not surgery. I tell you, that day-shift guy, he sloshes my profit margin onto the floor and I mop it up…”

I raised my arm. “I better bandage this.”

I found the first-aid kit in Ollie’s cramped office. There was a desk, with scatterings of papers, an ancient, grinding PC Ollie had never quite mastered (I’d had to help him do searches on the web and also recover a lost spreadsheet), and a safe. The safe would not be difficult to crack; it had a keypad and, considering Ollie’s general loathing of technology, I suspected the pass code would be a simple one to guess.

Arm tightly bandaged, and dressed to work, I went back out to the bar. Mila was gone, bills tucked under her glass. She was an excellent tipper.

“She completes me,” Ollie said. “Damn. I like her but there’s no hope.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Everywhere.”

If Howell wanted to have me followed by someone other than his normal teams, or wanted to insert someone into my life, he might pick a person like Mila. Or if the Money Czar was coming after me,
he
might send someone like her.

But. But she had a history with Ollie. Unless Ollie was lying about that, and was in Howell’s pay. Hello, madness. You see how your mind starts to twist: you suspect everyone. I went back to wiping down the bar, trying to blank my mind.

“Hey, I got this for you.” Ollie pushed a thick book at me. I looked at the cover. A bartender’s guide. I opened it to the end to see how many pages it was: 508. Very comprehensive.

“Preparation is key so you don’t mix drinks wrong and waste liquor,” Ollie said. “Take it home.”

“I will never make most of these drinks.”

“You strike me as a guy who likes to be prepared.” Ollie was right.

The week inched past. Dave with his Budweiser, Meg with her pinot grigio, the Alton brothers with their pints of Guinness every Friday night; they’d watch the pour you did as though you were splitting a diamond. I worked, I ran, and Howell’s two shadows followed me everywhere I went. At night I lay in bed and I flicked through the five-hundred-page bartender’s guide. It relaxed my mind to consider the thousands of cocktails crafted by humanity; each a perfect little mix of what was at hand to produce a desired result. That was the pattern of thinking I needed to solve my own problem. What elements, mixed together in what order, to create a sublime result.

How to get a gun, how to get documentation to get overseas, how to escape Howell’s constant watch.

D
URING THE NEXT WEEK
, Ollie fired a bartender he didn’t like, hired a new one so he’d have a fresh face to bitch about. August only showed up twice, watched part of a basketball game, didn’t have much to say to me. I felt he was trying to summon the courage to broach a topic but didn’t know how to start.

Then there was the lovely Mila. She came in for four more nights, discussed world politics with Ollie and asked me about my parkour runs and nothing else. But I felt her watching me as I worked, as though taking my measure. Ollie’s mother in New Jersey got sick and he had me manage the bar for two days; one night I lifted prints off the safe’s keypad, found prints on only four keys. Same four numbers as the bar’s street address. I tested the code; the safe opened. Inside was a cash bag, a Glock with three rounds of ammo, and Ollie’s passport, used once three years ago to visit Ireland. I left everything where it was, cleaned off the keypad, and felt relief I could get to a gun when I needed one. Because I thought the time had come to move. Howell’s followers had been a bit lazy, not coming up on me when the bicyclist hit me. They were slacking or Howell was loosening the leash on me. They’d
convinced themselves that I was willing to sit still. That was the key to escape.

Now I knew where I could steal a gun. But I had no passport. And I needed to get back to Europe. Lucy’s trail started there.

But I didn’t know where I could obtain fake documentation in New York. Passports now have digital watermarks and subtle chips, and they can’t be forged as easily as they used to be. You need someone who can acquire the special paper used in the passports—usually by bribing someone who might send documents in a diplomatic pouch or works in government printing. It didn’t have to be an American passport; in fact, it would be easier for me to have one from Belgium or the UK or Canada. Belgian papers particularly are known for being easy to forge.

So I had to find a way to find a contact who could get me a passport that could pass muster. I knew the street value of a false passport was around eight thousand dollars. I would have to either save or steal the money, and I’d have to lose my tails to find a seller. I bought a cellular phone, prepaid, close to the local Brooklyn Flea Market, using the crowds to lose Howell’s shadows for a few minutes to make the buy. I made some discreet ventures, calling my non-CIA contacts in Prague and Paris and London, looking for someone who could help me get back to Europe.

No one I called knew I was part of the Company. I used an old identity from the Prague sting, a former Canadian soldier named Samson—close enough to Sam so I wouldn’t ever tongue-stumble using it—who operated as a smuggler and hired gun.

I got stonewalled for three days until a friend in London mentioned a broker in New Jersey named Kitter who
could set me up with Belgian papers. I called Kitter to arrange a meet in Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan the next day.

I dodged my shadows by going into Ollie’s—the tails did not sit in the bar, they watched from outside—and then heading out the back of the building, down a side alley through a deli. If a shadow there saw me, and I had to assume they would, it made sense to dodge into a department store and exit out the back, hurrying into a hotel across the street. I watched for familiar faces—it’s easy to dump out of a suit into casual wear, you can’t rely on clothes as identifiers, you can only rely on the face. I felt clean and I grabbed a taxi to Manhattan an hour early. Got off at Grand Central, felt I was still walking clean. I kept scanning the patterns of people’s movements for any followers as I walked through building lobbies and hotel lobbies, in and out, cutting through, doubling back, not spotting Howell or any of his regulars following me.

The man fitting Kitter’s description sat on the edge of a bench, iPod earphones in place, wires trailing inside his jacket. He was reading the
Wall Street Journal
. Thin blue jeans, flannel shirt. I sat on the other edge of the bench.

He pulled out his earphones but he didn’t look at me.

“Our mutual friend sent me,” I said. “I need documentation.” A tickle surged at the back of my throat; I felt the need to rush. Stupid. But I’d been waiting days, weeks, months, for a chance to track Lucy. I was like a dog, straining at the leash, ready to run. How could I wait anymore? I dreamed of my family every night.

“You have the photos and the money.”

“Four thousand and the photos.” Half up front, half when I got the finished passport.

He took the envelope from me and told me to wait. “Meet me at the Starbucks on the north side of Grand Central in three hours.”

Kitter stood and walked off. I sat for a moment, thinking, Good. Then I stood and started to walk and my stomach wrenched. Forty feet away stood Howell, hands tucked inside his overcoat. I turned around; Kitter and my money were gone.

I sat back down. I stayed on the bench and Howell walked up to me. He didn’t sit.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “My wife, my child, I’d be doing whatever I could to get to them.”

“Can I have my money back?”

“No. Let it be a lesson learned.”

“You’re the one who needs a lesson,” I said. “I could draw out Lucy’s kidnappers if I could get back to London. I know I could.”

“We can’t trust you. Look how you’ve disobeyed instructions.”

“But you said you don’t blame me.”

“You have not been fired, Sam, and your job classification has been reassigned so that you cannot resign without the permission of the Director. You do not have that permission. You’re ours. Do what you’re told and be glad you’re not locked in a cell for the rest of your life. We have been generous to you. Go back to that charming neighborhood bar, smile at people, be glad you’re not sucking cold soup out of a wooden bowl and being beaten every night.”

I shook my head. “I dream about my son,” I said. “Did you have that in your file, Howell? I dream about my wife and my child because I know she’s innocent and I know
she and my kid are out there and… you are in my way.” I heard the iron growl in my tone, for the first time in a long time.

He was unimpressed. “You’re in your own way. Go home, Sam. Play nice. I won’t be so forgiving next time. There was a debate in the office about whether to shoot you on sight for attempting to acquire forged documents. Your actions could be those of a desperate man or a guilty man. I argued for desperate and thank God for you I won. But desperation fades. Do this twice, then you’re guilty.”