I’d heard about stories in the press, starting around the time of the second Gulf War, suggesting that in Military Intelligence circles we represented human targets as playing cards with their suit and rank indicating their value and priority.
The truth is, the playing card analogy is a technique we’ve used for decades, but the media coverage gave a very misleading impression of how it’s implemented. A king might have been an ultimate target, but that didn’t mean you could go out, wander around the ruins of some Iraqi city, and expect to snatch the guy straight up. You had to understand the enemy’s command structure. Their hierarchy. The way our system worked was more like solitaire. We started with the lower value cards and worked our way up until the board was clear. We learned as we went. We gathered evidence. Dug into the background of the characters who were involved. Built a stock of information to make it less likely that we’d walk into a trap.
That approach had kept me alive for a lot of years, so tempting as it was to go straight after George Carrick, I formed a more patient plan. I needed to start at the bottom of his organization and work all the way up to the top.
I finished my burger, which was excellent, then continued east on Twenty-third. I took First Avenue to Tenth, then zigzagged through the East Village, past Tomkins Square Park, all the way to Sixth and Avenue D. That put me at the northwest corner of the Lillian Wald Housing Project. According to the file I’d sneaked a look at before leaving the courthouse, the place was home to Norman Davies. The guy who’d attacked Mrs. Mason.
I continued east on Sixth, then made my way around and up onto the pedestrian bridge over the FDR. It gave me a good vantage point to scope out the development. It was a dark, inhospitable place. The shadows left by the broken streetlamps were exaggerated by the light spilling down from the highway. I counted sixteen apartment blocks. Their exteriors were all stained a cancerous black by the exhaust fumes of the relentless stream of vehicles that rumbled past. The buildings themselves were scattered around like hulking, hostile jigsaw pieces that had been abandoned because they didn’t fit together properly.
Perching on the bridge was a disorienting experience. There was nothing but noise and light and movement behind me, and only stillness and silence and darkness in front. It took me more than five minutes to identify Davies’s block because all the signs around the site were either missing or too defaced to read. I eventually figured out which one it was, then tried to trace the structure of the buildings. There were lamps over the communal doorways, but they were mainly broken. The stairwells appeared only sporadically lit. There were dim, yellow lights showing in maybe ten percent of the other windows. It was hard to believe the place had been built with the best of intentions. Its architects had conceived it as a pleasant place to live. By all accounts it had been, when it was new. Now it looked like the ground had been split open and the overflow from purgatory regurgitated through the gap.
I crossed the rest of the way over the bridge, followed along the east side of the FDR on the bike path, then came back across another bridge at Houston. I passed a school, which had done its best to insulate itself from its surroundings with fences and razor wire. Then I turned north again onto Avenue D. It wasn’t the world’s greatest recce, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances. I was probably being overcautious, anyway. But then, as I kept finding, old habits die hard. And overcautious beats under-alive any day.
I took a breath and entered the project. I couldn’t see anyone, but right away I felt eyes watching me. I stayed in what little light there was, looped around an adjacent building, and approached Davies’s block from its front. An intercom had been installed next to the double glass door, but now it was just a jumble of components—a speaker, a microphone, a keypad—hanging impotently from its wires. I pulled on a pair of thick blue latex gloves that I’d taken from my janitor’s cart—old habits—and tried the door. Its lock was also broken. The oil-starved hinges put up a valiant fight, but I soon got it open.
I immediately wished I hadn’t. Going through that doorway was like walking into a latrine. One that was long overdue for a cleaning. The stench was almost overpowering. I forced myself to pause, despite the unpleasantness, and wait for my eyes to adjust. Details of my surroundings gradually became visible. I saw that the floor had once been tiled with bright blue and white squares, but now more than half were missing. There were beer cans strewn all around. Vodka bottles. Burger wrappers. A pile of dried vomit in one corner. Three syringes discarded in another. The outer wall was badly stained from a water leak, and the others were a patchwork of overlapping blocks of varying shades of cream. I guessed that was the result of graffiti being repeatedly painted over. There were also two elevators, but you couldn’t have paid me to go in either of them. In a place like that, they would basically be coffins on steel cables, if they even worked at all. So despite having to go up nine floors, I took the stairs.
I climbed slowly, because you never know who or what might be waiting on the next landing. At least the smell eased with each floor I passed. I reached the ninth unmolested and found the fire door. I had to lift the handle to get through because only the bottom hinge was still attached to the frame. The door led to a corridor that cut the building in half. There were windows at either end, but they were covered in grime. Three lights were evenly spaced out along the ceiling. Their cloudy glass globes were covered with wire mesh. Only one was working. I took out my pocketknife, unscrewed its cover, and loosened the bulb until it went out. Then I approached Davies’s door.
I stood to the side and knocked. There was no reply. I knocked again, harder. There was still no answer. Leaning across from the side in case Davies was shy but trigger happy, I started to work on the lock. It took fifteen seconds to pick. I stayed crouched, covered by the wall, and held my flashlight up high and to the right. No shots rang out, so I risked peeking around the doorframe. I could see that the entrance foyer, at least, was deserted.
The foyer was small. Its off-white paint was dirty and marked. There were five coat hooks, and all were empty. A pair of filthy sneakers lay on the floor. The floor itself was covered with cheap vinyl, which was bubbled and blistered in places. That was probably just due to its low-quality materials, but I took care not to tread on any of the raised patches, just in case. You don’t have to be house-proud to know how to set a booby trap.
I moved into the hallway. There was a thin brown carpet on the floor. A signed Mets team photograph on the wall. And doors leading to four other rooms. Three were on the left-hand side, and one was on the right. Two of the doors on the left opened into bedrooms. One was completely empty. The other had a queen bed with a knot of nasty turquoise sheets on the floor next to it. There was nothing under them, or beneath the bed. Nothing was in the nightstand drawer, but I found tape residue on the back of the unit. That would be a good place to conceal a gun. It would be in easy reach if you were surprised in the night. A bunch of wrinkled clothes was shoved over to the left-hand side of the closet, next to six empty Nordstrom hangers. Two more pairs of worn sneakers had been tossed on the floor, and there was an empty John Varvatos shoe box on its side at the front.
The shower curtain in the bathroom was covered with mildew. There was a toothbrush on the side of the sink—only one, not surprisingly—with worn, splayed bristles. The basin was plastered with dried toothpaste stains. A Burberry cologne box was alone in the trash. It was empty. A thin, beige bath towel lay crumpled on the floor. And the toilet was like something out of a bacterial warfare experiment. I pulled on a second pair of gloves—you can’t be too careful—and checked the cistern. Nothing was stashed inside or wedged down behind it.
The final room was a combined cooking and living area, and it took up half the apartment’s overall floor space. At one end, a couple of the kitchen cupboard doors were missing. I could see cheap, mismatched plates stacked up haphazardly on their flimsy interior shelves. A door was hanging off another cupboard. The countertop was caked with grease and dust for most of its length, but a section in the center had recently been cleaned and now housed a new microwave and a shiny chrome Nespresso machine.
At the other end of the room a sixty-inch Sony TV had been mounted on the wall. Someone had made a clumsy attempt at wiring it to a Bose surround-sound system with little black cube-shaped speakers dotted around on spindly metal stands. A new-looking leather couch was positioned in front of it, and a ratty fabric armchair had been shoved to the side. Its cushion was all askew. Its base had been slashed open, but I couldn’t find anything hidden inside.
There was nowhere left to check so I considered switching off the lights and settling down to wait. That wasn’t an attractive prospect, given the surroundings. And I figured the odds of Davies returning any time soon were low, so I nixed the idea and headed for the exit. There’d be other ways of getting to Carrick. More sanitary ways. I was confident of that.
There were four guys waiting for me in the lobby when I emerged from the stairwell. Two were standing directly in front of the exit door. Two were on either side, a yard farther forward, forming a C shape. All of them would be in their early or mid-twenties. They were short and stocky, with sneering expressions on their faces. One had a bat. Two had pickax handles. And the other, a crowbar.
The crowbar guy took a step forward. “You a cop?”
I stayed where I was and smiled pleasantly. “Me? No. Listen carefully and I’ll explain what I do. And how you’re going to help me.”