“That will be all, Chris,” said Elizabeth. The message—delivered with raised eyebrows and a cold expression—couldn’t have been clearer. Still, for a moment Chris didn’t understand what was happening. He stood there blinking, then looked at the deliveryman, as though he might be able to help. The deliveryman offered nothing. Seven hundred and fifty thousand—the number passed through Chris’s mind without meaning. He looked at Valencia and saw her standing there with her arms crossed. She nodded to him like, Yes, this is happening. Chris finally understood; he was being asked to leave the room.
His cell phone lay facedown on the table; a moment passed while Chris deliberated as to whether or not he should take it. His eyes went to a piece of tape on the back, and he wondered if Valencia had put it there. Finally, he picked it up, held it, waited a second for any objections, and then jammed it into his pocket.
Then he looked back at Elizabeth. “I’ll be in my office,” he said. The words came out at a lower volume than he’d hoped. The walk to the door seemed endless. His ears were ringing, and he felt dizzy.
When he finally stepped out, he saw Elizabeth’s assistant Andy seated at his desk. The expression on Andy’s face suggested a mixture of disbelief and watchfulness. “Back, to my office,” Chris whispered to himself. He pointed down the hall. One of the security guards sat near Andy’s desk. His posture and facial expression indicated that he understood something big was happening. He kept his eyes on Chris.
Look normal, Chris told himself. Normal walking feet, and hands in pockets.
As he made his way down the hall his mind went to the beginning of his problems. Just under two weeks earlier (an overcast Saturday), he’d been in his apartment working on an answer to a motion when someone knocked on his door. The building had an intercom system—he figured it was a neighbor knocking.
When he looked through the peephole, he saw three men standing in the hallway. They wore suits and ties. That was the precise moment when all of this started. There’d been nothing leading up to it. One day you’re home doing a little work, the next you’re involved in a criminal conspiracy.
At first, the men at the door looked like detectives, maybe FBI agents. Keeping his eye on the peephole, and without opening the door, he asked who it was. He couldn’t remember the exact words they used when they answered: something about needing to open the door right then.
He remembered some paperwork being held up—some kind of warrant. He leaned away from the door for a second and considered grabbing his phone. His heart was racing. The next thing he remembered was the sound of metal gently bumping against metal; he looked through the peephole again and could see that one of the men was bent over. Chris could only see the man’s rump.
It occurred to Chris that the man was picking the lock. Scared that the guy was going to damage his door, Chris pulled it open and tried to make himself stand tall like a lawyer who wasn’t at all scared of cops.
The men didn’t ask if they could enter. They just walked right in. There were five of them in total: two stayed in the hallway, and three pushed their way right past him. The next thing Chris remembered he was sitting on the couch. One of the men, a tall, skinny white guy with pitted skin, sat down next to him. He had thin hair, and a receding hairline. His eyes were dark, almost black, and set close together. He wore a slightly wrinkled gray suit. He seemed like the leader.
He had a cheap-looking book bag in his hand, and he unzipped it and pulled out a laptop. At that point, Chris still thought the men were law enforcement, at the wrong door, maybe looking for one of his neighbors.
I’m going to have your fucking badges for this, Chris remembered thinking with a kind of bloodlust. I’m a fucking lawyer.
The man opened the computer, typed in a security code, and shifted in his seat.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” he said. “You’ve been viewing child pornography. It doesn’t matter if you thought they were eighteen, it doesn’t matter if you think you can beat the case. It will be in the news.”
Chris stayed silent and then shook his head.
The man continued. “I guarantee you. One phone call and it will be all over the place. Fucking BuzzFeed, everywhere.”
The man looked at one of his associates as if he were going to ask a question, then he seemed to decide against it and continued talking to Chris. “People love when lawyers get busted with child porn. They love nothing more. It’s their favorite thing. You can’t get it off you. That kind of shit sticks with you for the rest of your life.”
Chris wondered if he was joking; he turned and looked at the other two men. They were busy going through his things. One of them looked Latino, or Middle Eastern, the other was pink-skinned, short, and ugly. Chris could see the darker one at the dresser near his bed. He was pushing the clothes around inside it as if he were looking for something.
This can’t be happening, thought Chris. “They can’t,” he said to the man seated next to him. The other man, the white one, had been searching in the closet, but now moved on to the desk. When he started taking pictures of the papers there, Chris blurted out, “You can’t do that.”
He tried to stand, but the man next to him grabbed his wrist and pulled him back down. He was stronger than he looked. It felt like he could break Chris’s wrist if he wanted.
It was at that point that Chris became truly scared. These weren’t cops.
“Look,” said the man. “Look at this.” He wanted to show Chris something on the laptop. Chris squinted and saw an article about some guy being arrested for child pornography.
Then he clicked through a few more articles about different men. “Look,” said the man, clicking on a blue file. A spreadsheet opened. The man pointed out things with his cursor: “That’s your IP address. That’s the date, that’s the time. That’s the URL.”
“That was DudePorn.com,” Chris argued, his voice shaking. “Those are legal sites, none of this is illegal.”
The man clicked back to the spreadsheet, and with the mouse, began pointing out URLs that were highlighted. He then opened another file, clicked on it, and a screen grab from a video popped up. “This is Brendan Francis Nelson,” said the man, pointing at the naked boy’s face. “He’s fifteen; he lives in Austin.”
Chris had never seen that boy, porno or not, but the man was already opening another file. “This is Kent Sampson, fourteen, Alameda, California.” Chris did actually remember looking at that one. “Billy McCormick—what is this? Twinkworld—Littleton, Colorado, sixteen years old. Fourteen times in the last four weeks. We can go through them all if you want.”
Chris protested that they weren’t on his computer.
“They’re on your computer,” the man insisted.
Chris believed him. His mouth went dry. He wanted to ask the men to leave, but he couldn’t come up with the words. This is not fucking fair, he thought. This is total and complete bullshit. I will have your badge. I’ll sue you to the moon and back, motherfucker.
The man sitting next to him produced a cell phone and showed Chris a saved contact. “Okay, this number is for Ali Roth,” he said. “She is the assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District. She’ll prosecute your case. She’s a boss in the courtroom, merciless. She works for us.”
He scooted on his seat and leaned forward so he was facing Chris straight on. “Look at me,” he said. His breath smelled like sour milk. “Look at me.”
Chris did as he was told.
“You work for us now. This isn’t law school.” He studied Chris’s face in a way that felt strangely intimate. “It’s not court. You work for us.”
The man leaned back on the couch. The other men had gone deeper into Chris’s apartment, and Chris could no longer see them. The man on the couch angled the laptop toward Chris. It took a moment to understand that he was looking at a video of himself. It had been shot from the ceiling of his kitchen. The video showed Chris making coffee. It had been that morning. Chris was still wearing the same clothes.
The man closed the computer. “Do you understand what I’m telling you? We know everything about you. No, no, no,” the man said, raising a hand, shifting in his seat and crossing one leg over the other. “I’ve been through this before. This is what we do. It seems big to you, but it’s not. I’ve been through this a thousand times. I’ll tell you one thing for certain—this is for real.”
Chris—idiotically, in retrospect—protested about the camera.
The man raised a hand and silenced him. He reached out and put a hand on Chris’s knee. “Your mother lives at 1709 Hunters Point Drive, in Boulder, Colorado,” he said. “Your father lives at 3402 Suskind Road, Chapel Hill. Your sister lives at 693 Elmhurst Park Road, Palo Alto. Your grandmother lives in Ashland, Oregon. I only have to send a text message. It doesn’t even bother me. It would be the easiest decision of my day. No, no, no”—he shushed Chris again—“stop making it so complicated.”
By that point the two other men had returned to the living room. Chris thought it might be helpful to remember their faces, but he was too scared to look at them. Instead he stared at a space on the floor. After a few seconds, the man with the laptop tapped him on the leg with the back of his hand. Chris looked at him and was surprised to see that his face had transformed; he didn’t look angry anymore. He looked almost friendly. He held out a hand to shake and Chris shook it.
“You work for us.”
Valencia Walker, when she got home that night, changed from her work clothes into sweatpants and a simple cotton T-shirt. She lived alone in an expensive, high-ceilinged, two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side that faced Central Park. Standing in her kitchen, she peeled Saran Wrap off her dinner bowl and looked at the salmon dinner her domestic assistant had prepared. Her attention was drawn to a grayish part of the filet. She put the bowl into the microwave and hit the button for ninety seconds. Brain-colored, she thought, while the microwave hummed.
Her thoughts shifted to the deliveryman and his ransom note. Who the hell would have sent this guy? She was just beginning to consider opening her bathroom blinds to signal a meeting when her thoughts were interrupted by an incoming call on her cell phone. She knew it was Elizabeth before she looked at it.
“Hello, my dear,” answered Valencia, fitting her earpiece and muting the television news.
“I changed my mind,” said Elizabeth.
“Tell me.”
“What do you think of offering less, say a hundred thousand?”
Valencia took a sip of wine, set it down, and walked toward her living room. “I don’t think that’s a good option.”
“Why not?” asked Elizabeth.
“Liz, this is not a lot of money.” They’d already had this conversation back at the office. Valencia had explained the risk of not paying.
“It’s not the price,” said Elizabeth. “It’s the partners—Gary? Jeff? Fuck, can you imagine? So guys, we’re being blackmailed …”
“Tell them what I told you,” said Valencia.
“That it boils down to—”
“That we have less than twenty-four hours,” said Valencia, interrupting her. “That there is no reason to believe the threat lacks credibility; that the price is worth stopping the threat; and, finally, most important, that only in paying them—given the hand we’ve been dealt—can we identify them.”
“So—”
“So, pay, identify, assess.”
“And if the partners say, no?”
“Then you have a PR problem that costs a lot more than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to fix,” said Valencia. She looked at herself reflected in the window and brushed at her eyebrows. Again, her mind returned to the question of who was blackmailing them. The truth was, she had no idea, and until she was told otherwise, she would treat it like one more problem that needed fixing.
After a long silence, Elizabeth spoke: “You know when I applied for my first job, fresh out of law school, they asked me what I saw myself doing in five years. You know what I told them?”
“Judge?”
“I said I wanted to run a midsized film studio.”
Valencia smiled. The microwave beeped.
“I’ll have a plan, on how we’re going to pay, by tomorrow morning,” said Valencia. “It’ll be strong. My men are good, and I can bring in help for this. Experienced, professional, help.”
“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
The line went dead.
Valencia walked back to her kitchen, took a dish towel and lifted the hot bowl out of the microwave. She pulled the plastic wrap off and watched the steam rise. A lemon seed in the quinoa caught her eye and she used her nails to pluck it out. She then spooned the food onto a plate, rinsed the bowl, and put it in the dishwasher.
Her mind, as she tidied up, stayed on Elizabeth. The woman was tough, there was no question about that. Valencia had seen her shout down a CEO in his own office. She’d seen her dismantle witnesses on the stand. Most important, she’d seen the way Elizabeth’s colleagues and underlings acted around her. She demanded respect. So what would happen if she sat Elizabeth down for a dinner and mapped out exactly what forces were at play here?
She thought about a past dinner they’d had. It had been two or three years ago. They ate paella at a place in Chelsea, and they were on their second bottle of wine. Elizabeth was drunk and got emotional; she told a story about being molested by an uncle. The uncle—her mother’s brother—had eventually been caught and charged with molesting his own children.
Elizabeth’s mother demanded to know if he’d ever touched her. She told her mother no. “It was a simple choice,” she said. “He’d already been caught. Why add more problems to everything else?”
Valencia un-muted the television; on it a baby-faced pundit carried on about congressional dysfunction. She glanced down at her food, isolated the gray bit of salmon, cut it off with her fork, and pushed it to the side of her plate.
At that exact moment, Chris Cowley, still tucked away in his office, sat clipping his fingernails. It was ten minutes past nine o’clock; a miserable thirteen hours had passed since the pickpocketing. He finished his left hand and swept all the white trimmings off his desk and into the trash. He wondered whether someone would come and collect the trimmings for DNA samples. Anything was possible.
After changing back into his street clothes, he patted his jacket pocket and confirmed that the thumb drive was still there. Then, keeping his back to the door, he took the drive out, wrapped it in a twenty-dollar bill, and tucked the whole thing back into his pocket. When he was done, he closed his eyes, took a moment and tried to pray. Just help, he prayed. Please, just help.
He’d been given two tasks for the day. The first was to allow his cell phone to be stolen. That one—while technically criminal and certainly frightening—was relatively simple. The second task was more complicated. His handlers had given him a thumb drive and instructed him to plug it into his boss’s computer.
He’d argued that he wouldn’t be able to do that, that he didn’t have access to her office.
The lead man, Jonathan, frowned, shook his head, and told Chris he would. “You have to think positively,” he said.
And he did. After he confessed that his phone had been stolen, Elizabeth brought him to her office, told him to wait, and excused herself. Just like that, he was left all alone. Pretending to be completely unbothered, he looked around like he was admiring her decor. He yawned, turned, and searched for cameras. The only one he could see was attached to her computer.
I’ll grab a pen, he told himself. If they come, I’ll say I was grabbing a pen; it’s a pen—he practiced in his mind—I needed a pen. Dry-mouthed, he pulled a yellow Post-it note off a stack on her desk and stuck it above the camera’s lens. After that, he plugged the thumb drive into her computer and watched the screen. A prompt asked: Are you sure you want to run program TX32H on this computer? Chris looked at the door, looked back at the screen, clicked Yes.
The computer hummed; he waited in misery and watched the blue progress bar slowly fill. When it was done, he pulled the drive from the port, removed the Post-it note from the camera, pushed both into his right pants pocket, and moved back to the other side of the room. Less than a minute later, the door swung open, and Elizabeth and Michael D’Angelo entered the office.
After that—and after his trip back to Grand Central with Valencia and her men—Chris spent the rest of the day pretending to work. He opened paper files and pretended to read them. He opened documents on his computer and pretended to work on them. He shredded the draft of a motion near the copy machines. He replied to personal emails. He clicked around online. He sat and stared at his screen.
Finally, at a little after four thirty Elizabeth called him back to her office. Valencia Walker, looking proud and relaxed, was already there. The phone had been found. Everyone was smiling. There was a moment where he felt almost happy. He’d had the thing stolen, and now it was back. Both sides won. He did his job, and it was done. The feeling was short lived. The deliveryman came.
Which is all to say it didn’t matter if anyone came and collected his fingernails. He had enough problems.
On his way out, when he finally left for the day, Chris stopped by the bathroom, urinated, pulled on his penis—which seemed to have shrunk—washed his hands, and studied his face in the mirror. A new set of wrinkles had appeared near his eyes. During his walk from the bathroom to the elevator he passed four of his colleagues’ offices; they sat slumped, typing away, utterly ignorant of what was happening around them. The elevator, when it arrived, smelled like cigarettes. He rode down alone.
Outside, he set off north by foot on Madison Avenue. His mind occupied itself with the question of whether he was currently being followed. Surely somebody from his own law firm would be watching. He could feel the eyes on him, but he resisted the urge to actually turn and look. It didn’t matter. None of it did.
The street, at any rate, was strangely empty. A few tourists, shivering against the cold spring night, hurried back to their hotels after what appeared to be successful shopping trips. A homeless man begged for change from the doorway of a Brooks Brothers. Steam rose from a vent; taxis and Ubers passed by in steady streams on the street.
Maybe the lawyer’s life isn’t for me, thought Chris. What would it look like to work for a law firm for the next twenty years? Is that a life worth living? It was a depressing thought. If he could just navigate his way through this little situation, perhaps he’d be able to get out and have a genuine reset.
This was a wake-up call. He could go into public interest law. Get staffed at the ACLU. Get out of this white-collar hellhole. Maybe give up the law. Move to California. Write a novel. Write a thriller.
At East Forty-Ninth Street, he turned left and headed west toward Fifth Avenue. From there, he headed up to Fifty-Second Street, where there was a smoothie stand on the corner. After approaching it, he looked in and confirmed that the man he was supposed to meet was there.
Sitting alone inside the small trailer was one of Chris’s tormentors, the shaved-headed Mexican-looking one with the scars on his face. He nodded when he saw Chris, looked at his watch, and pushed himself up. “What can I get you?” he asked, his eyes not looking directly at Chris, but above and beyond his shoulder at the street behind him.
Chris looked at the menu and realized he was actually quite hungry. “Strawberry-mango,” he said. “Can you add protein?”
The man smiled and turned his back to Chris. He made the smoothie with a surprising level of attention, measuring the ingredients carefully. Chris watched him blend them together. He stared at his back while the man worked, and wondered what thoughts were running through his mind. There was something attractive about him, thought Chris. Maybe when it was all done and over, they could meet up, get a hotel, watch some Netflix. Where do you live? Chris thought about asking him, Do you party?
The man poured the smoothie into a plastic cup and scraped the blender until the cup was filled. He fitted a lid on the cup and brought it to the window.
“Six dollars,” he said.
Chris pulled out the thumb drive—wrapped in the twenty-dollar bill—and passed it all through the window, just as he’d been instructed.
“Thanks,” said the man, handing back fourteen dollars. “I’ll see you later.”
“Did I wake you?” asked Valencia.
“Nope, I’m up,” said Billy Sharrock. He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the time. It was 4:45 a.m. He glanced at his bedroom window and saw that it was dark.
“I need you to go back to that little shop we were at,” said Valencia. “The phone place. Talk to the owner.”
“How much talking?”
“As much as he needs,” said Valencia.
“Alone?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Nah, I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Get there early, watch the door, make sure he comes in before you enter. We don’t wanna give him any excuses.”
“Come on, boss,” said Billy. It was too early to insult his intelligence.
“Call me if you have any problems.”
The line went dead.
Billy yawned and looked at his girlfriend, who was still sleeping next to him. They’d been using her for little jobs here and there. She was game and liked the money. For a second, while they’d been talking, Billy thought Valencia was going to ask him to bring her. He wished she had. It would be a lot more entertaining.
Billy had fractured a knee in Afghanistan, and it always felt tight in the morning. He went straight to the bathroom, shit, showered, and shaved. After getting dressed—he’d wear jeans, a hoodie, and a work jacket for this job—he went to his closet and grabbed a Mets hat.
In his office, he pulled up a chair near his safe, sat down, and twisted the dial until the safe opened. He looked at his guns and chose the 9 mm, put it in a soft case, and grabbed two spare magazines. From a different closet, he pulled out a large toolbox and fit the gun case into it. He grabbed a pair of heavy-duty pliers from a different box and a roll of duct tape, and put them in. He found his retractable baton, snapped it open, closed it, and put it in too.
He went back to his office and grabbed his lock-picking tools. From the back of the closet he pulled out a shoebox that held different license plates; he went through them and selected a set of New York ones, set them into the toolbox, and closed it all up.
From there he went to his kitchen, brewed coffee, and poured himself a bowl of healthy flakes. His girlfriend said he was getting fat, so he’d been torturing himself with this shit. While he ate, he looked at ESPN on his phone. The NBA playoffs had just begun. He’d grown up outside Indianapolis and liked to keep an eye on the Pacers.
When he got down to the garage below his apartment building, he pulled out his cell phone and, for billing purposes, took a screenshot of the time. Then he opened the back door of his van and set his toolbox inside. Moving efficiently, he switched out his license plates. He’d made the plates himself, copying numbers from other registered white vans, and using a tin press and enamel paint.
When he was done swapping plates, he pulled himself into the back of the van, took the toolbox, and placed it inside a larger lockbox. He then hopped out, got in the driver’s seat, backed the van out of its spot, and headed toward Manhattan. He was happy to be up at this time; he liked to get an early start on his day.
It was 6:14 a.m. when he arrived at the location. He parked the van across from the building that housed the American iPhone Repair shop. Besides an old Chinese woman rooting around in some recyclables, and a few pedestrians walking west, nobody else was on the street. Billy opened his glove box and took out a laminated piece of paper with a New York City Department of Sanitation seal on it, and a phone number that went straight to voicemail at the department. As far as he knew, nobody had ever called. He’d never been issued a parking ticket.
Then he opened the partition between the front and the cargo area, stepped back, and opened the lockbox. He pulled his Mets hat on, got back into the driver’s seat, and checked his appearance in the mirror. Then he got out of the van and walked west on Forty-Seventh Street. At this hour all the shops on the street were still closed, even the Starbucks on the corner. He circled the entire block looking for alternative service entrances but didn’t see any.
When he got back into the van, he took the hat off, found a notepad on the floor, and set it on the seat next to him. He pulled out a small battery-operated radio from the glove compartment, turned it on, found some sports talk, and began watching the front door.
At fifteen minutes after ten, Billy began to suspect his target had stayed home that day. He put the hat back on and turned the radio off. In the back of the van he took the toolbox out, hopped out the back door, and crossed the street. The prospect of not getting results was already bringing on a kind of guilty feeling.
When he got close to the door, he pulled out his cell phone, and for the next five minutes pretended to have a conversation on it. If a person passed, he repeated phrases like, I know, I know, and Yeah, sure, let me know, no problem.
Finally, after five minutes, a young woman walked up to the door, rang, and was buzzed in. Still holding the phone to his ear and lugging his toolbox, Billy caught the door and followed her.
On the third floor, he found a piece of paper taped to the door of the American iPhone Repair shop. The note read Temporarily closed. For phone pickup call (917) 258-4312. Billy pulled the paper off the door, folded it, and put it in his pocket. He then looked at the lock, a dead bolt. It would take him less than three minutes to get in.
Elizabeth Carlyle’s breakfast consisted of whole wheat toast with peanut butter and honey. She ate it alone standing at her kitchen island feeling a buzzing kind of dread. Still chewing, she poured coffee into a pint glass, added skim milk, dropped in three ice cubes, and then tapped her fingers on the counter while she waited for it to cool. She then drank the entire thing and set the glass in the sink.
Her husband was upstairs getting dressed. She hadn’t told him anything about what was happening at work. She couldn’t stand the idea of seeing any kind of amusement in his eyes. The man could find amusement in anything. A fine trait, except when it wasn’t. Before leaving, she called up the stairs to him, “I’ve got to run, I’ll see you later.” He didn’t respond.
Their marriage could be defined by these moments of one-way conversation. Elizabeth spoke, Tyler listened—at least he seemed to. The man was truly stuck inside his own head. Which wasn’t to say he wasn’t a great conversationalist. He could be—in fact, that’s what initially drew her to him. The man could speak on any subject when he wanted to. Or he could be his perfectly unbothered silent self. I’ll see you later, Elizabeth repeated in her mind as she backed down her driveway. He could have easily answered, Yes, dear, I’ll see you later. Anything would have been better than silence.
They’d been together since Elizabeth was thirty years old. She still lived in the city back then, and one night on a whim she went to the birthday party of a colleague’s friend. The party had been at the Odeon. The birthday boy had been Tyler. They got married in 1992, barely surviving Tyler’s insistence on voting for the first Bush. She had a baby—a daughter, named Genevieve—while she was still at Heller, Bromwell, Burgess, Drake. Her second daughter, Mary, was born a year after Elizabeth joined Mooney, Driscoll, Hathaway, Evans, Miller. The two maternity leaves were the only times she’d ever taken off from work. She hated staying home. It didn’t suit her.
It took ten minutes to drive to the Pleasantville Metro-North station. She arrived that morning six minutes before the 6:22 train. She walked past a group of bleary-eyed commuters and stared north up the tracks. The sky was gray and there was no wind.
Her plan, when she got to the office, was to corner Scott Driscoll—the most influential of the senior partners—and explain to him exactly what was happening. She’d then have him recruit two other partners—Iverson and Rosen seemed like the most likely candidates—and loop them in. With that small group, she could call an emergency meeting and have Scott ask the partners to sign off on a $750,000 discretionary investigation fund.
She could already see the twisted expressions that would appear on their faces: Wait, what? What the hell kind of investigation fund? Nothing illegal, she’d have Scott say, but nothing you want to know about either. Iverson and Rosen—on cue—would weigh in: Yes, they’d say. Do it. The other partners, God willing, would fall in line. Elizabeth thought the plan might just work.
When the train arrived, Elizabeth sat down next to a white-haired old woman who appeared to be headed off on a hike. The train rolled south. Elizabeth kept her eyes on the back of the seat in front of her. She had no desire to pull out her computer and work. She didn’t want to read the news. She wanted to sit in silence.
While she sat, her mind bounced back and forth between the problem at hand and random, disconnected questions: Was her jaw more masculine than her daughter’s? Did she currently have breast cancer? If the partners said no to the request for money, would she need to call Calcott immediately?
Then her thoughts shifted to Valencia. She pictured her getting dressed. Elizabeth had been to her apartment, but she’d never seen her closet. Now, she imagined it as large and airy. Her suits and dresses would be arranged by color. They would hang perfectly. There would be built-in lights. Her underwear and bras would be new and expensive. Smoothly sliding drawers would hold her jewelry. Elizabeth’s own closet was nice, but not like that.
Right then, a man walking down the aisle interrupted her thoughts. The man looked similar to Michael D’Angelo; that was enough to start her mind racing. What had he learned? She took out her phone and called him.
“So?” she asked when he answered.
“He left the office a little after nine,” said D’Angelo, referring to Chris Cowley. “He walked a few blocks to a juice stand, took a cab home, stayed there until at least one thirty, when I left.”
“Did you check his emails?” Elizabeth asked.
“Not yet, Liz, I got home at two thirty this morning.”
“Okay, do it when you get in. Thanks, Michael,” she said, hanging up before he could respond. The man worked hard; she appreciated him for that, but he moved slowly.
She called Valencia next.
“Walker,” said Valencia, sounding wide-awake when she answered.
“Tell me you have a plan.”
“Did you talk to the partners?”
“Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “Tell me the plan.”
“Okay, presuming you get the money and decide to go that route, it isn’t complicated. Our goal is to find out who is doing this. I’ll make the payment. My men will be monitoring me. We’ll sew GPS rats into the bag. We’ll have drones in the sky watching the field.”
“Are you out of your mind?” asked Elizabeth.
“I talked to my guy,” said Valencia. “He’s available tonight for whatever we need. I outlined the basic scenario, and he thinks two drones should be more than enough.”
Elizabeth scooted in her seat, looked out the window at the dark trees. “This is absolutely absurd,” she said.
“Liz, sweetie, this is war. We need to find out who they are and shut them down. If this sounds like too much, I think you should call John Braxton at the FBI. He’s good, discreet; he’ll keep it quiet.”
“You’ve cleared your day, I assume?” asked Elizabeth.
“Honey, we are in full-fledge war mode,” said Valencia.
“Good,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll call soon.”
Elizabeth put her phone down and closed her eyes for a moment. She could feel panic in her chest: she felt it in her lungs, under her heart, above her stomach; it was in her brain, her temples, and her jaw. This was uncharted territory. Steps, she told herself. There are steps that need to be taken. First, get the partners to sign off—
“We’ve got a bird-watching group,” said the old woman next to her. Elizabeth opened her eyes and turned her head toward the woman. “We meet once a month,” she said, as if she were answering a question Elizabeth had asked.
Elizabeth pursed her lips and nodded.
“But not in the winter,” said the woman. She appeared to have cataracts; her blue eyes were milky. “We’re going to good old Central Park.” The woman then scrunched her face up, as if a flood of beautiful memories were passing through her mind. “I’m trying to spot a hooded warbler,” she said.
“It’s good to have hobbies,” said Elizabeth, squeezing her mouth into a smile, leaning her head back against the seat, and closing her eyes again.
The Rabinowitz brothers lived in a large four-bedroom house on Homecrest Avenue, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Their uncle owned the house; they still had to pay nearly market rate to stay there.
That day, as noon approached, Yuri Rabinowitz, the older of the two brothers, had been awake for almost four hours. He’d been nervously watching MMA on TV, and he turned it off now. The fact that his brother was still sleeping annoyed him. This was not a day to sleep in. He shouldn’t have to explain that. It should be self-evident.
Yuri got up from the couch and climbed the stairs, two at a time, to the second floor. Surely, some girl would be in Isaac’s room; he could already imagine her, head turned away, long hair, shirtless. The idea of walking in on them caused an unwelcome feeling of shame to well up inside him.
Still, he knocked hard on the door, and called out, “Wake up, fuck head.” After not hearing anything, he turned the knob and looked in. He was surprised to see his brother sleeping alone. “It’s time to get up, bitch.”
Isaac put a pillow over his head.
Yuri stepped to the bed and pulled the blanket back. “You shit,” he said.
“Fuck off,” said Isaac, in English.
“I told you not to get drunk,” said Yuri.
“I didn’t.”
The air around the bed smelled like a homeless man; it smelled like vomit. Yuri wanted to slap him in the head. “We have to go to the gym,” he said. “You have to snap out of this shit. Get your head right.”
“It’s my off day,” said Isaac. He turned and tried to go back to sleep. “I did legs yesterday.” He then turned back, looked at his brother, and said, “Besides, you should relax”—then, switching to Russian, added—“Treat every Monday like a Monday and you’ll be rich by Friday.”
It was something their father used to say. Isaac was saying this to shame his brother. He was weaponizing the phrase to highlight Yuri’s fear. A neutral observer probably wouldn’t have read it that way, but both brothers understood it plainly. They had their own coded language. A shot had been fired.
Yuri walked over to his brother’s closet and picked up a pair of his jeans that had fallen to the floor. An all-consuming anger filled him. His diaphragm felt pinched. Did his brother not understand what they were going to do that day? Did he have no fucking clue? They were about to blackmail a major New York law firm. What the hell was he thinking?
He pulled the leather belt out of the pants, let the pants fall back to the floor, and began looping the belt around his fist, tightening it with each turn. When he finished, he faced his brother, but Isaac had already hopped out of bed and was pulling on a shirt.
Yuri weighed whether or not he should still whip him. Sometimes it was the only way to get through. He hadn’t hit his brother in a few weeks. Lately, he’d just been pinning his head to the ground. The last time he whipped him, he’d left pink welts on the younger man’s back and made him cry. It had been a pitiful sight.
Their father, before he died, used to whip Yuri. It was what they’d always done. If things escalated beyond yelling, a whipping was in order. One couldn’t allow anarchy to rule. Still, he couldn’t strike his brother if he was actually getting ready. That would violate their unwritten rules. A mixture of relief and disappointment washed through him.
In the kitchen, he texted his friend Moishe Groysman: Gym half hour.
Yuri stood there for a moment, breathing and staring at the wood on the cabinet. You need to get a hold of yourself, he thought.
He pulled out the protein powder and began making smoothies. They couldn’t be fighting today. A peace offering was in order. He was, after all, the older brother; he had to act more mature. Internal discipline. He scooped out the whey powder and dumped it into the blender. Treat every Monday like a Monday. Fucking cocksucker. He poured milk into the blender, cracked four eggs into it, peeled four bananas and put them in. After turning on the blender he stood there staring at it, watching the bananas swirl and disappear.
Upon waking that day, Chris Cowley experienced a tranquil few seconds of amnesia. A moment later his problems came barreling back. The prospect of being publicly charged with possession of child pornography wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was the injustice. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d looked at pornography; that was it. Now his family was being threatened. Now he’d been pulled into a criminal conspiracy. He was ruined. A very specific and lonely kind of helplessness seeped into him and the only way he could think to fight it was to curse uselessly in his mind.
At work he spent most of the morning at his desk, wondering just who the hell he was dealing with. Besides giving their first names—and lord knows if those were even real—his handlers hadn’t identified themselves. The skinny one, the leader, had said he was called Jonathan. He didn’t catch the shaved-headed one’s name. The small, ugly white guy was called JP or PJ.
Nothing more was given. No badges had been shown. He had no way of contacting them. On the two occasions they’d wanted to make contact, they’d simply approached him: once on the train, and once on the street outside his apartment.
Chris suspected they were working for some kind of intelligence agency; some kind of NSA-type group. They seemed too bold to be mere criminals. Besides, the Calcott case, with its Arabian Peninsula entanglements, was surely being monitored by some intelligence agency. Elizabeth hadn’t filled the team in on exactly what that was about. She firewalled it, but Chris had heard enough to know that it involved Oman, shell corporations, and access to oil-licensing fees.
Elizabeth had made it clear that CDH wasn’t going to address any of what the special opportunities fund was doing. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, when one of Chris’s colleagues had asked. “It isn’t relevant to this case.” The few junior associates seated at the table exchanged glances, but nobody ever brought it up again.
Still, Chris found it hard to believe that any U.S. government agency would act so unlawfully. For God’s sake, he was a member of the New York State Bar; he worked at one of the most powerful law firms in the country. Would they do that? Was that even possible? He didn’t know.
At noon, on his way to the restroom he was approached by one of his coworkers, David Moss, a mid-level associate who was two years his senior. “You’re off the case?” Moss asked, grabbing his arm while they walked.
“Yep,” said Chris.
“Why?”
“Conflict,” said Chris, politely freeing his arm. “I have a cousin who works at Emerson.”
“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”
“I didn’t know.”
That was the script Elizabeth had given him last night: Conflict. A cousin. I didn’t know.
“Lucky bastard,” said Moss. “I’d give up my firstborn son to be off this case.”
“So quit,” said Chris, ducking into the bathroom.
At the urinal an obvious question occurred to him: Why hadn’t Elizabeth fired him yet? Why wasn’t he fired yesterday? Why not today? More questions: What would happen if he was fired? What would those men do if he lost his job? He’d be useless to them. They wouldn’t need anything else from him. He’d be free.
That thought provided comfort for less than two seconds. The men who were running him wouldn’t want some useless lawyer walking around knowing they were involved in this case. In fact, he remembered the ugly guy saying: “You gotta stay in the game, though. Once we sub you out, we can’t sub you back in.”
He hadn’t understood what that meant at the time. Everything they’d said had washed over him; now it was beginning to make sense.
A few hours after his hallway conversation, he had another disturbing encounter. Michael D’Angelo, CDH’s investigator, stopped by his office to ask more questions.
“Hey, knock, knock,” said D’Angelo, opening the door and poking his head in. “Let me ask you a question?”
“Yeah,” said Chris, turning from his computer. He hoped the expression on his face would suggest he was busy, but the man seemed blind to hints.
“Had you ever seen that pickpocket before?” asked D’Angelo.
“Why would I have seen him?”
The investigator stepped in farther, closed the door behind him. “Look, Chris, I’m sure you know what’s going on here. This is big. This is a really big problem.” He lowered his voice, like he was letting Chris in on a secret plot: “We think you may have been targeted.”
A silence hung between them for a moment.
“Maybe you would have seen someone hanging around?”
Chris’s mind flashed to the idea of the surveillance footage from his own apartment building. Would someone eventually look at that and see his unwelcome visitors? Had they taken care of the video? Surely, they would have thought of that. “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Any strange emails?” asked D’Angelo.
Chris’s eyes went back to his monitor. He let his head drop to the side a little, pursed his lips, pretended to think. “Not that I know of.” He shook his head, looked at the investigator, pushed himself back in his seat a little. “Do you think I’m going to get fired?” he whispered.
“I think that’s the least of your worries.”
Chris rubbed around his eyes. “I’m so fucked,” he said.
It was only partly an act; he was fucked, but he wanted the investigator to have a certain impression of him. He wanted to seem naive and scared. “I’m so fucked,” he whispered, again.
D’Angelo stared at him with a flat expression. “Anyway,” said the investigator, shrugging with his face. He then turned and left.
The door closed. Chris Cowley was alone.
* * *
During his unexpected visit the day before, the deliveryman, Juahar, had laid out what they should expect. “You’ll get an email,” he told them. “They’ll tell you what to do.” He recited that part from memory. Then he turned the piece of paper around.
“See,” he said. An email address had been scrawled in the center of the page: newyork186241@yahoo.com. Below the address, Password: abracadabra321.
He shook his head as though everything he relayed caused him as much pain as it did the others in the room. “They’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “They’ll email you. They say, ‘Write it down’—I write it down. That’s all I did.”
So it wasn’t a surprise when at 3:21 p.m., Elizabeth received a text message from Valencia: Message, it said. That was all. Elizabeth excused herself from a meeting and walked down the hallway to her office. Standing outside the door, typing something on her phone, was Valencia.
“Danny got it,” said Valencia, referring to her own assistant, Danny, who had been monitoring the account.
“Did he read it?”
“Just the subject,” said Valencia. “It says: ‘Welcome.’”
Elizabeth walked past her, opened the door to her office, headed straight to her computer, and sat down. The Yahoo tab was already open on her screen. “‘Welcome,’” she said, reading the subject line. “What is this? It’s sent from the same account?”
“Slightly different,” said Valencia, bending down and pointing at the screen. “186242, off by a digit.”
“Well,” said Elizabeth, clicking on the message. She read it for Valencia: “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. No dye. No GPS.” She leaned back from her desk, looked up at Valencia. “That’s it?”
Elizabeth suddenly felt a bit more confident. The whole thing seemed like total bullshit. It seemed amateurish, the work of somebody who had been watching too many Hollywood movies. No dye! “What is this?”
“We’ll find out,” said Valencia.
Elizabeth looked at Valencia’s face even closer. There seemed to be a bad mood brewing behind the woman’s eyes. “I mean, they’re amateurs, right?” Elizabeth asked.
Eyes still on the monitor, Valencia didn’t answer; she just shook her head.
Elizabeth leaned closer to the screen. “What is this 186242 business?”
“Danny ran the original address through his databases. He broke it up into parts, ran just the numbers to see if they’d been associated with any other email accounts,” said Valencia, looking down at her phone, apparently reading a message from her assistant. “He’ll run the new one, too, same thing, break it down …”
While Valencia was speaking, Elizabeth’s mind drifted. She indulged a short fantasy about being kicked off the case, pushed out of the firm, and publicly humiliated. She saw herself getting divorced, moving to France, to the Loire Valley, learning to cook, taking long bicycle rides. In the winter she could make fires and read books—a more civilized life.
Meanwhile, Valencia had moved on to a different subject: “My guy at Yahoo says the account was created yesterday at 20:16 UTC—that’s 4:16 our time. The IP address tracks to Kazakhstan. It’s a network known for anonymizing proxy service.”
“So what’s that mean?” asked Elizabeth.
“Nothing special. Anyone could do it.”
As Elizabeth looked at the screen, a new email came in. Both women bent down to read it. Elizabeth could smell Valencia’s shampoo. It smelled like gardenias.
Elizabeth read it out loud: “‘You have two hours to get money.’” She looked at her watch, looked back at the screen. “‘Then we send further instructions.’”
Even before she got the okay from the partners, Elizabeth had sent an associate to get the money from their bank. The money was bagged up and locked away in one of Michael D’Angelo’s evidence lockers.
Elizabeth leaned back, crossed her arms in front of her chest, and closed her eyes. “You don’t think we should go to the FBI?” she asked.
“I thought we already charted that out.” said Valencia. She used a soothing kind of voice, which annoyed Elizabeth.
“We did. I’m second-guessing our conclusion.”
“A few years ago, I handled a kidnapping negotiation in Mexico,” Valencia explained. “A movie producer down there, a Mexican guy, his son was kidnapped in the middle of Mexico City. I don’t even speak Spanish, but they called me down; I analyzed the situation—as best I could—and advised the guy to pay the money. Just pay it. Different circumstances, but—just like here—it made sense. In the end he didn’t pay, he went to the police.”
“And?” asked Elizabeth.
“The kid got beheaded.”
You are one of the most arrogant women I’ve ever met, thought Elizabeth. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, centered herself, and then looked at Valencia. “You know what I like most about you?”
“Tell me.”
“Your decisiveness.”
“I’m a Taurus,” Valencia said. “We’re decisive.”
That evening, at the appointed time Valencia pulled her car into a spot across the street from Dyker Beach Golf Course in Brooklyn, not far from the Verrazzano Bridge. She was out of practice: it had been months since she’d last driven, and the drive from Manhattan had left her tense.
She backed up, pulled forward, turned the wheel, and put the car in park; it would have to do. With the car off, she took a deep breath, exhaled, looked in the mirror, fixed her hair behind her ears, and told herself to calm down. Then she popped the trunk and got out.
The money had been placed in a large gym bag borrowed from a young attorney at the firm. The instructions had specifically demanded that Elizabeth Carlyle make the delivery, but Valencia had insisted on taking her place. “They’ll have no idea,” she said. “A woman’s a woman. I’ll wear a hat.”
When she lifted the bag, it felt heavier than when she had put it in. She closed the trunk and began carrying the bag—leaning with the weight of it—toward the corner of Twelfth Avenue. The neighborhood had a slightly rundown suburban feel. “Do you see me?” she whispered into her earpiece.
“Affirmative, I have you westbound, north side Eighty-Sixth,” answered her drone man, Colter Jacobson, through the earpiece in her right ear. Two drones watched from above. Valencia resisted the urge to look up. She listened for it, but—apart from the sound of nearby traffic, city noises in general, and a distant barking dog—she didn’t hear anything.
“Milton? Are you set?” she whispered, barely moving her lips.
Milton’s voice came through her earpiece: “Yes, ma’am.” He and Billy were parked on Twelfth Avenue, between Eighty-Fourth and Eighty-Fifth Streets.
“Danny?”
“Yes, ma’am, same—moving … west on eight six,” said Danny Tsui. He was at their office in Manhattan tracking the GPS device that had been placed in the bag.
“Knock it off with all this ma’am shit,” whispered Valencia.
Danny said, “Yes—” and then cut himself off.
Cars passed in clusters on Eighty-Sixth Street, and Valencia flinched when a truck’s horn blared. For a moment, her mind went back to her CIA training at The Farm. Her team leader had been an old hand named Roland Faraon. During her first week there, she’d been told she had to do a solo night trek, humping a fifty-pound bag in the woods of Northern Virginia. Roland pulled her aside, told her not to worry, that it was perfectly reasonable to feel fear. He reminded her that they weren’t training her to be an assassin. “We just want you to be able to walk your ass out of a hostile country.”
After filling her in on the details—fourteen miles, no trail, no moon, rainy night—he pointed at a few of her male classmates who were standing near a fence. “Those guys think you’re going to be too scared to do this,” he said. “Are you?” She told him she wasn’t, and it was true.
Right then, an old man walking toward her on the sidewalk interrupted her memory of the hike. He wore blue pants and a long-sleeved navy blue polo shirt. He walked with a slight swing of the hips, like he’d been injured in the past. He had wide cheekbones and looked Russian. The idea that this man might just ask for the bag brought with it the feeling that everything was speeding up.
“Man approaching,” she whispered.
“I have him,” said her drone man.
As they got close to each other, the man kept his eyes firmly on Valencia; he offered a small smile as their paths crossed. Valencia turned and watched him walk away. Then on her right, she noticed an old woman staring at her from a porch. Valencia stared back, and waited for the old woman to look away; but she held steady, and it was Valencia who finally gave in.
She continued walking west. At the corner she set the bag down on the ground, and opened and closed her hand to get her circulation going. She waited for the light to change. When it did, she picked up the bag and crossed the street. Every person in every car seemed to be watching her. On the other side of the street, she looped back in the direction she’d just come. The fenced-off golf course was now directly next to her.
There were other people walking on this side of the street. An old woman walking a tiny white dog with brown smears around its eyes sauntered past. Next, two teenage Chinese boys, wearing glasses. The sound of passing cars rose and fell with the flow of traffic.
On her right, the chain-link fence separated the sidewalk from the wooded area that bordered the golf course. The instructions had said to enter at the middle of the block, and then walk through the woods to the edge of the course. She would receive further instructions there.
Valencia’s team had scouted the area beforehand. They told her there was an entrance in the middle, a simple cut in the chain-link fence. Coming upon it now, Valencia found it even more primitive than she had imagined. A cut ran from five feet straight down to foot level, where it split in both directions. Beyond the fence was a dark wooded area. She wondered whether the drones would be able to see through the trees.
For a moment she thought again about her training at The Farm. They’d spent a week simulating customs and immigration stops in a fake airport. The place came complete with the right carpet, fluorescent lights, and intercom system making announcements. She remembered one occasion where the person playing the immigration official yelled at her and called her a liar. They brought out a dog, a German shepherd, who sat within biting distance, barking.
Valencia repeated her cover story. Afterward Roland Faraon told her she’d rushed it. “You’re jumping the gun,” he said. “Just sit back and let the game come to you. Don’t rush it. React to what’s happening, not what you think needs to happen.”
Valencia looked at the cut fence and thought about that. The situation she now found herself in was way more complicated than simple blackmail. She needed to sit back and practice a little bit of patience. It was all about making the right choice in the right moment.
“I’m at the cut,” she whispered.
“There is nobody near you,” said the drone man. “Closest body inside the fence is four hundred yards east.”
“Copy,” she whispered. Her mouth was dry now. She pushed the fence apart, leaned her leg against it, and then pushed the bag through. After that, she looked left, then right, and then, awkwardly, struggled through herself.
On the other side of the fence she noticed that she was breathing loudly; she reached up and covered the mic on her earpiece. She breathed in and out through her nose and tried to put herself into the mind of whoever was making her do this—but she couldn’t.
The woods, in a canopy, stretched farther in front of her than she’d imagined. Trash lay scattered on the ground in all directions. It disgusted her. She took her hand off the mic, and whispered, “Okay.”
“You good?” came Milton’s voice.
“Yeah,” she said.
Bag in hand, she entered the wooded area, stepping carefully and trying to avoid any hidden holes. She cursed herself for not having brought a weapon. In the office, that choice had felt wise; here in the woods, it felt foolish.
“Talk to us,” said Milton.
“It’s clear,” said Valencia. She turned and looked back toward the street. “It’s fine.”
Thirty paces farther, she saw an opening that indicated the end of the woods. When she reached the golf course proper, she set the bag down, exhaled, and looked around. The sky was still not quite dark. The grass field opened wide in front of her. It was a beautiful sight. Her eyes tacked from left to right, and she felt herself become calm.
“Do you see any movement?” she whispered into her earpiece. The instructions had said to walk straight to the golf course, but they hadn’t said what to do after that. She presumed they were going to ask her to leave the money, but she didn’t know how they planned on conveying that message.
“All clear,” the drone man said. “Nothing moving.”
Valencia was calculating how long until dark when her thoughts were interrupted by a cell phone ringing. Moving her head around like a dog, she tried to locate the sound. She stepped out farther into the grass. The ringing stopped.
After a moment it started back up. Glancing back at the bag of money behind her, she kept walking toward the sound. Finally she found a black Nokia flip phone. It stopped ringing.
“They left a phone,” she whispered into her earpiece. She picked it up and then looked around to see if anyone was watching her, before walking back toward the bag.
The phone rang again. She answered it. “Hello?”
A beeping sound, something like a fax noise. Valencia took the phone away from her ear for a moment, looked at it. “Hello?” she repeated.
“Very good,” said someone at the other end. The voice sounded like it had been electronically pitch-shifted. Valencia squinted and tried to place the accent. “You win,” they said. “Bring bag to Batchelder Street, B-as-in-boy-A-T-C-H-E-L-D-like-dog-E-R, Batchelder Street, between Avenue Y and Avenue Z. Still Brooklyn. Batchelder, got it?”
Valencia put her free hand to her head. “Batchelder,” she said.
“Come alone.”
“I want to talk face-to-face,” said Valencia, but the phone went dead.
Yuri Rabinowitz’s phone vibrated in his hand. He answered it.
“I told her,” said his brother Isaac.
“Okay, go back,” said Yuri. “Smash the phone.”
He waited for his brother to affirm that he’d heard his instructions, but Isaac stayed silent. “Do you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Isaac, switching to English. “I hear you.”
“Smash the phone, dump it, and meet at the spot,” said Yuri. “Don’t speed. Don’t run any lights. Hey! Wait!”
“What?” asked Isaac.
“Did you see anything?” asked Yuri.
“Nothing.”
Yuri’s little brother had been parked down Eighty-Sixth Street. It had been his job to watch the area around Thirteenth Avenue, and make sure there was no activity from that end. Yuri had told him to dress in gym clothes and to keep his gym bag on the passenger seat.
Yuri, for his part, was tucked away in a friend’s mother’s apartment on Eighty-Sixth Street, at the corner of Twelfth Avenue. The friend was in Miami, but his friend’s mother had let him in. “I need to watch something,” he’d said, pointing at her window.
“You boys never stop with this monkey business,” the mother had said, speaking with the same accent as Yuri’s own mother. “Why always sneaking here, sneaking there? Go to law school. Become a lawyer if you want to sneak around.”
“I know,” he had told her. “I will, I want to, but first …”
Yuri had watched the woman park, and now he saw her walk right underneath the window. He’d seen her carrying the bag and then turn and look at the old man when they passed each other. Everything was going as planned, but he still felt very uneasy.
The other window in the living room looked up Twelfth Avenue. Yuri paced between the two windows, looking first this way, then that way. There were no signs of activity coming from either direction. No cars circling, no plumber’s vans; no men walking dogs; no FBI women pretending to push strollers.
Yuri had placed one of his associates, a young man called Felix, one block to the north on Twelfth Avenue. Felix had parked his car and now—accompanied by a teenage girl he’d brought to help him blend in—sat on the front stoop of a vacant house that was for sale. Yuri had told him exactly what to do. It would feel more natural. He told him to sit and watch the block. Watch every person—look for anybody trying to blend in.
So they had all three sides under surveillance. The fourth side was the golf course itself, which didn’t need to be watched.
“So we can see what we are dealing with,” Yuri had said. There had been no signs of trouble, no cops, no tails, no FBI. Still, he wasn’t at ease. His guts felt pulled. He took out his phone and called Felix.
“Yes?” said Felix.
“What do you have?” asked Yuri.
“There was a van, it stopped, nobody got out. Then someone got out of it and went into an apartment. That’s it.”
“Nothing else? No other people?”
“Nothing.”
Yuri told him to wait for fifteen minutes before leaving and to remember to make noise when he did. He ended the call.
“I don’t like this,” said their friend’s mother. She was sitting on the couch in the same room, dressed in a long white nightgown, something a grandmother might wear. Her glasses reflected the television screen, which played the local news without sound. Yuri saw sirens on the television screen and watched for a moment.
“It’s a game, auntie,” he said.
“Do I look stupid?” she asked.
“Stupid?” he said. “You look like a professor.”
She had, in fact, been a professor of economics in Moscow, but the comment only made her shake her head and smirk. She took her remote control and changed the channel; then she smacked her lips and shook her head again. She seemed genuinely annoyed at Yuri.
He went back to the window and stared at the area where the woman had entered the park. When she finally came out, he stepped a foot back from the window and raised his binoculars to look at her. He couldn’t see her face, but her body language suggested she was scared, and he took some measure of comfort in that.
“You boys will end up in an American prison,” his friend’s mother said. “Think about that for a minute.”
Valencia parked next to a fire hydrant on Batchelder Street, shut the car off, and studied the area in front of her. It was a residential block. The kind of unadorned, large brick buildings that dominated New York City stood on each side of the street. She counted eight stories on her left, and six on her right. The buildings on her right had paths cutting through them. The one on her left had a large courtyard in the middle, so the front door was set back almost two hundred feet from the street. Ideal landscape for a sniper, she thought.
A few people hunched against the evening chill seemed to be making their way home for the night. Valencia watched a delivery driver on an electric bike speed past. From there, her attention shifted to a man fussing with his dog’s leash. She watched him until he turned and walked away. Then she looked back at the building across the street from her. Brooklyn—she thought, attempting to ground herself—New York, America, Earth.
Then, trying to put herself in the right mood, she repeated the phrase, Let me help these people, three times in her mind. She breathed deeply, exhaled, opened her eyes, and spoke. “I’m parked.”
“We have you,” said the drone man. “Still, do me a favor and tap your brake once.”
She tapped it.
“We have you,” he repeated.
“Milton?” asked Valencia.
“Parked one block south,” said Milton. “Billy’s out. You should see him behind you.”
Valencia looked in her rearview and then side mirrors, but didn’t see him. “Danny, where are we on the Emporis floor plans?” she asked. She wanted a three-dimensional image of the buildings on either side of her.
“Working on it, boss,” said Danny.
Thinking that one of her men could lift a fingerprint or DNA, she refrained from touching the phone as much as she could. While she waited for it to ring, she opened the glove compartment, found two pens, and—using them like sewing needles—flipped the phone open. She then pressed the talk button and looked at the call history. Besides the calls that had come in at the golf course, there had been another series of blocked calls earlier, at 4:45 p.m. It occurred to her that they’d been practicing. There was something pathetic about that.
Using the pen, she punched in her own number, and hit the green talk button. Her iPhone lit up with a 718 number.
She spoke into her earpiece: “Danny, run this number—718-936-5156, tell me what you see.”
“Yes, boss.”
“After you’re done, give Dale Burkhart a call and have him do the same thing. Tell him this is real. Danny, you gotta say it like that: ‘Real.’” Dale Burkhart was an FBI agent in Newark. He’d have more access and could possibly tell her where the phone had been sold.
The drone man’s voice came into her earpiece: “Okay, Valencia, the building across the street from your location, the tall one, we have five warm bodies in windows, one on the second floor, one on the third floor, one on the seventh, and two on the eighth, at the same window.”
“Copy,” said Valencia. She bent down in her seat and craned her neck to look up at the tower, but she couldn’t see any signs of warm bodies. She looked at the phone, and breathed deeply through her nose.
“Do you want the other buildings?”
“Not now,” said Valencia. “Just the street.”
“You have two warm bodies near the front door of that same building, and a group of three bodies, moving in your direction, from one block north on Avenue Y.”
“Copy,” she said. Her eyes went back and forth between the people at the door and the area where the three people would be coming from. They still hadn’t come into her view.
“You should see Billy,” said Milton. His voice sounded like an AM radioman.
She lowered her head and looked in the side mirror. She still couldn’t see Billy. He’d be dressed like a homeless man, complete with a long-haired wig and an authentic smell. Out collecting cans, he’d be strapped with a gun, handcuffs, and his fake badge. Wally Philpott, Valencia’s NYPD detective, was standing by at a bar on Nostrand Avenue, just in case they needed him.
She pulled down the visor and checked in the mirror for food or lipstick on her teeth. Then she shut the mirror, leaned back in her seat, touched two fingers to her wrist and felt her pulse; slowly breathing in and out, she tried to get it to settle. Snug as a bug in a rug, she told herself.
“The three inbound just turned back on Batchelder and are now headed away from you—northbound,” said the drone man. “A cluster of six new bodies inbound from the south.”
“Hold the updates, for a minute,” said Valencia.
“Copy,” said the drone man.
Valencia’s earpiece went silent.
She closed her eyes for a few seconds and waited for her mind to steady. When she opened her eyes, she looked again in her side mirror. This time she spotted Billy on the other side of the street. He was drinking a beer and examining a large pile of trash bags. He looked the part. He’d speak Polish if anybody questioned him.
Right then the phone rang on the seat next to her. It sounded louder than it had in the field, and its ringtone, a vintage jangle, took her back ten years. Touching the phone as little as she could, she answered it.
“Welcome, friend,” said the same pitch-shifted voice.
“Thank you,” said Valencia, scanning the street in front of her.
“You are parked?”
“Yes.”
“You are parked across from 2520?”
He was referring to the tower with the courtyard. “Yes,” she said, looking over at the front door.
“Hold, please,” said the voice.
Valencia sat there blinking. Hold, please? She looked at the area in front of her, but didn’t see any movement. She glanced in the side-view mirror and saw Billy walking away from her.
Her iPhone lit up with a text from Danny. It was the floor plans. She clicked on the 2520 building and gave the layout a quick look, making note of all the stairways. Then she looked back at the street. A car had pulled up in front of the building, and an older woman was slowly pushing herself out of the backseat. The man on the phone was presumably waiting for the area to clear.
Before making her way to the door, the old woman had to speak to the driver for a bit. Valencia almost smiled; all eyes—including two drones—were on this old woman. The world had stopped for her.
“Exit the car, bring the money in the bag, and walk to the doorway of 2520,” said the voice on the phone. “There are benches there. Sit down on one of them. Keep the phone on you. We’ll call back.”
“Okay,” said Valencia. The call ended.
She reached for the trunk release lever. “Showtime,” she said.
“Copy,” said the drone man.
“Copy,” said Milton.
She opened the door and set her feet on the ground. As she exited the car, she became dizzy and momentarily experienced something like stage fright; she felt watched.
The feeling passed. She pulled the trunk open, lifted the bag out, put the strap over her right shoulder, and began lugging the bag across the street. She walked at a measured pace, not too fast or slow. If anyone out there doesn’t want me to do this, now is the time to speak up, she thought.
Right then, a black Monte Carlo pulled up behind her. It was blaring hip-hop, and the bass vibrated through her body. She turned and looked at it, but she couldn’t see anything through the blackened windows. Still, she could sense men leering at her from inside. She took a moment and mentally prepared herself to fight. Go for the knees, she told herself. Knees, throats, balls, and noses. But the car roared off, its muffler adding to the noise. Valencia was left alone on the block again.
She walked into the courtyard and toward the door of 2520 Batchelder.
“Two men standing at the door,” said the drone man. “You still have the same warm bodies in windows on floors two, three, seven, and eight.”
She didn’t answer. The two men in the doorway were thirty yards from her; they wore puffy coats and smoked. She couldn’t see their faces because they were lit from behind. She kept moving toward the bench, and then sat on it, slipping her hands under her butt to warm them.
The phone in her pocket rang. “Okay, Elizabeth”—they still thought she was Elizabeth, which was somehow comforting—“cross back over Batchelder,” said the voice. It sounded to Valencia like he was reading from a script. “Walk between the two buildings directly across the street from where you are. Before you get to the side door of the building on your left, you will see a trash can. It is the only one there. It’s fifty meters from the sidewalk. Put the bag in the trash can and then return to your car and leave the area.”
“Put the bag in a trash can across the street from me?” she asked, so her men could hear what she was being instructed to do.
“Yes,” said the voice. The pitch-shifting couldn’t disguise his nervousness.
“Do we have your word that you won’t come back to us again?” asked Valencia, saying what she thought Elizabeth Carlyle might say.
“Yes,” said the voice. “Put the money in the trash can and leave. Thank you.”
The line went dead.
She crossed Batchelder Street again and looked for Billy, but couldn’t see him. The space between the buildings was lined with park benches. There was a little plot of grass on her right. The streetlights cast the area in pinkish orange and hummed unnaturally. There was nobody else in her line of vision. Put the bag in the trash, she thought. This is ridiculous.
She found the trash can. It looked like any New York City trash can. There was a lid on top, the kind meant to discourage people from dumping their own bags of trash. It wasn’t locked, and she pulled it open. She looked in and saw a black plastic garbage bag and no trash. She placed the gym bag in the trash can and then put the lid back down. She turned and raised her hands to signal that it was done.
Feeling like men in every window were watching her, she straightened her shoulders and began her walk back to the car. Now we wait, she thought.
As soon as she was in the car, she asked her drone man what he had. “Nothing yet.”
Valencia, pumped up on adrenaline, pulled her seatbelt on, pushed her hair back, started the car, turned her lights on, checked her mirrors, and drove away.
Billy watched Valencia’s car disappear down the road. He’d found a carton of halal chicken and rice in the trash, and, fully committed to his role, ate from it like a man who’d skipped a few meals. It wasn’t bad. Still chewing, Billy stepped into the doorway of an abandoned building. He set his food and drink down and then lowered himself to a seated position. From there, he could watch the trash can. He sipped his beer, adjusted his earpiece, and leaned back against the door.
While he watched, he switched to autopilot; fragments of sentences passed through his mind: Wait and watch … walk the block … filled up … tossed out … he said duck….
A little over two hours later, Valencia came on his radio and told him to take a walk. “Billy, time for your lunch break.”
He was happy to go for a walk; his back and knees had stiffened up, and he was getting cold too. He might have to buy another beer to keep up his cover.
He walked three blocks west—didn’t turn to look behind himself once—and found a bodega on Nostrand Avenue. Colter, meanwhile, sent regular updates through his earpiece: “Holiday,” he’d say, meaning the field was clear. Then ninety seconds later he’d repeat it, “Holiday.”
“Wassup, player?” Billy said to the store clerk when he walked in.
The clerk, a young Arab, raised his eyebrows, shrugged, shook his head.
Billy walked to the back, scanned the beer, grabbed a can of Olde English, and stepped to the register. “Let me get two loosies,” he said. The clerk looked at him for a moment, like he was wondering if Billy was a cop; but then he reached under the counter, grabbed a pack of Newports, and shook out two cigarettes.
“Three fifty,” said the clerk.
Billy gave him five, took the change, picked up a lighter that was tied to a string, and lit one of the cigarettes.
“Billy, we’re gonna need you to take a look in the box,” said Valencia in his earpiece.
Billy stepped back outside. “Take a look? Or grab?” he said into his earpiece.
“Take a look,” she said. “Confirm it’s there.”
“Copy,” said Billy.
He walked back down Batchelder across from the tower. He first went to the trash can on the far side of the street, looked into it, dug around, pulled some paper bags out, pretended to look through them.
“Holiday,” said Colter.
If Allah wills it, it will be done, thought Billy, trying to talk himself calm. Truth was, he was feeling nervous. He couldn’t help it.
He walked toward the target, following a drunken line from the sidewalk onto the dead lawn and back. Twenty feet from the can, he stopped walking and made a show of finishing his beer. He tossed his head back and guzzled with his elbow out like a college kid. Then he dropped the can to the ground, crushed it under his boot, and belched loudly. He took a second, turned, and scanned the entire area. He didn’t see anyone.
“Stay there for a minute,” said Valencia. Billy became aware that she was watching him from Colter’s van.
Today is not my day to go, thought Billy. He leaned up and turned a circle, scanning all the windows for scope shines. A white SUV drove down the block and Billy watched it. After that the street became silent again. Billy tried to relax his shoulders; then he stomped on the beer can twice more, and picked it up.
“Okay, Billy,” said Valencia.
He turned and walked toward the trash can. For the first time that night, he noticed the sky above him, with the clouds lit by the moon, and beyond the clouds, two stars. After tossing the can into the trash, he took a step away, then pretended to have second thoughts, and turned back to it.
He stepped up and tried to peer in, but he couldn’t see anything. He grabbed the top of the receptacle and pulled it open. When he looked in, it took a moment to understand what he was seeing. There was a black plastic trash bag, but it had been cut. Underneath that, at the bottom of the receptacle, was the can he’d just thrown in.
He looked in deeper. “Bag’s gone,” he said.
Colter Jacobson’s van was outfitted with boxes of computer hardware stacked and belted against the walls; neatly bundled cables extended from those stacks to a larger black trunk behind the driver’s seat; above the trunk, attached to a wall behind the driver and passenger’s seat, were eight small monitors. Sitting on a bench facing that wall was Valencia. She could see the white glow of Billy’s body on the screen, the dusted landscape of the lawn, the concrete street that played gray on the monitor. For a moment, the idea that Billy was at the wrong trash can passed through her mind.
She turned toward Colter, who was seated next to her. “That’s the right can?” she asked, knowing full well it was.
Colter pushed his glasses up, frowned, and nodded.
“Fuck.” She spoke into her earpiece: “Milton, come pick me up.”
Colter busied himself talking to his pilots, who were flying the drones from his office in White Plains. At that moment he was reading an indecipherable list of coordinates from a notepad.
Valencia dropped her head and closed her eyes for a second. She touched her ear and spoke: “Billy, drop back, cross the street, and wait for us. We’re coming.”
She turned back to Colter and asked, “You have a quarter-mile view on the field?”
He nodded, pointed toward one of the monitors.
“And you’ve grabbed every license plate that has come and gone since we’ve been here?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Okay, sit tight,” she said.
She hopped out of the van and watched Milton’s SUV speed down the block to get her.
“Shit’s bad,” she said, when she got in. “Real bad.”
Milton, silent, whipped a U-turn.
Less than half a minute later they saw Billy walking toward them on Batchelder. They stopped and he got in the back.
“You fucking stink,” said Valencia. Billy knew better than to respond. The car bumped over a pothole; sirens could be heard responding to some other incident in the vicinity. An older African American woman stopped and stared at them as they sped past.
Milton stopped on the street, near the sidewalk that led to the trash can. The three of them sat there looking toward the drop spot.
Valencia was the first to speak. “Fucking shit,” she said. “Back in and drive down that way.”
Milton was already moving. He pulled forward and lurched the car in reverse. Bumping over the curb, he drove backward toward the trash can.
“Hold on,” said Valencia. He stopped. She touched her earpiece. “Colter, is the area clear of police cars?”
“No cars in the area. You have one body, a block over on Voorhies, but he’s moving away from you.”
“Hit it,” said Valencia.
“Hard?” asked Milton.
“Yes.”
When Milton stepped on the gas the three of them turned in their seats and watched out the back window as they headed for the can. The noise, when he rammed it, was quieter than Valencia expected.
“Pull up,” she said.
He pulled forward.
“Let’s go.”
They got out and walked to where the trash can had been. In its place was a two-foot-wide hole. “Son of a bitch,” said Valencia. She shined the light into the hole. It appeared that the trash can had been placed over some kind of sewage tunnel.
Valencia handed Billy the flashlight. He took his jacket off, stepped to the hole and then put his head over it, then pulled back, like a gun-fighter looking around a corner. He then leaned over and shined his light into it. Convinced it was clear, he lowered himself in. Valencia moved closer and watched him. There was an iron ladder attached to the wall of the tunnel.
Valencia then went to examine the trash can. The New York City Department of Sanitation logo seemed to mock her. She reached down and touched the bottom of the can. It looked as if it had actually been fixed to the path with cement. A false bottom had been attached to the can with screws. It was either a very smart job or she was an idiot.
She stepped back to the hole. “What is it?” she called down.
“It’s a sewer,” Billy answered. “A sewer,” he repeated. “You’re gonna wanna see this, though.”
Valencia stepped to the hole, looked down, and stretched her foot to the first rung of the ladder. Billy lit her way from below. When she reached the bottom of the ladder, she had to hop about four feet down. Billy offered his hand, and she accepted it. When she was down, he shined the light on the gym bag, which sagged empty in a puddle. The two small GPS devices they’d placed in the bag sat next to it on some dry concrete.
Billy then directed her attention to one of the walls. A crude devil with a tail and a huge erect phallus had been spray-painted in white. He swung his light for Milton, who was lowering himself down.
Valencia stared and blinked at the dark black space where the painted devil had been.