Will stood on a side street just off Broadway in Washington Heights, Manhattan, and decided that the small hotel before him looked perfect. There were backpackers, badly dressed tourists, and dubious-looking women attached to dubious-looking men constantly coming and going from the place. It looked cheap, and its occupants looked cheap. In Will’s experience, cheap hotels were anonymous and often the best places to go to disappear from unwanted intrusion or to conduct covert meetings. He stepped across the street and entered the building.
A man stood behind a small reception desk and looked bored as he fiddled with room keys and papers. He glanced up at Will and continued to look bored as Will asked for a room for one night and said that he would be paying with cash. The man took two hundred dollars from Will and asked him for ID. Will told him that he’d lost his ID but was willing to pay him an extra fifty dollars just to get the room. The man hesitated, took the additional money, and gave him a key. He told him that there might or might not be hot water in the room’s bathroom, and that the room’s door lock was sometimes a bit temperamental. He announced that Will was not allowed visitors in his room after 7:00 P.M. but that in truth nobody here would give a damn how many guests he had in his room during the night or when he had them.
Will took the key and walked up narrow creaking stairs to the hotel’s second floor, squeezing past a short-skirted woman with generously applied makeup as she tottered down the stairway in high heels. He reached the top of the stairs and saw that his room was immediately to his right. He fiddled with the door lock until he felt the bolt snap open and entered the room. It was larger than he expected and had a lounge area, which led to a double bed on the far side of the room. But it smelled musty, and aside from the bed it had only one armchair, a couple of lamps and side tables, a minifridge, and an old-looking TV. He looked out of the room’s window, saw the daylight of New York, and heard the city’s noise.
He pulled out his cell phone and typed a message, which he sent to Lana’s number, knowing that it would not be read by her but instead would be seen by Megiddo. He told the man where he could find Nicholas Cree. Will replaced the phone in the inner pocket of his suit jacket and rubbed his face.
He wondered if tonight a huge hole would be carved into the city of New York. Then he wondered if that would happen shortly after he was murdered in this hotel.