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July 15th, 2003 Midtown Manhattan
NYE kept her eye on ‘George’—or at least her glasses did—as she ladled plenty of the delicious cabbage soup into a bowl for the next person in line. George had let some stubble grow and taken to rubbing dirt on his face, but it was too late. He’d already attracted her attention. Even had she not previously identified him, it was not a disguise that would’ve fooled her facial recognition software. He must have been worried she’d recall his face anyway, and know him for who he was, since he kept turning that face away from her. But what’s he doing here?
He sat sipping delicately at his cabbage soup at one of the tables near the entrance, and nibbling on his bread in between great gulps of coffee. And Nye reviewed her video of him and looked for clues.
Shortly after she had volunteered to help out at this soup kitchen, Nye had realized that all this free food was intended for the poor—which didn’t mean her, or George either. But she considered that since she was working here, she could share their meals—but just to be safe, she’d anonymously donated several thousand dollars. She supposed George had to be working too, even if she didn’t know on what. It would be nice to think his employers were also contributing to the needy—she’d have to ask them if she got the chance.
She had to eat lunch, and she loved the cabbage soup here. If she took an extra long lunch break, so she could serve meals and clean up too, it also gave her the opportunity to study more of these twenty-first century denizens of New York City. Such as the woman who ran this place.
As good as the food they served was, it could be improved. But when Nye had suggested adding raw eggs and vinegar to the soup, that most sensible recommendation had not been well-received. Nye was still trying to analyze the woman’s facial expressions as she’d listened to it. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.
Jeannie, one of the regulars, had yet to show up, and Nye hoped she hadn’t been taken to the mental hospital again—their food wasn’t nearly as good. If she asked, Bernie might know. Nye could try when she took her break to enjoy her own bowl of cabbage soup.
She dipped the ladle deep in the pot as the next man shuffled forward. Then her glasses were lighting up with facial recognition reports and microexpression analysis and bookmarks of previous video. She filled a bowl for him with a blank face and went on to serve the next person in line.
After Nye’s first visit to this place and identifying ‘George’—whose real name she still didn’t know—she had taken the precaution of preprogramming certain subroutines into her glasses. Now that was paying off. She had found another person she’d encountered during her brief interaction with the FBI. She let her glasses keep a watch on both of them as she continued to serve the people in line, wondering what two federal agents were doing there disguised as the needy.
She waited until she’d served the last customer to ladle out a bowl of soup for herself. Grabbing the tray and a cup of coffee, she ran a more complicated analysis on the two men’s behavior since they’d entered the building. By the time she’d sat down next to Bernie her glasses were displaying the results.
The two agents had been glancing at each other in a furtive fashion, which the report described as a mutual recognition with suspicion and gave a confidence rating of eighty-five percent. And it assigned a seventy-two percent likelihood to their being unaware of each other’s reason for being there. A lower rating was given for the possibilities that they’d perceived each other as imposters but without recognition, or that there was some personal reason for the apparent discomfort with each other’s presence.
Bernie turned and smiled at her. “Hi, Nye.”
She smiled back. “Good afternoon, Bernie.” Instead of asking about Jeannie, though, she became absorbed in slurping down her soup, and kept looking straight ahead.
The two federal agents sat a couple tables ahead of her, one to either side. Her glasses kept both men in view and displayed the video of each in the center of her lenses. The new one was trying to watch her out of the corner of his eye—but George was paying more attention to the new arrival. Considering her options as she drank her coffee, Nye came to a conclusion. She needed to confront them if she wanted to sort out what was going on.
She stood and marched down the center aisle to position herself between the two men and swiveled her head back and forth to glare at them both. “You two clearly aren’t here for the same reason. I don’t understand what possible interest you could have in this place. Or is it me you want?”
Both men sat with mouths gaping and eyes boggling as they stared at her, but ‘George’ was the first to recover. “What are you talking about? I’m here for the food. What else?”
Nye shook her head at him. “I recognize both of you.” She pulled the relevant data up to make sure of her facts. “I saw you two months ago, on the fifteenth of May in the Javits building, walking down a corridor on a certain floor. But I wasn’t able to see your ID.” She turned to face the other one. “And on that same day, you were the one who’d followed me to Times Square. You were even—”
She stopped because he’d finally shut his mouth and then opened it again right away, to blurt something out. “The pizza is sour. The pizza is sour.”
Since they never served pizza, Nye was standing there trying to figure out what he’d meant by that a minute later when several men in suits charged into the place. Before she knew it, two of them were lifting her by the arms and hustling her from the building. They carried her around the corner and thrust her into the back of a big black van.
The men climbed in after her, and the van sped away, all before she had a chance to comment. “You should have presented your credentials. Or is it different for an undercover operation? I assume that’s what that was intended to be, though I can’t say you were doing a very good job of it.”
They didn’t respond. Nye sighed—the last time this had happened, the agents had not talked much, but this time they weren’t saying anything. Maybe because Special Agent Coulter wasn’t there. “Aren’t you allowed to talk when your boss is not around?” Apparently not, as the short ride stayed silent. She spent that time wondering if she’d broken any laws and whether she’d have to call Mr. Hollingsworth to help her out.
They took her to the same room as before. Coulter was waiting there, sitting in the very same chair. This time she took the initiative.
“What’s the meaning of this? It should be clear to you by now that I’m not a terrorist. And what, by the way, are two FBI agents doing dressed up as the homeless and eating their food at that soup kitchen? I hope you’re donating some money.”
The man leaned back and smiled. “You’re more confident than you were before. Are you aware that if we consider you a terrorist, we don’t even have to let your lawyer know we’re holding you? Much less allow you to speak to him.”
Nye shook her head. “You’re not a stupid man, Agent Coulter, so that’s either an empty threat or a bullying tactic and an abuse of power, which I won’t stand for. Either way, you want me to cooperate? Why not try telling me how I can help, and see how reasonable I can be?”
Special Agent Coulter kept smiling at her without, as far as her glasses could detect, any microexpressions to indicate a particular attitude. “I could charge you with obstructing a federal investigation, Miss Walker. You were exposing an undercover operative, and that could get you some serious time in a federal prison, no matter who your lawyer is.”
“That might be an interesting research project, to inspect the inner workings of a penitentiary. But it would interfere with my current studies, which I am still in the middle of, so I don’t have a lot of time to waste. Now, I had not exposed either agent, and I was trying not to. But as they kept giving each other surreptitious looks, I thought I’d have to sort something out for them. They didn’t seem to understand each other’s presence.”
Agent Coulter just sat there, staring, so she continued. “Since he had followed me in the past, I assume the one who just showed up today was watching me—if that’s the case, I’d like to know why. And the other agent has been observing the soup kitchen for over three weeks now, and since he was already there before I showed up, I’d also like to know what possible reason the FBI could have for spying on the people there.”
“Are you done?” He dropped his smile, shaking his head sadly at her. “I’m certainly not going to be telling you those things because you’d like to know. It’s enough for you to know that you disrupted our operation, and that we take a very dim view of that.”
Nye snorted. “You should be blaming your people, not me. Their shifty behavior was the problem with your operation, or operations. Are you so disorganized that you can’t coordinate between different investigations?”
Agent Coulter gave her a wry grin. “Since I was in charge of both operations, it wasn’t a question of coordination. I’m not surprised you made the man who’d followed you in the past, but I must admit to being curious how you spotted the other man as being a federal agent.”
“Oh, that.” Nye waved her hand and blinked to bring the relevant data back up. “The last time you brought me here, two months ago, when I was walking to the elevator, I saw him down one of the hallways, wearing a suit and walking with other men in suits—and none of them wore a visitor’s badge. So, they must have been federal agents.”
Nye hoped she had not gotten those agents into trouble, but she had to impress Special Agent Coulter. Of course, she had been oblivious to all of that at the time, but anything her glasses recorded could be searched, even identifying profiles at a distance. And her glasses recorded everything.
“You must have a very good memory for detail, Miss Walker. Photographic?”
Nye nodded. She supposed that term could accurately be applied. “I can recall every detail of anything I’ve actually seen.” If she’d been wearing her glasses at the time, of course.
“Well then, perhaps there’s something you can help us with.” Agent Coulter stretched out his hand and another agent stepped forward and passed him a plastic bag. He slid it across the table so she could get a good look. “Do you recognize this watch?”
It was one of their Travel devices, and again Nye was glad she’d taken to leaving her own in her room safe. There were ten of the watches altogether, and she wondered whose it was and how it had ended up in the hands of the FBI. “I can’t identify one specific watch out of however many identical watches there must be.” With that statement out of the way while it was still true, Nye casually flipped the bag without looking directly at—but her glasses saw. The designation on the back was H—6, Kirin’s watch.
He took the bag back and opened it, withdrawing the watch and pressed one of the buttons. Then he held it up in front of her face. “Do you know who this person is? Have you ever seen them before, or can you give us any idea who they might be?”
She blinked as she stared at a picture of Samantha displayed on the watch screen. Supposedly her fellow researcher was off gallivanting around somewhere in time with Bailey. According to Anya.
Nye wondered if this had something to do with why her team leader had been hanging around her rooms at the Ngaio for the past couple of weeks. It would be best, Nye decided, to only answer the last of Agent Coulter’s questions.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you who she is or anything that might identify her for you.”
“So you have no idea why a professional hit man would be carrying a watch with her picture on it?”
“No.” She could certainly answer that one with the truth. What has Sam been up to? And Anya always complained about Nye getting herself in trouble. “But I don’t understand why you would think I had an idea about such a thing.”
He looked for a moment as if he would tell her, but then he shook his head. “We had our reasons to suspect there might be a connection to you.”
It had to be Anya. Somehow Anya was involved with all this, but clearly Agent Coulter wasn’t going to tell Nye. So she would have to drag the details out of her team leader.
“You see, I cooperated. Now, is there anything else you wanted to ask me?”
“No, Miss Walker, that’s all for now. But I expect I’ll be seeing you in the future.”
Nye wanted to get back to her research, but she needed to find Anya and have a little chat first.