Chapter 16: Prey

"Hey, Paul, I could lose my job for this, you know," the paunchy middle-aged retired NYPD detective said sotto voce to his former colleague as he hesitantly pushed a plain white envelope across the Formica tabletop.

"I know, Mike, but this should make it right," Paul Riley, known on his current job as Agent Nine, replied to his former partner as he passed a paper bag containing a hundred hundred dollar bills under the table.

They were sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan, not far from where the towers once stood. The nervous man was now employed in the corporate security department of the most-popular cell phone carrier in the metropolitan area (rhymes with "horizon"). The day before they had met at a bar in midtown, and the agent had given his old buddy a cell number he wanted traced, including the carrier frequency for that phone, and the billing information. Once they had this data they could send out a few vans with sensitive antennae and get a location for the target by triangulating the signals they monitored.

The break had come a few days earlier; Agent One, the team's leader had decided that they had exhausted their leads. The target had not been spotted during long weeks of mind-numbingly boring surveillance-- neither at the lawyer's office nor at Grand Central Terminal.

After consulting with his boss in London, Agent One and a team of three other agents had broken into the law office again. They couldn't gain access to the steel-doored room, and the attorney's office itself contained nothing of use to them, but the secretary's desk yielded an important clue. Her desk calendar, the calendar upon which she logged her boss's appointments and calls, showed an appointment with Carl Sutherland (a name which they knew to be a pseudonym) at the exact time they had first spotted the target; more importantly there was a phone number next another, more recent entry in the call log, 914 area code, indicating that this Sutherland lived in one of the suburbs north of New York City, in Westchester County, most probably, but perhaps Rockland or Orange counties, or even one of the other more distant suburban regions.

Further investigation--there was no entry for the number in the reverse directories, and Agent One had called the number itself the outgoing voicemail announcement indicated it was a cell phone, and this complicated things, making it harder to pin down their prey. This was why One had dispatched Nine, the retired detective to meet and bribe his old friend from the force, ten thousand up front, another ten when the info was delivered.

"Hey," Soren greeted him as Alan returned to their room on a cloudy Saturday morning in October. Alan could sense the dejection in his voice.

"What are you doing back?"

Soren had left Friday morning and taken a train home; he was from Rockville, a suburb of Washington, DC, and his girlfriend was a freshman at the University of Maryland, about halfway between the nation's capital and Baltimore.

"My girlfriend wanted me to meet someone: her new boyfriend. His name is Charlie, and he's a senior. Pre-med. Isn't that great?" he asked facetiously, grimacing.

"Oh shit. Jeez man, that's terrible," Alan commiserated. "Come, I'm taking you out for brunch." Soren demurred. "Seriously," Alan insisted, "Come on, we're going to La Rosita."

La Rosita is a Cuban coffee shop on Broadway and 108th Street. It's cheep and delicious, and Alan ate there at least once a week. After a brief bit of haggling Soren agreed; it was one of his favorite eateries too. The crisp autumn air made Alan wish he had worn a jacket, but since it was a relatively short walk he decided not to run back into the dorm for one. Soren, Alan could sense by scanning his roommate's mind, was on the cusp of a serious depression. His now ex-girlfriend, Debra, had been his first serious relationship, and he seemed devastated by the loss; they had spoken on the telephone almost everyday since school had begun.

After their cafes con leche had arrived Alan started the conversation, because his roommate had said nothing for a long while.

"Look, don't blow a head gasket over this, dude. I can spout off all of the clichés: long distance relationships almost never work out; she's your high school girlfriend, and those relationships aren't meant to be permanent; there are plenty of other fish in the sea; etc. But you don't want to hear them, so I'll leave it at that and not try to chew off your ear. What I do want to say to you is this: these are supposed to be the most fun years of your life. Don't fall into a funk about some girl who broke your heart. I know it sucks for you, and I know you loved her--" Soren looked up at Alan and stared him in the face, a questioning look in his eyes, "--Yeah, I heard you on the phone, I could tell by the way you talked to her, and about her that you loved her, but you have to move on. Now, I don't mean go out and marry the next girl who rocks your world. Just go to parties, drink beer, flirt, you know? I'm not going to let you stew in the room for the rest of the semester. Anytime I have someplace to go, you're coming with, and I wont take no for an answer. OK?"

"m'kay," he answered morosely mumbling into his coffee.

Two middle-aged men with short haircuts and flesh-colored wires snaking out of their jackets and into their ears came in an took a table near Alan and Soren. They made an effort not to look directly at the two teens. One of them sat facing them, not looking their way, while the other sat opposite, observing them in a mirror on the wall in front of him. He put his hand on his cheek and whispered into a microphone his sleeve. No one in the coffee shop took any notice. A surveillance van was parked across the street on Broadway.

Soren digested this little speech as he ate his eggs, rice, and beans. He was still very quiet, trying to hold back the tears. On the way back to the dorm they had stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change, and Soren put his arm around his roommate, around Alan's shoulder. "Thanks," he croaked, a half of a smile forming on his lips.

Alan smiled inwardly as he gave his roommate a pat on the back. "Lock up your daughters: Soren's on the loose!" he joked, and was rewarded with Soren's hearty laughter.

"Yes, I understand, Your Lordship. Your instructions will be carried out to the letter. We will take the boy on the first of December. Surveillance teams have him covered twenty-four hours a day. It will not be a hardship. I will call again if there are any, ah, unusual developments." Agent One was consciously avoiding saying the word "problem."

"You do understand, Tadeusz, the penalty for failure," the voice on the other end of the phone said, the arctic coldness--intensified to a great degree by the clipped tones of an upper-class British accent--of his voice easily transmitted through the international circuits.

"Yes, Your Lordship, I understand."

"You are doing an adequate job. Continue down this path."

Tadeusz Karick hung up, shuddering slightly. He knew very well the consequences, for he had executed the leader of the failed London team, the team that had failed to capture Massimo. A bullet to the back of the head would ruin your day, and he resolved not to be the next recipient of such a treatment. He had done a great deal of "wet work during his dozen year's service with the StB, the Czech equivalent to the KGB, and he had hoped his now freelance status meant murder was a part of his past.

He gave another shudder, thinking of that terrible summer night just a few months ago; he had coaxed the last "Agent One," a disgraced former commander in the French Surete, his true name unknown to him even as he rested the barrel of his pistol, silencer attached, against the back of his head, pulled the trigger, and then shoved him into the Thames.

Two mornings later, sitting in a cafe and sipping coffee, his stomach lurched violently as he spied the front-page photo in the morning's paper, a picture of two bobbies standing near the riverbank holding two long poles with hooks at the end, fishing out of the water the corpse he himself had deposited in those waters. He didn't want to, but found himself compelled to read the article anyway. Yves-Marc Didiere. "Shit! I didn't want to know his name," he had thought at the time. "There but for the grace of God go I."

Now Karick leaned back in his office chair, looking out the window and zoning out while watching the cars crawl downtown in heavy Lexington Avenue traffic, hoping that his second-in-command wouldn't be tasked with the job of dumping him into the river--in this case, the Hudson.

Little did he know that his date with a nine millimeter headache was forthcoming, no matter the outcome.

On the other side of the Atlantic the photographs and reports were being closely examined by the man Karick referred to as "Your Lordship." The former Czech intelligence operative had good reason to address him that way, for the man who employed him was indeed a member of Britain's upper house, a hereditary Lord whose mother's second husband just happened to be Jean-Pierre Massimo's father's second wife. The London team had bollixed the job, though the death of Massimo, his step-brother, was hardly saddening for him.

"Alan Marshall," Lord Thornbow thought to himself. "I should have known." All of this could have been avoided if Swindon-Smythe had contacted him sooner. This Marshall, this boy, is a much fatter target than Jean-Pierre ever was. Probably new to his powers, unsure of himself. A satisfied grin crept across his leonine features. Soon, very soon, the power would be his. He pressed a button on his desk, and his assistant, Mr. Patel, entered through a side door.

"You have reviewed the files of all the New York team members?"

Patel nodded, he was a man of little talk.

"I have just spoken with Mr. Karick in New York. We will be taking action on the first day of December, in the late evening. That is the last day of a four day holiday weekend in America. Thanksgiving. You will depart two days earlier. You know what you must do."

Mr. Patel bowed in the formal fashion and withdrew. The day before they grabbed the boy all but three members of the New York team would be dismissed, sent packing with extremely generous cash bonuses. Karick and two others would take the boy to their secure location, a warehouse in the Bronx. There, Mr. Patel knew, they would meet their end; he himself would do the deed. After that he would transfer Alan Marshall to another van, and set the warehouse afire as he left, then proceed to the second secure location and rendezvous with Lord Thornbow.

He checked the files of all the men on the overall team, and picked the two others to accompany Karick; about half the squad was made up of former NYPD officers and detectives. None of them would die in this operation, because their murders would be too conspicuous.

Kate was in her dorm room, studying for a French quiz, when her roommate came in.

"Hey, Kate."

"Hey, Scarlet, s'up?" she answered back casually. Scarlet had been acting sort of weird lately. When they first met in person at the beginning of the semester, after spending the summer e-mailing and IM'ing back and forth, they had really hit it off, hanging out together and going to parties together, but about a week ago the amount of time they had been spending in each other's company had been trickling off dramatically, and it wasn't due to course load. Even when they alone together in their room over the last seven days or so Scarlet seemed distant, Kate thought.

"Nuthin' much, you?" she said diffidently.

"Same old, same old."

Scarlet went over to her desk and started on her own coursework. The radio played softly in the background, and neither spoke or moved from their desks for the better part of an hour.

"Listen, Kate, there's something I have to tell you, but I've been hesitant because I'm not sure if you'd take it well," her roommate said nervously, breaking the awkward silence between them.

Kate put her book down slowly and swiveled her chair to face her. She could see the tension written across Scarlet's face. "What is it?" she asked guardedly, thinking she had offended her in some way.

"There's no easy way to tell you this, and I will totally understand if you don't want to room with me anymore, but," she paused, sighing portentously.

Kate looked at her, suddenly very worried, no longer that she had done something wrong, but now simply worried about Scarlet. "You can tell me, I promise. Are you in some kind of trouble? Can I help? What?"

"No, no trouble." She paused again, her throat suddenly becoming really thick with anxiety. "I've decided to become a L.U.G."

Kate was puzzled, and worried. "Lug, what's a lug?"

"Not a 'lug.' An L.U.G., a Lesbian Until Graduation. See, the thing is, I like boys and all, but I've recently found out that I'm bisexual, and while I'm in college I'm only going to, uh, do it, with girls. That way I can concentrate on classes, not guys."