The Old Man(46)

The doors opened and he was out on the platform, hurrying with a hundred others to the upward escalators. On the way he dropped the clothes into a trash barrel, then took the next escalator up into the sunlight.

There was a parking lot on Bosworth Street across from the station, but he didn’t go near it. Instead he hurried up the other side of Diamond Street to Wilder Street, where there were no signs of cameras. As soon as he was visible on Wilder, the black BMW pulled away from the curb and glided up to him. He got into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and the car moved on.





17


Julian Carson walked along Market Street at a quick pace with the demeanor of a man irritated at the fact that his cable car had never come. As he forced his body to convey the feeling, his experienced eyes were picking out the intelligence people. He saw five men who had been seated inside a restaurant dash across the street toward the Apple store, then into the subway entrance beside it. The tables along the front window of the restaurant were now vacant. A man in a third-story window of the hotel across from the turnaround was looking down at the street and talking into a cell phone.

Here and there pedestrians stopped to talk into cell phones or radios or Bluetooth earpieces—an attractive young couple, the man in a sport coat and the thin blond woman in tight jeans and high boots, a pair of women carrying shopping bags that were heavier than they should be. There was a shout from somewhere near the subway entrance, and each woman put her right hand into the shopping bag that hung from her left, and kept it there until it was clear that the commotion was over. Julian didn’t know the women, but he knew that they had not been reaching for new dresses they had bought.

A cab passed with a sign that said OUT OF SERVICE. The driver stopped in front of the BART station and two of the men from the restaurant used a gray blanket as a stretcher to carry a dazed man from the entrance to the backseat of the taxi. Two more men ushered another injured man with a towel wrapped around the lower part of his face and blood on his shirt into the passenger seat. Julian sped up to a trot to see if this one was the old man, but it wasn’t. The cab pulled away.

Julian kept walking. He had warned his superior officers. He had told them a couple of times that the old man wasn’t just an old man, like somebody’s uncle. He was old in the way a seven-foot rattlesnake was old.

Julian had listened to the agents when they told him he was going to be the one to meet the old man and take charge of the money. He had said “yes, sir.” He’d certainly had no interest in getting himself killed, and this was the kind of mission that might accomplish that. He had known instantly that the thing to worry most about was friendly fire. He had listened to the plans, but heard nothing to make him expect so many people with guns surrounding him in a crowded public street.

Julian’s strides took him to the spot where he had been told to go after the exchange. A fake UPS delivery truck was stopped around the corner with its engine running and lights flashing as though it were making a delivery. He stepped up into the open side door by the driver’s seat.

Inside the cargo bay there were three men sitting on a bench wearing UPS uniforms, but two of them held MP5 rifles with thirty-round magazines. The slings that held the short automatic rifles were brown webbing that matched the uniforms. Julian didn’t know any of the three.

“Where do we pick up the money?” one of them said.

“He transferred the money electronically,” said Julian. “He’s already gone.”

“Should we go too?”

“Affirmative,” Julian said. “It’s over.”

The man released the magazine on his MP5 and put the gun and ammunition into an open cardboard box that sat in front of his bench, closed it so it looked like something he was delivering, and hurried forward to the driver’s seat.

Another man held a radio. He said, “I’m getting the call now.”

In a moment the truck pulled away from the curb, went down the street to the next corner, and turned. The big rectangular vehicle made two more turns and headed south of Market. Through the windshield Julian could see warehouses, garages, and small manufacturing operations. Occasionally there were bars that Julian judged were probably even less inviting at night. Then the truck was on the freeway. Fifteen minutes later it pulled through an open gate into a fenced lot adjacent to the vast open space of the San Francisco airport.

The building inside the fence had once been a hangar. The door swung upward and the truck pulled in past a couple of large trucks that looked like appliance delivery trucks and stopped. Julian got out. Beside him were two taxicabs, and beyond them an ambulance, a repair truck for Pacific Gas and Electric, a US Postal Service truck, and four black cars that looked like unmarked police cars, with the distinctive side spotlights.

“Hey, it’s Carson.” Harper’s voice was flat with a hint of sarcasm. “Glad you survived your dramatic mission.”

Julian turned to see that Harper and Waters were sitting at a table at the far side of the hangar. They got up and walked toward him.

“Thanks,” Julian said. “There didn’t seem to be anything dramatic about it that I could see. There seemed to be quite a few people running around tripping over each other, though. Did something happen after the old man left me?”

Harper and Waters glanced at each other, and Waters gave his familiar cringing expression. Harper said, “Maybe that’s the problem right there. He wasn’t supposed to leave.”