The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(4)
“Gurdeep,” she asked, her eyes on his in the mirror. “Are you a gentleman?”
He looked back at her. “Of course, madame.”
Yael flicked back her auburn hair and gave him her most winning smile. “I am in trouble. I need your help.”
“More U-turns?” he replied, his thin face intrigued.
Yael leaned forward. “Something like that.” She explained what she wanted Gurdeep and his cousins to do.
He glanced at her in the mirror. “But that is illegal, madame. We could lose our licenses.”
“You won’t,” said Yael. She continued talking.
Gurdeep stared at her in the mirror, assessing her and her request. He paused for a few seconds before he replied. “You can guarantee that?”
Yael nodded emphatically. “Absolutely.”
*
Michael Ortega stared at Yael’s taxi as it turned around, corrected its skid and sped off down Riverside Drive. He walked back inside the apartment building’s lobby, the wine still in his hand, concentrating fiercely on a short series of letters and numbers.
Enrico Vasquez, his shift coworker, looked at the bottle and raised his eyebrows. Vasquez was Mexican, in his late fifties, portly and taciturn. Ortega was half his age, brawny, with dark blond hair and a soft Southern California accent.
“Changed her mind, I guess,” said Ortega.
A taxi pulled up by the building’s entrance. An elderly lady, laden down with Bloomingdales bags, got out. Vasquez nodded at Ortega and stepped onto the pavement to help her.
Ortega stopped at the doormen’s desk, put the wine down, and grabbed a pen and a sheet of note paper. He quickly scribbled “EXW 2575, black SUV, spider crack in left-side rear brake light,” folded the paper, and stuffed it into the back pocket of his uniform. He glanced at the vestibule that led from the entrance into the main lobby. Vasquez was busy chatting with Mrs. Rosenberg, a wealthy widow who lived in a large apartment on her own and gave substantial tips each Christmas, as he carried her shopping toward the elevator.
Ortega grabbed the wine and walked through to the back of the lobby. There was a fridge in the doormen’s locker room, where he placed the bottle. He walked back to the lobby and sat down at the long wooden desk, once again wondering at the turn-around in his fortunes. He strongly suspected that his good luck—if luck it was—was somehow linked to what he had just witnessed. The SUV certainly looked familiar. A car like that had brought him into Manhattan from LaGuardia airport. He would give Yael the wine back when she came home. He looked forward to the encounter, no matter how brief. Maybe he would tell her the license plate number as well. He knew an evasive maneuver when he saw one.
*
As Yael’s taxi sped toward West End Avenue, a sharp snap resounded across an enormous office that overlooked K Street in Washington, DC.
Clarence Clairborne looked down at his desk. Two cracks had appeared in the phone: one across the back of the handset he had just slammed down, the other fracturing the cradle. He reached to buzz his secretary, then thought better of it. Instead he continued to watch the four New York traffic camera feeds on his outsized computer monitor.
Moron.
What was the SUV driver thinking? And why were they using this car?
Clairborne had specified at least three vehicles, all unobtrusive: well-used Fords or Chryslers in bland colors, with a team communicating by radio. But no, they tailed a highly security-conscious target in a single car that looked like it had just driven out of a rap video. Of course she had spotted it. A blind cat in a dark cellar would have spotted it. On the screen the SUV was still stationary, stuck behind the cement mixer, in the middle of its 180-degree turn.
The chairman and CEO of the Prometheus Group closed his eyes for several seconds, then picked up the Montecristo Reserva smoldering in an ashtray by his keyboard and drew deeply. He closed his eyes for a moment, relishing the fragrant smoke. Nobody made cigars like the Cubans. The fact that he was committing a criminal offense by smoking them made them taste even better. He slowly exhaled, opened his eyes, and peered at the computer screen again, willing the traffic to move.
The cement mixer had moved forward a few feet. The SUV was slowly completing the turn.
Clairborne shook his head and inhaled again on his cigar. The smoke caught in his throat and he coughed loudly. Why couldn’t they organize a simple tail? A better question was, why couldn’t he? He had insisted on getting involved, had specified how the operation would be run, but somehow it had all fallen apart. First they use the wrong type of vehicle, and only one of them, and then that one gets stuck in traffic. Step this way, ladies and gentlemen, to see one of the richest and most powerful men in the world get royally f*cked by a cement mixer.
The black SUV slowly finished its turn, headed down Riverside Drive, and turned right onto West Eightieth. Finally, the idiot was heading in the right direction.
At least New York’s Domain Awareness System was working. The DAS took feeds from thousands of police and privately owned CCTV cameras across the five boroughs and funneled them into a central channel for the New York Police Department. Manhattan’s grid system of numbered horizontal streets and wide, vertical avenues made the city easy to divide into zones and therefore ideal for CCTV surveillance. Clairborne had lobbied hard for the technology, persuading city officials that in the post 9/11 world such a system was not a luxury but a necessity, one best supplied by the Prometheus Group’s clients and business partners. A Caribbean cruise for the developer and his girlfriend, together with a large brown envelope thick with hundred-dollar bills, had ensured that Clairborne’s computer had access to the NYPD system.