The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(6)
The visitor did not speak, but he didn’t need to. Ortega stood up and followed him out of the building. They crossed Riverside Drive and walked into the park.
*
Clairborne picked up the glass of bourbon that sat by his keyboard, his eyes still fixed on his computer monitor. The drink was specially blended for him by a boutique distillery he owned in Alabama. He grimaced slightly as he swallowed. They needed to adjust the mix. It was too sweet, cloying on his palate. Or maybe the third generous serving of the early evening never tasted as good as the first.
He was just about to take another sip anyway when Yael’s taxi lurched forward and ran the red light. Clairborne’s grip steadily tightened on the glass. Delicate crystal from Bohemia, the oversized tumbler was part of a set gifted by a Czech arms dealer in the early 1990s. The collapse of Communism had flooded the market with Soviet weapons. The dealer had sold off a division’s worth of AK-47s to a Prometheus Group subsidiary. The guns had promptly been shipped to Sierra Leone.
Yael’s cab raced across West End Avenue, weaving around the traffic coming from both directions, swerved sharply, and raced up West Eightieth toward Broadway.
Clairborne watched, squeezing the glass even harder. “Fuck-a-duck,” he exclaimed.
The taxi turned right onto Broadway, easily made the next light, and slid into the early evening traffic heading downtown. The SUV was still trapped a block away, behind a brown Ford station wagon and a pizza delivery van, not moving.
Clairborne heard a crack. His thumb was suddenly pressing against his index finger. He looked down for a moment, turned his palm ninety degrees. Two large curved pieces of glass sat in its center, together with a small pool of bourbon. The bottom of the tumbler had fallen onto his desk, which was now drenched with golden liquid, filling the air with a sweet alcoholic stink. Then the pain hit. He gasped as he stared at his hand. It felt as though it had been dipped in acid. He carefully moved over his desk and tipped the two glass fragments into the nearby trash can, a sticky brown mix of blood and bourbon dripping off his palm.
Clairborne grabbed a bottle of seltzer from the bar trolley with his left hand, held his right hand over the trash can. He upended the seltzer bottle, wincing as the bubbles fizzed against the wound. He stared at his palm. There were no more pieces of glass, but blood was welling up. It needed to be dressed. He glanced at the damaged phone on his desk. He picked up the handset. Silence.
He pressed the button several times. A soft hissing. The line was dead. He could shout for Samantha, his superefficient personal assistant who would immediately clean the wound, clear his desk, and remove the mess. And she would give him one of her looks, ever more frequent, that said, You are losing it, Mr. Clairborne, and if you carry on like this, you will lose your office, your company, and everything that goes with it. And she was right.
Instead he rummaged in his desk until he found a Band-Aid and a heavy monogrammed white cotton handkerchief. He padded his palm dry, put the Band-Aid onto the gash, wiped up the remaining bourbon with the handkerchief, picked up the base of the tumbler from his desk, and dropped it into the trash can. He sat back for a few seconds with his eyes closed, trying to ignore the searing pain in his hand.
He opened his eyes and glanced at the monitor. The black SUV was still stuck at the corner of West Eightieth and West End Avenue. Meanwhile Yael’s taxi was making swift progress downtown a block east on Broadway, zipping past the Seventy-Second Street subway stop, catching one green light after another.
Clairborne slid his BlackBerry across his desk with his left hand. He put it on speaker, then punched in a series of numbers. It rang once before it was answered.
“She’s on Broadway, heading downtown, just past Seventy-Second Street subway. Center lane,” he snapped.
“I’m on it,” a male voice said.
“You had better be,” said Clairborne, and hung up.
The SUV finally turned onto Broadway. Eight lanes wide—four lanes uptown, four lanes downtown—the avenue was divided by pedestrian islands in the middle. The first lane was clogged with parked cars and trucks making deliveries to the shops and cafes. The SUV was heading downtown in the second lane. The taxi was four blocks ahead, back in the SUV’s line of sight.
Then two more taxis appeared in the third lane, to the left of the SUV: A Mitsubishi minivan and, immediately behind it, a Ford Crown Victoria. Boxed in to the right by the parked traffic, the SUV signalled left, trying to nudge its way out. But the Crown Victoria kept parallel with the SUV, its bumper slightly ahead.
A space opened in front of the SUV. The Mitsubishi darted in front, forcing its way in with inches to spare. Clairborne hunched forward, slowly shaking his head. He glanced at the top right hand of the screen. Now Yael’s taxi was speeding southward on the Henry Hudson Parkway, already in the mid-Fifties. The SUV was still stuck between the Mitsubishi and the Ford at West Sixty-Seventh. Broadway cut down through Manhattan diagonally as well as vertically, and the boxed-in SUV was already three avenues away from Henry Hudson Parkway, heading into the maze of midtown. There was no chance it would catch up.
He picked up his cigar. The bourbon had splashed into the ashtray and the cigar had gone out. He grabbed a heavy gold lighter and held the flame to the cigar tip; it smoldered and a thin tendril of smoke appeared. Clairborne put the cigar to his mouth and drew hard. The glowing tip sputtered, hissed, and died. He stared at it in disgust, then jammed the entire cigar into the ashtray. It bent sideways. He threw it across the room and exhaled loudly, pulling a face as he got a good whiff of the bourbon on his breath, then leaned back in his $5,000 executive chair, which had a carbon-fiber frame and an inbuilt computer that automatically adjusted to his posture. He waited for the kid leather cushions to slide into the programmed position, the arms to rise slightly.