Into the Fire(49)
Were Evan not sitting in clear view of two of the bodyguards, he might have risked raising his phone to take a picture.
But the facial-recognition route would not be an option.
There were three men at the table, and a lot of espresso sipping was going on.
Which meant it was only a matter of time.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t one of the associates who moved first. It was the bodyguard from outside, the one watching the vehicles. He entered and nodded at the man by the French doors, who nodded at one of the redundant guards in the courtyard, who slipped outside to cover as the first guy headed into the bathroom. A seamless rotation.
Evan waited a moment. Then he rose and entered after him.
It featured only stalls, as befitted a unisex bathroom.
From behind the closed stall door came the sound of a torrent of urine.
Evan quietly threw the dead bolt behind him. He cupped his hands under the sink, sprinkled some water on the concrete, and then entered one of the vacant stalls. As he waited, he noted that his body temperature felt higher than usual, and then all of a sudden he was sweating as if someone had ramped up the heat. A familiar fogginess rolled over him, altering his perception, fuzzing the edges of the stall, the latch lock, his own hand held before his face. He didn’t know what an ideal time was to have a flurry of concussion symptoms, but this was not it.
The guy finished, zipped up, and cleared the stall, moving to the trough sink.
Evan closed his eyes, focused on his breathing, willed his body temperature to lower. He had to be swift and precise in order to avoid any kind of physical altercation. He couldn’t risk another knock to the head.
Once he felt steadier, he emerged, giving a neighborly nod when the guard looked up to eye him in the mirror.
As the man reached for the paper-towel dispenser, his weight shifted forward, moving him up onto his toes on the water-slick concrete. Evan grabbed the nape of his neck, swept his ankles back, and slammed his forehead into the lip of the sink.
The man’s knees buckled forward, and he sat froggy style, his torso flopped back over his legs. His eyes were open a sliver, showing a seam of white, and his breath came evenly and jaggedly. He would come to in a few seconds. The overwhelming likelihood was that he would remember nothing and dismiss it as an unusually painful slip in the bathroom.
Evan lifted the unconscious man’s weighty arm, adjusting his grip around the right index finger, and rolled the finger pad onto the back of his own right thumbnail.
A nice hard surface that would hold the print.
He released the arm, and it slapped to the floor.
Evan adjusted his hair in the mirror and exited.
He hooked left through the lobby and was out on the street in seconds. Too late he realized that in his slightly dazed state he’d inadvertently dined and ditched, which would make him memorable, especially to the snotty ma?tre d’. Now he’d be unable to return to surveil the area if the mission called for it, the first concrete cost of the concussion he’d sustained. He vowed it would also be the last.
Next door a concrete office building the color of sandstone rose five stories to a steep slope roof. The building probably didn’t offer a useful view of the courtyard, but it was the best and only option.
Evan gauged it from outside and then rode to the top level. The lights of the elevator seemed unnaturally bright, aggravating the aching in his brain, making him squint.
A dermatologist and an internist shared the floor. A bathroom conveniently took up the center of the southwest side.
Evan entered the bathroom, slid open the window, and stuck his head out.
He could see down onto the top of the courtyard but not quite to the table.
Another five feet or so would get him there.
But he didn’t have five feet. There was only open air. The ground gave a vertiginous swirl, and he took in a lungful of fresh air and moved his gaze upward.
A faint commotion stirred on the sidewalk outside the Three Monkeys Café, the valets rushing to assist one of the bodyguards as he helped his fallen comrade out the door and into the front Town Car. He was squeezing his forehead and staggering. Evan could relate.
The bathroom door squeaked open behind him, a few workers entering. He pulled back from the window, offering a bland smile to their inquisitive stares. It was a busy bathroom on a busy floor.
Evan went back downstairs, walked two blocks, and got into his truck.
Driving home, he was careful to keep his right hand fanned off the steering wheel so as not to brush the fingerprint invisibly preserved on his thumbnail.
26
Small Talk
Back home in the Vault, Evan harvested the fingerprint from his thumbnail using lycopodium powder and lifting tape, converted it to digital, and ran it through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Unsurprisingly, the bodyguard he’d knocked unconscious in the bathroom had a criminal record, which provided a convenient ID. Evan leapfrogged from there, running through known associates in the databases until he arrived at a photograph of the silver-haired Unidentified Caller he’d watched sip espresso at the Three Monkeys Café.
Alexan Petro. Evan figured the surname for an Ellis Island special or a crime-lord affectation.
Either way Petro was a busy man, with a history that ranged from money laundering to racketeering. Armed with a strike team of attorneys and advantaged by a pattern of convenient key-witness disappearances, he’d proved slippery. As he’d telegraphed through his texts to Evan, he was the head of the snake to Terzian’s operation, the upper echelon of corruption.