Andrew Grant - Even

The elevator had buttons for twenty-four floors. Lavine hit the one labeled “23.” The doors closed gently, and almost imperceptibly we began to ascend. The elevator’s walls were covered by some sort of rough sacklike material hanging from small metal hooks near the ceiling. I pulled back the edge of one of the sheets and found it was protecting a mirror. I presume it was the same on the other walls. If so, I was glad they were hidden. I didn’t need an endless sea of those agents’ miserable faces reflecting all around me.

The display gradually wound its way up to 23. We stopped moving and the doors silently slid apart. Weston pushed me out first. He guided me around to the right, away from the elevators, and then steered me along the corridor until we reached an enormous open-plan office. Two lines of storage cabinets were laid out along the center of the room, forming a kind of pathway to a glass supervisor’s booth that jutted out from the end wall. The cabinets were low-less than waist height-and a gap after each third one gave access to groups of desks on either side. They were pushed together in fours to form parallel rows of identical crosses. These were arranged alternately one against the cabinets, one against the windows all the way down the room. The nearer ones were completely bare, except for a tangle of wires spilling out from the exposed cable trays at the back. Farther away several computer keyboards were scattered around, all with their leads neatly coiled up, and I could see a handful of old telephone headsets mixed in among them.

The last couple of desks on the right looked as if they hadn’t been cleared yet, and the ones at the far end on the left had been moved out of position. They’d been pushed aside, and the space between them was filled with chairs. At least a hundred. They were piled high on each other at impossible, drunken angles. Some had their arms hooked together to hold them in place. Others had fallen off and were lying on the floor, blocking the entrance to the booth.

Lavine flipped a couple of the fallen chairs onto their wheels and rolled them through the glass doorway. I had to stand aside as he came back out for another one, and I ended up squashed against the last desk on the right. I could hardly see any of its surface. It was covered with pizza boxes, Coke cans, coffee mugs, newspapers-all kinds of junk. The next desk was clinical in comparison. It held neat piles of papers and folders, several pens, a cell phone charger, and a pair of laptop computers. The screensavers had kicked in on both of them. One had a floating FBI shield that rippled as it moved. Homer Simpson was showing his backside on the other.

Two maps were pinned to the wall behind the desks, completely filling the space between a pair of windows. At the top was a large-scale street map of Manhattan. Clusters of red dots and blue triangles had been marked on it, along with a series of times and dates from the previous week. Below that a color-coded linear diagram was superimposed on an outline of the United States. The key said it was a schematic of the national railroad network. A set of black-and-white photographs had been stuck around the top right-hand border. They showed men’s faces. I counted five. All of them would be in their mid to late thirties. They looked scruffy and unkempt, but basically cared for. Certainly not a pack of tramps. Arrows had been drawn connecting them to points on different railroad lines. All the points were on routes that fanned out from New York.

And all the men in the photos looked as if they were dead.

I sat right at the rear of the booth. Lavine had pushed my chair all the way in, so my back was literally against the wall. The agents sat facing me. They were shoulder to shoulder, pressing forward, blocking me in, trying to make me uncomfortable.

No one spoke for eleven, maybe twelve minutes. Then the fingers on Lavine’s left hand started to drum against his thigh. He fought it for another minute, and then his mouth got the better of him.

“How’re your veins?” he said. “Good?”

“Hope they’re not,” Weston said. “Hope they have to really dig around in there, trying to find one big enough.”

“You know you’re looking at the needle,” Lavine said. “New York’s a death penalty state. Being English won’t save you.”

“But hey,” Weston said. “That’s what you get when you start snapping people’s necks.”

I allowed myself a little smile.

“Snapping necks?” I said. “Didn’t the NYPD tell you? The guy I found in the alley had been shot.”

“The guy in the alley had been,” Lavine said. “But the other five guys all had their necks broken.”

“What five guys?” I said. “The NYPD were only trying to frame me for one. What is this? Rollover week at the bureau?”

“The guys who were found by the railroad tracks,” Lavine said. “I saw you looking at their pictures, outside.”

“I’ve never been near one of your railroads.”

“Don’t waste my time. We’re not here for a confession. Forensics will take care of that. We’re here for something else.”

“Truth is, we don’t know when things started going wrong for you,” Weston said. “We don’t even know for sure if they did. Maybe you just killed those guys ’cause you liked it.”

“But either way, we don’t care,” Lavine said.

“So why are we talking?” I said.

“Because you have something we want,” Weston said.

“A name,” Lavine said. “Help us with that, and we can take the death penalty off the table.”

“We can save your skin,” Weston said. “And we’re the only ones who can.”

“The only ones,” Lavine said. “You need to understand that. You need to be real clear. Take a moment. Think about it.”

He leaned back, his fingers moving faster now.

“You want help with a name?” I said. “Why? Is one of you expecting a baby?”

“Michael Raab,” Lavine said. “Who gave him up to you?”

“Who told you how to contact him?” Weston said. “Who he was? How to recognize him?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You’re not thinking straight,” Weston said. “We have you. We can bring the hammer down any time we like.”

“And believe me, we would like to,” Lavine said. “The only thing we want more than you is the name. Who gave Michael Raab away?”

“Are we on to weddings, now?” I said.

“He went to that alley specifically to meet someone,” Weston said.

“The alley where you were found,” Lavine said.

“Someone with an English accent,” Weston said.

I shrugged.

“You called him,” Lavine said. “You set the meeting up.”

“Wasn’t me,” I said.

“We heard the 911 tape,” Lavine said. “You didn’t pick him at random. You targeted him. Why? How did you know who he was?”

“Someone gave him away,” Weston said. “Who?”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” I said. “The only people in that alley were me, and the tramp. And he was already-”

“Not ‘the tramp,’ ” Lavine said. “Mike Raab.”

“No,” I said. “The tramp’s name was Alan McNeil. I saw his Social Security card. His number was-”

“No idea where that came from,” Lavine said. “Something he must have picked up. We’ll look into it. But get this straight. His name wasn’t McNeil. It was Michael Raab.”

“And he was no tramp,” Weston said.

“He looked like a tramp,” I said. “Smelled like one, too.”

“Because he was undercover,” Weston said.

“Michael Raab was a Special Agent,” Lavine said. “I knew him for twelve years. He was my partner. And my friend.”

One year my father organized a fete at the local community center.