Requiem for an Assassin

20

DELILAH LEFT the next afternoon. She had things going on in Paris, I knew, but still it wasn’t easy to get her to go. She was worried about me, and about Dox. She wanted to help.

I appreciated the sentiment, but I was determined to keep her out of this. I’d accepted, even solicited, her help before, but that had always been operational. These killings for Hilger…no matter the reasons, no matter the coercion, there was a line I didn’t want her to cross. She had no idea what would be waiting for her on the other side of it, or how difficult, maybe impossible, it is to find your way back.

I didn’t want to face it, but the odds of my coming out of this thing intact weren’t exactly encouraging. I’d established some room for maneuver, true, but overall Hilger was still calling the shots. He had no intention of letting me live when I was done with his work, and there were a hundred ways he could use Dox to get to me when he was ready. Even if I managed to survive, most likely Dox wouldn’t, and losing him would fuck me up in ways I sensed but didn’t want to fully consider. What would Delilah do with me after that? And no matter how things turned out, as long as Hilger was out there, I’d be not just a burden to Delilah, but a danger, too. It wasn’t fair to her.

Not two days earlier, I’d decided I should just break things off with her, I’d accepted that it had to be done. Then, stupidly, I’d let her come see me, and it had been so good that I’d temporarily forgotten my resolve. But already, as I drove east into West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard, the sun flaring behind me as it sank in the sky, my evening with Delilah was beginning to feel meaningless, even foolish. She was an attractive woman, yes, more attractive than any I’d ever known. And she had a lot of good qualities, along with a few maddening ones. But what did any of that have to do with me, really, and the life I had to lead? Drunk on liquor at the time, and intoxicated by her nearness, I’d nearly been beguiled by her talk of choices. But I saw clearly now all that was foolish. Some things go beyond choice. Some deeds have such power and resonance that they become your own nature, and eclipse everything else you do. Delilah didn’t understand that. Because part of me cared about her, and always would, I was glad she could indulge such illusions, and took some quiet pride in maintaining them for her. What I couldn’t, and wouldn’t do, was share them.

I stopped at an Internet café with no great hope and checked the Kanezaki bulletin board. Still nothing. I stared at the empty text box for a few moments, unsurprised. I would just have to go on to the next target. It felt natural. It felt like fate.

At another café, I checked on Hilger. There was a message waiting, as I had expected. I smiled to myself, ruefully. You see? I thought, as though I was talking to Delilah. You see?

A name, Michael Accinelli. A timetable: five days again. Shit. I wondered what the short fuses meant. For now, no way to know. I supposed I should count myself lucky that Hilger hadn’t made the deadline even sooner, after learning how quickly I’d managed to do Jannick.

There was a business address in Mineola, New York; a home address in Sands Point, New York. I didn’t recognize the name of either town. Phone numbers. The make and model of the cars he drove-a 2007 Mercedes S600 and a 2007 Range Rover HSE-along with license plate numbers. Several photos of a fit-looking guy in his late fifties, with a full head of steel-gray hair and dark, piercing eyes. In one of the shots, Accinelli was wearing an expensive-looking charcoal chalk-striped suit; a white, spread collared shirt; a navy tie; and a white linen handkerchief. He was sitting, both hands folded on a knee, leaning forward slightly, smiling confidently. Very chairman of the board, and in fact the photo looked like something lifted from a corporate brochure or website. In the other photos, he was behind a lectern in similar business attire, probably at an investors’ conference or some industry event.

I Googled him. The first hit was for a company called Global Pyrochemical Industries, and sure enough, there was the shot of Accinelli in the charcoal suit, right on the home page. He was indeed the chairman of the board, and the CEO, too. I clicked on his bio: born and raised in Oyster Bay, Long Island, 1950; graduated with honors from West Point, 1972; served in Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf War, winning a Silver Star in the second of the three conflicts; retired from the Army a bird colonel after twenty years of service. Founded GPI in 1993, took it public in 2001.

I wondered about Iraq. That was Hilger’s war, too. Could be a coincidence; could be a connection. A long shot, but I tried searching for Hilger/Accinelli. Nothing. Likewise Jannick/Accinelli and Jannick/Hilger. Well, maybe Kanezaki could do better.

GPI described itself as a specialty chemical supplier to companies all over the world. They had four product lines: intermediates for pharmaceuticals; automotive airbags; industrial cellulosic polymers; and pyrotechnic and military. I didn’t know much about any of it. The only applications I recognized were car airbags, and the various military uses: rocket propellant, explosives, white phosphorus grenades.

I checked on the business and home addresses. Mineola was on Long Island, about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan. Sands Point was ten miles north of Mineola, on the north shore of Long Island at the tip of the Port Washington peninsula. Mineola sounded solidly middle class; Sands Point, on the other hand, apparently was the model for the town of East Egg in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s mansion was still there, I discovered, on Hoff-stots Lane, and was currently for sale for $28 million. It seemed Accinelli had done well with GPI. He certainly wasn’t living in Sands Point on his military pension.

Manhattan made me think of Midori, living in Greenwich Village with our son, Koichiro. He would be…about two and a half now. I’d seen him only once, a year earlier, and after Midori’s betrayal I knew there was no way I could have either of them in my life. A permanent gulf was best for all of us, even, much as it saddened me to admit it, for Koichiro. I thought of him, of course, late at night, when sleep wouldn’t come, and the way he looked and felt the one time I had held him in my arms. Sometimes I would open up a small vein of hope about the far-off future, and imagine going to him, explaining who I was, building a relationship, however uncertain, being part of his life. Those tenuous hopes and fragile aspirations seemed ridiculous now, weak and naive in equal measure, and I could have laughed at myself for ever having indulged them.

Sands Point had its own website, which boasted that the community was entirely residential: just eight hundred fifty families; a few houses of worship; a primary and a secondary school; and unsurprisingly, a country club with an eighteen-hole golf course. The country club was called the Village Club, and I had a strong suspicion that Accinelli, an ethnic kid who had grown up on the other side of the tracks in nearby Oyster Bay and then gone on to make something of himself, would be a member. I checked the club’s website. There was no directory of members, but there was a collection of photos from a recent New Year’s Eve party, Accinelli prominent in several of them. An attractive woman of about his age, whom I assumed was his wife, was on his arm in all the photos. The people around them were well dressed, looked well fed, and must certainly have been blessed by fortune. I made them as low-tax Republicans and limousine liberals. Probably there was more to them than that, but the shorthand would get me started as I determined how to invisibly infiltrate their society.

I thought about posting the information to Kanezaki. The sooner he had the name of the second target, the sooner he could apply the new data to the nexus we were trying to build with Hilger, and, by extension, Dox. There wasn’t an obvious connection to the CIA, as there had been with Jannick, but…I hated the thought of tipping off a government agency to an impending hit, even if the tip-off was to someone with a good track record, like Kanezaki. It was just too dangerous. I decided to play it by ear again. Worst case, I’d tell him immediately afterward, and find a way to placate him, as I had before.

Because I had accessed the bulletin board and then researched Accinelli from computers in L.A., I had to assume Hilger might now be able to place me here. I imagined how he would try to anticipate me, if that’s what he wanted to do: He’s coming from L.A. The most obvious airport would be LAX, but of course there’s Orange County, too, and Burbank. On the other end, JFK, La Guardia, and Newark are all pretty much equally possible. I haven’t given him much time, so assume he goes straight to the airport after accessing the bulletin board…

No. With a minimum of three airports on either side, the whole thing was too unpredictable. He couldn’t narrow it down enough to make it operational, not unless he had a small army of people to rotate through all three possible destination airports for surveillance of multiple incoming arrivals. Even so, as always, I would assume the presence of a welcoming party, and use extra caution leaving whatever airport I flew into.

I purged the nav system for a last time, input LAX as my next destination, and returned the car at the airport. I caught a bus to the terminal, where I discovered that United offered three red-eyes: two to JFK and another to Newark. First class was sold out on the JFK-bound flights, but there was one first-class seat left on the 10:30 to Newark. I bought a ticket, spent two hours reading the latest Economist in the departure lounge, and slept for a few hours before arriving in Newark at six-thirty the following morning.

I waited in the arrivals area with my carry-on after getting off the plane, until the passengers from my flight had cleared out. Among the people who remained, all presumably waiting for other flights, no one set off my radar, but there was no way yet to be sure. I started walking toward the baggage area, and no one followed me out. So far, so good.

I took the tram to another terminal and noted again I wasn’t followed. If someone was waiting for me, he was outside the terminal, not inside. That, or they had enough manpower for a static approach. Regardless, there were a few more things I could do to make sure.

I went to a pay phone and used the Yellow Pages to find a place called Image Rent-A-Car that specialized in exotics. I was looking to rent a Mercedes for a few days, I told them, the S Class. Did they have one I could pick up today? Unfortunately, the Mercedes rentals were all out, the helpful gentleman on the other end informed me. But they could have a navy 2006 BMW 750Li delivered to me in most places in the tristate area in less than an hour-four days, four hundred free miles, seventeen hundred fifty dollars. I told him the BMW would do, and that I’d be happy to come to him, if he could give me an address.

I went outside, and the East Coast winter cold hit me immediately. I felt my nostrils prickle, and a sudden wind cut right through the cashmere blazer I was wearing. I wanted to hunch my shoulders and jam my hands in my pockets, but didn’t, in case I’d missed something and needed to react quickly. I scanned the area as I moved. There were people around, getting in and out of cars, fumbling with luggage, but no danger signals. Damn, it was cold. The airport workers were all in gloves and hats and bulky parkas, and the exhaust coming from cars and taxis was billowing out as white steam. I’d have to pick up some warmer clothing as soon as I could.

I got in a cab and, in a thick Japanese accent, told the driver I was concerned my suspicious wife was following me. Could he take a strange route so I could make sure she wasn’t?

“Anything you want, buddy,” he said. “I’ll just put it on the meter.”

I smiled, slipping on the leather gloves I had bought in Mountain View, and thought, I love New York.

ONE HOUR, TWO CABS, and a foot route later, confident I was clean, I picked up the BMW. Among the mansions of Sands Point, it would be familiar, comforting, and invisible. I threw my bag in the trunk, turned the seat warmer on high, plugged Accinelli’s work coordinates into the nav system, and followed the directions out to Long Island.

It was Sunday morning, so traffic was light, and the trip took about an hour. Global Pyrochemical Industries was on a four-lane road called the East Jericho Turnpike, which sliced east to west through a mixed residential neighborhood about a mile south of the Long Island Expressway. The immediate area consisted of modest single-family houses, compressed into regular clusters alongside one another, set slightly back from their streets on small, rectangular patches of lawn. There were a few apartment buildings; a school and a baseball field; train tracks and a lumberyard. East Jericho itself was zoned for businesses: real estate and other professional buildings; an office-supply store; restaurants; a bowling alley. And, at the east end of it, six H-shaped buildings, arranged in two rows of three, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Global Pyrochemical Industries.

I drove past, looking for anything that smelled of a setup. With Accinelli as the target, it wouldn’t be difficult for Hilger to predict my fundamental moves, such as initial surveillance of the target’s workplace and residence. There could be a team here, waiting for me. But for now, nothing set off my radar.

Operationally, I wasn’t wild about what I saw. First, the parking lot was accessible only through a gated station, currently manned by a guard. Probably a rent-a-cop, possibly half asleep, true, but it complicated things. And the presence of all that razor wire, and the fence, and the access control, and of course the guard, all hinted at other measures I would prefer not to encounter.

I drove through the area, getting a feel for it. I noted some possibilities, all involving setting up in a nearby parking lot and waiting to tail Accinelli’s Mercedes when I saw it leave the premises. The one advantage of the controlled access meant there was only one place I had to key on to know when he was coming and going. Well, it was a start. I decided to take a look at his home.

Sands Point turned out to be possibly the most moneyed town I’d ever seen. Mansion after mansion on plots the size of small countries, some of them set so far back from the road they were nearly invisible through the bare branches of all the winter trees. Because the town was set on the Port Washington peninsula, many of the homes fronted Long Island Sound and had their own marinas, the better to dock, of course, private sailboats and yachts. The cars I saw were all Mercedeses, BMWs, and Lexuses, along with one antique Bentley, and I was glad to have a ride that felt at home among them.

I was on high alert as I approached Accinelli’s house, on a quiet, tree-lined road called Hilldale Lane. If Hilger had decided to set up a welcoming reception, the area around the residence would be a key choke point. But the street was entirely quiet. I rolled up just past the driveway and took a peek.

Accinelli’s was one of the town’s more modest dwellings, but his home was still a mansion by any definition: a massive, Romanesque-style building of gray stone set a hundred yards back from the road; a rolling, manicured lawn, frosted over now, with a circular driveway cutting through it; old growth trees and plots of flower gardens, empty now but for a few hardy perennials hanging grimly on in the frozen dirt. The air of the place was ease, a relaxed confidence in the rightness of the natural order, money and status untouchable by the vicissitudes of the outside world.

Next to the house was a detached two-car garage of the same stone as the main structure. At the driveway’s center, at the front of the house, there was a stone portico, and under it, a black Mercedes S Class, the 2007. The way it was parked, I couldn’t see the license plate, but most likely it was his. Was someone coming, going, or did they typically just park the car there? No, there was no frost on the windows, so it hadn’t been there all night. Someone had just come from somewhere, some errand, maybe, maybe grocery shopping, and they had parked the car in front of the house to carry something inside.

Just then, the front door opened and I saw Accinelli. Son of a bitch. I eased off the brake and let the BMW roll forward. But not before I saw what he was carrying: golf clubs.

He hadn’t looked out toward the street, and I didn’t think he’d noticed me. Even if he had, I doubted he would have made anything of a fancy BMW driving past. I kept driving, thinking, weighing the possibilities. I hadn’t expected anything actionable to happen so fast-I had planned only on a drive-by, a get-acquainted-with-the-neighborhood visit-but this looked like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Golf clubs suggested an outing, and the clothes he’d been wearing…it hadn’t fully registered at first, but he was in black-and-gray polypropylene or something similar, zipped to the neck. “Technical gear,” some of the sporting-goods outfitters like to call it, a fancy way of saying cold-weather sporting clothes. Yeah. He was on his way to the links.

Shit, I didn’t remember the address of his club. If I did, I could have gotten ahead of him, which is almost always preferable to tracking from behind. The Village Club, it was called, but where was it? As I drove back down Hilldale, then right on Middle Neck, the same way I had come in, I looked for local points of interest on the nav system. Country clubs, country clubs, come on… I couldn’t find it. Okay, the hell with it, plan B.

I pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. If Accinelli came this way, I’d let him go right past me, then fall in behind. A few minutes of a big BMW behind him, especially if he were heading to Sands Point’s golf club, as I expected, wouldn’t alarm him. And if he went the other way on Middle Neck, I would just swing around and follow him in the other direction.

Sudden paranoia jolted me: what if the Hilger team I’d been so watchful for turned out to be Accinelli? Maybe they know each other from the war. Maybe Accinelli owes a favor. Hilger tells him roughly when to expect me; Accinelli watches the road from the house, with the car warmed up; he sees me, then walks out pretending not to, with a golf club bag that’s actually holding a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with sabot slugs.

I scanned the area. A black SUV was coming toward me down Middle Neck, and I started to get that deep-down Oh, fuck feeling. I held down the brake with my left foot and put my right over the gas, ready to floor it if the SUV slowed, or sped up, or swerved. But it didn’t, and as it came closer I could see the occupants were just an elderly couple. Shit, they were probably on their way to church.

I let the SUV pass and checked the rearview. There was the Mercedes, pulling out of Hilldale and making a left on Middle Neck, away from me. For a moment, I’d been so keyed up that I was surprised he wasn’t coming at me. Then I realized I was being ridiculous. What was Accinelli going to do, blow someone away from his own car a hundred yards out from his $10 million home, right in front of the horrified neighbors? No. Hilger might have been trying to set me up, but it wouldn’t be that way.

I did a U-turn on Middle Neck and followed from about a hundred fifty yards back. It was a long, straight road that gradually curved from east to south, and tailing him from far back was easy. I continued to scan for surprises as I drove.

After about two miles, Accinelli made a left onto Thayer Lane. Thayer, right, now I remembered, that was the address of the club. I followed along behind him. About eight hundred yards up, Thayer curved around to the right and I lost sight of him for a moment. Then I came around the curve, too, and saw Accinelli’s car again, stopped next to an island with a guard post at the center of it. Beyond the post was a parking lot; beyond the parking lot, a compound of enormous tile-roofed brick buildings that I remembered from the website comprised the former estate of Isaac Guggenheim. This was it, then, the entrance to the club. Accinelli moved forward past the post. I swung around on Thayer and headed back out.

I recognized there was an opening here, if I could move fast enough to exploit it. I input the coordinates for Midtown Manhattan into the nav system. Twenty-five miles. Allowing time for parking and the purchase I planned to make, with just a little luck and light traffic I could be back here in not much more than an hour and a half.

I took the Long Island Expressway west as fast as I could without risking a ticket. What was Accinelli planning today-nine holes, or eighteen? And how long would he be playing regardless? Surely no less than two hours, even for a shorter game. And it would be lunchtime after that. Maybe he’d grab a bite at the club. Maybe this was a Sunday ritual for him, leaving his wife a golf widow, spending two, three, maybe four hours on the links, and with his cronies thereafter. It made sense. Anyone who played in these temperatures had to be a fanatic.

Maybe. But of course I couldn’t really know. There was no time to hone in on his patterns, and all my suppositions were just that. But with only five days to work with, I had to exploit whatever openings presented themselves, no matter how narrow.

It took me less than forty minutes to reach the Spy Shop on 34th between Third and Lexington. I remembered it, along with a few other handy places, from the last time I’d reconnoitered New York. Predictably, there were no parking spaces anywhere nearby. I considered parking illegally-I was going to be in the store for only a few minutes-but decided it wasn’t worth the admittedly small risk of having the BMW’s presence here logged in a New York City law enforcement database. I found a garage around the corner, gave the attendant a twenty to keep the car on the main floor for fifteen minutes, and jogged over to the Spy Shop. It was a bit warmer now than when I’d arrived that morning, but I was still going to have to make time to buy some proper clothes when I had a chance.

The store was well outfitted with various options for vehicle tracking, overt and surreptitious. I chose a top-of-the-line model I was familiar with, the Pro Trak Digital, a magnetically emplace-able real-time GPS system, and was suddenly down another twenty-six hundred dollars. Along with warm clothes, I was going to have to find a bank.

I picked up the car and headed back to the Village Club. Traffic was manageable again and I made good time. While I drove, I unpacked the unit, placed the eight D cells I had also bought into the battery pack, assembled everything, and tested it for power. It all seemed to be working. I put the unit in the glove box and stuffed the empty packaging under the passenger seat. I was wearing the gloves, not just because of the weather, but to keep my prints off the device, too.

As I turned onto Thayer Lane again, exactly ninety-seven minutes after I’d left it, I started thinking in Japanese, like my good friend Yamada, who this time was being transferred to New York and would live on Long Island. Like many Japanese, I was an ardent golfer, and relished the chance to become a member of a top club for less than the million dollars entry cost in Japan. I was hoping to take a look at the Village Club because it sounded so good on the Internet… Would that be all right?

I pulled up to the guard post and rolled down the window. The guy inside, about seventy with ruddy cheeks and fading blue eyes, leaned toward me, away from a portable space heater. Something about him felt like retired law enforcement, but I took in the impression only in the most fleeting mental shorthand. I was too deeply in character to consciously consider anything operational, although of course I was still aware of and responsive to it.

He looked me over, and again in some compartmented part of my consciousness I realized he wasn’t used to seeing Asians pull in here. “May I help you, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I said, in the thickest Japanese accent I could muster, with an accompanying helpless, timid expression. “I move soon Long Island. Want club member become. Can pick up…brochure here?”

The guard smiled. Amazing the generosity of spirit a little helplessness can bring out in some people. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “The main facility is directly in front of you. Just park anywhere you can find a spot and they’ll help you inside.”

“Thank you very much,” I said, nodding. The gate went up and I drove forward, my heart starting to beat hard.

The parking lot was on my right. I pulled in, driving slowly through. Damn, it was full. The place was popular.

Black Mercedeses weren’t exactly in short supply in the parking lot, and I had a couple of false starts before seeing each time that the license plate of the car I was looking at was wrong. But the third time proved to be the charm. There was Accinelli’s car, in one of the lot’s center spaces, next to a deep green Aston Martin Vanquish S. Perfect.

I kept going until I found an open spot, at the farthest edge of the lot. I parked and took the unit out of the glove box. The battery pack and accessories went into my front pockets. The GPS and cellular modem housing I tucked into the back of my pants, under the jacket. I took two quick breaths and got out of the car.

I walked slowly, my breath fogging in the cold, swiveling my head as though taking in the view of the lovely golf course and grounds surrounding the lot. In fact, I was checking for people. The cold was on my side at the moment-it wasn’t the sort of day anyone sane would linger in a parking lot. And if there were people waiting in one of the cars for some reason, they’d certainly have the engine running, with a billow of exhaust rising up from the tailpipe.

No, the lot was empty. It was lunchtime; that was also on my side. I reached Accinelli’s car, scanned it and the surrounding vehicles to ensure I hadn’t missed anyone, then took a step in next to the Vanquish, easing the GPS unit from my waistband as I moved. I doubted I was the first person to pause for a closer look at that gorgeous emerald of a race car. It was built to be ogled as much as to be driven.

I leaned closer, my hands on my thighs, then dropped into a squat. I pivoted, and in less than fifteen seconds, had emplaced the main unit and battery pack on the Mercedes’ undercarriage, the GPS antenna to the underside of the rear bumper, and the miniature cellular antenna underneath the side skirting. I glanced around from the squat and saw no one, then stood and, for the benefit of anyone who might just possibly have seen me disappear for a moment, shook my head at the Vanquish one last time in envious admiration.

For form’s sake, I continued on toward the main building. Continue all the way through with the charade, or pull out now? There were risks and benefits both ways. The more time I spent here and the more people I engaged, the greater the chance I would be remembered. On the other hand, if that former cop of a guard asked anyone inside about a Japanese visitor looking for a brochure, it would look odd if no one remembered me.

I decided there was less risk in just killing five minutes walking along the golf course, then waving my thanks to the guard as I left. I had parked so far down that I was out of his view in any event.

I strolled along the access road, my hands in my pockets, shoes crunching the frozen gravel, breath fogging, ears numb. A group of four well-insulated diehards was leaving the course in my direction, golf bags slung over their backs. I kept my head down, and from the cadences of their conversation as they passed I sensed they had paid me no mind.

I stopped at the edge of the access road and admired the green for three minutes, freezing my ass off. Then I turned around and headed back to the BMW. I waved to the guard as I drove past, but he seemed not even to notice. His attention was directed at cars coming in, not ones that were leaving.

There were a few things I still needed, things I could probably find in the suburbs, but I wanted to do the bulk of my shopping in the more anonymous city. So I drove back, stopping first at a military-surplus store I knew-Galaxy, on Sixth Avenue between 30th and 31st. I went inside, and emerged fifteen minutes later wearing polypropylene long underwear under a new pair of jeans and a wool turtleneck sweater; wool socks and work boots; a black wool watch cap and a navy peacoat; and a pair of ski gloves. Thank God. I also had on a pair of sports shades, the swept-back style bikers and marathoners use, which would cut the winter glare and, not coincidentally, obscure my appearance. In my pocket was a Victorinox Swiss Army knife with a four-inch blade. Not exactly a fighting knife, but the kind of tool I preferred was hard to find in New York and this was better than nothing. The clothes I’d been wearing I carried in a store bag, along with a few extra pairs of socks and underwear.

Next, I stopped at a Citibank ATM for a cash infusion. Then a low-end men’s clothing store for a shirt, jacket, and tie, and another pair of sunglasses, this time with large, round lenses that would hide my eyes and change the contours of my face. Finally, the Apple store on Fifth Avenue, where I used one of the store’s computers to check the Kanezaki bulletin board. Nothing. I wondered whether he really was coming up empty, or whether he was holding back from me, the way I was from him. No way to know. And nothing to do about it. But it was still irritating as hell.

Now that I was properly outfitted and had a little time, I realized how hungry I was. I hadn’t eaten since the plane. I walked two blocks west to the Carnegie Deli and, over a tureen of chicken soup and a roast beef sandwich that could have faced down Godzilla, I configured the iPhone to work with the GPS transmitter. By the time I was washing down a gigantic slice of apple pie with a second cup of coffee, I had everything up and running, and checked Accinelli’s position. I had expected to find him still at the club, or perhaps back home. Instead, I was surprised to see that he, or his car, anyway, was right here in Manhattan. I zoomed in on the location-downtown, corner of Bowery and Prince. I watched for three minutes, but the car didn’t move. Okay, a fair bet he wasn’t at a light or stuck in traffic. The car was parked.

I paid the check and went back to the garage where I’d left the BMW. I headed down Broadway, the iPhone plugged into the cigarette lighter, faceup on the passenger seat en route. The Mercedes didn’t move.

I made a left on Spring, then another left on Bowery. I drifted north a block, and there, on the east side of Bowery just north of Prince, a parking lot. I didn’t see Accinelli’s car as I drove past, but according to the transmitter it was there.

I parked in another lot three blocks north of Houston and walked south back down Bowery, the watch cap pulled low, the shades in place. Thick traffic rolled by in both directions, and I heard engines and tires on pavement, the sounds somehow amplified, compressed by the dull background roar of the wider city. Down the street, someone laid on a horn, and three horns answered, like some bizarre mating call. A truck was backing up to a loading bay on 1st Street, beeping loudly and incessantly enough to warn all Manhattan. Two men stood behind it, gesturing to guide it in.

I slowed when I reached the lot. An attendant manned a booth at the front. Behind him were eight rows of cars, parked grill to tail, each about five deep. And there was Accinelli’s Mercedes, second from the front of one of the rows.

The cars were clustered tightly to use as much of the small lot as possible. When you came for your vehicle, they’d have to move others to access it. Meaning they would ask when you were returning, so they could put short-timers up front and latecomers farther back, and thereby minimize the need to shift vehicles every time a customer arrived for his car. Wherever Accinelli was, he wasn’t planning on staying long.

I circled the block on foot, considering. There was no way I could act here. Too many people, too much light, too little control over the environment. I supposed it would have been too much to ask for Accinelli to be parked in some deserted spot in the Meadowlands.

Still, it might be useful to see which direction he came from when he returned to his car. I would have a good view of the parking lot from up to a block north on Bowery and from up to a block south, and from as far away as a block west on Prince. I checked my watch and began slowly walking a T pattern along the two streets. I figured I could keep it up for an hour before someone might find the behavior suspicious. This was New York, after all. If I’d been near a high-value terror target, the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle or the New York Stock Exchange, for example, I wouldn’t have risked loitering. But on a cold Sunday afternoon just north of Little Italy, I didn’t expect any problems.

As it happened, I didn’t have to wait long. Twenty minutes after I’d started the T pattern, as I was heading west on Prince, Accinelli made a left from Mott, just a block away and walking briskly toward me on the other side of the street. He was still in the black-and-gray polypropylene golf attire. I kept my face away from him and turned left onto Elizabeth before we reached each other. Then, when he’d passed my position, I turned around and headed north on Elizabeth, back to the BMW. There was no particular hurry now; I could track him remotely from the iPhone.

I did. I stayed behind him, hoping for a crazy, random opportunity, a toilet break at a highway rest stop, something like that, but he didn’t stop or turn off, he just headed straight home. As we proceeded, I fell farther and farther behind, and I realized he was speeding. I didn’t want to risk going more than nine miles an hour over the limit, and I estimated Accinelli was doing something like eighty-five, maybe better. Either the speeding was habitual for him, or he was in a hurry.

I tracked him to Sands Point, but didn’t follow him all the way to his house. There was no benefit to doing so. I already knew it wasn’t a good place to get to him, although if I had to choose between his office and his home, I marginally preferred the latter. With the GPS tracker in place, though, I had a feeling I’d find an opening somewhere else. It was just a question of when.