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  “DID YOU GET a shot of the meet?” Rick Cotton asked, his expression calm as he listened to the answer.

  Xavier Jackson marveled at Cotton’s forbearance. He hadn’t said, “Did you at least get a shot of the meet?” and there was nothing in his tone that implied any hint of impatience. Most SACs would have been biting heads off left and right, but not Cotton. He was always fair, even when the results weren’t what he’d hoped for.

  They hadn’t been prepared for Salinas to walk anywhere, much less into Central Park. By the time the agent on the street had realized Salinas wasn’t being picked up by a car, he and his entourage had already been halfway down the block. Then, though he’d been hurrying as unobtrusively as possible to catch up, a traffic signal had caught him and forced him to wait before he could cross the street. As a result, the meet had already happened before the agent could catch up, and all he could give them was a partial description of the man Salinas had gone to meet, for all the good it did them. About six-one, two hundred pounds, short dark hair described at least a hundred thousand men in the area, if not more.

  “I think it was the same man on the balcony with the girlfriend,” Cotton said when he hung up.

  Jackson thought so, too. The big question was, where was the girlfriend? She’d left four days ago, and hadn’t been seen since. They had stopped following her months ago, because their budget and manpower was limited and using it to follow Salinas himself had been deemed more productive. Besides, she’d never done anything interesting, at least not until that scene on the balcony.

  Maybe her absence was due to nothing more dramatic than a breakup with Salinas, but something was going on. Salinas and his men were stomping around as if they were spoiling for a fight with someone, anyone. If it were just a breakup, Salinas might—might—be upset, but his men wouldn’t be.

  And now Salinas had met with probably the same man who’d been on the balcony making love to Salinas’s girlfriend. Something was going on, but it was more than likely personal crap, and they weren’t interested in that. Unless they could use it against him somehow, Salinas’s love life was his problem, not theirs.

  THERE WERE OVER twenty-three hundred known street surveillance cameras in New York City, and God only knew how many hidden ones. If anyone was on the street in the city, odds were he, or she, would be caught on camera, which was why he was always so careful to change his appearance on a regular basis. Even if he happened to be tracked on camera, his trail would be lost when he entered a building as one person and left as someone else. Only extensive analysis would, with a lot of luck, pick him up again, and he went to great pains, in this country, to ensure he wasn’t worth taking that much trouble.

  Drea was smart enough to change her appearance, too; he took that for granted. What he didn’t know was where she’d changed, or how she’d looked afterward. He could’ve asked Salinas what was known about Drea’s movements on the day she disappeared, but where was the fun in that? Finding her without Salinas’s help would keep him sharp, sort of like doing math in his head instead of using a calculator.

  He had considerable computer skills, but in this case the cons associated with doing his own hacking outweighed the pros. There was no point in taking the chance of setting off an alarm when he could find out what he wanted to know by another avenue. A lot of things truly did revolve around the old truism that it wasn’t what you knew, it was who you knew—and it so happened he knew someone who worked for the city of New York, someone who owed him a debt so huge it could never be repaid, and who could access that network of security cameras.

  He’d caught a break in that nothing important had happened in the city over the last four days—just the usual number of muggings and murders. There hadn’t been any terrorist attacks, no bicycle riders hurling bombs, no sensational happenings of any kind. Because things had been quiet, no one would be paying any attention to a back access to the video records from several days ago.

  On the other hand, did he want to go to that much trouble before he even decided to take the job?

  Hell, yes. For his own amusement, he wanted to know how she’d done it. He was even a little proud of her; she hadn’t let any grass grow under her feet. Salinas had seriously insulted her, and the very next day she’d taken action. He knew the banking hoops she would have had to jump through, knew the timing issues, because he’d played that game himself.

  He was seldom amused, and never proud, so the fact that he actually felt both of those emotions was a little puzzling.

  Or not. Another thing he didn’t do was play games with himself. The way he felt was directly tied to the admitted chemistry he’d had with her—not that chemistry would save her life if he decided to take the job. Attraction was one thing, but two million was two million.

  Using his disposable cell phone, he placed the call. When the Brooklyn-accented voice answered with a terse yeah, he said, “I need a favor.”

  He didn’t identify himself; he didn’t need to. There was a long pause, then the voice said, “Simon.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Another pause, then: “What do you need?”

  There was no attempt to blow him off, or stall him. He hadn’t expected there to be. “I need access to the street cameras.”

  “Live feed?”

  “No, from four days ago. I know the starting point. After that—” An invisible shrug was evident in his tone. After that, his search could go in any direction, though after he did some background work on Drea he’d have a better idea of what she was likely to do.

  “When do you need it?”

  “Tonight.”

  “You’ll have to come to my house.”

  “What time’s best?” He could be considerate. In fact, he made an effort to be considerate; it didn’t cost him anything, and a little goodwill could one day make the difference between living or dying, escaping or getting captured.

  “Around nine. The kids will be in bed by then.”

  “I’ll be there.” He hung up, turned to his computer, and went to work.

  Finding out Drea’s real name was Andrea Butts took no time at all. He wasn’t surprised that her name wasn’t Rousseau, though the “Butts” was a bit unexpected. He’d have been surprised if her name really had been Rousseau. Once he had her real name, he went into the DMV records and got her driver’s license information. Her Social Security number was a bit tougher, but he had it within an hour; after that her life was an open book.

  She was thirty years old, born in Nebraska, never been married, no children. Her father had died a couple of years ago, and her mother…her mother was back in Drea’s hometown, so that was somewhere to check, even though he thought Drea was probably too smart to go back there. But she would be comfortable in the area, and she might contact her mother. There was one brother, Jimmy Ray Butts, in Texas, currently serving the third year of a five-year sentence for burglary, so she wouldn’t be going to him for anything.

  That was it for immediate family; if he dug deeper he was likely to find aunts and uncles, cousins, maybe some high school friends. But Drea struck him as a loner, trusting no one except herself, depending on no one except herself.

  He understood that philosophy. As far as philosophies went, it was the least likely to result in disappointment.

  At exactly nine p.m. he leaned on the buzzer, and in a few seconds the Brooklyn-accented voice said “Yeah” in the same way he answered the phone.

  The assassin said, “Simon,” and the door was buzzed open. The apartment was on the sixth floor, and he took the stairs instead of the elevator.

  The apartment door opened as he approached, and a whippet-thin mixed-race man of about his own age gestured him inside. “Coffee?” he said, by way of both greeting and invitation. Scottie Jansen’s real first name was Shamar, but he’d been called Scottie most of his life, because kids in school had started calling him “Shamu” and thereafter he’d refused to answer to Shamar.

  “No, I’m good. Thanks.”