False Impression

“Home zip code?”

“One zero zero two one.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fenston. We’ll get someone up to the thirty-second floor as quickly as possible. The engineers are currently responding to an incident on the seventeenth floor, where we have someone stuck in an elevator, so it might be a few minutes before they get to you.”

“No hurry,” said Fenston casually, “there’s no one else working on this floor at the moment, and the office won’t open again until seven tomorrow.”

“It’s sure not going to take us that long,” the guard promised him, “but with your permission, Mr. Fenston, we’ll change your category from emergency to priority.”

“Okay by me,” shouted Fenston above the deafening noise.

“But there will still be an out-of-hours call-out charge of five hundred dollars.”

“That sounds a bit steep,” said Fenston.

“It’s standard in a case like this, sir,” came back the duty officer’s reply. “However, if you were able to report t

o the front desk in person, Mr. Fenston, and sign our alarm roster, the charge is automatically cut to two fifty.”

“I’m on my way,” said Fenston.

“But I have to point out, sir,” continued the duty officer, “that should you do that, your status will be lowered to routine, in which case we couldn’t come to your assistance until we’ve dealt with all other priority and emergency calls.”

“That won’t be a problem,” said Fenston.

“But you can be confident that whatever other calls we have outstanding, we still guarantee that yours will be sorted out within four hours.”

“Thank you,” said Fenston. “I’ll come straight down and report to the front desk.”

He replaced the receiver and walked back into the corridor. As he passed his office, he could hear Leapman pounding on the door like a trapped animal, but he could only just make out his voice above the shrill scream of the alarm. Fenston continued on toward the elevators. Even at a distance of some fifty feet he still found the piercing drone intolerable.

Once he’d stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, he went straight to the front desk.

“Ah, Mr. Fenston,” said the security guard. “If you’ll sign here, it will save you another two hundred and fifty bucks.”

Fenston slipped him a ten-dollar note. “Thanks,” he said. “No need to rush. I’m the last one out,” he assured them as he hurried out of the front door and back down the steps.

As he stepped into his waiting car, Fenston glanced up at his office. He could see a tiny figure banging on the window. The driver closed the door behind him and returned to the front seat, puzzled. His boss still wasn’t wearing a dinner jacket.

49

JACK DELANEY PARKED his car on Broad Street just after nine thirty He switched on the radio and listened to Cousin Brucie on 101.1 FM, as he settled back to wait for Leapman. The venue for their meeting had been Leapman’s choice, and he’d told the FBI man to expect him some time between ten and eleven, when he would hand over their camera containing enough damning evidence to ensure a conviction.

Jack was suspended in that unreal world somewhere between half awake and half asleep when he heard the siren. Like all law-enforcement officers, he could identify the different decibel pitch between police, ambulance, and fire department in a split second. This was an ambulance, probably coming from St. Vincent’s.

He checked his watch: 11:15 P.M. Leapman was running late, but then he had warned Jack that there could be over a hundred documents to photograph, so not to keep him to the minute. The FBI technical boys had spent some considerable time showing Leapman how to operate the latest high-tech camera so he could be sure to deliver the best results. But that was before the phone call. Leapman had rung Jack’s office a few minutes after seven to say that Fenston had told him something that would prove far more damning than any document. But he didn’t want to reveal the information over the phone. The line went dead before Jack could press him. He would have been more responsive if it hadn’t been his experience that plea bargainers always claim they have new information that will break the case wide open, and therefore the FBI should reconsider the length of their sentence. He knew his boss wouldn’t agree to that unless the new evidence clearly showed an unbreakable link in the chain between Fenston and Krantz.

The sound of the siren was getting louder.

Jack decided to get out of the car and stretch his legs. His raincoat felt crumpled. He’d bought it from Brooks Brothers in the days when he wanted everyone to know that he was a G-man, but the higher up the ranks he climbed, the less he wished it to be that obvious. If he was promoted to run his own field office, he might even consider buying a new coat, one that would make him look more like a lawyer or a banker—that would please his father.

His mind switched to Fenston, who by now would have delivered his speech on Moral Responsibility for Modern Bankers, and then to Anna, who was halfway across the Atlantic on her way to meet up with Nakamura. Anna had left a message on his cell phone, saying she now knew why Tina had taken the job as Fenston’s P.A., and the evidence had been staring her in the face. The line had been busy when she called, but Anna said she’d phone again in the morning. It must have been when Leapman was on the line. Damn the man. Jack was standing on a New York sidewalk in the middle of the night, tired and hungry, while he waited for a camera. His father was right. He should have been a lawyer.

The siren was now only a couple of blocks away.

Jack strolled down to the end of the road and peered up at the building in which Leapman was working, somewhere on the thirty-second floor. There was a row of blazing lights about halfway up the skyscraper, otherwise the windows were mostly dark. Jack began to count the floors, but by the time he’d reached eighteen he couldn’t be sure, and when he counted thirty-two, it just might have been the floor that was blazing with lights. But that didn’t make any sense, because on Leapman’s floor, there should only have been a single light. The last thing he would have wanted was to draw attention to himself.

Jack looked across the road to watch an ambulance come to a screeching halt in front of the building. The back door burst open and three paramedics, two men and a woman dressed in their familiar dark blue uniforms, jumped out onto the sidewalk. One pushed a stretcher, the second carried an oxygen cylinder, while the third held a bulky medical bag. Jack watched them as they charged up the steps and into the building.