Page 56 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

Then I slide the latch and sneak back out of my hidey-hole.

I sneak through the factory and out of the wire fence.

I walk. I don’t take the bus. Buses have cameras and I’ve got a face that’s been on every screen in the city, even if it is currently hidden by a big scratchy beard.

I walk with my head down and my hands in my pockets.

Nobody looks at me. A woman with a dog crosses the street to avoid me and that’s about right. That’s normal.

Getting across town takes me the better part of two hours and it takes more out of me than I expected. My feet hurt in boots that dried out wrong. My arm is one long ache from the shoulder down.

The towers come up. Then the river, the good part of it, the part with lights on the bridges. Then the block.

I come at the hotel from the park side, the way I planned. I don’t go into the park. Not yet. I walk past the end of it on the far sidewalk with my head down, looking once, out of the corner of my eye, across four lines of traffic, at the front of the hotel.

It’s lit up like a stage. There’s a name in gold over the main entrance and a doorman in a fancy coat. On either side of the doors, there are two men in overcoats, standing with their arms folded.

Yeah, that’s the dirty glare that the forums told me about.

I keep walking around the block. There’s a camera on the corner of the bank. I walk under it with my chin in my collar, face down.

No press and no other security. Or at least no one that I can see.

Second time around the block, I go into the park.

It’s empty. The wind is racing in across the river, freezing every inch of skin that I have spare. That’s a problem too. A man alone on a bench in an empty park is a man somebody notices.

But I’ve looked at every angle of this and there isn’t a better one. I’m certainly not going to stand in the door of the bank with the camera over it.

I pick the bench. Not the one with the clearest view. The one behind it, half under a tree, where the streetlight doesn’t quite reach and there’s a low wall on my left.

From here I can see the front doors, the drive, the two overcoats on the steps. I can see the windows going up and up.

He’s up there somewhere. Despite the cold, I suddenly feel warmer and happier than I have for weeks.

I have a purpose. Maybe it’s not much of one, but I’m closer to him than I have been.

I sit. I put my hands in my pockets and my chin in my collar and I get out my phone, pretending to be furiously texting.

And discreetly, I watch.

A car comes in. Not his. Some businessman with a suitcase. The overcoats don’t even look at him.

The wind moves the bare branches over my head. Across the road the automatic doors open and close on nobody.

The mark on my neck itches under the collar. It does that in the cold. It’s healed, the same as the arm, a raised ridge now where his teeth went in.

Half an hour. I don’t move.

A long, black car arrives with diplomatic plates. It pulls into the drive and the overcoats come down the steps for it. I sit forward.

A man gets out. Gray suit. Silver hair. He goes up the steps and the car pulls away.

The sun goes down behind the towers. Up on the ninth floor, a terrace catches the last of it, red, then gray. I’m still watching the doors when I hear the footstep.

Just one. Behind me and to the left, where the low wall is. It’s barely anything, just a split second of the sound of gravel under a shoe.

I know before I turn. You don’t do the work that I do without knowing the difference between a drunk and a man who has been waiting for you to turn and look the wrong way.