AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It’s near noon and Tom decides to take his lunch outside on this pleasant day in May. The elevator is crowded and makes one more stop as it descends, and a young man in a work uniform steps in, carrying a leather satchel over his shoulder and a wide utility belt around his thin waist, wearing tan work boots and blue chinos. He’s dark-skinned, with faint stubble on his face and thick eyebrows, and he has a work ID attached to his dungaree shirt:
MIKE P.
Tom doesn’t like how his fellow passengers step away to make room for the utility worker. There’s a difference between giving someone enough room to come aboard and another thing to back away because you’re afraid you’ll smell him or get dirt on your thousand-dollar suit or two-thousand-dollar outfit.
There are knowing smirks among the high-powered passengers, and Tom feels a slow burn start inside him. He grew up in Virginia, and not the pricey and wealthy counties near the District of Columbia that serve as suckerfish around the federal government. No, he had grown up in a small town near the Kentucky border, and he knew from a young age there was no shame in working with one’s hands to make a living. Scholarships and writing prizes had gotten Tom out of the rural life, and years of trying to soften his southern accent had worked to eliminate most prejudice, but he still finds that the way blue-collar workers get treated pisses him off.
The young man stares straight at the display, then the elevator stops, the doors sliding open.
The man named Mike walks off. As the doors close, one man murmurs to his friend, “Hey, I didn’t know ISIS was hiring here, did you?”
A couple of slight giggles and Tom can’t get away fast enough from these people, his supposed peers in upscale Manhattan.
After getting off the elevator, Mike Patel walks with no apparent guilt or fear to the end of the pretty and wealthy corridor, to a plain gray door with a small black sensor lock to one side. He slides his identity pass over the lock and a little green light comes on, then the door clicks open. Mike walks in and carefully closes the door behind him. Somewhere in the security systems that keep watch in this enormous building, some computer somewhere recorded that he, MIKE PATEL, an employee of Chrome HVAC Systems and a lifelong resident of New York State, had entered this equipment bay.
As he goes through another door and into a long corridor filled with circuit boxes, blinking lights, gray cabinets, and conduits, he reflects that the computer recording was two-thirds correct. His name is in fact Mike Patel, and he is an employee of Chrome HVAC Systems. But he is also a British citizen from Manchester, here illegally and serving a second employer.
Who that is doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that a young woman had asked him months ago back in Manchester if he was tired of being on the dole, tired of no future, tired of skinheads spitting on him and calling him “dirty Paki.”
Mike kneels down, places his workbag on the clean concrete floor, and remembers.
Yes to all three questions.
He opens the workbag, takes out a black box with attached wires and alligator clips, and with practiced ease—in his months working here, Mike has done this at least a hundred times—he secures the box in a hidden area behind an access panel.
What does the black box do?
Nothing, for now.
But he knows what it will do in a very short time, and the thought of those smirking figures on the elevator getting their due justice—well, that is a wonderful thought indeed.
Chapter21
JEREMY MOVESas best and as quickly as he can, knowing the few minutes standing and talking to Amy back there have caused his joints and muscles to stiffen, but he has to get on with it. Eventually Amy will find her way home, being the smart and capable woman she is.
But right now Jeremy is out in the open as night is falling, and he wants to get to Nassim’s place as quickly as he can, which—unfortunately for Amy—is not at the house back there, the one near the battered Renault sedan.
His mission is key and he’s going to complete it on his own.
He stops at the other end of the alley, looks up and down. There’s a small plaza to the right with some shops that are open, and luckily for him, Nassim is on the other end, away from the few lights and the number of villagers milling around.
Jeremy takes a breath, starts out, and—
Something heavy slams into his back, hammering him to the dirty concrete and a puddle, and a sharp blade is stuck to his throat.
Tom gets a thick pulled-pork BBQ sandwich from Hudson Eats on Vesey Street, and is trying to enjoy his early lunch while sitting out in the warm May sun.
The sandwich tastes off, and he knows why. He’s warm so he shrugs off his coat and rolls up his sleeves, trying to ignore the old burn scar on his left forearm that brings back dark memories of the time he was in danger, along with Denise, and how Amy put it all on the line to rescue them.
Something is stirring out there, and he knows it. He just knows it. It remains tantalizingly and hauntingly just out of reach, like trying to re-create a previous night’s dream.
Another bite of the sandwich. Another squirt of BBQ sauce lands on his napkins, keeping his shirt and necktie clean. A tiny success.
A bit of shade flicks across his view, and he looks up as his boss, Dylan Roper, sits down next to him. At first he thought it might be one of the folks doing surveillance on him, but that would have been too funny.
“Hey,” Dylan says. “Am I paying you to have lunch?”
“You are at the moment,” Tom says.
