Blow the House Down Read Online Free Page B

should.”
    â€œUh, Max. It’s not me who wants to hear you singing soprano in the choir.”
    â€œThanks. You’re a dear.” I shut off the cell phone before Chris could say anything more.
    Â 
    What bothered me about the Quick & Reilly pair wasn’t so much their existence as their tradecraft. They should have been doing sentry duty way down Park or watching from inside that unmarked van they were picked up in. Or they could have used some cover, like climbing in and out of a manhole in monkey suits. Even a vendor’s cart. New York City is 40 percent foreign born. If you can’t disguise yourself in that thicket of humanity, where can you? The van pickup didn’t make sense either. Why not just break off on foot?
    The easy explanation was ineptitude, but there was another possibility: They’d exposed themselves on purpose. In Moscow we called it “dolphin surveillance”—now you see us, now you don’t. The way it worked was the KGB would start off with a sloppy team on you. You’d have to be blind not to pick up on it. Then, maybe an hour or two later, the team would drop off, disappear completely. You couldn’t even find their comms on your pocket scanner. It was as if the whole damn service had taken the afternoon off for a company picnic.
    The idea was to lure you into a false sense of security, give you the impression you were sparkling clean so you would go ahead and make your meeting, put down a drop, do whatever. But what really was going on was that the KGB had switched out the sloppy team for the pros. And it wasn’t just new people and new vehicles. They enlisted fixed militia posts and the police to call in your movements while the real watchers hung back out of sight. They also switched to military frequencies—so much traffic that a scanner was useless.
    That was Moscow, though. Who in New York would even know about dolphin surveillance? More to the point, who would use it on me, a taxpaying American on his own hook in the Free World’s Capital of Commerce?
    Â 
    I’d almost convinced myself that the simplest answers are best when I pushed out the door to Forty-second Street and saw a guy exiting two doors down. Early forties, maybe. An elegant summer-weight cashmere sport coat topped by a screaming orange baseball cap. This time, at least, I hadn’t completely lost it. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your head covered, but a piece of crap like that in a 250-watt color on top of a pricey cashmere jacket?
    Chances are, this guy was the “eye”—the point man for the surveillance team, the sacrificial lamb who sticks to the target so the rest of the team can hang back out of sight. Follow the orange hat, and they’re following me. Simple, and way too much work for the little reward I offered. A reasonable person would have simply caught the shuttle to Penn Station, climbed on the next Amtrak back to Washington, and opted out of the game. Chase over. Go home. But for a guy who pretty much lies for a living, I’m perversely attached to the truth. I had to know if I was being followed and, if so, who it was.
Who
would lead me to
why
.
    First, though, I had to clean myself up—dump my cell phone, not wash my hands. Cells these days are not a lot different from those electronic bracelets used to monitor prisoners serving home sentences. Like Chris’s Breitling, they have built-in beacons that constantly transmit your position, your GPS coordinates. Even when a phone’s off, it keeps transmitting. A lot of supposedly street-savvy people think that removing the battery fixes the problem, but the pros aren’t that dumb.
    A couple weeks before, I’d dozed through an afternoon listening to some genius from the National Security Agency explain how he could conceal a capacitor in a cell phone to power its beacon. You can’t find the capacitor unless you take the whole thing apart, he