Even by Andrew Grant Page A

imperceptibly we began to ascend. The elevator’s walls were covered by some sort of rough sacklike material hanging from small metal hooks near the ceiling. Ipulled back the edge of one of the sheets and found it was protecting a mirror. I presume it was the same on the other walls. If so, I was glad they were hidden. I didn’t need an endless sea of those agents’ miserable faces reflecting all around me.
    The display gradually wound its way up to 23. We stopped moving and the doors silently slid apart. Weston pushed me out first. He guided me around to the right, away from the elevators, and then steered me along the corridor until we reached an enormous open-plan office. Two lines of storage cabinets were laid out along the center of the room, forming a kind of pathway to a glass supervisor’s booth that jutted out from the end wall. The cabinets were low—less than waist height—and a gap after each third one gave access to groups of desks on either side. They were pushed together in fours to form parallel rows of identical crosses. These were arranged alternately one against the cabinets, one against the windows all the way down the room. The nearer ones were completely bare, except for a tangle of wires spilling out from the exposed cable trays at the back. Farther away several computer keyboards were scattered around, all with their leads neatly coiled up, and I could see a handful of old telephone headsets mixed in among them.
    The last couple of desks on the right looked as if they hadn’t been cleared yet, and the ones at the far end on the left had been moved out of position. They’d been pushed aside, and the space between them was filled with chairs. At least a hundred. They were piled high on each other at impossible, drunken angles. Some had their arms hooked together to hold them in place. Others had fallen off and were lying on the floor, blocking the entrance to the booth.
    Lavine flipped a couple of the fallen chairs onto their wheels and rolled them through the glass doorway. I had to stand aside as he came back out for another one, and I ended up squashed against the last desk on the right. I could hardly see any of its surface. It was covered with pizza boxes, Coke cans, coffee mugs, newspapers—all kinds of junk. The next desk was clinical in comparison. It held neat piles of papers and folders, several pens, a cell phone charger, and a pair of laptop computers.The screensavers had kicked in on both of them. One had a floating FBI shield that rippled as it moved. Homer Simpson was showing his backside on the other.
    Two maps were pinned to the wall behind the desks, completely filling the space between a pair of windows. At the top was a large-scale street map of Manhattan. Clusters of red dots and blue triangles had been marked on it, along with a series of times and dates from the previous week. Below that a color-coded linear diagram was superimposed on an outline of the United States. The key said it was a schematic of the national railroad network. A set of black-and-white photographs had been stuck around the top right-hand border. They showed men’s faces. I counted five. All of them would be in their mid to late thirties. They looked scruffy and unkempt, but basically cared for. Certainly not a pack of tramps. Arrows had been drawn connecting them to points on different railroad lines. All the points were on routes that fanned out from New York.
    And all the men in the photos looked as if they were dead.
     
    I sat right at the rear of the booth. Lavine had pushed my chair all the way in, so my back was literally against the wall. The agents sat facing me. They were shoulder to shoulder, pressing forward, blocking me in, trying to make me uncomfortable.
    No one spoke for eleven, maybe twelve minutes. Then the fingers on Lavine’s left hand started to drum against his thigh. He fought it for another minute, and then his mouth got the better of him.
    “How’re your veins?” he said.