Page 74 of Nobody's Hero
They had a long journey ahead of them.
Chapter 77
Four days later.
New York embodied America’s past, present and future. That’s what Koenig thought. The city’s history was in plain sight, and it was hidden. No doubt some of it was still to be discovered. Parts seemed utopian in their ambition and vision. They filled him with hope. Other parts were bleak. MoreBlade RunnerthanMetropolis. Run down and driven by crime and despair. Rudy Giuliani’s ‘broken windows’ policy hadn’t cleaned up the city. Not really. All it had done was push the undesirable to the fringes. Or force them into wearing suits and neckties. Play the game properly.
Koenig was sure he’d met most of these suit-wearing undesirables in the four days he’d spent around the intersection of the Lower East Side, Chinatown and SoHo. And that’s because the human billboard promoting Gurkha Spicy, New York’s premier Nepalese restaurant, was an asshole magnet. People seemed to think it was fine to treat human billboards as less than human. They sneered and they hurled insults. He was there for anyone trying to impress a date, and he was a punching bag for the bad-tempered and the angry. If he’d heard ‘Get a real job, asshole’ once, he’d heard it a hundred times. It was very disappointing.
But other than that, the surveillance had gone exactly as he’d expected: a whole load of nothing. No sign of Hobbs or his daughter. Just assholes being assholey. But that was surveillance. Boring as hell until it wasn’t.
Koenig and Draper had settled into an easy routine. He would collect his sandwich board and patrol the sidewalk opposite Stillwell Hobbs’s apartment. He started around 9 a.m. and kept going until mid-afternoon. Draper would then relieve him by taking a window seat in the bar on the street corner. Koenig would grab something to eat and check in with Carlyle and Margaret. Margaret was usually asleep. Carlyle spent her time on the internet. She wouldn’t say what she was looking for.
After an hour, Koenig would head back out and spend the rest of the evening on the street. Draper would relieve him at ten p.m. Ten p.m. was the last sitting at Gurkha Spicy, and a suspicious person might wonder why he was still promoting something they couldn’t have. And Koenig knew Hobbs would be suspicious. It was the only way he and his daughter could have practised their trade for so long.
Depending on who was in, the bar closed between three and four in the morning. Koenig had assumed he and Draper would have to improvise some mobile surveillance, walking past every thirty minutes or so. It would have been imperfect, and susceptible to rudimentary countersurveillance moves, but it was all they had. In the end, though, there’d been no need. A Korean-run bodega wedged between two apartment blocks opened when the bar shut. Within minutes it was full of happy barflies eating hot and spicy rice cakes, twisted doughnuts and mung bean pancakes. Draper simply switched one seat for another. She sat on a stool by the window, drank coffee. Chatted to the bar’s regulars and Mr Sun, the bodega’s owner. Within a day she was on first-name terms with twenty people, and Koenig was reminded that Draper was ex-CIA. Infiltrating groups was second nature.
At 9 a.m. Draper would say goodbye to Mr Sun, and Koenig would take over.
It was working well.
Until it wasn’t.
Chapter 78
Koenig was taking a break. He had removed his sandwich board and was eating takeoutchasa momo, Himalayan-style chicken dumplings, on the stoop of a brownstone. He’d gotten them from Gurkha Spicy. Free. Perks of the job. They were delicious. Just the right amount of chilli heat. The dumplings had come with a fortune cookie. It said, ‘Enjoy yourself while you can,’ which Koenig thought sounded more threatening than inspirational.
When he saw the three men, he thought ‘Enjoy yourself while you can’ was the kind of thing they might say. It was early evening and they were drunk. Not falling-over drunk, but they’d clearly been drinking all afternoon. Probably had a successful morning doing whatever it was men like them did on Wall Street. Government-approved theft. They wore fitted suits and pink shirts, like a uniform for douchebags. They were glassy-eyed and sweating. People were crossing the street to avoid them.
They were heading directly for him.
The middle one, a squabby man with fat hands, grinned, but it was nasty and mean. He nudged the others and nodded in Koenig’s direction. They spread out and sped up. Their intention couldn’t have been clearer if they’d been wearingBumfightsT-shirts.
Koenig was carrying his Fairbairn–Sykes and his SIG. He wouldn’t need them. These idiots were softer than pudding. He wiped the grease off his hands with a paper napkin. Rolled his shoulders. Mentally rehearsed his first move. Crushing the squabby man’s nose with a headbutt seemed the right thing to do. Put him on the ground, see what the others were made of.
Which was when they saw the girl.
She was a waif of a thing, as thin as a heron’s leg. About five nine with short black hair. She was on the other side of the street and looked like she was heading home after a day’s work. Her head was down and she wore wireless headphones. She walked gracefully, like a ballerina.
The change in the men’s demeanour was immediate. They looked like a cackle of hyenas that had stumbled upon a limping wildebeest. As one they crossed the road. A cab screeched to a halt, but they ignored it.
The girl didn’t notice. She was near the alley by Stillwell Hobbs’s apartment, the one Koenig had worried they didn’t have eyes on. They were going to reach her before he could. If they got her into the alley, by the time he arrived, she’d already have been through something horrific.
Koenig started to run but knew he wouldn’t make it. By the time he’d crossed the street, the men had already reached the girl. The squabby one dragged her into the alley. One of the others pulled two of the dumpsters together and blocked the alley entrance.
Koenig put his head down and sprinted even harder.
Chapter 79
A minute wasn’t a long time. Sixty seconds. Not long enough to read a page in a book. Or boil an egg. Wasn’t even long enough to watchFresh Guacamole, the shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar.
But for someone being sexually assaulted, a minute is a lifetime.
Koenig reached the alley at a run. He yanked the dumpster away from the entrance. He blinked in surprise. He didn’t see what he’d expected. He’d expected to see three bare-assed men. Men who were about to add rape to their résumé. ‘Consensual intercourse’, their high-priced attorneys would no doubt call it. He’d expected them to turn around and look sheepish for a moment. Then bullish and indignant as self-preservation kicked in.
But that wasn’t what Koenig saw.
Instead, he saw three men lying on the oil-stained concrete, blood pooling by their heads. The squabby man was clutching his throat and gurgling. The other two weren’t making any sound at all.