A Friend in the Glass (An Auden & O’Callaghan Mystery #3)

Chapter Seven

It took them two hours to shake off Weaver. Once they managed that—and it wasn’t easy, because the detective hadn’t been pleased to find them in the room, and he’d been even less satisfied with the story they’d been able to give him—the walk was short. Short, but miserable in the late-December wind howling through the city.

The Javits Center was an amalgamation of see-through boxes, all glass and steel supports bristling on the bank of the Hudson River. Slush gathered at the base of the walls, but the rest of the sidewalk had been shoveled and salted, the granules crunching under Sam’s boots as they approached. Flags snapped restlessly, a reminder of how civic and patriotic the Javits Center was. The whole thing reminded Sam of a greenhouse taken over by Young Republicans who were also undergrad architecture majors.

Inside, a wall of warmer air met them with the smell of wet winter gear, a cocktail of colognes, and overheated bodies. Voices echoed from the high, open spaces, rebounding off glass and cement. Every sound seemed amplified, in spite of the crush of bodies as people zipped back and forth through the concourse. Sam stepped to one side to clear the doorway, unzipped his coat, and rubbed his mouth.

“Jesus Christ. And I thought the subways were bad.”

“It’s definitely busier than I expected,” Rufus agreed as he took off his sunglasses. “The name made me think, like, eight old guys in a musty room.” He glanced at Sam. “Are you going to be ok in here? If you want to wait outside….” Rufus trailed off at the suggestion.

Sam released his breath slowly. Then he shook his head. Pointing at a banner over the escalators that announced MoDe US Expo , he asked, “Do we just walk in, or….”

Rufus made a humming sound while looking around the expansive room. “Oh, it looks like those ticket booths over there are open. Did you want to actually check the conference out?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Well. No. Not really.”

“Neither do I.”

Sam plunged into the maelstrom of bodies. A woman in stiletto heels, with a dog riding in the massive bag she carried, glared at Sam as she shrieked something into her phone in what sounded like an Eastern European language. An older man in a pinstriped banker’s suit shouldered past Sam, raising a hand as he bellowed “Roderick” at someone across the room. A pair of middle-aged twins in matching trench coats and, underneath, sagging rainbow spandex, waved batons at Sam as though directing traffic.

When he got to the ticket booth, he was sweating.

“May I help you?” She was petite, young, her hair in tight cornrows, her eyes wrinkled with amusement.

“You can get me out of this puckering anus of a city,” Sam muttered as he took out his wallet.

The girl made a noise that left no doubt as to its meaning, which could mostly be summarized as This guy is an asshole and every assumption I made about him has just been proven right .

Sam chose to ignore the communication. “Two for the MoDe Expo.”

“That will be five hundred and forty-five dollars.”

“Is that some kind of joke? Two hundred and seventy something dollars for a fucking convention?”

“No, sir. That’s five hundred and forty-five dollars each. There’s also an add-on option for two dinners and a meet-and-greet luncheon, plus the early morning and midmorning kaffeeklatsches and—”

“Is there a sale? A discount? What about veterans?”

Rufus, having kept up well enough when Sam had barreled his way through the crowds, was now doubled over at Sam’s side, hands on his knees. “I can’t pay that. It’s giving me the shakes.”

“Active-duty—” the girl began, arching her elaborately done eyebrows.

“Never mind,” Sam said. “For fuck’s sake, this fucking city.” He didn’t have that much cash, which meant using a bank card, which he liked even less than paying full price for this fucking debacle whose sole purpose, he imagined, was for old white men to give each other handjobs. That was only partially figurative, he decided. But since Shareed Baker had tracked him down, he figured he wasn’t giving too much away by using the card now. He paid. He scribbled his name on the receipt hard enough to tear the thermal paper. And then he took the badges that the girl slid under the partition and passed one to Rufus.

A guard—if you could call a middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting blazer and a Mary Tyler Moore wig a guard—checked their badges and waved them onto the escalator. They rode down to the exhibition hall in silence. Relative silence, anyway.

“Any ideas on how to figure out who Shareed wanted to track down?” Sam asked as the hub of voices faded above them and the softer babble from the hall below swelled.

Rufus absently worried the plastic edge of his badge with a fingernail. “Maybe we should find a schedule. They list exhibitors on that, I bet.” He glanced up at Sam before adding, “Maybe someone’s here from Benning?”

After a moment, Sam jerked his head in a nod. “Do they have a program with a list of people? Or do we just wander around?”

“Hang here for a second.” Rufus patted Sam’s arm as they stepped off the escalator. He slipped into the sea of people, heading toward a small booth off to the left with a banner overhead reading: WELCOME.

Rufus talked to a very blonde and very perky woman, took a handful of printouts she politely forced into his hands, and made his way back to Sam. He sifted through the pile, leaned to one side of the escalator wall to dump what he apparently deemed to be junk into a trashcan, and ended up with a fully colored program listing events, speakers, locations, and times.

He gave it to Sam. “I don’t speak government. You look at that.”

The exhibition hall was overwhelming in its own way. The roar of voices. The maze of booths and dividers. The underlying rush of ventilation fans like someone breathing heavily in the distance. But what caught and kept Sam’s attention were the people. Unlike the exhibition hall above, the demographic here skewed heavily male and predominantly white, with the 50+ bracket abundantly represented. They wore expensive suits and shook hands and talked too loudly, some of them the kind that had to drop numbers—the cost of their car, the cost of their pool, the cost of their wife—while others had the predatory, dead-eyed look of men for whom numbers were less important than power. The women Sam did see seemed to fit one of two types: either the kind who were clearly ex-military and who carried themselves with the kind of invisible armor that Sam was all too familiar with, having worn it himself while he was still serving; or the kind who were purebred corporate, fake hair and fake teeth and fake tits, and who had the brassy self-assurance that came from trying too hard to be one of the boys. Sam was sure he was being unfair; someone in the room had to be a decent, normal person. They were probably wearing a Javits uniform.

Sam flipped through the program. Many of the events—most of them—were exclusively about and by corporations—everybody who fell under the umbrella term for this section of the population, industry . These were the guys who wanted to sell more guns or more tanks or more nuclear warheads—who the hell knew anymore. Two events caught his eye, though. Summit on Wireless Communications: Key Battlefield Considerations, A Tactical Reevaluation was sponsored by AboutFace Innovations and Red Ice, Inc., two corporate drones listed in conversation with LTC Campbell Credille, US Army. Another was Mobile Deployables in the 21st Century: Engagement and Elimination , hosted by Deepriver Properties and AdvaGrowth Advancements and featuring a panel headed by Major Annelise Sherman, US Army.

Sam showed the two entries to Rufus. “One is about to end,” he said, “and the other starts in fifteen minutes.”

“They sound riveting.”

“Credille was at Benning for a time,” Sam said. “I don’t know Sherman, but I’d like to check them both out.”

They headed through the hall, using the tiny map of the Javits Center on the program in the kind of orienteering field exercise that would have given sadistic NCOs the world over a wet dream. By the time they reached the room where the first panel was being held, sweat soaked Sam’s tee, bunching it under his arms, and he could feel his heartbeat in his throat. He ratcheted the emotions down as they slipped into the back of the room, and he forced himself to focus.

A skinny white guy in a skinny tie was trying to swallow the microphone.

“—real-time communication vis-à-vis operability and adverse logistical networks—”

Rufus leaned against the wall beside Sam, arms crossed, a scowl on his face. “What the literal fuck,” he whispered, “is he saying? Why can’t Government Yes Men just talk like regular humans?” A handful of seconds passed before Rufus added in as much snark as a whisper could have, “ Vis-à-vis .”

The moderator kept trying to break in to end the discussion, but the skinny guy was too busy deepthroating the mic to notice. Sam used the time to study the people on the stage. He had a hard time believing Shareed Baker would have tried to contact anyone on that stage—all of them, to borrow Rufus’s phrase, Government Yes Men—except Credille. The lieutenant colonel was something of a fixture at Benning; he made a big deal out of his Puerto Rican ancestry, and he’d played himself up as an ordinary guy. His tightly cut dark hair was graying, and he had the hard look of a man who has grown old on the inside.

Eventually, the moderator managed to put the audience out of its misery, and Sam pressed himself to the wall as people hurried to escape. Credille was swept up by two corporate bros, men who had to be twenty years younger and with the soft, baby-faced look of men who spent exorbitant amounts on moisturizers.

“I guess we try the next one,” Sam said, unable to keep the frustration from his voice. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

The next panel was in an identical room, with an identical crowd of men who kept themselves busy on their phones and tablets, hardly bothering to pretend to be interested in the conversation on the stage. As before, the speakers were a motley of pale-faced industry types, although Sam was surprised to see two women on stage in addition to Annelise Sherman. The major was a solidly built woman, although some of that had to be the uniform, which, in true Army fashion, had probably never been flattering on anyone because it had been designed to fit everyone. Sexy pics of guys in uniform were all well and good until you actually saw an enlisted dumbass in real life in baggy trousers. Then Sam remembered certain barracks episodes and grudgingly reconsidered.

One of the women was talking too quickly into the microphone.

“—neutralize enemy combatants with an increased 0.4 percent success rate, calculated using the Stromberg factor—”

After fifteen minutes of that, Sam jerked his head at the door, and they made their way out. “This is stupid,” Sam said. “And a fucking waste of a thousand dollars. Shareed called here, but we’re never going to figure out who she wanted to reach or why. What am I supposed to do? Walk up to Sherman and say, ‘Excuse me, Major, but I think a murdered woman was trying to reach you, but if she was, it was probably about something illegal, and you’re definitely not going to want to admit you know what I’m talking about.’” He rubbed his leg—the stab wound had healed well, but the gunshot still ached, and right then, it was starting to throb. “Fuck this shit.”

Rufus had waited until the pissing and cussing was out of Sam’s system, and then he grabbed a fistful of his shirt and said, “Come here.” He dragged Sam down a hall of closed doors. It grew less crowded and quieter the farther they went, until most of the noise was made up of muffled voices echoing from the panels within the closed rooms. Rufus came to a stop at the end, pushed Sam against the wall, and kept a hand pressed to his chest. “Stand here a minute and relax, ok? Give me this.” He took the partially rolled and wrinkled program. “Just stand here.” Rufus thumbed through the booklet, pausing about halfway through. He asked, “What did you call that company—Conasauga?”

“The one with Stonefish? Conasauga Solutions.”

Rufus was nodding as he turned the program around and tapped a short paragraph. “They’re here. See?”

“Of course they’re here; they’re a major defense contractor—” Sam cut himself off. “Shit. She said the information was about Stonefish.”

Rufus flipped the program, studied the details, then looked over his shoulder at the way they’d come. “Their panel is going on right now. I think it’s down that way. Opposite end—isn’t it always?” He offered Sam a small smile. “Wanna poke your head in? Unless you’d rather go listen to that lady talk about neutralizing some more….”

“Jesus God, no,” Sam muttered as he set off down the hall.

Rufus had been right; the Conasauga event was at the opposite end of the hall. The crowd had thinned somewhat after the latest set of panels had begun, which meant that Sam could move more easily down the hallway, but there were still enough people to make him wish for the good old days, when you could carry a buggy whip to make people get the hell out of your way. The faces of so many nominally straight, quasi-military white guys were starting to blur together. One industry bro in a too-modern suit—the damn thing fit him like a sausage casing—checked Sam with his shoulder, and when Sam met his glare with one of his own, he could have sworn, for an instant, he knew the guy.

Then he reached the doors for the Conasauga panel and stepped inside.

His eyes fell on Lew Frazer. He sat at the front of the room, and for a moment, Sam couldn’t move, and Rufus crashed into him. The movement propelled Sam into the room, and he recovered himself enough to shuffle into the back row of seats. His eyes were still locked on Lew.

He hadn’t changed much. Average height, solidly built—Lew had always liked the gym. Crew cut, but he did something to it that made him look pretty as well as regulation. He was one of those guys who, even with a deep tan from the field, looked smooth-skinned and glowing. Went had told Sam, once, drunk, that he thought Lew had a gorgeous mouth, but Sam didn’t see it.

Right then, Lew was talking to an older man in a conservative blue suit, the two of them in a whispered conversation that, under closer scrutiny, looked fraught with emotion. On stage, an older white man in an even more expensive-looking suit was strutting around with the microphone, while a woman stood opposite, trying to look patient, maybe even enthusiastic, and doing a poor job of it.

“So I told Evangeline they might not like it, and they might not want it, but we’re going to do it because it’s the right thing to do. And Evangeline and I told those senators what we were going to do, and you should’ve seen them—the lot of them nervous as cats in a room full of rocking chairs!”

The audience burst into laughter that seemed, to Sam’s distant awareness of it, only partially cued. Evangeline, apparently the woman on stage, offered a mile-wide smile and said in a fake aside, “That’s how Del Jolly does business, everyone. Are you surprised?” And another laugh rolled through the crowd.

All of it might have been happening on another planet as far as Sam was concerned. Lew’s conversation with the older man had clearly escalated, and Lew had shifted to the edge of his seat, gesticulating sharply, although he held his hands low as though trying to keep them hidden. Then Lew shot to his feet, head bowed as he snapped off something else in a low voice.

Sam pushed Rufus toward the door.

“What the— Sam ,” Rufus hissed, stumbling over his own feet. “What the hell?”

“Go,” Sam muttered, shoving him again. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Rufus slapped both hands down on the push bar. He’d just stepped into the hallway before he was shoved sideways so hard that he crashed into a nearby table display.

Sam turned around as Industry Bro, the one who had bumped him in the hall minutes before, threw a punch at his head.