Nobody’s Hero (Ben Koenig #2)

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. More Blade Runner than Metropolis . 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.