American Subversive (44 page)

“I know,” she said softly. She handed the phone back to Simon.

“Drudge must have gotten the article from someone at the
Times,
” Simon said.

“One of the ‘angry newsroom insiders,' ” I posited.

“Who's this ‘acquaintance'?” Simon asked. “Your buddy Touché?”

“Has to be,” I said, keenly aware that only two days before I'd been willing to put our lives in his hands. Paige could have called me on it, but didn't.

Simon sat down across from us. “Let's figure out what we do now.”

“We wait,” Paige said.

“No, no.” Simon shook his head. “Keith won't come down here after this. It's far too risky. He'll find out about you two in the next few hours, if he hasn't already, and then he'll disappear. Or stay disappeared.”

“You think he'll scrap the Action?” Paige asked.

Simon rubbed the stubble on his jawline. “Not necessarily. If you two had been caught, it'd be a different story. He'd have no choice but to scrap it because one of you might talk. But as things are . . .” Simon frowned.

“What?” Paige said.

“He may even try it tonight. Think about it. The Feds are closing in and he has no base of operations. But he has a bomb and one last chance to use it.”

“And if it does go off,” Paige followed, “everyone will think we're the de facto suspects, and Keith and Lindsay get away scot-free.”

“Exactly,” Simon said. “Which means we need to get out of the city right now. Before this press briefing. Before any more pictures of you two get out there. Before they ramp up security at the bridges and tunnels. There's a place in New Jersey, a farmhouse in Bernardsville, just off I-287. We use it occasionally for meetings. It's not perfect, but it'll work for a night or two while we sort out something better. I'll drive us out there. Here, let's straighten this place out and—”

“No,”
said Paige, quiet but forceful.

“But we have to move. You saw the Drudge thing. They're not far behind us. We're down to luck now.”

“We've been careful,” Paige said.

“Really?”
said Simon, standing up. His eyes narrowed, his weathered face turned hard. “If you'd been careful, Cressida wouldn't have made you in that stairwell. If you'd been careful, Aidan wouldn't have left his idiot friend a message, and the FBI wouldn't be swarming the Liberty Inn right now.”

“Hold on,” I said. “All of that was my fau—”

“Fuck that!”
Paige said. “Why don't you come out of retirement and see how long
you
last.” She stood up and took a step toward Simon, the two of them suddenly nose to nose, and for a second I thought she might push him or, Christ, take some sort of swing. But she stopped short. “This isn't 1970. You can't just vanish. There are cameras everywhere, satellites and surveillance. They're watching the entire world. It's a miracle we're still going, so don't tell me to be more careful. Especially after what
you
did.”

“And what did
I
do?” Simon asked, digging in.

“You threw me under a fucking bus for some supposed greater good.”

“You don't think stopping Keith is worth it?”
Simon said, his face reddening.
“You don't think I've done everything I possibly—”

“Enough!”
I shouted, finally standing up myself.

They both looked at me, startled. Simon bowed his head and took a step back. Paige moved over—as if out of habit now—to the window, then spun around to face us.

“I think stopping Keith is worth everything,” she said calmly. “Which is why I'm not going out to New Jersey. Not yet.”

Simon took a heavy breath. “Why can't you understand the danger you're—”

“He wants to kill people this time,” Paige said. “Don't you know? The bomb's filled with shrapnel. I saw it myself.
That's
why I left.”

Simon's mouth opened but nothing came out.

“Yeah,” Paige said. “My thoughts exactly.”

The Roorback option, though no one had said as much, was now gone. It had disappeared when two determined young women passed each other in a stairwell. And where did that leave me? Exactly where
I was: with Paige. On the far side of the American equation. Nothing was certain. Little was known. I listened, lost, as Paige and Simon argued in stage voices, trying not to be too loud. The contents of the bomb had clearly swayed Simon's thinking.

“I think Keith means it only as a harsh warning,” he said. “I just . . . I can't imagine he'd intentionally hurt people, but still, this changes everything. We need to alert the authorities now. Place an anonymous call, feed them Keith and Lindsay's names, along with the sordid details of N3, and then get out of town.”

“But what will that solve?” Paige asked. “It might save N3, temporarily, but they won't get Keith or Lindsay. No, the two of them will spot the extra security and be long gone. Their bomb will go off somewhere else, and then another one will, and sooner or later people will die and we'll still be suspects. We need to talk them out of it.
I
need to talk
him
out of it. I say we give it one last shot. He'll show up at N3 tonight, I'm almost sure of it, and if he doesn't, then we can call the cops. Either way, we'll regroup outside the city and figure out what to do.”

I looked at Simon, and I saw in his eyes a kind of determined humanity. Keith had been his friend, his collaborator, the two of them working and dreaming together on a level I couldn't imagine. The sacrifices made, the risks taken, all in this foolish, brilliant, noble attempt to—what was his phrase?—
budge history
. And this is what it had come to. The opposition—immovable America—had once again proven too strong. It was time to retreat with as few casualties as possible.

So it was settled. We would stay. We would stay against every instinct we had to move, to run. Simon had come around to Paige's way of thinking. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any event, the arguing had ended, and the only thing that mattered now was stopping the bomb. They were both convinced that Keith would try it that night. After that the risk would be too great, the city too dangerous. We'd never hear from him again. Until, of course, we did: loudly.

We got back to work, the three of us around the table again. Paige had cracked the blinds, and the ensuing light, while hardly radiant, changed the mood. Simon went back out to his van and returned
with a set of Google map grids detailing the blocks surrounding the National News Network's Midtown Manhattan headquarters. Paige had memorized the specifics of the Action back in Vermont, including the building's vital statistics, from the location of elevators and stairwells to the office of each senior executive. As well as lobbies and bathrooms, conference rooms and closets, and the expanse of ground-floor news sets and studios. What Paige didn't know (since she'd split before they'd returned) was what had happened on Keith and Lindsay's reconnaissance trip.

That's where Simon took charge.

“Keith told me everything,” he explained. “The details down to the minute.”

“When?” Paige asked.

“Last Sunday, on his way back up to Waitsfield after the N3 recon. We met in the Wal-Mart parking lot one last time. He wanted my help again, like on Indigo, but he didn't realize the extent of my opposition. He couldn't fathom I might turn against him—that the Roorback leak and Aidan's sudden appearance on the scene might be my doing. And he didn't know, Paige, that you would take off—had
already
taken off. He was still riding the adrenal success of Indigo, and he thought everyone would come around, everyone would
understand,
once he had a chance to explain himself.

“And that's exactly what he did,” Simon continued. “He told me everything: how he'd canvassed the blocks surrounding N3's headquarters, discreetly videotaping the outside of the building, the entrances and exits, the side-street loading docks, and further down Fifty-first Street, the studio emergency-exit door, which had been propped permanently open—like the alley door downstairs—by the company's nicotine hordes. Keith saw it immediately for what it was:
his way in
. Meanwhile, Lindsay, guidebook in hand, signed up for N3's Saturday-afternoon studio tour and slipped away when no one was looking. She spent hours sneaking around the building, marking not just placement and location, but employee flow, cleaning schedules, and security walk-arounds. She took the stairs up to the sixth floor, Executive Row, which by seven p.m. was deserted, as were the floors above and below. There were no cameras in the hallways, no internal motion detectors. The only part of the building that
remained occupied at night was the twenty-four-hour news studio on the ground floor.”

“Sounds easy compared to Barneys,” Paige remarked, apparently seriously.

“That's what Keith said, too. And still I told him no. That it just felt wrong. You can't sway public opinion by attacking the media. It never works. But Keith wasn't listening. He said he'd be in touch, then got out of my car, walked over two rows to where Lindsay was waiting, and together they drove away.”

Paige took careful notes as Simon talked, often asking him to repeat or clarify things. They discussed overnight security and cleaning schedules and concluded, as Keith would have, that the sixth floor at 2:15 a.m.—the original go time—would be just as empty on a weeknight as on a weekend. It was a dangerous assumption—despite Simon's hopeful premise, the makeup of the N3 bomb could also point to some secret darker plan to explode it at a busier hour—but in the absence of other information, it held firm. The day progressed, the room brightened. Soon, a strategy took shape, along with the necessary contingencies (and those two thought of everything:
if this, then this, or this, or this
). They decided almost right away that no confrontation could occur on the street. Instead, Simon—and it had to be Simon: our covers were blown—would wait inside the building while we acted as lookouts in the van. Lindsay (Keith always sent a girl in) wouldn't be hard to spot, as she'd be carrying the silver suitcase in a large messenger bag—a suitcase she would carefully carry upstairs, then place in the back of a storage closet across the hall from the chairman's office.

“But it'll never get that far,” Simon said. “I'll stop her on the ground floor.”

“What if she won't hand it over?” I asked.

“She will.”

We took a break in the late afternoon, then went over everything again, and again, until it felt like I knew the National News Network's every back office and storage closet. And I wouldn't even be going inside. Finally, Simon proclaimed us as ready as we'd ever be, and we
all reached for the cigarettes at once. We spent our last hour in that morbid room erasing any trace of ourselves. Even I pitched in, having witnessed this drill before. It was dark when we were done, darker still when Paige and I snuck down the staircase and out the basement door into Mechanics Alley. Simon, who'd got a head start, was waiting in his van. I'd seen it any number of times, parked around the side of my mother's house, but—how was this possible?—I'd never been inside. It was a typical workman's van, brown and battered, with tinted glass and rear doors that opened out. Simon used it to transport the raw materials of his art, but not until I climbed into the back did I realize the van was outfitted to serve another purpose as well. For what I saw looked more like the decked-out cabin of a modern yacht. Small appliances were tucked snugly under a cushioned sleeping bench, and behind the passenger's seat sat a built-in media system—TV, stereo, and wires running every which way. Two sleek walkie-talkies rested in specially made bases, and Paige knelt to pick one up.

“We used this type in Carolina,” she said. “They were indispensable.”

“I know, I sent them down there,” Simon answered, putting the van in gear. “They're GPS enabled. And dead silent when they need to be.”

Then we were moving. I took a seat on the bench while Paige balanced like a surfer in front of a tiny mirror and started applying heavy makeup, mounds of shine and shadow. We'd be continuing on to Jersey afterward, no matter what happened at N3, and Simon, worried about bridge and tunnel checkpoints, had insisted Paige and I leave the island separately. He would drive me in the van (they wouldn't be looking for two men), while Paige took the PATH to Jersey City, where we'd pick her up. It was risky, hence her transformation—this time into a suburban girl coming home from a late night at the clubs. “
You
won't even recognize me,” she had said, and now, as I watched the makeover progress, I realized how right she was.

I, meanwhile, was wearing the same hoodie and jeans I'd had on for two days. My hair looked like an art installation dreamed up by a Cure fan.

“Should I do anything?” I asked, pinching my sweatshirt.

Paige regarded me through the darkness.

“You're fine like that. Your outfit goes with the van. Blue-collar on the outside.”

From Canal Street we turned onto busy Sixth Avenue. Simon kept the radio off. The task before us was the only thing, and already there were glimpses of trouble—a cluster of cops standing on the corner of West Fourth, another group at Fourteenth. We kept to the middle lane, even when others opened up. Was it normal, this show of force? What about the squad cars parked side by side in Herald Square? Or the police van pulled up onto the Bryant Park sidewalk? I'd never noticed so many cops, but then again, I'd never been looking for them. Not like this. Simon didn't seem overly worried, so maybe this was just an average night. The thought gave me pause. What would I have been doing at 9:30 p.m. on an average Thursday night? I'd be at a couples dinner party in Boerum Hill, having been dragged there by Cressida and told to behave; or barhopping with bloggers through the last of the Alphabet City dives; or lounging on plush couches in the parlor room at Norwood, or the roof of Soho House, or, inevitably, Touché's apartment. Waiting for the light back at Fourteenth Street, I'd imagined flinging the van doors open and escaping to Café Loup or Bar Six. I knew the bartenders there, and at a half dozen other Village spots. But it was much too late for that.