The Identity Man Read online

  Who was it who had told him that story, he wondered. It seemed to him he should remember someone who had been kind to him when he was a boy...

  The loft door opened and Foster came in. Shannon had not realized he was gone. He was carrying a bag with him from a local diner. Shannon could smell coffee.

  "Let's get ready," Foster said.

  Shannon swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  He was glad the waiting was over.

  Now it was full day. Shannon was sitting in one of the metal chairs in the main part of the loft. He had his elbow propped on the card table to steady his arm. He was holding the handset of an old-fashioned landline phone to his ear, the kind with a coiling wire. His grip on the handset felt weak. His palm was sweaty.

  He looked at Foster. Foster sat next to him, leaning toward him. He had an earpiece in his ear, wired to the phone so he could listen in. He fiddled with the earpiece and with the wire and tapped at a nearby computer keyboard. The phone was hooked to the computer, which was running some kind of program that Foster said would foil a trace, fooling the electronic switching system into thinking the call had come from somewhere else.

  Shannon waited for Foster to finish with the keyboard and give him the go-ahead. He was growing more and more nervous by the second. The other two agents stood over them, pretending to be nonchalant, but watching the whole thing intently.

  Now finally, Foster drew a breath and nodded at him. Shannon pressed the buttons on the phone. He waited. The phone started ringing. Shannon listened. He licked his lips to wet them. His heart was beating hard. The phone rang again. Foster tapped at his keyboard. Shannon switched the handset to his other hand. He wiped his wet palm on the leg of his jeans.

  The phone began to ring again—then it broke off. Shannon's breath caught. Foster stared at him. The weaselly agent and the slick agent stood straighter. There was silence on the other end of the line. Then a voice:

  "Yes?"

  Foster nodded. It was Ramsey. It was a moment before Shannon could speak.

  "Hello?" Ramsey said.

  "You know who this is?" said Shannon.

  "Yeah," Ramsey said. "I know."

  "You want to meet me, I'll be at Betsy's Café at noon."

  "No. That's no good for me."

  "You're not in charge of this," said Shannon gruffly.

  "We've both got to feel safe."

  There was a pause. Shannon didn't know what to answer.

  "You know Anatomy?" Ramsey said. "It's public, crowded. We can sit in plain sight and talk it out. Everyone goes home happy."

  Shannon glanced at Foster. Foster shrugged and nodded.

  "Yeah," said Shannon. "That's all right. Noon."

  "I'll be there."

  The phone line went dead.

  Shannon hung up. He let out a long breath. "All right. What's Anatomy?"

  "Restaurant downtown. Ground floor of One CC—One City Center. It just reopened about a week ago. They'll be booked solid—that's why he picked it. The place has strong connections with the city machine—obviously, or it wouldn't have that location. We won't be able to get a man in there without Ramsey knowing. You'll be on your own."

  "But if it's crowded like he said, he can't just kill me."

  "Oh, he'll kill you, Shannon."

  "But not just right there with everyone looking."

  "Maybe. Or maybe he'll just shout, 'Everyone get down, there's a cop-killer' and open fire. I don't know."

  Shannon wiped his hand on his jeans again. "I don't think he'll do that."

  Foster took out his earpiece and tossed it down on the table. "That must be nice for you," he said. "But believe me, he'll find a way."

  THE BUSINESS DISTRICT had been hit hard on the night of the disaster. Water had damaged luxurious lobbies and atria. Rioters had smashed massive storefront windows. Mobs had marauded through skyscrapers, ransacking offices at random. There had been fires everywhere.

  No one knew exactly what had destroyed the upper floors of One City Center. Its distinctive spire had somehow been torn free of its moorings and had speared down forty-five stories through the flaming night before piercing the floodwaters, hurling great waves in every direction, and pulverizing itself on the pavement underneath. What was left of the building's top windows had been shattered. Its offices had been gutted by flames. From a distance, the building now seemed a looming charred-black tower rising to a jagged, mangled confusion of light and shadow. It darkened the whole skyline with an aura of malevolence and ruination.

  Below, at the building's base on Center Street, there were still rows of boarded windows. There were lobbies and offices still filled with debris. But there were lights on, too, a checkerboard of lighted panes. Revolving doors were turning, people going in and out. The banks and financial and legal businesses had opened again wherever they could. So had the restaurants that served them. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks and cars passed hesitantly under the sporadic traffic lights, edging around the barriers protecting the broken place in the street where the tower had crashed.

  Foster and his agents had found an office directly across from the restaurant Anatomy. The office was abandoned, all the furniture removed, the walls torn up, the insulation underneath exposed. The paneling was gone from the ceiling, too. Wires hung down and light fixtures dangled. The floors were covered with dust.

  Shannon and Foster stood together at a filthy window, looking out. They were on the second floor. They could see the front of the restaurant below, but they couldn't see inside through the tinted window. The slickster and the weasel were there behind them, each sitting on a metal chair. A laptop computer was set up on a third chair.

  Shannon kept his hands in the pockets of his jeans. They were unsteady and he didn't want Foster to see them shake. It was annoying. In his mind he was pretty calm now that the waiting was over. In his mind he was thinking: What the hell, right? Everybody dies. But his body was afraid and unsteady.

  "Need another look?" Foster said. He held his cell phone out in front of Shannon. There was a photograph on the phone's screen: Lieutenant Brick Ramsey. He was a solidly built man with a serious, oval-shaped face and a thin moustache. He seemed to have a sort of stillness and dignity about him. He looked like an upright guy, the kind of upright guy every tough neighborhood needs. The priest, the cop, the coach—the kind of father fi gure they need in these neighborhoods where there are no fathers, where it's all women without virtue and men without honor, like Applebee had said. If this had been one of those old black-and-white movies he had watched back in the white room, a guy who looked like Ramsey would've been the hero of the picture, except for his being black and all. But the real world was different from the black-and-white movies, Shannon thought. The real world was always right on the brink of falling completely the fuck apart.

  "I've got it," Shannon said. "I'll recognize him."

  Foster put the phone back in his pocket.

  "And you'll be able to hear me, right?" said Shannon. He just said it to say something because he was nervous. He didn't really want to know how the whole thing was going to work.

  "Maybe," said Foster. "We may be able to hear you. We sent a text message to Ramsey's cell phone. When he picked it up, it downloaded a Trojan horse—malware—software—that turned his phone into a listening device."

  "Really? You can do that?"

  "Maybe. I guess we'll find out."

  "Hell, if you can do that, why didn't you just do it before? Why do you need me?"

  "Because every warrant we've ever gotten in this city, the target's been alerted within forty-eight hours."

  "Great. So what's different now?"

  "We got the warrant twenty minutes ago. We may have some time before he finds out."

  "But what if...?" Shannon started to say.

  "If the Trojan horse doesn't work? Or he turns off his phone or he somehow spots the download or the warrant's already been blown or any of another
million ways we can be fucked? Then we'll be fucked. That's just the kind of fly-by-night operation it is, dog."

  Shannon's hands clenched in his pockets. "My tax dollars at work," he muttered.

  "If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't be working for the government, believe me. We'd make our own damn money."

  Shannon glanced at a clock that stood above the boarded storefront of a bank. It was nearly noon.

  Foster said, "All right. Let's go."

  It was during the next few moments that Ramsey had his revelation. Until then, there had just been his burgeoning, amorphous dread and superstition, an increasing sense of persecution by unseen forces too powerful to resist and an increasingly desperate idea that none of it mattered anymore anyway. Ever since his meeting with Super-Pred, he had felt like that. He had felt vague and distant, indifferent, dead. When the phone call from the gangster reached him, when he heard that Teresa and her family had escaped, that this plan, too, even this one, had been foiled by the forces arrayed against him, he accepted the news with a sort of spit of laughter, as if to say, What else could you expect in this unfair world? He no longer seemed to care whether or not he saved himself. He didn't even feel as if he was himself any longer. He was just the sullen vessel of his own resistance to the inevitable end. But the end was inevitable all the same.

  So he sat in the booth, waiting. Anatomy was an upscale Italian restaurant. It had soft lighting and yellow walls. There were square tables under white tablecloths throughout the open room. There were booths with brown leather seats against one wall. Hanging on that wall between the sconces here and there were large plaster sculptures of body parts. That's what gave the restaurant its name. There were enormous arms and hands hanging up there, huge legs and feet and an oversized torso. And there was one table under a gigantic woman's breast and another under a gigantic pair of buttocks. That's where Ramsey was sitting—in the booth under the giant ass.

  There were people at almost every other table, and the empty tables had signs on them marking them reserved. The crowd was mostly men in suits, but there were some women, too. Everyone was talking and the room was filled with voices and laughter.

  Where Ramsey sat—under the plaster buttocks—he had a clear look at the front of the place. The bottom half of the long window was blacked out and there were venetian blinds on the top half. The blinds were partially open, so he could see the people passing on the street. The door was clear glass. He would be able to see anyone approaching.

  He sipped from a glass of water, set the glass down, and checked his watch. It was nearly twelve. When he lifted his eyes, he looked out through the front door. He spotted Henry Conor crossing the street.

  Ramsey hadn't realized until then that he despised Conor and was afraid of him. Maybe he'd denied it to himself because he didn't like to think he was afraid of any man. But now he felt the full force of it. This nemesis that he sensed was dogging him—this evil fate he'd got himself all worked up about in his mind—what was it, in the end, but Conor really? Conor inspired by the Reverend Skyles as Patterson had been inspired by Skyles. Conor coming after him to avenge Patterson like he was Skyles's vengeance or the vengeance of God. Conor killing Gutterson. Getting the drop on Super-Pred and his g's. Conor and Patterson and Skyles and God and his mother—it had all gotten wrapped up together in Ramsey's mind until it felt like the work of some persecuting power. But now that he saw the man in the flesh he realized: it was just this man, this one man. All he had to do was get rid of this one man and his problems would be over and he'd be free.

  Yet, even as he thought that, once again, he felt that instinctive doubt, that awareness of shadow and uncertainty beyond the edges of his understanding. Something still didn't quite add up. Something was wrong.

  And then, as so often happens in the moment of crisis, circumstances brought the revelation he needed.

  Because, just as Conor reached this side of the street, just as he was approaching the door, his hand lifting to push it open, a waiter came up beside Ramsey. The waiter was a husky crewcut blockhead who looked a lot like a police detective in a white waiter's outfit. He handed Ramsey a pink square of paper from a message pad. Ramsey glanced at the paper. The words on it were scribbled in pencil:

  They got a warrant to Trojan horse your phone.

  Ramsey looked up sharply. Silently, he mouthed the word: Who?

  The blockheaded waiter-who-was-really-a-cop mouthed a word back at him: Feds.

  ***

  Shannon pushed through the restaurant door. The voices and the laughter rose around him as the door swung shut. He saw Ramsey sitting in the booth along the wall. The lieutenant was wearing a fine gray suit and a fine burgundy tie. He was holding a pink message slip in his hand, talking to the waiter standing next to him. Then the waiter moved away and Ramsey looked over and saw Shannon coming toward him and Shannon saw the look in his eyes and it was a look like murder. For a second, fear rose uncoiling like a cobra in his stomach, and he actually thought the scenario might play out the way Foster described it: Ramsey just pulling his gun, just shooting him down right there with everyone watching. But no, that didn't make sense. He took a breath and managed to force himself to keep walking forward.

  Ramsey stood up as Shannon reached the booth. The waiter stood close to Shannon so that both men blocked him from the restaurant's view. The waiter was a cop, too, it turned out. He searched Shannon quickly, his hands going over his sides, his stomach, down to his ankles. Shannon let it happen, glancing up idly at the enormous plaster buttocks hanging on the wall. What the hell was that about?

  Then the waiter was finished searching him. He nodded at Ramsey and moved away. Ramsey sat back down. Shannon slid into the booth across the table from him. He wagged his thumb at the ass over his head.

  "I hope that's not a working model."

  Ramsey gave a barely visible hint of a smile. "Could be." He crumpled the pink message slip and put it into his jacket pocket. He came out with his cell phone. He placed the phone in front of him, a small black machine on the white tablecloth. "In your case, it could just be."

  The lieutenant's calm, still, dignified eyes held his eyes steadily. It made Shannon even more nervous. And that cell phone on the table, the phone that was supposed to act as a listening device ... Shannon glanced away, looked around the room at the men and women talking and laughing over their plates of pasta. At least the restaurant was full of witnesses in case anything bad happened.

  "You have something to say to me?" Ramsey asked.

  When Shannon looked at him again, Ramsey was toying with the cell phone on the table in front of him, turning it this way and that as if he was getting ready to spin it around. Had the warrant been blown? Did he know the phone was bugged? Did he know this was a federal operation? Shannon couldn't face the possibility. He decided the lieutenant was just playing with the phone, that's all.

  Shannon leaned toward him, leaned toward the phone.

  "I was there the night you took down Patterson," he said. That was how Foster had told him to open it, go for the shock value. "I was Patterson's backup. I saw the whole thing."

  Ramsey turned the cell phone on the tablecloth this way and that. He gazed at Shannon mildly. "Take down Patterson? What do you mean?"

  "You know what I mean. I was there. I saw it happen."

  "Saw what? I don't know what you're talking about."

  "You know damn well. He gave me copies of his records, too."

  "You're not making sense." Ramsey turned the cell phone in his hand, gazing at Shannon.

  "I'm not here to bust you, Ramsey. That was Patterson's thing. I don't care. I'm just after money, that's all."

  "I'm sure you are," said Ramsey calmly, turning the phone in his hand. "But this is all a mystery to me."

  Shannon felt cold sweat break out on his temples and under his shirt. This was bad. It was wrong. He could feel it. He could feel disaster coming at him, a train on a track. He leaned toward Ramsey, his face damp, hi
s arms on the table. He was vaguely aware that the restaurant noise of voices and laughter had grown dimmer around him.

  "Look," he said in a harsh whisper. "You brought me here. I thought you wanted to deal. You don't want to deal, don't waste my time."

  "You're the one who's wasting time," said Ramsey coolly, smiling slightly. "I thought you had information for me about a murder case. Now you sound as if you're trying to blackmail me. But over what? It doesn't make sense."

  It was such a smooth performance that Shannon stared at him. And as he stared, he noticed for the first time that the sounds of voices and laughter all around him had died away completely. The restaurant was quiet. There was a clink of silverware against a plate, then nothing.

  Feeling the sweat roll down his chest, Shannon turned. The people sitting at the tables—the men in suits, the women here and there—had all stopped talking, stopped eating. They were all just sitting there at their tables. They were all turned toward him, every single one of them. Just sitting at their tables and staring at Shannon.

  Shannon sensed a movement behind him. He looked over his shoulder in time to see a waiter—or a man dressed as a waiter—close the venetian blinds that covered the top half of the front window. Now the whole window was covered. Shannon turned farther at another movement and saw another waiter directly in back of him locking the front door, moving to stand in front of the door so that no one could see past him.

  Now there was no noise in the restaurant at all. The place was silent and he understood: they were all cops. Everyone in the restaurant. They were all Ramsey's people. It was all a setup, all of it.

  Shannon slowly turned back to Ramsey, his eyes passing over all those people—all those cops—at the tables staring at him. When he faced front again, Ramsey gazed at him just as mildly as before. A line of sweat ran down Shannon's temple.

  Without looking down, Ramsey opened his cell phone. He pressed the power button. The cell phone gave out a tone and went dark.