I left word at the hotel to inform me if those parties check in.”
“They shouldn’t be checking in,” Andropov said. “They should be leaving, correct?”
“That was the message,” Totoy said.
Andropov called to Markov.
“Bring the boy in,” he said.
Markov went out and came back dragging Ronnie with the help of another Russian.
Andropov put the photocopy of the woman’s passport in his face, giving him a good look at the photo.
“Know her?” Andropov said.
Ronnie shook his head wearily. “No.”
Markov said, “Little bastard, you haven’t had enough? I guess we go at it again.”
“No,” Andropov said. “You don’t have to do that.”
Markov seemed puzzled.
“I believe him,” Andropov said.
“You do?” Markov said.
“Look at him. Look at that shirt. Those trousers. Does he really look like he has anything in common with the kind of people who pay seven thousand U.S. dollars per night for hotel rooms? I don’t know who these Americans are or why they care, but I’m sure they have no personal connection with this sorry specimen.”
Markov, dropping into Russian, said, “What should we do with him?”
Andropov answered in Russian: “Take care of him tonight.”
Markov nodded and started to take Ronnie from the room.
Andropov stopped him. “Have Leonid do a blood draw first.”
Markov gave a derisive snort.
“What?” he said. “You expect to strike gold twice in the same family?”
“Let me tell you about gold mining, hunting for nuggets,” Andropov said. “You spend a lot of time and money just to get in the right place to do it. If you go to all that trouble, you’re a stupid fuck if you don’t turn over all the stones.”
He saw that Markov still didn’t understand.
“Just do it,” he said.
He turned to Totoy Ribera.
“Find the Americans,” he said.
“It isn’t that easy,” Totoy said. “This is a city of twenty million people, with thousands of foreign visitors at any time.”
“I want to know where they are. I want to know what they’re doing,” Andropov said.
Totoy thought that finding the four might have been easier if Andropov hadn’t overplayed his hand with the soft-spoken visitor named Winston Stickney. Totoy had suggested a discreet tail. Andropov had insisted on the rough stuff.
“Muscle up on him a little,” Andropov had ordered.
And Andropov was unquestionably the boss.
Now Totoy began to ask himself how he might find four Americans in one of the largest and most chaotic cities on the planet.
He went to the video monitors, where one of the Russians sat staring blankly.
“This morning,” Totoy said. “Around the time the American arrived and I took him for a ride. What do you have on the sidewalk outside?”
One of the views was from a camera above the front door of Impierno. Another looked up the walkway to the sidewalk. The operator began to rewind both cameras, jumping back in time, first rewinding in large chunks, then slowing the rate.
Then it was there, at the top of one view: Winston Stickney speaking with the old woman on the sidewalk.
“Back more,” Totoy said, and the view loped backward in time until it caught Stickney and another man speaking on the sidewalk, then standing in front of the front door of Impierno, then leaving a car—a Nissan sedan—that was backing into a parking space as it arrived.
A car, not a taxi. He had a driver.
“Stop. Slowly forward.”
Totoy was watching the Impierno camera, the rear bumper of the car, looking for the license plate as it backed in toward the curb.
A group of pedestrians cut off the view just before the plate became visible. By the time they moved out of the way, the car was parallel to the curb, the plate unreadable.
“Okay, forward again.”
It all began to unfold in the proper sequence now, the American and his driver getting out together, looking around, the American going into Optimo and coming back out again, speaking to the woman, standing, and being hustled off the sidewalk, into the car.
The camera above the front door caught the driver watching this, hesitating, then going around and getting behind the wheel, backing up, turning out, into the street…
“Stop,” Totoy said. “Forward by frames.”
And there it was, caught in a single frame, the license plate. Totoy leaned in close to the monitor screen. Three digits, three letters.
Totoy reached for a piece of paper.
Fifteen
Favor was watching from the front window when the old trike driver named Romeo Mandaligan pulled up to the hotel precisely at four p.m. Favor went down and folded himself into the cramped passenger seat, hunching under the low canopy, and they rode a block and a half