any one of the buildings would have been regarded as a grand edifice indeed. In lower Manhattan, none left any individual impression at all. Ambler shifted again in his seat, not so much to get comfortable as to get less uncomfortable. The jackhammer of a Con Ed street repair crew, somewhere nearby, was beginning to prompt a headache. He checked his watch; he had already read the New York Post from cover to cover. A vendor across the plaza was selling sugared nuts from his four-wheeled cart; Ambler was thinking about buying a bag, simply to give himself something to do, when he noticed a middle-aged man in a Yankees jacket emerging from the back of a black Town Car.
The mark had arrived.
The man was paunchy and sweating despite the cold. He looked around agitatedly as, unaccompanied, he climbed the steps that led from the sidewalk to the plaza. This was someone who knew himself to be acutely vulnerable and was filled with a sense of foreboding.
Ambler stood up slowly. Now what? He had figured that he would play out Arkady's scenario as long as he could-that something would come to him when it had to. It seemed entirely possible that the whole thing would prove a dry run.
Walking toward Ambler rapidly was a woman in heels and a green vinyl raincoat. She had a full mane of tendrilly blond hair, full lips, gray-green eyes. The eyes put Ambler in mind of a cat, perhaps because, like a cat, she never seemed to blink. Incongruously, she was carrying a brown lunch sack. As she approached, her attention seemed distracted by the revolving door to the federal building on the north side of the plaza and she stumbled into him.
"Aw, tripes, I'm sorry," she murmured in a raspy voice.
Ambler found that his hands were now clutching the paper sack, which, his fingers quickly confirmed, did not hold lunch.
The man in the Yankees jacket had reached the plaza and was starting to walk toward the building. Perhaps twelve seconds remained.
Ambler opened his tan raincoat-on every block of the city, one would see a dozen just like it-and pulled the weapon from the sack. It was a blued-steel Ruger .44, a Redhawk. More powerful than the job required and certainly too loud.
He turned and saw that the blonde was seated at another bench, near the building. She had given herself a ringside view.
Now what?
Ambler's heart was pounding. This was no dry run.
This was madness.
It was madness to have agreed to do this. It had been madness to have asked him in the first place.
The mark stopped abruptly, looked around, and started to walk again. He was no more than thirty feet away from Ambler.
An intuition glinted and then flared in Ambler's mind, like the sun passing from under a cloud. Now he understood what he had previously only vaguely, subconsciously surmised.
They never would have asked him.
No doubt Arkady believed what he had been told, but sincerity was no guarantee of truth. In fact, the story made no sense: a risk-averse organization would never give someone of uncertain loyalties an assignment of this nature. He could have easily tipped off the authorities and ensured the mark's safety.
Ergo the whole arrangement was a test. Ergo the gun was empty.
The mark was twenty feet away, walking steadily to the building on the east side of the plaza. Now Ambler strode rapidly toward him, withdrew the Redhawk from his coat, and, aiming at the back of the man's baseball jacket, squeezed the trigger.
There was the quiet, dry click of an empty gun, a sound largely swallowed by the traffic noises and the jack-hammering of the Con Ed crew. Feigning dismay, he squeezed again and again, until all six chambers had been hammered.
He was sure that the blond woman had seen the cylinder rotate, the firing pin twitch without effect.
Detecting sudden movement in his peripheral vision, Ambler turned his head. A security guard across the plaza had seen him! The guard pulled out his own gun from his short navy coat and crouched in a two-handed firing position.
The guard's gun, of course, was loaded. Ambler heard the hard, popping sound of a .38 pistol and the higher-pitched twang as a bullet zinged by his ear. The guard was either lucky or skilled; Ambler could well be killed before he decided which.
Even as Ambler started to run toward the stairway on the south side of the plaza, he noticed another sudden movement; the vendor, as if panicked, had pushed