expensive townhouses, all gleaming white with red-tiled roofs and beautifully maintained. Few were residences. Most served as offices for accountants, lawyers and doctors. The park’s maple trees on the far side of the road cast dappled shadows across the pavement and offered shade for parked high-end sedans and hulking luxury SUVs. Victor couldn’t see a single piece of litter or trace of gum.
Every thirty metres or so a bench was positioned on the wide pavement opposite. Men and women in business attire made use of them to eat their lunches and drink coffee, or just to enjoy the sunshine while chatting on their phones.
A bus stop on the far side of the road was the only sign the neighbourhood did not exist in a world of pure affluence. Only two buses stopped there because those who lived and worked here shunned public transport, but the stop was useful for visitors to the park. Victor imagined he was one of the few people in the area, if not the entire city, who considered a bus the ideal method of urban transport. His life was one of assumed identities, but if he could avoid it he preferred not to compromise them with the trail of documentation required to buy or rent a car. Stealing one posed an unnecessary risk, significant enough that it was only to be undertaken when there was no other option. Cars also trapped him, both by confining him physically and by demanding the concentration necessary to drive them. Riding the subway meant he could maintain more vigilance, but at the price of being held captive at least thirty metres underground. A bus, however, was a mode of transport that let him preserve vigilance, yet one via which he could depart frequently and easily without leaving behind a paper trail.
He planned to take a bus out of the neighbourhood as the first step of his counter-surveillance routine, but not from the stop opposite his destination. A handful of people were waiting – three heavy-set men in business suits, an elderly couple holding hands, a young man in a cap, and a woman with two small children – and they stood up from their seats or shuffled forward into a rough line as both buses that stopped there neared, one after the other.
Except for the man in the cap.
Victor slowed his pace and dropped his gaze to the medical notes in his hand while the buses pulled up, the first in front of the stop, the other directly behind the first. A minute later they set off again, the second bus pulling out ahead of the first because they largely shared the same route and most of the waiting people had not wanted to walk the extra distance to the second bus.
The first bus joined the traffic after the second, leaving the bus stop empty.
Except for the man in the cap.
He wore walking boots, jeans and a sports jacket. Earbuds rested in his ears and the wires extended down and disappeared beneath the jacket. The brim of a cap hid his eyes. There was some logo on the cap Victor didn’t recognise. The cap was navy blue and the logo black. The sports jacket was grey. The jeans were faded but dark. The walking boots were brown.
He looked to be in his late twenties, but it was hard to be exact when his face was half hidden by the navy blue cap. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t broad or thin. His clothes were ordinary. Most people wouldn’t have looked at him twice, if they had noticed him at all. But he’d let both of the only two buses that served the stop leave and there was a bench less than ten metres away that would have been far more comfortable to sit on than the small plastic stools of the bus stop.
Victor crossed the street to the same side as the man in the cap and headed west. He didn’t look back: either the man was still sitting at the bus stop and therefore was of no concern, or he was now walking west as well, in which case Victor had nothing to gain by letting the man know he was on to him.
After one hundred metres the pavement turned ninety degrees to follow the border of the park. Victor waited in the small crowd that had gathered at the road’s edge, waiting for the crossing light to change. If the man in the cap was behind him