Chapter 32
They rode in silence to Cadorna and left the station for the streets and the plaza that led to the buses and trams, an open-air square, clean and colorful with bright sculptured art.
To the left, touristic and inviting, rose the massive walls of the Sforzesco castle, and Munroe went in the opposite direction, navigating through pedestrian traffic with the directions Bradford had given, for several minutes along a street lined with trees still bright green with young leaves.
Munroe double-checked the address on her paper and stopped at a gelato store that stood contrastingly spare and modern against the grand colonial structure it inhabited.
Inside, she found a seat for Neeva and, in an attempt at normalcy and in acknowledgment of the hunger that gnawed at her own insides, reached into her pocket for the last of the euros to buy Neeva something to eat.
She caught the eye of the man behind the register. He was deceptively young-looking, though Munroe placed him in midthirties, tiny and wiry, and not at all what stereotype might suggest one of Bradford’s connections would look like.
But in his focused interest, his unwillingness to drop his gaze, there was no mistaking that he’d recognized Munroe, if not Neeva, when she’d first walked through the door.
Without breaking eye contact with her new admirer, Munroe handed Neeva the cash.
“If you’re hungry,” she said. “But don’t leave the shop. And if you see Pretty Boy, or anyone else who looks familiar, same instructions as last time.”
Neeva nodded and Munroe moved toward the register.
The aproned man motioned one of the employees to take his place.
He stepped away from the counter, not so obvious as to be noticeable to the random observer, and definitely not to Neeva, who, money in hand, was already headed to the cold glass cases, but enough that Munroe understood she’d been invited inward.
He exited the room through a swinging door not far from the register and Munroe followed.
He turned only once to confirm her presence and led the way down a narrow hall that wrapped into an L, past a cold room and a small kitchen, to another door, which, contrary to everything else about the shop, had a keypad and a biometric scanner.
He placed his thumb against the pad and the door clicked open.
The room was walk-in-closet-size with bare walls and a bare desk.
The door shut behind Munroe of its own accord, and the aproned man turned to face her.
“I’m told you have a tail,” he said, and his English was spoken with an unmistakable hint of small-town Texas.
“Yes,” she replied, and out of habit scanned the walls and seams of the windowless room, taking measurements, calculating where she assumed the faux walls ended and the real room began.
“I’m ahead by at least five minutes,” she said. “I’ll drop into a few other places for the sake of appearances.”
He reached beside the bare metal desk. Picked up a briefcase, laid it flat on the desktop, popped it open, and turned it toward her.
Munroe examined the contents. Two Israeli Jericho 9 mms. Two spare magazines. Eight 50-round boxes of 9 mm ammunition.
An envelope. Six blocks of dollar and euro bills, bound and stacked. Cell phone. Charger. Pocketknife. Taser.
God, she loved Bradford. Only he could have, without any explanation on her part, anticipated her moves in advance.
Munroe pulled the roll of tape and Lumani’s travel documents from her jacket and dumped them into the briefcase.
She looked up to find the aproned man studying her the way she’d studied the room.
“Whoever you are,” he said, “Miles just pulled in a large favor for you— you’d better be worth it.”
“It’s well earned,” she said, and the nameless man dropped the briefcase lid, pushed it shut, then handed the case to her.
“Do you have another bag?” she said. “Something easier to carry, that won’t attract as much attention?”
“You’re on foot?”
Munroe nodded.
“In the staff room,” he said, tipping his head in the direction he’d intended.
She followed him out again to the room next door, where he pulled a satchel from a cubbyhole and dumped its contents on the floor.
“This’ll have to do,” he said. “Unless”— he glanced at her again from head to toe— “you want a purse.”
“This is fine,” she said.
He held the satchel open while she transferred the items from one bag to the other. “Miles referred to you as a ‘she,’ ” he said.
Munroe shoved the phone into her jacket pocket. Took one of the handguns back out. Released the magazine, pulled the slide, snapped the magazine back into place.
As soon as she had a moment she’d strip the weapons down, reassemble, and reload, but for now this would have to do.
“I am a she,” she said. She slipped the Jericho underneath her jacket at the small of her back.
The aproned man said, “I see,” and he motioned to the door. “Questions, but no time.”
She followed him out. “I need a clothing store,” she said. “Something away from the metro— doesn’t have to be big.”
They moved through the swinging door back into the shop. “Take a right on your way out and just keep walking,” he said.
“Someone’s probably going to come looking for me,” she said. “I really do apologize.”
He smiled— the first spontaneous facial expression he’d offered. “I’m not worried about it, might even be a good thing.”
When Munroe returned to the main room, Neeva was sitting at a table eating chocolate gelato from a half-finished large cup. She paused when Munroe approached.
“Take the food,” Munroe said. “We’ve gotta go.” Neeva half stood and, with the cup in her hand, hesitated. “It’s not disposable,” she said.
Munroe took Neeva’s elbow and guided her upward so that Neeva had no choice but to stand upright.
“Take it anyway, we need to move.”
Neeva put the glass on the table and, with head down and no protest, followed Munroe to the door.
There, with another scan up and down the street, Munroe slipped back in among the pedestrian traffic.
“Why did we go there?” Neeva said. “Not for food.”
“Money,” Munroe said. “Options.” And left it at that.
They’d need to move quickly to turn this stop into one of many so that Lumani, knowing she was working toward a plan, would be forced to check each lead in his own attempt to put the pieces together and try to jump ahead of her.
Another several minutes of walking and Munroe spotted a clothing store.
While perhaps not specifically the one the aproned man had in mind, it would suffice.
Inside, she pulled items off of racks, held them up to Neeva for size, and draped them over Neeva’s outstretched arm until she’d combined two full sets of clothing for the girl and another for herself,
then headed toward the checkout— they didn’t bother trying anything on for fit because they didn’t have the time,
but once the items had been paid for, she tore tags off several pieces and sent Neeva to the changing room.
“Take off everything you’re wearing,” she said. “Down to your bra and panties— leave nothing that came from the bad people— bring it all to me because I need it.”
Neeva grimaced. “Even the panties? I’ve been wearing this stuff for two days.”
“Everything,” Munroe said.
“What about the shoes?”
“That’s our next stop.”
Years in a job that required the ability to blend seamlessly from one environment to the next had taught Munroe well in regard to clothing.
The human subconscious filtered out the familiar, and as such, the fastest way to become invisible in any city was to acquire and wear what could be had locally.
Neeva returned from the dressing room and handed Munroe a ball of textured color, and Munroe stuffed the lump into the shopping bag.
The new outfit, combined with hat and sunglasses, had effectively turned Neeva into one in a crowd. Munroe nodded approvingly.
“What about you?” Neeva said.
“No time, we need to keep moving.”
“I thought you got rid of the tracker.”
“I got rid of some of them,” Munroe said. She took Neeva’s arm and nudged her toward the door.
“So they’re still following us?”
“I hope so,” Munroe said. Heat along her neck, like breath, a finely attuned sense long developed by hunting and hiding, told her Lumani was close.
Imagined or not, she could feel him, watching, breathing in her ear.
Out of the store and down a side street, flattened against the wall, heart slowing into the reptilian calm of narrowed focus,
Munroe waited, watching traffic, finally spotting a vehicle, which, although only one of many, was traveling particularly slow.
She saw no faces, only the shadows of two people in the front.
Couldn’t know if the car belonged to Lumani or one of his people, only that intuition had spoken, and she had learned through long, hard experience to trust her instinct and allow the inner tempo to lead where logic failed.
THEY FOUND A shoe store and repeated the procedure, allowing no time to dally, and were on their way again in minutes with directions from the shopkeeper for a grocery store,
where along aisles a tenth the size of what she’d have found in Dallas, Munroe filled a basket haphazardly and at random with packaged food and bottled drinks.
Outside Munroe handed two of the bags to Neeva. “I know you’re tired, but you’re going to have to help me carry some of this stuff,” she said, “just a couple more stops and we can rest.”
Last came a drugstore, where Munroe searched out the closest items she could find to hair wax, eye pencils, and lip products.
Added hydrogen peroxide, nail polish, and mascara and grabbed a backpack off a circular rack— a shopping foray that would have made most males proud: items procured with indifferent efficiency.
Neeva grabbed soap, shaving cream, and a packet of razors and held them up for approval before adding them to the pile.
From the drugstore Munroe led a zigzagged course toward the nearest tramline, reaching the bus-stop-size platform at the same time a streetcar arrived.
Didn’t matter where the tram was headed, only that they would move away from the area faster than they could if they remained on foot.
The doors hissed shut and Munroe studied passersby through the windows.
Caught sight of a familiar figure— not Lumani, Arben the second, the nameless silent man who’d been with them in the cells— running, so foolishly running, as if to say Here I am, notice me, through the crowds.
He’d clearly not spotted them, as he had headed for the tramline as if following a map, as if he’d known where to look.
Then missing the tram, he turned from the platform to the street, and the car Munroe had spotted earlier slowed only long enough for the man to climb into the passenger seat.
