They exchanged nods.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Scull said.

DeMarco looked briefly at him, then turned to Nimec.

“You think we ought to take a walk?” he said.

Nimec jerked his head slightly to indicate the surrounding crush of market buyers.

“I like it where we are,” he said. “Best place to be right now.”

DeMarco nodded his understanding. A congested area offered its own type of cover—the people in circulation around them would present a constant and changing impediment to an observer’s line of sight.

“Okay, let’s compare notes,” Nimec said to him.

“We were tailed.”

“Wheels or heels?”

“Wheels,” DeMarco said. “A-B.”

Meaning he and Wade had been subjects of a two-car vehicular surveillance.

“The lead driver was a cabbie outside the hotel,” Wade said, looking down as he spoke to partially mask his lips from view. “He wasn’t interested in fares, ignored a whole bunch of people at the stand. Pulls out behind us, follows slow and tight. Then he turns off, and somebody else in a regular car picks up the tail.”

“The hack show himself again?” Nimec said.

“Cruises by about five blocks farther on, disappears,” DeMarco said. “I think he might’ve been worried he got burned.”

Nimec stood in thoughtful silence.

“Heels for Scull and me,” he said after a moment. “A-B-C.”

Meaning the surveillance placed on them had consisted of a three-man foot team. And it hadn’t been half bad. There had been a man in an embroidered kufi hat and dashiki talking into a cell phone as he stepped from an apartment building near the hotel. Another two men in casual Western clothes, strolling together on the opposite side of the avenue, moving almost abreast of them. The men across the street had seemed to be conversing with each other, but then Nimec, noticing one of them wore an earbud headset, realized he was also on a cellular. Just as Dashiki had passed Nimec and Scull and turned into a store, Earbud crossed to their side of the avenue, dropping back, taking Dashiki’s position at the rear. A few blocks later they pulled another switch. Earbud quickening his pace, then passing. Dashiki reappearing behind them, trailing them again, a quick shopper that one. Meanwhile, lo and behold, Earbud’s friend had kept pace across the avenue. The leapfrogging had continued almost the entire way to the market.

Nimec glanced at Ackerman.

“How about you?” he said.

“A pair of gendarmes in a patrol car,” Ackerman said. He was shaking his head in the negative, a ploy to confuse hidden eyes. “Right up until I got into the market.”

Nimec kept looking at him. “You sure?”

“Positive. Black uniforms. They split off after Conners.”