“I want you to get up and walk toward the front entrance.”

“What are you going to do, take me for a ride?”

“Don’t fuck around, Devlin. You could be dead in a heartbeat. No point in killing a cop. Besides, certain people would be very mad at me if I dusted you.”

“Old DiBennedetti, you mean?”

“Shut up. Just walk.”

The plainclothesman was looking the other way. To get to the entrance, Devlin was going to have to walk right past him. Lederer had a gun, no doubt about that; all he had to do was leave it in a toilet before he boarded his plane. “Tell me about DiBennedetti,” Devlin said.

“I told you to shut up. Get moving. This could get real ugly if you don’t listen to me. See that woman over there? If I kill you here, I kill her, too.”

Devlin got up. He had to figure this right. The plainclothesman might not even be close to being a real cop, like a security guard, completely untrained. He had been easy enough to make. Devlin wasn’t sure he had seen the guy take a single precaution against being spotted. Devlin couldn’t be sure that Lederer hadn’t made the guy, too. Devlin moved forward, noticing that Lederer stayed back far enough to keep Devlin from getting a good look at him. “Why is DiBennedetti framing me?”

“For making it personal.”

“What?”

“You made it personal. You and the Brennans.”

“It’s bullshit. I never heard of Vittorio DiBennedetti before this afternoon.”

Lederer gave him a little push. The plainclothesman saw it. He tried to act as if he wasn’t suddenly alert, but he wasn’t fooling Devlin. Lederer said, “I’m only telling you what was told to me. There’s no fucking point in arguing with me about it.”

The plainclothesman saw that Devlin was trying to make eye contact. Devlin gave a little jerk of the head. The guy’s eyebrows moved. Devlin didn’t know what Lederer was looking at. They were twenty feet from the plainclothesman. “I don’t see how those people put me in the center of it. I haven’t seen any of the Brennans, including my wife, for more than a decade. Why does DiBennedetti want me alive?”

They were passing the plainclothesman. He had his face in his newspaper. If Lederer had seen his eyebrows go up, the guy was just calling more attention to himself. Beyond the row of plastic chairs was an information booth, empty now.

“Hold it right there!”