Devlin rolled out of the lot as quickly as possible without drawing attention to himself, turned up the hill toward the tunnel, and mashed the accelerator. As he reached the crest, six blocks away, the rearview mirror showed the police cruiser nosing around the corner. Devlin kept the pedal to the floor. He couldn’t take any kind of a chance, even checking if they had spotted him. They would see in the next two seconds that the car was gone. Devlin’s palms were so wet with sweat they were slipping off the steering wheel. Psychiatrists said that criminals liked this. They liked living on the edge, getting as close to the edge as possible.

“Assholes!” he shouted. “Assholes!”

The Hudson Tubes—they were called PATH now. After the war, when he was still in grade school, his aunt and cousins lived in Irvington, beyond Newark. The Devlins had made the trip by public transportation. Focusing on that experience, Devlin suddenly remembered the dank smell of the tubes, like nothing he had encountered before or since. Journal Square popped into his mind: the hub of Jersey City. A PATH stop was there or nearby, and in just minutes he would be back in Manhattan—but far downtown, near the World Trade Center and all the Liberty hullaballoo. Not the worst thing: it was easier to hide in a crowd, easier to move around. His only added problem might be finding a telephone. He had to call Steve Loncaric. And he wanted to talk to Vittorio DiBennedetti.

Now more than ever.

4:12 P.M. …

4:12 P.M. …

“Steve, it’s Frank Devlin. What’s on your mind?” “Eileen is safe. She’s here. I could have told your partner that, but I thought maybe his telephone was being tapped.”

“Good thinking. Let me talk to her.”

“She’s lying down—asleep on the couch in the office upstairs.”

“What made her leave John’s apartment?”

“A telephone call. She had a signal with John. The phone rang twice, stopped, started again, and when she picked up, no one spoke. Someone was checking to see if she was there. It was all she needed. She came here, very rattled. This is the one place they wouldn’t dare violate.”

“Steve, the cops are looking for me everywhere. The mayor and the commissioner are behind it. The mob killed Jack Brennan. There’s some suspicion that they killed Joe eight years ago.”

“What does that have to do with you?”

“That’s the part I don’t know yet,” Devlin said. “Some files in Jack Brennan’s office had my name on them, they were stolen during a break-in, and that’s where they got the idea that I was involved, I think. They could have killed me at anytime, but haven’t yet. I made things worse for myself today, but given the story of my life, that shouldn’t surprise anybody.”

“What did you do?”