The NSA employee whom he’d contacted earlier hadn’t been able to tell him much, other than that Mannie had been picked up by the FBI and was being held somewhere, but he didn’t know where. “They’re playing this one really close to the vest,” the guy had said.

“I imagine they are.”

Now, Sasha pointed. “But I don’t get it. What’s the plastic for?”

“Easier cleanup.”

“But—”

“Trust me, my dear. The less you know, the better.”

As he was setting a chair in the middle of the tarp, his encrypted phone rang, and when he answered it, Mannie’s voice came on: “I’m out. I’m free. The Feds had me at the Field Office.”

“What happened?”

“Picked me up on Amber Road. I’ll fill you in when I see you.”

“Where are you?”

“On my way to Kingsbridge Heights. The reservoir.”

Blake knew the place. One of their prearranged meeting locations.

“I’ll send a car to pick you up,” Blake said.

“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell them anything.”

Blake smoothed out the few remaining wrinkles in the plastic. “The thought never crossed my mind.”

++++

Collins was good.

It took her less than four minutes to tag the phones. All five of them were traveling in different routes and at different speeds along nearby streets. One dot on the map might have been our suspect, but all of them clearly were not.

Mannie passed the phones out. He gave them away.

Not bad. That’s what I would have done.

Over the next few minutes, we checked our external CCTV cameras to no avail and tracked down all the people carrying the missing phones. However, even when the agents or NYPD officers caught up with them and asked where the big guy who’d handed them the phone had gone, none of them could tell us anything helpful.

The fact that Mannie was able to elude detection on the street and avoid being captured on any exterior cameras made me think again of how the observer in the senator’s house was able to avoid being seen on the security cameras at the residence.

I still hadn’t spoken with Tessa, which concerned me, so, before regrouping with DeYoung, I headed to the lobby to touch base with her.

When I arrived, she wasn’t there. I asked the FBI Police officer assigned to the metal detector if he knew where she was, and he told me simply that she’d left.

“Do you know where she went?”

“Nope. She was worried about coming back through again, though. Said something about getting a sandwich.”

I felt a flood of frustration that quickly turned to worry.

“Was she alone?”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t know where she might have gone?”

“I already told you that I don’t.”

This guy was irritating me. “Right.”

I went outside and scanned the street but didn’t see her.