The March Against Crime began on time with fifteen church groups and a miscellaneous contingent of men, women and children who wanted to take their neighborhoods back. The weather had worsened and snow blew on frigid winds that drove more people into taxis and the subways because it was too cold to walk.

At two-fifteen, Lucy, Commander Penn and I were in the control room, every monitor, television and radio turned on. Wesley was in one of several Bureau cars that ERF had painted to look like yellow cabs and equipped with radios, scanners, and other surveillance devices. Marino was on the street with Transit cops and plainclothes FBI. HRT was divided among the Dakota, the drugstore and Bleecker Street. We were unclear on the precise location of anyone because no one on the outside was standing still, and we were in here, not moving.

‘Why hasn’t anyone called?’ Lucy complained.

‘He hasn’t been sighted,’ said Commander Penn, and she was steady but uptight.

‘I assume the parade has started,’ I said.

Commander Penn said, ‘It’s on Lafayette, headed this way.’

She and Lucy were wearing headphones that plugged into the base station on the console. They were on different channels.

‘All right, all right,’ Commander Penn said, sitting up straighter. ‘We’ve spotted him. The number seven platform,’ she exclaimed to Lucy, whose fingers flew. ‘He’s just come in from a catwalk. He’s entered the system from a tunnel that runs under the park.’

Then the number seven platform was on black-and- white TV. We watched a figure in a long dark coat. He wore boots, a hat and dark glasses, and stood back from other passengers at the platform’s edge. Lucy brought up another subway survey on the screen as Commander Penn stayed on the radio. I watched passengers walking, sitting, reading maps and standing. A train screamed by and got slower as it stopped. Doors opened and he got on.

‘Which way is he bound?’ I asked.

‘South. He’s coming this way,’ Commander Penn said, excited.

‘He’s on the A line,’ Lucy said, studying her monitors. ‘

‘Right.’ Commander Penn got on the air. ‘He can only go as far as Washington Square,’ she told someone. Then he can transfer and take the F line straight to Second Avenue.’

Lucy said, ‘We’ll check one station after another.

We don’t know where he might get off. But he’s got to get off somewhere so he can go back into the tunnels.’

‘He has to do that if he comes in the Second Avenue way,’ Commander Penn relayed to the radio. ‘He can’t take the train in there because it’s not stopping there.’

Lucy manipulated the closed-circuit television monitors. At rapid intervals they showed a different station as a train we could not see headed toward us.

‘He’s not at Forty-second,’ she said. ‘We don’t see him at Penn Station or Twenty-third.’