The camera zoomed in.

The woman had brown hair.

“Ruiz, get that bird over Sixth Avenue. We see them. They’re heading north toward 32nd.”

They watched as the couple ran diagonally through the intersection on 32nd Street into a little park.

Reyland slapped a palm down on a desk as they suddenly disappeared under some leafless trees.

“Where the hell did they go?”

“Shit,” said Emerson, now standing by a laptop. “They went down some subway stairs into a station.”

“No, wait. 32nd and Sixth. That’s not the subway. That’s the PATH train entrance, isn’t it? The Jersey train?” Arietta said.

Emerson clicked at the keyboard.

“Double shit. It’s both. There’s a corridor that leads to the PATH train and another one a block long that leads to the subway.”

“Where the hell is our team from the hotel? Get them over there!” Reyland yelled.

“Wait, wait. No, this is a good thing. We have this… I’m patching in… We have a link to the MTA CCTV system,” Arietta said.

The big screen changed to show a tremendous grid of cameras, and Arietta brought up a screen of a platform with the commuter PATH train.

“I don’t see them,” he said.

“Gee, Arietta, I guess they’re not headed out to the Jersey Shore in January. Go figure,” Reyland said.

“It’s them! Look! Number 23. I just saw them,” Emerson said, pointing. “What’s that? The corridor. Where’s that?”

“It’s the two-block underground corridor that runs toward the subway station at Macy’s Herald Square,” Arietta said.

“Get our team down into the subway station at 34th and Sixth now,” Reyland said into the comm link.

“No, no! Tell them to stay on the road,” Arietta said, watching the screen where now the man and woman were running past homeless people down a wide gray corridor.

As they disappeared out of the frame, he brought up the next camera and picked them up again.

“We have eyes on them now. They have cameras throughout the entire system. If they get on a train, we’ll see them. The teams can follow from the surface.”

Reyland rubbed at his chin as they followed the targets across the grid of screens. At the entrance of the subway, they watched as the man paid for a metro card at a machine.

They got a closer look at him for the first time. A stocky white guy, close-cropped sandy hair, about six foot or so, around forty but lean-faced and fit.

Reyland looked at the shoulders on him. Reyland had played Division One college ball, second-string left tackle at Notre Dame, and he thought the guy looked like a running back, a tough, sneaky white boy faster than he looked.

“Arietta, hit this fool with the facial recognition,” he said.

A red square appeared around the man’s profile. Reyland took in his lean face, his blue-gray eyes. His goatee was the color of the Carhartt jacket he was wearing. Is he a hick or something? The reporter’s friend?