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“How can I talk to you if I have to?”

“I will text the next number I get to Tesserat’s phone using that code we made up.”

“Okay,” she said, and we both disconnected.

“Hullo,” he answered, a dreamy note to his voice, sounding almost like a real watchmaker-repairman from another era.

“Somebody connected to the cops grabbed me with pay soldiers. I think they were planning to kill me.”

“You all right?”

“Free and not wounded. I got one’a their cars and phones.”

“Ditch ’em both and get over to me.”

“First I got to settle,” I said. “But I’ll be there by tonight.”

I parked the SUV at an underground garage in Midtown. I exited, trying my best not to be recorded on their security cams. After that I climbed down into the hole in the ground.

At the best of times I don’t like subways. All those people, and many of them, I knew from thirteen years on the force, were armed. Buskers, pickpockets, madmen and women, and then all the potential victims, whom no police force on earth could protect.

My breathing in the crowded southbound car was erratic, and I could feel my heart beating. That cellar had been my grave for some hours, but it was just now that the terror was settling in.

Six times I decided to leave the country. Canada and then maybe Mongolia or Lithuania, Cuba or Chad. Jackie Robinson’s son made a new life for himself in Tanzania. Six times I steadied myself and thought of how I could dig my way out of a grave with no name on it.

The worst part of that leg of the journey was that I didn’t have a book on me. I needed to read something. It didn’t matter what.

A woman across the aisle got off at Thirty-Fourth Street leaving a throwaway newspaper on the seat next to her. I literally leapt out of my seat and grabbed the rag before anyone else could. Then I went to the chrome pole set between the center doors of the car and read all about Chinee Love, a black-skinned, yellow-haired New Age singer whose band played pots and pans behind her performance-art songs.

I climbed out of that hell at the West Fourth Street station and walked nine blocks to Name-it Storage facility. Their records knew me as Nigel Beard. I had a pretty big space on the thirteenth level.

It was a crowded room, twenty by twenty-five feet. There were boxes of books, papers, weapons, and other, more particular, tools of my trade.

But before I did anything else I sat down in the stuffed chair that I kept dead center of the secret workspace.

There was electricity, so I had light. There were a thousand books, so I didn’t have to read.

Over the next hour or so my breathing normalized and my heart gave up its drumroll. I was innocent of any crime. Those men had kidnapped me. I had every right to defend myself.

And then there were the simple pleasures of life: a comfortable chair and air to breathe, no chains or chimeric criminals who would kill you just for wanting to reveal the truth.

After calming down I used bottled water, bar soap, and a disposable razor to shave my head.

Against the south wall of the storage room stood a rosewood armoire that was eight feet high and six wide. From this I took a makeup case I bought while taking a class called Hollywood Makeup Techniques.

I studied that particular facet of cosmetics for one reason—to be able to don convincing fake facial hair when I needed anonymity. I realized over the years that a mustache made my face look different. Something about my nose, the distance between my eyes, and the shape of my skull.

After attaching the natural-hair lip wig and sideburns to hide my telltale scar, I waxed my bald pate and then studied myself in a hand mirror, as Lamont Charles had done.

I was pretty well satisfied with the results.

There was a dull ochre trench coat hanging from the closet pole of my wardrobe. It was stuffed with wadded material so that when I put it on I looked forty to fifty pounds heavier.

I then spent a good while looking at myself in the full-length mirror that lined the inner left-side door of the armoire. While checking out my disguise, I was considering a next move.

The disguise was solid. Scar, size, face, and hair all altered enough. On any other job I would have stopped there. But this was a situation where I couldn’t afford a mistake. My visage was still too cop-like.

So I reached into the armoire and took out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with clear, thick, nonprescription lenses. The transformation was now complete. Rather than a Cro-Magnon cop I was a Neanderthal nerd.