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.”Guilfoyle raised a hand, indicating that Hoover should contain himself.Hoover had spent too long with the machines.His answers always began with “If only.” If only we could improve this.If only we could get more of that.Like the mother of a mischievous child, he had become an apologist for the system’s shortcomings.A picture window ran along one side of the Quiet Room, giving a clear view of the communications center.Guilfoyle slipped on a pair of glasses and directed his attention to the wall.Projected onto the screen was what was called a link map.A bright blue ball with the initials “TB” glowed at its center.Phone numbers belonging to his home, office, cell phone, and BlackBerry ran beneath it.Emanating from the ball, like rays from the sun, was a cluster of lines each leading to its own ball, some small, some large.Those balls, too, had initials, and below them tightly scripted phone numbers.Many of the balls were interconnected, lines running between them.The whole thing looked like a giant Tinkertoy.Each ball represented a person with whom Bolden maintained contact.The larger balls represented those whom, according to his phone records, he spoke with most frequently.They included his girlfriend, Jennifer Dance (at last report, undergoing hospital treatment), several coworkers at Harrington Weiss, the Harlem Boys Club, and a dozen colleagues at other banks and private equity firms.The smaller balls included less frequently contacted coworkers, other colleagues, and a half dozen restaurants.In all there were approximately fifty balls in orbit around Bolden’s sun.Guilfoyle had programmed Cerberus to monitor all the phone lines indicated on the link map on a real-time basis.Automatically, Cerberus would compare the parties speaking with a voiceprint of Thomas Bolden taken that morning.Guilfoyle didn’t have enough manpower to stake out all of Bolden’s acquaintances.With the link map, it didn’t matter.Should Bolden phone any of these numbers, Guilfoyle could listen in.More important, he could get a fix on Bolden’s location.The problem was that Bolden was a sharp operator.He had learned firsthand that his phone had been bugged and that using a cell phone meant risking capture.The link map was therefore a waste of time.Guilfoyle rubbed his eyes.Over a hundred monitors running floor to ceiling occupied another corner of the room.The monitors drew a live feed from exterior surveillance cameras around Midtown and lower Manhattan.The pictures switched rapidly from location to location.Software analyzed the faces of all pedestrians captured by the cameras and compared them to a composite of three photographs of Thomas Bolden.Simultaneously, it analyzed the gaits of the subjects, and using a sophisticated algorithm, compared them to a model established from the video of Bolden striding down the corridor at Harrington Weiss earlier that morning.It wasn’t the walk it was analyzing as the exact distance between his ankle and knee, knee and hip, and ankle and hip.The three ratios were added together to yield a composite number that was as unique for every man, woman, and child as their fingerprints.That was the good news.The bad news was that snow, rain, or any kind of moisture in the atmosphere degraded the picture enough to render the software program ineffective.For all the money the Organization had poured into Cerberus, for all the millions of man-hours the brightest brains in the nation—in the world, dammit—had spent developing the software to run it, Cerberus was still a machine.It could gather.It could hunt.But it could not intuit.It could not guess.Guilfoyle removed his glasses and set them delicately on the table.The discipline that had governed his entire life fell round him like a cloak, smothering his irritation, dampening his anger.Still, it was only by the utmost self-control that he did not shout.Only Hoover noticed the tick pulling at the corner of his mouth.Machines.Wolf Ramirez sat quietly in a dark corner of his hotel room, drawing the blade of his K-Bar knife across the sharpening stone.A clusterfuck was what it was, he thought, as he reversed direction and drew the blade toward him.Too many people running in too many directions trying to get the simplest thing done.Well, what did they expect? You didn’t send a pack of hounds to do a wolf’s work.Wolf’s eyes lifted to the cell phone he had set on the table in front of him.After a moment, he concentrated on the knife again.To hone the blade as sharp as he liked, he needed to work on it for a solid hour.Only then would it be truly razor sharp.Sharp enough to slip into the skin as easily as a needle and cleanly separate the dermis from the sheath of fat below it.Only then could he lift the six layers of tissue off a man as neatly as if he were filleting a trout.Straight, unfrayed lines.That’s what he liked.Precision.Wolf didn’t like to leave a man messy.When he was finished with the bad guys, he wanted their souvenir of their time with him to be a work of art, geometric in its precision.The pain would soon pass.But the scars would be with them forever.Wolf was proud of his skills.He stared at the phone.This time it rang.He smiled.Sooner or later Guilfoyle always came back to him.“Yeah?” he said.“Can you find him?”“Maybe.But you have to level with me.”“What do you need?”“Just one thing.Tell me what you don’t want him to discover.”40Bolden walked past the entrance to Harrington Weiss’s world headquarters.Tall glass windows allowed him an unobstructed view inside.At one-thirty, the lobby was moderately busy, a thin but steady stream of people flowing in and out of the building.By now, Weiss’s body had been removed, the office cordoned off, and hopefully cleaned, witnesses interviewed, and reports taken.Other than the usual building security, he didn’t see a single police officer.Like a messenger who’d overshot his address, Bolden turned right back around and walked inside.A white marble floor, high ceilings, and stout granite piers gave the lobby the look and feel of a train station.He presented himself to the reception desk.“Ray’s Pizza.Delivery for Althea Jackson.HW.Forty-second floor.” He plopped the brown paper bag holding the pizza and soft drink on the counter, and slipped a business card he’d taken from Ray’s along next to it.“Let me make that call,” said the security guard.“Althea on forty-two?”Bolden nodded, and looked around.Less than ten feet away, a dozen uniformed police officers stood huddled around two plainclothes officers, listening intently to their instructions.He kept his face turned away from them.After seeing his picture on TV, he’d spent the last of his money on a cheap baseball cap and some even cheaper sunglasses.He had no doubt that Althea was in the office.Any normal place of business you’d get the day off after seeing a man’s brains blown out.The whole firm might be expected to shut down, if for no other reason than to show respect for the boss, a founder no less
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