"I want a union rep," he said. "And I want my sergeant. I am not answering anything else standing in the middle of a street."
"That is your right," Sullivan said. "Meyer."
The young officer flinched at his own name.
"Your notebook," Sullivan said, not unkindly. "And the log. Read me the call exactly as it came to you. The number, the code, all of it. Slowly."
Lucas Meyer lowered his hands at last and reached, very carefully, for the notebook in his breast pocket.
Chapter Eleven
Call Sign 4417
The street had gone quiet in the way a street goes quiet when everyone on it understands that something has gone wrong beyond fixing. The three black SUVs sat angled across Mercer and Fifth with their doors open, and agents in windbreakers held the corners of the block, and the two city officers stood in the middle of all of it with their hands visible and their radios silent.
Grant Sullivan stood beside the wreck of his own coupe and looked at Officer Derek Vaughn the way a man looks at a locked door he intends to open one way or another.
"Who sent you," he said. It was the third time he had asked. He intended to keep asking until the answer changed shape.
Vaughn worked his jaw. He was a heavy man and the fight had cost him his breath and most of his authority, and neither was coming back quickly. "Dispatch sent us," he said. "We got a call. Suspicious male by a black coupe, possible stolen vehicle. That is all we had."
"And the description," Sullivan said.
"Big man. Dark car. That is what came over."
"And nobody ran the plate."
Vaughn said nothing, which was an answer.
Sullivan turned his head slightly, not far, just enough to bring the younger officer into the conversation. Officer Lucas Meyer stood a half step behind his partner with his baton still riding half out of its ring where he had left it when Sullivan warned him, and his face had the fixed look of a man watching a building come down floor by floor and counting.
"Officer Meyer," Sullivan said. "You were in the passenger seat. You heard the call come in."
Meyer swallowed. "Yes sir."
"Then tell me what you heard. All of it. Word for word, the way it sounded."
Meyer looked at Vaughn. Vaughn did not look back at him, and something in that refusal seemed to settle a question in the younger man, because when Meyer spoke again his voice had steadied into the flat recitation of a man reading from a log he had already memorized.
"We did not get a voice call," Meyer said. "Officer Vaughn told me dispatch had called it in. He said there was a code attached so it would be in the system." He reached slowly, with two fingers, telegraphing the movement for every armed person on the street, and drew the small notebook from his chest pocket. He turned a page. He read the way men read numbers off a page at accident scenes, carefully, one digit given room to stand on its own.
"Call sign 4417," Meyer said. "That is what he gave me. Four four one seven. He said it was a priority response, possible stolen vehicle, driver likely to flee."
A silence followed that had weight to it. Rachel Kim stepped in closer, and her attention had sharpened into something that made the agents nearest her straighten without knowing why.
"Say it again," she said.
"4417," Meyer said. "That was the call code."
Kim looked at Sullivan. Sullivan looked at the two officers standing in the wreckage of a morning that had been eight months in the building, and his voice, when it came, was almost gentle, which on him was never a gentle thing.
"Agent Kim," he said. "Run it."
She had her phone out. She put the call through to the federal communications desk, which had a live bridge into the city system for exactly the length of this operation, and she read the code twice and then she waited, and the whole street waited with her while traffic stacked up beyond the frozen block and a city bus sighed its brakes a street away.
Sullivan did not watch her. He watched the officers, because he had learned long ago that telephones deliver facts but faces deliver the truth about facts, and the truth usually arrives a second early.
On Vaughn, the second arrived right on time.
His weight shifted. It was a small thing, the weight of a big man moving from one foot to the other on broken glass and spilled coolant, but Sullivan had spent twenty years learning to read small things, and he read this one the way other men read headlines. Vaughn knew something about the number his partner had just read aloud to a federal agent. He knew it the way a man knows the sound of his own step on a stair that is not there.