Blow the House Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

swore—and know
exactly
(his emphasis, not mine) what you are looking for.
    Was my phone tricked? Possibly. Did I want to chance it? Definitely not, but I couldn’t just toss the phone in the nearest USPS mailbox. For one thing, I’d be seen and lose the element of surprise. Worse, the FBI carries keys to mailboxes. If that’s who was on me, they’d be crawling through my SIM card—the unique chip every cell phone operates off—before I got to Sixty-first Street. I had probably a couple hundred contacts stored on it. I wasn’t giving those up to anyone without a fight. I needed a real drop, and I knew the perfect place.
    I headed up Madison fast enough to string out surveillance behind me, then darted across the street at Fifty-fifth against the light, grazing a cab. The Sikh hacker celebrated my victory over death by rolling down his window and cursing me in Punjabi.
Bhenchot!
But this wasn’t the time to stop and tell him I didn’t have a sister, that one child was way too much for dear old Mom. Half a block later, I ducked into the showroom of the Sony building, raced through without breaking stride, and headed straight to the trash can in front of the Starbucks coffee bar on the backside. Surveillance would have had to have been inside the can to see my cell phone filtering down through the crushed cups and napkins.
    â€œCan I help you, sir?”
    â€œA grande double latté con brio with hints of the Costa Rican sunset, and hold the mayo.”
    â€œHuh?”
    My server, if that’s what she was called, had a sterling-silver safety pin stuck through her nose. Other than that, she looked like a Girl Scout from Kansas.
    â€œHouse brew. Large,” I amended. She almost laughed.
    Reinforced paper cup in hand, I found a seat and paged through a well-fingered
New York Post.
The idea was to give surveillance a chance to catch up. When I figured that even an AARP flying squad could have gotten itself in place, I carefully folded the paper, returned it to the counter, and headed for the street. Time to move out and draw fire—Plan B.

CHAPTER 3
    â€œAll units, this is Selma. Che holding steady at five-five-oh Madison. Repeat, Che steady at—”
    â€œSelma, Selma, this is Oxford.”
    â€œFive-five-oh Madison, between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth.”
    â€œSelma—”
    â€œOxford?”
    â€œChe just crossed Sixty-first on foot….”
    H ALF OF EVERYTHING I KNOW about spotting surveillance I owe to Wild Bill Mulligan, my first boss in India, and it took just a single lesson.
    â€œBoy-o,” he said one day as we sat on the veranda at the Bombay Yacht Club, “the trick is to always look at the feet, the shoes. And in a pinch, pants. A good surveillance team carries along reversible jackets, neck braces, red straw hats, a raft of accessories from shopping bags to umbrellas, dogs to a watermelon—anything to distract you. Sleights of hand. But what they almost never do is change shoes. It’s awkward. Takes time. Shoes are hard to carry. Always watch the shoes.”
    Which is just what I was doing as I made my way up Madison Avenue. Fortunately, now that I had moved out of Midtown, people were fewer and farther between. So light was the sidewalk traffic as I cleared Sixty-second Street that I had time to focus my attention on a pair of extraordinarily fine and extremely unlikely suspects, neither more than a size six. When they turned into the Chanel store at Sixty-fourth, I thought, Why not? Browsing Chanel the way I was dressed was one sure way of drawing fire, on me and on anyone else who might find a couple thousand bucks a little steep for a crepe de chine blouse, even if the silk had been spun by free-range worms.
    The door had just closed behind me when it popped back open and in walked a doughy guy in his mid-fifties, brick face, bad comb-over, scarlet Ohio State vinyl jacket, polyester pants, and spotless white