The 4 Phase Man Read Online Free PDF

only inches away, tried to break it down into individual components and constructs; tried to see inwardly what he couldn’t see with his eyes.
    Fire escape.
    The window at the end of the corridor with the fire escape had no coverings of any kind. The wall on the apartment side showed the effects of thirty-plus years of direct sunlight eight months a year. And the sun shone equally brightly on the door.
    Which was still dark, not dried out, fresh despite the superficial signs of wear and tear.
    For the next twenty minutes Xenos checked the ends of all the other corridors of the building that corresponded to Paolo’s end of the building. All the doors were faded and dry.
    Paolo’s door had recently been replaced.
    Returning to the apartment, he pulled a small set of what looked like opera glasses (that oddly came together at a point in the front) from his pack. Checking to be sure he was alone, he pressed them up against the one-way peephole installed in the door. The prism-reversal imaging system (developed by the United States Secret Service) allowed him to reverse the qualities of the peephole’s optics and get a fish-eye look into the apartment.
    It seemed empty.
    After carefully looking over the entire perimeter of the door, and not wanting to take the time and have the visibility that running an ion meter over the door frame would involve, he was convinced the door was unalarmed. Using the key, he let himself in.
    “Six-eight.”
    “Go.”
    “We have a shake at target.”
    “Specify.”
    “Single individual. White male, forties. Baggy clothes, Yankee cap, shades, backpack.”
    “Will relay. Tag Indigo One.” Continue observation.”“Six-eight.”
    The place
was
empty. As empty as an apartment could possibly be. No furniture, curtains, carpet, possessions of any kind. No marks on the floor where furniture might’vebeen. No stains, dirt, cobwebs, nothing. As devoid of identity as any place had ever been. As he moved through the living room, kitchen, and one bedroom, Xenos’s sense of
wrong
dramatically increased.
    Even new homes, freshly built and never occupied, were less empty.
    Xenos had personally emptied enough places over the years in precisely the same way to understand the message behind it. Someone—maybe Paolo, maybe not—wanted nothing left behind that could trace him or give hints of what had happened.
    And there
was
the door.
    Maybe the kid
had
run off with the money, and knowing that the Corsicans would send someone after him, was taking no chances. That was the simple answer, but Xenos hated simple answers.
    So he continued to wander the small rooms.
    He pulled out a small camcorder and began to video the room, the view from each of the three windows. He opened the traps on the drains and bagged the small amount of sludge he could scrape from the almost clean pipes. Moved the shut-off refrigerator, tested the floorboards for hollows, leaned out the window and checked the outside of the building around it.
    Nothing of note.
    Finally he reached into his backpack and pulled out a lineman’s test phone, plugging it into the phone socket.
    Surprisingly he got a dial tone.
    “That’s not right,” he mumbled as he unplugged the phone, and plugged in a palm-sized—less than half-inch-thick—plastic box with an LCD readout. “Not right.” He pressed some buttons on the box, then watched the display.
    212-473-3749
    “Why go to all this trouble and leave the goddamned phone…” He pressed a different sequence of buttons.
    96.3265%
    Xenos smiled without realizing it. He began to enter another sequence. “Now, what’s drawing off less than four percent of your natural impedance, little fellow?”
    Tracer Line Confirmed
    The smile remained frozen as he began to enter a final, longer sequence. Then he quickly gathered his equipment and left the apartment.
    “Six-eight.”
    “Go.”
    “Indigo One on the move.”
    “Seven-one will pick up Indigo One on exit.”
    “Six-eight.”
    It would take