The Last Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page B

Midori, the kind of thing I'm comfortable with, and not on what I would do afterward, about which I had no idea.
    I checked in and headed to my room on the twelfth floor. I liked what I saw: spacious layout, high ceilings, and a wall-to-wall window overlooking the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor. Somehow the location felt right: Manhattan, yes, but at a safe distance, literally the water's edge, not the tangled inland terrain where I might easily find myself confused or lost or worse. I unpacked, showered, and called housekeeping to have my laundry picked up. Then I grabbed a hotel umbrella and headed out to do a few evening errands.
    I walked north on West Street, the rain beating steadily against the umbrella. A few financial district commuters hurried past me, but the area was otherwise dark and deserted. At Vesey, I walked up a gray riser of stairs and cut east along an elevated walkway. Water dripped from the corrugated roof into puddles on the concrete. On the left, through chain mesh fencing, clusters of construction equipment lay dormant in dust and darkness. I moved to the right and paused for a moment before the metal wall like a visitor in front of a hospital curtain, then looked down through a gap. Below me, frozen in the glow of sodium arc lamps as unflinching as those of any coroner's examination room, was the enormous hole where the towers had burned. At first glance, it was just a large construction site, much like any other. And yet the air was undeniably heavy with the enormity of what had produced this amputated place and the contorted walkways around and above it. The debris had been cleared, the equipment positioned, the lights turned on… and then, it seemed, some odd rigor had taken hold. The dead had been carted away but the land had yet to be resettled, and so the area felt sad and pernicious, a purgatory, an inbetween. I looked around and noticed other people who had similarly paused to observe the strange urban absence, and realized the mood of the site was infectious. I moved on.
    I kept walking until I reached Tribeca, where the lights and laughter from restaurants and clubs pulled me from the pall that had gripped me farther south. I started to think operationally. The first item I needed was a mobile phone. Ordinarily I eschew mobiles. I've never liked the idea of carrying something that's quietly tracking and in fact broadcasting my location — especially after revelations about the NSA's post-9/11 eavesdropping program — and I prefer to rely on electronic bulletin boards and, when necessary, random pay phones. But now I needed something I could use to communicate quickly with Dox. Well, a prepaid mobile ought to be secure enough for the short time I'd be using it.
    I would have preferred to purchase a unit without identifying myself, but governments all over the world, including Uncle Sam, are cracking down on the anonymous purchase of prepaid cell phones because terrorists seem to like them. Still, using the Watanabe ID, I was able to pick up a pair of slim Nokias with five hundred prepaid minutes apiece at a Cingular store in Chinatown, along with two sets of wireless earpieces.
    Next on my shopping list was a folding knife. I'd left the Benchmade behind in Barcelona because to get it on the plane I would have had to check a bag, which I prefer not to do. Finding a replacement in New York, however, was tricky. The local laws governing concealed knives are so stringent that I couldn't find a store that sold anything other than the small Swiss Army variety. I had just about decided to rig up a kitchen knife in a shoulder harness when I came across the right kind of street vendor, a bald black man of indeterminate age with a megawatt smile and secrets in his eyes, who sold me a Strider folder with a four-inch recurve blade.
    Next I stopped in an army/navy store and found a gray windbreaker that would be so anonymous in the city as to make me invisible. I also grabbed a plain black