“Bring him back.”
His voice caught on the word “back.” The line went dead before I could say more.
I closed my eyes for one second and tried to breathe normally.
The SUV took the turn onto Storrow.
The building was on a side street off Kendall, one of those glass-and-steel monstrosities that had gone up only a decade ago and was already getting tired around the edges. Collins pulled up to the curb a hundred feet short of the entrance and killed the engine.
I got out and checked the block. The foot traffic was light. It was early.
The street was clean. The building unnecessarily exposed.
Glass frontage ran the full width of the lobby, floor to ceiling. From the sidewalk, you could see the elevator bank and the security desk. Anyone inside was visible from the street.
It was beautiful in an abstract, architectural sense. Operationally, it was stupid.
I opened Wiley’s door. “We walk in fast and continue through the lobby to the elevator. Keep your eyes forward. Don’t stop to read the directory. Don’t check your phone. You ignore everybody. If I touch your back, you will follow my hand. Clear?”
“Clear.”
I tapped the comm. “On approach.”
“Copy,” Dane said. “Heads up, Eamon’s at the elevator.”
Wiley climbed out, and I closed the door. I clocked everything as we moved.
The lobby door was a single glass pane on a slow hydraulic. Wiley hurried through. Eamon was at the bank of elevators reading his phone. He looked up as we joined him.
Eamon pressed the call button. The light for the sixteenth floor lit up, then the fifteenth. It was on its way down.
I scanned the lobby. A guard sat at the security desk. He was in his mid-fifties, reading something on a computer screen. The seating area was empty.
“Patterson’s coming on foot from the parking garage on the next block,” Eamon said. “He didn’t want a car at the entrance. Collins spotted him on his way.”
“You agreed to that?”
“I agreed to a meeting. He chose the approach. I made him take a route I could see for the last hundred feet.”
The elevator chimed. The doors slid open.
I caught movement at the glass front.
Patterson was on our side of the street, thirty feet from the lobby door. Eamon had shared his photo—mid-sixties, trimmed silver beard. He walked with his head down, holding a briefcase against his thigh.
Beyond Patterson, a man in a long charcoal coat was on the opposite side of the street . He had one hand at his side. The other held what I read as a phone. Half-a-heartbeat later, I knew it wasn’t.
“Eamon,” I said.
Eamon had already seen.
The elevator finished opening behind us. The man in the coat raised his arm.
I put my hand on the back of Wiley’s neck.
“Down,” I shouted.
Wiley’s knees hit the polished marble floor. His shoulder hit the inside corner of the elevator threshold. I went down with him, my body shielding him from the entrance, my left hand still cupped at the back of his skull. I reached for my sidearm with my free hand.