At two-fifteen, Lucy, Commander Penn and I were in the control room, every monitor, television and radio turned on. Wesley was in one of several Bureau cars that ERF had painted to look like yellow cabs and equipped with radios, scanners, and other surveillance devices. Marino was on the street with Transit cops and plainclothes FBI. HRT was divided among the Dakota, the drugstore and Bleecker Street. We were unclear on the precise location of anyone because no one on the outside was standing still, and we were in here, not moving.
‘Why hasn’t anyone called?’ Lucy complained.
‘He hasn’t been sighted,’ said Commander Penn, and she was steady but uptight.
‘I assume the parade has started,’ I said.
Commander Penn said, ‘It’s on Lafayette, headed this way.’
She and Lucy were wearing headphones that plugged into the base station on the console. They were on different channels.
‘All right, all right,’ Commander Penn said, sitting up straighter. ‘We’ve spotted him. The number seven platform,’ she exclaimed to Lucy, whose fingers flew. ‘He’s just come in from a catwalk. He’s entered the system from a tunnel that runs under the park.’
Then the number seven platform was on black-and-white TV. We watched a figure in a long dark coat. He wore boots, a hat and dark glasses, and stood back from other passengers at the platform’s edge. Lucy brought up another subway survey on the screen as Commander Penn stayed on the radio. I watched passengers walking, sitting, reading maps and standing. A train screamed by and got slower as it stopped. Doors opened and he got on.
‘Which way is he bound?’ I asked.
‘South. He’s coming this way,’ Commander Penn said, excited.
‘He’s on the A line,’ Lucy said, studying her monitors. ‘
‘Right.’ Commander Penn got on the air. ‘He can only go as far as Washington Square,’ she told someone. Then he can transfer and take the F line straight to Second Avenue.’
Lucy said, ‘We’ll check one station after another.
We don’t know where he might get off. But he’s got to get off somewhere so he can go back into the tunnels.’
‘He has to do that if he comes in the Second Avenue way,’ Commander Penn relayed to the radio. ‘He can’t take the train in there because it’s not stopping there.’
Lucy manipulated the closed-circuit television monitors. At rapid intervals they showed a different station as a train we could not see headed toward us.
‘He’s not at Forty-second,’ she said. ‘We don’t see him at Penn Station or Twenty-third.’
Monitors blinked on and off, showing platforms and people who did not know they were being watched.
‘If he stayed on that train he should be at Fourteenth Street,’ Commander Penn said.
But if he was, he did not disembark, or at least we did not see him. Then our luck suddenly changed in an unexpected way.
‘My God,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s at Grand Central Station. How the hell did he get there?’
‘He must have turned east before we thought he would and cut through Times Square,’ Commander Penn said.
‘But why?’ Lucy said. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
Commander Penn radioed unit two, which was Benton Wesley. She asked him if Gault had called the pharmacy yet. She took her headphones off and set the microphone so we could hear what was said.
‘No, there’s been no call,’ came Wesley’s reply.
‘Our monitors have just picked him up at Grand Central,’ she explained.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know why he’s gone that way. But there are so many alternative routes he could take. He could get off anywhere for any reason.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Wesley said.
‘What about in South Carolina?’ Commander Penn then asked.
‘Everything’s ten-four. The bird has flown and landed,’ Wesley said.
Mrs. Gault had wired the money, or the Bureau had. We watched while her only son casually rode with other people who did not know he was a monster.
‘Wait a minute,’ Commander Penn continued to broadcast information. ‘He’s at Fourteenth Street and Union Square, going south right at you.’
It drove me crazy that we could not stop him. We could see him and yet it did no good.