To get to his exfiltration site, Hulius needed to take his bike on the subway for three stops. It was a calculated risk: his mission planners had decided it was faster and marginally less dangerous than requiring him to ride for fifteen blocks through Brooklyn, and if the weather was inclement it was clearly preferable. But this was where he ran into trouble.
To get to the subway station he pedaled uphill along a couple of residential roads, then turned onto a main street. It was an uneventful, if effortful, ride. He was in good shape for his age, but the way the Americans had taken to neglecting their road surfaces was shameful, and by the end of the trip he was glad for the front and rear shocks on the mountain bike. Every second he spent in time line two gave him a crawling gunsight sensation between his shoulder blades, as if one of the Americans’ invisible flying killer robots was stalking him across the streets of the city. While his path took him past no fewer than nineteen CCTV cameras, most of these were domestic or commercial alarm systems: only one was connected to the municipal surveillance system, and that via the Department of Transport automatic number plate lookup system. Even in the United States, bicycles were not yet expected to bear plates.
But the entrance to the subway station took Hulius down a flight of drab concrete steps, into an underground vestibule with ticket machines and barriers, and here things changed. The city of New York had become extremely sensitive to terrorist threats since the turn of the twenty-first century, and the subway was seen as a primary target. Not only that: it was a highly efficient checkpoint—after all, almost everybody used it.
Entering the station, Hulius passed under the lenses of cameras on the staircase, of cameras fronting the ticket machines, of cameras watching the faces of everybody passing through the barriers, and, finally, of the cameras on the platform and on the subway train itself. These cameras had just enough onboard intelligence to match faces against a database of persons of interest, and to call for help if they scored a hit.
And, all unbeknowst to him, Hulius had become a person of interest.
It wasn’t because he had been detected making contact with Paulette Milan on a previous visit. Hulius’s tradecraft was watertight, his organization’s doctrine as good as any. It wasn’t because he’d been observed behaving oddly. It was simply that bigger memory cards made it practical to store more faces on each camera node, and in addition to the FBI’s Most Wanted, the cameras now looked for a wide range of interesting people. Hulius was a person of interest because he’d been observed on numerous previous occasions and never identified. His face was known, his biometrics logged; but he was never associated with the same cell phone ID, or with RFID tags in an ID card (or the washing instruction labels in his clothing), or even with the same bicycle. Hulius was a blind spot in the surveillance network’s purview, like the 600-mile-per-hour moving hole in the radar reflection of a rain cloud that betrays the passage of a stealth bomber.
And as he walked toward the back of the platform for a train to Forest Hills, phones began to buzz.
As it happened, Hulius didn’t have to cool his heels for long: after just four minutes a 7 train screeched and rattled its way to a halt beside the platform, and he rolled his bike aboard.
The organization had run couriers through the city before, equipped with carefully configured sensors, programmed to record the distribution of monitoring cameras. They carried wi-fi receivers in promiscuous mode, sniffing for buried ubicomp cells. They also used jail-broken phones with baseband chips hacked to help them map cell towers. The results were alarming. In the past three years, the density of surveillance devices scattered through New York City had skyrocketed tenfold, and there was no sign that this increase would slow down until every square meter of sidewalk and road had its own secret police machine, vigilant for signs of subversion.
What the organization hadn’t done was to run the same tests on subway trains.
Fortieth Street, Queens Boulevard. Three stations ahead, four Transit Police stopped what they were doing and paused, listening to their earpieces. Walking, not running—there was plenty of time—they began to converge on the nearest eastbound platform. (Two other cops, busy with a random search, declined the call.)
Forty-sixth Street station. Hulius had, over many years, developed an almost supernatural sensitivity to the signs and portents of operations on hostile soil. Right now, he wasn’t on full alert; but he was never entirely relaxed when on a mission, and some instinct he couldn’t name made him tense up and glance surreptitiously up and down the almost deserted subway car.
Too long, he thought, his skin crawling. The train sat at the platform edge, brakes ticking, transformer fans humming. Something’s wrong. Ten seconds stretched into twenty, then thirty. Uh-oh. It might just be a signaling fault, he told himself; that’s probably all it is. But the MTA had in-cab signaling these days, didn’t it? They’d just completed a monstrously expensive upgrade to the entire network.
Hulius took a lurching step to one side just as the doors hissed and rattled closed. Cold sweat burst out up and down his spine. The train began to move. He looked around quickly. Reasons for delaying a train: (1) signal at red, (2) mechanical fault, (3) allowing someone to get into position ahead. Scheiss, time to bail! Maybe he was spooking at shadows, but instinct told him otherwise.
He unslung his messenger bag and slid the jacket off his shoulders. Inverted it again, other way out; pulled the spectacles out of their pouch and put them on before he picked up the messenger. A quick glance at the bike: Farewell, trusty steed. The train was already slowing. Nobody had looked up: nobody was watching him. He glanced at the ceiling, seeing the cluster of pinhead-sized camera pickups. Ops had assumed they were off-line recorders, just logging foot traffic and faces for digestion at the end of the day. But: what if that monstrously expensive network upgrade had been enough to carry live video streams of all the cameras on all the trains? A decade ago it would have been preposterous, but these days—
Hulius turned and ran to the other end of the car.
Fifty-second Street station. The train rattled and squealed to a stop: doors banged open up and down its length.
Two MTA transit cops entered the rear carriage, scanned the seated passengers with practiced eyes. A bicycle, shackled to a vertical rail, told its story. One of them swore under his breath as the doors closed again. As the train began to move, the door at the end of the carriage—the one giving passage to the next car along—squealed and banged open, admitting a rattle of tracks and a gust of stale subway air.