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cement patio surrounded by a high iron rail fence. Empty now. Weeds coated the fence, depriving someone in the surrounding brownstones of a view of the door to the courtyard, for instance through a rifle scope.
    Stepping onto the patio, Fisk was hit by the blare of engine noises and horns and people trying to talk over them—a typical A.M. rush hour, unless you were feeling like a fugitive.
    He proceeded down a narrow back alley, at the end of which he peered onto Thirty-Fifth Street, spotting several doorways and other choke points ideal for an ambush. A hit man might also be lying back so that his head was beneath the window line in any of fifty parked cars. And there were hundreds of dark windows behind which a sniper might be readying a rifle.
    If so, Fisk thought, holstering the Glock, then they had him.
    Starting up the sidewalk, he had the discomfiting sense, whichever way he looked, of someone sneaking up behind him.
    The heat slowed the stream of professionals on their way to work, making it that much easier for him to pick up a tail. Tails are easier to spot than most people think. Sometimes they have no good reason to be where they are. Sometimes they even use hand signals to communicate with teammates. The key is the other times, when they’re imperceptible.
    Feel them, Fisk exhorted himself, heading up Tenth.
    When choosing the printing house, he had composed a mental list of the pros and cons of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.
    Pros: Proximity to Madison Square Garden, which is to say, Knicks games.
    Cons: Everything else.
    In taking inventory of his surroundings now, he began to reassess that stance. Hell’s Kitchen’s gritty reputation was rooted in a preponderance of soot-blackened industrial buildings, the Westies gang, and Damon Runyan stories.
    Yet this part of the city had exploded into a district of upscale and exotic restaurants. In and around them were brownstones that had recently been restored to their full nineteenth-century Greek Revival luster. The warehouses had yielded to glossy television studios and extensions of Silicon Alley. Vacant lots had morphed into community gardens and playgrounds. And directly ahead, emblematic of this urban revival, stood the city’s fourth tallest building, a stunning metallic cruciform completed in 2007 and known to locals as the Times Tower.
    It was Fisk’s first time inside the tower, and he was surprised by the relative blandness of the interior, especially within the paper’s office. The open newsroom looked like a call center or an insurance agency within a generic suburban office park, its sea of repetitive office-drab gray workstations and cabinets lit by too-sharp fluorescents. On the far end of the newsroom was a conference room that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a frequent traveler’s lounge at a minor-league airport.
    He made out eight-by-ten crime-scene photos scattered atop the conference room table. Like most law enforcement agents, he never liked murders, but he brightened at the prospect of working one now. In the two years prior to his promotion to Intel, at the rank of NYPD detective investigator, he’d worked primarily on homicides, but he hadn’t gotten his fill of the one-of-a-kind puzzles. Intelligence work consisted of preventing crimes, a process that lacked the game-winning-home-run rush that came with solving them. In Intel, if you do your job, no one notices; you’re more like a good umpire.
    The old-school crime-scene glossies, as opposed to digital images, told him that at least one of the ten people around the conference table was a fed. Expect to see time travel before a paperless Bureau, agents there often grumbled. Their presence here signified that the crime involved spies, terrorists, hackers, pedophiles, mobsters, gangs, or serial killers.
    On entering the room, Fisk recognized the man seated at the head of the table, FBI special agent Burt Weir, a balding, middle-aged remnant of a high school jock. Weir