Odysseus

Inside, Atzmüller still crouched behind his door. Things had been silent for a while, so he summoned his courage and went back to the chem lab door, accidentally bumping it as he squatted by it. He grabbed his sidearm and prepared. Nothing happened. Ever so slowly, he opened it. The room was dark, all windows boarded up, and empty. On the other side of the room, an ajar door bore witness of the other dealer’s exit route. Atzmüller left and returned to base at the hotel.

Bhrunt’s taxi took him back to the Marriott, as the afternoon started to turn into evening, seemingly without him ever discovering the tail. He went straight to his room. While enroute through the city, O’Byrne contacted local police with whom he had good relations. He learned that a person had, indeed, been arrested. The charges were resisting arrest – he was running from the officers – and possession of illegal firearms. He was previously known to police for involvement in drug trading. It seemed that there might be a possibility to get to Bhrunt, after all. Udagawa got an application for any type of more intrusive warrant on Bhrunt or the others going. O’Byrne advised him to contact his brother who worked as an assistant DA. As friendly as he was, he could not do anything better than a search warrant on Bhrunt’s person and room. Without something more solid, like clear indication that there was a major drug deal going down, wire taps were not possible. Even so, this development still had the investigation in a much better position than it was in the morning.

This turning point please Atzmüller to no end, and the anthropologist-turned-law-enforcement officer immediately started bragging about his bravado in the abandoned school, telling his story to anyone who’d listen and anyone who wouldn’t, again and again. Meanwhile, Kowalski checked in and reported that Colm was back at his apartment at about 6 pm, and walked his dog with the same punctuality as before.

Harris and Hopkins kept tailing Drinkwater throughout the afternoon. He did not return to the hotel for the evening, choosing instead to eat out in the company of his big bags of books, before he ventured off-Broadway, catching “The Glass Menagerie”. The two ladies found themselves in the salon, watching their subject watch the show and didn’t mind that one bit. They finally got back to the hotel at about 10 pm, where everything was quiet – Bhrunt had ordered food through room service.
The Marriott team settled in for their night surveillance shifts, but before she went to bed, Harris invited Atzmüller down for a drink. He let the German scholar babble on for a while about his fantastic achievements, before she asked him about the bookstores he had visited the day before, tailing Drinkwater. Specifically, she was curious about the interior decorations, if he spoke to the clerk, and what the clerk looked like in the first bookstore he visited. Baffled, he described the scene. One by one, every single detail corresponded with Harris’ experience. Atzmüller was too self-absorbed to notice how she paled with every new detail he added. She finished the conversation a little later and retired, shaken.

The night passed uneventfully again, and again Drinkwater was the first of the Marriott subjects to leave the hotel. O’Byrne wanted to switch tails later that evening when the subject Hames arrived, but for now, he let Harris and Hopkins keep tailing Drinkwater. They expected another tour of bookstores, but this time he instead went for breakfast in a coffee shop, reading paper, before he went to a use a public pay phone. Given their experiences with Bhrunt yesterday, this had the two investigators on alert immediately. Harris, who had gone through some lip reading training, used her new skills to the best of her advantage. Drinkwater seemed to be making an appointment with someone named “Hank”, as best as she could tell. They followed him. Meanwhile, Kowalski checked in to ops to report that Colm was going to his office as punctually as ever.

Drinkwater made his way to Greenwich village, where he met a handsome young man. They greeted each other very cordially and took lunch before they headed over to a pub. Hopkins started to wonder if their body language might not be indicative of something more than just casual friendship, and Harris soon confirmed this; the old professor was on a date! When this was reported to ops, Udagawa muttered something about these gentlemen not exactly being model Nazis, what with drug deals with Hispanic professional criminals and gay relationships. Fields immediately took to the Internet to see if this might not be the reason for Drinkwater’s dismissal from Boston University.

Meanwhile, O’Byrne went down to the police in Queens to interrogate the arrested suspect from last afternoon. He wanted to pressure the man to give up Bhrunt and implicate him as a drug dealer. It took quite some time to break the suspect, but the final clincher came when O’Byrne agreed to cut him a deal and told him that the guy he was protecting actually was a f-ing Nazi, with little real respect for people of Hispanic descent. The suspect started cooperating and revealed that there had, in fact, been a drug transaction, for significant quantities of cocaine. O’Byrne was exceedingly pleased: with this material he contacted the DA again, now obtaining a warrant for a wire-tap, as Bhrunt was now a suspect of trafficking.

During the morning, Kowalski failed to report in to Udagawa on his regular hourly schedule and Udagawa contacted him soon to check up what happened. Kowalski responded curtly and just blamed lack of sleep. The younger agent frowned and told him not to slip up again. He complied very conscientiously.
Bhrunt slept in and didn’t leave the hotel until 1 pm. Atzmüller and Udagawa were given the task of tailing him and found that he went straight to Central Park, still wearing his briefcase, and sat down to play chess with other enthusiasts. To Udagawa’s great dismay, Atzmüller decided to engage in further daredevilry and challenged his subject to repeated games, clearly taking great pleasure in beating him in the game, seemingly not caring too much that he had just compromised his ability to tail his subject. Meanwhile, Udagawa and Fields showed the hotel management their warrant and obtained the key to Bhrunt’s room.

Just after lunch, agent Kazimir called agent Ymir and notified him that he was done and arranged a drop-off point with the goods – apparently he had found some interesting material and copied files off the subject’s computer. He laughed – Colm had clearly watched too many agent movies, like the Sting and Mission Impossible, and poured talk on the floor to spot intruders, and put pieces of string as crude burglar alarms on certain drawers. Ymir was pleased and sent Kazimir, now as Kowalski, to assist Fields at the hotel. She was having trouble mounting working bugs in Bhrunt’s room.

Colm left work at 3pm, when Bhrunt was still playing in Central Park, and again went to the Convention Centre to prep things. When the work in the latter’s room was finally done, Kowalski went back to join Faulkner outside Colm’s apartment, where the subject punctually turned up after leaving the convention centre at 5.30 pm. Meanwhile, Bhrunt stopped playing at about 5 pm and took a light dinner. At this time, O’Byrne had had the time to swing by the drop off point and pick up the material Kazimir had left behind. It was a CD-rom and a pile of Xerox copies of letters, all in German. He promptly called Atzmüller in to meet him in ops: he needed to translate this material.

Atzmüller notified Udagawa of his new orders. The young officer was thoroughly baffled. German documents? Obtained from a suspect? What suspect? How did we get hold of those? That just made Atzmüller angry and he just left his partner and travelled back to the hotel. Udagawa was most displeased but was soon joined by O’Byrne who went there to relieve the already departed German. Udagawa, curiosity awakened, immediately started asking his superior questions about this strange new lead, but O’Byrne brushed him off by saying that it came from the Hispanic perp arrested outside the school. This surprised Udagawa greatly, but since this came from his superior office, he felt that he had to trust the information.

Bhrunt eventually returned to the hotel and stayed in his room for a couple of hours. Meanwhile, Kowalski reported in that Colm walked his dog, which meant that it was now 7.30 pm. Finally, Bhrunt, still carrying his briefcase, ordered a cab for the JFK airport. It seemed. O’Byrne and Fields went out there to intercept the subject. He arrived promptly and was greeted by Bhrunt. The two went back to the hotel and shared a drink before going to bed. Meanwhile, Atzmüller had translated the Xerox copies and shared them with the rest of Y-Cell, who took great care to not share the material with the non-aligned FBI agents. The material provided some interesting information, but, for now, there was little opportunity to act on it. Another night of surveillance was upon them.