“I know.” Ken’s voice was tense. “Watch.”
Just as Ken spoke, the man at the table dropped his napkin on the floor. Instead of reaching for a fresh one from the dispenser in the middle of the table, he bent down to pick it up. If the boys hadn’t been watching him intently they would have missed what he did then. As he picked up the napkin he also picked up the flat package Barrack had left on the floor, put it on his knees under his recovered napkin, and then went on eating. But now he seemed suddenly in a hurry, gulping his food in large mouthfuls.
“Never mind Barrack,” Ken said. “Let’s see where he goes.” He picked up the second half of his sandwich. “I’ll finish this outside. You stay here until he leaves.”
“Right,” Sandy agreed. He still had the surprised expression he had worn ever since the man first appeared at the cafeteria entrance.
Ken waited in the doorway adjoining the cafeteria until, a few minutes later, the man came out and moved purposefully toward the corner. Sandy was close behind him.
Their quarry descended into the subway station at the corner, and the boys followed. He boarded an uptown train and they got into the next car, standing where they could see him through the glass-topped door between.
When the train pulled into the Times Square station the man got off and headed for the street. But before he passed through the exit turnstile he suddenly reversed his direction, walking straight back toward them. Sandy froze where he was and, finding himself before a chewing-gum slot machine, tried to look as if he had been busy inserting pennies into it for some time. Ken, who had been slightly farther behind, had time to step behind a protective pillar.
But the station was fairly well occupied. They didn’t dare let the man get too far away before they followed him. Sandy took up the chase.
Ken intercepted him as he came past. “Let me take the lead. He may have seen you. Drop behind.”
In their new order, with Ken dogging the man’s footsteps as closely as he thought was safe, they went through the maze of corridors and passageways that brought them to the crosstown shuttle-train terminal. They boarded a train already waiting on the nearest track and were whisked across Manhattan to the east side. There the man made his way down a flight of stairs to the station platform of a downtown subway.