Then he looked around the hotel suite he had rented. It was an expensive one—very expensive. It consisted of an outer room—a "sitting room" as it might have been called two centuries before—and a bedroom. Plus a bathroom.
Harry Morgan, a piratical smile on his face, opened the bathroom door and left it that way. Then he went into the bedroom. His luggage had already been delivered by the lift tube, and was sitting on the floor. He put both suitcases on the bed, where they would be in plain sight from the sitting room. Then he made certain preparations for invaders.
He left the door between the sitting room and the bedroom open and left the suite.
Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down 42nd Street toward Sixth Avenue. On his left was the ancient Public Library Building. In the middle of the block, somebody shoved something hard into his left kidney and said. "Keep walking, commodore. But do what you're told."
Harry Morgan obeyed, with an utterly happy smile on his lips.
IV
In the Grand Central Hotel, a man moved down the hallway toward Suite 7426. He stopped at the door and inserted the key he held in his hand, twisting it as it entered the keyhole. The electronic locks chuckled, and the door swung open.
The man closed it behind him.
He was not a big man, but neither was he undersized. He was five-ten and weighed perhaps a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His face was dark of skin and had a hard, determined expression on it. He looked as though he had spent the last thirty of his thirty-five years of life stealing from his family and cheating his friends.
He looked around the sitting room. Nothing. He tossed the key in his hand and then shoved it into his pocket. He walked over to the nearest couch and prodded at it. He took an instrument out of his inside jacket pocket and looked at it.