Free Last to Fold by David Duffy

conference room. A red backpack sat on a table surrounded by leather chairs. A clean-cut young man in a suit stood as we came in.
    Bernie said, “This is Malcolm Watkins. You spoke on the phone.”
    I shook hands with the kid and pointed to the backpack. “That the money?”
    “Yes, sir. They specified a red backpack.”
    “What did they sound like?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The voice on the phone—man, woman, American, foreign, young, old?”
    “Oh, sorry. I have no idea—Mrs. Mulholland talked to them.”
    I looked at Bernie. “Mulholland said—”
    “I know. No way around telling her. I’ll deal with Rory.”
    I didn’t point out she almost certainly already knew. I’d caused enough trouble. Instead, I asked, “What’s the drill?”
    Franklin looked down at a yellow legal pad. “Bring the money to the Sheraton at Newark Airport tonight at ten. Alone. She said they repeated that. Go to the front door with the backpack, wait. You’ll be searched. No guns. Then you go to the room they tell you. The door will be ajar. Put the backpack on the bed and leave. The girl will be in the lobby. They said if anything goes wrong, they’ll kill her first, then you.”
    He said the last part awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable. This wasn’t what he’d been trained for. I nodded and smiled.
    “Don’t worry. These guys probably learned that watching TV. Let’s see what we have.” I picked up the backpack. It was full of bills, tens and twenties, banded into packs of a thousand dollars each. I looked up at Watkins. “All here, right?”
    “Yes, sir. Counted it twice.”
    I took the box of small electronic devices from my messenger bag and selected one about the size and shape of a Wheat Thins cracker. Then I reached around in the backpack until I felt an inside pocket, and used some Super Glue to stick the RFID tag to the nylon. Bernie and Watkins watched while I rezipped the pocket, the latter with some suspicion.
    “Radio frequency identification transponder,” I said. “RFID. Everybody’s using them. Casinos, Walmart, car rental companies—it’s the big new thing. Sends a signal to my laptop. GPS software communicates with the satellite, tells me where the backpack is.”
    Watkins looked at Bernie, then back at me. “She said they said no tricks. They said—”
    I cut him off. Whatever they said wasn’t important. “These guys have any brains at all, they’ll expect us to try something. Hundred grand’s too much money to just piss away—that’s how they’ll look at it. This is an older radio tag. I want them to find it. So they won’t look for this one.” I held up a piece of plastic about the size of a grain of rice. “New generation, just out. Japanese, of course.”
    I removed a pack of bills from the bag and slid a twenty from the middle. A tiny drop of glue stuck the transponder to the currency, which I reinserted into the pack. “If they take the money and leave the bag, we’ll still know where they are.”
    Bernie said, “What will you do when you find them?”
    “Don’t know. Depends in part on who they are. I’ll think of something.” I picked up the red backpack along with my bag. “Better get going. Might be traffic in the tunnel. Where do you want me to call?”
    “We’ll be here,” Bernie said. “Good luck.”
    *   *   *
    I walked north through the all but empty, muggy streets. I keep the Potemkin in a garage on Pearl Street. I keep the Vlost and Found company car—a black 2003 Ford Crown Victoria, Police Interceptor model—in an open lot on Water Street. I call it the Valdez, after the ill-fated tanker, not the Madison Avenue coffee character. It has seventy-five thousand miles on the odometer, dents in the front fender and back door, and cost $9,800. It’s essentially a Crown Vic with a bunch of extra features and equipment and drives like its namesake, but it’ll move when you ask it to, and I couldn’t care less if it gets nicked, dinged, or totaled. A