by Dan Simmons
“I don’t want to leave it on the road where I’m hiking in,” Dar said truthfully. “I’d worry about it.”
Lawrence certainly understood that. It was a running joke between Trudy and Dar how Lawrence invariably parked in the most distant edge of any parking lot, and then with the curb and shrubs and cacti on one side if he could—anything to avoid dings. When Larry’s car got dings, Larry’s car got sold.
“Sure, I’ll drop you off,” Lawrence had said. “I wasn’t up to anything except watching a video tonight.”
“Which one?”
“Ernest Goes to Camp,” said Lawrence. “But that’s OK, I’ve seen it.”
Two hundred and thirty-six times, thought Dar. Aloud, he said, “I appreciate this, Larry.”
“Lawrence,” said Lawrence. “You want to leave your Crusher here or shall I come pick you up in town?”
“I’ll drive out to your place,” said Dar.
Now, on the way out from Escondido in Lawrence’s Trooper, the bulging rucksack loaded in the backseat, Lawrence said, “Where you headed? Borrego Desert State Park? Cleveland National Forest? Or are we going as far as Joshua Tree or someplace?”
“Mulholland Drive,” said Dar.
Lawrence almost drove off the road. “Mul…hol…land… Drive? As in L.A.?”
“Yeah,” said Dar.
Lawrence squinted at him. “For camping.”
“Yep,” said Dar. “Probably two days worth. I’ve got my cell phone, so I’ll give you a call when I need to be picked up.”
“Eight-thirty on a Saturday night, it’ll be after midnight when we get there, and you’re going camping somewhere off Mulholland Drive.”
“Right,” said Dar. “Just off Beverly Glen Boulevard, actually. You don’t have to drive on Mulholland, just through Beverly Hills and up Beverly Glen to just over the ridgeline…on the Valley side.”
Lawrence squinted at him and then slammed on the brakes, kicked up dust in a turnout, and turned the Trooper around, headed back toward his home.
“You’re not going to take me?” said Dar.
“Sure, I’ll take you,” growled his friend. “But if I’m going into goddamned Los Angeles on a Saturday night and going through goddamned Beverly Hills, and stopping on Mulholland after midnight, I’m going home to get my .38.” He glanced suspiciously at Dar. “Are you armed?”
“No,” Dar said truthfully.
“You’re nuts,” said Lawrence.
Dar asked Lawrence to stop once, on Ventura Boulevard. It had taken Dar three minutes on the Internet to track down Dallas Trace’s unlisted phone number, and now he used a pay phone to call that number. A woman’s voice answered in a Latina accent—not sultry Brazilian, but no-nonsense Central American housekeeperese.
“Mr. John Cochran calling for Mr. Trace,” he said in his softest male-secretary voice.
“Just a minute,” said the woman. A minute later, Dallas Trace’s fake West Texas drawl boomed on the line. “Johnny! What’s up, amigo?”
It was Dar’s turn to turn on a fake dialect. Speaking through his red bandana, he growled in his best East L.A. gang voice, “Chew’re what’s up, you honky motherfucker turf-jumping chickenshit bastard. If chew thing you can off Esposito that way and cut us all out—I mean, fuck your Russian fucking mafia, man—we know about Yaponchik and Zuker and we don’t give a fuck, man. Those Commie fag bastards don’t scare us, man. We comin’ for you, homme.”
Dar hung up and got back in the Trooper. Lawrence had been close enough to hear most of Dar’s monologue.
“Calling your girlfriend?” said the adjuster.
“Yeah,” said Dar.
Dar had Lawrence drop him off about two hundred yards east of the intersection of Beverly Glen Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. They waited for a car or two to pass, until the road was dark, and then Dar was out of the Trooper with his rucksack and moving quickly downhill into the tall weeds. He did not want to be arrested by Sherman Oaks police in the first five minutes of his mission. Lawrence drove off.
Dar reached into his heavy rucksack and found the carefully wrapped L. L. Bean night-vision goggles and the small box of camouflage color sticks. The ghillie suit was heavy, but most of the weight in his pack came from optical aids he had brought along and wrapped carefully in foam.
Dar was wearing black jeans, dark Mephisto boots, and a black Eddie Bauer cotton henley. Clicking on the battery-powered night-vision goggles, he saw that he had stopped just before running into a barbed-wire fence. The lights of the San Fernando Valley were so bright that it caused the goggles to flare every time Dar raised his gaze above the uninhabited ridge.
“The Counselor and his wife designed the house to take maximum advantage of the view of the city lights,” the Architectural Digest article had read, “the same view that inspired their former neighbor, Steven, to create the unforgettable alien Mother Ship.” It had taken Dar twenty minutes to figure out that the writer was talking about Steven Spielberg, who had lived in this neighborhood long ago when he was working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Right now that Mother Ship–shaped V of bright lights visible between the darker hills was just a pain in the ass—or to be more specific, a pain in the eyes.
Dar removed the night goggles and used the camo-sticks to paint his face and hands. The idea was to use light colors on those parts of the face where shadows were formed—under the cheeks and chin and nose, in the eye sockets—and darker colors on prominent features such as his nose and cheekbones, jaw and forehead. The important thing, both with the face and hands, was to create an irregular pattern that would keep the human brain from piecing together the outline of a human face or hands at a distance.
This was a point of no return. If a Sherman Oaks PD searchlight suddenly pinned him now, he would have a hell of a time explaining the face paint. Of course, he rationalized, the night goggles and rucksack full of ghillie suit might be a problem to explain as well. Then again, so far he had not trespassed.
Dar eliminated that technicality by climbing the barbed-wire fence and heading out onto the long ridge, passing through the few trees that ran along Mulholland and into the scrub grass and shrubs. The ridges on either side—each about two hundred yards away—were developed to capacity with homes, most with outside security lights. Between that glare and the moonlight, Dar realized that it was easier to slip along with the night-vision goggles up on his forehead.
It took him about ten minutes to hike to a place on the ridgeline directly opposite Dallas Trace’s mansion. Dar knew from Architectural Digest that the huge home presented a fortress’s blank face to the street: high walls, windowless concrete, a basement garage with automatic doors, no sight of the main door. It must be, Dar knew, a serious problem for the FBI, NICB, state’s attorney’s office, or anyone else who was trying to carry out legal surveillance of the place.
But the back of Defense Attorney Trace’s home was a blaze of lights. Every room seemed to be lighted. Dar went to one knee, set the rucksack down carefully, and extracted his old Redfield Accu-Range telescopic sight. The scope was only 3–9 variable magnification, but it was easier to use than binoculars and had the advantage of showing only one set of optical lenses to the sun in the daylight.
Well, there was no doubt that this was the house. The four-foot-wide pool on its strip of coral-colored concrete that made up the backyard was brightly lit, as was the almost vertical strip of mowed grass below it. Dar could make out a security fence about twenty yards down the hill: razor wire atop an outward-slanted fence. The rear lights were bright enough to illuminate the hillside, but he could see extra motion-detector-activated lights on the wall and fence. Dar had no doubt that the fence and the lights, as well as the doors and the windows, were all hooked to state-of-the-art anti-intruder circuitry and that both the Sherman Oaks private security agency and the police would be notified if so much as an errant squirrel ended up in that yard. Mr. Dallas Trace’s home was not an easy target for a lazy or careless burglar.
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nbsp; Dar could see no one moving in any of the rooms, nor anyone visible in couches or chairs, even though a sixty-four-inch high-definition projection TV was flickering away in one of the lower-level rooms. The magazine article had not exaggerated when it had raved about the forty-foot-high window walls on the main level; they jutted out like a ship’s bow over the ravine to Dar’s west. As always when confronted with such architectural monstrosities, Dar’s thoughts were Who the hell changes the light bulbs in the ceiling and washes those windows? He had come to peace with the realization that he was a Philistine of practicality at heart.
Right now practicality demanded finding a good place to spend the next twenty-four hours or so. Once planted in a ghillie suit, a sniper did not move in daylight unless there was pressing need to. The idea was to stay prone in one place during all the hours of the day, observing. Dar knew from experience that it was difficult to do this if one staked out one’s position on an anthill or a cactus or too many rocks or on the opening to a rattler’s den.
Dar used the night goggles to search for a place just northeast of Trace’s house—where every window and room on this side was still within view—and found a relatively flat area below the crest of the ridge, tucked in between Spanish bayonet yucca and a large ottoman-sized boulder. Another boulder behind him would shield him from daylight view of anyone strolling idly along the ridgeline. Taller grass in front should make a good viewing blind. His ghillie suit should blend well with the tall but dry tan grass growing along this stretch of hillside. But to make sure, Dar flipped up his night-vision goggles, crouched with his back to the Trace house, and used a tiny, shielded penlight to study every inch of the position. Moving any stone larger than his fingernail—and knowing that even those tiny pebbles left would be well known by sunrise—he did his checklist: fire ants, no; cacti, no; snakes, no; gopher hole, no; dog shit, no; fox den, no; animal tracks, no (it was never smart to set your sniper position on a game trail); and finally, signs of humans—cigarette butts, shell casings, Dairy Queen cups, used condoms—no.
Dar sighed, pulled out his ghillie suit and wrestled himself into it with as little noise as possible, laid his rucksack under the extra camouflaged netting he had brought for that purpose, and lay prone, feeling the padding of the thick canvas on his elbows, knees, and belly, setting his camera with the huge four-hundred-millimeter lens under the ghillie suit next to him, and using the Redfield as his spotting scope. Thus the long night began.
During his training with the 7th Marine Regiment more than two and a half decades earlier, Darwin Minor had been taught how to keep a sniper’s log. He had no pencil and paper with him now, but if he had, the log might have read something like this:
Date:
6/24 (Saturday)
Time:
2300
Place:
Hill 1, Finger 1 (coord. 767502)
2310
First movement in house. Maid leaving.
2345
Mrs. Dallas Trace (Destiny) enters main room accompanied by a man. The man is blonde, well tanned, a muscle-bound bodybuilder type. Not Mr. Trace. Probably not Yaponchik or Zuker. He looks more like the stereotype of a Beverly Hills pool maintenance man.
2350
Mrs. Trace and bodybuilder enter upstairs bedroom. Turn on one lamp. Engage in strenuous sexual intercourse.
6/25—Sunday A.M.
0005
Bodybuilder appears ready for nap. Mrs. Trace does not. Previously observed activity begins again.
0030
Mrs. Trace wakes up bodybuilder and ejects him from room.
0038
Dallas Trace enters downstairs main room one minute after Mr. Muscles leaves by kitchen door. Trace is accompanied by 4 bodyguards. Photographed everyone with Nikon using 400-mm lens and ultra-high-speed film. Bodyguards appear too young and stupid to be Yaponchik or Zuker.
0045
Bodyguards check backyard pool area, sweep area with night scope. Had worried about thermal imaging, but hoped that residual heat from boulders would muddy TI scan. Bodyguards use only image intensifiers. They carry Mac-10s.
0050
DT goes upstairs to check on Mrs. Trace. She is sleeping. Trace goes back downstairs to confer with guards.
0115
DT makes several phone calls.
0205
Bodyguards reenter house. DT goes to upstairs bedroom.
0210
Lights out in bedroom. Guards remain in main room and billiard room. Work in shifts of 2.
0300
Cramp in left leg only 4 hours into watch. Too old for this crap.
0450
Predawn light. Make sure ghillie suit and extra camo-cloth covers everything.
0521
Sunrise. Was freezing all night. Already beginning to get too hot.
0640
Pissed into small fissure next to boulder without moving. Violates training, but will be damned if I’m going to ruin these new coveralls this early. Glad I fasted and purged system all day Sat.
0715
No movement in DT house except change of guards. Using polarizers to see through reflection of rising sun. Partially successful.
0735
Female jogger runs up trail twenty meters above me. Hear her Walkman. Doberman with her. Dog came down to sniff, peed on me. Was called back by jogger.
0930
Redfield scope sees through kitchen window well enough to spot DT eating large breakfast the maid cooked for him. Mrs. DT still asleep.
1039
Mrs. DT joins husband in kitchen. DT on phone.
1115
DT dresses—jeans, cowboy boots, western blue silk shirt, bison vest.
1138
DT leaves home. 3 of 4 bodyguards go with him.
1222
Maid leaves. 4th bodyguard led upstairs by Mrs. DT. Strenuous sexual intercourse.
1250
Bodyguard returns to main room.
1300
Maid returns.
1430
Heat very intense. Using water judiciously, but finish second bottle. One left.
1440
Rattlesnake crawls over my right leg and suns itself on boulder approx. 1 meter to my left.
1630
Snake leaves immediate area.
1645
Heavy rain. Visibility still acceptable.
1655
Last night’s bodybuilder returns. He is the pool man. He hangs around under patio canopy to stay out of rain.
1710
Mrs. DT leaves with 4th bodyguard. Pool man is called into house by maid. Two engage in strenuous sexual intercourse in video room.
1820
Rain ends, but rivulets of water are pouring off boulders and through my position. Maid and pool man have left house. No movement visible.
2120
Last twilight gone because of clouds. Eyes very tired because of scope use. Eyedrops almost gone.
2210
DT returns with his 4 guards and 5 unidentified men. New men look foreign. 3 of them stay in main room with DT’s regular bodyguards while 2 go upstairs with DT to office.
2245
Long conversation. DT sits with his back to the glass just like in his Century City office. The 2 men continue standing during the discussion. Shoot 3 rolls of high-speed black-and-white film using bipod to steady 400-mm lens. This is the sniper team: Gregor Yaponchik and Pavel Zuker. Zuker even stands 3 paces back on Yaponchik’s left during discussion, just as a spotter does for his master sniper. Cannot quite read the Russians’ lips—although I can tell that they are speaking English—but I seem to make out the words “Latino” and “Mexican” several times. I assume they are discussing whether my phone call of the night before was a fraud.
2255
DT is showing the 2 men photographs of lawyer Esposito and me. The photos of me were obviously taken by a long lens—2 outside my San Diego condo and 1 at the Gomez wreck. Last 2 were taken at the cabin. Damn.
Meeting breaking up. Clear images of Zuker and Yaponchik. The spotter looks nothing like the FBI photo of the man with the beard—he is tall, thin, and clean-shaven, with short-cropped black hair and deeply sunken eyes. He smokes a cigarette during the discussion; I can see the anger on DT’s face as the lawyer gets up to find an ashtray.
Yaponchik is an older man, perhaps 2 to 3 years my senior. He reminds me of some Swedish actor…can’t recall his name… Bergman movies. Short blonde hair, long, lined face, thin lips always seeming to be ready for an ironic smile, blue eyes, sculpted cheekbones and chin. Very large hands with long fingers. Dressed in a very expensive Italian suit. Does not look Russian. More Scandinavian.
2320
The 3 go back downstairs and talk to the 7 gathered bodyguards. I am certain that the 3 who came with Y and Z are foreign, Eastern European or Russian—their taste in suits has not yet evolved—while the original 4 appear to be American thugs, professional but not in the Russians’ league.
2330
Rain starts again. Photographed all 10 men. Resisted urge to call Dallas Trace on my cell phone and ask for Yaponchik.
2340
Mrs. DT comes home and goes straight to bed.
2345
Yaponchik, Zuker, and 3 other Russians leave.
6/26—Monday
0015
DT makes three calls from his office.
0042
DT goes to bed. Mrs. DT sleeping. He tries to rouse her. Fails. DT watches TV in bedroom.
0150
TV off. Bedroom dark. Guards on 2 shifts.
