Downtown, the volume of office space occupied by city, county, state, and federal governments was rivaled only by the space occupied by banks. At lunchtime the conversation in the restaurants was more often than not about money— massive, raw slabs of money—whether the diners were from the political or the financial community.
In this opulent wallow, the agency owned a handsome ten-story building on a desirable street near city hall. Bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and wine-swilling derelicts shared the sidewalks with mutual respect—except for those regrettable occasions when one of them suddenly snapped, screamed incoherent deprecations, and savagely stabbed one of his fellow Angelenos. The wielder of the knife (or gun or blunt instrument) frequently suffered delusions of persecution by extraterrestrials or the CIA and was more likely to be a derelict than a banker, or a politician, or a bureaucrat.
Just six months ago, however, a middle-aged banker had gone on a killing spree with two 9mm pistols. The incident had traumatized the entire society of downtown vagrants and had made them more wary of the unpredictable "suits" who shared the streets with them.
The agency's building—clad in limestone, with acres of bronze windows as dark as any movie star's sunglasses—did not bear the agency's name. The people with whom Roy worked weren't glory seekers; they preferred to function in obscurity. Besides, the agency that employed them did not officially exist, was funded by the clandestine redirection of money from other bureaus that were under the control of the Justice Department, and actually had no name itself.
Over the main entrance, the street address gleamed in polished copper numbers. Under the numbers were four names and one ampersand, also in copper: CARVER, GUNMANN, GARROTE & HEMLOCK.
A passerby, if he wondered about the building's occupant, might think it was a partnership of attorneys or accountants. If he made inquiries of the uniformed guard in the lobby, he would be told that the firm was an "international property-management company."
Roy drove down a ramp to the underground parking facility. At the bottom of the ramp, the way was barred by a sturdy steel gate.
He gained admittance neither by plucking a time-stamped ticket from an automatic dispenser nor by identifying himself to a guard in a booth. Instead, he stared directly into the lens of a high-definition video camera that was mounted on a post two feet from the side window of his car and waited to be recognized.
The image of his face was transmitted to a windowless room in the basement. There, Roy knew, a guard at a display terminal watched as the computer dropped everything out of the image except the eyes, enlarged them without compromising the high resolution, scanned the striation and vessel patterns of the retinas, compared them with on-file retinal patterns, and acknowledged Roy as one of the select.
The guard then pushed a button to raise the gate.
The entire procedure could have been accomplished without the guard—if not for one contingency against which precautions had to be taken. An operative bent on penetrating the agency might have killed Roy, cut out his eyes, and held them up to the camera to be scanned. While the computer conceivably could have been deceived, a guard surely would have noticed this messy ruse.
It was unlikely that anyone would go to such extremes to breach the agency's security. But not impossible. These days, sociopaths of singular viciousness were loose in the land.
Roy drove into the subterranean garage. By the time he parked and got out of the car, the steel gate had clattered shut again. The dangers of Los Angeles, of democracy run amok, were locked out.
His footsteps echoed off the concrete walls and the low ceiling, and he knew that the guard in the basement room could hear them too. The garage was under audio as well as video surveillance.
Access to the high-security elevator was achieved by pressing his right thumb to the glass face of a print scanner. A camera above the lift doors gazed down at him, so the distant guard could prevent anyone from entering merely by placing a severed thumb to the glass.
No matter how smart machines eventually became, human beings would always be needed. Sometimes that thought encouraged Roy. Sometimes it depressed him, though he wasn't sure why.
He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, which was shared by Document Analysis, Substance Analysis, and Photo Analysis.
In the Photo Analysis computer lab, two young men and a middle-aged woman were working at arcane tasks. They all smiled and said good morning, because Roy had one of those faces that encouraged smiles and familiarity.
Melissa Wicklun, their chief photo analyst in Los Angeles, was sitting at the desk in her office, which was in a corner of the lab. The office had no windows to the outside but featured two glass walls through which she could watch her subordinates in the larger room.
When Roy knocked on the glass door, she looked up from a file that she was reading. "Come in."
Melissa, a blonde in her early thirties, was at the same time an elf and a succubus. Her green eyes were large and guileless—yet simultaneously smoky, mysterious. Her nose was pert—but her mouth was sensuous, the essence of all erotic orifices. She had large breasts, a slim waist, and long legs—but she chose to conceal those attributes in loose white blouses, white lab coats, and baggy chinos. In her scuffed Nikes, her feet were no doubt so feminine and delicate that Roy would have been delighted to spend hours kissing them.
He had never made a pass at her, because she was reserved and businesslike—and because he suspected that she was a lesbian. He had nothing against lesbians. Live and let live. At the same time, however, he was loath to reveal his interest only to be rejected.
Melissa said crisply, "Good morning, Roy."
"How have you been? Good heavens, you know that I haven't been in L.A., haven't seen you since—"
"I was just examining the file." Straight to business. She was never interested in small talk. "We have a finished enhancement."
When Melissa was talking, Roy was never able to decide whether to look at her eyes or her mouth. Her gaze was direct, with a challenge that he found appealing. But hei lips were so deliciously ripe.
She pushed a photograph across the desk.
Roy looked away from her lips.
The picture was a drastically unproved, full-color version of the shot that he had seen on his attaché case computer terminal the night before: a man's head from the neck up, in profile. Shadows still dappled the face, but they were lighter and less obscuring than they had been. The blurring screen of rain had been removed entirely.
"It's a fine piece of work," Roy said. "But it still doesn't give us a good enough look at him to make an identification."
"On the contrary, it tells us a lot about him," Melissa said. "He's between twenty-eight and thirty-two."
"How do you figure?"
"Computer projection based on an analysis of lines radiating from the corner of his eye, percentage of gray in his hair, and the apparent degree of firmness of facial muscles and throat skin."
"That's projecting quite a lot from such few—"
"Not at all," she interrupted. "The system makes analytic projections operating from a ten-megabyte database of biological information, and I'd pretty much bet the house on what it says."
He was thrilled by the way her supple lips formed the words "ten-megabyte database of biological information." Her mouth was better than her eyes. Perfect. He cleared his throat. "Well—"
"Brown hair, brown eyes."
Roy frowned. "The hair, okay. But you can't see his eyes here."
Rising from her chair, Melissa took the photograph out of his hand and put it on the desk. With a pencil, she pointed to the beginning curve of the man's eyeball as viewed from the side. "He's not looking at the camera, so if you or I examined the photo under a microscope, we still wouldn't be able to see enough of the iris to determine color. But even from an oblique perspective like this, the computer can detect a few pixels of color."
"So he has brown eyes."
"Dark brown." She put down the penci
l and stood with her left hand fisted on her hip, as delicate as a flower and as resolute as an army general. "Absolutely dark brown."
Roy liked her unshakable self-confidence, the brisk certitude with which she spoke. And that mouth.
"Based on the computer's analysis of his physical relationship to measurable objects in the photograph, he's five feet eleven inches tall." She clipped her words, so the facts came out of her with the staccato energy of bullets from a submachine gun. "He weighs one hundred and sixty-five, give or take five pounds. He's Caucasian, clean-shaven, in good physical shape, recently had a haircut."
"Anything else?"
From the file folder, Melissa removed another photograph. "This is him. From the front, straight on. His full face."
Roy looked up from the new photo, surprised. "I didn't know we got a shot like this."
"We didn't," she said, studying the portrait with evident pride. "This isn't an actual photograph. It's a projection of what the guy ought to look like, based on what the computer can determine of his bone structure and fat-deposit patterns from the partial profile."
"It can do that?"
"It's a recent innovation in the program."
"Reliable?"
"Considering the view the computer had to work with in this case," she assured Roy, "there's a ninety-four-percent probability that this face will precisely match the real face in any ninety of one hundred reference details."
"I guess that's better than a police artist's sketch," he said.
"Much better." After a beat, she said, "Is something wrong?"
Roy realized that she had shifted her gaze from the computer portrait to him—and that he was staring at her mouth.
"Uh," he said, looking down at the full portrait of the mystery man, "I was wondering . . . what's this line across his right cheek?"
"A scar."
"Really? You're sure? From the ear to the point of the chin?"
"A major scar," she said, opening a desk drawer. "Cicatricial welt—mostly smooth tissue, crimped here and there along the edges."
Roy referred to the original profile shot and saw that a portion of the scar was there, although he had not correctly identified it. "I thought it was just a line of light between shadows, light from the streetlamp, falling across his cheek."
"No."
"It couldn't be that?"
"No. A scar," Melissa said firmly, and she took a Kleenex from a box in the open drawer.
"This is great. Makes for an easier ID. This guy seems to've had special-forces training, either military or paramilitary, and with a scar like this—it's a good bet he was wounded while on duty. Badly wounded. Maybe badly enough that he was discharged or retired on psychological if not physical disability."
"Police and military organizations keep records forever."
"Exactly. We'll have him in seventy-two hours. Hell, forty-eight." Roy looked up from the portrait. "Thanks, Melissa."
She was wiping her mouth with the Kleenex. She didn't have to be concerned about smearing her lipstick, because she wasn't wearing any. She didn't need lipstick. It couldn't improve her.
Roy was fascinated by the way in which her full and pliant lips compressed so tenderly under the soft Kleenex.
He realized that he was staring and that again she was aware of it. His gaze drifted up to her eyes.
Melissa blushed faintly, looked away from him, and threw the crumpled Kleenex in the waste can.
"May I keep this copy?" he asked, indicating the full-face computer-generated portrait.
Withdrawing a manila envelope from beneath the file folder on the desk, handing it to him, she said, "I've put five prints in here, plus two diskettes that contain the portrait."
"Thanks, Melissa."
"Sure."
The warm pink blush was still on her cheeks.
Roy felt that he had penetrated her cool, businesslike veneer for the first time since he'd known her, and that he was in touch, however tenuously, with the inner Melissa, with the exquisitely sensuous self that she usually strove to conceal. He wondered if he should ask her for a date.
Turning his head, he looked through the glass walls at the workers in the computer lab, certain that they must be aware of the erotic tension in their boss's office. All three seemed to be absorbed in their work.
When Roy turned to Melissa Wicklun again, prepared to ask her to dinner, she was surreptitiously wiping at one corner of her mouth with a fingertip. She tried to cover by spreading her hand across her mouth and faking a cough.
With dismay, Roy realized that the woman had misinterpreted his salacious stare. Apparently she thought that his attention had been drawn to her mouth by a smear or crumb of food left over, perhaps, from a mid-morning doughnut.
She had been oblivious of his lust. If she was a lesbian, she must have assumed that Roy knew as much and would have no interest in her. If she wasn't a lesbian, perhaps she simply couldn't imagine being attracted—or being an object of desire—to a man with round cheeks, a soft chin, and ten extra pounds on his waist. He had met with that prejudice before: looksism. Many women, brainwashed by a consumer culture that sold the wrong values, were interested only in men like those who appeared in advertisements for Marlboro or Calvin Klein. They could not understand that a man with the merry face of a favorite uncle might be kinder, wiser, more compassionate, and a better lover than a hunk who spent too much time at the gym. How sad to think that Melissa might be that shallow. How very sad.
"Can I help you with anything else?" she asked.
"No, this is fine. This is a lot. We'll nail him with this."
She nodded.
"I have to get down to the print lab, see if they got anything off that flashlight or bathroom window."
"Yes, of course," she said awkwardly.
He indulged in one last look at her perfect mouth, sighed, and said, "See you later."
After he had stepped out of her office, closed the door behind him, and crossed two-thirds of the long computer lab, he looked back, half hoping that she would be staring wistfully after him. Instead, she was sitting at her desk again, holding a compact in one hand, examining her mouth in that small mirror
* * *
China Dream was a West Hollywood restaurant in a quaint three-story brick building, in an area of trendy shops. Spencer parked a block away, left Rocky in the truck again, and walked back.
The air was pleasantly warm. The breeze was refreshing. It was one of those days when the struggles of life seemed worth waging.
The restaurant was not yet open for lunch. Nevertheless, the door was unlocked, and he went inside.
The China Dream indulged in none of the decor common to many Chinese restaurants: no dragons or foo dogs, no brass ideograms on the walls. It was starkly modern, pearl gray and black, with white linen on the thirty to forty tables. The only Chinese art object was a life-size, carved-wood statue of a gentle-faced, robed woman holding what appeared to be an inverted bottle or a gourd; it was standing just inside the door.
Two Asian men in their twenties were arranging flatware and wineglasses. A third man, Asian but a decade older than his coworkers, was rapidly folding white cloth napkins into fanciful, peaked shapes. His hands were as dexterous as those of a magician. All three men wore black shoes, black slacks, white shirts, and black ties.
Smiling, the oldest approached Spencer. "Sorry, sir. We don't open for lunch until eleven-thirty."
He had a mellow voice and only a faint accent.
"I'm here to see Louis Lee, if I may," Spencer said.
"Do you have an appointment, sir?"
"No, I'm afraid not."
"Can you please tell me what you wish to discuss with him?"
"A tenant who lives in one of his rental properties."
The man nodded. "May I assume this would be Ms. Valerie Keene?"
The soft voice, smile, and unfailing politeness combined to project an image of humility, which was like a veil that made more difficult to see, until now,
that the napkin folder was also quite intelligent and observant.
"Yes," Spencer said. "My name's Spencer Grant. I'm a . . . I'm a friend of Valerie's. I'm worried about her."
From a pocket of his trousers, the man withdrew an object about the size—but less than the thickness—of a deck of cards. It was hinged at one end; unfolded, it proved to be the smallest cellular telephone that Spencer had ever seen.
Aware of Spencer's interest, the man said, "Made in Korea”
"Very James Bond."
"Mr. Lee has just begun to import them."
"I thought he was a restaurateur."
"Yes, sir. But he is many things." The napkin folder pushed a single button, waited while the seven-digit programmed number was transmitted, and then surprised Spencer again by speaking in neither English nor Chinese, but in French, to the person on the other end.
Collapsing the phone and tucking it into his pocket, the napkin folder said, "Mr. Lee will see you, sir. This way, please."
Spencer followed him among the tables, to the right rear corner of the front room, through a swinging door with a round window in the center, into clouds of appetizing aromas: garlic, onions, ginger, hot peanut oil, mushroom soup, roasting duck, almond essence.
The immense and spotlessly clean kitchen was filled with ovens, cooktops, griddles, huge woks, deep fryers, warming tables, sinks, chopping blocks. Sparkling white ceramic tile and stainless steel dominated. At least a dozen chefs and cooks and assistants, dressed in white from head to foot, were busy at a variety of culinary tasks.
The operation was as organized and precise as the mechanism in an elaborate Swiss clock with twirling ballerina dolls, marching toy soldiers, prancing wooden horses. Reliably tick-tick-ticking along.
Spencer trailed his escort through another swinging door, into a corridor, past storage rooms and staff rest rooms, to an elevator. He expected to go up. In silence, they went down one floor. When the doors opened, the escort motioned for Spencer to exit first.
Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart Page 9
