by Chris Holm
He turned it on and cranked the volume up. The sound of static filled the room, not so loud as to be intolerable but loud enough to render useless any listening devices within a hundred and fifty feet. Then, finally, he picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”
“Sal, it’s Bobby V. We gotta talk.” Bobby V. was the Council rep for the Ventura crime family.
“This better be fucking good, Bobby,” Sal replied. “It’s my weekend with Izzie.”
“Ah. I take it you haven’t seen, then.”
“Seen what?”
“If you’d seen, you wouldn’t have to ask—you’d know. Turn on your TV.”
“What station?”
“Doesn’t matter. Any of ’em.”
“Hang on.”
He grabbed the remote from the nightstand drawer and turned on the tiny flat-screen atop the dresser. The cable box defaulted to the local NBC affiliate. Under a BREAKING NEWS banner was an aerial shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, thick smoke billowing from beneath it. The portion of the bridge directly above the smoke was hard to see, but it appeared to be canting, and several of the vertical support cables swung free, their ends frayed. The span on either side was littered with overturned cars.
“Jesus Christ,” Sal muttered.
“Yeah, it don’t look good.”
Sal cleared his throat. “Do they have any idea what happened yet?”
“If they do, they sure ain’t saying, but it looks to me like a big-ass bomb went off.”
“Bobby, I hope you’re not calling to ask if we had anything to do with it.”
Bobby scoffed. “Course not! I’m sure it was ISIS or some shit.”
“Then why’d you call? I assume you have a reason beyond torpedoing my fucking weekend.”
“They playing the video yet?”
“What video?”
“They got cell-phone video of the blast. Smiling family. Big boom.”
“No.”
“Keep watching. They will. And when they do, pay attention to the ugly mug that kicks the whole thing off.”
Sal sighed with frustration. “Listen, why don’t you just cut the bullshit and tell me what this is all about?”
“Because some things gotta be seen to be believed.”
Sal kept watching. As promised, the aerial footage cut to a shaky cell-phone video, first of a footpath, then of an old man’s blurry face. Sal tilted his head and squinted. “Holy shit. That’s Frank Segreti.”
“Oh, thank God—you see it too. When he popped up on my TV, I thought I was losing my goddamn mind.”
“He looks like hell.”
“You think? I’d say he looks pretty fucking good for a dead man.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. We blew up Segreti’s ass seven years ago.”
“Did we?”
“C’mon, Bobby. The safe house the Feds stashed him in was leveled by the blast—no one coulda made it outta there alive. And besides, they found his DNA when they processed the wreckage, it said so in their report.”
“Yeah, well, that video tells a different story,” Bobby said. “We need to convene the Council and hold a vote to authorize the funds to send a hitter after Segreti.”
Sal’s brow furrowed as he weighed his options. It’d take a couple days at least to organize a meeting, and even then, there was no guarantee they’d vote in favor of offing Segreti; they’d been reluctant to take action ever since the Engelmann job had gone sideways last year. “No. There isn’t time. Every second we wait, Segreti gets a little farther away.”
“I hate to break it to you, Sal, but you don’t have the clout to authorize an op without Council approval.”
“Of course I don’t,” Sal snapped. “And neither do you. There’s only one man who does.”
“You saying you’re gonna take this to the chairman?”
“I don’t see any other choice.”
“Do me a favor, then, and leave my name out of it.”
“Why, Bobby, you sound scared.”
“Scared? Hell, no. It’s just—you know how he’s been since the Feds announced Engelmann’s death. Communicating by dead drop. Voting by proxy. A different burner twice a week whether he used the last one or not. He’s goddamn paranoid, and for good reason. If Council business were ever linked to him, he—and everything we’ve been working toward—would be ruined. The last thing I need is to wind up on his bad side just because I put a bug in your ear.”
“How the fuck do you think I feel? I’m the one who hired Engelmann. The chairman blames me for his failure.”
“Aw, c’mon. You’re his handpicked guy. He can’t stay pissed at you forever. Hell, maybe putting Segreti in the ground will get you back into the chairman’s good graces.”
“Maybe. But first, I gotta be the guy to tell him the shitheel’s still alive. One thing’s for sure, though.”
“What’s that?”
“This time, I’m not leaving anything to chance. I wanna see him die with my own eyes. It’s the only way we’ll know that this time, the motherfucker stays dead.”
9.
HENDRICKS LEANED HEAVILY on Cameron’s shoulder as she helped him from the car, the wound in his side stamping her T-shirt red with every step. “C’mon,” she said. “My apartment’s upstairs. Let’s get you in before someone sees you.”
She struggled to support his weight as they crossed the patchy lawn. “Wait,” he said, trying to wriggle from her grasp and turn around. “The car.”
Cameron eyed his eight-year-old Accord—four-door, silver, nondescript. She’d driven it two miles inland from the restaurant while Hendricks lay in the backseat applying pressure to stanch the bleeding and cursing every time she hit a pothole. Now it was parked at the curb in front of an ugly prewar home that had been converted, shabbily, some decades ago into multiple apartment units. “Is stolen, I’m guessing.”
Who was this girl? he wondered. “Nah. It’s clean. I bought it from a private seller and paid in cash. But it doesn’t matter now. If anybody saw us leave the Salty Dog, it will lead the cops right to your door. We need to ditch it.”
“What we need is to get you inside. You’re barely upright. You’re covered in blood.”
“Damn it, kid, this isn’t a negotiation. The car has to go.”
“Look—there’s a strip mall a half a mile from here. Let me take you upstairs and get you situated. Once you’re safely off the street, I’ll come back down and move it to their lot, okay?”
His gaze traveled from the car to his blood-soaked shirt. Realized that of the two, the latter was more likely to be noticed. “Okay,” he conceded.
They scaled the concrete steps to the porch. Hendricks braced himself with his free hand on the rust-flecked pipe railing. Up close, he could see the house’s aluminum siding was dingy, and the nearest downstairs window’s bottom pane was split by a diagonal crack. Several mailboxes hung crookedly beside the door, each marked with peel-and-stick reflective letters, A to E, and handwritten names scrawled on masking tape. Hendricks scanned them as he went by: Ndiaye. Williamson. Goldenstern. Samuels. Karasiewicz. “Which one’s you?” he asked.
Cameron chuffed as if to say, Nice try. “None of them. I never peeled the old name off when I moved in.”
The front door was unlocked. Inside was a narrow hallway that smelled of cigarettes. The brown indoor/outdoor carpet was worn bare. They bypassed two doors labeled A and B, respectively, and headed up the rickety stairs. The wound in Hendricks’s side flexed excruciatingly as they ascended. He was breathing heavily by the time they reached the second floor.
“Sorry,” Cameron said, “but I’m in E. We’ve got one more flight to go.”
Hendricks set his jaw, and they pressed on.
The top floor was narrower than the first two because it was essentially attic space, tucked into the pitch of the roof. It was hotter up here by a good fifteen degrees. There was no hallway, just a small landing with one door. As they neared it, a dog inside went apeshit.
“You
failed to mention you have a dog,” Hendricks said.
“Oh, don’t sweat it. That’s just Cujo.”
Claws scrabbling on hardwood. Snarls punctuated by a snapping jaw. “Sure, a pissed-off dog named Cujo—what’s to sweat?”
“No, I’m serious,” she said, swinging the door open with a flourish. The barking trebled in volume. Hendricks tensed, but inside, there was no dog—just a motion sensor jury-rigged to an off-brand MP3 player that was plugged into a speaker dock. “It’s the actual Cujo…you know, from the movie? My landlord’s a sketchball. This keeps him from prying. On the upside, he takes cash and didn’t ask a lot of questions when I moved in.”
She reached down and shut the barking off. Then she helped him to her futon. Hendricks collapsed atop it, panting.
She disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a towel. “Lemme see your side,” she said.
Hendricks peeled off his ruined shirt. Cameron blanched when she saw the jagged gash across his rib cage. She took a steadying breath, then folded up the towel and pressed it to the wound.
“Hold this a sec.”
He complied. She stripped off her belt—military-style, canvas—and wrapped it around his chest, over the towel. Then she yanked it tight to hold the towel in place.
Hendricks sucked air through clenched teeth.
“Sorry,” she said. “But we need to keep applying pressure until the bleeding stops.”
“I could’ve just held it.”
“Maybe, but I don’t trust you not to pass out while I’m gone.”
“I’ll be fine. This isn’t the first time I’ve been stabbed.”
Cameron eyed his naked torso, taut and riddled with scars. “Yeah. Guess not.”
“Okay, I did as you asked—I came inside without a fight. Now go move the car.”
“All right, all right, I’m going.”
She crossed the room to the dresser. Grabbed a fresh shirt from the drawer. Turned her back to him. Hesitated briefly, then pulled her bloody top up over her head and tossed it to the floor. Hendricks saw a flash of lower back, lean and sun-freckled, but looked away before she exposed her bra.
When she reached the front door, she paused and turned. “Don’t die on me, okay? I won’t be long.”
Hendricks nodded, grimacing at the effort, and reluctantly, she took off down the stairs.
As soon as the door swung shut behind her, Hendricks rose shakily from the futon and began ransacking her apartment. He was hobbled by the wound and knew he didn’t have long, but luckily the place wasn’t very big—maybe one hundred and fifty square feet, bathroom included. And, thankfully, it was nearly bare of furniture, just a futon, a dresser, and a papasan chair, all of which—if the patterns on the sun-bleached floorboards when he moved them were any indication—had come with the place.
He removed drawers and overturned them. Rifled through their contents and checked to see if anything was taped to their undersides. He checked inside the futon’s cushion and the papasan’s too. Ditto the toilet tank and minifridge.
Every time he twisted, lifted, or bent, the knife wound tore a little—but it wasn’t deep, and the towel had slowed his bleeding significantly. His jaw clicked when he moved it, thanks to the punch Dimitris had landed, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t broken.
He was furious that he’d allowed Pappas to get the drop on him, and while he was grateful to Cameron—or whatever her real name was—for saving his life, he had no idea who she worked for, so he couldn’t discount the possibility that she had shot Pappas to silence him. If she was working for the Council, though, why hadn’t she just put him down when she’d had the chance?
Fine, then. Maybe she was on his side—but why? And who the hell was she? Hendricks didn’t know, but he aimed to find out.
Twenty minutes later, Cameron returned. As she pushed open the door and stepped inside, she said, “Don’t worry—it’s just me.” Puzzlement flickered across her face when she saw her belongings in piles on the floor. Then she noticed that Hendricks was sitting on her futon, the .45 he’d taken from Pappas aimed squarely at her gut. “Uh, did I do something wrong? Or are you delirious from blood loss? I saved your life, remember?”
“I remember,” he said. “But I think it’s time that you and I got to know each other better.”
“Fine by me,” she said, the quaver in her voice putting the lie to her casual bravado, “but do you really think you need to point a gun at me to do that? I’m one of the good guys.”
“Who says I am?” He gestured to the papasan chair with his gun barrel, its cushion bare, its slipcover lying on the floor beside it.
“I do,” she replied, moving slowly toward it with her hands up halfheartedly and then sitting down. “But we can play it your way.”
He glanced at the laptop that sat beside him on the futon, a tricked-out custom job with more ports than Hendricks knew what to do with and a seventeen-inch screen. “I found your computer,” he said.
“Good for you. I wasn’t hiding it.”
“It’s a serious piece of hardware.”
“For a waitress who lives in a total dump, you mean.”
“For anybody,” he said. “Care to explain to me what I found on it?”
“Sure,” she said. “I think the word you’re looking for is nothing.”
“Come again?”
“I built that thing myself. It’s encrypted six ways from Sunday and requires a USB passkey to log on. That passkey is in my pocket. I could give it to you, if you’d like to boot it up and poke around.”
Hendricks frowned. “Later, maybe. First, let’s talk about the dossier you’ve got on me.”
“What, the one in the dresser?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, I’d hardly call that a dossier,” she said with exaggerated snootiness, as if mocking his word choice. “It’s just some clippings, really, of stuff I couldn’t find online and haven’t had time to scan yet. If you really wanna see what I can do, you should check out what’s on that baby,” she said, nodding toward the computer. “I’ve got a virtual corkboard of news pieces stretching back four years. Same with crime-scene photos and coroner’s reports. And then there’s the juicy stuff. I’m talking real-time data collection on every criminal organization in the country from a half a dozen federal databases—and Interpol too, obviously. Five separate regression analyses, both parametric and non-, that all feed into a weighted model designed to treat each according to its accuracy in predicting prior known movements—”
“Whoa. Slow down. Whose prior known movements?”
She looked at him like he was the kid in class who couldn’t be trusted with the paste. “Well, yours.”
“So you admit that you’ve been tracking me?”
“Yes, of course!”
“For how long?”
“I dunno…a few months now? But like I said, my data stretches back way farther than that.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Nobody right now. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t follow.”
Cameron cocked her head and regarded him quizzically. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
“Should I?”
“I dunno. Four years ago, you saved my mother’s life. I thought maybe you’d recognize me.”
“I’ve saved a lot of people. Killed a lot of people too. You’re going to have to give me more to go on.”
“Cameron’s not my first name, it’s my last.”
It took a few beats, but eventually, it clicked. “Jesus. You’re Dana Cameron’s kid.”
When Hendricks met Dana Cameron, she was the head of bioinformatics for Veridian Laboratories. Dana was a brilliant programmer and had been a rising star in the male-dominated world of Silicon Valley before the pharmaceutical giant poached her to run its nascent division, which aimed to use rapid genotyping and next-gen computer modeling to tailor its promising new cancer drug to individual patients. The corporation’s executives pledge
d to give her a billion dollars to use however she wished in order to reach that goal.
When Veridian made the announcement, their stock soared. The scientific community heralded the decision as revolutionary. Bill Gates wrote in his annual Gates Foundation letter that the partnership could reduce cancer mortality by 80 percent in the next decade.
But the honeymoon was short-lived.
Six months into her new job, Dana discovered that the results of several in-house studies of Veridian’s new drug had been suppressed—studies that indicated the drug increased patients’ risk of stroke and cardiac arrest more than twentyfold. She made the mistake of giving her company’s CEO, Gavin Lockley, the chance to make things right and take the information public before she did. If the world found out about the studies, Lockley and Veridian stood to lose tens if not hundreds of billions, so he’d responded the way any shrewd businessman would: he’d hired someone to kill her. That’s how Hendricks wound up in her employ.
He remembered the job well, in part because the man Lockley had hired to kill Dana was a seasoned pro who’d nearly succeeded in his task before Hendricks finally finished him off, and in part because his clients were rarely as decent and principled as she was.
Hendricks set down his gun and smiled. “You were just a knobby-kneed kid with braces back then.”
“I wasn’t that young—I was sixteen!”
Hendricks was thirty-one. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that from where he was sitting, sixteen qualified as that young. “I seem to recall your parents called you Rosie.”
“Yeah. My first name’s Rosalind. My parents named me after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose research Watson and Crick ripped off to write their paper on the helical structure of DNA. Mom always said it was her way of reminding me that if I wanted something in this world, I had to fight for it. Dad used to joke that he went along with it because he thought that an old-lady name would scare off potential suitors.”
