“Nah,” Iain McCorquodale tossed into the mix. “It’s like the shoemaker’s children going barefoot.”
“I thought that was his elves who went barefoot,” mused Ray Lopez. “Or is that a different story?”
“Okay,” I muttered, scanning the rest of the paper Steve had handed me, and typing “He’s an insurance broker” onto the screen, waiting to see what Tremor’s response was going to be to that.
Tremor: Ha. Sort of like the shoemaker’s children, right?
There was a snort over my left shoulder from McCorquodale.
Chimera: I guess so.
Tremor: Does he keep business hours or what?
Chimera: He is in the office half days, usually mornings, and in the afternoons and evenings he goes on calls, or takes meetings with corporate clients.
To me, this sounded like way too much detail for a wife to know about her husband’s work, but Tremor seemed to be buying it. Who knows, maybe husbands and wives shared all the minutiae and butt-ends of their days. Maybe that’s what Steve and I really had to look forward to, talk over dinner of police paperwork and workable classroom techniques. Of course, that didn’t sound too bad. I was just hoping there were going to be some days to share when this was all over.
Tremor: Sounds like a nice predictable life. Does he have his own office where he works?
We hadn’t worked this out. I looked over to Steve, who shrugged, so I turned toward Ray, who nodded.
Chimera: Yes. A corner office. Probably things would have been different if getting that office hadn’t been so important.
Alchemist: That’s long ago and far away, sugar. Things are going to get a whole lot better real soon.
Tremor: You can bank on that. Speaking of, where will this bus station be located?
Chimera: You mean what city?
Tremor: Yes.
Chimera: It’s downtown Edmonton. Canada.
Tremor: Ah, the Great White North.
Chimera: Is that a problem?
Tremor: Nothing is a problem, ma’am. I am in the business of alleviating problems, right?
Alchemist: Right.
Tremor: Okay. The down payment goes into a sports bag and is left in the bus station. The key goes in a Fed Ex envelope addressed to L. Cranston at the YMCA, Edmonton. Nothing will happen until the initial fee has been processed, of course. Then, once my end of the bargain has been fulfilled, you will be contacted for the remainder. Agreed?
Chimera: Agreed.
Alchemist: Agreed.
Tremor: Okay. What is your husband’s name, and what are your names?
Here it was. The moment when we could cut and run. Nothing had actually been said, besides the fact that I had told an ax-murderer what city I lived in, the one cautionary step I had always tried to avoid on-line to this point. I craned my neck to check the folks behind me. It was as if everyone was holding their breath. I reached out to the keyboard with both hands shaking.
Chimera: His name is Steve Browning and my name is Randy Craig.
Our names hung there on that purple blobby screen, and I wished desperately to haul them back. There was such a feeling of invasion and vulnerability, knowing that a murderer was seeing the real me. And then, of course, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I saw what went up on the screen after that.
Alchemist: My name is Tim Ross and I live just outside Chicago.
What a rat.
Tremor: You’ll be hearing from me. G’night.
He logged out, or at least it said he had. I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t just created that appearance. His IP address hadn’t yet dropped off the upper screen, so I wasn’t taking any chances. I stuck to private messages with Alchemist.
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Do you think he’s really gone?
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Not sure, but it’s best to be safe. So, I guess the money stuff is going to happen at your end?
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: I think it’s already happening.
Kate and Steve nodded to confirm my theory. There were three cell phones and my land line all working at once. Ray was still following things from my screen on his, but he was also transmitting something, probably a log of the conversation and the pertinent screen captures.
If Tremor was as adept at the Internet as we thought he was, it wouldn’t take him long to have tracked down this address. If, God forbid, he was already in Edmonton, it wouldn’t take him long to get to the Y. I could hear Lewis requisitioning undercover cops to go and register into the Y immediately so they could be on-site in the lobby when Tremor came to get his mail.
Suddenly I didn’t want to be on-line anymore. I couldn’t stand the thought of chatting with Alchemist. Dealing with Tremor had exhausted me. I knew I could probably bow out of talking with Alchemist, and he wouldn’t suspect a thing. He knew I was scared silly by all of this. The thing was, I still had several hours of monitoring to sit through. Besides, it’s not as if I could have signed off and flaked out. My apartment was still full of law enforcement officers. I slumped down in my chair, and yawned.
More coffee appeared at my elbow. So not everything about having an infestation of cops was to be sneezed at. However, it was my party and I’d kvetch if I wanted.
48
I am not sure how I made it through the night. Every time I heard a movement in the hallway my heart jumped and raced. And boy, was there a lot of movement in the hall. Ray and Steve had commandeered what seemed like an army, and my apartment was mission control. If Tremor was already in Edmonton, casing the joint, he wouldn’t stick around long, I figured.
Ray was sure he wasn’t here yet, though. There was someone watching the airport and someone else covering the train station, the bus station, and the Red Arrow express bus to Calgary. I had a hard time envisioning a hired gun riding in on the Greyhound, but I supposed stranger things had happened. Arriving at the bus depot would make him good and close to pick up the money.
Several cops were already tenanted in the downtown Y, and my neighbors, including Mr. MacGregor, had been moved out of their apartments to stay in the campus apartment hotel down the street. I was torn between being happy that my neighbors were apprised of the situation and out of danger, and being worried that they all now knew my business and were going to be annoyed with me.
My monitoring duties were finally done for the night, and I tried to sleep, with no real luck. Steve and Ray tried to shoo the extraneous bodies out of the apartment, but there was a constant undercurrent of movement and muttering in the outside room. I finally got up, got a clean pair of jeans, a fresh sweatshirt, and underwear out of my chest of drawers and went into the bathroom to take a shower and dress.
When I came out, everyone looked up with astonishment, as if they couldn’t imagine why I wasn’t sleeping like a baby. I shrugged, and went to pour myself some more coffee.
“Randy, you look great,” Ray enthused, “and you’re just in time to see what’s up. We’ve got the money in the bus-station locker and the Fed Ex envelope is on its way to the Y. We were going to just deliver it there ourselves, and then we determined that he might be tracing the package number on-line, so we figured normal channels were the best route there. So, now we wait. Steve’s address is covered everywhere and should lead to here. Now, it might give Tremor pause when he arrives here to find an insurance broker in a small university apartment, but we decided to add a condo sign to the front of the building and create a locked door front.” He noticed my shock, and hurried on, “Don’t worry, it’s a very tasteful small brass sign just under the numbers. No one will even see it, and it will be gone before the rest of the tenants come back. This way, he’ll think you two are some sort of urban yuppies. After all, it’s impossible to tell how big the apartments are from the outside of the building, and once he’s inside, we’ve got him.”
“So, we just sit and wait for him to come and kill Steve?”
“It’s a little bit more complex than that. We figure he’ll case the joint first, and
we can nab him then. We don’t want him actually doing any damage.”
“I would hope not.”
“Randy, don’t worry. I am not going to get killed.”
“I don’t know. It all feels just slightly off. Maybe one of the things is that I just don’t know where Alchemist stands in all this. And what about all the Edmonton spikes on the system that Ray was talking about before? Has anyone managed to explain that one yet? And is anyone keeping an eye on Sanders? There are just too many loose ends, and meanwhile we’re sitting here with a spotlight on us and a killer coming for us.” I had a hard time clamping my jaw shut, although I knew I had to stop babbling.
Steve put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me to him. “The sooner all of this goes down, the sooner everything can get back to normal. Don’t worry, hon. There is nobody who can get through to us. The chances of him figuring out it’s a trap and running are way higher than of him getting through and doing the job.”
There is nothing worse than being a sitting duck. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, because I had to be ready to take any e-mails from Tremor or Alchemist, or, indeed, anyone, to indicate I was still on the up and up. Since I didn’t have to be in Babel till 7:00, it was decided I shouldn’t go near it. Instead, I watched as Ray logged in as Emilio Lizardo.
Detectives Lewis and McCorquodale had left for the night, but Kate Brouder returned about 8:00 a.m., just as I was noticing the sun rise. She had brought a bag of Egg McMuffins, which smelled divine. I wolfed down two of them and found myself looking longingly at a third. She laughed and urged me on.
“They’re no good once they’re cold. Go for it!” Danger obviously makes me hungry. I wondered how many people ever had to learn that about themselves, as I bit into another McMuffin. Kate was full of information about the rest of the Banzais, as she referred to the Austin task force.
“We’re trying to cross-reference all the airline manifests into Austin for three days prior to Charlie Banyon’s death, to compare them to reservations and entries at the Edmonton International. You’d think, with all the Homeland Security happening, that this wouldn’t be a problem. To hear the airlines tell it, though, we’re asking for the moon.”
Ray nodded as he helped himself to breakfast. He excused himself to go back to the hotel for a shower while I tuned into the little nugget of information Kate had slipped in there. Thea’s husband’s name had been Charlie. There. I didn’t have to think of him in the abstract anymore. Well, technically, since he was dead, I supposed that’s all I could do—but that would be splitting hairs. I walked through mission control into the living room, bumping my hip against the edge of the kitchen table as I passed it.
Steve noticed me rubbing my hip.
“Careful, Randy. Your reactions will likely be slower and your dexterity limited. You’ve been up more than twenty-four hours and your body doesn’t like that sort of thing. You have to know to ease back on expectations, and conserve the energy you do have.”
“What about if something dreadful happens while you’re tired and slowed down?”
“Never underestimate the power of adrenalin, kiddo,” he grinned. “You just have to trust that it will be there when you need it.”
I was going to trust Steve on that one and hoped it held true for the both of us. What had I got us into? I knew that most of the reason I was so upset was that I no longer felt I could trust Alchemist, and he had been the one to really get me into this whole plan. Was it all a trap? Who the heck was Alchemist, anyway? Was he the killer? Was he in on it with Tremor? What role in all of this was he playing?
Suddenly, it came to me. It had never dawned on me before that Alchemist and Alvin shared the first two letters of their names. What if Alchemist was actually Chatgod in disguise?
I moved toward my computer, trying to puzzle it out as I drew closer. Why would Chatgod hire me to be a monitor if he already was monitoring things? Of course, Alchemist took a different shift from mine, but he was around an awful lot to cover for me, and he would often make it feel covert, as if we were pulling one over on the boss. Would the actual boss play with an employee that way?
He might if he were testing my loyalty. I ripped backward through my memory, trying to remember if I’d said anything horrible about Chatgod and his weird ways. I couldn’t recall any particular gaffes, but who knew what I’d said in passing that might have been construed as an insult?
There was a sort of validation of Alchemist’s being Chatgod, if I thought of him as Henry V wandering disguised among his troops. He was evangelical enough about chatting and community to be ever-watching. Maybe he just hired one person to watch while he slept and merely invented the Alchemist persona to make me feel as if I was joining some sort of corporation rather than a one-man operation. Of course, if that were the case, why invent a mythical Illinois alter-ego?
“Kate?” I asked, coming into the kitchen. “You met with Chatgod, didn’t you, when you were down in Florida?”
Kate looked up from her mapping of the area around my apartment building.
“Yes. His name is Alvin Epstein, and he runs the server out of his home in Coral Gables. He funds the chat-room through advertising banners and uses the chat room figures to demonstrate his demographics on the pulse of the Internet. Our supervisors were initially concerned that he might be fronting porn; but I think his master plan is to sell the chat software, since he has done some interesting tweaks on the program, or maybe to see if he can be bought out by one of the community sites to run the chat as a sort of town square forum.”
“What did you think of him as a person?”
“He seems quite nice, in a computer geeky sort of way. He’s better-looking than many of the fellows I went through computer science with, and slightly older. He’s tall, and sort of monkish.”
“Would you ever think of him as a smart aleck, or a joker?”
“Alvin? No. Definitely not. I don’t think the man has a sense of humor. At least not about Babel. It’s his baby, there’s no doubt about that.”
I told her about my theory of Alchemist being Chatgod. It was interesting that our supposedly fictional persona, Alvin, was really Chatgod’s name. From the sound of things, though, there was no way that Alvin Epstein could joke and tease every night on-line as Alchemist. I trusted Kate’s judgment. She was connected to the computer world and knew the temperaments of the folks who inhabited it. If she said Alvin Epstein didn’t have a sense of humor, I wouldn’t even bother assuming he could turn it on and off in his presentation of Alchemist. So, who was Alchemist?
Steve and Kate sat and listened to my worries, which was really good of them, since I think they both wanted to be involved in some other, more concrete, element of planning for the siege.
“Why don’t we get him to come clean?” suggested Steve.
“How, though?” I still wasn’t sure that Alchemist wasn’t up to his nipples in this whole scheme. Lie to me once, and I can never be sure you aren’t lying about everything.
“Why don’t we pull him in physically? Tell him that the task force needs him here. We can authorize transportation from anywhere. You get on to him and plead with him to get up here to help you out in person. Who knows? It might not be a bad idea, especially if Tremor intends to case out the whole set-up. If he thinks your lover is coming into town, things might head to a boil even quicker.”
“I have a feeling Tremor would suggest against this,” I said, slowly. “Remember that whole warning against extra insurance. This is a guy who wants to keep it very low profile. I think he wants his kills to look like accidents. In fact, who knows how many disappearances in Babel might not actually have been Tremor’s doing?”
It was Steve’s turn to question Kate’s take on Chatgod. “This Alvin guy. You don’t think contract killing is his real reason for setting up Babel, do you?”
“That’s the twenty-four-thousand-dollar question, Steve. Ray still isn’t sure. My take on it is no, Alvin Epstein is just a minor-leagu
e chat guru whose place is being used without his knowledge. I am pushing to get chat logs from him dating back to the beginning of Babel in 1995, though, because I think Randy is right—Tremor has been working his schtick from Babel for a lot longer than just the last few months. It’s too smooth to be a new operation. I want to look through the logs for names that are seen regularly, and then drop out. I am betting anything that Tremor suggests to his clients that they resume their chatting habits in another venue.”
I told Kate about Maia and Vixen, and suggested she get in touch with them to discuss regulars who were no longer regulars. If anyone kept track of the Babel community, it would be those two. Meanwhile, I was still working on the problem of uncovering Alchemist.
“So, suppose I e-mail him and ask him to fly in here. He knows you all are here, and that Steve is completely in the loop. He knows that Tremor is on his way. Why would he come?”
“Because he’s your friend, your compatriot?”
“Puhleese. This is a chat room, not a sorority.”
“Maybe he would like to be in on all the excitement.”
“Maybe he should be monitoring our use of the software.”
“Ooh, that’s a good one. What if he is the only one who could coordinate the on-line activities, and the task force wants to second him to their team while this operation is in situ?” The two of them looked at me. I shrugged. So I read a lot of spy novels. It’s not as if either of them needed a dictionary to understand me. I poured my ninety-seventh cup of coffee and tried to see the problem from all sides.
I ask Alchemist to join us, with the blessing and request of Ray and the team. He has to tell us where to send the ticket, and he arrives. We discover, when we are face to face, who the heck he really is and why he is using an alias to register in Babel. An alternate possibility would be that I ask him to join us, and he bursts out of the laundry room with an Uzi and kills us all for discovering that he is really the hired killer of Babel.
What was it about the laundry room that was spooking me, anyway? All that was there were the boiler, three washing machines, three corresponding dryers, a set of drying racks, one table for folding towels, and the recycling bins. The doors had been locked ever since we’d found a homeless fellow bunking down in the corner. It wasn’t so much that he was frightening (although he was a big, shambling sort of guy who didn’t seem all that reasonable) as the fact that he had been urinating in the corner of the room, giving the air a decidedly feral reek to it. That had been several years ago, but I still opened the door wide and hit the light switch before descending the two steps into the room.
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