Rasmussen long enough to discover to whom he would pass the Wizard files
when he got them; they intended to prosecute the money man who had hired
Rasmussen, for no doubt the hacker's employer was one of Decodyne's
primary competitors.
They had allowed Tom Rasmussen to think he had compromised the security
cameras, when in fact he had been under constant observation. They also
had allowed him to break down the file codes and access the information
he wanted, but unknown to him they had inserted secret instructions in
the files, which insured that any diskettes he acquired would be full of
trash data of no use to anyone.
Flames roared and crackled, consuming the van. Julie watched chimeras
of reflected flames slither and caper up the glass walls and across the
roof and coalesce there in the form of gargoyles.
Raising her voice slightly to compete with the fire and with the shriek
of approaching sirens, she said, "Well, we thought he believed he'd
circumvented the videotape records of the security cameras, but
apparently he knew we were on to him."
"Sure did."
"So he also might've been smart enough to search for an anticopying
directive in the files-and find a way around it."
Bobby frowned. "You're right."
"So he's probably got Wizard, unscrambled, on those diskettes.
"Damn, I don't want to go in there. I've been shot at enough tonight."
A police cruiser turned the corner two blocks away and sped toward them,
siren screaming, emergency lights casting off alternating waves of blue
and red light.
"Here come the professionals," Julie said. "Why don't we let them take
over now?"
"We were hired to do the job. We have an obligation. honor is a sacred
thing, you know. What would Sam Spade think of us?"
She said, "Sam Spade can go spit up a rope."
"What would Philip Marlowe think?"
"Philip Marlowe can go spit up a rope."
"What will our client think?"
"Our client can go spit up a rope."
"Dear, 'spit' isn't the popular expression."
"I know, but I'm a lady."
"You certainly are."
As the black-and-white braked in front of them, another police car
turned the corner behind it, siren wailing, and entered Michaelson Drive
from the other direction.
Julie put her Uzi on the pavement and raised her hand to avoid
unfortunate misunderstandings.
"I'm really glad you're alive, Bobby."
"You going to kick me again?"
"Not for a while."
FRANK Pollard hung on to the tailgate and rode the truck nine or ten
blocks, without drawing the attention of the driver.
Along the way he saw a sign welcoming him to the city of Anaheim, so he
figured he was in southern California, although he still didn't know if
this was where he lived or whether he was from out of town. Judging by
the chill in the air, it was winter-not truly cold but as frigid as it
got in these climates. He was unnerved to realize that he did not know
the date or even the month.
Shivering, he dropped off the truck when it slowed and turned onto a
service way that led through a warehouse district. Huge,
corrugated-metal buildings-some newly painted and some streaked with
rust, some dimly lit by security lamps and some not-loomed against the
star spattered sky.
Carrying the flight bag, he walked away from the warehouses. The
streets in that area were lined with shabby bungalows. The shrubs and
trees were overgrown in many places: untrimmed palms with full skirts of
dead fronds; bushy hibiscus with half-closed pale blooms glimmering
softly in the gloom; jade hedges and plum-thorn hedges so old they were
more woody than leafy; bougainvillea draped over roofs and fences,
bristling with thousands of untamed, questing trailers. His soft-soled
shoes made no sound on the sidewalk, and his shadow alternately
stretched ahead of him and then behind, as he approached and then passed
one lamppost after another.
Cars, mostly older models, some rusted and battered, were parked at
curbs and in driveways; keys might have dangled from the ignitions of
some of them, and he could have jump started any he chose. However, he
noted that the cinder block walls between the properties-as well as the
walls of a decrepit and abandoned house-shimmered with the
spray-painted, ghostly, semi-phosphorescent graffiti of Latino gangs,
and didn't want to tinker with a set of wheels that might belong to one
of their members. Those guys didn't bother rushing to a phone to call
the police if they caught you trying to steal one of their cars; they
just blew your head off or put a knife in your neck. Frank had enough
trouble already, even with his head intact and his throat unpunctured,
so he kept walking.
Twelve blocks later, in a neighborhood of well-kept houses and better
cars, he began searching for a set of wheels that would be easy to
boost. The tenth vehicle he tried was a one year-old green Chevy,
parked near a street lamp, the doors unlocked, the keys tucked under the
driver's seat.
Intent on putting a lot of distance between himself and the deserted
apartment complex where he had last encountered his unknown pursuer,
Frank switched on the Chevy's heater and drove from Anaheim to Santa
Ana, then south on Bristol Avenue toward Costa Mesa, surprised by his
familiarity with the streets. He seemed to know the area well. He
recognized buildings, shopping centers, parks, and neighborhoods past
while he drove, though the sight of them did nothing to rekindle his
burnt-out memory. He still could not recall who he was, where he lived,
what he did for a living, what he was running from or how he had come to
wake up in an alleyway in the middle of the night.
Even at that dead hour-the car clock indicated it2:48-he figured his
chances of encountering a traffic cop was greater on a freeway, so he
stayed on the surface street through Costa Mesa and the eastern and
southern fringes of Newport Beach. At Corona Del Mar he picked up the
Pacific Coast Highway and followed it all the way to Laguna Beach
encountering a thin fog that gradually thickened as he progressed
southward.
Laguna, a picturesque resort town and artists' colon shelved down a
series of steep hillsides and canyon walls toward the sea, most of it
cloaked now in the thick fog. Only an occasional car passed him, and
the mist rolling in from the Pacific became sufficiently dense to force
him to reduce his speed to fifteen miles an hour.
Yawning and gritty-eyed, he turned onto a side street east of the
highway and parked at the curb in front of a dark, two story, gabled,
Cape Cod house that looked out of place on these Western slopes. He
wanted to get a motel room, but before he tried to check in somewhere,
he needed to know if he had any money or credit cards. For the first
time all night, he had a chance to look for ID, as well. He searched
the pockets of his jeans, but to no avail.
He switched on the overhead light, pulled the
leather flight bag onto
his lap and opened it. The satchel was filled with tightly banded
stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.
THE THIN soup of gray mist was gradually stirring itself into a thicker
stew. A couple of miles closer to the ocean the night probably was
clotted with fog so dense that it would almost have lumps.
Coatless, protected from the night only by a sweater, but warmed by the
fact that he had narrowly avoided almost certain death, Bobby leaned
against one of the patrol cars in front of Decodyne and watched Julie as
she paced back and forth with her hands in the pockets of her brown
leather jacket. He never got tired of looking at her. They had been
married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked an
played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys
at a bar or ball game-partly because it was difficult to find other guys
in their middle thirties who were interested in the things that he cared
about: big-ban music, the arts and pop culture of the '30s and '40s, and
classic Disney comic books.
Julie wasn't a lunch-with-the-girls type either, because not many
thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers
cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training. In spite of
spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and
she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever
known.
"What's taking them so long?" she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted
windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.
"Be patient with them, dear, Bobby."
"They don't have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota. They're just a
humble SWAT team."
Michaelson Drive was blocked off. Eight police vehicle cars and
vans-were scattered along the street. The chill night crackled with the
static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios. An
officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men
were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at
the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for
Rasmussen. Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner's office were
photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.
"What if he gets away with the diskettes?" Julie asked.
"He won't."
She nodded. "Sure, I know what you're thinking-Wizard was developed on
a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne. But there's
another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn't there?
What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them
out by phone?"
"Can't. The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different
from the one on which Wizard was developed. Incompatible."
"Rasmussen is clever."
"There's also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut
down."
"Rasmussen is clever," she repeated.
She continued to pace in front of him.
The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel
when she'd jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it
looked raw and wet. She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of
dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her
right eye and along her jaw line. Each time Bobby focused on those
stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him
at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.
Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated
her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious.
Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so
to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his
eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her. Though it
was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair
was usually thick and lustrous. She had wide-set eyes as dark as
semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally as toffee ice cream,
and a generous mouth that always taste sweet to him. Whenever he
watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his
attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image
of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food:
chestnuts, chocolate toffee, cream, sugar, butter. He found this
amusing, but he always understood the profundity of his choice of
similes: She reminded him of food because she, was more than food, she
sustained him.
Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away at the end
of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie's attention and then Bobby's.
Someone from the SWAT team had closed the doors to report to the guards
stationed there. A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie
and Bobby to go forward.
When they joined him, he said, "They found this Rasmusen. You want to
see him, make sure he has the right diskettes?"
"Yeah," Bobby said.
"Definitely," Julie said, and her throaty voice didn't sound at all sexy
now, just tough.
KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running
graveyard-shift patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from
the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him. He counted
fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds.
He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred
bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with
$140,000. He had no idea where the money had come from or whether it
belonged to him.
The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded
another surprise-a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but
two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a
California driver's license. With the wallet was a United States
passport. The photographs on the passport and license were of the same
man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an
easy smile, and dimples. Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked
like, he tilted the rear view mirror and was able to see enough of his
face to match it with the one on the ID. The problem was... the
license and passport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.
He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found
another Social Security card, passport, and California driver's license.
These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of
Frank.
James Roman meant nothing to him.
George Farris was also meaningless. And Frank Pollard, whom he believed
himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could
recall.
"What the hell am I tangled up in?" he said aloud.
He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in
fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for one to which
death had entitled him.
/> As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night
beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him.
He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere which he could
retreat and be assured of safety. A man with a past was also a man
without a future.
WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor,
in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom
Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the
wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a
length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together. He was
pouting. He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of
dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd's
office he had cold-bloodily given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet
here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught. His weasel
face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his
yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if
anyone dared to say a cross word. The mere sight of him infuriated
Julie. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into
his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.
The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had
rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place. Evidently,
standing at Ackroyd's window to watch the fireworks, he had been
surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota. She had driven the
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 4
