The List - A Thriller

by Konrath, J. A.

  Roy’s face got very serious. “I can be persuasive.”

  Tom looked at Roy, then at Bert. “Do we all agree, then? We try to grab one of the bad guys?”

  “What about saving the other clones?”

  “We can do both.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay, then.” Tom started the car and cranked up the heat. “We know Joan of Arc is in Hollywood, and Abe Lincoln is in Nebraska.”

  “Always wanted to see Hollywood,” Bert mused.

  “Me too.”

  “Sounds good.” Tom cruised down the driveway and through the gate, leaving the Stang estate. “California here we come.”

  “Joan?” Marsha peeked in the door. “There are some men here to see you.”

  Joan checked her desk calendar and didn’t see any scheduled meetings for that day.

  “Are they anybody?” Anybody big in the business who wouldn’t need an appointment.

  “They said they’re police officers.”

  “Thanks, Marsha. Send them in.”

  “Is everything… okay?”

  “It’s fine. I was assaulted last night. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  Marsha’s head disappeared, and a moment later three men came into her office. The first was black, big, cop written all over him. The second guy was smaller, a mustache, familiar in some way she couldn’t place. Bringing up the rear was a tall, wiry man, with sandy hair. He’s the one who spoke.

  “Miss DeVilliers? I’m Detective Tom Mankowski. This is my partner, Roy Lewis, and this is Bert Blumberg.”

  “Thanks for coming down, Officers. You’re here with good news, I hope. You caught the creep?”

  “The creep?”

  “The guy who attacked me.”

  For a moment they didn’t seem to understand her. Then the tall one, Tom, approached her desk.

  “Was it one of these guys?”

  He opened up a binder and handed her three color computer print outs. The first picture was of a muscular man covered with tattoos. She flipped to the second page. Goatee. Green eyes. There was no doubt at all.

  “This is him! Have you picked him up yet?”

  “This man attacked you?”

  “Twice. Tried to put me on a big stake. You’ve read the reports. Right?”

  None of them answered. Joan narrowed her eyes.

  “Are you guys LAPD?”

  “Miss DeVilliers—”

  “I’d like to see some identification, please.”

  “Joan, listen, you’re in danger.”

  “Do you have any ID or not?”

  “Please, give us just a second. This is important.”

  Joan felt her face flush. Paparazzi. It was only a matter of time before they caught wind of it. She hit the intercom button in her desk. “Marsha…”

  “We’re not from LA. Roy and I are Chicago Homicide Detectives. We’re following up on a murder investigation where the victim had a number 7 tattooed on his heel. Just like your number 3.”

  Marsha’s voice came through the speaker. “Yes, Ms. DeVilliers?”

  The tattoo again. Joan stared at Tom. His suit was off the rack, wrinkled, and his face left no doubt he was exhausted. His partners shared the look. Joan tried to tune into any perceived threat, any bad vibe, any hint of them being media jackals. They were calm as calm could be.

  “Hold my calls.” Joan leaned back and crossed her legs. “You have my attention.”

  “The man who attacked you is named Victor Pignosky. He goes by the name of Vlad. He also has a tattoo on his heel, the number 10. I’ve got a number 5. Bert here has a number 6. There are ten of us, total. All the same age. All adopted by different parents. Vlad and two of the others are trying to kill the rest of us—me, you, Bert. They’ve already succeeded twice.”

  “Do you have any proof of this?”

  Tom and Bert looked at each other, and then took off their shoes. Their tattoos matched the style of Joan’s.

  “Okay, so why does this Vlad guy want to kill me—us?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “And what’s the deal with the numbers? Are you guys my brothers?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, what exactly is going on?”

  “We should tell her.” The familiar guy, Bert, nudged Tom.

  He shook his head. “How can we prove it? With her, we can’t do the writing thing. There’s no pictures, no photos. Maybe we could look for old French paintings.”

  “You’re going to have to tell her sooner or later.” The black man, Roy, shrugged. “She either buys it or she don’t.”

  “Try me. I’m a Hollywood producer. I’ve heard it all.”

  “Fine.” Tom took a deep breath. “This will sound crazy. It sounded crazy to me, when I heard it. But all ten of us, we weren’t born, normally. We were—created. In a lab, in Mexico.”

  “Created, how? Are we talking mad scientists and test tubes here? Some holy miracle thing?”

  “We were cloned from famous historical figures.”

  Joan frowned. “You just lost me.”

  The little guy sighed. “He’s telling the truth. I’m a clone of Albert Einstein. He’s Thomas Jefferson. The guy who attacked you is Vlad the Impaler.”

  “And I’m…?”

  “Joan of Arc.”

  She hit the button. “Marsha, call Security.”

  Tom said, “Look. This thing is big. The police won’t be able to protect you. Victor—Vlad—isn’t going to stop. We’re all on a hit list.”

  “Nice try.”

  “This is the truth.”

  Joan let out a slow breath, surprised she’d suspended her disbelief for so long.

  “Well, it sounds like a movie pitch. The cloning angle isn’t bad, but it needs work. Maybe approach it from a comedy perspective. You could call it Send In the Clones.”

  “Security is on the way up, Ms. DeVilliers.”

  “We’re staying over at the Chinatown Holiday Inn. Here’s my cell phone number.” Tom tossed a card onto her desk. “Call if you need us.”

  “Sure thing, President Jefferson. Now, I have some actual work to do. If you’ll pardon me.” Joan smiled. “Get it? Pardon me?”

  Tom looked at her, hard. “Please, be careful.”

  Joan met his stare, and for a second almost believed him. She came very close to calling them back in, but the moment passed and rationality took over. She was no more Joan of Arc than those guys were Einstein and Jefferson. The little guy did look like Einstein, but it was all too far removed from reality. She wasn’t buying.

  But being stalked by some psycho—that was real. And they did have a picture of him, which implied some kind of connection. Joan didn’t perceive them as a threat—there was something very benign about the trio—but the smartest move would be to call the police department and tell them what happened. Let the professionals take care of it. Joan would show up for the trial.

  She located the number of the cop who took her report the night before. But before doing that, she called Marty into her office and had him set up some interviews for personal bodyguards.

  Until this Vlad lunatic was behind bars, Joan wasn’t going to take any chances. Even if she had to hire an entourage.

  “Well, what now? She didn’t believe us.”

  Roy put on his sunglasses. “We knew she wouldn’t. Be honest, I don’t either. I figure this is all just some big white-person conspiracy.”

  They walked out of the building and stopped on the sidewalk. The California sun felt good. Tom inhaled deeply, trying to smell the ocean. He believed he caught a whiff of salt water behind the car fumes and the rotting garbage from the alley.

  “At least we know Vlad is here. Roy, do we have any friends in the LAPD?”

  “Not that I know of. We can always make some.”

  “It’s a shot. I’d like to see those reports on Joan’s attack. Maybe we can catch Vlad before he makes his next move.”

  �
��So, we’re just supposed to sit here and wait?”

  “That’s the plan, Bert.” Tom held up his hand to hail a cab.

  “How about Lincoln? While we’re here, Attila and Jack could be trying to kill him.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I’ll go after Abe.”

  Tom turned away from traffic and frowned at Bert. Maybe all the jet lag had caught up with the little guy.

  “Bad idea. These are dangerous guys.”

  “If I want to go, you can’t stop me.”

  “I could break your legs,” Roy suggested. “Then you don’t go nowhere.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Don’t matter. I can break your legs whether you’re afraid or not.”

  Bert gave Roy his back and touched Tom’s shoulder. “I’d be dead right now if you didn’t show up when you did. Abe will be easier to convince. There’s a handwriting sample in the leather binder, and the guy already knows he looks like Lincoln. We have to warn him, or he’ll die.”

  “And if we leave LA, we miss our shot at Vlad and Joan will die.”

  “Why can’t we save them both?”

  “Let’s vote.”

  “No voting. You guys will team up against me again. The choice is simple—you let me go to Nebraska, or I’ll take off as soon as you both turn your backs.”

  A cab stopped by the curb.

  “We’ll discuss it back at the hotel.”

  “We’ll discuss it now. There’s a beat cop right across the street. All I have to do is start screaming that you two have guns.”

  Tom and Roy looked at each other. The cabbie leaned out the window. “You guys getting in or what?”

  “I could keep an eye on him, make sure he’s okay.”

  Tom couldn’t believe that came out of Roy’s mouth.

  “You’re kidding.”

  Bert was just as amazed. “You want to come with me?”

  “No, damn you both. I don’t want to go with you. But if we don’t have a choice, I’ll go. We zip over there, warn the guy, make sure he’s safe, zip back here. Could be back by tonight. I’m anxious to get back on a plane anyway. Been so long.”

  Tom considered it. Someone had to keep an eye on Joan, but it wasn’t very likely Vlad would attack her again so soon. And, honestly, it would be nice to be alone for a little while. Tom had some personal issues to sort out, a difficult task when surrounded by constant bickering.

  “Fine. Let’s hit the hotel, we’ll come up with a game plan.”

  The cabbie was fat, sweaty, and strongly smelled like a gym sock. The three of them climbed into the back seat. Roy was hesitant to sit down—Tom knew his donut was back at the hotel.

  “You should have taken it with.”

  “And do what with it? Carry it around on my neck?”

  “This is LA. I don’t think anyone would notice. Slug bug red, no hit backs.” Bert popped him in the shoulder. “And there’s another one! Slug bug green, no hit backs.” Bert hit him again, same spot.

  The cabbie scowled at Roy. “Buddy, you need to sit down.”

  “I’m trying to sit down. This jackass keeps whacking me.”

  Tom questioned his decision to sit between them. The front seat seemed like the lesser evil.

  “Chinatown Holiday Inn.”

  “Sweet Mary mother of Jesus wife of Joseph the carpenter!” Roy finally managed to sit down.

  “So, you guys play the slug bug game?” The taxi driver grinned at them in his rearview. “I see that all the time. Lot of Beetles in Hollywood. Trendy.”

  “There’s one.” Roy reached over and pounded Bert in the leg. “Slug bug black, no hit backs.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there.”

  “That’s a BMW.” Bert smacked Roy twice. “Wrong car, double hit backs.”

  “Can you guys quit this, please?” Tom looked ahead in the distance. “Oh God, no.”

  “Here it is.” The cabbie pointed to his right. “Largest Volkswagen dealership in Los Angeles.”

  It was ugly. Real ugly.

  When they got to the hotel, Bert and Roy were still laughing.

  “I hurt my hand, smacking you so much.”

  “I got so many bruises, I’m going to be darker than you. How’s your arm?”

  “I need a Vicodin. You hit me sixty-five times in the exact same spot. But the one who really nailed me was Tommy. Man, you hit hard.”

  “No kidding.” Bert patted Tom on the back. “You were jabbing so fast your hands were a blur. I didn’t think you liked this game.”

  “Yeah, Tom. Next time, though, you have to call out the color of the car. You forgot to say anything.”

  “Did I?”

  They entered the hotel lobby and got in the elevator. Their room was on the tenth floor. Tom opened the door with the keycard and made a beeline for the laptop. After logging onto Wifi, he went to the site he’d discovered last night after they got in. Surveillance Technologies.

  “You’re not taking your lures again, are you?”

  “Everywhere I go.”

  “Can’t you put them in the hotel safe?”

  “I don’t trust safes.”

  “But you trust the airlines? What if they lost your luggage?”

  “Then they pay me the market value. I insure them every time I board.”

  Tom took the tracer he’d liberated from Bert’s deodorant from his pocket and attached the lead terminal to the battery. Just below the battery, on the circuit board, there was a serial number followed by the tiny word BigTrack. Rather than sleep last night, Tom had used these to trace the tracer back to its manufacturer.

  Surveillance Technologies was an upscale spy store that sold bugging, tracking, and detecting equipment online. Their home page proudly advertised that the US government was one of their top customers. A disclaimer in somewhat smaller font stated that many of these products were illegal for civilian use.

  The BigTrack series were tracers. By accessing the private area of the Surveillance Technology website, you could access the global positioning satellite to plot the tracer on an overlay as large as the western hemisphere, all the way down to a street map.

  BigTracks were off limits for the public sector, and the tracking page required an ID and a password to access. Tom had spent almost two hours trying to get in. He used combinations of ATTILA, JACK, RIPPER, HUN, CLONE, GENES, STANG, BARNETT, and so on, hoping to luck into the right combination. He hit the jackpot with ID MARY and password KELLY. The Ripper’s final victim.

  He tried it now, and then punched in the serial number on the tracer. The screen loaded a map of the United States, with a small blip on the West Coast. He zoomed in to California, then to LA, then to Chinatown, and finally down to the street the hotel was on. Tom wondered if zooming in further would show a floor plan of their suite, but it was already maxed out.

  “We call each other every four hours, starting when you arrive. I can trace you guys with this.” Tom tossed the BigTrack to Bert. “Keep it on you.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Bert placed the transmitter into his thick wallet. Roy picked up Tom’s carryon—Roy’s had been lost in the fire in New Mexico. After the excruciating car trip back from Springfield, they’d stopped at their apartments to shower and change. Curiosity had prompted Tom to sweep his place with the Foxhound, and he found three bugs identical to Jessup’s. Trying to sound natural, they openly telegraphed their trip to California, hoping one of the bad guys was listening. To make the trail even easier to follow, they purchased their plane tickets with credit cards.

  Tom logged onto a travel site and searched for the next direct flight to Lincoln, Nebraska out of LAX.

  “Got one. Southwest, leaves in two hours.” He faced Roy. “Shall I also reserve a rental car for you, sir?”

  “If you’d be so kind.”

  “I’ll need a valid driver’s license and a major credit card, please.”

  Roy tossed him his wallet. Tom followed the li
nks and wound up at Hertz. He found an appropriate automobile and several keystrokes later, they had wheels.

  “How did we survive before we had the Internet?” Tom wondered aloud.