“Who am I speaking to?”
“You don’t need an introduction. All you need to know is that I’m on to you. And unless you meet me right now for a conversation, I’m going straight to the police.”
“And what would be the substance of this conversation?”
“A financial arrangement. The amount won’t be exorbitant. Just enough to make it worth my while to forget what I know.”
“What exactly is it that you think you know?”
“Not over the phone. We need to meet. You know Alcatraz?”
“The island prison in California?”
“No, the bar on Cooper Avenue.”
“I am unfamiliar with it.”
“Well, you haven’t missed much. Go south on 35, hook east on Cooper, and you’ll run right into it.”
“It is rather late for a meeting.”
“Yeah, but we’re both still up. Wait for me inside. I’ll recognize you. If you don’t show, you don’t get a second chance.”
“You are being most mysterious.”
“Just be there. Or my next call is to the police.”
She clicked off.
A couple of minutes passed, long enough for her to wonder if he’d taken the bait. Then the Lexus’s headlights snapped on, spilling across the parking lot and erasing her view of the motel’s doorway. She had an indistinct impression of a figure moving behind the glare, climbing quickly into the SUV.
Smart ploy. He’d used a remote starting function to switch on the lights, masking his exit from the room. It must have occurred to him that the phone call could be a ruse to draw him out into the open and gun him down.
She didn’t think this man was stupid. That alone made him unusual, because in her experience most bad guys were stupid as hell.
Her Jeep remained out of the headlights’ range as the Lexus eased out of the parking lot. She checked the map on her phone to be sure the GPS tracking worked. A blip on the screen traced the Lexus’s progress down Highway 35.
She didn’t know how much time she had—fifteen minutes, maybe. Long enough to get into the room and sniff around, get a feel for this guy, a better sense of what she was up against.
She walked to the motel room door, taking a key and screwdriver from her purse. The key was a bump key, filed down to fit a template she’d downloaded from an underground website. She inserted it in the lock and tapped it with the screwdriver’s handle until a jar of impact popped the lock’s pins into position, allowing the knob to turn under her hand. Easy.
It was called lock bumping, and all the cool kids were doing it.
She went inside, shutting the door behind her. He’d left the lights on, which was thoughtful of him. Her impulse was to toss the place at once, but she forced herself to take a quick overview first. It was your standard issue cheap-ass motel room, the kind she knew too well from her upbringing on the road. There was the smell of stale air, the mat of short-nap carpet, the play of distant headlights across the drapes.
The black leather jacket, she noticed, was gone. He’d put it on before going out. According to the GPS app, the Lexus was still on its way to Alcatraz.
She checked out the closet and bathroom to reassure herself she was alone. In the bathroom she noticed something odd. He’d taken down the vinyl shower curtain and draped it over the tub as a lining.
Now, why the hell would he do that? Maybe he’d been planning to take a bath, and he thought the tub was dirty. But the shower curtain wasn’t any cleaner. She saw spots of gray mold in its creases.
An image flickered in her mind. Another shower curtain, this one likewise dappled with mold. And printed with pictures of baby ducks. Through the translucent screen, a dark figure, shadowy and huge, and coming closer ...
She shoved the memory aside and returned to the main room, making a beeline to the suitcase on the luggage rack. It was equipped with a small padlock but had been left open, a lucky break. She searched the contents: shirts, slacks, socks, underwear. The shirts were expertly folded, the pants perfectly creased. The sock pairs were clipped together. Neat freak.
Except for the underwear, most of the items were dark blue or black. And there were gloves, several pairs of black leather gloves. This guy definitely didn’t like getting his hands dirty.
She looked in the pockets of the suitcase, hoping to find an airline ticket or an itinerary, even a sales receipt. All she discovered was a well-worn paperback of Le Morte d’Arthur. She’d never heard of it, which didn’t mean much, since she hadn’t read an actual book since she’d ditched high school. Reading just wasn’t her thing. It seemed like there was always something more interesting on TV.
Skimming the back cover, she gathered that it was the story of King Arthur’s knights. A long section on Lancelot and Guinevere, which looked boring as hell, was heavily marked up with careful underlining. A folded piece of paper served as a bookmark. It didn’t look like just any piece of paper. The corners were dog-eared, and there was foxing on the edges. Like something that had been carried around for a while.
She opened it up and saw lines of flowing script in a looping ornamental hand. A poem, from the look of it. She wasn’t sure, because it was in Spanish, and her espanol was limited to the Taco Bell drive-through menu. No title, and it was unsigned, but probably her guy had written it. She refolded it and stuck it into the back pocket of her jeans. Probably it was unimportant, but so far it was all she had.
Next to the suitcase was a duffel bag. Black, naturally. She unzipped it and allowed herself a little fist pump. It was his bag of goodies. Spare ammo, a couple of dark amber bottles with vaporizer nozzles, a roll of duct tape, a toolkit—wrench, pliers, screwdrivers.
And there was a strange little black box with no markings, obviously a custom-built job. The two metal prongs protruding from one end told her it was a stun gun. The little red button on the side must be the trigger. Commercial stun guns usually had two sets of prongs. One pair was mainly for show; the current passed between them, ionizing the air in a crackling blue threat display. This gadget had only the charge electrodes, the ones that did the real work. It was a serious weapon, probably packing a serious wallop.
He’d taken a few other items from the bag; there were empty pouches, the right size for a handgun, a spare clip, and maybe a suppressor tube.
She checked Sammy again. Her quarry’s vehicle was now stationary in the vicinity of Alcatraz. He must have parked by the bar.
She went to the closet. A charcoal gray jacket was draped on one of those annoying motel room hangers that you couldn’t remove from the rod. Nice jacket, fine quality, probably what they called bespoke, though she wasn’t sure exactly what that word meant. The label was from a London shop on Savile Row. He was a world traveler, all right.
There had to be some kind of pocket litter. Everybody stuffed crap in their pockets, right? Not this guy. The jacket was infuriatingly pristine.
Next to the jacket was an immaculate and costly Turkish bathrobe, its pockets empty also. It was definitely not an item supplied by the Roach House. Her man must be accustomed to living the good life, even in a rat hole like this.
The GPS signal remained stationary. He was still hanging out at Alcatraz. She might have another few minutes before he gave up and headed back.
Her quarry was definitely a hired gun, but so far all she’d learned was that he dressed well, toted weapons, and was gaga for Camelot. It wasn’t a lot to go on, and she was running out of time. The only places left to look were the bureau—empty—and the nightstand. She approached the nightstand without much hope. At best there might be a Gideon Bible inside, if the Gideons had bothered to canvass a dump like this.
She opened the drawer. Lying there was a nice shiny iPad and a rolled up power cord.
“Yachtze,” she whispered, then felt stupid for saying it.
She tossed her purse on the bed, picked up the computer, and pressed the power switch. A passcode-lock screen came up—a numeric keypad and four blank spaces. Ten thousa
nd possible combinations. But there might be a way to narrow it down.
She tilted the tablet so the light from the desk lamp illuminated it at an angle. The smudges of smooth glove prints showed up on the screen. The tablet’s owner would enter and reenter the passcode more often than any other data. Smudges would cluster around the keypad buttons he used.
There were four large smudges, each corresponding to a different button. Suddenly the list of possibilities had been reduced to only twenty-four. Her fifth try was the charm. She was in.
The home screen was customized with a wallpaper image of the night sky, constellations like frozen pinwheels amid a freckling of stars. She looked over the folders. One was labeled San Alfonso. Inside there was a collection of photos—snow-capped mountains, glittering waterfalls, a luxury villa embraced by climbing ivy and fruit trees. His home? Where the heck was San Alfonso anyway?
Not important right now. Keep looking. She opened a word processing application, but the only files were blank templates. She checked the web browser—no bookmarks, no history, and the homepage was a general news site.
A glance at her phone again. The vehicle was still parked near Alcatraz. He hadn’t started back.
Anything else on the iPad? Yeah, nested inside a folder labeled Misc was an app that saved webpages offline. She opened it and found a bunch of downloaded news items about various people—Amy Bernstein, Herb Sentner, Jeffrey Walker. The names meant nothing to her.
She brought up the most recent story about Amy Bernstein. It was a New York Times article reporting her murder. She’d been found with her throat cut in her Manhattan townhouse. Yesterday.
“Three guesses who did it,” Bonnie muttered.
According to the article, Bernstein had worked for a human rights organization called Conscience Watch. Her death was viewed as a robbery gone wrong.
Next, Herb Sentner. The latest article about him, dated two weeks ago, was another death notice. This time homicide wasn’t suspected. Supposedly he’d died in an accident up in Maine. And what do you know, he’d retired from Conscience Watch six months earlier.
That left Jeffrey Walker. The most recently downloaded file on him dated back three years. Not as sinister as the others. Cheerful, in fact. A press release. The headline read, “Conscience Watch Welcomes Jeffrey Walker.” The Manhattan-based group known for defending international prisoners of conscience was pleased to announce the arrival of Mr. Walker, who’d relocated from Chicago with his wife Caroline and their young son.
A photo of Jeffrey Walker accompanied the piece. It was a posed close-up, a professional portrait, and the smiling face belonged to her newest client, the man who called himself Alan Kirby.
So.
Alan Kirby, formerly Jeffrey Walker, had been shining her on about his identity and his past. Which meant he’d been lying about other stuff, also. That whole story about the client he’d gotten off, the rival gang—it had to be a crock. And the man who occupied this motel room wasn’t some gangland hitter. He was somebody a lot more serious and probably a hell of a lot more expensive. A pro, sure, but not just any pro. There was some big-time intrigue going down here, and she’d been flying blind.
She and her client would need to have a conversation about that.
Alan had claimed he was with another do-gooder outfit, People Against Poverty. She clicked through other files on Jeffrey Walker, enough of them to know he’d been with Conscience Watch until about six months ago. He’d never been with the other organization at all.
She took another look at her phone. The blip hadn’t budged. Back to the iPad. Maybe she could find an address book, a list of contacts. She clicked back to the home screen, but before she could check out other folders, she found herself looking at the night sky, the blaze of flickering stars.
Flickering.
But they couldn’t be flickering. It was a static image.
There was flicker, though. A ripple of movement reflected on the glass.
Movement at her back.
According to Sammy, the guy with the Nosferatu face was still at Alcatraz.
Sammy was lying.
The son of a bitch was in the room, closing on her from behind.
She spun, dropping the phone, bending in a crouch.
He was three feet away, blocking her in against the nightstand and bed. Over his shoulder the door to the room hung ajar, framing the night. He’d opened the door and crept in without a sound. Distantly she thought it was a pretty slick move.
So he’d known her phone call was a ruse. He’d known she wasn’t going to meet him at Alcatraz. Known she was just trying to get him out of the room.
But he’d left anyway. Because he’d wanted her in the room, wanted to trap her here.
And the bathtub lined with the shower curtain—it was meant for her somehow.
She twisted toward the bed, grabbing for the purse with the gun inside, but he was quicker. He batted the purse away. It flew off the bed and disappeared somewhere on the floor.
He reached under the sleeve of his jacket and unsheathed a knife. It looked like one of those silicon carbide jobs, the kind with no metal parts, made to pass through metal detectors.
The knife came at her fast. She dodged it, and the blade sank into the nightstand, embedded there.
She grabbed the motel phone off the nightstand and swung it at him. He brushed it away almost casually, the phone vanishing into a corner. She picked up the lamp and whickered it at his face. The bulb went out as the cord was ripped free, and the room was thrown into sudden half light, with only the ceiling lights in the entryway and bathroom for illumination. He threw a punch at the lamp, shredding the lampshade, then wrenched it away from her and cast it aside.
He was right up against her now, and smiling.
That smile pissed her off. She launched a knuckle strike at his throat. He parried, blocking the blow with one arm. The move left his midsection exposed. She tried delivering a punch to his abdomen, but his arm was there again, warding off the strike, then brushing her fist aside to jab her quick and hard in the right breast.
Okay. The guy had skills.
In the movies, the ninety-eight-pound girl was always beating the crap out of guys twice her size. Bonnie weighed more than ninety-eight pounds, but it was a simple fact, unadmitted by Hollywood, that men had greater upper body strength than women. In a match between two equally well-trained opponents, one male and one female, the smart money was on the testosterone.
Her best shot was to throw him off balance, break free of containment, and run like hell.
She hooked her left foot around his right ankle and angled her leg sidewise, pistoning out both arms to shove him in the chest. He fell backward onto the bed. She whipped past him, heading for the door ...
He seized the comet tail of her hair, jerking her head back.
The ceiling blurred, the bed creaked under her, and then his face filled her field of vision, a grinning death mask. She was on the bed, flat on her back, and he was on top of her.
She grabbed a pillow, pushed it into his face, squeezing hard, shutting off his breath.
He withdrew, clawing it free, and she was on her feet again, but not fast enough. He grabbed her from behind, his arm around her neck.
Blood choke. Crap.
It would put her under in ten seconds or less.
Panic flashed through her. She thrust out both legs, bracing her feet against the nightstand, trying to push back against him. No good. The nightstand shifted away from the wall, wobbling at a crazy angle, and she lost her leverage.
She threw an elbow at his face. Couldn’t connect. Already her vision was graying. Running out of time.
The guy was a killer. If she lost consciousness, she would never wake up.
Scrabbling at his arm, trying to find purchase, tearing the sleeve of his jacket, but he still didn’t let go.
A high tuneless hum rose in her ears. Fading fast. She didn’t want to die this way, gasping for air, thrashing helplessly
.
Her fingers, bent like claws, stabbed blindly at his face, seeking an eye.
Then all her strength went away, just like that, and she knew it was over, really over for her. Elvis had left the building.
She had no time to feel sorry or scared. No time for anything now.
Plunge of vertigo, sudden darkness, and she was out.
CHAPTER 13
The girl had fought well, Pascal decided. Though hardly his equal, she had made things interesting.
Now he would make things interesting for her.
Her swoon would last only fifteen or twenty seconds unless artificially prolonged. Briskly he removed one of the amber bottles from his duffel and gave her a good long whiff of halothane. It was a powerful inhalational anesthetic, and it would keep her under for ten minutes or so.
He was careful not to give her too much. An overdose might stop her heart. That would be a shame. They had much to talk about.
For the same reason he had not wanted to use his gun on her. He could have vanquished her with a silenced shot—it would have taken only a moment to remove the suppressor tube from his pocket and screw it into place—but he did not want her dead. Had he not lost the use of his knife, he could have incapacitated her with a nonlethal wound. As it was, he had rendered her immobile by other means.
The struggle had made some noise, but there were no neighbors on either side of his room, no one to hear or call for help. He was not sure the habitués of this establishment would be too quick to contact the authorities in any event. Brawls must be common here.
On the floor was the girl’s phone, which she had used to track his vehicle, a predictable gambit. It had been easy to find the throwaway mobile phone secured to the SUV’s bumper. He had discarded it in the vicinity of the bar, then doubled back, taking her by surprise.
He picked up the phone. The screen had cracked when it fell, but the phone was still on, not yet having timed out. The index fingers and thumbs of his gloves were threaded with carbon fibers, allowing him to operate the touchscreen. He checked the settings and found that the phone was set up with a four-digit passcode that would lock him out the next time the device shut off. He could not disable the code, but he knew a simple workaround. He navigated to Google Accounts, established a new account for himself, and logged in. Now he could bypass the screen lock whenever he wished.
Cold Around the Heart Page 8
