Their company wasn't just any old company either and she was surprised she didn't know more about them considering her business. Obviously they liked to keep a low profile but it was clearly getting harder with the increased media attention the impossibly good-looking trio were attracting. These guys weren't gray, boring Warren Buffet style money machines, waiting idly for blue chip stocks to turn over and go up in value but neither were they geeky, pale skinned code warriors turned good. These guys were serious boys with toys. The kind of toys the military were interested in and the kind that changed lives at the cutting edge of medical technology.
"No wonder he was edgy about my noticing his glass." She murmured.
She decided to call Suzy, her old friend and information specialist. They had known each other for a long time and Suzy Falstaff was the only person from her old life who knew for sure that she was still alive. They had grown up side by side and then studied engineering together; the only two girls in a class of over one hundred socially challenged guys. Suzy had always been interested in ethical hacking and she was very, very good at what she did. When Katy needed information on someone beyond an internet search then Suzy was her point of contact. If her girl couldn't get the dirt then nobody could.
She found her secure Blackphone, routed it through her clean laptop and then zigzagged the call through several continents via her personal, customized VPN technology. If Clayton Hargrave could track this call he would be a whole lot smarter than her and good as he was, she still doubted that. She had to, or why even bother putting up a fight?
"What's going on?" The friendly voice at the other end greeted her, the sound of her Golden Retriever, Redmond barking happily in the background.
"Information." Katy said. It was enough to let Suzy know that things were serious.
"Who is it?" One of the first thing Katy did with any new client was a background check so she assumed this was what she wanted.
"Clayton Hargrave."
"Of Hargrave Robotics?"
"You've heard of him?"
"Who hasn't?" She turned to her dog and loyal friend who had just come in from the beach. "Pipe down Redmond, I'm speaking here." The dog went quiet. He knew not to interfere in his owner's business. She turned back to her phone. "Not everyone lives like a hermit you know. Are you going to be working with him?"
"Come on, you know better than that. No details. Just get me whatever you can on him and then send it via the usual channel."
"Ouch. No problem boss." She said with a twang of playful sarcasm. "Did you run out of coffee this morning or something?"
Katy looked at the smashed coffee pot on the floor. Caffeine and good coffee beans were her one addiction. That and her obsession with secrecy.
"You could say that." She said with an involuntary smirk that annoyed her and quickly left her face.
"Hmmm, mysterious as always. Don't sweat it boss, I'll have information within the hour. Just hang tight."
"I'm not tight." She said quite ridiculously.
"Uh… whatever. I'll be in touch. Look, just remember, stay low, stay clean--"
"Leave no trace, I know, I know. Don’t worry. Call me when you have something."
She ended the call. Suzy was used to her friend being moody and it didn’t bother her. She let a lot of things slide for old time's sake, not only because her old friend was a very well paying client, but also because she had to imagine that living like a dead person for years on end would leave you feeling more than a little grumpy at times. Not to say lonely. Hell, sometimes the secrecy even got to her as well, especially when mutual acquaintances talked about what a great girl Nadia, her friend's original name, had been.
Katy finished cleaning up the mess and went to put more coffee on before realizing she had no cups to drink from and no coffee pot to make it in.
Shit. Screw you Hargrave. Men and sex. Such animals. She smiled again and wiped it quickly from her face. Again.
She fished a stainless steel saucepan out of the cupboard and a glass tumbler from the cabinet. They would have to do because she seriously needed caffeine.
It wasn't quite dark yet, although the autumn sunshine was fast fading in the early evening. The silent flash of blue and red lights that filled the house sent fear snaking down Katy's spine.
"What the hell has that asshole done now?" She hissed as she looked around to see if anything in her home was obviously out of the ordinary.
She heard footsteps approach her front door and her heart began to pound. It had been a long, long time since she had had anything to do with the police. When the doorbell went she jumped, even though she has seen clearly seen the officer approach through the a small panel of frosted glass.
She didn’t move.
"Open up it’s the police."
Shit.
There was no point in running. She knew that. The face of the young officer was pressed close up against the glass, scanning the interior of the house for signs of life.
"It's the police." He said. "Can you open the door please?"
She went to the door like a dead woman walking. Was this it?
Stay calm Katy, stay calm. It's probably just a misunderstanding.
She opened the door and struggled to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t move. Another of the consequences of living like a recluse; loss of basic social skills.
"Good evening officer, what can I do for you?"
He peered inside before answering.
"May we come in?"
"Uh, sure, please do." She stepped aside and the good looking young man brushed past her followed by a stern looking female cop. They looked around her bare living room and kitchen area as though it were a crime scene.
"Been living here long ma'am?" The male officer asked. His badge said Officer Hardy.
"No, not long. In fact I've just moved in."
"Is that so?" Officer Smity, the female cop said.
"That's right. Just last week."
"Can I see some ID?"
"Sure, sure thing." Katy found her wallet and produced her driver's license.
"Ms. Katherine Maldon. State of California." He said, as though her name and the state of issue were both highly incriminating. He handed the license back to her. "We got a report of a disturbance up here." He said.
Officer Smity began walking around the living room.
"Well, it must be a mistake." Katy said. "I live alone up here and there's nothing going on. I just went out for a run earlier and then came back to make coffee and do some work before going to bed."
"Did you have any visitors today ma'am?" Officer Hardy asked.
This was it. Twelve months of anonymity and peace ruined. Should she lie? Her relationships with clients were strictly confidential, but then again, no client had ever placed a tracking device on her and followed her to her home.
"No sir." She said. "None at all."
"Did you have a little accident earlier?" The female officer asked from the kitchen area, looking into her trash can where the broken coffee pot and cups were piled up. The remains of two coffee cups.
Shit. Katy thought.
"That's right, actually I did have a visitor earlier. Sorry about that. An old friend. We were having coffee."
Officer Hardy put his hand to his weapon. "I'm getting confused here ma'am. Did you have a visitor or didn't you?"
Katy faltered. Her expertise was electronic privacy. Lying to the cops face to face was far, far outside her comfort zone.
"Who's Clayton Hargrave?" Officer Smity asked, picking up Clayton's business card from the counter top. It was the only damn thing that hadn't hit the floor when impulse had momentarily overcome them.
"He's… he's an old friend." She said.
"An old friend who left you his business card?"
Shit, shit, shit.
"That's right. We kind of lost contact with each other and he looked me up again. I haven't seen him in years. Then my stupid cat came along and knocked over the coffee pot and cups from the co
unter top and that was that."
Hardy and Smity exchanged a glance.
"Where is Mr. Hargrave now?" Hardy asked.
"He left. We agreed to meet up again later."
Hardy waited for a moment until Smity had joined him again. Katy fixed a nervous smile on her face.
"Okay ma'am. That about wraps it up. You have a nice day." Neither of the officers smiled.
"You too officer." Katy said and then escorted them to the door.
"By the way officer," she added as they got into the patrol car, "who called in the report of a disturbance?"
"That's confidential ma'am. You have a nice day." Officer Hardy rolled up his window and pulled away down the deserted road. Katy looked around the surrounding hills and woodlands. There wasn't a visible neighbor anywhere for miles around.
Chapter Four
As soon as the cop car went out of view Katy ran from the house and scrambled into the woods behind her house. She kept her getaway pack hidden under a shallow layer of dirt and some rocks. It had everything she would need to get out of town. One hundred thousand dollars in cash, her Sig Sauer P220 compact - a low caliber semi-automatic pistol designed for self-defense rather than to put a huge hole in someone - credit cards and fake IDs for various states of the USA.
The only other items she would need were her clean laptop, secure Blackphone, smart watch and various other small items of electronic privacy hardware. She would melt away and stay low for a while, a few months maybe or even a year. She could spend the time trying to hunt down her birth father, a project that never left her mind but for which she had never been able to find the time.
Now she could do that; find some damn closure in a life so ragged with loose ends.
When she returned to the house she stopped dead. She heard the sound of wheels again on the road in front of her house. Three times in one day was a record. Three times in a year would already have been too much. She drew out her pistol and approached the house with extreme caution. The sound of the wheels was definitely receding away. Someone had come and gone. She came around the side of the house holding her pistol at the ready. It had been a long, long time since she had held a firearm and she definitely did not like the sensation. She had never shot anyone in her life and hoped she would never have to.
Rounding the corner she saw a small package on her doorstep. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead. The statistics of the US Witness Security Program were excellent. Stay in the program and you die of natural or accidental causes. Leave the program and turning the key in your front door was likely to shoot you twenty feet into the air and leave bits of you spread over out over a three hundred foot area.
Was this a warning of some kind? Why leave it there in the open? Why not just find her and kill her?
She approached slowly, the feeling of choking beginning to take hold of her throat again. Then the package fell over.
Katy froze.
A set of huge green eyes stared up at her. It was Brad Pitt, her cat and closest companion of the last three years. He was pawing relentlessly at the brown packaging.
"Brad! No, stop it, don’t do that."
He paid no attention and quickly tore a huge hole in the paper letting a small sixteen ounce bag of dark coffee beans fall out onto the porch.
"What the hell?" It was almost certainly not an explosive device. She looked around, put the safety back on her weapon and then picked up the package. Inside was a brand new coffee pot with two new cups and another sixteen ounce bag of coffee beans. There was also a note. She looked around again, scanning the hills and trees and then picked it up. It was handwritten.
Sorry about the pot and cups. Here's some Peaberry Jamaica Mountain Blue to make up for it. I watched them harvested myself on the Langford estate in the Blue Mountains. See you later,
Clay.
She held the note in her hands and then looked up into the darkening forest around her house. Tears began to come to her eyes while Brad Pitt stared up at her.
"What the hell is wrong with me Brad?" The cat didn't move, he was hungry, but Katy imagined what he would be thinking if he had a shred of human emotion in his body.
I'm just a cat but as your closest companion I'm going to suggest that maybe three years of living like the deceased has left you a little on edge. Maybe three years without any human interaction other than listening to your clients' paranoid demands for secrecy has made you an emotional wreck. And finally, as my final word, maybe, just maybe, three years without any human contact other than a handshake has fucked you up girl.
She wiped the tears away as her internal monologue subsided.
Brad still looked hungry, but somehow wiser.
"You're right." She said to her living companion. "I've been alone too long. I'm getting psychological advice from you, a cat, via your voice inside my head."
She wiped away the last of her tears and then gathered up the beans. The coffee pot and cups could stay where they were. She would have no room for them in her suitcase but the beans she would enjoy whenever she got to wherever she was going, and if she never saw Clayton Hargrave again she would at least have that handwritten note to look at and pretend that…. pretend what? That she was an ordinary woman with an ordinary life who could have a relationship and settle down somewhere, be happy, have a normal life with children, vacations, holiday celebrations?
It all sounded so ridiculous, so impossible.
The tears began to come again but she forced them back down.
"Screw it." She threw the beans and the note away into the darkness and went inside to get her suitcase.
"You’re a big girl Nadia…."
Shit.
She had used her real name out loud. That hadn’t happened in a long, long time. She clamped her jaw shut and plunged into the darkness to retrieve her bag and resume getting the hell out of town.
********************
After he had dispatched his gift to Katy, Clayton set about preparing dinner. He had not been resident in the stunning hilltop and waterfront property that long but it had been so fabulously equipped already at the time of sale that he had decided to keep most of what was there. He would adapt things to his taste in good time. Between his work and his leisure time passions interior design and decoration didn’t feature that highly on his list of priorities.
He called his personal chef and gave him basic instructions for an excellent vegetarian meal. Obviously he had no intention of cooking himself. Time, always time. Instead he checked in with his private detective, Lacey MacMahon. She had come to him via an excellent personal recommendation from one of the Demovic brothers in New York and he had found her to be excellent in meeting his needs thus far.
"It's Clayton." He said when she answered. "Do we have anything new?"
"I think you're correct about the Witness Security Progam Mr. Hargrave. But if you are it means whoever she was before is, to all intents and purposes, now dead. There's no way to get information from that program. It is easily the tightest run department the government has. It'd be easier to get credit card details for the Area 51 security team."
"In that case, what exactly am I paying you for?"
"For this. I did a thorough search on cases that involved protected witnesses from two to four years ago and narrowed the criteria down to crimes that involved electronic eavesdropping or the use of military grade technology to hide criminal activity."
"Spare me the mechanics Lacey, I'm meeting this person in under an hour. What did you find?"
"There was a case in Washington DC about four years ago involving the Russian Mafia. It turned out that a seemingly legitimate business, BoyTech Inc, with connections in the White House was a front for a big time Vory, a Bratva, a Russian mobster by the name of Mikhail Boyevik. Government secrets seemed to be the major currency involved with a major tax evasion and pyramid scam going on as well. One person had the guts to blow the whistle on these guys but her name was never released."
"You're sure t
his person was a she?"
"Absolutely. She paid a heavy price. Family members were sucked into it but she stuck to her guns. After the case she disappeared presumably into the WITSEC."
"What's the connection to Katy Maldon?"
"Nothing. Not on the surface at least, except that this WITSEC girl was a technology expert with the same kind of expertise you say this Maldon has. One part of the Mafia front operation, the part that was legit, had a contract with Uncle Sam to provide military grade security devices for electronic silence. She was pretty damn good by all accounts. Maybe the best in the business. Sound like your girl?"
A video call from the surveillance team he had left with Katy was coming through.
"Good work Lacey. I have to go. Keep digging." He took the video call and Angel Montoya, his head of security came through. He was good looking man of Colombian and Hawaiian origin. He had gone to college with Clayton and worked for him ever since Hargrave Robotics had hit the big time two years ago.
"What's up Angel?" Clayton said with perfect Spanish pronunciation of his friend's name.
"She's on the move Clay. Something's up. A cop car was up there earlier."
"Did they see you?"
"Not a chance. They didn’t stay long. Seems funny though. Out here in the middle of nowhere."
"Did she get my gift?"
"Sure she did. She came at it with a handgun."
Clayton's mouth fell open.
"A handgun? Are you crazy?"
"No, but it sure looks like she is. Looked like a Sig Sauer, compact model."
His Secret Desire Page 4
