by Thomas Perry
She spent two days driving the freeways until she found the spot she wanted, right on the western edge of a confusing knot of interlocking entrances, exits, and overpasses on the Ventura Freeway. If a person drove east, he would immediately come to the fork where half the lanes swung off onto the San Diego Freeway, then divided again to go north toward Sacramento or south toward San Diego. After another mile or two, there was another junction where some lanes went north on the Hollywood Freeway but most swung southeast toward the city. Another mile and there was another fork, with some lanes continuing southeast and the others bearing due east toward Glendale and Pasadena. With a small head start, a car heading eastward could be very hard to follow.
Every mile on the Ventura Freeway there was a little yellow pole with an emergency telephone on it. The small blue marker above the pole Jane chose announced that it was number 177.
That night in the motel Jane tested the equipment. At two a.m. she drove back into the San Fernando Valley. She parked the car on a quiet side street in Sherman Oaks just north of Riverside Drive and walked the rest of the way to the little hill that elevated the Ventura Freeway above the surrounding neighborhoods. She had to lower the equipment over a fence and then climb over after it.
She was hidden from the street by thick bushes, and from the freeway by a low metal barrier along the shoulder. The barrier was supposed to keep a runaway car on the eastbound side of the Ventura Freeway from careening down the hill into the front of somebody's house, and judging by the depth of some of the dents and scrapes, it probably had. She trained the directional microphone carefully across the freeway on a spot twenty feet from call box number 177, then adjusted the breadth of its field until it picked up very little street noise. She threw a stone at the spot and watched the reels of the two tape recorders turn when it hit, then stop again. She set the video camera on automatic focus and aimed it at the same spot. She switched everything off, carefully covered all of the equipment with leaves and branches, then went down the hill, over the fence, and back to her car.
Jane and Mary stayed at the motel for two more days. They rehearsed, memorized, and analyzed until it began to seem as though everything Jane was planning had already happened and they were weeks past it already, trying to recall the details.
"How long do you stay?" asked Jane.
"Ten seconds. Fifteen at the most. Just long enough to pop out the tapes."
"What happens if he pulls out a gun?" Jane asked.
"I leave."
"What if he puts it to my head?"
"I ignore it. There's nothing I can do to stop him, so I leave."
Early each morning they drove along the Ventura Freeway past call box 177, studying the flow of the traffic for ten miles in both directions. They memorized the fastest lanes, practiced making an exit just beyond the junction with another freeway and then coming up a side street to emerge on the new freeway going in another direction.
"Can't you just call him up and record what he says on the phone?" asked Mary.
"No," said Jane. "He's the regional head of a big security company. His phone will have sweepers and bug detectors that even the police can't buy yet. Besides, he won't say anything that will put him away unless he sees you."
On the third day at four in the afternoon Jane White-field went to a pay telephone in Barstow and made the call. "I want to speak with Mr. Barraclough," she said. "Tell him it's Colleen Mahoney from the courthouse. I have something he wants to talk about."
"Can you hold?" said the secretary.
"No," said Jane. "I'll call back in two minutes. Tell him if he's not the one who answers, he's lost it." She waited four minutes, then dialed the number again.
This time a man's voice answered. It was deep, as though it came from a big body, but it was smooth, clear, and untroubled. "Yes?" he said.
"Is this Mr. Barraclough?"
"Yes, it is." He held the last word so it was almost singsong.
"This is - "
"I know who it is, Jane," he said. "I heard that's what you like to be called. What can I do for you?"
Her mind stumbled, then raced to catch up. He was far ahead of the place where she had thought he would be. "I have Mary Perkins," she said.
"Who's Mary Perkins?"
"I'm not recording this," she said. "Your phone isn't tapped."
"I know it isn't."
"Then do you want her?"
"If you have her, why do you need me? You like me all of a sudden?"
"If you weren't tracing this call, why would you ask so many stupid questions?" Jane asked. "I'll call this number at five a.m. tomorrow. If you meet me alone and unarmed, you'll get a peek." She hung up, picked up Mary, and drove to Los Angeles, where they rented two identical white cars, then left the gray Toyota at the Burbank Airport. They spent the night in a motel in Woodland Hills.
At four a.m. Jane parked her rented car on the street she had chosen below the freeway, climbed the fence to turn on her camera, microphone, and recorders. Then she drove west to the big coffee shop in Agoura and at exactly five a.m. used the pay telephone outside the door.
"Yes?" said Barraclough.
"It's me," she said. "In twenty minutes I'll be at the lot on the corner of Woodley Avenue and Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. If you're not there I'll keep going."
"Wait," he said. "I didn't get those streets."
"Then rewind the tape and play it back," she said, and hung up.
Twenty minutes was an enormous stretch of time for a man like Barraclough. Jane thought about all of the preparations he would have made already. He would have all of the trainees on the special payroll of Enterprise Development already awake and standing by. He would have some pretext for using Intercontinental Security's facilities and equipment too. Now he would be frantically ordering all of them into positions around the Sepulveda Recreation Area. No, not frantically: coldly, methodically.
She had selected the meeting place carefully. It was the sort of spot a person might choose who had some fear of ambush but no understanding of how such things happened. It was free of people in the hours before dawn, a flat open lawn that had been built as a flood basin with a vast empty sod farm on one side, a golf course on the other, and nothing much but picnic tables and a baseball diamond in between. The place gave the illusion of safety because she could see a second car coming from half a mile off. So could he, but all he had to do was block two spots on Burbank Boulevard and one end of Woodley and she was trapped.
Jane left the Ventura Freeway and continued eastward on Burbank Boulevard. It would still be another hour before the sun came up. At exactly 5:20 she was driving beside the golf course, and as she came around the long curve, she saw his car. It was a new, dark gray Chevrolet parked beside the road on the small gravel plateau above the empty reservoir. She could see the little stream of exhaust from the tailpipe that showed her the car was running. She took her foot off the gas pedal as she approached, and coasted to a speed of under ten miles an hour. She made a left turn onto the lot, then pulled up ten feet away from his car and stared into the side window.
It was difficult to tell how tall he was when he was seated in the car, but he gave her the impression of being big. His hands on the wheel were thick and square-knuckled, and his shoulders were much wider than the steering wheel. The white pinstriped shirt he had on seemed a little tight on his upper arms, the way cops wore theirs. He was obviously wearing it without a coat to make her believe he had actually come unarmed.
She looked directly into his face. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a wry half smile. She reminded herself that she had known he would try to rattle her with some intimidating expression, maybe the poker player's look when he raised his bet: my money's on the table, so let's see yours. But his face set off a little burst of heat in her chest that rose up her throat into her jaw muscles. She could not turn away from the eyes. They were light, almost gray, squinting a little because of the false smile, and watch
ing her with a disconcerting intensity. They took in her fear and discomfort, added his savoring of it, and reflected it back to her. His mind was focused utterly on her, on what she was feeling and thinking. His eyes revealed that he felt nothing except some vicarious glow from the anxiety he could inspire in her.
It was time to lose whoever he had brought with him. Jane stamped her foot on the gas pedal and the car's back wheels spun, kicking up gravel. It fishtailed a little as one wheel caught before the other and then it squealed out of the lot onto Burbank Boulevard. She drove to the east, took the ramp onto the San Diego Freeway at forty, and sailed into the right lane at sixty-five. She checked her rearview mirror to be sure he was coming, and saw the gray Chevrolet skid around the curve and shoot off the ramp toward her. She kept adding increments of speed while she held the car steady in the center lane.
She watched the mirror so she could spot his helpers coming up to join him, but no other car on the freeway was traveling as fast as theirs were. She checked the cars ahead, but none of them did anything out of the ordinary either. She waited until the last second to cut back across the right lane to the feeder for the Ventura Freeway, then stayed in the eastbound lane until it was almost too late before she cut across the painted lines to the westbound ramp. She looked into the mirror again, not to confirm that he was still chasing her but to be sure that no other car could have followed him.
She drove westward until she saw the telephone with the blue "177" painted above it, then turned on her emergency flashers and coasted along until she made it to the shoulder and stopped twenty feet past the call box. She got out of her car and walked to the spot where she had aimed her directional microphone and camera. She saw his headlights after five seconds, then the turn signal, and in a moment he was rolling up along the shoulder of the road to stop behind her.
He swung his door open on the traffic side, got out as though he were invulnerable to getting clipped, and walked up to her. His arms were out from his sides, but he was carrying something in his hand. She stepped backward to the door of her car. He saw her move and seemed to understand that she was preparing to bolt. He set the object on the ground and stepped back.
Jane kept her eyes on him as she stepped forward and picked it up. It was a small box with a metal hoop and a thumb switch. She recognized that it was a hand-held metal detector like the ones they used in airports when somebody set off the walk-through model. She ran it over herself from head to foot, then tossed it to him and he did the same, turning around so she could see there was nothing stuck in his belt. The little box didn't beep.
Barraclough's eyes scanned the area around him in every direction, returning to her face abruptly now and then to see if she reacted. He said, "Mind if I look in your car?"
"Go ahead," she said. "Mind if I look in yours?"
The mysterious smile returned. "No." He watched her as he took a step toward her rented car. She never moved. He said, "You driving or am I?"
She said, "I'm not getting into a car with you."
He looked around him again, as though this meant he needed to do a better job of searching the middle distance for witnesses. He said, "What made you panic back there?"
"That's not what I want to talk about. I say it was a trap, you say it wasn't, I say you're a liar."
His smile seemed to grow a little. "What do you want to talk about?"
"You've been chasing Mary Perkins, I've been hiding her. Now I'm ready to sell her."
He squinted a little as he studied her face. "Why?"
She returned his stare. "I've been at this a long time. A lot of people would be dead without me."
"I've heard that," said Barraclough. "Sometime I'll get you to give me a list."
"No, you won't," she said simply. "Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for. She's not worth it. I gave her a chance and she disappointed me. I know that she's got a lot of money. You seem to think you can get it. I'm not interested in that kind of work."
Barraclough tilted his head a little to watch her closely. "You know what will happen when I have her?"
"You'll end up with her money. I also know that if you have her she's not coming back to ask me how it happened."
"That's true," he said.
She took a deep breath and blew it out. She had done it. He had agreed on tape that he was going to take the money and kill her. "This is a one-day sale," she said. "Tomorrow she goes up for auction. You want her or not?"
"I want her."
"The price is three million in cash. You hand it over and I give her up three weeks later. I know you'll mark it, so I need time to pass it on before you start tracing."
A laugh escaped him abruptly, as though a small child had surprised him by saying something unintentionally profound. "Done," he said. "Of course, that's assuming I get to see her in person so I know you can deliver."
"You can," said Jane. "She'll be along any minute."
"Here?" he said. She could see his mind working. He wanted to get back to his car to retrieve the weapon he had hidden, but he had not yet thought of a way to do it without Jane's noticing.
"There," said Jane. She pointed across the ten lanes of the freeway at the white car just like hers gliding onto the shoulder on the eastbound side. "That's her now." Mary Perkins's car rolled to a stop just at the spot Jane had shown her. "She'll get out of the car so you can see her. Then she'll pick up something I left for her in the bushes over there. She thinks you're a wholesaler who sells me stolen credit cards and licenses." Jane watched Barraclough's hands. "You're not trustworthy, so I can't pay you until she has them." Mary got out of the car and stepped over the barrier into the bushes.
Jane let her eyes flick up to Barraclough's face. "Well?"
"Hard to tell," he said. "She's so far away."
"Nice try," she said. "I saw you start to drool the second she opened the door. You get one more peek."
Mary Perkins came back out of the bushes. Jane could see the bulge of the tapes from the video camera and the recorders in her purse. Mary nodded and Jane stepped away from Barraclough, closer to her car. Now was the time when it would occur to him to hold her.
Barraclough was smiling again. His arm straightened and he waved happily at Mary Perkins.
"What are you doing?" Jane snapped.
He turned to face her, but his arms were poised in front of him. He looked like a fisherman about to make a grab for a hooked fish. "Just waving to the lady. We don't want her to think I'm not a friendly wholesaler."
Jane's body tensed, not certain whether to run for the car or attack him. He was signaling someone, and it wasn't Mary. What had she missed? She jerked her head to the left to look back up the freeway - and saw the man Barraclough must have been waving to. He stepped out of the bushes and ran back along the shoulder just at the entrance ramp. In another two steps he disappeared around the curve.
He must be getting into another car that had been idling out of sight beside the entrance ramp. Now she saw its lights come onto the freeway and they seemed to jerk upward into the sky before they swung around and leveled on the pavement ahead of it. The car accelerated toward Jane and Barraclough, its right tires already on the shoulder as though it were going to obliterate them.
Jane waved her arm at Mary. "Go!" she shouted.
Mary seemed to be transfixed by the sudden arrival of an unexpected car. She stared across the ten lanes of the freeway and watched the red car rushing up the westbound side toward Jane, knowing it was time for her to leave, but not knowing how.
Jane screamed. "Go! Go! It's a trap!" She started backing toward her parked car, the adrenaline making her legs push too hard so she half walked and half danced, trying to watch the car bearing down on her and Mary and Barraclough at the same time.
Mary dropped her keys, bobbed down to pick them up, then got into her car. Jane took one more look at Barraclough and hurried to the door of her own car.
The headlights of the car Barraclough had summoned d
ipped down as it decelerated suddenly, moved past Barraclough, and then pulled over. As it slowly moved up behind Janes car, her heart began to pound. Its headlights went out, the driver's door opened an inch, and the dome light came on. The one in the passenger seat was Timothy Phillips.
Barraclough opened the other door, pulled the little boy out onto the shoulder of the freeway and yelled, "Hey, Jane! How about a trade? Is he worth it?"
These were the first words loud enough for Mary to hear across the freeway. She started the engine and shifted to Drive, but her eyes were on the activity going on across the freeway. The little boy must be the one Jane had told her about. Who else could he be? He was scared, straining to get closer to Jane Whitefield, but the big man in the white shirt had a grip on his thin arm and it was hurting him. Anybody could see it was hurting him. Headlights settled on them, grew brighter and brighter, and then flashed past. Were those drivers blind? Couldn't they see that something horrible was happening?
The knowledge slowly settled on Mary that none of the drivers knew who the big man was, and you had to know that. They probably thought he was a father who was afraid his son might stray too close to the lane where their cars were speeding past. There was only one person here who had any idea of what she was looking at.
Mary turned off the engine, got out of the car, and stood on the shoulder of the road. She could see Jane ten lanes away, caught for a second in the headlights of a speeding car, staring back at Mary, her mouth wide open and her arm in motion, waving her back into the car. Her voice reached Mary faintly across all the lanes, but whatever it was saying was only a distraction.
Mary was concentrating, so there was no room for Jane's voice. She waited for a moment while a truck barreled past and the hot, sulfurous wind from its passing tore at her clothes and stung her face. Then she stepped onto the hard pavement of the freeway. She walked at a normal pace. She never stopped to wait on the dotted line between two lanes, because anything that was not in motion might blend in. It would take only a second of blindness for a driver going sixty miles an hour to travel eighty-eight feet and kill her. She made it across five lanes to the middle island and rested her fear for a moment inside the barrier before she could face walking across another five lanes.
