by Dean Koontz
She had little patience for shopping, especially because, when trying on clothes, she had to leave her rig and pistol under the driver’s seat in the locked Ford. From wig selection to gloves, she felt naked.
Out of West Hollywood, she drove into less glamorous precincts.
For decades, the northwest suburbs of Los Angeles, on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, had thrived and expanded. But too many parts of Van Nuys, Reseda, Canoga Park, and other communities were showing signs of the state’s decline.
The sparkling coastal communities remained mostly luxe, but here in the western half of the San Fernando Valley, seediness was creeping in everywhere.
Jane passed by a few motels that had gone to the rats and roaches, that appeared to rent by the week to crack junkies who lived four to a double room.
In a better neighborhood, a national-chain motel still looked family friendly. She checked in, paying cash and presenting false ID, confident she wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to break up a grudge match between a meth freak and a free-baser.
She began her fade-to-flash transformation.
12
* * *
THERE WERE JOBS in the area, some of them high-paying, and the central commercial district was trying hard to be cutting-edge hip, youth-oriented, the Place to Be if you were one of those who thought there was such a thing as the Place to Be. A few empty storefronts put the lie to full prosperity, but vacancies were not an epidemic.
For every three shops or restaurants that looked as if they might have had a poster of Che Guevara somewhere on the premises, there was one stubborn Jurassic retailer offering knit suits for older women or an Italian restaurant that offered all-you-can-eat garlic bread and didn’t call itself a trattoria.
Jane was interested solely in a shop where the sign over the door said VINYL, just that one word, because it was meant to suggest an ongoing business without attracting the annoyance of too many customers. There was no indication of what product or service the place might be hawking. The big windows were painted green, neither displaying merchandise nor providing a glimpse of the interior.
Driving behind the shop, she saw no indications of active surveillance from the buildings on the other side of the alleyway.
After parking a block from Vinyl and around the corner, she walked the south side of the street, tall in her platforms, feeling out-there but not out of place. She had never been comfortable with undercover work.
She stopped at an ill-conceived hole-in-the-wall take-out business that was trying to be a juice bar, a hip purveyor of chai tea and like beverages, and a gelato shop peddling exotic flavors, all in a space so small that grade-school entrepreneurs would be reluctant to set up a lemonade stand.
She paid for a bottle of coconut water, which tasted like palm-tree piss, if there had been such a thing. She drank it anyway as she strolled that block and the next, pretending to window-shop.
After crossing to the north side of the street, she slowly worked her way back to Vinyl. None of the vehicles parked in the area seemed to be conducting surveillance of the place.
When she went through the painted-glass door, chimes announced her. Rows of record bins divided the front room into aisles. They were filled with phonograph albums and even more ancient 78-rpm platters from the era before the compact disc and digitized music.
On the walls hung framed one-sheets, concert playbills, and posters ranging from Bing Crosby to the Beatles. Vinyl catered to audiophiles, black-wax geeks who preferred authentic recordings that hadn’t been engineered to soulless perfection. Such was its apparent purpose, anyway.
On a stool behind the counter sat a long-faced girl with big eyes and ringletted sable-black hair to her shoulders. She sported a small tattoo of a skull in the hollow of her throat, and she must have spent a thousand hours in front of a mirror, perfecting her look of ennui.
Spinning on a turntable near her, an album by Kansas offered their biggest hit, “Dust in the Wind,” and it was easy to suppose that this girl played nothing else all day.
Jane placed an index card on the counter. With a felt-tip pen, she had earlier printed this on it: THE FBI HAS AN OPEN-END COURT ORDER ALLOWING THEM TO RECORD EVERY WORD SPOKEN IN THIS PLACE.
Instead of reading the card, the clerk said, “What—you’re a deaf mute or something? We don’t make contributions.”
Jane raised a black-gloved middle finger to her and then with the same digit tapped the index card.
The girl deigned to read the message, and if she understood it, she maintained an admirable deadpan expression.
On the second index card was this: IF JIMMY RADBURN DOESN’T WANT TO SPEND 20 YEARS IN PRISON, HE NEEDS TO TALK TO ME NOW.
The skull tattoo in the hollow of the clerk’s throat seemed to widen its lipless grin when she swallowed hard.
She plucked the two cards off the counter, swung off the stool, went to a door on her side of the sales counter, and stepped into a back room.
Jimmy Radburn deserved to spend the rest of his life being some gang thug’s main squeeze in Leavenworth or the equivalent.
But Jane needed him. It sickened her to have to turn to him. A lot of things sickened her these days, and yet she didn’t spend any time throwing up.
Kansas finished decrying the bleakness of the human condition and moved on to another cut.
13
* * *
AFTER A COUPLE OF MINUTES, the salesgirl returned with a guy in his twenties. Tall, rangy. A two-day beard. Brown hair cropped close on the sides, longer on top. His gray T-shirt featured one word in black letters: MALWARE. He wore drawstring sweatpants that were too short and Nikes without socks.
Coming through a gate at the end of the counter, he looked Jane up and down but said nothing. He went to the front door, locked it.
Having settled on her stool, the salesgirl took the Kansas platter off the turntable. She slid another album onto the spindle.
The guy returned to Jane and stared at her as if waiting for her to prove something.
She said softly, “Jimmy Radburn?”
In respect of her claim that every word was being recorded, he tapped his chest with a forefinger, pointing to himself.
In fact, he wasn’t Jimmy Radburn, looked nothing like the man. If he was stupid enough to assume she had only the name to go on, he was likely to do something else stupid.
He made a come-with-me gesture and led the way to the gate in the counter.
Once more wearing her expression of exquisite boredom, the girl on the stool set the needle down not on the lead-in groove of the record but instead at the start of a deeper cut. It was Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend,” and whether she had chosen the song with a snarky purpose or not was impossible to know.
Jane followed Malware into the shop’s back room. Unlabeled cardboard boxes and rectangular plastic tubs full of phonograph records stood on deep wall shelves, on tables, and under tables, with no apparent order to them. In one corner stood a cleaning station where the collectible platters could be lovingly swabbed with appropriate chemicals. Nobody was working there.
Yawning as though the salesgirl’s world-weariness might be contagious, Malware closed the door to the front room—and then abruptly pivoted, grabbed Jane by the crotch, by the throat, and rammed her backward into the wall beside the door.
He should have body-slammed her, pinning her tight against him, and in the same instant should have reached under her open biker’s jacket to feel whether she was carrying; but he didn’t take her seriously enough yet. And he wanted to do that crotch grab, he very much wanted that, because his fingers squeezed and probed through the denim as he lowered his face toward hers with one foolish intention or another.
When she raised her right leg, he thought she meant to knee him in his package, but it was too easy for him to block that move, so it wasn’t what she had in mind. The hard edge of the platform sole of her Ferragamo knockoffs struck down across his exposed left sh
in, shredding the skin and gouging the flesh and bruising the sharp edge of the tibia, from the hem of his too-short sweatpants to the tongue of his Nikes, which might make him think twice about not wearing socks in the future.
The shin, a nerve-rich portion of the lower leg, was webbed with venules returning deoxygenated blood to the small saphenous vein. The pain was immediate and intense, and he could surely feel warm blood running down his leg, a scary sensation if you weren’t trained to ignore it. For a man, Malware achieved a remarkable soprano shriek. He lost his grip on her. He staggered back a step as he bent forward to clutch his shin, whereupon she drove a knee hard into the underside of his chin and heard his teeth clack and stepped aside as he collapsed onto the floor.
The door flew open, and Ms. Ennui appeared vividly engaged with the world for the first time. She froze on the threshold, however, because Jane had already drawn her Heckler & Koch, giving the girl’s big dark eyes an intimate view of the muzzle.
“Go back to your stool,” Jane said. “Put on some happy music. Elton’s recorded a lot of it.”
14
* * *
BEHIND A DOOR, STAIRS led up to the second floor, where the real work at Vinyl got done, and Jane wanted Malware to ascend in front of her. These people weren’t dangerous in a gangland sense, and they certainly were not as bloodthirsty and twisted as the homicidal sociopaths whom she had spent the last six years tracking down. But if they were all as lacking in common sense as this one, blood could be spilled unnecessarily. She needed to use this humbled assailant for a shield, coming behind him with her pistol ready to perform the ultimate spinal tap, thereby giving the people on the second floor time to rein in their heebie-jeebies.
Malware found it painful to stand up straight, but he was no good to her if he humped up the stairs like a troll. The thought of the gun in his back put some starch in him. He needed the handrail, and he limped step by step, but he ascended at his full height. He cursed her at first, spitting blood because he’d bitten his tongue. Then he realized the point of her wanting a shield, and belatedly he took it upon himself to call out, “I’m in front, Jimmy, I’m in front of her, it’s me in front, Jimmy!”
There was one long steep flight of stairs, no door above. As they got close to the top, she pressed the muzzle of the pistol into his spine, just in case he got his macho back when he came eye-to-eye with his friends.
Past Malware, as they rose into the second floor, Jane saw a large room the length of the building, windows boarded over, mellow down-lighting, stained-concrete floor. Maybe ten workstations, each computer with its own printers, scanners, miscellaneous black boxes, support tech. An elevated, circular central desk provided a platform from which the entire room could be overwatched.
Seven guys were standing at various points, looking toward the stairs, all in their twenties and early thirties. Some were stick-thin, some fat, some bearded and some not. All were pale, not out of fear, but due to a lack of interest in activities conducted in sunlight. Each of the seven fit within the spectrum of computer-geek style.
Only one of the seven, Jimmy Radburn, was packing, though in spite of the gun he looked no more dangerous than a kitten. His stance was wrong, his left foot behind him and his weight too much on it instead of evenly distributed. His primary criterion when he’d bought the weapon must have been its intimidating appearance. Maybe a Colt Anaconda, .44 Magnum, with a ridiculous eight-inch barrel. Probably fifty-six ounces, heavier than a large brick. He held it in one hand, arm extended, because maybe Clint Eastwood had done that in a Dirty Harry movie. If he ever squeezed the trigger, the recoil would stagger him backward, he’d blow out some expensive overhead lights—and he’d probably be so startled, he’d drop the revolver.
When it came to firearms, Jane preferred facing experienced gunmen, because if you died in the confrontation, at least it wouldn’t be a cartoonish death.
In his free hand, Jimmy was holding the two index cards on which she had printed messages to him.
Jane pushed Malware away from her, but not toward Jimmy Radburn. “Get in a chair.”
Cursing her once more, Malware hobbled to an office chair.
Maybe Jimmy spooked easily, but he wasn’t a stupid man. He had read the index cards. She’d given him information that could keep him out of prison if he acted properly on it. Even if what she’d told him turned out to be bogus—which it wouldn’t—it couldn’t be construed as a hostile act.
Counting on him to have more common sense than the guy whose shin she had raked to the bone, she holstered her pistol. While he continued to point the cannon at her face, she fished another index card from a jacket pocket and held it out to him.
For a moment, he couldn’t decide what to do, and his crew of six stood tense and expectant, as if this was a spaghetti Western moment if ever there had been one. Then Jimmy lowered the revolver.
With his left hand, he motioned her toward him, and he took the third card that she offered.
On it, she had written this: SOME OF YOUR PHONE LINES HAVE BEEN SLEEVED WITH INFINITY TRANSMITTERS.
The infinity transmitter couldn’t be called cutting-edge technology. It was older than Jimmy, who was thirty, perhaps even older than his mother, but it worked as slick as anything. Maybe it wasn’t the first threat Mrs. Radburn’s baby boy considered when he thought about spending a large part of his life eating prison food, but Jane counted on him having heard of it.
He put the index cards and the revolver on the round elevated desk and said to his crew, “Log off and shut down,” and at once they returned to their workstations to do as he instructed.
Once an infinity transmitter had been hooked into a phone, it hibernated until an activating call was placed from an outside line. As the final digit of the number was entered, the caller at the same moment triggered an electronic whistle into the mouthpiece. This instantly switched on the infinity transmitter, which prevented the target phone from ringing but activated its microphone. The people in the room, this room, would be unaware that every conversation among them was being transmitted to a law-enforcement agency, which was recording everything. With an open-end court order granted for national-security reasons, the FBI was most likely eavesdropping on the Radburn operation frequently but not continuously, though there was no reason they couldn’t record 24/7 if they wished.
When all the computers had been shut down, Jimmy went to a tall metal cabinet in the northeast corner of the long room. It contained the switching system for a business with a couple dozen phone lines. He fiddled in there for a minute, and when he closed the cabinet door, Jane assumed he had shut off his entire telecom package.
When he returned to her, he said, “What’s with the wig?”
She pointed toward the boarded windows at the south end of the room. “There are so many traffic cameras anymore, people stop seeing them. You’ve got one mid-block, in front of your store, but it’s not a traffic camera.”
“That sucks.”
“It looks as if it’s shooting west to east, but it’s aimed at your front door.”
“Orwellian bastards.”
Of which you are one, unrealized, Jane thought.
She said, “It clicks every two seconds and transmits high-resolution images of everyone who goes in or out of Vinyl. That’s why the wig. And the massive eye shadow. At least, the last I knew, the camera isn’t twinned with facial-recognition software.”
“What’s your name?”
For the hell of it, she said, “Ethan Hunt,” borrowing it from the bakery delivery guy in San Diego.
“Funny name for a girl.”
“I’m not your usual girl.”
15
* * *
JIMMY RADBURN SENT MALWARE—whose name was Felix—downstairs to get first aid from Ms. Ennui, also known as Britta. He dispatched the other six guys in his crew to wait in the shop for instructions. They thundered down the steep stairs, and he shouted, “Close the door behind you,” which someone did.
; He led Jane to a table covered with boxes of cookies, packages of candy, bags of potato chips, pretzels, corn chips, cans and jars of nuts—enough munchables to satisfy a legion of potheads during an around-the-clock smoke-in. The complexity and delicacy of the tasks undertaken by Vinyl’s black-hat hacker crew ruled out weed before or during—and pretty much after—work, but evidently either a salted-carb rush or a sugar high was thought to contribute to productivity.
They pulled out a couple chairs and sat facing each other.
Jimmy Radburn looked like an adult Kewpie doll—pleasantly rounded but not truly fat, his face smooth and unlined and nearly beardless. He was well barbered, freshly scrubbed, and had the most perfectly manicured hands of any man Jane had seen.
He said, “How’d you get your information, the stuff on the index cards? Which, anyway, is probably all gubbish.”
“Doesn’t matter how I got it. And it isn’t garbage.”
She wasn’t going to tell him that she was an FBI agent on leave. He couldn’t testify in court to what he didn’t know.
She said, “They came at you with grandpa tech, and you missed it during your sweeps because you’re always running straight-line analysis, looking for breaches where you expect them. When you’re developing products—apps, whatever—or trying to crack a network, you want straight-line progress, but you know you also need to take a drunkard’s walk.”
“Respect randomness,” he agreed. “Drunkard’s walk. Brownian movement. Random and undirected progress.”
“So you should apply it to security sweeps as well.”
“I’m a genius and an idiot.” With his smile, he tried to project self-deprecation, but it was a smile borrowed from a baby rattlesnake. “So how screwed am I? Should I flush this place today?”