by Dean Koontz
22
* * *
JIMMY RADBURN in the hell that is reality.
A warm day for March, sweat prickling the back of his neck and trickling out of his underarms. Sky clear blue, ocean a reflection of it, sun glare flashing off the water and between the trees and cutting at his eyes. Waves breaking softly and pushing onto shore the odor of decaying seaweed. None of it as vivid and enthralling and welcoming as any virtual-reality construct.
Under the trees, Palisades Park green and populated by fools on roller skates and idiot runners and girls dressed in Lululemon doing impromptu Pilates on the grass.
Damn seagulls shrieking. Crows perched on the backs of benches, on trash cans, on fence posts, crapping everywhere they sit. He hates birds. One day he is going to retire to a place that has no birds.
Once when Jimmy Radburn was nine years old, a bird in flight dropped a shit bomb on his head. People laughed, he was humiliated, and he never forgot. Jimmy never forgets any offense, never, no matter how far in the past it lies or how minor its nature.
Jimmy Radburn has used that name only for five years. He lives so intensely in this identity, however, that he can rattle on for hours about Jimmy’s childhood, every bit of it invented as he talks, and within a few days of having created a new piece of Jimmy’s storied past—such as the bird disrespecting his head—he comes to believe it is true.
This ability to believe his own lies is of great value in his chosen work as a cracker and cyberspace pirate. In this brave new digital world, reality is plastic, and your identity is whatever you wish it to be. As is your future: Wish it, build it, live it.
He carries a packed briefcase in each hand, a metallic helium-filled balloon tied to his left wrist and floating six feet above his head. Because the balloon isn’t for a special occasion such as a birthday, the sonofabitch florist gave him one that says in big red letters HAPPY HAPPY. Moronic. He is embarrassed by the balloon.
The purple-haired bitch, Ethan Hunt, whatever her real name is, comes into his life like a bad wind, blows it apart. She’s right about the infinity transmitters sleeved on his phone lines. So if he’s able to break down his operation and move it before the FBI realizes he’s ghosting away from them, she will have saved him from prison. But he hates her nonetheless, because she embarrassed him in front of his crew. Ever since that bird dropped a shit bomb on Jimmy Radburn’s head twenty-one years earlier, anyone who embarrasses him earns his undying enmity, even though bird and bomb are imaginary.
Besides, because of her aversion to thumb drives, because she’s “gone primitive,” the heavy briefcases of printouts are killing him as he walks north on the park path from Broadway.
Some of the girls skating past or running past in shorts and halter tops are worthy of Jimmy’s romantic interest, but none will give him a second look because now his face shines with perspiration and the sweat stains on his shirt are epic. It is simply a fact of Jimmy that he doesn’t have the buffed look that can make sweat sexy.
He perseveres with a smile because he has a surprise for the bitch in the form of his partner in Vinyl, Kipp Garner, the money man who financed their enterprise.
She’d been right when she’d said Jimmy didn’t have it in him to kill. He has a long list of bastards he would greatly enjoy killing, but he doesn’t have the stomach for wet work.
On the other hand, Kipp Garner, a mountain of muscle, has a taste for violence. Maybe he was born twisted. Or maybe in order to pump ever greater amounts of iron, he mainlines so many steroids and testosterone supplements that sex alone can’t tame the beast in him, so he needs the release of stomping someone now and then.
Even through the wireless receiver in Jimmy’s right ear, Kipp’s voice rumbles like distant thunder: “You’re almost to Santa Monica. You see her?”
The tiny microphone that appears to be a collar button is wired under Jimmy’s shirt to a battery-powered transmitter the size of a pack of gum in his right pants pocket. “She said somewhere between Broadway and California Avenue. The bitch will make me lug this shit all the way to California. And she won’t have purple hair.”
Kipp says, “Of course she won’t have purple hair.”
“I’m just sayin’ I might not recognize her.”
“You were hot for her, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You were very hot for her.”
“Yeah.”
“Then you’ll recognize her.”
An old homeless guy like a shrunken and misplaced yeti, wearing a backpack, toting a trash bag bulging with belongings, shambles into Jimmy’s path. “Give a dollar to a Vietnam vet?”
“You were never in Vietnam,” Jimmy says. “Get away from me or I’ll cut your tongue out and feed it to one of those stinking seagulls.”
23
* * *
AT 11:55, STARTING AT California Avenue, Kipp Garner swaggers slowly along the fence that protects park visitors from tumbling down the Palisades and onto Pacific Coast Highway. To his right, the sea is shot with sunlight, like a sheet of hammered steel, and to his left, beyond the narrow park, traffic surges on Ocean Avenue.
He wears black-and-white Louis Leeman sneakers, NFS ripped-and-repaired jeans, and an NFS palm-print T-shirt that is almost tested to destruction by his shoulders, biceps, and pecs. Encircling a wrist the size of some men’s forearms, a Hublot column-wheel watch in blue Texalium alloy, one of a limited edition of five hundred, virtually shouts power and money at any eye that beholds it.
Only on rare occasions does Kipp Garner carry a handgun, and he isn’t packing one now. His best two weapons are his mind and body, though today, tucked in one pocket, he also has a chloroform-soaked rag in a Ziploc plastic bag to ensure the woman doesn’t struggle.
For the past hour and a half, spread across three blocks from California Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard, six of his people have occupied assigned positions in anticipation of a rendezvous between Jimmy and the woman. Two appear to be college kids with textbooks, studying while catching some rays. One is on a woven-reed mat on the grass, practicing yoga. Another tries to flog Seventh-Day Adventist literature to passersby. Two in park-maintenance uniforms trim shrubbery as best they can. Four of them are men, two women, all carrying chloroform-soaked rags, and three are armed with pistols.
Parked at intervals along the west side of Ocean Avenue, next to the park, are six SUVs. Wherever the takedown occurs, one of those vehicles will be close enough to assure that they can convey the woman into it without too much of a scene.
On this first warm day of March, most people out and about are not in Kipp’s crew. Dedicated runners are making time all the way from the Santa Monica Pier to the upper end of Will Rogers State Beach and back again, a six-mile round trip. People are walking dogs. Young lovers stroll hand in hand.
There is as well the usual human debris: two ragged alkies toting everything they own, destined to spend the night in a drunken sleep, hidden in nests of park shrubbery; a long-haired stripped-to-the-waist blue-jeaned pothead so anorexic and pale that he shouldn’t take off his shirt even alone in the shower, sitting on a bench playing the guitar so indifferently that Kipp wants to take the instrument away from him and smash it….
Jimmy, a born worrier and complainer, frets that a lot of people means too many witnesses. But as smart as he might be about computers, Jimmy is ignorant about the finer points of physical assault and kidnapping. The more people in the park, the more they will be distracted by one another, oblivious to what Kipp and his crew do to the woman. And when the action starts, more people means greater confusion, which assures fewer reliable witnesses.
Kipp carries with him a small pair of powerful binoculars. He uses them every couple minutes, sweeping the park to his left and ahead, what he can see of it among the trees, checking on his people and anticipating a first glimpse of Jimmy Radburn.
Through the receiver tucked in Kipp’s right ear comes the voice of Zahid, one of the guys pretending to be a college student de
ep in his textbook. “Jimmy’s approaching me, a third of a block north of Santa Monica. Looks like he’s wimping out.”
“Eat me,” Jimmy says. “Should’ve packed these freakin’ bags with Styrofoam.”
Kipp says, “You wouldn’t sweat, and the lack of weight would be obvious. Anyway, if this goes wrong, she gets the bags, nothing’s in them—then she’d gas us with one phone call. Shut up and sweat.”
He doesn’t necessarily intend to kill the woman calling herself Ethan Hunt. He’ll squeeze her, learn how the gutsy bitch got the information she needed to make them dance to her tune, understand why she’s interested in all those autopsies and the dude named David James Michael. Then he’ll either waste her or not. If not, he’ll isolate her while they ease their operation out of the Vinyl space without alerting the FBI, then release her. If she’s as hot as Jimmy says, he will give her a lot of Kipp Garner to remember before he lets her go.
Little more than halfway between Wilshire and Arizona, which both terminate in Ocean Avenue, Kipp turns from the Palisades railing, moving farther into the park, to be better able to see through the clusters of trees. He stops and glasses the way ahead.
Here comes Jimmy, lugging the stuffed briefcases, metallic balloon mirroring the sun and bobbing over his head. He’s nearing Alika, where she’s peddling religious tracts with few takers.
Kipp doesn’t see any bitch, with or without purple hair, hot enough to match Jimmy’s description. That doesn’t mean she isn’t here, because Jimmy is a horndog who will jump a goat if it happens to be the only female available when he needs one, a fantasizer who will, in the telling, turn the goat into first runner-up in the Miss Universe contest.
Then something unexpected happens.
24
* * *
THE RATHER PLAIN seven-story hotel with some Art Deco details stood across from Palisades Park. The entrance gave it a needed element of style: Six steps flanked by stainless-steel railings coiled to form newel posts led to a portico where marble columns supported a curved architrave under which stood a pair of polished-steel-and-glass doors flanked by panels of art glass etched with a scene of egretlike birds standing in the suggestion of water.
At the moment, the doors were closed, and Jane stood behind one of them, watching the park on the farther side of Ocean Avenue.
Outside, on the portico, stood a doorman-valet dressed in black except for a white shirt, waiting for the next arriving guest. He was also helping Jane by keeping an eye on the park to the south, which was out of her line of sight.
She had turned in her service pistol when she’d gone on leave, and she’d been supposed to turn in her FBI credentials, too. She intentionally kept them. Her section chief, Nathan Silverman, didn’t chase her for them right away, maybe because she was one of his most successful investigators and he expected her to be tough enough to deal with her grief and return in a few weeks, instead of months. Or maybe he put a pin in it also because they had great mutual respect and were friends to the extent that the difference in their ranks, ages, and genders allowed. By the time he might have insisted on having her ID, she’d been two months out of action, had sold her house, filed a request for leave extension, and gone underground.
She assumed that her current status with the Bureau was either problematic or nonexistent.
Nevertheless, because she had little choice, she had presented her credentials to the hotel manager, a gracious woman named Paloma Wyndham, asking for cooperation in a minor sting operation. Paloma agreed to allow her to conduct surveillance of the park from the lobby, which was not busy because the hotel had only sixty luxury suites, no single or double rooms.
She had offered to have her section chief in Washington speak to the manager, which was where it could have fallen apart. But she knew that even in the current politically charged atmosphere, when people were encouraged to distrust or even openly disrespect law enforcement, the FBI was one of the few—perhaps the only—federal agencies for which most Americans still had respect. Because Jane was supposedly using the hotel only as a point from which to conduct surveillance for an hour, the manager merely Xeroxed the ID and asked her to check back when her work was concluded.
In fact, if Jimmy Radburn did not play according to the rules of their agreement, there might be more action within the hotel than Jane had led Paloma to believe. She had walked the premises earlier in the morning and knew how best to use the place.
From his post on the portico, the doorman-valet turned to Jane and gave her one thumb up, indicating that he had seen the man with the metallic balloon approaching from the southern end of the park, beyond her line of sight.
25
* * *
SWEATING, THIRSTY, WISHING he’d remembered to coat his face with sunscreen because he burned easily, muttering to himself about the weight of the briefcases, Jimmy arrives at a small grove of huge trees that canopy the walkway. He still doesn’t see anyone who might be the slut who turned his life upside down, and there are two long blocks until he will reach California Avenue, by which time he will probably be dehydrated and on death’s doorstep.
From nowhere, like a demon conjured, the rag-and-bone creature that had claimed to be a Vietnam veteran comes in a shrieking fury, having dropped his trash bag of belongings and shed his backpack, now assaulting Jimmy with bony fists like clenched talons. “Cut out old Barney’s tongue, feed it to a seagull, will you? I’ll stab out your eyes and eat ’em myself!” He is all filthy crusted clothes and tangled hair and bristling beard, wild-eyed and yellow-toothed, spraying spittle with each threat, spittle that no doubt carries with it diseases beyond counting.
Jimmy drops the briefcases to engage in self-defense, slapping ineffectually at the old man, not for the first time proving himself the furthest thing from a gladiator. The walking scarecrow has too little substance to be a danger to a grown man, but he rocks Jimmy on his heels before scrambling backward, spitting and cursing and stamping his feet like Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale that had made Jimmy, as a child, wet his bed when his mother read it to him.
The craziness seems to be over, but it isn’t. Along the walkway comes a fiftyish, helmeted, roller-skating Amazon in black Spandex shorts and a canary-yellow sports bra. She spins into an abrupt halt and snatches up both briefcases.
She’s tanned, solid, hard-muscled, grinning with disdain. He calls her what he thinks she is—“Gimme those, you freakin’ dyke”—and he reaches to take back one of the briefcases. She executes a Roller-Derby maneuver, digs the rubber toe stop of one skate into the pavement, balancing on her left leg like a ballerina, and kicks him in the balls with her other skate.
Jimmy buckles at the hips, at the knees, and folds down to the ground, making a sound like a thin stream of air escaping a valve under extreme pressure. Although his eyes blur with tears, he sees Alika drop her Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlets and reach into the satchel at her feet, where she stowed a pistol. Gunfire will draw cops, but he wants Alika to shoot the dyke anyway.
What happens instead is that the Roller-Derby queen spins in a full circle, maybe twice, swinging one of the briefcases as if it’s a discus and she’s going to throw it, except that she slams it into Alika’s head, knocking her to the ground, unconscious.
And the crazy bitch is off, from the park walkway across the grass, onto the public sidewalk along Ocean Avenue, to the corner and into the street at the crosswalk. She gets a horn blast from a Honda coming out of the side street and turning south on Ocean, but the light is with her as she skates away, carrying the briefcases.
26
* * *
JANE HAD HOPED that Jimmy would pull no tricks, that he would give the briefcases to Nona and walk away. But she had prepared for the likelihood that, after she had saved him from prison, he would prefer to pay her back with a kick in the head. These cyberspace cowboys thought of themselves as masters of the universe, and they resented being one-upped.
She had been in the park from eight o’clock till ten
, studying the regulars, from the ragged panhandlers to the fitness fanatics. Her years of experience in the Critical Incident Response Group had given her the tools to analyze the candidates for an improvised crew of her own; and a ready supply of cash made it possible to induce them to help her.
She didn’t like using people this way. They didn’t mind being used, but their willingness didn’t excuse her. Something could go wrong. Someone could be hurt, crippled, killed. But like everyone else, she had priorities. Her priority was her son. She would use anyone to keep him safe and to keep herself alive for him.
At 10:15, an hour and forty-five minutes before her rendezvous with Jimmy, she had been in her car at a meter on the farther side of Ocean Avenue from the park, scanning with binoculars for anything unusual, when the train of SUVs appeared northbound and curbed at intervals between Santa Monica Boulevard and California Avenue. Occupants of the vehicles convened briefly around a hulk who looked as if he had stepped out of a Marvel movie, and then they dispersed.
Maybe they weren’t Jimmy Radburn’s people, but they were of the type. If they were with Jimmy, Jane was not surprised that they would think being almost two hours early ensured they were in place before she showed up. Evil is unimaginative and lazy.
Now, after the dustup involving Jimmy and the pamphleteer, both briefcases in her possession, Nona skated into the street, and Jane winced when the Honda nearly clipped the woman. She flew across Ocean Avenue, glided up the curb cutout at the corner, climbed the six front steps by toe-walking in her skates, all so fast that Jane barely got the door open in time to admit her to the hotel lobby.