by Dean Koontz
Jane said, “He’s all growl, no bite. How long’s he been here?”
“Since he bought the building. What is it, Rosa? Five years?”
“Closer six.”
Since he bought the building. Those five words revised Jane’s understanding of the situation.
“A girl like you,” Charlene said, “can’t be lookin’ for a job in this place. Are you wantin’ to volunteer?”
“Never enough volunteers,” Rosa said.
“Actually,” Jane said, “I’m trying to persuade him to volunteer for something.”
“He’ll do it, whatever it is,” Charlene assured her. “Our Mr. Bigfoot doesn’t know how to say no. He has a finger in everything from veterans’ needs to no-kill animal shelters to Toys for Tots.”
“After-school programs for kids, scholarships,” Rosa added.
“He spends so much time spreadin’ his money around,” Charlene said, “I don’t know when he has the time to make more of it.”
“Just the one thing,” Rosa said, and gave her coworker a meaningful look.
Charlene said, “If sometime he goes pale and breaks into a sweat and seems not himself for just a minute, pay him no mind.”
“Is he ill?” Jane asked.
“No, no, no. It’s just a bad memory, maybe from one of his wars. He works his way through it quick. It doesn’t mean nothin’, child.” Charlene and Rosa returned to their work, subject closed.
8
* * *
WHEN JANE RETURNED from the women’s lavatory, Charlene waved her over to the cafeteria counter. “The boss said, ‘Send that young lady back in here.’ If he forgot your name, child, don’t take offense. He’s got a lot on his mind, and he remembers everybody’s name after a while. By the way, what is your name?”
“Alice Liddell,” Jane said.
“I hope we’ll be seein’ a lot more of you, Alice. Now, do you remember how to get to his office?”
“I do. Thank you.”
In Trahern’s office, Jane closed the door and regarded the man hulking over his desk, wearing his homeless-guy clothes, behind his lightning-shot beard. Her respect for what he had done in the past was corroded by suspicion, by the apprehension that the country was afflicted by a pandemic of corruption. She thought about David James Michael, who was widely viewed as a generous do-gooder, cover that allowed him to back Shenneck and use the girls at Aspasia. Suddenly it was possible to see Trahern’s clothes as a costume, his unruly hair and Moses beard as part of a crafted image.
She said, “So you’re rich, huh?”
He raised his untrimmed eyebrows, which were as lush as a pair of mustaches. “Is being rich a strike against me?”
“Depends on how you made it. You spent twelve years in the Army, which isn’t known for big salaries.”
Trahern watched steam wisp from his coffee. He picked up the mug and blew on the coffee and cautiously took a sip. He might have been striving to control his temper, which he had indulged before. Or maybe he was buying time to spin a convincing lie.
“When I left the service,” he said, “I had an inheritance waiting from my father, who died the year before.”
“How did he earn it?”
Trahern’s face knotted like a gnarled scrub oak. “Someone in as much trouble as you are shouldn’t ask for help and then throw stones with both hands.”
Self-righteous indignation was not an answer.
“In case you’ve forgotten,” she said, “I’ve recently had my life knocked out from under me by some rich people who think they can own anyone they want and kill anyone they don’t own.”
“Painting all rich people as villains is purest bigotry.”
She was keenly aware that a charge of bigotry was a popular technique used to shut up an adversary who was no more a bigot than she was a blue giraffe, to make her doubt herself and misdirect her, while implying the moral superiority of the accuser.
Whatever Trahern’s motivation, benign or sinister, she wouldn’t be manipulated. “Do you hang out with a bunch of rich people? Seems to me like they hang out with each other and no one else.”
Rising from his chair, standing perhaps six feet four, chest describing an arc like that of a fifty-gallon wine barrel, face now red with displeasure, he said, “I hang out with millionaires and paupers and near saints and certain sinners and anyone I damn well want to hang out with. Now, why don’t you sit down?”
“I’m waiting for the answer.”
“What answer?”
“How did your father earn the fortune he left to you?”
Trahern made a wordless sound not unlike a dog shaking a garden snake to death. Then he said, “Dad was an investment advisor, and a good one. It wasn’t a massive fortune. A few hundred thousand when the estate was settled. I’d just gotten out of the Army, back in 2000, at the turn of the millennium, when you were a snot-nosed kid in pigtails. There were opportunities. I took the three hundred grand and proved to be a much better investor than my father.”
She remained standing. “Yeah? What did you invest in?”
He waved his big hands in the air and rolled his eyes. “Drugs! Guns! Huge scary knives! A company that made Nazi uniforms!” He took another deep breath and snorted it out as before. Still displeased but in as normal a voice as he could muster, he said, “On 9/11, when those creeps took down the World Trade Center, everyone bailed out of stocks in a panic. I bought into the market with everything I had. In 2008, 2009, when the bottom fell out of the economy, I bought stocks and real-estate big-time. See the pattern? It’s always smart to bet on America.”
“You got rich by betting on America?”
“And it still works for me.”
She went to the folding chair and sat down, not entirely at ease with him, but convinced that his indignation was real, not contrived. “I pushed your buttons pretty hard there, but I won’t apologize for asking. It’s my life, my boy’s life. I need to know that you are who you seem to be. It’s a rare thing these days.”
He sat behind the desk once more. “I guess it works both ways. I called someone who might have known your husband. Relax already. Will you relax? Give me a chance here? All right. So this is a guy, if he was starving on a desert island with nothing but a dog, he’d eat his own arm before he’d take a bite out of the mutt. Turns out he did know your Nick, and he talked about him kind of like the Pope might talk about the baby Jesus. This guy never met you, but he was in action with Nick, and he says there’s no way Nick would have married a nutcase or an airhead, no matter how good she looked.”
9
* * *
FROM GOOGLE EARTH, Dougal Trahern had printed satellite views of a few key areas of Shenneck’s seventy-acre Napa Valley ranch at different magnifications. The stack of pages was more than half an inch thick, held together by a binder clip.
Jane was sitting at Trahern’s desk, studying the photos, when the big man returned with a fully loaded duffel bag, which he put on the floor beside the office door.
“You’re right,” she said. “My way in won’t work.”
“But my way will.”
“What’s your way?”
“To save time, I’ll tell you when we’re on the road.”
“Where are we going?”
“Los Angeles. To see a guy.”
“What guy?”
“You trust me or you don’t.”
“I do and I don’t. These days, there’s only eight people in the whole world I trust completely—which is why I’m not dead already.”
“Do and don’t. Maybe that’s good enough for now. But soon you’ll have to make up your mind. Are you carrying?”
She pulled aside her sport coat to reveal the rig and pistol. “Not licensed when on leave from the Bureau. But if I’m going to Hell, it won’t be because I broke the concealed-carry laws.”
Trahern had put on the voluminous black quilted-nylon garment that he had been wearing when she’d first seen him in the library. The zipper was not engaged, and he spread
both panels of the jacket, revealing a dual rig with pistols snugged against his left and right sides. “Have good connections and a reputation for philanthropy, you can be licensed to double carry.”
“You really need those at Toys for Tots meetings?”
“I mostly carry just one. I know ministers, teachers, little-old-lady retirees who pack everywhere they go.”
As he spoke, he looked toward the blacked-out windows, first one and then the other.
“Why’d you paint the glass?” Jane asked.
“I don’t like having a window at my back where anyone could be looking in at me.”
“Blinds wouldn’t work? Draperies?”
“Not good enough. Paint it black. That’s the only sure thing.” He picked up the duffel bag. “Better be going.”
As she watched Trahern open the door and leave his office, Jane wondered if, by turning to this man, she had improved her chances of getting to Shenneck or instead had guaranteed failure.
10
* * *
AS JANE STARTED the engine, Trahern dropped his duffel bag in the back of the Ford Escape. He got in the front passenger seat and closed the door, holding the satellite photos on his lap.
In the confines of the car, he seemed not merely bigger than before but also stranger, sitting there in his lace-up boots and camouflage pants and black T-shirt and shiny black nylon jacket. He was forty-eight years old, yet in spite of his size and his age, at times he had a childlike quality. Sometimes when she looked at him, when he didn’t realize that he was being observed, he appeared lost.
“What’re you looking at?” he grumbled.
“Are you sure you know what you’re maybe getting into?”
“Trespass, breaking and entering, false imprisonment, assault, kidnapping, homicide.”
“And you met me just a couple of hours ago.”
“You’re convincing. I saw the Aspasia website. I trust you.”
She didn’t put the car in gear. “That’s really all it takes to plunge like this—that you trust me?”
“It’s more than that. It’s like I’ve been waiting most of my life for this. I’ve got my reasons. And don’t ask what they are, ’cause they’re my reasons. You can’t do this alone, you’ve got nowhere else to go, and you’re damn lucky I said yes. Hit the road.”
11
* * *
SINCE MID-MORNING, clouds had been sailing in from the north, an armada of gray galleons that raised their sails to screen out the high blue vault with which the day had begun. Now, at 2:30, the low lead-colored overcast suggested the possibility of rain but didn’t promise it. The wind that drove the clouds was at high altitude, while here at ground level, the city stood in stillness, its many trees untroubled, its flags and pennants and banners and awnings limp, motionless. This seemed to be a city waiting for something, and not for anything good, poised in tense expectation.
On the freeway, heading north toward Interstate 5, Trahern said, “I’m talked out. Let’s be quiet awhile.”
“All right.”
“I need quiet. To think.”
Jane said nothing.
He closed his eyes and sat there, big and strangely costumed and bristling and perhaps unknowable. As she drove, Jane glanced at him from time to time, and she vacillated between being comforted by his presence and being disturbed by him.
In mutual silence, with only the drumming of the engine and the drone of the tires, they had gone maybe twenty-five miles on I-5 and were passing Oceanside when, eyes still closed, Trahern said with bearish gruffness, “I have absolutely no romantic interest in you.”
“Likewise,” she replied, amazed that he felt it necessary to broach the subject.
He wanted to be sure his point had been taken. “I’m old enough to be your father. And for another thing, I’m beyond all that.”
“I was only recently widowed,” she reminded him. “For the foreseeable future, I’m beyond all that, too.”
“Not that you aren’t attractive. You’re quite attractive.”
“I understand.”
“Good. I’m glad we’ve got that straight. Now let’s can the chatter for a while.”
In spite of the gray sky and the gray sea to the west and the dismal scrub-covered hills to the east and the potential bleakness of events to come, a small smile settled on Jane. She didn’t hold it for long. Somehow, a smile seemed dangerous just now, a challenge to Fate that Fate would not ignore.
12
* * *
AFTER CANCELING HIS RETURN flight to Reagan International in Washington, Nathan Silverman booked passage on a direct flight out of Austin to San Francisco and from there a one-hour shuttle to Los Angeles. If Booth Hendrickson, on behalf of the attorney general or anyone else in the Department of Justice, had indeed been conveying a message to cease and desist, the effect on Silverman was the opposite of what had been intended.
At 2:50 Saturday afternoon, in San Francisco International, as he sat near the appropriate gate, awaiting a boarding call for the commuter flight, he received an email from the L.A. field office. Enhancement of the park video and facial-recognition processing had determined that the man carrying the two briefcases, with a metallic balloon tied to one wrist, was Robert Frances Branwick, alias Jimmy Radburn, who operated a collectible-record store called Vinyl, which was a front for a cybercrime operation. The FBI had been conducting electronic surveillance on Radburn’s business, gathering data about his client list in preparation for a sweeping series of arrests.
The musclebound specimen who had been foiled at the hotel entrance by the chain and padlock was Norman “Kipp” Garner. He was of interest to various police agencies because they believed that he was a conduit for dark money coming out of certain totalitarian regimes for investment in criminal enterprises in the United States, though insufficient evidence existed to press charges against him.
As the boarding call came and Silverman got to his feet, he was unable to imagine anything in those briefcases, given their source, that wouldn’t incriminate Jane. Depending on what evolved in Los Angeles, he might not be able to delay much longer before reporting her to the director and opening an official investigation.
He refrained from doing so now only because of his faith in her and because, according to her father-in-law, unnamed players had threatened to kill her child. Ancel Hawk’s claim that young Travis was a target had become more credible following Silverman’s encounter with Booth Hendrickson.
13
* * *
ON INTERSTATE 405, by the time Jane was drawing near to Long Beach, one thrombosis after another began to form in the traffic. Even the carpool lane was stop-and-go. She resorted to the kind of driving that annoyed her when others did it, frequently changing lanes to get around a clot of vehicles, weaving in and out to take advantage of a length of open pavement that might gain her only a hundred yards.
She was propelled by the thought of Overton’s corpse lying in his big walk-in closet since the previous night. Initially she had told herself that he wouldn’t be found until Monday. Now she could imagine a variety of scenarios in which a missed weekend engagement might motivate a friend to become concerned enough to pay a visit to the house. News of the attorney’s death would not necessarily be at once conveyed to other members of his vicious confederacy, but if it was, Shenneck would be even more security conscious.
In the passenger seat, for the past hour, Dougal Trahern had been studying satellite photos of Gee Zee Ranch. Occasionally he muttered to himself, but he didn’t speak to Jane until they were passing Inglewood. “Take the ten west to PCH and then north.”
A short while later, Jane turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway. She again passed Palisades Park, where roller-skating Nona had drop-kicked Jimmy Radburn and snatched the two briefcases on Wednesday, though this time she was on the ocean side of the park, the Palisades rising on her right.
“Now where?” she asked.
Trahern recited an address in Malibu, and at last he
gave her a shorthand version of how to get past security at Gee Zee Ranch.
Although he didn’t plan to fly the bird, she expected the part with the helicopter. He’d been a Special Forces helo pilot, which was one reason she had gone to him.
The other component, however, seemed over-the-top. She didn’t say as much right away. She owed him thoughtful consideration. But she began to worry that in spite of his military heroism and his genius as an investor and his management skills evident in the free kitchen that he had established, his psychological problems made him a less-than-ideal strategist.
14
* * *
NATHAN SILVERMAN PARKED the airport rental car a block from Vinyl, stiffed the parking meter, and walked to the record store.
Sunset was almost an hour away, but the gunmetal sky plated over the sun so effectively that the San Fernando Valley huddled under a premature dusk.
An agent at the front door of Vinyl checked Silverman’s ID before letting him inside. “Sir, the action’s on the second floor.”
The framed vintage posters on the walls and the bins of collectible records remained as they had been. The back room contained even more of that inventory.
He heard voices on the second floor. When he got upstairs, he found a forest of abandoned furniture and a table heaped with snack foods. But there wasn’t a single computer or scanner or other piece of equipment used in the Dark Web business that had been conducted there, not even so much as one extension cord or cable tie.
Present were John Harrow, SAC of the L.A. office, whom he knew, and two other agents who were unknown to him.
Harrow, with his gray crew cut and shoulders-back posture and sharply pressed suit and alert demeanor, was as clearly ex-military as a man could be. As the section chief of the Critical Incident Response Group, Silverman oversaw among other things the five Behavioral Analysis Units. Unit 2, which dealt with cybercrime and related issues, had been advising Harrow in the matter of Robert Branwick, alias Jimmy Radburn, for the better part of a year.