by Dean Koontz
“There’s a bogus traffic cam,” Harrow said, “watching the front entrance. Phone and off-phone conversations are on auto-record for delayed review. With everything else going down these days, we don’t have personnel for twenty-four/seven surveillance, but we do regular drive-bys. Never seemed they’d bail from here without discussing it, which we’d have caught in plenty of time with the delayed review.”
A dreary mood had overtaken Silverman. “So they vacated quickly but discreetly.”
“Yeah. As if they discovered we had them boxed and ready to put away.” He waited a beat, then said, “Do you have a rogue, Nathan?”
Silverman didn’t miss the calculation in Harrow’s use of the word you instead of we. These days, the Bureau was, as it had always been, a loyal brotherhood—except when it wasn’t.
Instead of answering, he said, “Branwick’s ego weighs as much as his brain. He’s convinced he’s been clever about his identity, that no one but Kipp Garner knows his real name isn’t Radburn.”
“Yes. Unless…someone told him different.”
“Have you grabbed him?”
“Not yet. An hour ago we put surveillance on the Sherman Oaks house. We’re going after all the rats before they scatter, and at the same time, so they can’t warn one another.”
“Are you going with SWAT at the Branwick house?”
“Yeah. That’s where the big prize is, and where we’re likely to get a hard pushback. All those guys in the hacking crew that worked here—they’re gutless wonders. The moment they see a badge, they’ll be outbidding one another to sell each other out.” He looked at his watch. “It goes down after dark. We’re on our way over there now.”
“I’ll be there,” Silverman said.
“If Branwick knows we have his real name, if he’s skipped, you have a rogue.”
“It’s not that simple, John,” Silverman said, and hoped that he would not have to eat his words, at least not just a few hours after speaking them.
15
* * *
THE MALIBU MANSION might have stood on one acre or three, but it was nobody’s idea of a tract home. Jane found it hard to size it from outside the stacked-stone estate wall.
The guard at the gatehouse wore gray slacks and a white shirt and a maroon blazer. The cut of his coat allowed a concealed weapon. Mr. Trahern and guest were expected. In their wake, the solid green-patinaed copper-clad gate swung shut across the quartzite driveway.
The grounds were expansive and tropical, graced with phoenix palms and royal palms and palms she couldn’t name, with all manner of ferns. Flowers everywhere. Lawns as smooth as putting greens.
The house was a marvel of white stucco and glass and teak, curved at every corner, with dramatically cantilevered decks.
She parked in the circular drive and said, “Here we go again.”
“You’ve been here before?” Trahern asked.
“No. Here we go again with rich people. Is there no limit to the number of them?”
“You’ll like this one. He’s a San Diego boy. Donates big-time to every good cause I bring him—”
“Half the do-gooders in the world are bad-doers pulling a con.”
“Donates big-time to every good cause I bring him,” Trahern repeated, “and never uses it for publicity.”
She walked with him to the front door. It was opened by a man dressed in white shoes, white slacks, and a tasteful white Hawaiian shirt with no decoration except the outlines of palm trees stitched in the palest of blue thread.
Jane mistook him for the owner, but he was a casually dressed butler. “The mister is waiting in the garage. I’ll take you to him.”
“That’s all right, Henry,” Trahern said. “I know the way.”
In those expansive rooms of sleek modern furniture accessorized with Asian antiques and art, the lumbering Dougal Trahern looked even more out of place than did the humble Ford Escape parked in the grand driveway. But he seemed to feel at home.
They passed a wall of glass beyond which lay a breathtaking view of the sea, gray under the ashen sky, phalanxes of whitecaps marching toward the shore.
An elevator took them down to a subterranean garage paved in limestone and containing a collection of maybe two dozen cars.
The owner was there, too, a surprise to Jane. One of the most famous movie stars of his time. Tall and handsome and black. His killer smile had melted hearts worldwide.
He and Trahern hugged, and upon being introduced, the actor took both of Jane’s hands in his. “Any friend of Dougal’s is—highly suspect! But not in your case. What agency represents you?”
Trahern was quick to translate, “He means talent agency.” To the actor, he said, “Jane isn’t in the business. You might say right now she’s something of a private investigator.”
“I’ve played a P.I. more than once,” the star said, “and I’ve had to hire a few, but none of them with your impact, Miss Hawk.”
The Gurkha RPV Civilian Edition was parked in the center of the garage, under pin spots. It appeared as formidable as the tactical armored vehicles, armored SUVs, and special-purpose law-enforcement vehicles that Terradyne, its Canadian manufacturer, sold around the world. Over eight feet high, more than twenty feet long, with maybe a 140-inch wheelbase. The Gurkha stood on large run-flat tires. The only obvious difference between it and the military version was the lack of gun ports.
It looked as if it were a Transformer just starting to change from an ordinary vehicle into a robot colossus.
The actor beamed with the affection of a passionate collector as he said, “Six-point-seven-liter V8 turbo diesel. Three hundred horsepower. Gross weight of this baby with all the options and both forty-gallon fuel tanks filled is like seventeen thousand pounds, but it handles sweet, gives you all the speed you need, and while you’re in it, you’re safe unless you plan to go up against a tank.”
Trahern handed an envelope to the star. “A check for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I’ll need the pink slip signed.”
Bemused, the actor said, “Dougal, I still don’t get this.”
“What’s to get?” Trahern harrumphed. “I can’t wait months and months for Terradyne to deliver one. And you’ll be gone for months on location for those two movies…which, by the way, don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning you another Oscar. You can order a new Gurkha and have it when you get home.”
“But you can borrow this for nothing.”
“No good,” Trahern said and glowered and shook his massively haired and bearded head. “I could get myself in trouble with this, so it’s better for you to have sold it than loaned it to me.”
Not with concern, but with the interest of a born adventurer, the actor said, “Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“Every kind,” Trahern replied, his expression dour and his brow beetled as if he were a gifted foreteller who could see no possible futures except dark ones. “And that’s all I’ll say. You need to have plausible deniability. Unless you want to change your mind, not do this at all, leave your old friend with his bare ass hanging out.”
The actor fashioned his face into a God-forbid expression. “I’d be blinded by the blight. Keep it under wraps, Captain.”
Trahern said, “If we do what we need to do and bring the Gurkha back, you can buy it from me minus the cost of any repairs, if you want, or I just keep it, whatever. But now we’ve got a long night’s drive ahead of us. As much as I’d be enchanted to hear you tell some of your interminable Hollywood stories, I need that damn pink slip.”
The actor grinned at Jane. “Isn’t he something?”
“He’s something,” she agreed.
“I guess you know what you’re getting into with him.”
“I guess I do.”
16
* * *
WHEN THE LONG, sloped street was clear from intersection to intersection, Bureau cars pulled across two lanes, barring traffic from entering either end of the block in which stood the Branwick r
esidence.
The neighbors in the house downhill from Branwick’s were not home. The neighbors on the other side had been quietly shepherded out of their place under the cover of night and escorted a safe distance from any potential action.
Uphill and across the street from the target house, Silverman and Special Agent Harrow stood watching from the darkness under the street trees and from behind a Roto-Rooter van that was in fact an undercover vehicle on loan from the Drug Enforcement Agency. In the back of the van waited the six members of the SWAT team, who were suited in hard high-impact armor, waiting for the order to go.
The night had been still. Now a light breeze came out of the west, stirring the trees into a whispering conspiracy.
In the target residence, lights glowed through most if not all of the ground-floor rooms, but only in part of the second story. Draperies hung open, the rooms beyond apparently vacant.
Initially, two agents approached the Branwick place dressed in street clothes with light-ballistic Kevlar vests under their shirts. No head protection. Their appearance did not scream police.
One of them climbed the four steps between the stone lions and moved to a section of wall between the front door and a window. The second man went to the east side of the house, let himself through an iron gate, and moved out of sight to the back of the residence.
The agent at the front, standing beside the window, pressed to the glass a two-inch-diameter suction cup at the center of which was a highly sensitive condenser microphone with a wide pick-up pattern. Clipped to his belt, an analytic audio processor the size of a pack of cigarettes was programmed to identify and screen out the rhythmic noise of bathroom-vent fans, refrigerator motors, and appliances, in order that voices and the irregular sounds of human activity would be more easily discerned. He wore an earpiece, so that he could hear what the processor deemed relevant.
The listening device also transmitted to a remote receiver, which in this case was Silverman’s smartphone.
He and Harrow listened for perhaps two minutes. The quiet was so unrelieved that if there were people inside the house, they must have been in cryogenic suspension.
The agent who had disappeared along the east side of the house reappeared through the iron gate. He crouched beside a hedge, all but invisible in his dark clothes.
A moment later Harrow’s phone vibrated. He listened, gave the order to fade back, and terminated the call. To Silverman, he said, “Through a window, he saw a dead body on the kitchen floor.”
Harrow stepped to the back of the van and gave the go order to the SWAT team to take the Branwick house and clear its rooms.
This was a day of revelations, each with greater import than the one before it, and the weight of them seemed to be compounding into a prophecy that Nathan Silverman didn’t want to believe. Even if Jane was in the jaws of a vise through no fault of her own, her son at risk, even though her motives might be pure, she was tangled in a very dark web. In desperation, people did things that the law could not forgive regardless of the circumstances. He liked her, he understood her, he trusted her…and yet his image of her had begun ever so slightly to fray around the edges.
17
* * *
JANE BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Gurkha RPV, racing north on I-5, the six-speed automatic transmission smooth, road noise less than she expected because of the insulating armor. Las Padres National Forest to her left, Angeles National Forest to her right, she piloted the Gurkha high into the Tehachapi Mountains, with only flyspeck towns immediately ahead—a couple thousand souls here, a few hundred there—otherwise a vast darkness under a shrouded sky in which the moon and stars were buried.
Her Ford Escape waited back in Malibu, parked in the actor’s garage, from which she would one day retrieve it if she lived.
Trahern in the passenger seat, seeming smaller than he did in the Ford. Looking less comical, more menacing, by association with this military-style vehicle. Looking in fact like a dangerous revolutionary bent on blowing up banks and stock exchanges. Although mumbling to himself from time to time, he invited no conversation.
They were a few miles from the Tejon Pass when Jane said, “So he takes your check and gives you the pink slip and doesn’t even want to know what you might do that could maybe link him to one kind of mess or another, screw up his reputation?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“That was a question.”
“To what point?”
“Why would he do that?”
“We go way back.”
“Well, that explains everything.”
“Good.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
He took a handkerchief from a pocket, hocked up phlegm, spat it in the hankie, and tucked it away.
She said, “I go back and forth about you.”
“Everybody does.”
“So why would he do that, no questions asked?”
“You won’t let this go, will you?”
“I need to understand you.”
“Nobody can understand anybody,” he groused. “In a nutshell, the man lied about his age to join the Army at sixteen. Served four years, three in Special Forces. We went through some shit together.”
“War?”
“It was like a war. They didn’t call it that.”
“What was the shit you went through together? Specifically.”
“You never heard this.”
“Never heard what?”
“He thinks I saved his life.”
“Why does he think that?”
“I killed a bunch of people who were trying to kill him and a few other spec ops guys.”
“How many are a bunch?”
“Twelve, maybe fourteen.”
“And you got the Distinguished Service Cross.”
“No. That was for another thing. Now will you just shut up for a while?”
“Shutting up,” she said.
They crossed the Tejon Pass at four thousand one hundred feet and began the descent into the San Joaquin Valley, thousands of square miles that had once been the most productive farmland in the world.
On both sides of the highway, boundless reaches of flat land darkled away to distant mountains that stood moon-abandoned and only half real, like faintly limned mystical peaks in a vision. Here and there in that immensity glimmered the lonely lights of isolated farmhouses, as well as twinkling clusters that marked small towns with names like Pumpkin Center and Dustin Acres and Buttonwillow.
Jane wondered if in this bucolic realm there might be people who lived with a sense of peace and belonging, untouched by the stresses and anxieties borne elsewhere in the modern world. And if there were such people…how numbered were their days?
18
* * *
IN SPITE OF the grievous face wound and the early effects of decomposition, the dead man on the floor was recognizably Robert Branwick, also known as Jimmy Radburn. In his wallet, teased out of his hip pocket without disturbing the position of the corpse, a driver’s license confirmed the visual ID.
The kitchen cabinets had been significantly damaged by shotgun blasts. Having ricocheted off hard surfaces, spent buckshot littered the floor.
“Branwick doesn’t have a weapon,” John Harrow said.
“Maybe he did and his killer took it,” Silverman suggested.
“Doesn’t feel that way.”
Silverman had to agree that it didn’t.
“If Branwick had a shotgun and was up against someone with a pistol, he’d still be alive, and there’d be a different stiff on the floor.”
Three bits of video ran through Silverman’s memory: this dead man when alive, carrying two briefcases through the park…the roller-skating woman taking the two bags from him…the skater and Jane fleeing the hotel garage after emptying the briefcases into a large trash bag.
Perhaps Harrow was remembering the same video when he said, “Shot point-blank in the face, no apparent weapon on him. If his hands test positive for gunpowder res
idue, I’ll concede he had a weapon. If they don’t test positive, he was essentially executed.”
“Not necessarily. But let’s wait for the lab report.”
The SWAT team had gone. Another agent leaned in from the hallway. “L.A. police and CSI van are five minutes out.”
When the agent retreated, Harrow said to Silverman, “Hawk’s husband killed himself.”
“That’s right.”
“She’s on leave.”
“She was.”
“But she’s not now? If she was working on something in my jurisdiction, why wasn’t I given a heads-up?”
“Cut me some slack, John. I’ll do whatever needs to be done tomorrow. There are pieces of this you don’t have, and I’m still trying to put them together.”
“What I do have is the whole Vinyl operation evaporated under my watch, and one stone-dead guy who was the heart of it.”
“I understand. But you’ve got the list of Vinyl’s clients you’ve been gathering for months. Now we can start moving against the worst of them.”
“Without Branwick to testify.”
“You’ll have some of the other rats to testify.”
“I’m just saying, there are consequences to delay.”
“There are consequences to delay,” Silverman agreed, “and there are consequences to hasty action, always consequences.”
He consulted his wristwatch, which read 11:05 P.M. because it was still counting by East Coast time. His eyes were grainy. He was running on fumes. Nothing more for him here. He needed to check in to his hotel, grab something to eat, and consider the events of the day to determine if, in retrospect, they had the same dark implications that they had seemed to have as he’d experienced them.