by Neovictorian
One more deep breath and I come back to the outside, reach up and turn off the ice water tap. In seconds a wave of good feeling spreads from inside out and my whole body feels it, there is no muscle soreness from lifting and there’s no pain in my left shoulder for the first time in three years. I flash back to a couple hours ago out on the back deck and the Light and the Silence, still very relaxed about it because it happened and it was Good. I smile inside thinking about what those UFO/Abduction/AncientAstronauts authors I so enjoyed when I was 14 would be saying right about now, “Missing Time!” “Taken!” “Probed!” and Mom, she’d be like “OF the DEVIL!” and James, what would James have said?
James would have grinned that grin that knew the World was a Stage and said, “Well you know Cal, I’m a phenomenologist” and we would have cracked up because, say no more.
It’s a good thing it’s a custom shower the size of a small bedroom because I swing my arms out, around up down side to side and there’s nothing wrong with the left one no pain no adhesions. I look down and make sure the scar is still there.
30. 3 years ago, Washington DC, April 23 12:57 pm
After a four-minute ride to the hospital, which I remember pretty well, pressure on my shoulder, bandages and pain and the medics talking on the radio, since I’m lucid they have me sign something on a clipboard to authorize treatment which unremarkably I don’t read followed by an x-ray and a black woman doctor with skin so silky it shines in the glaring lights, telling me that I am “very fortunate, the bullet passed through without hitting the joint or a major artery” and they are going to “debride” the wound and it won’t be general anesthesia.
Two DC Police detectives, one big and black and smiley and one slender and white and intense speak to me for a few minutes, no I’d never seen these guys before, didn’t know them at all they came up behind and showed a gun and we put out our wallets and one of them shot me, for no fucking reason. No, I didn’t know Mr. Crawford was armed. Yes, we’d had two drinks up the street just before the robbery.
I have one question for them; what about the three guys who robbed us?
The black detective answers with a faint smile, “All three dead at the scene. Nothing in their pockets—we’re running their prints now. We’ll let you know more tomorrow.” He turns away, then changes his mind and turns back. The smile is gone.
“They all got two in the center of the chest. The one got a third round, right in the mouth. Someone knew his business. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow, when you’re ready.”
Whatever is in that bag that they run through the needle in the back of my hand, I’m on my way out a minute later, I wake up, vaguely, at around 2:00 am by the clock I see on the wall and then they put another bag on and after that I am out of real time, there’s darkness and dreams, alternating, once I see Jack’s face, his mouth moving very slowly, “The…wound…is…not…in…a…bad…place” and I try to ask him how he knows, I try three times but my lips are numb, paralyzed, my jaw goes up and down a fraction but no words come.
Around 10:00 I wake up and I’m me again, know my name and birthdate and my shoulder throbs with my heartbeat, but bearable. There is, admittedly, a faint halo around the heads of the nurses that come and go, look at the monitors and levels and measurements and seem satisfied, it’s so damn easy to go in and out of sleep though, in and out on demand, and it feels so good, I’m going off again when the door opens and it’s no nurse, it’s Jack Crawford.
“Hi Cal. Nice to see you again,” and he’s scanning the room for hidden figures, cameras, microphones, bugs, the curtain is closed and I briefly wonder how I ended up in this nice private room, is Congressional insurance that good? He looks at me with the faintest of grins and touches his forefinger to his lips.
“Four hours with the cops going over and over every second from the time we left the office until the last shot was fired. Tiring,” he says. “But you’re probably more tired than me. Bet you got more sleep though.”
“How did you know that the wound wasn’t in a bad place?” I blurt it out, I’m not in calculating mode, due to whatever they’ve been pumping in me.
“Oh, that,” he says. “Well, given that there’s about a one and a half inch square in the shoulder that misses the joint and the big artery, and your arm was still on straight, and the bleeding seemed modest, let’s just say it was an educated guess.
“To be honest, I would have said the same no matter where it was. Saying ‘you’re gonna be ok’ isn’t the kind of specific that builds confidence in the guy who’s shot. It turns out I was spot-on. You’ll be going home in a couple of days”
His eyes snap onto mine and he smiles, happily. “Here, I’ve got something that will cheer you up in the meantime.” He reaches into his coat’s breast pocket and pulls out a get-well card with a picture of a hamster on it, and before I can comment, snaps it open. A God-awful cacophony issues from a tiny speaker inside the card. It sounds like what hamster singing would sound like if hamsters could fucking sing. I cringe for an instant then focus on the words block printed in blue pen:
Relax—we’ve got people in the hospital keeping watch. I’ll walk you to my car and drive you home when you’re released.
He snaps the card shut and the noise, mercifully, stops. He winks.
“Get well soon,” he says, and a second later he’s gone.
31. Today, Third Street, Reno, Nevada May 27, 7:47 am
There’s a parking garage up and across the street from the office that has an open-air top deck, usually empty except during the highest volume times because who parks outside when you can park in the shadowed anonymity of perfectly ugly bare concrete and steel beams? But the thing that’s good for me is when you pull a car top floor facing generally south you can see the entrance ramp to my office building—and the people driving in can’t see you unless they have 10x binocular vision. I’ve used this vantage twice before, with 100 percent satisfaction.
I run through the call again in my head as I watch the entrance. Since people have to come up the one-way street from my right I get a decent glimpse of the drivers, and given the demographics I’ve guessed (or imagined) for the Mystery Woman I think maybe Benz-Range-Lexus type…a full-sized SUV slows for the garage entrance, big ugly rig of the kind Hollywood and DC think of as “secure” at least it’s a dark metallic blue and not black, all the windows are dark tinted but the driver’s legally mandated less so, I see a swatch of red shirt or blouse and a bare arm on the wheel—her head isn’t in sight, so she must be quite tall and I’m almost certain that it’s my mystery caller. She turns into the garage and I see a California plate.
I give it 30 more minutes to see if anything that might be her backup arrives, I’m not going to come into the office until around 8:35 so I return a couple of calls from sources and just watch. A dozen more cars turn into the garage but none of the people in them look like anything special, which means nothing. But none set off my internal alarms, either.
I wheel it out and around the block, park on the street on the opposite side of my building, where there’s only a pedestrian entrance into the garage, and walk in and down a flight of stairs to the underground floor. Putting nothing in the open but the bare minimum of one eye I scan the floor. The blue SUV is visible about halfway down the row, backed in. In the artificial light it’s impossible to see if anyone is still in it. I back up the stairs a step, turn and walk up the rest of the way to the fourth floor where my office is. Enough scouting and intel gathering; if she brought a team of assassins they did a helluva job with the setup, and I have my favorite old custom Colt .45 and a spare mag. I’m ready to hear the story.
32. Today, Office, Third Street, Reno, Nevada May 27, 8:33 am
The stairs end at a metal door on the opposite side of the building from my office—I look through the wire-inlay security glass and can see all way down the central hall to the other side. Nothing and no one. I open the door and walk in, stepping silently on the carpet to hear any motion
, breathing, whispers but there’s nothing but the faint hum of the building moving air. I stride the rest of the way thinking of nothing.
The door to my office has the business names painted on the glass in the old style, gilt on the inside: R&M Consulting and Adler & Associates. I’ve seen R or M twice in the 18 months I’ve leased the space; I suspect they may be laundering money for the Russian Mob through the casinos.
I pause for a second, extend my spine and neck to maximize height, put on a dead neutral face and pull it open.
I see the red sleeveless turtleneck, she’s standing to my right, not sitting like most would. It takes a man’s brain less than half a second to size a woman up: she’s at least five eleven, lots of thick dark brown hair bound at the back of her head, face 20-23 years with almost no makeup except eyes shirt soft stretchy breathable stuff that clings perfectly to her flat stomach and softball-sized breasts, I’ll bet the shirt cost 500 bucks. Bare arms show a hint of muscle, instead of being tucked in the top is out, covering the waist of a black skirt that ends at least six inches above the knee. Black hose can’t hide the firm muscles of her legs. She’s wearing black running shoes.
As I say, this takes half a second and my eyes come to rest on her face again, her head is the perfect size for her long tall body, eyes a light speckled brown—the nose just a little too big and Roman, the eyes just a little too wide-set, the ears just a little too large, small fine gold hoops in both lobes and a small green jewel stud through the top of the left one. Jaw just a little too strong.
She’s stunning.
I repair the slight damage to my dead neutral face. She showed a startle reaction for most of that half-second but is impressively recovering, the slight involuntary open mouth is closing, she takes an obvious calming breath. I look her in the eye and wait.
“Mr. Adler.”
It’s not a question.
“Let’s go back to the conference room. It’s private.”
I stare her in the left eye for another fraction and stride on past. It’s not a question, either. She, or whoever she’s with, have tried to put me off balance with the compromised secret phone number and the breathless voicemail. She falls in behind without a word as I walk fast toward the back of the suite. There are two conference rooms, either side at the end of the short hallway. I glance at the small mirror I mounted on the wall at the dead end, just in case she’s going for a weapon or someone else is in the suite. She’s looking at the mirror, too, our eyes touch there at the end of the hall and she gives me a wry little “I know what you’re doing” grin. Her hands are empty.
I repay her with a genuine smile and the briefest of puff of air out of my nose, a substitute for laughter. The conference room door is open and the privacy blinds are up, but I still keep the rest of me behind cover as I stop and stretch around to see the concealed part of the room. Nobody.
“Come on in. I’m going to leave the blinds up for now. The fluorescents in here are annoying.”
I take a seat at the head of the table where I can see a slice of the mirror at the end of the hall. I let her find her own chair.
33. Today, Office, Third Street, Reno, Nevada May 27, 8:36 am
I don’t wait for her to sit, I’m playing this hard and see what comes out, because I’m not sure if this young woman and whoever sent her is trying to play me. She sits to my left in the first chair, closest to the door. I look at her, giving her nothing, and wait.
Most would only be able to take the silence for five seconds or less; to her credit she looks me in the face and also waits, her eyes making tiny motions; she’s cataloging my features as I did hers back at the door. The time stretches out, and as good as she is, inevitably she starts to realize she’s going to have to make the first move.
“Mr. Adler, my name is Lisa Hart. I want to hire you to find my mother.”
I raise my eyebrows a fraction at this, making a connection—Eve Hart is the CEO of Summa Technologies, which position she assumed about 18 months ago after husband David Hart crashed his private jet at the Jackson Hole airport. David believed in flying his own aircraft, and in privately held companies, which is why nobody knows exactly how much he was worth, but Forbes had him at around $8 billion, I recall. I don’t remember anything in the financial publications, or any publications, about Lisa except her name. Never seen a photo—I would have remembered that. Apparently she doesn’t have her own clothing line, doesn’t date rappers and doesn’t get arrested. It comes back to me that about seven years ago there was something in a magazine about how David and Eve made Lisa mow the lawn and trim the hedges to get her allowance. It changes my attitude slightly.
“Interesting. All right Ms. Hart, I do know something about who your mother is, who your family is. You know something about me, as well; more than most, it seems,” I say.
“So let’s start with this: Where did you get my phone number?”
She looks puzzled for an instant, like she doesn’t know why this is important, or why I’m not immediately asking about finding her mother. Maybe she doesn’t.
“I got it from Summa’s chief of security. He, um, well, he and I agreed I’d make a very quiet approach to you about this, instead of saying or doing anything public.”
“That just raises new questions for me. I’ll take them one at a time. Who is this chief of security?”
“His name is Dale Anders.”
“Never heard of him. So let’s move on to why you say you’re here. Why do you need someone to find your mother?”
“We think…” and suddenly her eyes are tearing up, there’s a quaver in her voice.
“We think s-she’s been kidnapped.” She makes a conscious effort at body control, a long slow breath to the bottom of the lungs, opening of the shoulders, she leans back in her chair until they lightly touch it.
“Will you help us find her?” she says softly.
I take my eyes off her face and peek at the slice of mirror through the window. I can see the entry door and the hallway. Nothing.
“I appreciate the situation, Ms. Hart, but I’m still unclear on why you came to me. You, or Mr. Anders, must know that my company does certain limited kinds of contract work, security analysis mainly. We do some open-source intelligence gathering and coordination on a limited basis. We’re specifically not bodyguards, or private investigators. All of this is on our website.”
“Yes,” says with a faint smile, “I looked at your site before I drove over from San Francisco last night.” I’m impressed with how she seems to have it back together; even her eyes are clear of any moisture.
“There’s practically nothing there except a one paragraph description and contact information. Your public phone number is a voicemail box.”
She looks at me, hardening a little, determination causing her spine to lengthen, and leans forward in the chair.
“Dale told me you’re one of the most competent operators in the civilian community. That you and another guy, no one seems to know who, rescued a girl from a kidnapper in Rio.
“Dale didn’t tell me this though—my Dad told me when I was 18. He and the Strauss brothers were friends. From way back.”
34. 3 years ago, Washington DC April 25, 8:12 am
Jack closes the passenger door of the big pickup truck for me and walks around to the driver’s side. The truck is parked next to the dumpster at the back service entrance of the hospital. His plan worked perfectly, so far, we didn’t see a single reporter or camera. After a smile and a “Hello, Cal. Let’s go,” he hasn’t said a word, either.
Aside from sleeping, exercising, eating mediocre hospital food and rereading Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon mostly I’ve been thinking for the last 36 hours. Josh Miller, our chief of staff and a couple of work friends came by yesterday, but there was a strange sense of formality about the visits, except for Josh. Cards, check, flowers, check, great to hear you’re going to be okay, anything I can do just call, you don’t have to try and rush to get back to the office, take your time.
Senator Miller chatted with me about the NSA wiretap reauthorization bill for a few minutes, but not the good stuff, kept looking around like he figured we were being recorded, “Well, got a floor vote at 2:00, great to see your doing well, Cal. See you soon…”
“…this was a hit. I’m not sure if it was on you, me or both of us.”
I have a lot of experience waiting for the right time to speak and I need it all, now, as Jack puts the truck in gear and pulls away slowly, head swiveling to take in all three mirrors and the alley on the right. I’m letting him go first, come what may. I have this feeling that it’s the right thing to do.
As far as I can tell, he saved my life. I’ve gone over the scene a lot of times and if Jack doesn’t shoot back I imagine three dark figures walking toward us, the muzzle flashes then the feeling of bullets hitting my chest, or maybe my face. Then nothing. Just like James.
Instead here we are in the bright spring sun, sitting in Jack’s big truck and cruising, rounding the corner and accelerating into traffic. Jack sits back a fraction, relaxing.
“That went well,” he says, breaking the silence. I’m unreasonably proud that I didn’t say the first word.
He turns his head and grins. His head and face are big, solid-looking things, but the grin reaches his eyes.
“I’m sure you got questions, plenty of them,” he says. “We have an hour or so drive, so now’s a good time to talk. I swept the truck for bugs, trackers, and I didn’t find anything. Which is no guarantee. But in this life, there ain’t none.”