by Dean Koontz
In this case, because the airborne search team would have Hannafin’s smartphone and landline numbers, they could monitor those, wait for Jane’s incoming call, and employ track-to-source technology to pinpoint her burner phone’s location, whether she was sitting on a park bench or cruising in a car.
That didn’t matter. She knew now that Lawrence Hannafin wasn’t an honest journalist. She wouldn’t be calling him at noon.
Because of Hannafin, however, she’d learned that the attorney, Larkin, was an associate of David James Michael’s, maybe even one of the billionaire’s inner circle. He was a fresh lead. A source.
If she couldn’t find a reporter to break the story, she would have to go after D. J. Michael. A man of his wealth would be hard to corner. He would have the best security. If the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, surrounded himself with sixteen heavily armed bodyguards at all times, as had been reliably reported, then D. J. Michael would most likely have more.
Their fortunes were approximately equal, but Michael had more to hide. And he knew that she had already gotten to Bertold Shenneck and an attorney, William Overton, who were close associates of his. They were dead. And though virtually every law-enforcement agency in the country was looking for her, she so far remained free to stalk her quarry.
The second thing of interest that Randall Larkin said during his phone conversation with Hannafin required interpretation, but she felt sure that she had arrived at the meaning of it. When the journalist pressed to be promoted to editor of his newspaper, when he declared that he deserved gratitude for giving them this shot at Jane, Larkin had responded obliquely.
Only a year, and you forget what’s already been done for you?
Lawrence Hannafin’s wife of seventeen years, Sakura, had died a year earlier.
Although Jane didn’t know all the details, the woman had suffered a medical crisis of some kind.
Hannafin hadn’t been anywhere near his wife when it happened. He had been out of town on a story assignment.
With friends like Randall Larkin and D. J. Michael, he wouldn’t have needed to risk getting blood on his hands.
19
* * *
For a couple minutes, the infinity transmitters sent nothing but silence from Hannafin’s house to Jane’s disposable cellphone.
When he began making noise again, she heard the clatter of dishes and the clink of flatware, the rattle of what might have been a frying pan dropped onto a gas burner, and she assumed that he had gone to the kitchen for breakfast. The coffeemaker, which stood near the wall phone, began to percolate, the distinctive burbling sound confirming his location.
In the street, traffic had declined. Children had gone off to school, parents off to work.
Los Angeles and environs seldom saw a sky as malignant as this one, the enfolded clouds condensing gray into veins of black. In Virginia, where she had lived with Nick and where Travis had been born, storms usually came with dramatic skies, but here even foul weather was laid-back, lightning and thunder rare.
Maybe five minutes after the journalist entered the kitchen and twenty minutes after Larkin terminated their previous conversation, the attorney called back. Hannafin’s smartphone ringtone was a few bars of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.”
He took the call: “Yeah.”
“They’re in the air,” said Randall Larkin. “She calls early, they’ll be sweeping frequencies and ready for her.”
“What about when you locate her?”
“We figure she’ll stay in the general area until she talks to you. In another twenty minutes, we’ll have six ground units parked within a twenty-mile radius of you, waiting.”
“What about the weather?”
“Are you on speakerphone again? Makes me nervous.”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad. I need my hands. I’m making breakfast here, plus I’ve got a piece on the counter just in case.”
“Piece? A piece of what?”
“A piece, a rod—a gun. She figures to surprise me again, I’ll put one between her tits.”
“She’ll call like she said. She won’t risk coming back until she’s convinced you’ll really help her.”
“You don’t know what the hell this one will do. She’s no more predictable than an earthquake. Anyway, what about the weather?”
“What about it?” Larkin asked.
“If the storm breaks, the flyboys won’t be grounded?”
“No, no. Only if maybe the wind cranks up way too hard, but it’s not supposed to. When she calls, keep her on the line as long as you can, pretend you’re on the fence but tilting her way, get her to do some coaxing.”
“She gets the sense I’m vamping, she’ll know why, and she’ll hang up. Hot and dumb usually go together, but not in her case.”
“You’re a reporter, so you’re a bullshit artist. Just use your gift. What’s that noise?”
“I’m whisking eggs for an omelet.”
“Not all roses, is it—being a widower?”
“It’s better than the alternative. This bitch could put a man off women for life.”
“Get over your hissy fit before she calls. No matter how slick you think you are, she’ll hear the edge in your voice.”
“Don’t worry about me. When those ground units find her, they better slam her fast and good.”
“Just keep her on the line,” Larkin said. “And don’t burn the toast.”
The attorney terminated the call, and Hannafin said, “Eat me, ambulance chaser,” when he thought there was no one to hear.
20
* * *
Carrying the tote, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, auburn hair curling from under her baseball cap, Jane walked south, away from the vacant house and from the Hannafin place, into the shrouded and expectant morning.
The storm continued to withhold its rain, but now it breathed away the stillness. The sharp edges of quivering palm fronds shaved whispers from one another; they would rattle noisily if the breeze became a wind.
When she passed a drain grate, she dropped the disposable phone between its bars and hesitated only long enough to hear the cell plop in the fragrant dead-rat darkness.
She walked a block and a half and turned east at the corner. Her black Ford Escape was parked under the weeping, lacy branchlets of pepper trees.
The car had been stolen in the U.S.; significantly souped-up in Nogales, Mexico; given a new engine number; repainted; and consigned to an unlicensed auto-sales operation across the border in Nogales, Arizona. The car dealer operated out of a series of unmarked barns on a former horse ranch, and he didn’t accept checks or credit cards. Or make loans. She paid with some serious cash she’d taken away from some bad people in New Mexico.
The vehicle’s GPS, with its identifying transponder, had been stripped out, so the Escape couldn’t be tracked by satellite.
For now she was done with the San Gabriel Valley, although not with Lawrence Hannafin. He wouldn’t get a significant part of her attention, not when she had much bigger fish to gut. But he was one of Them, a member of the confederacy of sociopaths that D. J. Michael and the late Bertold Shenneck, weavers of the web, had woven, and she would make him pay sooner rather than later.
She drove west into the San Fernando Valley, which showed more signs of wear and weariness than did the San Gabriel. The decline was not evident in every town, and often the deterioration had a threadbare, genteel character. But in places it was stark, a smear of rot and desperation by which to diagnose the corruption that was hollowing out the country.
In an area that had thus far escaped blight, she stopped at a deli and ordered takeout for lunch, relying not just on a new hairstyle and prop glasses to avoid being recognized, but also on an attitude that no one would associate with a fugitive. She didn’t keep her head down, didn’t pull the bill of her cap to her eyebrows, didn’t avoid eye contact, but instead smiled brightly at everyone, chatted up the guy taking her order, and stooped to have an amu
sing conversation with a cute little girl who was waiting with her mother to pick up their order. Jane wasn’t a Texan, but Nick had been born and raised there, and she’d been around his parents often enough to be able to imitate their drawl, which was nothing like her voice as people had heard it on the bits of FBI video being run on the news.
As she sat in her car to eat, lightning blistered the sky three times in quick succession, trees and buildings and passing traffic seeming to shudder along the strobed street, followed by a crack like the mantle of the earth split by the violent upthrow of some catastrophic force. Rain fell with tropical intensity. The world blurred beyond the Ford’s windows, and Jane welcomed the privacy.
21
* * *
The gnomes stood long-suffering in the rain. The single-story ranch-style house in Reseda was well maintained. On the gate of the white picket fence, a green plaque declared, in fanciful white letters, GRANDPA AND GRANDMA’S PLACE. Six gnomes inhabited the yard, a group of three quite contemplative and another three that were frozen in the postures of a dance. There was a birdbath as well and a four-foot-high windmill. A sign above the front door read BLESS THIS HOUSE.
All that was bullshit, the owner’s version of camouflage. If these people ever had grandchildren, they had probably eaten them.
Property records identified the owners as John and Judy White, and though they lived here, they called themselves Pete and Lois Jones. Only God knew their real names, and possibly not even Him.
They were Syrian refugees who had probably never been Syrians, who’d been accepted into the U.S. with forged papers that they later destroyed. They were supposedly living in Boston with sponsoring relatives, but the relatives didn’t exist, though Boston was real.
Stepping onto the sheltered stoop, Jane closed her collapsible umbrella, leaned it against a flowerpot, and rang the bell.
Lois opened the door, a fifty-something black-haired zaftig woman in a too-small pink sweat suit. Green fingernail polish. Six rings with diamonds the size of grapes. Dark eyes and a stare that could fillet a fish.
She spoke around the cigarette that dangled from her lower lip. In what sounded more like an Eastern European accent than one shaped in the Middle East, the woman said, “Is early for you.”
“I have a lot to do later. I was hoping my order was ready.”
“You’re wet.”
“It’s raining. I’m sorry.”
“Is all right, darling. You come in.”
The house reeked of cigarette smoke.
“Sit, sit,” Lois said. “I talk to Pete.”
On the blue sofa lay a fat white cat. It glared at Jane, its viperous eyes as yellow as egg yolks.
Jane perched on the edge of a La-Z-Boy lounger.
Nothing about the interior of the house supported the Norman Rockwell exterior, but nothing about it was unusual, either, until you went to the big room at the back, where Pete chain-smoked while he worked with antique presses and laser printers and laminating machines and all manner of other equipment to produce impeccable forged documents of numerous kinds.
She had been referred to these people by the black-market car dealer in Nogales, Enrique de Soto, who’d sold her the Ford Escape. She had known Enrique because she had crossed his path while still working as a Bureau agent, during the search for a serial killer named Marcus Paul Headsman, who felt obliged to live up to his name by collecting heads. Headsman stole one of Enrique’s stolen cars—a moment of street justice in a society inclined to guarantee real justice less often every year—and, after his arrest, he hoped to gain a favor or two by giving up the hot-wheels dealer.
There are more criminals than good guys to chase them down. It is necessary for cops of all brands to practice triage much the way that emergency-room physicians do in a crisis with too many wounded to treat. As happened more often than the public would believe, those authorities to whom Enrique had been referred were harried and short-handed and chasing bigger game than him. His file was put in a drawer labeled something like WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER, where it would turn yellow and brittle until a decade or two hence it would be thrown out to make room for new cases no one had the time to investigate.
Jane had visited Lois and Pete two days previously. As part of their service, they provided five high-quality wigs in a variety of colors and hairstyles, an array of nonprescription contact lenses that changed her eye color, new counterfeit license plates, and photographs to be used on a new batch of driver’s licenses.
A second white cat appeared and hissed at Jane, back arched, eyes the shade of green suitable for the stew in a witch’s cauldron.
She got up from the La-Z-Boy, and the cat leaped onto it, and Jane moved to a well-scratched leather armchair.
Although she already had a collection of forged licenses, they were no longer of any value to her. They were in different names and were issued from different states, but each bore a photo of her as she had looked before her face had been broadcast nationwide.
When Lois returned, she carried a small manila envelope and a plastic shopping bag that contained the five wigs, which would need to be worn in coordination with the phony licenses.
Jane took the laminated IDs from the envelope and sorted through them. Six. Issued in different names. One featured a photo of her as she currently looked, and five involved wigs.
Pete understood that photos taken by the junk cameras at every Department of Motor Vehicles seldom closely resembled their subjects and were never glamour shots. He re-created the harsh lighting of the DMV portraits, and she worked up expressions that weren’t too absurd but that made her look a bit geeky. Presented with these pictures, no one would think of the rogue FBI agent; and the vagueness of the shots allowed her to prettify or uglify herself, as the situation might require, and still resemble the woman on the license.
Best of all, Pete worked with a black-hat hacker of such refined criminal skill that he could back-door any DMV computer system in the country and insert a crafted file that would appear legitimate to any policeman who might stop her for speeding or for any other reason.
She had paid in advance, and as she returned the six licenses to the envelope, she said, “These were worth every penny, but your wig prices are outrageous.”
Lois blew a smoke ring. “Good business to sell support merchandise at juicy markup. We discount nobody nothing, darling.”
Jane would have taken pleasure in arresting them if she’d had the authority to do so—and if she hadn’t needed their help to stay free and alive.
She said, “It’s a long way from Syria, huh?”
“Syria is toilet. Have nice day.”
22
* * *
By 6:30 Thursday evening, five hours after the attack, the snow began to taper off and the streetlamps came on. In the glare of emergency work lights, the smoke rising from the half-collapsed and burned-out Veblen Hotel, once black and dense, issued now white and thin, suggestive of ethereal presences, of spirits ascending from this place of fiery death. Snowflakes, grown larger here at storm’s end, spiraled slowly down with the solemn grace of flower petals cast by mourners into an open grave.
Sheriff Luther Tillman stood on the corner of Fitzgerald and Main, across the street from the devastation, hands in the pockets of his quilted Thermoloft-insulated uniform jacket. From time to time, the rhythm and velocity of his dragon-smoke exhalations changed visibly, evidence of his mood phasing from anger to sorrow and back again to anger. He was thankful that the buildings flanking the hotel had sustained less damage than might have been expected, but that was meager solace in light of the scale of destruction. The death toll currently stood at forty-two, including the governor and the district’s congressman, but that number would surely climb as searchers raked the ruins.
He stood there in frustration, having been nudged aside first by the state police, then more aggressively by FBI agents from their Minneapolis field office, and most recently by Bureau specialists who flew in from Quantico, prim
arily from Behavioral Analysis Unit 1, which dealt with terrorism, arson, and bombings. He didn’t resent them. They possessed the special knowledge and the resources to investigate this event more thoroughly than any county sheriff’s department could have done. And that a congressman was among the victims meant it had become a federal crime. However, this was his jurisdiction, too, and too many of the dead were his friends and neighbors. He was heartsick, and his grief was sharpened by his feeling of uselessness.
In spite of the cold and the foul fumes that came and went on the vagaries of the evening air, townspeople had gathered in the area to watch and to stand a vigil for the dead. Luther’s deputies gently advised them to move back when they got too close, and gave patient counsel to those who worried about the fate of loved ones. But there was little else that anyone from his department could do in the face of the overwhelming presence of federal authorities.
He was a figure of interest to the crowd, because he stood six-feet-three, remained still ramrod straight at fifty-one, had been a local high-school football star back in the day, and was as black as anyone in Minnesota, where less than five percent of the population was African American. He took pride in having been elected county sheriff four times. But it wasn’t the kind of pride that would lead to a fall; it was shaded with humility and a sense of responsibility to the people who entrusted him with the job.