by Tim Tigner
As I fought to suppress the image of Katya brutally bound, a secondary conclusion struck. A most unwelcome one. Trey had been right about Oz. He was everything the blowhard banker had said—if only opportunistically.
They say it’s better to let one hundred guilty men go free than send one innocent man to prison. While I still embraced that central tenet of the United States justice system, I had to say that it felt pretty crappy becoming a victim of one of those hundred.
While that bitter pill went down, two significant things happened simultaneously. The combination was both unfortunate and disconcerting. Police sirens became audible in the distance, and Harold Herbert Huxley III emerged from the elevator gripping a gun. I couldn’t tell if the Glock held a magazine or chambered round, but there was no mistaking Trey’s target. He was aiming at my heart.
51
Backed Up
Western Nevada
I MET TREY’S EYE. He was a good twenty feet away and standing more like an archer than a shooter, with a side profile and a rigid right arm extended straight from the shoulder. He looked like a movie poster. Given his poor choice of grip, I checked his other hand. It held a rolled up sheaf of papers. The loan notes. Bastard.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Ensuring that you don’t leave.”
“Why would that concern you in the least, much less enough to draw a gun?”
As I spoke, it struck me that I hadn’t heard one word of thanks. There had been no grateful smiles or pats on the back either. I hadn’t been looking for any of those, so their absence hadn’t register—until now.
At first, the lack of gratitude seemed natural enough. People had much more pressing matters on their minds. Things like seeing sunlight and phoning family. But on second thought, I realized that I wasn’t getting a grateful vibe from the growing crowd. The body language exhibited by my fellow captives indicated that they remained wary. Again, the reaction seemed to fit the circumstance, especially since I was toting a submachine gun, but that conclusion also paled under scrutiny.
Trey didn’t answer my question. He issued a command instead. “Drop your weapons.”
It only took a blink to play out the proposed scenario in my mind. I could swallow my pride, put down my guns, and wait for the police to arrive. Given the sound of the sirens, that discomfort would only last about two minutes. Or I could tell Trey to pound sand and ignore him. In either case, the police would immediately disarm everyone.
But then what?
There would be interviews, and apparently accusations. Did Trey genuinely suspect me of being one of the kidnappers? Or was he just seizing an opportunity to salve his wounded ego? More importantly, could he twist the facts to present a compelling case?
My problem, I immediately recognized, was the dark. Nothing I’d done in the dark had been seen or heard. When the lights came on, I was there, armed to the teeth. Webster was dead and Sebastian subdued, but nobody outside my little circle knew to view that scene with the knowledge that they were spies. I had freed everybody, but that was what they expected the captors to do.
The truly damning evidence, I decided, was that the other three members of my group were all gone. As the captors would be.
The police would have Sebastian, so the truth would eventually come out. And they also— I stopped myself. The headsets were missing. There had been a bag full of them in the hidden closet.
“Put it down, Achilles!” Trey repeated.
The investigation would take more than a few hours. It would take days. Days during which Katya would be twisting in the wind. And if things didn’t go my way, if there was any kind of blip, days would drag into weeks. The justice system was more backed up than the plumbing at a sausage plant.
Ignoring Trey, who had obviously never fired a weapon, I picked up Katya’s purse and walked to the garage. Once on the other side of the door, I ran to the cross-country motorbikes.
Trey wouldn’t follow. Not immediately. Not ever. Not knowing that I could be waiting.
He’d defer to the cops.
They were my concern.
Two motorcycle keys were hanging from coat hooks on a rack full of matching gear. I helped myself to a red and white helmet, jacket and gloves before sticking one key in my pocket and palming the other. I gave the first bike a shake, then the second, listening for gas. Near as I could tell, both were topped off. I found the one that responded to the key in my hand.
Shaking my head at the stupid banker, I hopped on, revved the engine, and headed for the hills.
52
First Steps
Western Nevada
PULLING OUT OF THE GARAGE, I saw the police approaching from the east. The squad of sedans and SUVs was hard to miss with its flashing lights and blaring sirens. I turned to put the cabin between us before taking a broad cross-country loop that would put me back on the road they’d come in on. Hopefully I hadn’t been spotted, but it really didn’t matter if I had. They couldn’t follow me on four wheels. My immediate mission was to be impossibly far away before anyone considered pursuing me on two.
Or from above.
As I dodged tree trunks and boulders, my mind kept toggling between thoughts of this is crazy and no other option. It was a predicament with which I had considerable experience.
The further I moved from the scene of the crime, the more my ultimate move crystalized. Once Katya was safe, I would ask forgiveness. Remotely and through lawyers—if required.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t be.
If the lead detective was any good, he or she should quickly come to the correct conclusion.
I ended up on Forest Highway 100 heading downhill into Reno, which was vastly preferable to I-80 given both the traffic volume and the ease of escaping into the woods if required.
It wasn’t required.
Before my mind fully caught up with my body, I found myself on the outskirts of Nevada’s second most famous city. I was sweaty, shaken and speckled with road grime, but still without a tail. Still breathing free air.
Knowing it wouldn’t be wise to enter a populated area with a submachine gun slung around my neck, I stashed it in the trash can of a cabin close to town. Unloaded, of course. If I didn’t retrieve the H&K, it would almost certainly find its way to the city dump. I considered carrying the Glock in the shoulder holster under my shirt, but decided that would add pointless risk, so it too went in the trash. As did Katya’s emptied purse.
I continued moving quickly. A window of opportunity existed before the electronic law enforcement net would eliminate my ability to use plastic. I intended to slip through it.
The first thing I did upon entering the city proper was pull up to an ATM—of which there are a million in Reno—and withdraw the daily maximum on Katya’s card and my own. That put two thousand dollars in my pocket.
Then I hit a Walgreens in search of a Vanilla Visa.
Vanilla Visas require no identification to purchase or register. They are essentially money-laundering mechanisms hiding in plain sight wherever gift cards are sold. This Walgreens had only one left. I loaded it to the maximum and walked out of the store with five hundred dollars worth of anonymous debit card spending power that I could use anywhere in the US—or online.
Taking advantage of being off the bike, I asked a passerby where I might find a major shopping center. He directed me to the Meadowood Mall, which was near where the 589 ring road crossed I-580. An easy fifteen-minute ride.
I needed two new smart phones, two new SIM cards, a backpack and spray paint. The mall quickly yielded them all. I had the backpack salesman staple my receipt to the tag; then I straightened the staple in the men’s room and used it to pop the SIM cards on both my old phone and Katya’s. I’d destroy and dispose of the old components after transferring the data to my new devices.
Returning to my stolen motorcycle was risky business. It was distinctive, and the police officers at the cabin would likely have issued a BOLO for it. With that in mind, I�
��d parked in the shadow of a white Ford Bronco at the outskirts of the lot and left the helmet, jacket and gloves with the bike.
I approached it indirectly, beginning from a distant mall entrance and twice walking as if heading to different cars. When nothing caused concern, I decided to apply the flat black paint right there on the pavement.
I used a plastic shopping bag to mask the helmet visor, then went to work with the can. Within three minutes, the bike, helmet, jacket and gloves were all black. The leather was ruined and the coverage sloppy, but I’d effectively pulled the plug on the police radar.
I went for a walk around the parking lot to toss the can, clear my head and give the paint time to dry. The drying would be near-immediate in the hot Nevada sun, but the clearing might take a while.
It appeared that Oz and Sabrina had betrayed Katya and me in extreme fashion. We weren’t old friends or even new ones in the sense that our relationship would have continued after release, but we had banded together in a foxhole. Shared stress and shared time.
During that time, I had misjudged their characters, and ultimately I had enabled them to do what they’d done. It was going to take considerable effort to work my head around and past that failing.
If they killed Katya, I never would.
In one of our earlier conversations, once we’d adapted to our circumstance and were stuck making small talk in the dark, Oz told me they’d come to San Francisco to see the Bay Area and meet with an advisor. A wealthy Maltese who was flying in for the conference. He’d canceled his trip at the last minute and given them his prepaid dinner reservation at Cinquante Bouches in apology.
I’d believed him then and decided that I still did.
At least the advisor part.
In this new light, I was beginning to question Oz’s Maltese origin. Lots of Americans claimed to be Canadian when traveling abroad for simplicity and security reasons. Canadians didn’t tend to be the targets of animus the way Americans did. It stood to reason that other nationalities might do the same. For a Middle Easterner, claiming to be Maltese would be a savvy move. The citizens of that particular EU nation exhibited a Middle Eastern skin tone and even spoke a similar-sounding language.
Regardless of that potential white lie, I wondered if the canceled advisor meeting he referenced was the key. Had it made Oz desperate enough to resort to murder?
Crazy as that sounded, the startup world had set plenty of precedent. From personal experience, I knew why. The incessant stream of glitz and pressure stoked greed while it warped values.
Some got swept over the edge.
Just the other day, Silicon Valley had been shocked when news broke that the CEO of one red-hot medical startup had systematically fabricated everything. She’d raised billions from Wall Street by peddling a breakthrough diagnostic that she knew didn’t really work—and she’d sold thousands of patients life-threatening test results in the process.
She’d essentially committed mass murder for money. It was a story fit for a major movie, and in fact one was in the works.
I would mull over that angle later. At the moment I had to tackle a couple of much more pressing questions. Why had Oz taken Katya? More importantly, where had he taken her?
I pulled out one of my fresh phones. “Siri, what’s the address for Personal Propulsion Systems?”
While Siri thought, I prayed I was remembering the name right. The robot read Oz’s title off a second after revealing that his given name was Osama, so I’d been a bit distracted. Still, the name had enough of a ring that it stuck. I hoped.
“There’s a Personal Propulsion Systems in Melbourne, Florida. Is that the one you want?”
It was. I remembered overhearing Sabrina mention Melbourne to Katya and thinking Australia.
As I turned from my head-clearing walk back toward the bike, a CVS pharmacy caught my eye. I decided to risk a quick visit. Three minutes later I walked out of the store with an additional thousand dollars of anonymous online spending power. Just in case.
Knowing I’d pressed my luck with that last electronic transaction, I ran for the motorcycle. I threw on my freshly painted outfit and keyed the ignition. As the motor roared to life, I kicked the stand, twisted the throttle and shot off like a swarm of black killer bees.
My first stop would be the cabin with the trash can. My second the airport—but not to catch a flight. Couldn’t risk that. With a three thousand-mile drive ahead of me, I had a car to steal.
53
Working the System
Western Nevada
I HAD NO IDEA where Katya was or whether she was even alive. I didn’t feel the transcendental tear in my soul that I was certain would accompany her passing, but I heard that people rarely did.
Factoring in the gravity of the scene behind me, which included two confirmed kills and another forty-seven attempted murders, I knew the odds that she was alive were slim. When I found her, it would likely be in a ditch. But I would never stop looking.
The question was where? Where to look?
I had painfully few clues. The best I could do was triangulate from who. The couple who had taken Katya claimed to call Melbourne, Florida, home. The man ran a business called Personal Propulsion Systems. The woman was its CFO. At least according to the business cards our captors had read aloud.
I hadn’t asked Osama Abdilla about his business. I’d been focused on saving our lives. The niceties of polite social interaction had been far from my mind.
Now I wished I had asked. Finding Katya amounted to tracking them, and their business was the obvious place to start.
Siri showed Melbourne to be on Florida’s Space Coast, the midsection of Atlantic coastline that housed NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, America’s gateway to space. My goal was getting there ASAP.
I couldn’t fly. Not as a wanted man. Trains would be too slow and also required ID. That left cars. Since renting was out, my options were buy, borrow or steal. I wouldn’t trust anything I could afford, and knew no one nearby from whom I could borrow, so I was left with theft.
I didn’t like the idea of stealing, of dealing an innocent person a potentially crippling blow, so I went to the airport. I left the bike in long-term parking, with the jacket and gloves stuffed into the helmet, then headed for the rental car section of the parking garage.
Reno wasn’t Vegas, but it was still a good-sized airport. One thing those all have in common is an atmosphere of coordinated chaos. With pricing pressures forcing transportation providers to watch every dime, you end up with lots of lines. Lines to obtain boarding passes, lines to check bags, lines to pick up rental cars and lines to return them. In this case, and for the first time, a line was my friend.
I cruised the parking garage searching for the car company with the worst staff-to-volume ratio. On that day at that time, with plenty of planes going out and just as many coming in, I couldn’t go wrong. But there was a standout. A very active operation manned by a single haggard soul.
His circumstances begged for heroic effort, for him to rise to the occasion and overcome with quick, efficient service and a reassuring smile.
He wasn’t having any of that.
No doubt, he’d decided long ago to give his employer exactly what it paid for.
I picked my car and waited for my moment. The former was a full-size sedan, checked in but not blocked in. The latter was a customer frustrated by a contentious bill.
My appropriated vehicle was a white Ford Fusion, about as anonymous as cars come. The only things missing were a full tank of gas and a large cup of coffee. Twenty minutes and twenty miles out of the airport, I hit a gas station with an eye on obtaining both.
Filling up after prepaying forty dollars in cash, I caught sight of something that made me rethink the coffee. A hitchhiker with a Vegas sign.
He looked more like a college kid than a hippie. Decent haircut, clean clothes and a backpack that was stuffed but not stained. The Vegas sign was in his left hand. His right held a Bible.
&n
bsp; I looked at the navigation app on my phone. Las Vegas was 440 miles southeast along what promised to be a very desolate stretch of highway. It would take me six hours. Hours much better spent sleeping.
I didn’t know whether the Bible was a prop, profession or lifeline. But I decided to find out.
54
Silent Witness
Western Nevada
VIC was once again on the way to Incline Village when a call from Sacramento lit up his phone. It was Peter. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Your lucky day, my friend. That case we were talking about, the Napa restaurant.”
“Yes?”
“They just found the victims up near Lake Tahoe—on the Nevada side.”
“Dead or alive?”
“Alive.”
“Where, exactly?”
“An isolated cabin not far from Crystal Bay. I’m sending you the map coordinates.”
“How long ago were they discovered?”
“Minutes.”
“You’re the best, Peter. I owe you big time.”
Vic pulled to the side of the road, punched the coordinates into his navigation app, and hit the gas. He didn’t call his boss, but he did leave word with his office, both to put a stake in the ground and to cover his ass. It would be just like his boss to nudge him aside for a protocol violation.
The scene was swarming when Vic reached the top of the long and winding wooded drive. Ambulances, paramedics, firemen and police. Lots of police. But Vic appeared to be the first federal agent.
The cabin was made of logs, but it resembled President Lincoln’s childhood home about as much as President Washington’s Delaware-crossing boat resembled a modern motor yacht. From the doorway, the interior looked like a five-star hotel, less the reception counter. High ceilings and fine furnishings focused and enhanced magnificent views.