Death and Deception

by Seeley James

  “Where are you taking us?” Jenny asked.

  “To the Drake Hotel,” he said. “I brought gifts.”

  “We’re helping some friends,” Jenny said. “They’re expecting us at the Hampton Inn, Skokie. Could you drop us there?”

  “No.”

  I gave her a slow side-eye. We’d argued about helping the Brotherhood during the flight back. I saw undisciplined amateurs likely to get us killed. She saw freedom fighters. Jenny had fallen under Gu Peng’s spell after already being under Rafael Tum’s. I’d taken the plane ticket because I didn’t know how else we’d get back to the States given that my credit card was maxed out.

  In the end, I committed to nothing after the free ride. Outside of wanting to track down and kill Mr. Baldy, I wasn’t interested in the Brotherhood’s mission. I’d saved the world a few times and didn’t find it all that rewarding. People still cut me off for parking spaces at the grocery store.

  Miguel said, “I read about the archeologists. I hear you’re a wanted man. Again.”

  “Nah. I cleared that up with the authorities.”

  He nodded as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he said, “The gifts are in your suite at the Drake. They’ll help you with Gu Peng or Mikhail Yeschenko, whichever way you’re going.”

  “How do you know about Ms. Gu?” Jenny squeaked with surprise.

  I held up my Sabel Satellite phone. “Welcome to my world. Not only did Ms. Sabel let me keep my old company phone, she gave you one in case I dumped mine. She can track everything we do whenever she wants.”

  Jenny shriveled into her seat, a little creeped out by her old friend’s Big Sister-ish behavior. She looked at Miguel.

  He shrugged and said, “Not directly. Pia owns an international conglomerate. She doesn’t have that kind of time. I monitor Jacob’s penchant for getting into trouble. I told her you could use some help. She wants to help. That reminds me—you left this on the Numina.”

  Miguel held up my Centurion card, then slapped it in my hand. An American Express card issued by invitation only. It’s black, made of titanium, and has no spending limit. At all. It also bills directly to Sabel Security. Using it would put me in her debt. I said, “I will never, ever accept help from Ms. Sabel.”

  “Never say never,” they said in unison.

  “How is she?” Jenny asked.

  “Pia’s patience is wearing thin,” Miguel said. “She’s dealing with the stuff her dad used to do and it pisses her off, makes her edgy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People want her money and time. Invest in this, give to that. Everyone she meets wants something from her.”

  “She’d rather play soccer.” Jenny puffed air in sympathy. “She was on the verge of being the greatest of all time.”

  Jenny looked at me and the Centurion card. I held it in my palm like a black widow. Miguel’s face told me he would consider it a personal insult if I handed it back. I shoved it in my pocket. I didn’t have to use it.

  My phone vibrated with texts from Ms. Gu sent to both Jenny and me. She wondered where we went. I texted back, “Ran into an old friend.”

  The driver dropped us at the Drake. We rode the elevator to a suite with a view of Lake Michigan. Aluminum suitcases stood in a neat line in front of the coffee table. Technically, Ms. Sabel wasn’t asking me to come back. She was sending me a reminder of how good the accommodations would be if I stayed.

  While I started opening the aluminum cases like a kid diving under the Christmas tree, Miguel gave us some intel on our new playmates.

  “Gu Peng is an internationally renowned artist,” he said. “Her sculptures are on display from the Hirschhorn to the Guggenheim Bilboa. Patrons flock to her studio in Vancouver. Back in ’89, she lost her husband in Tiananmen Square. China labeled her an enemy of the state. Same as you.”

  That got Jenny’s attention. She looked to me for an explanation. We’d only been dating a few months. I hadn’t had time to tell her about every government that considered me a subversive. I shrugged.

  “Did you find anything about the Brotherhood of Claritas?” Jenny asked.

  Miguel’s blank look told us he hadn’t monitored everything. We left it alone.

  I checked the contents of one suitcase. Encrypted comm links for ten people. The next case held five H&K MP7 rifles. The next, rounds of ammunition for the rifles plus high capacity magazines for my Glock. Five Sabel Armor units, liquid Kevlar protection from the knee to the throat, waited in one case. They’re flexible and light yet highly effective. The next held a hundred Sabel Darts. Another held a pair of drones with infrared, thermal, and 3D room mapping software. From outside a window, it could give you a fair 3D model of a room’s furniture and inhabitants. Great for dramatic entries with 9 mils blazing. There was a monocular in another case with binoculars and Sabel Visors. I checked out the monocular.

  Miguel took it out of my hand, pointed it at the window, then motioned for me to look through the lens.

  “The range in the view finder,” he said, “indicates how far out the built-in laser will heat the air to form a mirror. Works like a mirage. Let’s you see around corners. It’s like an invisible periscope.”

  I checked it out, adjusting the range to twelve feet. Looking into it gave me the same perspective as sticking my head out the window and looking straight left. There was a bit of heat shimmer, like looking down a road in the desert. The laser was superheating a small patch of air to make it reflective. I rotated a ring on the outside and was looking straight down instead of left. I moved the range out and kept extending my view. It maxed out at a hundred meters. In theory, I could see around the corner of a building at the far end of a football field.

  Mercury pulled the monocular periscope away from my eye. I know what you’re thinking, homie. You’re thinking you could actually rescue Cherry Crocker, get the reward, and then go find Yuri Belenov. But that’s a bad idea. You—

  I said, What reward?

  Mercury said, You don’t know her daddy’s rich? Nob Hill people in San Francisco. They don’t even know she’s missing. Probably ain’t no reward, come to think of it. Let’s keep focused here. Yuri Belenov ripped a couple million from an Asian defense contractor yesterday. That’s on top of the thirty million he took from hedge funds last week. See, whatcha gotta do is shake down Yuri for thirty million, pay off Yeschenko, use the rest to fund Stearne Security and—zoom—you’re on your way to becoming a Caesar. Finally. It’s been a long painful wait, ya feel me?

  I said, That’s not a bad idea.

  Jenny and Miguel stared blankly at me as if waiting for me to say something.

  I said, “Going after Mr. Baldy, I mean.”

  “After we rescue Cherry?” Jenny said with a death ray in her eyes.

  I began to understand yin and yang. Or whatever. We had balanced goals: she wanted to save Cherry; and I wanted to kill Mr. Baldy. But I couldn’t tell her that last part. Jenny never condoned vigilantism.

  “Right.” I gave her my that-part’s-obvious shrug. “Of course.”

  Mercury tossed his hands in the air. Dude, you are SO whipped. And it’s only been four days, not a week like I gave you. It’s embarrassing.

  I said, She’s good for me. We balance each other. We have yin or yang. Or whatever.

  Mercury made a whipping noise, Whtt-tssh.

  “Just so we’re clear.” I gave Jenny the putting-my-foot-down stare. “I’m not getting involved in this Brotherhood thing. I don’t know what Gu Peng wants, but I’m not a benevolent society. I have a contract to find Yuri Belenov.” Jenny scowled at me, so I added, “Um, I mean, right after we rescue Cherry. Of course. OK?”

  Mercury said, Oh yeah. Totally whipped.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dusk descended on us like a blanket. I kept my big binoculars trained on the shores of Lake Michigan in Winnetka, Illinois. According to property records, the billionaire vulture capitalist, Joe Griffith had a property somewhere near here. Jenny piloted our two-p
erson sailboat—courtesy of Ms. Sabel’s Centurion Card—and kept shouting things like, “ready about” and “lee ho” before the big aluminum beam would come at my head like a batter taking a swing at me. I’d felt safer in Kabul. Farm boys from Iowa have no business on a sailboat. Eventually, I got into the rhythm of ducking and switching sides.

  Before we left the dock, she’d explained all about “beating” and “no-go zones” and “close hauled,” which she’d learned during her Naval Academy training. It meant nothing to me. She gave up after a few minutes, put a life jacket and helmet on me, and told me to duck to the other side whenever she yelled. She was right, we did balance each other.

  All that ducking and repositioning made it hard to get a solid look at the shoreline.

  After a while, I gave up and checked the tablet. My drone zipped along a pre-programmed route at three thousand feet, taking 8K footage of every house along the way. I scrolled through the online recording of its path. After ten minutes of scrolling, I found the house.

  “How do you know?” Jenny asked.

  “Because none of the other sprawling mansions have bulwarks and armed guards. I’m not talking Tasers; these are Smith & Wesson guys.”

  “How many?”

  “I’ll get a count when we get back and can study the footage. More than I expected.”

  I zoomed in on a couple faces. They weren’t the Knights from Guatemala. These guys wore uniforms and looked pudgy. That meant this Griffith guy his own security.

  I zoomed in for a look at the roof before it got too dark. Then I dropped the drone to see if I could get a look in the windows. It was tight. The property had a lot of trees. Sabel drones make less noise than most but moving enough air to hover creates noise no matter how good the craft. Noise could give away my inspection, which would destroy my element of surprise. To see between the budding trees, still somewhat bare in early March, I kept it out over the lake and zoomed in.

  Most of the upstairs windows had drawn curtains. In one room that didn’t, a woman crossed the space with a towel around her body and another around her hair. Then she was gone. The opening between curtains was narrow and her appearance fleeting, so I couldn’t tell much about her.

  In another barely visible gap, someone’s feet protruded from a recliner. Judging from the flickering colors lighting up the room, he was watching TV. I had the drone take laser scans of the room interiors for later rendering.

  I changed the angle and altitude to the ground floor. A spacious living room overlooked the patio, beach, and dock. The windows were wide open. The room was empty, which told me nothing other than Griffith’s taste in decorating leaned toward Louis XIV-Extra.

  From the large stone patio outside the living room, designer bushes framed a stone staircase that led down to the beach. Empty lounge chairs lined both sides of a long dock. No boats. No boathouse. Those were kept elsewhere to preserve the view.

  Lights came on around the property. A security patrol swept the patio near the living room’s twenty-foot windows.

  Below them, Danny strolled along the beach holding hands with Fiona. They were far from the water’s edge, violating Illinois’ feet-wet-beach-access rule. If you’re feet aren’t wet, you’re trespassing. They turned and trotted up the stone steps to eye-level with the house. Clearly casing the property. I wanted to scream.

  “Do you have Danny’s cell number?” I asked.

  “Why?” Jenny asked.

  “He’s walking on the beach in front of Joe Griffith’s house,” I said.

  “Oh, good. He’ll get an up-close look at the property.”

  “No, he’ll get whacked on the head and dragged to the local police station. The idiot’s going to blow our cover.”

  Jenny had taken us up the coast from the house and announced we would be turning around. This time with the wind at our backs. And that meant we wouldn’t have to tack. Which was a good thing for surveillance.

  She made the maneuver and I ducked the beam but not enough. It banged off my helmet.

  “That’s why I made you wear that thing,” Jenny said.

  I looked at her with a mixture of humiliation and loathing. Next time we rent a boat, it’ll have a motor and no sails. Hopefully, the Navy taught her how to operate those.

  The time it took to maneuver took my focus off Danny’s escapade. When I searched the drone’s feed for him, he was gone.

  I sent my drone down to ten feet above the water and switched to thermal view. That made it easy to find them. They were on the patio, being held at gunpoint by two guards.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Did I tell them stay at the hotel? Did I tell them not to follow us? Was I not clear?”

  “They’re trying to help. What’s wrong with that?”

  “They got caught. Now Griffith’s security team will be on high alert.”

  “Chill,” she said. “They did what they thought best.”

  “A security outfit like that will identify them. They endanger Cherry Crocker’s life doing that. They have no discipline, no respect for orders.”

  “You didn’t give them orders.” Jenny strained to see the pair as we approached the house. “We have to help them.”

  “Not without giving up on Cherry’s rescue. They chose this option against my order to stay at the hotel.”

  I lifted the drone higher and out over water to keep the noise down. I scanned the beach for any signs indicating the Brothers had intentionally crossed onto private property. Stone walls marched along Griffith’s property line down into the water and out into the lake. Shiny new signs were posted every ten feet along the wall. Willful trespassing. They were screwed.

  “Take us back,” I said. “Peng has to get her people under control. Hopefully, their planned excuse of being lost in love will get them a pass from the cops.”

  “Cops?” Jenny asked.

  “Pulling in the driveway now. That was quick.”

  “You have to help them. What can we do?” she asked.

  I thought it would be a simple mission like the camp in Guatemala. That was when I thought Griffith was just a guy who lived in a house. Then I saw his Colonial Revival mega-mansion designed to survive the apocalypse. Getting Cherry out would be next to impossible. Saving Mr. Wunderkind added a level of complication I couldn’t begin to calculate.

  I said, “Choose between saving Cherry and saving the Brothers.”

  “Cherry,” she said with a sigh.

  We sailed back to the boat rental in the dark without another word.

  CHAPTER 18

  With the tablet connected to my suite’s flat screen, I could see more detail from the drone recording. Like so many modern mansions, the house was not built for a view or any family purpose. It was more like a commercial building, meant to enclose as many square feet of space as possible. The front, back, and sides of the top floor had gabled windows set in a steep sloped shingle roof. But that was for show. The actual roof was flat and held the air conditioning, a series of vents and chimneys, and a solar panel array. The diameter of one vent scared me. It was too big for the gas-fired fireplaces. Too big for oil or coal heat. It wasn’t even a vent. It was a smokestack.

  The house filled the multi-acre lot from side to side but allowed for a sweeping driveway circle in front and the massive patio out back. There was no garage. I found that odd. I kept looking at the place and noticed a walkway and gate from the neighboring lot. On closer inspection, the house due north was small and old for Winnetka’s waterfront. But the eight-car garage that dwarfed it looked much newer. A narrow stone path led from the garage directly to the big house. My guess: security, staff, and chauffeurs were kept in the smaller residence. Wealthy people like their privacy.

  There were several free-standing granite block walls along each entrance to the house. To anyone arriving or exiting the house, they looked like decorative walls meant to impress with their scale and bulk. Walking past them would be like walking past giant hedgerows made of granite. I knew their real purpose
.

  The upstairs windows looked normal from the street. Zooming in showed two-inch thick glass with that unmistakable green tint that comes from laminating several layers. Hard thick glass was sandwiched between thick layers of soft plastic. The hard glass provides rigidity while the plastic allows flexibility. Combined, bullets bounce off like rain drops. A .50 cal machine gun wouldn’t penetrate it. Snipers need not apply.

  My laptop dinged when it completed rendering the room scans. The lasers went in the open windows and bounced off any surfaces, measuring the nanosecond delays to find the distances between objects inside. It was far from perfect. It was limited to what it could see through the narrow slit. It was like a pie slice. But it gave me the approximate depth of the two rooms facing the lake. They were big, but not half the depth of the house. Most houses have a hall in the middle with rooms off either side. This one had to have at least two hallways. Maybe four.

  The place also had a basement and a finished attic, altogether four floors of living space, which made me wonder how many people lived there. Then I recalled Ms. Sabel telling me how she once wandered her extra-huge mansion and found a room she’d never been in being cleaned by an employee she’d never met. The mega-rich live in a surreal world.

  Joe Griffith thought his surreal world was impenetrable.

  And that worked to my advantage.

  I measured out the probable rooms. If he had a home theater in the center upstairs, what was below it on the ground floor, a ballroom? Then what occupied the center in the basement? A safe room? No, a wine bar outfitted in brick that could double as a bomb shelter. Maybe an indoor swimming pool. At that point, I was speculating.

  I started looking at the video from the upstairs rooms. First, the feet on the La-Z-Boy were clad in Ferragamo shoes. As best the 3D scanner could tell, the room was twenty-four feet deep and probably twice that long. It had a king-sized bed several feet from the chair. Even in a monster-mansion, a bedroom that big had to be the master. Rich guys never give their guests that much space for fear they’d never leave.