by Roland Smith
“How does it work?”
Boone shrugged. “I have no idea. All I know is that X has some kind of array set up around the Electric Factory and he can monitor virtually everything within a three-mile radius.” Boone grinned. “You see, even X has secrets from me. It’s like your magic tricks. Telling people the secret would ruin the illusion.”
“That’s not the same thing,” I said.
“Maybe not,” Boone admitted. “But my point is that I trust X, and he trusts me. We don’t need to know everything the other one knows. I’m going to be as straight with you as I can, but eventually you and Angela are going to learn to trust me like the other members of SOS.”
Boone pointed back to Devorah’s smashed car. “X figured out what Eben is up to by using something called random wiretapping. There is a rather large computer operated by Homeland Security and the National Security Agency. It monitors land and cell phone calls, E-mails, Web sites, blogs, instant messages, and tags certain words and phrases. SOS and Some Old Spooks are two of them, which is another reason we picked the quirky name. When the computer gets a hit it targets the phone. We can pinpoint their location and follow them using their phone signals. We can even get live video of them with satellites. Eben and his crew dump their cell phones every few days and get new ones with new numbers, but we’ll be able to keep an eye on them until that happens… with the exception of Ziv. He either doesn’t have a cell, which is unlikely, or he doesn’t use it much because he hasn’t called any of them, nor have they called him. But with a broken ankle we’re not too worried about him. Eben picked up a new rental car and parked it at the hospital where Ziv is. He just walked into the hospital carrying a suitcase, presumably packed with Ziv’s clothes for his trip back home to Israel.”
“If we can tap their phones can’t they tap ours?”
“Not without the NSA computer or X’s equipment.”
“How many people do you have coming in to help?” I asked.
“Zero,” Boone answered.
“You’re kidding.”
“Well,” Boone said. “We have Marie and Art who are looking after Blaze and Roger and they’ll be back today. And our pilots…”
“Pilots?”
Boone nodded. “The corporate jet that flew your parents to New York is ours and the pilots work for us. Former military jet jockeys. They help us on the ground in a pinch, but they’re not former spooks. That’s the entire SOS team. We have no ‘specialists.’ I just said that to give Eben something else to worry about.”
Well now I was worried. I had images of black-clad-flak-vested S.W.A.T. teams shadowing every move we made. I changed the subject so I didn’t have to think about the fact that we had no protection except for an old woman who knew how to throw a knife.
“I’m surprised you have a jet,” I said. “Mom said you were terrified of flying.”
“It’s not my favorite mode of travel,” Boone admitted. “But sometimes we have to get places fast.”
This wasn’t on Angela’s To-Do list, but it was on mine. I looked down at Croc and asked him how old his almost toothless companion was.
“I don’t know exactly,” Boone said. “Close to a hundred years I’d guess.”
“You mean in dog years,” I said.
“I suppose,” Boone said.
“And how old are you?”
“Older than Croc,” he said.
These weren’t exactly forthcoming answers, but I felt I was making some progress.
Slim
The Match semi-truck had arrived and the roadies were unloading the last of the equipment into the Electric Factory. (There were actually two identical Match semi-trucks. The second one with another crew was on its way to the next venue. They would leapfrog like this across the U.S. for the next year. Another expense for Mom and Roger.)
Watching the roadies work was the skinniest man I had ever seen. He was frowning, but when he saw Boone the frown turned into a hideous yellowed nicotine-stained grin. He ran over and wrapped his skeletal arms around Boone like Boone was his long lost father.
“It’s wonderful to see you again, Boone!”
“You’re a sight fer sore eyes too, Slim,” Boone said, slipping into his country bumpkin persona without a hitch.
The nickname Slim was an understatement. The suit he was wearing hung on him like there wasn’t an ounce of human flesh beneath the fabric. His Adam’s apple was huge, bobbing up and down like he had a golf ball lodged in his throat.
He unhooked himself from Boone and fixed his bulging eyes on me. “And this must be Quest.”
I shook his bony hand.
“Q,” Boone corrected.
But Slim didn’t hear him because he was already talking about Peter Paulsen, aka Speed, aka my real dad. We followed him inside.
“Speed and I go way back,” Slim was saying. “And I mean way, way back when Blaze was singing with his band. With Speed’s guitar licks and Blaze’s voice they’d bring the house down, people went into a frenzy. And you look just like your dad…”
Actually, I looked a lot more like my mom than I did my dad.
“…Speed’s a twisted wild man!”
Meaning unbalanced and unpredictable, I thought.
“…I haven’t heard from Speed in over a year. What’s your old man been up to?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t seen him since he tried to break into the sailboat at three o’clock in the morning after he heard Mom and Roger were getting married and that their single was racing up the Billboard chart. I’m not sure which enraged him more, the upcoming marriage, or their musical success—and I guess it doesn’t matter. He was absolutely crazed that night, attacking the boat with an aluminum baseball bat. Mom called the cops and they hauled him away after jolting him with a stun gun…twice. She went to court that afternoon and got a restraining order against him. He wasn’t to come within five hundred feet of us, and this included Roger and Angela.
Somehow his public relations firm was able to keep the incident out of the press—not that the bad press would have hurt him. He’d made a fortune on bad press. Every time he got busted or went into rehab his album sales skyrocketed, which is why Mom left the music business in the first place. “A sick business,” she had called it. But I guess she had changed her tune. The success Match was having made Speed look like a wannabe garage band, which was not going to sit well with dear old Dad. Restraining order or not, one of these days, he was going to pay us another visit.
“You missed the first song,” Slim said. “But I have it on the DVR.” He glanced at his watch (which was so loose it looked like it was going to slip over his hand and hit the ground). “We have twenty minutes or so before the second number. If the second is as good as the first the ticket scalpers are going to make a fortune. The street price for floor tickets are going for over three hundred bucks now.”
“I need four floor tickets,” I said.
Slim looked at me like I had just asked him to give me the diamond ring he was wearing (loosely) on his left pinkie finger.
“Two under the name of Dr. Rask,” I said. “Two for Dr. Wilson.”
“Who are these guys?” Slim asked.
“Friends of the family,” Boone answered. “Good friends.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Slim said without enthusiasm. “I have the TV set up in my office.”
He led us into a large room that was cluttered floor-to-ceiling with music memorabilia. Prominently displayed on the wall, behind his massive desk, was a large photograph of Mom on stage singing. Kneeling in front of her was Speed, his long hair dripping sweat, his calloused fingertips hitting notes that only he could reach on an electric guitar. But the blurred little photo next to Mom and Dad was more interesting to me. It looked like Slim had downloaded it from the Internet and slapped it into a frame. It was a photo of Roger Tucker at some kind of award ceremony. He was holding a gold statue looking like he wanted to be anywhere but where he was. Except for very small gigs he’d never been a cent
er stage performer, or “front person,” like Mom and Dad. And in the photo he didn’t look like he wanted to be one. Roger wrote the songs and listened to other people perform them. How was he going to do on live television with millions of people watching him?
Slim hit a button on his phone with his diamond-ringed pinky, shouted to whoever was on the other end to get tickets for Dr. Rask and Dr. Wilson, hung up, then looked at Boone.
“What’s with this weird X-Ray dude?” he asked.
“What about him?” Boone said.
“He spent half the night here setting up things for the show, but he wouldn’t let any of my tech guys help him and they’re some of the best in the business. He wouldn’t even let them in the room.”
“X is a loner,” Boone said. “And he’s finished his setup. You’re guys are free to do their thing.”
“They’ve been working on the sound system all morning,” Slim said. “And they said that as far as they can tell your guy didn’t do anything.”
“X is subtle,” Boone said.
“Yeah?” Slim said. “Well, he might be ripping you off.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Boone said. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
I had to force down a smile. X had probably been setting up surveillance equipment to keep an eye on everyone else.
“I got a million things to take care of,” Slim said, pointing at the TV. “Make yourself at home. There’s Evian in the refrigerator.”
I wished the fridge were filled with chocolate shakes rather than French drinking water.
When Slim left I asked Boone what X had been doing in the Electric Factory half the night.
“I didn’t ask,” he said, pulling a cold bottle of water out of the fridge. “All he said was that he needed to set some things up.”
“Trust,” I said.
Boone turned around and looked at me. “Now you’re getting it.” He cracked the lid on the bottle.
“Did you know that Evian is naïve spelled backward?” I asked.
Boone laughed. “I didn’t know that. Let’s see how your parents are doing.”
He picked up the remote and rewound the DVR to their first song.
The last person Eben had visited in a hospital had been his brother Aaron. Walking down the antiseptic hallway toward Ziv’s room carrying Ziv’s suitcase brought back that terrible day.
Eben had been in London when he got the news. He was at the Israeli embassy talking to the Mossad station chief. In his pocket he had a letter of resignation. After nearly twenty years it was time to leave the Institute and find a place where he could forget the things he had seen and done. The terrorists grew stronger and smarter every year. Every time one was killed a hundred more stepped forward to take his place. Eben was tired. He’d lost his passion for the work. The war seemed hopeless and unwinnable.
Of course the station chief had tried to talk him out of leaving, appealing to his sense of duty, his skill, recounting the names of his fallen brethren in the long battle….
Eben listened to the expected argument and pep talk without emotion, undeterred, and was reaching for the letter when the call came.
It had taken him less than four hours to get to the Paris hospital. His beloved little brother died exactly thirty-nine minutes after he arrived at his bedside.
Little brother, Eben thought as he searched for Ziv’s room. There was nothing little about Aaron. He had been four inches taller than Eben and outweighed him by fifty pounds—all muscle. Eben was ten years older. He had begged Aaron not to follow in his footsteps by joining the Mossad, but there had never been a chance of that. Eben had been recruited by the Mossad while he was still in the Israeli army and had resisted for a long time before giving in. Aaron, on the other hand, had groomed himself from a young age to join the Mossad. But wanting something did not necessarily make you good at it. Aaron was impulsive and did not always think things through. Eben was constantly lecturing him about this. And in the end this is what got him killed.
They had received some very shaky intelligence that Anmar was in Paris. Eben did not believe the intelligence was credible, but when it came to the leopard they followed up every lead. He would have never sent Aaron over there alone if he thought it might be true.
Surveillance was not Aaron’s specialty. When he discovered Anmar he should have called the information in. A surveillance team would have been put on her and the two men at the Paris café. Aaron had made a fatal mistake in Paris, but it was Eben who had sent him there, and because of this, the letter of resignation had remained in his pocket undelivered.
Moments before Aaron died he was able to gather enough strength and breath to tell Eben where he had hidden the video recorder’s digital memory stick. Aaron’s last words were, “The Leopard….”
Today
All my doubts and worries about how Roger would do in front of millions of people vanished the instant he started singing. It wasn’t just his voice, it was his stage presence. The Roger Tucker on The Today Show was not the same Roger Tucker in the crummy photo hastily slapped on the wall behind Slim’s aircraft carrier-sized desk. Roger’s transformation was as complete as Boone’s had been the day before.
As soon as he opened his mouth the rowdy crowd was struck dumb as if an archangel from heaven had just landed on the open-air stage. He was singing the chart-topping single, “Rekindled,” from the new album. When Mom joined him on the chorus the crowd got even quieter (if that was possible). I’d heard them sing this song a hundred times in the loft, on the sailboat, in the coach, and on the CD, but it had never sounded like this before. It was magical.
I glanced over at Boone and noticed the old spy had tears in his pale eyes. I did too. I was proud of Roger and Mom. I don’t think I realized until that moment what a big deal Match was. And this was just the beginning. I wanted to call Angela and find out what she thought of the performance, but I couldn’t. She was going to ask me about her To-Do list and I couldn’t talk to her with Boone standing there because most of the things on the list had To-Do with him.
The song ended and the crowd went wild. They were so loud that the host, who had stepped onto the stage to interview them, could not be heard above the roar.
“We just witnessed something extraordinary,” Boone said. “I’m certainly glad I didn’t call them last night. To have interfered with what we just saw would have been a crime against humanity.” He looked at his watch. “For nearly four minutes everyone who heard them was on the same plane. There was no bigotry, no anger, or religious differences. Blaze and Roger were destined to make music together. The acoustics outside Rockefeller Center are notoriously bad, yet they just made it sound like they were performing inside Carnegie Hall.”
I guess there was one consistent thing about Tyrone Boone. He loved music and knew a lot about it.
Roger and Mom had their arms around each other and big smiles on their faces. They knew they had nailed it. The Today Show host finally got the excited crowd quieted down enough to be heard.
“Beautiful!” he said. “Outstanding… After this you head to Philly to kick off your live tour, which I hear is sold out all across the country.”
“First we go to Chicago to appear on Oprah,” Mom said. “We’ve put a cap on ticket prices to keep them affordable. And we’ll add concert dates where we can so everyone gets a chance to see us.”
(Buddy had fought them on the cheap tickets, but Heather Hughes had backed them up and he gave in.)
The host smiled and looked at the camera. “Match will be back with another song in our next hour.”
Slim came back into his office. “Time for the second number and if it’s as good as the first…” He grabbed the remote and punched the fast forward button.
Eben found Ziv propped up in a hospital bed watching a television suspended from the ceiling. He set the suitcase down, but Ziv did not take his dark eyes off the screen. His gray hair was mussed and his heavy black-framed glasses were askew. Surprised at the old man’
s reaction to his arrival, or non-reaction, he sat down on the chair next to the bed and stared up at the screen. Blaze Munoz and Roger Tucker were singing.
When they finished the song the crowd erupted into cheers and the host shouted, “Match! Watch for them in a city near you soon!” The host shook Roger’s hand and gave Blaze a hug, then the show cut to a commercial for their album Rekindled.
“They’re very talented,” Ziv said, without taking his eyes off the screen. “I’m going to download their album and put it on my iPod.”
Eben was surprised that Ziv knew what an iPod was, and for a second, thought that he had stepped into the wrong room. The hospital was probably filled with sick old men resembling Ziv.
Ziv pointed the remote at the television, turned it off, then turned to Eben, “You look terrible,” he said in Hebrew.
“Thanks,” Eben said in the same language with a slight smile. He had not stumbled into the wrong room.
“What happened to your eye?”
Eben’s eye was black and swollen. “I got into a little scuffle last night.”
Ziv chuckled. “With a little girl,” he said. “And I heard she took out Carma as well.”
Eben didn’t comment, but he wondered what had gotten into Ziv. The old man hadn’t strung two sentences together since he had joined the mission. Now he was chattering away as if they were old friends.
“Are you on pain medication for your ankle?” Eben asked. That had to be the explanation.
“No I am not,” Ziv answered. “I have been broken, stabbed, and shot so many times my pain receptors have given up on me.”
Eben wished he could say the same. His head had been throbbing all morning. In addition to his eye, the girl’s kick had also cracked one of his molars.
“I just came by to drop off your bag and see how you’re doing,” Eben said. “Boone and the boy are in the Electric Factory. I think the girl is still in the warehouse. I’m going over to relieve Devorah. She’s been there all night in spite of her injured shoulder. Carma is at the hotel tending to her knee. My point is that it’s not likely I’ll see you before you head back to—”