Phantom Instinct (9780698157132)

by Gardiner, Meg

  “Good.”

  “Dude. So who can help us?”

  She heard people in the hallway. Classes were getting out. They needed to go.

  “You ever been to Santa Barbara?” she said.

  26

  Harper slipped out of the classroom into the hallway and closed the door behind her. On her instructions, Oscar followed ten seconds later and headed in the opposite direction. She wanted nobody to see them together.

  She hurried from the building to the parking lot where she’d left the MINI. She tried again to reach Aiden. Again got voice mail. She texted him as she walked.

  Call me. Urgent.

  She debated leaving a more detailed message. But Forgive me. You were right all along didn’t sound compelling in text-speak. Neither did Are you okay? Still attacking innocent bystanders?

  A few minutes later, at the wheel of the car, she rounded a corner in Westwood and saw Oscar a block ahead, walking along the sidewalk. His head was down.

  Oscar had figured out her identity from the cloned swipe card. As a hacker with a series of powerful search software tools and no scruples, he found out she was enrolled at UCLA. How he figured out her class schedule was a different matter. She needed to alert the registrar that their system had been compromised.

  She edged through afternoon traffic, eyeing the mirrors for vehicles following her. Her countersurveillance skills were rudimentary. She turned the corner and zigzagged through village streets, past boho shops and restaurants and a movie theater. When she came around again, from the opposite direction, Oscar was crossing the street, just as she’d told him to.

  She swerved to the curb. He hopped in and she punched it, rounding the corner as the light turned red.

  “Anybody jump the light?” she said. “Anybody follow us? Anybody on foot watching to see where we’re going?”

  Oscar craned to see out the back window. “Clear. I think.”

  She shifted gears and swung into an alley, bouncing along the rough concrete. “You think, or you’re positive?”

  He kept watching. “Positive.” He turned around. “Nobody’s coming.”

  She barreled along the alley. Despite her nerves and anxiety, she felt stoked. The streets looked brightly etched, high-focus, and the traffic ahead seemed to ribbon into a smooth flow. She could see holes opening up, lanes where she could swing in and pass slower cars. It was like slaloming on a glass track. She accelerated.

  She skimmed the corner and came out on Veteran, heading for Wilshire and the 405 freeway.

  The channel scintillated with light that kicked off the surface of the water. The ocean was a deep, cold blue. The Carolina Gail pushed through, ten miles offshore, heading for the harbor. At the stern, Aiden stowed gear. The wake spilled white behind the boat. Alongside, slipping fast just beneath the surface, two dolphins swam in tandem with them.

  He didn’t look at the wheelhouse. Kieran drove the boat toward shore, tired behind his sunglasses, and silent. His brother hadn’t said five words to him all day.

  Aiden was sore. Beyond. His shoulder didn’t so much ache as stab every time he moved. His cheek was abraded. He didn’t want anybody to comment on his black eye.

  His phone buzzed. He waited for it to stop. He’d ignored three calls from her. She’d left three voice mail messages. But this one was a text.

  Call me. Urgent.

  What did Harper want with him? Was she trying to break through his stubborn silence, or did she really have news for him?

  The boat dipped in the afternoon swell and rose again. The bow lifted, spraying white water. He could see Kieran’s silhouette, still and steady at the wheel. Seagulls followed the boat.

  Harper. Maybe she wanted to play around. Maybe she just wanted to play him.

  She always came to him with questions. With inquiries. Did she just want information? If so, she should know by now that he had no more information to give.

  Did she want to use him for his connections to the sheriff’s department, to find out what the department knew?

  If she was involved in the events at Xenon, why would she do that? Did she want to screw it up?

  Did she want to steal information about the evidence the department had collected? Did she have plans that none of them knew about?

  Urgent.

  Ex-thief with a new name and a clean reputation. And the way she had used that when she was released from custody was to become a cryptologic technician—stealing information from foreign governments. It was robbery wrapped in the flag. A hell of a rehabilitation.

  Just happened to be on scene the night the club was attacked and destroyed. Just happened to claim to know the man he oh-so-helpfully told her he’d seen.

  But maybe Erika was right. Zero didn’t exist, except as his hallucination. What did you call that—a nonexistent nemesis?

  Had Harper actually wanted to plant that idea in his head?

  It didn’t make sense to him, except that it was happening. And the woman who’d run from him the second his mind had let the monster out . . .

  He guessed he couldn’t blame her.

  He watched the birds circle behind the boat.

  27

  Forty miles northwest of Los Angeles, driving along the freeway through the flat strawberry fields of Camarillo, the MINI’s fuel light came on. Harper checked the mirror for tails. She waited until the last possible second to veer across two lanes and hit the off-ramp. Oscar braced his hands against the dashboard.

  “Dude.”

  She downshifted sharply and took a right toward a big-box mall. Catty-corner from it, she pulled into a service station and drove the MINI to the center of the pumps, where she was surrounded by pickups and RVs.

  Oscar leaned back. “Paranoid much?”

  She climbed out. “Three minutes.”

  Oscar got out. “Men’s room.”

  He looked frazzled, his hair flailing in the salt-laden sea breeze. His eyes seemed feverish, the circles beneath them darker.

  “Get a sandwich,” Harper said.

  Oscar headed inside the service station’s mini-mart. Harper hoped he didn’t plan to ingest other substances in the men’s room. Maybe she should have searched him. She jammed the nozzle in the tank and began filling up.

  She hadn’t heard from Aiden.

  She scanned the station forecourt and the road as the pump hummed in her hand. She took out her phone. No replies.

  She finished filling up, replaced the nozzle, and headed inside to pay with cash. She didn’t want any record of the transaction to go into a database. Walking across the forecourt, she knew she was on CCTV. But a silent, grainy film from a Southern California video camera wouldn’t go anywhere, most likely. A credit card transaction would be easily accessible to the cops. Or to folks like Oscar.

  Paranoid? Very much.

  Inside the store, the door closed slowly, light and color sliding across the glass. She got in line to pay and called Erika Sorenstam.

  Her stomach clenched. How had she walked—no, leaped—into a love triangle, even a broken one, with Aiden and Sorenstam?

  The phone rang. She approached the register. The clerk, a woman in an orange top, said, “Number 12?”

  The phone was answered. “Yes?”

  Harper was fishing her cash from her front pocket. She put the phone between her shoulder and her ear. Another customer passed by, brushing her shoulder. The phone squirted out and dropped to the tile.

  She tossed a wad of bills on the counter and bent to pick it up. “Detective, sorry,” she called.

  When she straightened, Oscar was standing in the hallway by the restrooms, his eyes as round as quarters.

  Sorenstam said, “Ms. Flynn?”

  Oscar turned and disappeared down the hallway.

  Damn. She ran after him. “Hang on,” she said to Sorenstam.

>   The back door to the mini-mart was closing, a hot slice of sunlight shrinking as it hissed on its hinges.

  If Oscar got away, she had no proof of Zero’s involvement. None. She ran down the hallway, hit the door before it closed, and slammed it open. Oscar was already across the street, running toward the mall, his green fatigue shirt beating behind him like a cape about to shred.

  She ran across the street and into the mall parking lot with the phone in her hand. Sorenstam’s voice swung back and forth, tinny.

  “Hey, Flynn.”

  Oscar’s flapping green shirt vanished through the doors at the mall. Harper put the phone to her ear.

  “I’m here. Got . . .”

  A car passed nearby. She pulled up and veered.

  “What’s this about?” Sorenstam said.

  The driver honked at her, long and annoyed. She kept running.

  “I have evidence that Eddie Azerov was involved in the Xenon attack,” she said.

  “What now?”

  “The swipe card. Somebody cloned it. With my employee ID.”

  “Who? What evidence do you have?”

  Harper bounded toward the mall entrance. People were streaming in and out the doors. She ran inside, into echoes and air-conditioning and Muzak. The place was packed—with families ambling with strollers and hanging banners advertising a chance to win a new Corvette and a popcorn vender at a kiosk in the center of the concourse. The mall had three levels and escalators, and the noise and crowds extended overhead. A wallpaper version of the Chili Peppers’s “Give It Away” was playing. Briefly, she felt the urge to hunt down whoever had recorded it and beat them senseless with a shoe.

  Harper hated malls.

  She hated crowded public places, hated people pushing against her, and amplified music, and the smell of anything burning, even the cheap-ass popcorn being shoveled, greasy and yellow, into paper bags directly ahead of her.

  Oscar was barely visible a hundred yards ahead, heading for the department store at the end of the concourse.

  She barreled after him. Sorenstam was still on the line.

  “I’m chasing a guy I knew back when. Hacker. Turned up this morning.”

  “Who?” Sorenstam said.

  “Oscar Sierra.”

  There was a pause.

  Harper kept running. “He told me he’d been hired to clone my employee ID.” Still no answer. “Detective?”

  Sorenstam said, “Where are you?”

  At her desk in the Lost Hills station, Erika Sorenstam heard ambient noise and Harper Flynn’s hard breathing. Sounded like she was running.

  “Harper, where are you?” she repeated. She got no reply.

  She muted her end of the call so Flynn couldn’t hear her. Staring at her computer screen, she picked up her cell phone and dialed the number for the Kern County Sheriff’s Office.

  “Detective Erika Sorenstam, L.A. Sheriff’s Department. I just got your bulletin. I may have a lead on your missing person.”

  “Oscar Sierra?”

  “What more can you give me?”

  The Kern County deputy ran it down. An anonymous tipster had phoned 911 to report that a friend’s mobile home near China Lake was trashed, the friend’s car on fire. The friend was missing. When deputies arrived, the trailer’s door was pried open. A car outside the trailer was smoldering, nearly burned out. They could find no sign of Oscar Sierra.

  Sorenstam asked if they could send their report to her.

  The Kern County deputy said, “You say you have a report of Sierra’s whereabouts?”

  “I have a woman on the other line who claims Sierra is alive. She says she’s pursuing him.”

  “Name?”

  “Harper Flynn.”

  The Kern deputy said, “Flynn. You sure?”

  “Positive. Why?”

  “That name has come up in our investigation.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Sorenstam’s computer pinged. She opened the files Kern County had sent and saw photos of the scene: a trailer home, run-down even by desert trailer-home standards, door off the hinges. Inside, sofa sliced open, cushions gutted. Chairs overturned. Computer monitors all smashed, cables pouring onto the floor like viscera. What looked like blood on the wall, near a bent door frame.

  The Kern deputy said, “We found evidence at the scene that links to Harper Flynn. Messages in a cell phone we found in the trailer. Indicating that Harper Flynn was waiting for a delivery—of cash, drugs, we don’t know what—from Sierra. And asking him to be at the trailer last night between eleven P.M. and one A.M.”

  Sorenstam straightened. “What time did you get the 9-1-1 call?”

  “Eleven forty-five.”

  “You think Flynn set Sierra up, making sure he was home when somebody came knocking?”

  “That’s our working assumption. If you have Flynn on the line, I suggest—”

  “I’m on it. I’ll report back to you.”

  She hung up and returned to the call with Harper. She clenched her jaw and slowly exhaled to modulate her voice.

  “Harper,” she said. “Are you still there? Is everything okay?”

  “He’s trying to get away,” Flynn said.

  Sorenstam snapped her fingers to get the attention of two other detectives nearby. They looked up. She motioned them to her desk and pointed at the computer screen. Grabbing a pen, she scribbled on a piece of paper: Triangulate this call.

  28

  Phone pressed to her ear, breathing hard, Harper ran through the mall. “Detective?”

  A woman emerged from Victoria’s Secret, pink shopping bags in her hands. Harper dodged but sideswiped her. The bags went flying.

  “Jesus, you crazy—”

  “Sorry.”

  Bras and panties spewed into the air and rained to the glossy tile floor. She kept running, toward the department store. Her heart was thudding, and a heavy rock seemed to sit in her stomach. Oscar had vanished.

  Sorenstam said, “Ms. Flynn. Where are you?”

  “We’re not in L.A. County,” Harper said.

  “Where, then?”

  She ran into the department store. A young woman with a bottle of spray cologne stood at the entrance, wearing a white lab coat.

  “Miss, would you like to try—”

  “In hell.” Harper ran past. “Detective . . . what kind of assistance can you get in Ventura County, and how fast?”

  “What’s going on, Harper?”

  The tone of Sorenstam’s question sounded off, her voice too sharp. Harper’s warning radar sparked to life. Say nothing. If you have to say something, lie. But without help, without getting Oscar to officials who would listen, she had zip.

  “Lemon Tree Mall, Camarillo. I’m chasing Oscar into Macy’s. Can you get a patrol unit here to help me?”

  “Help you do what, exactly?”

  She slowed near the escalator, looking around. Glitz and bling and displays of makeup and jewelry. She glanced up.

  Saw the green shirttails disappear at the top of the escalator.

  “Harper,” Sorenstam said. “Has Oscar Sierra committed a crime?”

  “I don’t judge.” She turned and ran up the escalator, legs heavy. “Detective, please.”

  “Stay there. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Sorenstam hung up. Doubly uneasy, Harper reached the top of the escalator. Women’s Clothing. She jogged around the escalators, looking for him.

  Oscar, Oscar. Where would you go?

  She jogged to the fire door. When she opened it, she heard nothing in the stairwell, no scuffling feet, no labored breathing or sniffling.

  Online, Oscar was brilliant at covering his tracks. He could dip into a protected account, drain it, slash to the bone the information it contained, and slip away again without l
eaving anything but the slightest evidence there’d been an intrusion, much less his digital fingerprints. He knew how to plant bots deep in a system’s code, curled up so tight they were nearly invisible, even when they activated and misbehaved. He was expert at inserting himself into a system and hiding there.

  Not so good at running. Not so skillful in the physical world. Still, she couldn’t find him.

  She spun around. Women were browsing the racks. At a desk, a salesclerk pulled the security tag off a violet dress for a waiting customer. Harper hurried over.

  “Seen a man come past here? Young guy, dark hair, green fatigue shirt?”

  The clerk looked at her peculiarly. “You have a bra hooked on the back of your shirt.”

  Harper grabbed the Victoria’s Secret stowaway and tossed it aside.

  The customer said, “He headed toward the dressing rooms.”

  “Thanks.”

  When she reached the dressing rooms, she paused. Carpeted, they were hushed. Most of the doors were closed.

  She caught her breath and waited till she could proceed without panting. She walked down the row, glancing under each door. The fourth door was closed. She tried the lock. It wouldn’t budge. Nobody complained when she rattled the lock. She checked again: no feet visible inside.

  Checking that nobody was coming, she dropped to all fours and peered under the dressing room door.

  On a stool, feet propped against the wall, a middle-aged woman was sleeping. She wore a store name tag.

  “What the hell?”

  The voice came from behind Harper. She retreated and stood up. A sales assistant stood at the end of the hallway, mouth gaping.

  Harper pointed at the dressing room. “Heard moaning. Thought something bad was happening inside. Or really good.”

  She speed-walked toward the young woman, hoping to get past. Stay calm and don’t admit anything. Rule one of getting out of a store where you’re suspected of wrongdoing.

  The sales assistant braced herself, as though she might throw a low tackle.