“So you remember a quote from Margaret Thatcher, but you can’t remember anything about who you are?”
“I’m afraid that’s how this seems to be working,” replied Hall.
Megan nodded toward her purse, which Hall had placed beside her on an empty seat. “I have a Visa with a five thousand dollar credit limit. So money isn’t a problem.”
Hall paused in thought. “Won’t they be able to trace it?” he asked. There was no need for him to specify who he meant by they.
“Not nearly as easily as the movies would have you think,” said Megan.
Hall frowned. He had learned that knocking someone out with the butt of a gun, without actually killing them, wasn’t as easy as movies would have you think, either. Wow, he thought sarcastically, if you couldn’t trust Hollywood . . .
“For them to access my Visa information in real time,” continued Megan, “they’d have to have some major credentials. Or very impressive capabilities.”
“You’re probably right. But I think we’d better assume they’ll be able to, just to be on the safe side.”
A few seconds later a sly smile spread over his face. “But maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe we can turn this in our favor.”
“How?”
“What if I buy us two tickets to eight or nine different destinations. Even if they’re able to pull the Visa records and see all eight or nine, so what?”
“We’re going to be busy little travelers, aren’t we?” said Megan in amusement. “Good thinking. If that doesn’t confuse our followers, nothing will.” She paused. “Wait, I have another idea,” she added excitedly, shifting positions abruptly as she did so, which turned out to be a mistake. A look of nausea swept over her face, and she grabbed the arm of the chair for support and closed her eyes.
“Are you okay?”
Megan took a deep breath. “Yeah. Got dizzy. Still a little lightheaded, I guess.”
She looked up at his concerned face, more deliberately this time. “As I was about to say, let’s choose a destination. You go and buy tickets to the other eight or nine places that we didn’t choose using my credit card. Then, just before we leave, I buy tickets to our real destination in cash. That way, if they can access my purchase records, we’re not giving them a bunch of false leads and one real one. We’re giving them all false leads.”
“Very clever. You seem to have a knack for this.”
Megan reached inside her purse, opened her wallet, and handed Hall her Visa card.
“So where do you want to go?” asked Hall. He reeled off the destinations he had already mentioned once again. “Any of these sound good?”
“Is there really a Paris, California?”
“I guess so. But it’s not spelled like the one you’re thinking of. It’s fairly near here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”
“I only moved here a few months ago from LA,” she explained. “I have to say, though, I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Although something tells me the one in California might be just a hair less romantic than the one in France. Maybe it’s the spelling.”
Hall grinned. “I guess the Paris in France is for lovers. The Perris in California . . . Well, let’s just hope it’s good for fugitives.”
Megan flashed an incandescent smile. “I’m game,” she said. But just as Hall was about to leave to begin purchasing tickets, she stopped him. “I just had a thought, Nick. We can go to LA, after all. We don’t have cash for a hotel, and we wouldn’t want to use my credit card, but I have friends we can stay with.”
“No!” snapped Hall, and then instantly regretted taking this tone. “No,” he repeated more pleasantly. “We can’t bring anyone else into this. I would have never guessed they’d find out I was in your office—and they did. We can’t risk your friends’ lives.”
“You’re right,” she said softly. “I wasn’t thinking. Let’s stick with Perris. How much time do you think we have?”
“That bus leaves in thirty-eight minutes, exactly,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t know which destination I would choose. Are you telling me that you memorized the departure times for all possible choices?”
“Not at all. I’m just taking advantage of the personal web access in my head. I signed up for a free notebook app while I was reading the schedules. One with plenty of storage in the cloud. I figured it would be helpful to think information to this app. So I can see the cities and times for each trip in my, um . . . mind’s eye, so to speak. I’ve added a small digital clock at the bottom of any page I call up, so I can get the precise time whenever I want.”
Megan looked impressed. “So when you said thirty-eight minutes, you didn’t mean thirty-seven or thirty-nine, did you?”
“No. And the web has endless calculators, so I can be precise with respect to much more difficult calculations than this.”
Hall left once again, this time returning with tickets to nine destinations, not including Perris. They were waiting patiently for five minutes prior to departure, when they planned to purchase two tickets with cash, when a train and bus pulled into the station at the same time, both packed with passengers who were now disembarking. Added to the ever-growing crowd in the terminal waiting to leave, the increase in chatter in Hall’s mind was maddening. He suspected if he ever found himself in a dense concentration of people, like inside a football stadium during a big game, his sanity would be a quick casualty.
The chairs on either side of them began to fill in with passengers. Hall put his head in his hands and tried not to scream. Now the noise was coming through his ears as well as his mind.
A kid wanted some candy. A man was fantasizing about sexual acts he would perform with his girlfriend when they reached their destination. A couple was arguing about who worked the hardest. A man was tallying up how much he stood to lose financially if he divorced a wife he now despised. It never ended. A woman who was about to visit her mother for three days was freaking out, trying to remember if she had shut the garage door when she left, and deciding to call a neighbor, just to be sure.
Hall almost bolted upright as he read this thought. He extended his mind, this time entering the minds of anyone who was departing Bakersfield. The buzzing was still intolerable, but at least he now had a purpose. Five minutes later he rose and faced Megan Emerson.
“Change of plans,” he said, reaching for her hand to help her up.
13
Vasily Chirkhoff arrived just before midnight at the Bakersfield Municipal Airport in a small chartered jet, and Cody Radich met him and escorted him to his rental car. While the Russian had been in transit, Radich, with the help and resources of John Delamater, had made significant progress in picking up Hall’s trail once again.
WeOfficeU had long contracted with the Adams Janitorial Services company to send a two-person crew to their Bakersfield location each night after hours, with responsibility for cleaning the bathrooms and conference rooms, vacuuming out each of the two hundred and ten offices, and emptying the individual trash containers in each.
Only four hours earlier, a woman named Larissa Hochhalter, who was one half of this crew, had been covering the same ground at WeOfficeU she had covered for years. During this period of time she had thought she had seen it all. She had interrupted office residents having sex, had come across managers passed out drunk, and offices that had been literally torn to pieces by irate wives or lovers. But when she had entered Megan Emerson’s office to vacuum, minding her own business, she encountered something that even she couldn’t take in stride.
After she had stopped screaming, she had called 9-1-1 to report two very dead bodies resting comfortably on the floor, with patterns of blood leakage and spatter that were like demented modern art.
Delamater had learned of this only minutes after the Bakersfield police had been notified, and Vasily continued to be impressed with the wide variety of sources he had cultivated. Although, in this case, Delamater had probably recruited a si
ngle player with access to the national police computer system, and had set up the system to alert him to anything of possible interest in the vicinity of Bakersfield. In this instance, though, they didn’t need outside intel. Vasily and Delamater already knew their hired guns were dead at this location.
The men had called Vasily from WeOfficeU to give them Megan Emerson’s identity, but had never called back. And repeated attempts to contact them had failed. Vasily tracked their cell phones, and learned the phones hadn’t moved a millimeter in hours. Either they had both left their phones behind in the office, which was so unlikely as to defy imagination, or they were recently deceased.
The fact that Nick Hall had prevailed against two experienced killers this time was becoming alarming. At first Vasily had tried to convince himself the man just had a six-leaf clover in his pocket. But after this, he agreed fully with Delamater that they were missing something big.
They had been caught off guard by this development and didn’t have a crew ready to retrieve the bodies and scrub the premises, which would have been a challenge in a locked office building in any case. And who knew how many bullet holes, and how much blood, would have to be concealed and cleaned.
Had they removed the bodies they might have been able to delay an investigation, but not forestall it entirely. And this move, as well as others they had contemplated, like torching the entire building, added more risk than benefit. No matter. They always retained the capability of remotely frying the phones of anyone in their employ, which they had done to the two phones long before they were discovered. The mercs wouldn’t be carrying any identification, and they couldn’t be traced in any way to Vasily Chirkhoff or John Delamater.
Now they just had to be sure to stay at least one step ahead of whoever would be investigating the murders. Given that they had started many steps ahead, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Radich and Vasily had traced Megan Emerson’s phone to the Kern River Motor Lodge, and from there, with a little investigative work by Radich, they learned of the ambulance that had made a visit there, and of the woman and man who had left in it. A pair who matched the descriptions of Nick Hall and Megan Emerson. The girl was wounded, although the severity of her injury had not been clear. Apparently, Hall had played the Boy Scout and had stuck around to help her.
What an idiot, thought Vasily in frustration. What a soft, sniveling idiot.
How could they be having trouble getting this guy?
Vasily had sent a handpicked team of men to hunt him, each of whom could bring down a Grizzly with their bare hands. And yet none of them had managed to club the helpless baby seal that Nick Hall represented. It was insanity.
If Hall had any survival instincts at all, he had ditched the girl the moment she was patched up. But for some reason, only because nothing with this hunt had gone as planned from the very beginning, Vasily fully expected Hall to stick around to ensure her safety.
Radich had found Megan’s phone at the motel, under a bush, and had destroyed it so those investigating the murders would never be led to the Kern River Motor Lodge, or the ambulance that represented their single best lead. Staying a step ahead of the legitimate investigation was even easier when you could sabotage those behind you.
It was nearing one in the morning when Vasily and Radich pulled quietly into the Blue Ridge Luxury Apartments complex and killed the engine.
Vasily prepared himself mentally to put on an American accent and called a number he had already entered into his phone. At one in the morning, it could be hard to get someone to answer the door, and they wanted to minimize the attention they drew to themselves.
The land line he called was picked up after three rings, and a word was mumbled into it that Vasily could only assume was hello.
“Hector Garcia?” said Vasily.
“Yeah,” came a mumbled reply, only slightly more intelligible than Garcia’s first syllable had been.
“Sorry to trouble you in the middle of the night like this,” said Vasily, “But my partner and I are with the FBI, and it’s urgent that we speak with you.”
“What’s this about?” said Garcia, less groggy this time as adrenaline began to hit his bloodstream.
“We’re right outside your door, Mr. Garcia. If you could let us in, we’ll be happy to answer your questions.”
“Who are you?” said Garcia, a question that showed an unexpected level of suspicion, even for this hour. Vasily had already told him they were with the FBI, but he apparently wasn’t taking this assertion at face value. Good for him.
“My name is Jim Anderson,” replied Vasily, using the name that appeared on his flawlessly forged FBI credentials. “My partner is named Troy Shaw,” he added.
“I’m not opening the door until I see your IDs and badges,” said Garcia.
“If you have a peephole, I’ll hold them up to it.”
“No. Take a photo of them and text it to my TV. I’ll give you the address.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Vasily, losing his patience. “What’s wrong with the peephole?”
“If you aren’t really FBI, you could shoot me through the door.”
Vasily turned toward Radich and rolled his eyes. “If we weren’t really FBI and wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already. You think a killer’s going to call you and make sure you’re awake?”
There was a long pause. “That’s probably true also. Okay. Hold up your ID to my peephole. I’ll be down in a minute or two.”
Five minutes later they were inside Garcia’s apartment. Before they began any exchange, Vasily asked if they could conference in their colleague, and soon Delamater’s face appeared on Garcia’s TV. Garcia grew more impatient and agitated by the second.
“Okay, let me tell you why we’re here,” began Vasily once Delamater had joined them. “Six or seven hours ago, you and your partner, Tony Kosakowski, were called to the Kern River Motor Lodge. We want to know everything about the woman you patched up there, and the man who was with her.”
“Why?”
“There was a double murder less than an hour before you arrived at the motel. And these two were both involved.” Vasily sighed. “I know it’s unusual to visit you in the dead of night like this. But every minute we don’t apprehend these two, the trail grows colder.”
Garcia shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell. The girl had had an accident with a pair of scissors—stabbed herself in the leg. It was actually pretty minor. They really shouldn’t have called us. We stayed for a few minutes to make sure she was going to be okay, and then we left. Altogether, we couldn’t have exchanged more than a sentence or two, all of it medically related.”
Vasily considered. A scissor wound didn’t sound likely. He would have guessed a gunshot wound. But it was possible that after she or Hall had shot his men, one of them had managed to stab her with scissors before bleeding out.
“Where did you take them?” asked Radich.
“We didn’t. The girl was fine. So we just left.” He paused. “If you check the hospital log, it will show that we never brought them in.”
“Why are you lying to us?” said Vasily ominously.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We have a witness who saw them enter the back of the ambulance.”
Garcia looked flustered, but recovered quickly. “They did,” he said. “We had them in the back for a few minutes while we were working on the girl. But then they returned to their room.”
Vasily glanced at the television to see if Delamater wanted to jump in, but it was clear he was willing to let Vasily continue at this point. “Mr. Garcia, we don’t have to rely on eyewitnesses. I can play the satellite footage of what went on outside of the motel if you would like. Showing them leaving in your ambulance.”
This last was a bluff, but Vasily was sure it wouldn’t be called. He had no idea why Garcia was being so uncooperative. He was sure the man now believed they were with the FBI. They could have easily beaten the information o
ut of him, but given their cover they had assumed he’d give it to them willingly. And the current body count was already sure to be attracting enough unwanted attention.
Vasily leaned in toward the paramedic menacingly. “Frankly, Mr. Garcia, I’m having trouble understanding why you’re lying to us about this. These people are dangerous criminals. On the loose. Do you know what obstruction of justice is?”
The big Russian allowed this to sink in for a few seconds. “If the next words out of your mouth aren’t the truth, you’re going to become intimately familiar with this term. And jail time.”
Garcia took a deep breath. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you the truth. The truth is the girl had a gunshot wound, not a scissors wound. When we got there, the guy with her forced us to work on her. At gunpoint.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” commented Delamater dryly from the TV. “Why wouldn’t you want to tell us about this?”
“The guy told us everyone was after him. Trying to kill him. And he warned us that if we went to the authorities we’d probably end up dead ourselves. He said the people after him would kill anyone whose paths he had crossed.”
“And you believed him?” said Vasily.
“I didn’t know what was going on. But there was something persuasive about him. He threatened us repeatedly, but there was something about him,” he said, holding out his hands helplessly, as if unable to find the right words. “Like, I don’t know . . . like he was a decent guy who was at the end of his rope. Like the type who wouldn’t willingly hurt anyone.”
“You do realize,” said Delamater, “that this guy is a paranoid schizophrenic. Thinking the entire world is trying to kill you. Nothing about that suggested paranoia to you?”
“There was more to him than that,” said Garcia. He hesitated. “He had some . . . unusual . . . characteristics. Hard to believe characteristics. Which made what he said more believable.”
“Like what?” said Vasily.
Delamater jumped in immediately to cut off any possible answer. “Don’t bother with this now, Mr. Garcia,” he instructed. “We can circle back to it later. Right now, we need to know where you took them.”
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