by Barry Eisler
We pulled the two twin mattresses onto the floor, then spent a few luxurious hours alternating in the tiny bathroom showering and shaving, and cat-napping on the mattresses and the box springs. Next, we examined the room for anything Kei might later use to identify where she’d been held. We policed up some matches and a motel pen; various placards advertising motel services and area attractions; and pulled a plastic insert with an address and phone number off the room phone. We would discard it all later, far from the motel. Finally, we got down to business.
The first thing we needed was commo. I’d examined the mobile phones Horton had given us and had found no tracking devices, but something had enabled him to fix us at the Capital Hilton, and we’d dumped his phones all the way back in Culpeper just to be sure. We needed new ones, and I tasked Dox, who had a forged ID he claimed was ice-cold, with procuring us four prepaids from multiple vendors. Larison and Treven’s job was to fix Mimi Kei. We didn’t know where she lived, so the starting point would be the UCLA Film School website and the school itself. I gave myself the glory job of finding a coin-operated laundry and washing our clothes. We were all wearing our last clean ones.
Before we set out, Larison used the motel’s free Wi-Fi and the iPad to access Mimi Kei’s Facebook page. She was beautiful—a half-black, half-Asian mix, early twenties, dark hair in ringlets down to her shoulders. Full lips and a vivacious smile. Larison had been right about the photos with Horton: the hard, professional countenance was completely absent, replaced by that of a beaming father.
“Interesting that she doesn’t identify him in the captions,” I said. “Just ‘my dad.’”
Larison nodded. “I’m sure he’s explained to her that she needs to be discreet about who her father is. It’s not like he’s the president, but he has some capable enemies. I’m guessing that’s why her page is so privacy protected, too. Unusual for a grad student doing her best to network in the movie world.”
Treven said, “We shouldn’t assume she’s just a clueless civilian. If Hort taught her some things about watching her back, he would have taught her others. It’s not impossible he’s even told her to be extra careful right now.”
I looked at him. “That’s a good point. And now you’ve got me wondering…”
I thought for a minute, then said, “We know Horton’s concerned about Kei’s safety. So what does he have in place to protect her?”
“No one knows about her,” Larison said.
“I don’t know about ‘no one,’” I said, “but yes. Horton’s protecting her, essentially, by making her an unknown. There’s a name for that, isn’t there?”
Treven nodded. “Security through obscurity.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Security through obscurity. Which can be a useful supplement to other forms of security, but would a man like Horton rely on it entirely? Rely on it to protect his daughter?”
“I see what you’re saying,” Dox said. “Maybe he’d rely on it in ordinary times, but now isn’t ordinary. He’s involved in false flag attacks and a planned coup, which is crazy enough, but on top of it all, he showed his hand when he made a run at us in D.C. He’s got to be worried about his daughter now.”
“Good,” I said. “Now, put yourself in his head. He tells himself it’s probably fine, no one has a way of even knowing about Kei, but still. What does he do?”
“He calls her,” Treven said. “Tells her to be careful.”
“Does she listen?”
Treven shook his head. “Film school student, far from his world? No. Not in a meaningful way. And even if she listened, he’d know she wouldn’t have the skills to really act on the warning.”
“Agreed. So now what does he do?”
Larison said, “He sends men. To watch her.”
I nodded. “Does he tell her he sent men?”
Treven said, “No. He doesn’t want to scare her.”
“Right,” I said. “Meaning they’re not functioning as bodyguards protecting a witting client. They need to hang back. So what are they doing right now?”
Larison said, “They’re figuring out what we would be doing. Where we would approach her. How. And they’re watching for that.”
I nodded. “And now we’re watching for them.”
There was nothing more to be said. Maybe we were giving Horton too much credit. Or maybe he deserved the credit but, after D.C., lacked the resources. Either way, we would assume the presence of opposition. And approach Kei accordingly.
Treven and Larison headed out. They took one room key; I kept the other. My job would likely take the least time, so I’d get back to the room first and could let the others in after.
I found a coin-operated laundry place on Lincoln less than a quarter mile from the motel. A woman in a headscarf was folding her clothes next to one of the driers. The other patrons kept glancing at her and away. They barely noticed me.
I threw the clothes in a couple of machines and, while I waited for them to cycle through, used the place’s Wi-Fi to check the secure site. There was a message from Kanezaki:
The D.C. area is on lock-down. All the spokespeople are giving the “Everything’s under control, don’t panic folks” routine, but behind the scenes, it’s a five-alarm freak-out. And they’re looking for you. The assumption is that you’re somewhere in the city, so that’s good. I hope you’re very far away.
The president is scheduled to give a big speech and announcement any day now. I don’t know what it’s going to be. I do know that a couple more attacks, and the country’s going to go completely insane. It feels like we’re at a tipping point.
We need a way to get to Horton. Call me.
I wrote him back: We’re working on something. Should know in a day or so. Will call then.
When the laundry was done, I carried it back to the motel and waited in the room. Dox was the first to arrive. Grinning as usual, he dropped two large paper grocery bags on one of the beds, reached inside one of them, and extracted four mobile phones and four wire-line earpieces.
“Mission accomplished,” he said. “Bought ’em from three different vendors with two different sets of ID, so they should be untraceable for as long as we’re likely to need ’em. No word from Larison and Treven?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. What else have you got in the bags?”
He reached inside and started removing the contents. “Exotic fruit salads, greens salads, various tasty wraps, some protein smoothies, the usual. Plus a six-pack of Red Bulls because, I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit peaked from our recent sojourn.”
I picked up one of the fruit salads. “Very thoughtful of you.”
“Well, with you on laundry detail, figured it was the least I could do. Did you bleach my whites and get my colors extra bright?”
I chuckled. “I think you’re going to have to settle for, it all at least smells clean.”
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “A little off topic. So, we snatch Mimi Kei. And tell old Horton we’re fixing to do harm to his daughter’s personage if he doesn’t play ball with the diamonds and otherwise. But what if we’re wrong about him? What if he doesn’t back down? How far are we willing to go? I mean, do we mail him a finger? An ear? What do we do?”
I nodded. “I know. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“I don’t mean to sound like I’m going soft on you, but I have some acquaintance with what it’s like to be held hostage, ‘hostage’ in this case meaning waterboarding, shocks to my legendary genitals, and threats to remove said legendary genitals with sharp instruments if a certain someone didn’t comply with my captors’ demands. Any of that ring a bell with you?”
He was talking about Hilger, who’d held Dox hoping to get to me. It hadn’t gone as Hilger had planned, but Dox suffered anyway.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
“I’m just telling you, between the two of us, that I’m not comfortable hurting some girl who has nothing to do with any of this. I mean, my d
addy taught me that gentlemen can kill each other, preferably with firearms, and that’s fine, but that we respect womenfolk. I’m sure that sounds fucked up to most of your more modern, egalitarian, self-actualized killers, but it’s how I was raised.”
“I hear you.”
“And I know you have a thing about no women and children, too.”
“Yes.”
“So…we’re just bluffing then.”
I nodded. “But I think when Horton understands Larison is involved in this, he won’t take the chance.”
“Well, that right there is the problem. See, I don’t think Larison is bluffing. I think that man—and no disrespect, ’cause he is obviously one capable sumbitch—I think he’s a little bit…Well, how do I put this. You know, some dogs, big dogs, they could kill you, but they don’t, because they’re good dogs. You can trust them. Other dogs, they’re looking at you, and you don’t know what the hell they’re thinking. Or which way it could go. That’s how Larison is to me. Any given moment, I don’t know what he’s going to do. I’m not sure even he knows.”
It interested me that each of them understood the other in canine terms. But I kept the thought to myself.
“Horton said something about Larison keeping too much hidden,” I said. “Being in turmoil.”
“Well, shit, everybody has something to keep hidden.”
“You have something to keep hidden?”
He grinned. “Just my midget porn fetish. Don’t tell anyone.”
“You and I are on the same page,” I said. “We’ll let Larison think what he wants, because the more scared Horton is, the better for us. But we’re not going to let him hurt anyone. If it comes to that, we’ll stop him.”
He nodded. “Thank you for that. I figured as much. Just wanted to make sure.”
We pulled our own clothes out of the pile of clean stuff and ate some of the provisions Dox had brought in. Then he napped while I watched the door, the Supergrade in hand. I watched the angle of the sun on the window curtains get increasingly sharp, and still no sign of Larison or Treven. Dox woke up and it was my turn to sleep while he stood sentry.
At a little past six, I was awakened instantly from a light sleep by three sharp knocks. I took a position on one side of the door, the Supergrade up and ready, while Dox opened it. It was Larison.
“Treven’s on the way,” he said. “Good news. I’ll wait until he’s here and then brief you. Is that grub? I’m starving.”
He grabbed a wrap and started devouring it. Treven showed fifteen minutes later. While he tucked in, too, Larison briefed us.
“We went online,” Larison said. “And found only four summer classes at the school. And only one on screenwriting, which is her thing. So we staked out the building where the class is held.”
“You see anyone?” I asked. “Anyone who looked like they were looking for us?”
“Hell yes,” Treven said. “We saw them—two of them—hanging out exactly where we would have been hanging out if we were trying to get to us.”
Larison said, “So we made sure not to be where we would have been if we’d known no one was looking for us.”
“The weird thing is, I understood all that,” Dox said.
“We picked up a couple of radios at a Radio Shack,” Larison said. “Not much range, but good enough for our purposes. We hung way back. Decided to take a chance, and it paid off.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What kind of chance?”
“We don’t know how she gets to school,” Treven said. “Could be a car, could be a bus, could be a bicycle for all we know. We made Hort’s guys monitoring her building, so we couldn’t do the same. Which meant we had to take a guess. Car, bus, or bicycle. We guessed bus. We guessed right. Followed her onto an L.A. Metro bus.”
I still didn’t like it. “How’d you manage it without getting seen?”
“I staked out Hilgard and Charing Cross,” Larison said. “The stop right by the school.”
“And I waited at the next stop,” Treven said. “Hilgard and Sunset.”
“Totally lucky that it turns out she rides the bus,” Larison said. “But hey, sometimes you catch a break. When I saw her come out and wait at the Charing Cross stop, I radioed Treven. He got on at the next stop, right after her.”
“What about Horton’s guys?” I asked.
“One of them got on with her at Charing Cross,” Larison said. “The other stayed behind.”
I nodded. “So she’s definitely unwitting.”
“Right,” Larison said. “If she were witting, they’d both be staying close. Plus, she was wearing earbuds, listening to music, shit no bodyguard in the world would ever tolerate. As it was, the guy who got on with her was doing everything he could to keep away from her, and otherwise be unobtrusive. As we expected, they’re not trying to directly protect her, they’re trying to anticipate, and eliminate, the threat.”
I agreed with his assessment. “What else did you learn?”
Treven cracked a Red Bull. “I saw her get off at Sunset and Gordon. Hort’s guy got off with her. I waited and jumped out at the next one—Sunset and Bronson, otherwise Hort’s guy would have made me. But as the bus pulled away, I saw Kei walking north on a street called La Baig Avenue. If you look at La Baig—and we did, at an Internet place—you’ll see it leads to only two streets, Harold Way and Selma Avenue. The whole neighborhood looks super quiet, nothing but single family houses. No pedestrian traffic. No way to follow her, even if I’d gotten off at her stop, even if Hort’s guy hadn’t been there. So no way to get her exact address. But—”
“We don’t need her exact address,” I said. “Assuming she was going home on the bus, and not somewhere else, now we know her stop.”
Treven took a long pull of Red Bull. “Not just her stop, but her walking route to the stop. When you look at the map, you’ll see she must live on one of those three streets—La Baig, Harold, or Selma. Otherwise, she would have gotten out at an earlier stop—Sunset and Gower.”
Larison grinned. “But it’s even better. We did get her address.”
Treven grinned, too, looking like a kid who’d just pulled a brilliant prank. Larison gestured to him and said, “You tell them.”
“So I radioed Larison,” Treven said, still smiling, “and as I’m waiting for him, frustrated at getting so close and not being able to really close the deal, a mail truck went by. And I thought, shit, they’re just delivering the mail now. Which gave me an idea.”
“Pizza flyers,” Larison said, apparently unable to resist interrupting. “There was a guy out on Sunset distributing flyers for some pizza place. I gave him twenty bucks for his stack of flyers, then Treven caught up to the mailman.”
“Told him I was trying to reach people in the neighborhood,” Treven said. “Gave him two hundred bucks for letting me put the flyers into his mail bundles. He told me he could do it himself, but I told him hey, how do I know you won’t just throw them out? Let me put them in the bundles, it’ll only take a minute.”
“The pizza guy, and the mailman, they saw you?” I asked. “Could they remember you? Describe you?”
Treven shook his head. “We were wearing shades. Anyway, what if they could? The mailman would have to cop to taking bribes, and the pizza guy would have to admit he sold his flyers rather than giving them out. Even if someone made the connection between the flyers and Kei’s temporary disappearance, those two wouldn’t want to get involved.”
“Besides,” Larison said, “no one but Hort is even going to know Kei’s gone missing. The police won’t be involved. Even if they do get involved, we didn’t give them anything to go on. And anyway, right now, potential police, even FBI, is pretty much the least of our problems.”
He was right. “Well? What’s her address?”
“A nice little bungalow on Selma Avenue,” Treven said. “Again, we might not even need it because I think we’ll have a better shot at her by the bus stop than we would by the house. But it was good to confirm
she was heading home anyway, and not to, say, a friend’s house or whatever. We’ll show it all to you on Google Maps. Looks like she’s renting a room from the family that lives there. But whatever. The main thing is, we know what time the first class is tomorrow morning, we know her bus stop, and she’s got an approximate six-minute walk along a nice quiet street to get there. Wearing her earbuds, if we’re really lucky.”
We were quiet for a moment. Dox said, “Well, I have successfully procured us food and phones, and Mister Rain has kindly laundered our gamey garments. But I believe the day’s glory goes to you.”
“Couldn’t have done it without clean clothes and food to look forward to,” Treven said, and we all laughed.
“It looks promising,” I said. “But there a few things to consider. And a few we need.”
They looked at me.
“Potential opposition aside,” I said, “the first class at UCLA begins at what, ten o’clock? So how early will we need to be in position?”
“No later than eight,” Treven said. “And probably earlier.”
“Right,” I said. “And if we’re thinking that, then Horton’s guys are thinking the same. That’s what they’ll be looking for.”
“Sunup,” Larison said. “Earlier, in fact.”
“Agreed,” I said. “The key will be to get there earlier than we would reasonably need to for Kei—because Horton’s guys expect us to be hunting Kei, when in fact, we’ll be hunting them.”
“Works out well anyway,” Dox said. “I mean, we really don’t know very much about her patterns. Does she like to go in early for a workout? Or to meet a friend for breakfast on campus, or to study in the library? We’ve been watching her for barely twenty-four hours, it could be anything. So we can’t afford to time things so precisely regardless. The earlier we get in position, the better, assuming we can find good concealment.”