Thank heaven the wait was finally over. He’d have paid ten times the asking price to end it.
Awaken the Sleeper, fee fifty million, instructions to follow within one week, he thought now, the message that had finally showed up in his on-line mailbox ticking in his mind like a NASDAQ readout.
A week, one more week—seven days until he could get things rolling.
Williams knew he’d be counting down the hours.
ELEVEN
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 8, 2001
“I CAN’T DO WHAT YOU’RE ASKING. IT ISN’T AN OPTION.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Palardy,” Enrique Quiros said. “Because, as a matter of fact, it’s your only option.”
“Don’t use my name. It isn’t safe—”
Quiros shook his head and indicated the portable bug detector on the seat between them.
“There’s where you’re mistaken again,” he said. “Because this is my Safe Car. Honestly, that’s what I call it, just as some people might give their cars endearing little names like Bessie, Marie, or whatever.”
Palardy let out a sigh. The Safe Car in which they sat was a Fiat Coupé that Quiros had driven into the parking lot outside the cruise ship terminal on Harbor Drive. It was six P.M., the upper rim of the sun sinking into San Diego Bay, the area outside the terminal crosshatched with dusky shadows. Palardy had left his own Dodge Caravan several aisles away when he’d reluctantly arrived in answer to Quiros’s summons.
“Those pocket units aren’t reliable,” he said. “Their bandwidth sensitivity’s limited. And certain kinds of listening devices operate in modes that won’t scan. It’s my job to know this sort of thing, my goddamned job, or did you forget—”
“Settle down. I haven’t forgotten anything,” Quiros interrupted. “This vehicle is garaged on my property, and the grounds are under constant video surveillance. There are alarms. Canine patrols. Unless I happen to be inside it, as now, it’s never parked anywhere else.”
They looked at each other, Palardy seeing his own features reflected in Quiros’s dark green Brooks Brothers sunglasses. He’d always found it offensive when a man wore tinted lenses during a talk with somebody who wasn’t wearing them, in this instance himself, the concealment of the eyes a blatant means of gaining distance and position. State troopers, paranoiacs, egotistical movie stars—so many personality types, and yet that desire to set themselves apart was an attribute they all shared.
“Open areas are hard to secure; even the military has problems with them, I don’t care how many watchdogs or alarms you’ve got.” Palardy sighed heavily again. “Listen, I’m not trying to argue. My point’s just that it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”
Plainly tired of the subject, Quiros reached into the inner pocket of his sport jacket and produced a zippered leather case.
“Let’s make this short so we can both move on,” he said, holding the case out to Palardy. “Everything you’ll need is in here.”
“I told you I can’t do this. It’s too dangerous. It’s too much for me.”
Quiros looked at him in silence for several moments. Then he nodded to himself, turned toward the front of the car, and leaned back against his headrest.
“Okay,” he said, staring straight ahead with the case still in his hand. “Okay, here’s how it is. I’m not interested in what you have to tell me. When you wanted money to pay off your gambling debts in Cuiabá, you were glad to sell off confidential information about the layout and security of an installation that it was your job to protect. When you were rotated back to the States and found yourself in hock again, loan sharks riding all over you, you became more than eager to slink into your employer’s office and collect material for a genetic blueprint that you knew would be—”
“Please, I don’t feel comfortable talking about—”
Quiros raised his hand. The gesture was slow and without anger, but something about it instantly quieted Palardy.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, either. Because you’ve done worse than break bonds with every professional trust that’s been placed in you. You’ve been an accessory to acts of murder and sabotage. And if that information were to surface, it could put you away in prison for the rest of your life.”
There was a brief silence. Palardy swallowed spitlessly. It made a clicking sound in his throat.
“A decision’s been made for you,” Quiros said. “It’s too late for objections or disavowals. And my advice is to drop them right now. Or I promise you’ll regret it.”
Palardy swallowed again. Click.
“I didn’t want to get involved in anything like this,” he said hoarsely.
Quiros stared out at the terminal in the deepening pool of shadows near the harbor’s edge.
“It could be we have that in common,” he said, his voice quiet. And paused a beat. “You’ll do what you have to do.”
He extended the case across the seat without turning from the windshield.
This time, Palardy took it.
In a rental van on the opposite side of the parking aisle, Lathrop began to pack his remote laser voice monitoring system into its black hardshell camera case. From the rear window panel of the van, the invisible beam of the device’s near-infrared semiconductor laser diode had been aimed at a ninety-degree angle through the back windshield at the Fiat’s rearview mirror.
It is a basic rule of optics that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. What this means in practical application is that a beam of coherent light—that is, a beam in which all light waves are in phase, the defining and essential quality of a laser transmission—will bounce back to its source at the same angle at which it strikes a reflecting surface, unless that surface creates some sort of modulation, or interference, to throw the waves out of phase, causing some to bounce back at different angles than others. Vibrating infinitesimally from the conversation inside the Fiat—perhaps a thousandth of an inch or less with each utterance—the window glass had caused corresponding fluctuations in the optical beam reflecting off it, which were then converted into electronic pulses by the eavesdropping unit’s receiver, filtered from background noise, enhanced, and digitally recorded.
Lathrop had gotten every word spoken inside the car. And though he wasn’t yet certain what they all meant, one thing was eminently clear to him.
After days of following Enrique Quiros in a succession of rentals and disguises, days of following his instincts, his patience finally had been rewarded with a deeper and richer load of pay dirt than he could have imagined.
TWELVE
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 11, 2001
THE INSTANT PALARDY ENTERED ROGER GORDIAN’S office, a strange feeling came over him. Everything seemed the same yet different, like in one of those dreams that was so close to real life you awoke confused about whether its events had actually occurred. The setting of the dream might be the place you grew up, the home you lived in, the park across the street, it didn’t matter. You knew you were somewhere familiar, but things weren’t quite the way they should be. Both inside and outside yourself.
It was like that for him this morning. The same yet different.
He tried to shake that floaty, disoriented sensation as he strode across the carpet toward Gordian’s desk.
“You’ll do what you have to do, ” Quiros had insisted. And Palardy thought now that he could.
He could do it.
Because this was only a day after his regular countersurveillance sweep, Palardy was not carrying the Big Sniffer or any of its accompanying equipment, which made him a bit more conspicuous than he otherwise might be. But once Enrique Quiros had forced this thing upon him, he’d known he would want to get it done right away. That zippered case he took from Quiros, it had felt so heavy in his hand, so heavy in his pocket. Like some superdense piece of lead being drawn toward the earth’s magnetic core, pulling him down with it. Every minute he held onto it, that downward pull grew harder to resist. Palardy
needed to get the thing over with before he sank into the ground.
He’d arrived at work a little before seven o’clock, the usual time for countersurveillance personnel—their sweeps were always conducted before the corporate workday began so as not to interfere with business—and then had gone straight up to Gordian’s office suite, prepared with an excuse, should anybody be around. And it had turned out someone was. Though the boss almost never came in before seven-thirty, a quarter of eight, Palardy knew his administrative assistant, Norma, would often arrive much earlier to get a jump on her filing, scheduling, whatever other duties admins performed. And sure enough, she’d been at her desk in the outer office today when Palardy stepped out of the elevator.
Damn good thing he’d had that story ready.
“Morning, Norma,” he said, amazed that he could stand there and smile while feeling like he was about to plunge through a hole in the ground. “How goes?”
She’d looked up at him from her computer screen with mild surprise.
“Hi, Don,” she said. “Don’t tell me it was your twin brother I saw here yesterday with that fancy bag of tricks?”
“Nope, sorry to report there’s just one of me to go around,” he said.
“I’m crushed on behalf of all womankind,” she said with a mock frown. “So what brings you back to us?”
“Actually, I think I must’ve misplaced one of the fancy little gizmos that go in my bag when I made the rounds.” Palardy’s words seemed to reach his ears from a far corner of the room. “Maintenance tells me it isn’t in the lost and found, so I’m retracing my steps.”
Part of his mind had expected Norma to be suspicious. To sit there with her eyes boring into him, discerning something was amiss. Though the rest of him had known that was irrational. Known the reason he’d given for his encore appearance would sound perfectly ordinary and believable.
And, of course, it did. She had waved him toward the door to the inner office.
“Be my guest,” she said.
Now Palardy stood over Gordian’s big mahogany desk, his back to the door, and hurriedly put on the white cotton gloves he’d brought in his pocket. Just to the right of the blotter was a can of rolled wafers. A month or so before, Palardy had been running behind schedule with his sweep, and the boss had come in and waited at the desk as it was completed. Swirling a wafer in the cup of coffee he’d poured for himself, Gordian had complained in a kind of lighthearted way about having to swear off flavored coffee, and the two-per-day wafer stick allowance his wife had insisted upon instead.
Palardy had clearly remembered that instance in Quiros’s car the other night. And was remembering it again as he reached for the can of wafers, pulled off its plastic lid, and set it down on the desktop. The can was more than three-quarters empty. Maybe ten wafers left inside. He got the flat leather case out of his coverall pocket, unzipped it, produced the disposable syringe, and laid it beside the can lid. He’d already drawn the solution from the ampule and tossed it. This should take him sixty seconds, ninety max.
Get it over with, he thought. Get it done.
With his right hand, he fished one of the wafers out of the can. With his left he inserted the syringe’s needle deep into the opening at one end of the rolled wafer and depressed the plunger about a millimeter. Colorless, odorless, tasteless, the contents of the ampule would in-discernibly permeate the wafer’s cream-filled center.
Removing the needle, Palardy put the wafer back in the can, and injected a second, a third, and a fourth wafer.
That would be enough. Would have to be. There was more of the suspension in the hypo, but he couldn’t bear staying in the office any longer. His stomach felt like a brick of ice.
Palardy closed the can, returned the syringe to the case, and slipped the case back into his pocket.
He was taking off his gloves when he heard the doorknob turning behind him.
His heart tripped.
“Any luck?”
Norma’s voice. From the doorway.
It was the worst moment of his life to that point. Worse, even, than his last terrible meeting with Quiros. Balanced equally between guilt and terror, he went numb everywhere, the blood seeming to flush from his veins.
Somehow Palardy managed to stand perfectly still, managed to keep his body between his hands and the doorway until he’d finished peeling the gloves from his fingers and stuffed them into a patch pocket on his thigh.
He turned toward Norma. She was leaning into the room through the open door.
“No,” he said. Realizing nervously that he hadn’t looked himself over, hadn’t made sure the gloves weren’t sticking out of his pocket. Wondering if she could see them. “Not a bit.”
The receptionist studied his face a second, shrugged.
“Sorry, my dear,” she said. “But in the meantime, don’t look so worried, I’m sure your thingamajig will turn up.”
She didn’t notice, Palardy thought. Merciful God, she didn’t notice.
He nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I can manage without it, meanwhile.”
Then the phone on her desk chirruped.
“Better answer that, hope you don’t mind letting yourself out,” she said and ducked her head back into the outer office area. “I’ll remind the cleanup crews to stay on the lookout.”
Palardy took a gulp of air, smoothed his coveralls over his body with sweaty palms. The gloves weren’t showing. She hadn’t seen anything. He was going to be okay.
A moment later, he followed Norma into the anteroom, exchanging a smile and a wave as he went past her desk, got into the elevator, and rode it downstairs.
Moving on legs he could hardly feel through a world that would never again seem to be the one he’d always known.
“Hi, Ash,” Gordian said into his office phone. “Your wheels down at LAX yet?”
“On the ground, safe and sound,” she said. “I’m calling on my cellular from the arrivals terminal, so you can stop biting your nails.”
Gordian smiled. Nearly four decades of flying planes ranging from Air Force bombers to his private Learjet had made him a well nigh unbearable backseat pilot, and he became even more fretful whenever his wife or kids took to the air with someone else’s hand at the controls.
Grown kids, he reminded himself.
“Trip okay?”
“Couldn’t have been smoother,” Ashley said. “How are things at the office?”
“Not without pockets of turbulence,” he said. “I just retreated to my desk after running into one, matter of fact. You know Mark Debarre? The Marketing veep?”
“Sure. Nice guy.”
“Usually,” Gordian said. “You should’ve seen him sprout fangs at today’s sales conference. Almost sank them into one of the guys from Promotions when they got into a flap about whether to call those information download kiosks we’ve developed Infopods or Data-pods. ”
She laughed.
Even from hundreds of miles away, the sound warmed him. It was like being able to hear a sunbeam.
“Which was Mark’s preference?”
“The first.”
“And yours?”
“I’m back and forth.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “I’ll think about it over the weekend, give you my opinion, if you’d like.”
“I’d like.”
“Then consider me on it,” she said. “Meanwhile, Laurie, Anne, and yours truly are about to hold a marketing conference of our own at the luggage claim. We wish to become the most enthusiastically vulnerable, suggestible consumers we can be.”
Gordian smiled, reached into his tall can of rolled wafers, fished one out of the can, and let it steep in the cup of coffee on his desk. Ashley’s pre-Thanksgiving shopping weekend with her sisters in L.A. was a lollapalooza that had grown in size, scope, and budget each year, seemingly by conscious design.
“Did I hear you say luggage claim?” he said. “Since you’re only going to be away from home for two days, my im
pression was you’d be okay with carry on.”
As always, Ashley knew a setup line when it was pitched to her.
“The suitcases, my love, are for bringing home the bounty,” she said.
“Guess I’d better wait till you’re done with the charge cards before filing for Chapter Eight, then.”
“That would be considerate.” She laughed again.
A sunbeam touching the wings of a butterfly, Gordian thought. On the brightest and bluest day of summer.
“I really should get cracking,” Ashley said after a moment. “Meet you at Julia’s house Sunday afternoon, okay?”
“Why don’t I pick you up at the airport,” he said. “We could drive there together afterward.”
“Really, Gord, you don’t need to bother. It’s easier for me to arrange for a car.”
“Well ...”
“Besides, some father-daughter alone time might be good for the two of you. And I know you’d like to finish that doggie corral you’re building for Jack and Jill.”
“That I would ...”
“Then knock yourself out,” she said. “I certainly will.”
Gordian pulled his wafer out of his coffee, examined it idly, dunked it back into the cup.
“You win,” he said. “Have fun. And give my regards to your partners-in-buying.”
“Will do on both counts,” she said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too, Ash.”
Gordian hung up the phone, reached for his cup, sipped, and decided the wafer stick had imparted all the hazelnut flavor it was going to. The result wasn’t quite as satisfying as the high-sat-fat coffee blend he’d relinquished at Ashley’s insistence, but having the wafer to snack on with his hot beverage offered something of a consolation.
He took a bite of the end that had been soaking in the coffee, like a man playing Russian roulette without even an inkling that he holds a cocked and loaded revolver in his hand.
This, his second rolled wafer of the day, was not among those Palardy had injected.
Three hours later, Gordian would sneak a third into his daily allotment as a perk to himself after hearing more cries and lamentations from his fueding execs.
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