The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

  ‘OK. Maybe just a teeny one. The message is great, but,’ he over-emphasized the word, bringing smiles from the sycophants around the room, ‘we don’t want to go much further than that. That’s all I’m saying. Up to that line, but not beyond it.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Padilla has hinted at tearing up the Treaty, kicking out the Chinese. The Ted Norman folks would love us to climb onto that one, but we can’t go there. Not a candidate for the highest office in the state.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘I know you do, Bill. We’re all on the same page here. We want to ride this tiger, no doubt about it. We just gotta make sure we’ve got a good, tight hold of the reins. Because if we lose control, this thing could destroy everything in its path.’

  Maddy knew she was doing it too often, that it was looking like a tic. But she couldn’t help herself. Every ten or fifteen seconds, she felt the same urge to look over her shoulder. To see who was there, to see what had changed, to see whoever might be seeing her.

  A break came on the first of the three buses she had taken. The back seat was available, enabling her to keep her head relatively still as she surveyed all those in front of her, assessing every passenger, weighing up whether they were a regular commuter or a fake – an agent of Terminal Island, carefully concealing his or her true mission, which was to watch her.

  Even on the back seat, she couldn’t rest, though. She found her eyes darting sideways, watching the young black man dozing in the far corner, listening to his breathing to determine whether his sleep was genuine or phoney.

  On the second and third buses, it was worse. She had to maintain a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, scoping the entire vehicle, front and back. She knew she was arousing the suspicion of those sitting alongside her, that the repeated turns of the head looked manic. But she could not rest.

  Not that she knew what she was looking for. She watched two men – one in his twenties, another, bearded, perhaps fifteen years older – whose studiedly distracted manner unnerved her. But then the younger one got off the bus before she did. Another took a call and proceeded to defend himself in loud, animated Spanish from an accusation that he had failed to pick up his youngest son from football practice: ‘Honey, we never made that plan!’ Maddy realized that any man she suspected was almost certainly above suspicion. It was probably the mumbling senior at the back of the bus or the mom with kids she needed to fear.

  She broke her journey with two taxi rides. The first driver paid her no attention, but the second kept taking fleeting glances at her in his rear-view mirror. What was he looking at? Had he recognized her? She got him to drop her off two blocks early downtown, so he would not be able to tell his handlers her precise destination.

  From there, she walked to the car rental place, paying in cash. The tactic struck her as useless even as she did it, for there was no ducking the requirement to show her driver’s licence. If her pursuer had tracked her to Tony Gilper’s place, then a car rented in her own name was not going to present too stiff a challenge. As she drove, this time using the paper smog mask provided with the rental car, she resumed her regular over-the-shoulder checks. The result was a near-collision with the Changan-Benni that came to a sudden halt in front of her when she was looking the other way. Which made her wonder if her pursuer was, artfully, in front of rather than behind her.

  Exhausted by her own paranoia, she eventually arrived at Leo Harris’s building in the Miracle Mile district a full two hours later than she might have done. She told herself that she had come here chiefly because it made no sense to have this conversation on the phone. She was less willing to admit that, after the chase through the stairwell in Huntington Park – and the encounter with the triple-amputee veteran of the 82nd Airborne and rape fantasist whose window Rosario Padilla used to pass on her way to and from work and on her lunch hour – Maddy also felt wary of returning to her own, empty apartment.

  She pressed on the buzzer, the sound prompting an instant image of her ex-boyfriend hurriedly stuffing a woman’s discarded underwear into a drawer as he picked up the entryphone. More paranoia, she thought, pushing the image out of her mind.

  ‘Leo. It’s me.’

  ‘Maddy, what’s—’

  ‘Just let me in.’

  She came up the stairs to see Leo standing by his front door, his arms open for an embrace, which Maddy shrugged off as she pushed her way in. Wasting no time, she said ‘I’ve just spent the entire evening chasing – and being chased – down a blind alley, thanks to you.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Leo said, following her inside. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, I think you know very well what happened. Exactly what you wanted to happen, that’s what happened.’

  ‘Back up, Maddy. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What happened?’

  ‘That file you gave me led – surprise, surprise – nowhere. Or, to be more accurate, it led to a man with no legs and one arm. A man who, it’s clear for all to see, had nothing to do with these murders.’

  ‘Oh.’ Leo looked crestfallen.

  ‘All of which was obviously checked out by the, you know, authorities who would have cast this lead aside as utterly, fucking useless. That wasn’t help you gave me, Leo. That was a big, exhausting, deliberate detour.’

  Exhausting was the truth. You could stay afloat on adrenalin when there was a prospect of a breakthrough. But failure always had the same effect. Fatigue would flood the system, sudden, surging waves of it, the thicker and stronger for having been dammed up by hope.

  She was unloading on Leo but she blamed herself more. Stupid, naïve, to believe it would ever be that easy. She had failed to ask the question every journalist was meant to ask of everything: cui bono, who benefits? A classified file does not just land in your lap unless someone wants it there. In her excitement, she had hardly thought about that, accepting that Leo had acted out of nostalgic kindness. He had done her a favour. Even he, she had thought, was not beyond that.

  Had she got him so badly wrong? Was he as morally empty as he liked to pretend, ready to exploit her grief and send her into an exitless maze just to buy himself a few hours? Was his devotion to his boss and his political career so fierce that he would do that to a woman he had once … what? They had never said they loved each other.

  Perhaps the hard-bitten cynic shtick was not a front. Maybe Leo really was ready to do whatever it took.

  He was shaking his head, his eyes down, his fingers running through his hair. ‘I had no idea, Maddy. Really. I thought what was in that, you know … I thought it was a lead.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t, OK? How’d it work, Leo? The boss tell you to shut that crazy bitch down? Is that how this worked?’ She had imagined that conversation in her head on her way over here, Dick Berger agitated by the Weibosphere buzz accusing him of allowing a Chinese serial killer to terrorize the streets of LA, ordering his lieutenant to change the subject. What better way than to get the author of the original story to chase another hare?

  ‘You’re right,’ he began. ‘The boss does want you shut down. There’s only bad news in this story for him. But that’s not what was going on here, with that … information.’

  ‘So what exactly is going on here, Leo? What? Can you tell me? Can you?’ He began to open his mouth but words were still falling out of hers. ‘I mean, can anyone tell me what the fuck is going on here? I’m running around this city and no one is helping me. My older sister hates me, my mother doesn’t know what day of the week it is and my baby sister – my baby sister—’

  ‘Oh, Maddy,’ Leo said, stepping forward to hold her. She moved to push him out of the way, but this time he would not be shaken off so easily. He reached for her wrists: he would force her to accept a hug from him, if that’s what it took. Her resistance continued, Madison writhing in his arms, her fists beating on his chest.

  ‘Get off me,’ she was saying. But he was enveloping her, the way he always used to. Her head was against his che
st, his arms were around his shoulders. She looked up, so that their eyes met. ‘I mean it,’ she said.

  ‘I know you do,’ he said. And the gaze held for a second longer than it should, a second past the point where one or both had always looked away. And a second later their lips were touching.

  Leo kissed her gently but the first taste of his lips on hers flooded her with desire, a craving for his mouth, his tongue, for as much of him as she could consume. She tugged the shirt from his chest, breathing deeply, taking in the scent of him. She knew her voraciousness was a surprise to him; it was to her, too. But now that it had been unleashed, it could not be stopped.

  Still kissing him, she wrenched off her shirt and, before he could remove her bra, fell to her knees, unbuckling his belt, pulling down his shorts, taking his cock in her mouth, sucking on it as if it would nourish her. She heard him gasp. Pushing him back onto the couch, she climbed on top of him, felt the familiar surge of him inside her. Her desire thundered in her ears.

  An hour later and she was looking at Leo’s face. He was asleep in the bed they had reached eventually. With his eyes closed, he looked as she had remembered him after sex: younger and, however improbably, more innocent. She closed her eyes and saw him again, a few hours ago when he had watched her read through the contents of that file in the UCLA lobby.

  She was trying to analyse the expression he wore, the image of it frozen under her eyelids, ready for study. Leo had been pleased, no doubt about it. But his was not a smile of cunning satisfaction that she had taken the bait. There was something different in his eyes, she had seen it. They were warmed by the idea that he was helping, that he was doing good. There had been no gags, no bluster. In his own way, he had been sombre – sombre, she reflected now, at the loss of Abigail.

  She could not prove it. She would simply have to trust her intuition, even in its current, unreliable state. And her intuition said Leo had given her those documents in good faith. Her mistake had been not to press further at the moment of handover. She had asked how he had got the file, but she had got no answer and had not demanded one. She castigated herself for not learning this lesson long ago: it was not enough to understand your source. You needed to understand your source’s source. On this one, she was in the dark.

  The inescapable fact hovering over the bed they had just shared was that Leo Harris served at the pleasure of the mayor; it was Berger whose bidding he was commanded to do. Is that how this happened, Maddy wondered. Had the mayor presented Leo with the documents, along with instructions to get them to Maddy? Leo would not have agreed to that if he had thought it a trick, a deliberate exercise in wasting Maddy’s time. If her gut was right about Leo, he must have been assured he was handing over something useful. Which meant either his boss had lied to Leo or the mayor had himself been lied to.

  The former was certainly possible: that politicians lie was hardly news. But a candidate lying to his closest advisor? Rare and beyond reckless. It strained credulity to believe Berger’s career had come as far as it had – and he had just won a competitive primary race to become the Democratic standard-bearer in California – if he was capable of that. And Leo had always been a sharp judge of character: he wouldn’t work for Berger unless he trusted him.

  But if it hadn’t been Berger lying to Leo, it must have been someone else who had set her chasing after Gilper. She opened her eyes. She didn’t like being played. Not ever and definitely not at a time like this.

  Gingerly, she levered herself away from Leo, replacing the arm that had stretched across her. She collected up her underwear and shoes, finding stray items all the way from the bedroom to the living room to the hallway, and let herself out. She was aware that she was not the first woman to perform this ritual – probably not the first one to do it this week. She did not say goodbye and she did not leave a note.

  Once back in her apartment, she resisted the urge to fall into the sofa and sat at her desk instead. The long, circuitous journey she had taken home had given her time to think. Leo, she had decided to accept, for now at least, had been telling the truth. As for the mayor, she could be much less certain. He was probably a lying snake. For all that, she could not realistically envisage either scenario – the mayor lying to Leo or the two of them explicitly conniving in a diversionary tactic. For now, she believed Leo would have refused. Surely it was most likely, despite Berger’s determination to shut her down, that the mayor had no direct part in it.

  Which pointed the finger elsewhere.

  She fired up the computer and keyed in the name of the Chief of Police, Douglas Jarrett, personal appointee of Mayor Richard Berger four years ago. She called up the long profiles first, scanning the details of his past service in Chicago and, earlier, in Hawaii. Most of the pieces were glowing, including a recent extended magazine profile that said Jarrett had won admirers in Washington for policing Los Angeles ‘tactfully’. She read on:

  Where others have stirred the complex racial and ethnic brew of the west coast’s biggest city, Jarrett is credited for letting things go from a boil to a simmer. Policing LA was always a complex business, even before the Treaty. But now it involves managing relations with an area over which the Chief is not chief. The Port of Los Angeles and Terminal Island, with its Chinese customs officers now protected by their own garrison of People’s Liberation Army personnel, is off-limits to Jarrett. Yet his fellow officers as well as city and state politicians note how he has, as one puts it, ‘elegantly finessed’ that fact. He keeps a close eye on his Chinese counterparts, ‘making sure their authority is not too “in your face”’, says one City Hall source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ‘If the PLA wants to act, Doug always makes sure there are LAPD guys present and visible, so it looks like a joint effort, even if it isn’t. He understands the optics.’

  More praise for his blameless private life: an attractive wife, Rachel, seen at the opening of the Sinopec Museum of the Arts in Brentwood, two adult daughters. A cop his entire life, from his very first job, walking the beat in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

  She looked at the pictures accompanying the articles. He was in his mid-fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and a decent build. Looked like he played squash. Solidly Midwestern, reliable and dull.

  Here was one from the summer before last, when the heat was insufferable. He was out in Koreatown, praising shopkeepers who had doused a situation before it could turn into a riot. He was in chinos and a polo shirt. As fatigue enveloped her, muffling and smothering her brain, she stared and stared at the photograph. It might have been a minute, might have been an hour. She found she was not looking at Jarrett’s face but his wrist.

  On it was a solid Patek Philippe watch. She enlarged the image and took a closer look. It was substantial and jewelled, the kind you’d see advertised in the international magazines left behind in business class on the LA to Beijing flight. She could see the weight of it, even from here.

  Idly she Googled it until she had found a price. The first figure she saw she deemed so absurd, she presumed she had identified the wrong watch. But site after site suggested otherwise. To her amazement, the item was sold for between eighty-five and one hundred thousand dollars.

  Now she widened the search, looking for any other images she could find of Jarrett. In each case, she looked only at his wrist. But it didn’t yield much; in too many cases he was wearing a jacket or shirt cuffs that obscured the view. But her blood was up now.

  She reached for her tablet, equipped thanks to Katharine with a VPN gizmo that kept her IP-address secret by substituting it with another one. This was the machine she used for probing the othernet, when the pickings offered up by the regular internet were too slim. K had never admitted it outright, but Maddy had long suspected her friend had been part of the original othernet community, even perhaps that she was still active now. Those pioneers had started beavering away below radar when Beijing, backed by Moscow, started getting its way on tightening the global rules governing the internet. With the US no longer stro
ng enough to resist, the Chinese authorities set about pruning the internet of anything it deemed damaging to state security, ‘national honour’ and – the justification used most often and broadly – the safety of children. They started with the wilder fringes, but bit by bit the censors’ shears turned into chainsaws, hacking down the woods and forests of the internet, slashing away at anything they deemed too unkempt. Katharine-types had cached much of what was lost and migrated it over to a realm they constructed themselves: the othernet. Before long, dissenters posted there first, many of them abandoning the original internet altogether. The othernet came under attack day and night, Katharine’s comrades playing a constant game of cat and mouse, jumping from hidden deep-sea server to remote Icelandic relay station and back again, as they sought to avoid the blade coming down on them. Maddy’s relationship with it was less noble. She was a user. Or a ‘parasite’, in K’s language: taking out but never putting in.

  She typed in Jarrett’s name and hit ‘Search’. Now the screen filled with more images. She could see a couple of exposed wrists immediately and, on one, another heavy watch. She zoomed in and saw that it was as heavy as the other one, but in a different shade: a brown strap this time and a silver face, TAG Heuer the brand. This one too was comfortably in the high five figures.

  Now Maddy went over to Weibo, the mirrored version that existed below ground. There she put out a simple message, issuing a call for help the way she had on several stories in the past. She attached the Patek Philippe picture.

  Chief Jarrett seems to have an expensive taste in watches. Any other examples besides this one?

  She sat back and waited, hoping the late hour would bring at least a slight delay in the bolt of fury that would, inevitably, be hurled her way by Leo and, no less certainly, Howard Burke. What she needed was for the little cogs of the human flesh search engine to turn. It was crowdsourcing at its very best, thousands of unseen individuals digging at their own little patch of virtual dirt, turning up whatever they could on an individual – scouring every link, reference, article and, above all, photograph, that had appeared on every conceivable forum or platform. A human flesh search would scour magazine pieces but also Renren and Weibo entries, including those a dozen degrees of separation away from the subject. If Jarrett had been at a hotel bar in Redondo Beach at the same time as a wedding reception six years ago, snapped in the far background of the family group shot, the search would find it. When the ants of the online colony started crawling over you, examining every pore of your skin, they missed nothing.