They're Watching (2010)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He sat there, patient as a sniper. I wasn't sure what I was trying to convey, so I drained my glass and handed him the CD. His eyebrows lifted.

  He took the disc, circled the desk, and popped it into his laptop. He clicked and read. Read some more. I sipped and sat back, cataloging everything I was going to do differently if I got a chance to be with my wife again. That last night we'd been together, my thumb drawing a bead of sweat through the dip between her lovely shoulder blades, the quick urgency of her mouth against my shoulder--what if it was a final memory?

  His voice startled me from my thoughts. "This internal study shows very different results from those that Festman released publicly and put into evidence before Congress. Three hundred and fifty decibels? That's well into illegal territory."

  "The figure surprises you?" I asked.

  "Not in the least. We all know it. This just proves that they know it." A glance back at the screen. "They stole our data, too. We must have a mole. That will be handled." He was talking to himself; I just happened to be there. His gray eyebrows furrowed, holding an anger he'd so far concealed. "At least they stole accurate data." He seemed to notice I was there again. "We have a superior product," he told me. "But innovation takes time. Change is hard. There are alliances. Partnerships. Inertia. We needed to raise awareness, apply the right pressure at the right time. The documentary was a way of doing that. Business can make for strange bedfellows."

  "And by 'product' you mean the sonar system that you're developing?"

  "More or less. We design transducers and sonar domes for submarines and ship hulls. Just like Festman Gruber."

  "Why are yours superior? Because they don't harm whales?"

  He chuckled. "Don't mistake me for some manatee hugger. We have a lot of motivations. Saving Shamu certainly isn't at the top of that list. But our system is less disruptive to the environment. That's a PR benefit, you see. Which makes it good business. And a good advantage to press. How's your physics?"

  "Paltry."

  "Okay, here's the shorthand: Festman Gruber's is a traditional sonar system. Low frequency but high output power--think of it as high intensity. The high intensity is what screws up whale migrations, blows out their ears, all that Greenpeace stuff. Of course, Festman denies any link."

  "Like cigarette companies and cancer."

  "Like smart businessmen. You can't please shareholders airing your dirty laundry all the time. The key is"--he pointed to the laptop screen--"not to get caught with your pants down."

  "How can your company's sonar work in such a low decibel range?"

  "Because North Vector has developed a low-frequency, high-pulse-rate, low-intensity sonar, based on the type used by whispering bats. We overlap signals correlating from multiple sources to increase propagation distance without raising intensity. This offers a huge strategic advantage, because even though it's active, it's hard to detect, record, or source, even with specialized acoustic equipment."

  "And what could a little arts-and-crafts project like that be worth?"

  "About three point nine billion. Annually. For five years." He uncrossed his hands, held them out like Vanna White. "But can we really put a price tag on the well-being of our seafaring mammals?"

  I wanted to make a smart reply, but I thought of Trista sitting in her bungalow with those autopsy photos, Keith lingering in the shadow of the Golden Gate to rest a hand on the side of that gray whale, and decided to keep my mouth shut.

  He continued, "NSA has an essentially unlimited budget. They need more money, they print it. But they don't like paying twice for the same thing, not in these amounts. Looks bad to the Senate Appropriations Committee. And Festman, see, is in the middle of a long-term naval sonar contract. So despite all our advantages, we're next in line. And this document"--another adoring glance at the laptop screen--"or more specifically the threat of this document, is the kind of thing that will accelerate certain processes."

  "They can't just say it's doctored?"

  "It won't come to that. This battle has to be over before a single shot is fired."

  "How?"

  "I make sure that the right people in the right positions are aware that if they support Festman, they will be on the losing side. Senators. United States Attorneys. Cabinet members."

  "How do you do that?"

  "There is no greater power--not bombs, not laws, not parliaments--no greater power than picking up the phone and having the right person on the other end."

  "Won't the government push back?"

  "I am the government."

  I said, "You're a private company."

  "Exactly."

  I nodded slowly. "I keep finding I'm not cynical enough to live in this country."

  "Try living in other countries," he said. "It won't convert you to an optimist."

  I jabbed a finger in the direction of the laptop. "Can you use that internal study to nail Festman's hide to the wall?"

  "That's not what we want."

  "After what I've been through, Mr. Kazakov, I'm not sure you can speak for what I want."

  "You came to me for a reason, Patrick. I know how to swim in these waters."

  I tapped the empty glass against my thigh.

  "You never want to humiliate a rival," he continued. "Because then you don't get what you want. You flash your hand, give them a way out. Avoidance of shame is a vastly effective and underutilized motivator. We bury the study. Arrange to clear your name for whatever charges they've drummed up. It all happens quietly, behind the scenes, and we agree on a headline or two that we can all sell and live with. The higher-ups at Festman Gruber won't be imprisoned. They'll just lose. This round."

  "And you'll get the defense contract."

  "How much," he asked, "do you want for this CD?"

  "I don't want money. I want my wife."

  "Then let's get you your wife."

  "It's not that easy." Standing, I pulled the folded documents from my pocket and tossed them on the desk before him, all those phone bills, wire transactions, bank accounts, and photographs linking Ridgeline to Festman Gruber. "There's much more at stake. And I've got a lot more than just an internal study."

  I explained to him about Ridgeline and what I'd determined about their relationship with Festman Gruber. When I told him about Ariana's being taken, his eyes burned with forty-two years of empathy and his hand tightened angrily around the arm of his chair. His wife emerged silently, ostensibly to return the tea service to the counter, but her timing suggested she'd been listening to our conversation. She made sure to catch her husband's eye, and his expression of marital resignation made clear the decision was no longer in his hands. When she retreated to the bedroom again, he nodded at me weightily.

  "This," he said, "changes everything." He sank back, rubbed his temples with his fingertips. His silver goatee looked gray in the glow of the banker's lamp. "If Ridgeline so much as catches wind of the fact that you're making a play, they'll clean up, understand? That's what they've been doing. Cleaning up."

  I fought off dread, the endless wrong-turn scenarios, the crimescene imagery.

  "I need to know how it works," I said, "if I'm gonna help my wife. Who's involved and at what level? Does Festman's CEO make the call to hire Ridgeline?"

  "The CEO?" He waved a dismissive hand. "The CEO isn't even aware of this. It's not like in the movies. He lists corporate priorities. Makes a directive. 'Stop that fucking Keith Conner documentary.' That's all. The rest gets brainstormed and implemented."

  "By whom?"

  "Security."

  "Who's Security report to?"

  "Legal. Insert lawyer joke here. But that's how it's done."

  Kazakov's neutrality--his casualness--was chilling.

  My voice shook. "So they're the ones who laid the plan? To fuck with me and my wife? To murder Keith? To frame me and take away my life? Lawyers?"

  "I don't know that Legal would have come up with the plan. But that's who would have approved it."

  "On
ce they'd hired Ridgeline."

  "That's right."

  "How do I know who's at the top of this particular food chain?" I asked. "Legal?" I spit the word.

  "You show up with some information and see who comes out to talk to you."

  "Show up? Aren't they in Alexandria?"

  "You bet your ass whoever's running things is on this coast overseeing this little imbroglio."

  "Won't they just call the cops on me?"

  "Maybe," he said. "You'll be betting that they'll want to talk to you first."

  "Betting my life and Ariana's."

  "Yes."

  On the leather blotter rested a satellite cell phone. Distractedly, he reached over and spun it. The Glock was digging into my kidney, so I pulled it free and set it on the coffee table.

  He eyed the pistol, unimpressed. "That's useless. This is a power and intel game. You're not going to win it with that. You'll probably just shoot your kneecap off."

  I picked up the glass again, as if it had magically refilled with Stoli. "I want Legal to go down. And I want Ridgeline. The business stuff you can handle however you see fit."

  "You've got a long row to hoe."

  "That's why I need your help. The only benefit to being stalked by a global defense and technology company is that their rivals are also global defense and technology companies."

  "That we are. Fire with fire and all that, sure. But what do you expect us to do?"

  "They stitched a tracking device into my wife's raincoat. They don't know we know about it. My wife managed to grab her raincoat as they snatched her."

  "Resourceful woman."

  "Yes, you two would get along just fine. Is there any way to track that device?"

  "Not unless you had the signature of that particular signal."

  "Like its characteristics?"

  "Yes, radio frequency, period, bandwidth, amplitude, type of modulation--all the usual suspects."

  "An acquaintance of mine swept our house for us, and he found the thing using a signal analyzer. Would that have recorded the signature?"

  "Any signal analyzer worth a damn would have saved the signature in its library. Can you get the analyzer?"

  "I have an idea how I might. But I . . . uh, I might need you to offer the guy a job."

  "He get fired?"

  "Not yet."

  Kazakov nodded. "I see."

  "I need to make a call. If I turn on my cell phone, can Ridgeline source where I am?"

  "This isn't 24. It takes a good amount of time to track a signal. If they're looking. Keep it to a few minutes and you'll be fine." He gestured to the balcony, but his eyes had already moved back to his copied cell-phone bill, the one I'd used to track him down. As I stood, I noticed that his stare had caught on some of the underlined numbers.

  "Whose numbers are those?" I asked.

  "Advocates," he said, not elaborating. "May I copy this as well?"

  "You can have it."

  "You've done me an enormous service. Now I need to do a bit of damage control." He gestured to the sliding glass door again, and I left him to his vodka and satellite phone.

  "Help you?" The weak cell-phone connection did nothing to stifle Jerry's indignation. "Jesus, don't you learn?"

  "Not quickly."

  "I'm hanging by a thread over here after Mickelson found out I swept your house. I told you this shit better not come back on me with the studio, and here I am--an ass hair from fired."

  "You said you wanted to get back to real security anyway. I have a job lined up for you with North Vector."

  "Everyone's looking for you, Patrick. Cops, press, not to mention whoever you're tangled up in. Forget fired. How 'bout aiding and abetting?"

  "You haven't watched the news today," I told him. "You don't know I'm on the run."

  Beyond the closed sliding glass door, Kazakov sat in his plush white bathrobe, satellite phone tucked between ear and shoulder, gesturing with aggressive precision. I set my hand on the balcony rail, looked out into a tangle of branches. I closed my eyes, breathed in rain and mud, waited for Jerry to decide my wife's fate.

  "No," he said slowly. "I guess I haven't. What kind of job?"

  "You can sit down with the CEO and pick one."

  "The CEO?" He was breathing hard. "This better not be a ruse."

  "They have my wife," I said. "They have Ariana."

  He was silent. I checked my watch, eager to turn the phone back off.

  "Tell me what you're asking for."

  We talked through the details, made arrangements, and signed off.

  Immediately after I hung up, an Asian chime sounded. With dread, I clicked to open the cell-phone message.

  BY NOON TOMORROW, YOU WILL LEAVE THE CD WITH THE VALET AT STARBRIGHT PLAZA.

  The screen opened to a live shot of Ariana, bound to a chair. The background was blurry, but it looked like a small room. Her hair was loose and wild, one eye was black, and blood trickled from the edge of her lips. There was no sound, but I could tell she was screaming my name.

  The feed vanished, replaced by block letters: TWELVE HOURS.

  Then darkness.

  I turned off the phone. My mouth was dirt dry, and I had to clutch the balcony rail until I could feel my legs back under me.

  A memory came, vivid and unbidden--that first time I'd met Ariana at the freshman-orientation party at UCLA. Her lively, clever eyes. How I'd approached on nervous legs, gripping that cup of keg beer. My lame line--"You look bored." And how she'd asked if I was making a proposition, an offer to unbore her.

  I'd said, "Seems like that could be the challenge of a lifetime."

  "Are you up to it?" she'd asked.

  Yes.

  Out on the balcony, the midnight cold had found its way through my clothes. I was shivering violently. Inside the hotel room, Kazakov set down his satellite phone and beckoned me.

  I pried my hands off the balcony rail and started in.

  Twelve hours.

  Chapter 56

  The lobby was spotless and gleaming. Even the marble ashtrays, standing obediently at the elevator doors containing nary a butt, looked as though they'd been polished with a silk handkerchief. It could have been a hotel or a country club or the waiting room of a Beverly Hills dentist. But it wasn't.

  It was the Long Beach office of Festman Gruber.

  The elevator hummed pleasantly up fifteen levels. A floor-to-ceiling wall of thick glass--probably ballistic--rimmed the lobby, funneling visitors to the bank-teller window of the reception console. The security guard behind the window had a sidearm and an impressive scowl for 8:00 A.M. Behind him was a beehive of offices and conference rooms, also composed of glass walls, with assistants and workers scurrying to and fro. Aside from the dollhouse view, it looked just like any other business, depressing in its sterility. The front barrier muted everything beyond to a perfect silence. All that classified work, taking place right in the soundproofed open.

  It didn't seem that the guard recognized me, but the bruising on my face said that I was out of place here among the Aeron chairs and plush carpet. My palms were damp, my shoulders tense.

  Four hours until Ridgeline would kill my wife.

  "Patrick Davis," I said. "I'd like to speak to the head of Legal."

  He pushed a button, and his voice issued through a speaker. "Do you have an appointment?"

  "No. Just give my name, and I'm sure he or she will want to see me."

  The guard didn't say anything, but his face showed he thought that to be improbable. I prayed that the cops wouldn't be summoned before I had a chance to talk to someone.

  Of course I'd yet to sleep. I'd picked up Jerry's signal analyzer from a drop point in the wee hours, and some of Kazakov's unnamed associates were rigging it to plug in to a standard GPS unit so I could zero in on Ariana's--or at least her raincoat's--location. After that I was on my own. I'd have to source that tracking signal and catch up to the Ridgeline crew wherever they were hunkered down before they headed out to our me
et point at high noon. Right now I needed something to drive that wedge deep and hard between Festman Gruber and Ridgeline, something to arm myself with to take in to the men holding my wife. There were more variables than I could wrap my sleep-deprived mind around, and if any one of them tilted in the wrong direction, I'd be making funeral arrangements, standing trial, or filling out a casket.

  As I waited for entry or arrest, treated to a little piped-in Josh Groban, I watched an assistant walk down a glass-walled hall and enter a glass-walled conference room. Men in suits rimmed a granite table the length of a sailboat. One man, identical to the others, rose from the head abruptly when she whispered in his ear. He glanced through the walls at me, Ariana's life hanging in the balance of his decision. Then he walked briskly into an office next door. Waiting breathlessly for his verdict, I was struck that all the glass wasn't some pretense of feel-good corporate transparency; it was an embodiment of the ultimate paranoia. At any time everyone could keep an eye on everyone else.

  To my great relief, the assistant, an Asian woman with a severe bob cut, fetched me and led me back. I passed through a metal detector, dropping Don's car keys to the side in a silver tray that passed them through a scan of their own. But I kept my sealed manila envelope in hand.

  Now came the real challenge.

  The man waited for me in the middle of his office, arms at his sides. "Bob Reimer," he said, not offering his hand.

  We stood centered on the slate rug, regarding each other like boxers. He seemed to fit with the total ordinariness of the setting, a mover and shaker who left nary an imprint on the retinas, as bland as a watercooler in a bomb factory. He was older--fifty, maybe--of a generation that still wore tie clips, carried through on their side parts, said "porno" instead of "porn." I couldn't help but think of those replicating G-men from The Matrix--Midwest white, neat suit, not a hair out of place. He was Everyman. He was nobody. Blink and he'd been replaced by an alien, simulating human form. A crushing disappointment, after all the fear and loss and menace, to be confronted with such banality in an air-conditioned office.