I hadn’t protected her. I hadn’t saved her. I had shrugged off her fear as mere paranoia. Now she was dead and, worse, I hadn’t learned whatever it was she had intended to tell me.
People will die.
The whole company is focused on one thing right now.
Innocent people.
I had betrayed her trust. I had ignored the danger she was in. I hated myself for it. The worst mistake I could have made, with the worst consequences. I was worthless—every time in my life when it most mattered, worthless to the people who needed me.
Pulling out of the parking lot, I had to brake hard to avoid a silver Mercedes that passed as though the driver hadn’t even noticed me. I looked around in annoyance as the big sedan turned into a handicapped parking spot right in front of the Care4 entrance. One of those drivers who seemed to operate on the principle that the most expensive vehicle should be given unquestioned right-of-way. The driver was already getting out. He didn’t seem handicapped as he pulled a black briefcase from the trunk and headed toward the lobby. He wore a navy pinstriped suit and bold red tie that was out of place in the excessive casualness of the Valley. Something about the man’s self-satisfied stride was familiar. I’d seen it before. Photographed it, in fact. As he walked from an apartment building to that same car with a woman who was not his wife.
I took a last look and then pulled away, wondering what Brenda Johnson’s husband could possibly be doing at Care4.
26
I had been up for almost two days, running on not much more than adrenaline and caffeine. I still didn’t want to sleep, but I was becoming too tired to think, let alone do anything else. I reminded myself that in my current state I wasn’t much good to anyone, went home, and got into bed. Twelve hours later, I woke up feeling more or less normal. I went for a run, had breakfast, and got to the bookstore by mid-morning.
“What do you think of this poster?” Jess wanted to know. “It’s rough, I know.” In the last year she had been expanding the number of local author readings, and these had proved popular. Lately she’d been working overtime setting up for Thrillers in the Fog, a new event we were putting on featuring local mystery writers. I looked over the glossy twelve-by-fourteen paper she was holding up, gray and black tones, a rusty slice of Golden Gate Bridge daggering out from swirls of fog, the lettering done in that same brick-rust color as the bridge.
“I love it.” It felt good to think even for a moment about anything besides Care4. “Who do we have lined up so far?”
She smiled, proud. “It’s going to be awesome. Martin Cruz Smith and Laurie King for sure are confirmed, and I’m working on a few others. Possible shot at Joyce Carol Oates if she’s out here teaching at Cal again.”
“Does she count as thriller?”
Jess gave me a look. “Have you read DIS MEM BER? The Barrens?”
“Good point.”
“Excuse me?” I turned, seeing a red-haired girl in a flannel skirt and black stockings and boots. “I’m looking for a book for my boyfriend,” she said. “He’s really into jazz, plays trumpet, but doesn’t read that much. I’m trying to get him into more fiction.”
I thought again, relieved for the mental change of pace. “Hang on. I think I have something perfect, if it’s in stock.” I was back a minute later and handed her a book.
“1929? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Historical fiction, Bix Beiderbecke. If he likes jazz, I bet he’d like it.”
As the girl paid, Jess handed me an envelope. “Almost forgot. Either they hired a cute new postman or grad students are starting to deliver their own mail.”
“Thanks.” I tore the envelope open. A few lines of neatly slanting handwriting.
Dear Mysterious No-Cellphone-Girl,
Having been duly warned about your million and one shortcomings, I would like to proceed full steam ahead. I was thinking we could check out this Vietnamese place I like. This week, if you aren’t out cracking heads.
PS: the last part was a joke (I hope).
The note gave me a good feeling. I wanted to have dinner with Ethan. I wanted to forget about Gregg Gunn and Care4 for a few hours, forget about trying to understand what Karen Li had meant when she talked about hiding something, forget that there were people walking around in the world—in this very city—who would bash in a woman’s head for a couple of missing files.
Jess wasn’t done. “Someone else stopped by, a little guy, stank of cigars. He said you should get in touch as soon as you can.”
Charles Miller. I wondered what he wanted to tell me.
“And one more thing. That girl Zoe, from the book club. She was outside when I opened up this morning. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, just asked when you’d be in.”
“She’s here? Now?”
Jess nodded. “She doesn’t look like she’s had the best day, either. Must be going around.”
* * *
We sat on a pair of red beanbags in a corner of the bookstore. The shabby, understuffed bags were more comfortable than most of the thousand-dollar leather armchairs I’d encountered. Above us the reassuring solidity of bookshelves rose up to the ceiling. Like the walls of a confessional: comfortable, secure. The air itself smelled good. Pressed paper and the leather of the spines. The outside world seemed distant in the best possible way. I remembered Gunn’s initial skepticism, whether people still needed bookstores. To me, sitting here, the answer was all around us. Like asking a fly fisherman, knee-deep in a clear stream, why he didn’t just go to the supermarket for farmed tilapia.
“I’m sorry,” Zoe said. She’d been crying. Her long black hair hadn’t been straightened and it was springy with curls. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to. I shouldn’t have left like that the other week. I was having a good time.”
Since she had brought it up, I was curious. “How did he know you were here?”
Zoe looked surprised. “My phone, of course. He has me keep the location-sharing turned on so he knows where I am.”
Her answer made me dislike cell phones even more than I already did. “He doesn’t seem to trust you much.”
“He’s had girlfriends go behind his back, cheat on him. He likes to know where I am.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“I live at his house, he takes care of me. My kids, too. Luis is good to them. You know how hard it is to find a man like that?” She ran a hand through her hair, pulling distractedly at a curl. “If he ever got sick of me, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Can I ask you a question? Has he touched you before?”
“Touched me?”
I looked at her. “You know what I mean.”
She looked away. “He takes care of me.”
“There are other people out there, you know. Who take care of you. Without the other stuff. And along the way you get better at taking care of yourself.”
She laughed. “For you, maybe, sure. You talk good, you’re beautiful, read all these books, probably went to college. Me? I’m a high school dropout with two kids. Luis gets mad sometimes, sure, but all men do. It’s not his fault.”
“Are you safe around him? Has he threatened you?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“What did he come in to apologize for the other day? With the flowers.”
She looked at the rows of books. “Nothing. He just overreacted about something and felt bad. It was my fault, really. I should know what gets him mad.”
“I could talk to him,” I suggested quietly.
She was surprised. “You? Talk to Luis?”
“I could explain that it might be better if he gave you some space.”
“Where would I go?”
“I could help you with that.”
She ran a hand through her hair again, like the very idea made her anxious. I saw her fingers untwist another curl, saw it bounce back into shape. “He wouldn’t listen.”
“If I talk to him he’ll listen.”
“He doesn’t list
en to anyone. Why you?”
I put a light hand against her knee to emphasize. “Luis would listen to me because I’d make him feel.”
“Feel?”
I wanted her to understand. “I’d explain things so that he would feel the same things he’s made you feel. And then he’d get it.”
Zoe laughed. “Feelings … I don’t think so. He doesn’t go for the sentimental stuff.”
I didn’t laugh. “Neither do I.”
“You don’t know him,” she said again. “You’ve already been too good to me. I don’t want to get you in trouble.” She looked around uneasily. “I should get back. Thanks for listening. Sometimes I just want someone to talk to so badly.”
“You don’t have to leave,” I told her. “You can stay a bit.”
“I don’t want to get in trouble,” she said.
I watched Zoe hurry out, knowing she was right. It was all well and good for me to tell her to stay. I didn’t have to worry about what she’d come home to. Her form seemed to blur, to become Karen Li, to become Samantha, Marlene, all the women I had known over the years, everyone I had tried to help. I watched her walk out of the bookstore. Hating myself for wondering if she’d ever walk back in.
* * *
I rode up through the Berkeley campus, passing the empty football stadium, the wide flagstone plaza and enormous whale sculpture that marked the Lawrence Hall of Science. The road steepened as I worked my way into the hills, and I throttled up to match the grade. I rode through brown hills and viridian scrub spilling thousands of feet down, an immense terrain of hiking trails and untouched land, until I spotted Charles’s Honda Civic parked in a small dirt turnoff. One of the many scenic viewpoints that jutted off from the narrow road. Charles sat on a bench at the overlook. A little puff of smoke rose from his cigarillo and dispersed into harsh blue sky. I sat down next to him. “Never figured you for a hiker.”
He nodded at me. “Who said anything about hiking? I just enjoy a good bench.”
We sat quietly. For mid-October it was a hot day. A hawk wheeled around on the thermals. We both watched it. Charles finished his cigarillo, stubbed it out against the ground. “You said this fellow Gunn originally came to you because he didn’t trust the big security firms?”
“Right.”
Charles shook his head. “That doesn’t add up. Those places wouldn’t be in business two weeks if they weren’t totally discreet.”
I gave him a look. “You brought me all the way up here to tell me that? Come on, Charles. Clients bullshit. Horses eat apples. What else is new? I took the job.”
Charles took a brass cigarette case and a gold Zippo lighter from his pocket. He lit another cigarillo and puffed the tip into an orange glow. “It was the money that stuck in my mind—the funding. Why lie about that? The logical lie is to say they had money if they didn’t—project stability. But why lie about not having the funding if it had already gone through? Where’s the benefit in that?”
“What does that change?”
Charles seemed to ignore the question. “I looked closer at Gunn. He worked on Wall Street for a couple of years, like I said, until they got him on insider trading. He took a plea bargain and traded names, got off with a fine. Gotta love nineties New York, right? As long as you weren’t dealing crack or jumping turnstiles it was hard to get into trouble.”
“So the guy who hired me is a white-collar crook? Sorry to shatter your illusions, Charles, but I’ve worked with worse.”
Charles puffed smoke out of his mouth. “It’s one thing to lead a private company. The Valley tends to be forgiving when money’s at stake. But a publicly traded company is different. If you’re talking about getting money from state pension funds, university endowments, mom-and-pop investors? All kinds of regulation and scrutiny kicks in.”
“Meaning?”
“If you’re the CEO of a publicly traded firm, they look at you funny if you get too many speeding tickets. There’s no way Care4 would issue an IPO with Gregg Gunn at the helm.” Charles stubbed out cigarillo number two and placed the stub next to the first one. “So then I looked much closer at the company itself.”
“The baby monitors.”
“But really, what’s a baby monitor?”
Charles wasn’t prone to redundancy. I thought and answered. “Something to watch with. Make sure the kid is sleeping. Make sure the babysitter doesn’t have the boyfriend over when you’re at the movies.”
“Something to watch with. In other words … surveillance.”
“Surveillance?”
“They make cute little baby cameras and it sounds warm and fuzzy. A website filled with smiling families and a bunch of feel-good stories about how they’re devoted to improving childcare. They even have a nonprofit arm, healthcare, global poverty, all that. That’s all sugarcoating.”
“But he even showed me one of their cameras.” I thought of the sleek white sphere, the pinpoint lens. “I still have the damn thing sitting in my office somewhere until I can find someone to give it to. That’s real enough, right?”
“They make hardware, sure, but that’s unimportant. Anyone can find some cheap Chinese factory to outsource manufacturing to. Cameras are easy. Surveillance software systems are Care4’s real business.”
For one of the first times in my life I found myself wishing I had paid more attention to the omnipresent tech world that I usually tried so hard to ignore. “Isn’t surveillance basically just cameras?” I thought of my own work, aiming the zoom lens at Brenda Johnson’s husband through the apartment window. “It sure is when I do it.”
“You’re old-fashioned, Nikki. Times have changed. Have you heard the term ‘CNNs’? Not the news channel,” he added. “Technology.”
I gave him a look. “Please, Charles. I don’t even date guys who work for Google.”
“CNN stands for convolutional deep neural networks, used in computer vision. Essentially, deep learning models the biological brain’s way of learning new information based on what it already knows. Show a computer a picture of a dog, tell it that it’s looking at a dog, and then the next time the computer sees a dog it can remember and identify it without being told. Just the way a person would.”
I was starting to see where he was going. “So show a computer a picture of a face…”
He nodded. “Exactly. It can be taught to recognize the next face. The technology is filtering down everywhere, from tagging photos on Facebook to autonomous vehicles. But Care4 has developed proprietary algorithms aimed directly at large-scale surveillance, offering its customers massive crowd-scanning capability. Let’s say you’re an NFL team and you want to know if anyone coming to your games isn’t supposed to be there. Anyone from people on no-fly lists to the drunk guy who picks fights in the parking lot. Hook up a Care4 camera system, scan everyone walking in, and input photographs of the people you want to know about. The system flags them instantly and security grabs them. Easy as pie.”
“How’d you learn this?” I wanted to know.
Charles smiled and scratched one of his thick eyebrows. He took pride in his work. “Not all that thrilling. If you want to learn what a company is up to, the first step is to look at who they want working for them. Investigative Journalism 101. I examined hiring ads across a half-dozen of the major job search engines, going back years through cached pages, called some headhunters for good measure.” He was working his way through yet another cigarillo and I wrinkled my nose as the acrid smoke hit me. “A little over three years ago Care4 started aggressively hiring graduate-level computer scientists, Ph.D.s who specialize in AI and neural networks. Which is no different than plenty of the companies around here, except it made less sense for Care4 to want those types, given what they ostensibly do. I found that significant and looked closer.”
“So besides sports teams, who buys that stuff? Airports? Police departments?”
“Sure. Or governments.”
“For what, antiterrorism or something?”
“Th
at was my first thought,” he agreed.
“Okay. I understand why Gunn would lie about that if they’re selling to foreign countries. Public image. But why lie about the IPO?”
Charles leaned forward. “Exactly. What’s significant is not that he lied, but the nature of the lie. Gunn isn’t worried about an employee ruining him by going public, because he has to know that will never happen.”
“So what do they want?”
“As far as I can tell? Nothing. They seem happy to be churning out money and keeping a low profile. The last thing they want is to go public and have to hold quarterly earning calls and divulge who they do business with.”
I was adding things up. “They probably never even wanted to go public.”
“Which means three things. You’re not dealing with some little start-up. Care4 is a global, well-established company that deals with rough, shadowy clients. And unlike every other company I’ve heard of, they’re not peacocking, acting bigger and more successful than they actually are—they’re pretending to be much smaller.”
“Okay, that’s one.”
“Next. This woman you were tailing, Karen Li. If they weren’t worried about her ruining an IPO, what were they actually scared of? What was she taking?”
“Charles, she—”
He wasn’t finished. “Third. Maybe most important. A company that literally makes surveillance equipment. With contacts all over the world. Why would they come to you?” He looked intently at me, eyes serious. “You have to approach this woman you’re following, Nikki, and find out why Care4 is so scared of her, and what she is trying to take.”
“That’s the problem.”
“What do you mean, problem?”
“This woman. Karen Li. They got to her. She’s dead.”
Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Page 15