Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel

by S. A. Lelchuk

  Mr. Ruby answered. “We know that the CEO, Gunn, has been traveling recently to all kinds of rough places.”

  “The kinds of places where bad guys sit around drinking strong coffee and planning how to get the next truck bomb into the next building,” added Mr. Jade.

  “Terrorism?” I had thought about it and was skeptical. “What benefit could it possibly be for an American tech company to help terrorists attack Westerners? What’s the upside? Wouldn’t that just instantly make them our government’s public enemy number one?”

  Mr. Jade nodded in agreement. “It’s anyone’s guess, but Silicon Valley is dead set on protecting client privacy at all costs. They’re notorious for it. These companies are like the Swiss banks of the twenty-first century.”

  “We have to go through the courts just to open a goddamn iPhone,” Mr. Ruby put in bitterly. “As though some AR-wielding nutjob who just mowed down an office full of innocents needs to be protected from the big bad FBI.”

  Mr. Jade wasn’t done. “Our best guess is that Care4 had gotten hold of information about some kind of cell or strike, quite possibly unintentionally. Only they can’t say anything or they lose the trust—and more importantly, the revenue—of their most lucrative clients. The Eastern Bloc pack, the oligarchs and Middle East petro-states, that crowd. No way those guys let Care4 do business in their countries if they think the company is passing any kind of info back to the States.”

  I was still unconvinced. “So someone at Care4 essentially decided that letting a handful of Westerners possibly die was preferable to taking a devastating financial hit?”

  “That would be the thought process, yes. Factoring in the calculus that they’d never get caught for said decision and were not doing anything to actively aid and abet.”

  “And this bad thing, whatever it is, this attack, is going to happen on November first?”

  “Everything we’ve learned so far is pointing strongly to that.”

  “Have you talked to other intelligence? CIA, NSA?”

  Mr. Ruby nodded. “We’ve been in touch with our counterparts, sure. But there’s always so much online chatter about pending attacks that it’s almost impossible to say what’s real and what isn’t. If you’re not exposed to the kind of information that we look at, it’s hard to describe the flood that hits our desks daily. There’s extremely credible evidence for a dozen different attacks to happen on any given day, every day, somewhere in the world. Most the public never hear about. Some fall apart on their own, some are stopped—and some happen.”

  “So where do you go from here?”

  Mr. Jade looked glum. “Try to find someone else willing to talk. But Karen Li had unique access. Even under the best of circumstances she’d be hard to replace. By November first, impossible. That’s less than two weeks from now. We don’t know what kind of evidence she had. Whatever it was, there’s no trace. We’ve checked everywhere.”

  I nodded absently. Thinking that “checked” could mean one of three things. Maybe Karen had been lying. Maybe Care4 had found and destroyed whatever it was.

  Or maybe these two hadn’t checked the right places.

  The two men in front of me seemed competent. But they didn’t seem wildly creative.

  Mr. Ruby asked, “Can we count on you, Nikki? To help us if you learn more?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sure, I’ll be your man in Havana. Graham Greene would love this.”

  “It’s not funny.” This from Mr. Jade again. “We got to you today. Which means other people can, too.”

  29

  “I need your help,” I told Jess.

  “Sure, gimme a sec.” She was finishing with one of our regular customers, Lennis. He was an old man in a blue flannel shirt, jaw roughened with white stubble like moss over bark. He came in about every other week to clean out our science-fiction section and swipe pours of bourbon. He saw me and winked, mug in one hand and a stack of worn paperbacks cradled under his arm. “Great coffee you serve here.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to wait until after lunch?”

  He grinned. “After lunch it might not be free.”

  Jess rang him up while I hung a CLOSED sign on the door. “What’s up?” Jess asked when we were alone in the store.

  “Remember that man who came to the bookstore when we were closing the other week? The one with the briefcase who you sent upstairs?”

  She thought for a second and nodded. “Yeah, vaguely. Something happened to him?”

  “Not exactly. He hired me to follow an employee of his, a woman named Karen Li. So I did. Now she’s dead.”

  “Oh my God, dead? Like, murdered? What happened? Who did it?”

  “I don’t know.” Saying it made me see it. The cabin. That broken window. That broken body. The cracked pane of glass somehow suggesting all of the futility and desperation about the whole thing. I forced the memories out of my mind. “She hid something that she wanted me to know about. I need to figure out what it was.”

  “And you’re going to find out how…?”

  I placed a stack of paper on the desk between us. Jess looked from me to the papers and back. “Don’t tell me Ethan’s making you edit his dissertation?”

  “Printouts of locations. From the GPS tracker I put on her car. Everywhere she went recently. That’s how we’re going to find whatever she hid.”

  “What if it happened before you started following her?”

  I thought about the look on Karen’s face. The fear. “I don’t think so. It was close to the end. After she was scared by whatever it was she found. If she hid something it won’t be too obvious. She suspected people were watching her. But also somewhere she could get to it again.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I don’t know. Not for sure. But it’s all we have.”

  “Okay.” Jess shrugged. “Tell me where to start.”

  Each paper was a printout showing a time-stamped location. I started going through the stack one by one, reading out the addresses. Jess had her laptop open to Google Maps. She looked up each address as I read it off, skipping the repeats. As we worked, Karen Li’s life began to coalesce with haunting accuracy. Most people stuck to routines. Karen was no different. We put all the repeats in one pile. The Care4 office, her home. I’d been by there already. A bland townhouse in San Jose, surrounded by rows of identical homes. A new development, probably built within the last few years. I hadn’t even bothered to try to get in. By this point the police would have been inside. Probably other people, too. Now it would just be her family. The long, sad task of retrieving possessions that were no longer needed. Going through books and silverware, jeans and underwear and shoes, paintings and souvenirs, making those hopeless and meaningless decisions. What to give to charity, what to throw away, what to keep.

  I shut my eyes, again seeing the cabin.

  “Her poor parents,” Jess said, as if reading my mind. “Can you imagine?”

  “I don’t think they’re alive,” I said, remembering the family photo clenched in her hand.

  “The poor woman.”

  “Let’s keep going,” I said. “We have a lot to get through.”

  Other addresses came up frequently enough that we put them in a second pile. Several restaurants, a Starbucks and a wine bar, both near where she lived. I pictured her at the bar. Sitting alone, a glass in front of her, maybe with a laptop open. Probably having a second glass but not a third. We kept at it. Moment by moment, her life rewound. A fitness club. A yoga studio. Normal places for an energetic, successful woman in her midthirties. All the things people did and places they went when they were alive.

  In the third category went the addresses that came up less frequently but didn’t seem out of step with routine. Restaurants and bars, a spa at a fancy hotel, a few different apartment buildings that I assumed were addresses of friends. A location a dozen miles south of San Francisco, just off the Bay, that turned out to be a rental car facility serving the San Francisco Airport. A Kaiser hos
pital, an AMC movie theater, a nail salon. A nonprofit in San Francisco called Tiananmen Lives, various stores and parking garages, and a handful of random addresses that looked to be street parking.

  The stack of papers in front of us steadily diminished.

  There was a fourth category: addresses that actually meant something. Potential hiding places. Except we got through the printouts without putting anything there. “Now what?” Jess sounded exhausted.

  I pushed my chair back from the counter and rubbed my eyes. “Lunch.”

  We ate at a little Mediterranean place up the block from the bookstore, taking gyro wraps and fries and salads on plastic trays to a table. “Here I was thinking you were running around being exciting,” Jess said. “If this is how you spend your spare time, I’ll stick with the bookstore. I have more fun reading Gogol than Google.” She took a bite of her gyro, holding it carefully so that the juice leaked downward into the foil wrapper. “Also, what if she walked somewhere? She could have ditched the car entirely.”

  “You don’t spend enough time in the South Bay,” I said. “Nobody ditches their car. They can’t. It’s worse than LA.”

  “How can anything be worse than LA?”

  “LA has a subway.”

  “Okay, fine. But how do you look for something if you don’t know what it is? You said the fourth pile would be the key. So how do you find something that isn’t there?”

  “It’s there,” I said. “We just have to know how to look.”

  “You mean where to look?”

  I wiped my chin with a napkin and finished chewing. “When I was a kid my family went to a Seder every year, hosted by a Russian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Berkovich. They managed to get out of the USSR in the seventies and wound up in Bolinas. They always said they wanted the exact opposite of Moscow, and Bolinas was the closest they could find.”

  “Soviets—so did they teach you spycraft or something?”

  I laughed. “God, no. They would have made terrible spies. He was a painter and she taught piano. But the Seder. Everything is ritual, the whole meal. Early on, Mr. Berkovich would break a piece of matzah in half. He’d wrap half in a napkin and then sneak away from the table to hide it. The afikoman, it’s called. Then later on, us kids would try to find it, and we’d get a reward if we did.”

  Jess interjected. “I grew up in SoCal. I’ve probably been to more Seders than Moses. But this applies how…?”

  “The rule was that it always had to be hidden in plain sight. Just a matter of looking.”

  “Let me guess who found it each year.”

  I smiled. “Not trying to boast. But if Karen Li hid something, it’s there for us to see.”

  “Talk about a needle in a haystack.”

  I thought about Mr. Berkovich. “It’s not, though. What we’re looking for was hidden by a person. A needle in a haystack is a random occurrence. But finding something hidden is the opposite of random. Because people hide things. And people can’t hide things randomly no matter how hard they try. There’s always a decision process. Choosing, eliminating, choosing. It’s like coming up with an e-mail password. The security experts always say make it totally random, just a jumble of letters and numbers. But no one actually listens. We’re people. Coming up with something truly random is unnatural. Finding something is just about figuring out how the person doing the hiding thinks.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We narrow it down. One: it has to be a place where she could physically hide something. In Mendocino she told me it wasn’t with her.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “Two: she was scared. She had to assume they would check the obvious places. Three: she had to be able to get to it again. So, accessible on relatively short notice. Not halfway across the world or in a time-locked bank vault. And four: she had to make sure that someone else wouldn’t accidentally find it in the meantime.”

  Jess thought. “Maybe that Starbucks or the wine bar she liked?”

  “Possible, but I don’t think so. Food service is tricky. Too many staff members constantly doing inventory, cleaning, moving around. I don’t see how a customer could hide something and be confident a busboy or barista wouldn’t run into it.”

  “The movie theater, maybe? Under a seat or something?”

  “That’s how we should be thinking, but not a movie theater. She wouldn’t chance it. Again, too easy for a janitor or employee to accidentally come across it.”

  “What if she got on a plane and stashed it thousands of miles away? She went to the airport, remember?”

  “She needed it to be accessible.”

  “How about a friend’s house? Someone she trusted.”

  “She was too scared. She wouldn’t have risked getting someone she cared about wrapped up with Care4.”

  “But how do you hide—” Jess pushed her tray away in excitement. “The hotel and spa that she went to. A spa is perfect. Lockers, cubbyholes, privacy, all kinds of hiding places. And single gender. Harder for the Care4 goons to go in looking.”

  I thought about the idea. “Where was it again?”

  “The Ritz-Carlton, in Half Moon Bay. We went once for our anniversary. I think I’m still paying off that credit card.”

  I thought about Buster. He’d laugh. I was going to the Ritz after all.

  30

  Like many coastal towns, at some point Half Moon Bay had traded fishing for tourism as its major source of revenue. The hotel was a massive stone and beige palace on manicured green grounds and golf courses, set high above the ocean. It looked like a place where Henry James would have happily placed one of his European scenes. We were in Jess’s old black BMW convertible. It was a stick shift and she drove aggressively, top down, the heater running to compensate for the foggy coastal air.

  After parking, we followed signs to the spa. “Do you have an appointment?” asked one of the receptionists, a pretty college-age girl with a perfect smile and a perfect manicure.

  I shook my head. “Referred by a friend. We were hoping to talk to her masseuse.”

  “We love our referrals!” said the receptionist. “Do you know the name?”

  “No. But my friend was Karen Li. L-I.”

  She typed into her system. “She had Kaitlyn.” She clicked around more. “Kaitlyn is totally booked today, but can I schedule you with someone else? Everyone’s amazing.”

  “Is it okay if we just meet her quickly?”

  “I think she’s in between appointments right now. Let me check.”

  We waited. I flipped through a home decoration magazine showing perfect outdoor firepits and pools lined with geometric rows of beach chairs, wishing that waiting rooms like this one could be bothered to stock a few paperbacks along with the magazines. Then again, with smartphones everywhere, even finding a Reader’s Digest wasn’t guaranteed anymore.

  The receptionist came out with a tall blond woman who smiled, revealing whitened teeth. “Hey guys! I’m Kaitlyn.”

  We introduced ourselves. “Our friend loved you,” Jess said. “Karen Li.”

  “Pretty Asian woman, late thirties, looked younger,” I added.

  Kaitlyn laughed. “You totally described about half my clients.”

  I gave a more detailed description and her face pinched in thought. “I thiiiink I remember her.” She paused, trying to be helpful. “I think she did the Pearlescence Facial. Maybe? Anyway, I gotta run!”

  She vanished into the door she’d come out of. “Now what?” Jess asked.

  “We’re here. Might as well look around. They must sell day passes.”

  In the locker room, we changed into comfortable bathrobes and slippers at one of the lockers. It was a weekday afternoon and the locker room was almost empty. Soft music played and the lighting was dim and generous. The lockers were stacks of empty cubes set against the walls. Multiple signs warned that they were emptied nightly. No way something was hidden in one of them long term. The rest of the room would have been equally difficult to hide somet
hing in. The counters were sterile, the only objects hair dryers and jars of Q-tips and facial lotion. Even as I watched, a cleaner came through to empty the used towel bin. I thought briefly of the laundry room but wrote it off. The laundry room probably handled the hotel as well as the spa. Cheaper than running two separate facilities. Meaning it would be going twenty-four hours a day, staffed constantly, maids in and out. Whatever we were looking for wouldn’t be there.

  We found our way through an opaque glass door to a smaller room with an emerald hot tub set into the floor. Candles glowed from crannies in the walls and Eastern instrumental music played. I hit a button on the wall and the jets came to life. The water frothed appealingly. “Might as well,” I said. “We paid for the damn day passes.”

  We left our bathrobes on a teak bench and got in. The bubbling water felt good. I leaned back into a jet, feeling it pulse against the center of my back. “Maybe she put it somewhere in the hotel,” Jess suggested. “But I don’t know where we’d start.”

  I shook my head, thinking of the laundry room. “Too many employees everywhere, cleaning. It’s impossible to hide anything because the whole point is to make each person feel like they’re the first ones to ever arrive.”

  Jess sank lower in the water until the bottom of her chin brushed the surface. “How are we supposed to find this thing if we literally don’t have a clue?”

  I thought again about those childhood afikoman searches through the Berkoviches’ house. “We’re looking, but we’re not seeing. Spas, movie theaters, restaurants—those are just places she went. They don’t mean anything. We could spend a year looking that way. Like digging random holes in the ground to see if we strike oil.”

  Jess blew an exasperated mouthful of water. “Sorry, I don’t get it. We thought about everywhere she went—everywhere she drove, at least. This is why I run a bookstore and don’t solve cold cases, Nikki. I thought my spa idea was genius. After that I got nothing.”

  “It wasn’t a bad idea,” I said. Jess had been right about the Seder. I had always been the one to find the carefully folded napkin every year. It drove the older boys crazy. They couldn’t figure out why a little girl always beat them to it. It wasn’t coincidence. While they ran around straining adolescent muscles to lift up the couch or checking the sleeves of the record collection, I’d stood thinking. Not looking for hiding places that I’d choose, but places that Mr. Berkovich would pick. That was the difference. Adding up both the physical and nonphysical characteristics I had observed in him over the years: a mischievous, playful side; fairly short; deliberate by nature; a bad knee that made him less likely to bend low; very proud of his creativity. Adding up those things told me a lot about where he might hide something. Everything there to see, so long as I looked. Each year the hiding places got tougher as Mr. Berkovich became more determined to stump me.