“Why not just have the FBI here waiting? Why take the risk of meeting us alone?”
Glancing back at them, I nodded toward Joseph. “You can thank him for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Joseph is cautious,” I said. “In his line of work, if you’re not, you generally don’t hit thirty. I couldn’t take the chance that he’d sense a trap or see the FBI guys and get spooked. I needed you to show up tonight, but I also needed him to be here. That part was important.”
“Why?” This time it was Joseph asking. He sounded genuinely puzzled. “You must know what I’m going to do to you.”
“You tried to kill my brother,” I answered frankly. “And you’re just as responsible for Karen Li’s death as Gunn or Oliver or Victor. You think you get to just walk away?”
“But I will walk away,” said Joseph. “Right after I’m done with you. And before I get on a plane I’m going to do two things. I’m going to grab your junkie brother a second time, and then I’m going to tie him up in that goddamn bookstore of yours, soak him in gasoline, and burn it into ashes.”
I ignored him. If he was thinking about the future that was his problem. I was focused on what was right in front of me. Specifically, a glint of metal on the ground.
“Found them.”
I picked up the keychain and held it up obediently. The flashlight in my hand had momentarily angled toward them. The direction of the light made it difficult for Joseph and Oliver to see me, while making it correspondingly easier for me to see them. I took a step toward them, hands held wide and unthreatening, and sprayed Joseph full in the face with the pepper spray clipped to my keychain. Then I flung myself down and to my left, to the outside of his right shoulder. His sling pinned his right arm to his body. He’d have to twist his whole body around to aim.
Joseph yelled in pain and flung a hand across his face even as two bullets cracked out toward where I’d been standing a moment before. Then I was exactly where he hadn’t wanted me: within arm’s range.
He was trying to rub his eyes, turn, and shoot all at the same time. I came up with my left hand in a twisting uppercut and hit him as hard as I could. Not in the face or body or groin or any of the places I usually would have aimed for. I hit Joseph just under the right shoulder in the thickness of his bandages. The gunshot wound was only a few days old. He cried out in agony and the fingers of his right hand loosened. His gun fell to the ground.
We both dove for it. I felt a big hand against my face and bit hard into the fleshy part of the palm. Joseph yelped and kneed me in the stomach while relocating his bitten hand to my hair. I got my own hand into his crotch and twisted, hard. He made an unappetizing sound and then drove his good elbow into my forehead. I felt skin split, got two fingers around his earlobe, and did my best to annex that piece of territory. He got another knee into my stomach and a finger hooked into my nostril. My teeth found their way back into his hand for the second time. It was that kind of brawl. Not pretty. No rules. Not any kind of event that Kentucky ladies would have donned flowered hats to see.
I got one hand on the gun and felt Joseph’s hand close over my own. He was much stronger than I was, even one-handed. He got the gun angled up and then toward me. I head-butted him, but in my prone position I couldn’t get my weight behind it. I felt the barrel of the gun nudge into my body and tried frantically to push it away, but he was too strong. He had me. We both knew it. The barrel of the gun poked into my stomach and I jerked my body around and under his in a desperate attempt to get the barrel off me.
There was a sharp report and the pungent smell of gunpowder filled my nostrils.
Something was wrong.
There was no pain.
It took me a moment to realize the gunshot had come from above. Joseph’s hand fell from the gun. His body went limp and eased away from mine. Oliver stood over us. That last movement of mine had put Joseph between me and the bullet Oliver had fired down at us. Oliver’s hands were shaking and his face was covered in drying blood, but he kept his gun pointed down at me.
“Roll away from the gun,” he said. “Slowly.”
I rolled. Once, then again, blinking my eyes to try to clear the blood running down my forehead from Joseph’s elbow. “You just shot Joseph. I’ll assume it was an accident.”
Oliver was breathing raggedly, his eyes fierce and determined. “He was expendable.”
“You say that about a lot of people.”
“A lot of people are.”
I was still curled into a protective ball. My hand brushed at my boot as his eyes wandered to Joseph’s body, then retreated as he looked back to me. “How are you going to explain this mess?” I wanted to know. “Are you forgetting the camera? I wasn’t kidding about that. A copy will go to the FBI. They’ll know you were here tonight.”
Oliver didn’t seem overly worried. “You made things awkward, yes, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Anyway, this isn’t recording, now, and”—he nodded at Joseph’s body—“I’m starting to learn that dead people make excellent scapegoats. As far as the fallout, I have friends who understand how crucial it is that we be allowed to go live unimpeded. Starting tomorrow, our network will provide U.S. intelligence services an invaluable window into the world. You think that will go unappreciated? Even the FBI backs off with national security at stake.” He ran a hand across his nose, which was still trickling blood. “This is as vulnerable as we’ll ever be. After tomorrow we’ll never be threatened like this again.”
“There was one part that really had me stuck,” I said.
He sounded only mildly curious. “Oh yeah? What was that?”
“You.”
“Me? What about me?”
“Who you are, Oliver—or Martin Gilman, I should say.”
He was startled. “How do you know my name?”
“Missing a Clipper card?”
His eyes narrowed, remembering the ferry ride. “That was you? You resorted to that kind of cheap pickpocketing? I’d think that was beneath you.”
“I wanted your name. Even in Silicon Valley, low-tech solutions still work.” Each Clipper card was marked with an individual number so it could be reloaded electronically from a personal account. Finding Oliver’s personal information had taken Charles Miller less time than it took me to finish a cup of coffee.
He shrugged. “Fine. So you have my name. So what?”
“I couldn’t figure out why you were mixed up in everything if you were just a salaried employee at Care4. It didn’t make sense to take the kind of chances you took. Look at you. You’re more committed than Gunn ever was, and he was the damn CEO. I guessed at all kinds of things: blackmail, maybe you two were jockeying for power and working at cross-purposes, but none of it quite added up.”
“And what did you conclude?”
“I kept coming back to the only answer that worked. Care4 wasn’t actually Gunn’s company at all, was it?”
Oliver looked at me without answering for a long moment. “What do you mean?” he finally asked.
“On paper, Gregg Gunn seemed like the classic Valley success story—Stanford dropout, gets a taste of finance on Wall Street, gets into trouble, fresh beginning in the start-up world. But there was something wrong with that narrative that I kept coming back to. He didn’t seem to be very good at any of it. He didn’t drop out; he flunked out for bad grades. In New York he almost ended up in jail for insider trading. I’m sure the fines eclipsed any profit he made. And every company he started out here lost money and folded. Three of them, I think it was.”
Oliver’s face stayed neutral. “Interesting assessment.”
“Interesting? Sure. What I found interesting was that I’m not the only one who made it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You did.” I said. “Years ago. I arrived at a conclusion recently that you’d reached long before we ever met. Gunn was broke. He’d lost money for investors every time at bat. No one was about to trust him with more money. Care4 was your idea, no
t his. But you were already thinking ahead. Maybe you just didn’t like the spotlight or found it distracting. Maybe you wanted someone who could be the face of the company, and, if necessary, a lightning rod, while you quietly ran things from behind. Even someone you could send all over the globe on your behalf—or, for that matter, someone you could send to hire a private detective while you played both sides, buddying up in case she found out too much. Assigning yourself to a boring division like the security department was clever. You could plausibly know what was going on without attracting interest. And Gunn was perfect for you. A charismatic, extroverted stooge. Someone greedy enough to skirt the law, smart enough to act the part, and dumb or shortsighted enough to go along with everything you wanted without asking too many questions.”
“And how exactly am I supposed to have met this perfect person, at a bus stop?”
“No.” I thought of the transcript Charles Miller had given me on the Berkeley fishing pier. “Gregg Gunn was your freshman-year roommate at Stanford. Then he flunked out. Maybe you stayed in touch, maybe not. But later on—long after you graduated and decided to found Care4—you had the perfect person for your purposes. You tracked down your old down-on-his-luck college roommate and made him an irresistible offer. To do what he’d always wanted: lead a successful company.”
Martin Gilman stared at me, then nodded slowly. “In retrospect, we could have made our lives much easier by finding someone less good at her job,” he said. “Live and learn, I suppose. A shame I have to kill you. If I didn’t, I’d hire you for real.” There was a beeping sound from his pocket. His eyes flicked down as he used one hand to reach into his pocket and silence his cell phone.
This time my hand found its way all the way down to my boot.
“Anyhow,” he said, “we don’t want to be out here all night.” He held his pistol again with both hands. “Care4 is a company with limitless potential, Nikki. We’ve been cultivating many important relationships, not just around the world but also in D.C. Next time something like this happens, we’ll be untouchable.”
The tiny .32 Derringer wasn’t good for more than a few feet of accuracy, but the man in front of me wasn’t more than a few feet away. I brought my hands up fast and fired upward. There was a small crack, barely more than a cap gun would make. The bullet hit him in the throat and within that fractional space of time his life expectancy changed from about another forty years to another forty seconds. He dropped his gun and sat down on the ground, holding his throat with both hands as it leaked blood. The Derringer was a two-shot gun. I could have shot him again but I didn’t. It wasn’t that I wanted to prolong things. I was just tired of shooting people. I could have been fine never seeing another gun. I was overcome by one of those sluggish, unhappy sensations where the entire universe seems pointless.
The man who had called himself Oliver was trying to say something, but he couldn’t talk because of his throat. He made unpleasant sounds as he shifted from a seated position to supine, slowly, as though in a reclining dentist chair.
It took him a little while to figure out the whole dying thing, but he figured it out eventually.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear sirens. Like many parts of Oakland, the Port was blanketed with a network of ShotSpotter microphones, designed to pick up gunshots and relay the location to nearby police. If gunshots occurred anywhere outdoors, there was always a decent chance police would soon be headed for the noise.
I was standing in between two bodies, one shot dead with a gun registered to me.
No matter what might happen later on, there was no way that I’d be allowed to just walk away.
I reached into Martin Gilman’s pocket and took out the iPhone that had distracted him so fatally. I used his limp right thumb against the fingerprint sensor to unlock the screen and dialed from memory. “It’s me,” I said.
Mr. Jade’s voice was tight with adrenaline. “Nikki? We’re at Gunn’s house, we found his body. Where are you?”
“I’m at the next stop.”
“Where?”
“I have the documents Karen Li was trying to get you, but I need your help. The Care4 servers need to be shut down from their offices tonight. Tomorrow will be too late.”
He didn’t sound particularly fazed. “It won’t be the first time I woke up a judge. If you have the evidence to prove why we have to get in there, we’ll handle that part.”
“One other thing. Some people tried to stop me tonight.”
“Tried?” He heard my voice and understood. “I see. Tried. Are you okay?” Worry laced his tone. Unsentimentally, I wondered if it was for me, or because he risked losing the same evidence twice. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured it was a bit of both.
“Oakland’s finest are about to show up. I need you to be here to explain the situation. Make sure they understand that I was working with you. I have a very comfortable queen-size mattress at home. Memory foam, coil-free, all that good stuff. I’m used to it. I like sleeping on it. In fact, I don’t much feel like spending the night anywhere else.”
He got my point. “Give me the address. We’ll leave now.”
I gave him the address.
“Oh, and Nikki?”
About to hang up, I kept the phone to my ear. “Yeah?”
“If we were wrong about everything, like you said, then what was actually happening? Were people in danger?”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Just not the people we thought. When you get here I’ll explain everything, but hurry. Until you reach the Care4 offices, they’re still not safe.”
I put the phone down, walked over to a row of shipping containers, and sat. I slumped against the ridged metal, hearing the sirens getting louder. I was tired enough that I could have fallen asleep leaning against broken glass. My face hurt. My body hurt. Every part of me hurt. I could see blue lights beyond the gate. I watched the lights get closer.
WEEK FIVE
47
“My goodness, Nikki. The last time I saw you, you looked bad. Now you look … worse.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Your reticence can make you really extraordinarily difficult to work with. I mean that with equal measures of frustration and affection.”
“Everyone likes a challenge.”
“Challenge, yes—I suppose that’s one way to put it. You’re through with these sessions, you know. This is our last one. I submit my papers to the court and you’re all set. But you’re free to keep coming back, voluntarily.”
“Choices.”
“Choices, exactly.”
“Can I ask you something before I go?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think we’re defined by what we do?”
“Defined?”
“Like, do you think doing bad things makes a person bad?”
“I’m not sure how to answer that. I think it must depend on what is done, and why. Maybe a question that a spiritual or religious adviser might answer better. For what it’s worth, Nikki, you strike me as many things, but bad isn’t one of them.”
“But you don’t know me.”
“I don’t know what you’ve done, and I doubt I ever will. That’s true, but maybe if I did I still couldn’t answer your question.”
“I’ve always been scared of being, you know, like a Becky Sharp out of Vanity Fair. Someone who can think, take care of herself, tough, resourceful, but inside … nothing. Just her own well-being. Sometimes I think that would be worse than—worse than a lot of things.”
“Nikki, you’ve never come out and said as much directly, but I get the distinct impression that you have no problem putting yourself in danger to save others. Out of all the things for you to worry about, I wouldn’t worry about a lack of empathy.”
“Maybe. But I still do.”
“The ones who don’t worry are the ones who should worry, I’d say. I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep next week’s slot open for you. Same day, same time. Just in case.”
>
“Sure. Just in case.”
“All right, then, I’ll see you next week. Maybe.”
“Maybe it is.”
48
The cemetery was in Monterey. I parked my motorcycle by the gated entrance, near a small office. Inside, I found a groundskeeper in jeans and work boots reading a newspaper with the day’s date, November 2. As he put it down on his desk and got up, I saw bold headlines on the front page: a tech CEO dead, a middle-of-the-night FBI raid, chaos. A second, smaller headline announced that a San Francisco law firm had also been implicated. There was an inset picture of Silas Johnson. He didn’t look so cocky as the last time I’d seen him, at the hotel bar. Handcuffs had that effect on people.
Outside, the groundskeeper pointed me in the right direction and then returned to his newspaper. I strolled slowly along a paved path, feeling that odd juxtaposition of tranquility and despair that hung in the air at any cemetery. It was a cool, pleasant morning. The ground slanted down toward a dark-green lily pond and groups of large white geese marched with self-satisfied purpose among polished granite and marble. There was a playground across the street, the top of a yellow slide just visible, and happy children’s voices filtered lightly through the air.
I found her grave after a few minutes of searching. It was new enough that a headstone had not yet been put in and the rectangle of ground was still raw. There were numerous bunches of flowers, though, and someone had set a photograph of her on the ground, propped against a small pile of ocean-smoothed stones. I had my own bouquet that I placed carefully on the grass. I stood quietly in the sunshine for a few minutes and finally sat cross-legged facing the picture, not minding the dewy grass against my jeans. “We saved them, Karen,” I said out loud. “I’m sorry you can’t be here, I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to know you better, and most of all I’m sorry for letting them get to you—but we saved them.”
There was a simple stone bench nearby, within sight of the grave.
I sat there for a long time before I left.
Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Page 34