The Kill Clause

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “What did they find in the house?” Tim asked.

  “Maps, charts, diagrams, notebooks, pressure containers holding traces of what was later determined to be sarin gas, lab equipment consistent with the generation of chemical weaponry.”

  “Thrown out?”

  “All of it. The prosecutor tried to convict based on the eyewitness report and a few beakers later found in Lane’s vehicle, under a valid warrant. It wasn’t enough.”

  “Did he take the stand?” Ananberg asked.

  “No,” Rayner said.

  “Since the acquittal he’s received a number of death threats, so he’s gone underground,” Dumone said. “Some of his fringe buddies packed him off to a safe house.”

  “Then he’s probably on a ranch somewhere, barricaded behind a bunch of militia wackjobs,” Mitchell said. “Those boys don’t tend to be short on ammo.”

  “Endless civil claims are brewing, but since there’s no way to hold someone in custody on civil charges, there’s a lot of speculation Lane might just Osama bin Laden his ass off into a secret desert enclave.”

  “Oh, Lane’s planning to resurface. On his way out of town, he had this to offer the press.” Rayner aimed a remote control at the suspended TV, and the screen blinked to life. Wearing a starched button-up shirt and a sharply pressed pair of slacks, surrounded with a cadre of bodyguards, Lane addressed a pack of reporters on a browning lawn outside his house. He kept his hair military-short and precisely side-parted. Stubble curled from his sideburns, pronounced and patchy on his sallow cheeks, a lapse in his otherwise clean grooming.

  “Whoever committed that terrorist act against the government’s totalitarian socialistic agenda is a patriot and a hero,” Lane said. “I’d be proud to have released the sarin gas, because in doing so I would have been championing American freedom and sovereignty against a fascist citizen list—the same kind of list used by Hitler to carry out raids and round up citizens, the same kind of list that propelled him to power. The blood of those eighty-six federal workers will save countless lives and protect the American way of life. While I’m not saying I was or was not involved, I will say that such actions are not at odds with my mission as a citizen of this nation under God against the New World Order.”

  A reporter’s adrenaline-high voice cut in as Lane’s men pushed a path through the crowd toward an awaiting convoy of trucks at the curb. “Does that mean your mission will continue?”

  Lane paused, his jaw cocked. “If you’d like to know more, watch my interview Wednesday night on KCOM.”

  Rayner clicked off the TV.

  “He left out the fact that seventeen of those eighty-six ‘federal workers’ were children under the age of nine,” Tim said.

  Robert said, “If Motherfucker’s gone underground, at least the interview gives us a when and where we can find him.”

  “If the when and where aren’t security cover smoke,” Tim said.

  “For someone who claims to loathe the biased, leftist press, he does get his face time,” Dumone said.

  “Like most intelligent people seeking to change public policy or make a political statement, he’s a press whore,” Ananberg said. “Even if he wouldn’t admit it.”

  Rayner rested a hand on his chest and bowed his head, a self-deprecating grin touching his lips. “Guilty.”

  “Lane has already sold his book rights to Simon & Schuster for a quarter million dollars, and I believe several stations are vying for TV-movie-of-the-week rights,” Dumone said. “Thus the expert plug for his interview.”

  Robert grimaced. “The City of Angels.”

  “The money could provide Lane ulterior motive to allude to committing the crimes, even if he didn’t.” Ananberg’s voice lacked conviction, but Tim respected her for raising the point.

  She ceded under a barrage of facts and evidence.

  After several more hours of discussion, Ananberg led them through the case from arraignment to verdict. By the time they finished, the morning sun was creeping across the hardwood floor of the foyer.

  The vote went much more smoothly this time around.

  16

  THE STORK BOBBED in the driver’s seat of the overheated Chevy rental van, peering across at the KCOM building at Roxbury and Wilshire. He’d toned down his shirt for the low-profile drive-by, but Tim still wasn’t pleased about having his distinctive mug pointed out the window. The Stork fidgeted continuously, shifting in the seat, polishing his watch face, one knuckle or another endlessly assisting his glasses on their Sisyphean climb up the barely existent bridge of his nose. He was an incessant mouth-breather, and he smelled like stale potato chips. Tim contemplated how he’d come to be here with this bald, lisping man prone to peeling sunburns and too-bright shirts.

  They stared at the fifteen-story building, rising up in planes of concrete and glass to shade a bustling stretch of Beverly Hills. A window washer hung suspended from cables about a hundred feet off the ground, swaying and wiping, his silhouette standing out from the late-morning sun’s brilliant reflection off the panes. An enormous front window on the ground floor housed a panoply of plasma-screen televisions broadcasting KCOM’s current offering, a talk show exhibiting couches, ferns, and women of various ethnic backgrounds sharing a common unpleasantly vigorous demeanor. Since the TVs ran on closed circuit, showing the sets even during commercial breaks, they drew a small crowd of voyeurs and Rodeo Drive tourists hungering for table scraps of behind-the-scenes showbiz.

  “If the new metal detectors at the entrance are any indication,” the Stork said, “they’re gearing up to turn this place into a high-tech fun-land by the Wednesday interview. Entry control points, IR sensors, metal-detector wands. The whole ten yards.”

  “Nine yards.”

  “Yes, well.” He shifted his weight deliberately from one side to the other, as if breaking wind. “Heck of a lotta security.”

  “News orgs are all about confidentiality and scoop. They’re notoriously difficult to penetrate. CNN used to come in with stories ahead of Army intel.”

  “What’s CNN?” the Stork asked.

  Tim studied him to see if he was joking. “A news station.”

  “I see. I can help you more if you tell me what you’re planning here.”

  “I appreciate that, but I don’t need more help. I just need you all to do your respective jobs.”

  “Okeydokey.”

  As they pulled past the building, Tim armed some sweat off his forehead. “Listen…Stork—”

  “No origin.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name has no origin. At least none that’s exciting. Everyone asks, everyone wants a story, but there isn’t one. One day, third or fourth grade, a kid on the playground remarked that I looked like a stork. Perhaps he intended it to be hurtful, but I don’t believe I look like a stork—I mean, truly resemble a stork—so I took it as neutral. The name stuck. That’s it.”

  “That’s not what I was going to ask.”

  “Oh.” The Stork strummed the padded wheel with the heels of his hands. “Fine, then. That. Okay, not that it’s any of your business, but it’s called Stickler’s syndrome.” His voice slipped into a drone as he launched into a rehearsed speech. “A connective-tissue disorder that affects the tissue surrounding the bones, heart, eyes, and ears. Among other things it can cause nearsightedness, astigmatism, cataracts, glaucoma, hearing loss, deafness, vertebrae abnormality, hunchback, flattening of the nasal bridge, palate abnormalities, valve prolapse, and vicious arthritis. As you can see, I have a relatively mild case. I can’t type, I can’t shuffle cards, and I’m nearsighted to twenty over four hundred, but I could be curled in a wheelchair deaf and blind, so I try not to bitch. Does that satiate your curiosity, Mr. Rackley?”

  “Actually,” Tim said, “I was just going to ask if you could turn down the heat.”

  The Stork made a soft popping sound with his mouth. He reached over and rotated the dial. “Righto.”

  They finished their turn around
the block and came up on the building again. Tim tracked a bike courier at the crosswalk, heading for the shipping and receiving dock at the northeast corner of the ground floor. She had a KCOM decal on her helmet and a Cheesecake Factory bag in the bike’s front basket.

  “Slow down,” Tim said.

  The courier biked up the ramp and flashed an ID card at an obese security guard with a clipboard, who lazily wanded her down with a metal detector, then tugged open the roll-up gate. Heading back into the dock interior, she slotted her front wheel into a bike rack by the service elevator, yanked the bike seat free of the frame, and tucked it protectively under an arm. Just before the guard slid the rolling gate down, Tim saw the courier punch a code into a numeric keypad beside the elevator. An extended metal frame shielded the pad from view; her hand disappeared to the wrist by the time her fingers reached the keys.

  The Stork eased the van over to the curb in front of a pharmacy and medical-supplies store that displayed a wheelchair and a bevy of aluminum walkers in the front window. They sat watching the closed, corrugated dock gate and the security officer rolling something he’d dug out from his nose between his thumb and index finger.

  “Do you think the bike-courier cards are strictly ID, or do they double-function as access-control cards for movement within the interior?”

  “They’d be strictly ID, I’d bet,” the Stork said. “Access-control cards are usually only issued to high-clearance people, not mailroom gofers. Corporations are very strict about them. If they’re reported missing, they’re immediately deactivated.”

  “Fine,” Tim said. “Forget the access-control cards. If I gave you a prototype of a regular ID, could you manufacture a fake one?”

  The Stork snorted and flopped his hand in a dismissive wave. “I engineered a microphone that could fit in a pen cap and pick up a whisper at a hundred yards. I think I can deal with duplicating an overglorified library card.”

  Tim indicated the dock gate with a slight tilt of his head. “The bike rack’s just past the checkpoint, near the service elevator.”

  “Probably a Beverly Hills zoning law—they don’t want the sidewalks cluttered up.” The Stork popped a pill into his mouth and swallowed it effortlessly without water. “If you want to get a pistol through, smuggle in a dismantled Glock. They’re mostly plastic. Only the barrel has enough ping to set off a detector—make a key chain out of it and stuff the rest down your shorts. The firing pin doesn’t have enough metal to get picked up.” He studied Tim curiously, awaiting confirmation.

  Instead Tim said, “We need to get a better angle on that keypad.”

  The Stork pointed at the narrow street running parallel to the north edge of the building. “A window on that side would look directly in on it.”

  “Give a drive by.”

  The Stork pulled out and eased down the street. There was indeed a window, but it was largely blocked by a decrepit truck.

  Tim barely turned his head. “Keep moving, keep moving.”

  The Stork drove down the block and pulled over again.

  “The truck’s in the way, and it’s a narrow sidewalk. The only way we could see in would be to press up against the glass, which would be more than conspicuous.”

  The Stork said, “Then we wait for the truck to move.”

  “It’s a parking-permit street—no meters in need of refreshing—and the truck has a permit dangling from the rearview. There are reservoirs of leaves collected around the front wheels from the last rain four nights ago. I’d bet that’s the resting place for someone’s old rig.”

  “I’ll get it moved.”

  “How?”

  The Stork grinned. “I just will.”

  “Even if you get that truck moved and we get binocs on the window, there’s no clear sight line to the keypad. It’ll be blocked by the courier’s body when he’s punching in the code.”

  The Stork’s mouth shifted and clamped. “Let me work on that.”

  “Also work on getting into the security phone lines—tap in to however many phone junctions it takes. I’d like you to monitor all developments.” Tim had already asked Rayner to nose around his media contacts to get a read on the security politics, but the more information sources he had, the better.

  “How many minutes to pickup?”

  Tim glanced at his G-Shock. “Seven.”

  The Stork dug an eyedropper out of his pocket, removed his immense glasses, and applied the drops. When he put his glasses back on, still blinking against the liquid, his eyes looked like those of an agitated turtle. Tim felt the pull of empathy, followed quickly by an urge for comradeship, for unity in their common cause.

  “It hit you hard?” Tim asked. “When your mother was killed?”

  The Stork shrugged. “I’ve learned not to expect much from life. If you never expect things to go right, you’re less upset when they go wrong.”

  “Then why are you doing this? The Commission?”

  “Honestly? For the money. A nice little salary on top of my FBI pension. That may sound awful to you, but I don’t have anything in this life but money. I’ve never had many friends. I’ve never played baseball. I’ve never had sex with a woman. I’m just an outsider, looking in at this other life I see in movies and advertisements. After a while I just checked out. I don’t watch TV anymore, any of that stuff. I read. Mostly older stuff. Now and then I’ll rent black-and-white movies when I can’t sleep. I have trouble sleeping. My breathing…” He gestured to the knot of scar tissue beneath his nose, then folded his hands peacefully in his lap. “The zeitgeist alarms me because it reminds me of all the things I’m missing.”

  He removed his glasses again and rubbed his eyes. The lenses were concave, thick at the edges. “There’s a reasonable chance I may be blind someday. I don’t mind having extra money to buy books, to travel around and see things. Different oceans. Arctic snow. I took a helicopter ride around the Grand Canyon last May, and it was divine.” He tapped his chest gently with his fingertips. “It’s all more than I should do, given my heart condition, but it’s my one pleasure.” The glasses slid back on again, and his turtle eyes blinked at Tim. “I like money. It doesn’t make me a bad person.”

  “No, I don’t think it does.”

  They sat awkwardly for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Rackley. I don’t have much occasion to talk to people, so when I start…” He cleared his throat moistly. “Perhaps we should get moving.”

  Tim reached into the backseat and removed two magnetic logos the size of garbage-can lids. He stepped out and stuck one on either side of the Chevy, where they proclaimed PERFECT TINT WINDOW WASHING.

  The Stork pulled back down the narrow street, past the loading dock, and looped around the front of the building. Tim’s watch blinked from 12:59 to 1:00 precisely as Robert stepped out the maintenance door on the west side, rags hanging from the pockets of his overalls, baseball cap askew.

  It took him fifteen steps to reach the van—already Tim had the side door rolling open—and he ducked in as the Stork pulled away. They rode in silence for several blocks. The Stork stopped the car on a deserted street, just behind Tim’s parked Beemer.

  Robert coughed into a fist, then spit out the window. He tapped a cigarette out of a crumpled pack he pulled from his shirt pocket. He snapped open the lid of a Zippo with an American-flag decal. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes,” the Stork said.

  Robert lit up and blew a gust of smoke up at the driver’s seat. It wreathed the head of the displeased Stork like a laurel. The Stork tried to hold in a cough, but it hiccupped out of him.

  Tim looped his arm around the headrest so he was facing Robert. “The fourth and tenth floors are empty, right?”

  “Yeah, they are. The dot-coms that used to rent them went the way of the dodo.”

  “Are there still infrared-strobe motion detectors in place?”

  “Both floors are rife with ’em—SafetyMan casings. They’re off during the day because of the occasional
maintenance guy or mover, but I’d imagine they go hot after five, six o’clock.”

  “Tomorrow, before we throw you back up there as a window washer, we’ll figure out a way to slide you past security—as a maintenance guy, maybe—to breach the interior. I’ll need those IR strobes made bad-operating. Stork?”

  “I’ve dealt with SafetyMan before,” the Stork said. “I’ll size some mirror fragments to fit the casings. Robert can get ’em in tomorrow during working hours when the strobes are deactivated. When they reactivate at night, the mirrors’ll bounce the IR beam back on itself and you’ll be able to do the lindy hop down the hall.”

  “The lindy hop?”

  “It’s a lively swing dance, Mr. Rackley. Named after Charles Lindbergh.”

  “Right. Thanks for your help.” Tim’s eyes flicked to the door, in case the Stork didn’t catch the hint.

  The Stork tossed Robert a tiny, flat camera, which he slid into his T-shirt pocket, and then the Stork hopped out, climbed into a second rental van parked at the curb, and motored off.

  In the back Robert was changing out of his overalls, throwing on a pair of jeans. “Weird dude,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the departing van. “He’s a solid operator, but you don’t exactly want to drink beers with the guy.”

  “He’s all right,” Tim said. “A little soft, but he’s had a tough time, I’d guess.”

  Robert stuck a pencil behind his ear and slid a clipboard into a copy of Newsweek. He bent over to relace his sneakers, the Lee insignia popping out on its leather tag in the back of his fitted true-blue jeans. “So why’d you send him packing? Who cares if he overhears?”

  “Give me the intel dump.”

  Robert stared at him, irritated, then inhaled sharply so the cigarette’s cherry flared. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t have to answer your questions.”

  “Look, I’ve done everything you asked, like a good little soldier. Now I’m not giving you shit until you tell me what the plan is.”