Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “I don’t want Frigg’s operating system anywhere near our computers,” Stu repeated, “and I don’t want somebody’s leased computer equipment contaminating ours, either.”

  Heaving himself off the chair, Stu started for the door.

  “One more question,” Ali said.

  “What?” he asked, pausing in mid-stride.

  “Supposing you rebooted Frigg long enough to get the passcode information from her and access the money. What would you do with her then?”

  “Take her back off-line,” Stuart answered at once. “The very fact that she was devious enough to lay groundwork that would force me to reactivate her shows that she’s capable of strategic thinking. As for Owen Hansen’s money? It wasn’t Frigg’s to give away in the first place, which means it sure as hell isn’t mine. Once I lay hands on it, I’m sending it straight back where it belongs, most likely to Owen’s mother.”

  Knowing Stuart was honest as the day is long, Ali didn’t find that at all surprising.

  “That settles it, then,” Ali told him. “Our new computer space is pretty much ready to go, pending our final inspections. I say we lease whatever equipment we need to get the job done, set it up in our new lab, and put this matter behind us.”

  “It’s going to cost a fortune,” Stu grumbled.

  “I know,” Ali grinned at him, “but you’re worth it. Besides, once you have all that money at your disposal, feel free to reimburse us. In the meantime, see what you can do about finding the equipment.”

  “All right,” Stu conceded, “but I’m telling you here and now that I don’t like using anyone else’s computers.”

  As far as Ali was concerned, that wasn’t exactly news from the front.

  12

  With her mother’s remains properly packaged and duly shipped, Graciella walked to work. It was late October. Heavy rains would come in November, but for right now it was relatively dry and fine and not too hot, either. She walked with a definite spring in her step because she knew that the future was about to open up for her.

  Early the previous Thursday morning, when she had entered her mother’s bedroom and ostensibly found her dead, Graciella had delivered a bravura performance. She had forced herself to walk the very thin line between being too upset and being upset enough. Because of her mother’s long-standing issues, Graciella already had the number of a local ambulance service loaded into her phone, and she had summoned the ambulance before dialing the police. That way, when the cops arrived, one of the ambulance attendants opened the door to let them in while Graciella, still wearing her bathrobe, sat on the living room sofa, and wept.

  Everyone had been incredibly kind to her—from the neighbors in the building to the cops who questioned her about the incident. Had her mother been out of sorts? No, Graciella told them, not at all. Had she been upset about something? No, it had been a perfectly ordinary evening. They had watched television together—Graciella was able to reel off the names of all the programs—and then her mother had gone to bed. Had there been any indication that she intended to do herself harm? No. Had she ever done something like this before? That question, posed by a homicide detective, was one that required a more complicated answer, because there were several attempted suicides lurking in Christina Miramar’s medical history, mixed in with her various bouts of treatment for ongoing addiction problems.

  Graciella was in the process of answering when Arturo Salazar showed up. She had called the office earlier to explain her absence, but the last thing she had expected was for Arturo to take it upon himself to turn up uninvited at her condo. Because officers were still coming and going, the front door was open. Without bothering to knock, Arturo rushed into the room. Ignoring the detective, he hurried over to Graciella and smothered her in an all-encompassing hug.

  “You poor thing,” he murmured sympathetically, “you poor, poor thing. Tell me what we can do to help.”

  What would have helped immensely was for him to get the hell out, but Graciella could hardly say that to his face. The cops, the detective, the neighbors were all there watching. They had been invited to enter. She regarded Arturo’s presence in her home as an invasion, and the intimacy of his hug was a violation.

  “There’s really nothing you can do,” Graciella said, keeping her voice civil. “I was just telling Detective Vargas here about my mother’s rather complicated medical history.”

  Obligingly, Detective Vargas pulled out a business card and passed it to Arturo. Looking at the card, Arturo’s eyes widened.

  “Homicide?” he asked. “Surely you don’t think Graciella here had anything to do with her mother’s passing!”

  “It’s considered an unnatural death, so of course we’re investigating,” the detective replied mildly. “At this point no one is making accusations of any kind.”

  Arturo drew himself up and glared at the detective. “Graciella Miramar has been an outstanding employee at my firm for more than ten years now. For all the time I’ve known her, she has single-handedly cared for her mother with utmost devotion and without a word of complaint. To my knowledge, she has always put her mother’s needs before her own.”

  It was grating to have to sit there and listen to him sing her praises. Here Arturo was, supposedly championing Graciella’s cause, when he had merely used this as an excuse to barge into her home and nose around.

  “Thank you, Arturo,” she managed.

  He gave her one of his smarmiest smiles along with a lingering pat on her shoulder. “So as I said earlier, Graciella, if there’s anything at all we can do to help, please let me know. And be sure to inform us about scheduling for the funeral service so I can tell the girls. I’m sure most if not all of them will want to attend. In the meantime, you have a week of bereavement leave coming. If you need longer than that, let me know.”

  “I will,” she said. “Of course.”

  “You’re lucky to have such a caring boss,” Detective Vargas said after Arturo took his leave.

  “You have no idea,” Graciella had told him, “no idea at all.”

  For years she had used her mother as an excuse to dodge any number of social engagements. Now, feigning overwhelming grief, she still held herself apart. She had left her father with the impression that the church had declined to hold Christina’s funeral based on a determination of suicide. In fact, her mother’s former priest from Our Lady of Guadalupe had come by and offered to perform a funeral mass. The people from the mortuary had also suggested that a small memorial gathering would be appropriate. Graciella had nixed both. She wasn’t the least bit interested in mingling with strangers and near-strangers and hearing their rote messages of sympathy for her loss, especially when what she was feeling was freedom and relief rather than sorrow.

  As Graciella neared the office that Friday morning, she slowed her pace. By the time she stepped inside the door, she had erased all evidence of her earlier sunny mood. Her coworkers greeted her circumspectly, treating her with the gentleness and gravity one was expected to observe around someone grieving the recent loss of a beloved parent. On Graciella’s part, it was important to maintain just the right balance between sadness and appreciation as she acknowledged each expression of sympathy. It was a relief for Graciella to finally be able to tuck into her cubicle and focus her attention on her computer’s screen and keyboard. The morning was half gone when Arturo walked up behind her and placed a possessive hand on her shoulder.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “Would you care to go to lunch?”

  She wanted to shrug away from him and move her shoulder out of reach, but she didn’t. She knew where this was going, and it had nothing to do with his expressing condolences over the loss of her mother. No doubt he thought that, in her weakened condition, Graciella would finally be ripe for conquest. He probably expected that after lunch and a couple of drinks, they’d finish the afternoon by spending a few hours in the little boutique hotel that, according to the other girls in the office, he frequented when it was time for one of
his workday assignations. From the grapevine Graciella had learned that the hotel was nice. Arturo? Not so much.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been away for a whole week, and I’ve got a lot of finishing up to do on the Owen Hansen account.”

  Arturo shook his head. “It’s a shame to lose that piece of business. Señor Hansen was one of our best customers.”

  “Yes,” Graciella agreed, “and that’s why I’m doing my best to hang on to as much of his book of business as possible.”

  “By all means, go ahead, then,” Arturo muttered, walking away. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”

  Watching him go, Graciella wasn’t surprised to see him stop off at Bianca Navarro’s desk on his way out. Bianca was the newest of the new hires. She was young, good-looking, and incredibly naive. Graciella suspected that she was probably dumb enough to fall for his claims—the age-old story about how his wife was cheating on him, but that he couldn’t ask for a divorce on account of the kids. Yeah, right! When Arturo and Bianca left the office together, Graciella turned back to her computer screen.

  Unfortunately, despite the fact that more than a week had passed since she sent the letter, there was no response from Stuart Ramey. Nothing. Nada. That was disappointing, and there was still no word from the surveillance guy about when he’d have the bugs up and running. All she could do for now was wait.

  And so she went to work on her computer, answering the e-mails and sorting through transactions that had necessarily been handled by others in her absence. As she worked through the remainder of the morning and on into the afternoon, Graciella had an unobstructed view of Arturo’s empty office and of Bianca’s unoccupied cubicle.

  With each hour that passed, Graciella quietly let her fury come to a full boil. The man was a pig—a despicable pig, who had bullied his way into her home and laid his filthy hands on her. And now he had turned his unwelcome attentions on poor Bianca. That, Graciella decided, was completely unacceptable.

  Over the years, she had negotiated transactions for her father, transferring funds made in payment for hits in which people’s lives had been rubbed out. But all those had been from a distance. Standing silently in the doorway while her mother breathed her last was the first time Graciella had been directly involved in a homicide, and to her surprise, she had liked it. She had enjoyed the challenge of the delicate dance with the investigators afterward—of playing the grieving daughter role when she’d been anything but grief-stricken. If anything, the whole experience had given her an exhilarating sense of empowerment.

  That afternoon Graciella shut down her work computer and clocked out of the office right at quitting time. After walking home, she went straight to the safe, and pulled out the other computer—the private one.

  In the world of the dark Web, the transaction didn’t amount to much—only a Bitcoin or two—but she trusted that the results would be entirely satisfactory.

  13

  Once Stuart left her office, Ali returned to making B.’s emergency travel arrangements. She soon learned that the situation on the ground in the UK continued to worsen. She had managed to book seats on a flight on WOW air from Reykjavík to San Francisco, but making the Reykjavík connection was a bust. The first-tier jet service operators she would have preferred to use were already fully booked. After another hour of searching, she finally located an off-brand jet charter service called Jet-To-Go operating out of an FBO at Biggin Hill Airport in Bromley.

  Dan Arnold, the guy who answered the phone, sounded like an older gentleman, one who was more likely to be a pilot than a receptionist, leaving Ali to wonder if Jet-To-Go was anything more than a one-man operation. With the words “fly by night” ringing in her head, she quickly checked the company’s safety record, which turned out to be fine. With that information in hand she called B. with her latest proposal.

  “I just want to be home,” B. assured her wearily. “But wait, did you say they fly a Falcon 50EX? One of those could make it from the UK to Sedona in two hops. Did you ask him about flying direct?”

  Ali bit her lip. He was whining again. She had been so focused on getting the transatlantic piece of the puzzle ticketed that she hadn’t even considered using a private jet for the entire trip.

  “Look,” B. urged. “It’s only money. Ask him. If he can do it, great—damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. As for your worry about him being an older guy? If that turns out to be the case, it also means that he’s got a lot of takeoffs and landings under his belt. He’ll be every bit as concerned about safety as I am. As for that WOW flight? If you just made the reservation, you should be able to cancel it within twenty-four hours with no problem.”

  Right, Ali thought with annoyance. Easy for you to say. You haven’t spent the last several hours on the phone trying to make that damned reservation.

  “Okay,” Ali said aloud.

  “Anything else going on?” B. asked.

  At that very moment she didn’t feel much like telling him about Stu Ramey’s being bossed around by a dead man’s artificial intelligence. That story was far too complicated for a shorthand version over the phone. “Not so as you’d notice,” Ali said shortly. “I’ll get back to you on the plane situation.”

  She redialed Dan Arnold’s number. “My husband wants to know if your aircraft can fly all the way to the US.” She didn’t bother asking how much the flight would cost because she was pretty sure she already knew, and if B. was willing to pay the price, she sure as hell was!

  “Whereabouts in the US, miss?” Dan Arnold asked.

  “Sedona.”

  “Oh, you mean that little place outside of Phoenix where the airport is up on a hill over town?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I know where it is, but we can’t land there. Sedona’s runway is too short for us to take off at that altitude,” Arnold said. “Had us some good customers who owned a second home there, up until the husband died, may he rest in peace. When they flew with us, we usually put down at Flagstaff. We’d fly into Bangor, Maine, clear customs and refuel there, and then fly the rest of the way in one hop.”

  “But could you do a flight like that tomorrow?” Ali asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, we most certainly could. Where’s your husband now, and what time tomorrow morning can you have him here?”

  “He’s in London,” Ali answered. “At Claridge’s.”

  “That’s around an hour from here, depending on traffic. What I’ll need from you is his Amex number, his passport number, his weight, and a Global Entry number if he’s got one. Once I have all that, you tell me what time he wants to leave. We’ll be fueled up and ready to go when he gets here. And we’ll have plenty of food and drink on board so he won’t starve to death between here and there.”

  “I’ll tell him to be there at ten,” she said.

  “Okay,” Arnold told her. “That’ll put us in Bangor around one. It’ll take the better part of an hour to clear customs and refuel, which means we should be on the ground in Flagstaff sometime between three and four in the afternoon. Will someone be on hand to pick him up?”

  “That depends,” a disgruntled Ali told him.

  “On what?”

  “On how I’m feeling tomorrow,” Ali answered. “The way things stand right this minute, he may just need to rent a car.”

  After providing all the necessary information, Ali got back on the phone to WOW, where she sat on hold again, waiting to cancel the San Francisco flight. She was still waiting when Camille Lee popped her head into the room.

  Cami, as she preferred to be called, was a twenty-something relatively recent computer science graduate who had been hired by High Noon primarily to serve as Stu’s assistant. Her parents, both of them dyed-in-the-wool academics, heartily disapproved of their daughter’s signing on to work for a cyber security company, and they especially didn’t like the idea that she was working in a lab with Stuart Ramey, someone they saw as an unschooled oaf and little more than a glorified hacker.

 
; From Cami’s point of view, she had lucked into a place that was far enough away from her California-based parents to be out from under their day-to-day supervision. At High Noon, she had found work that suited both her talents and her mind-set. And rather than being put off by Stu’s limited social skills, she simply navigated around them. She had learned to take his idiosyncrasies in stride and often served as his intermediary to the rest of the world.

  “Hey,” Cami said, catching a glimpse of Ali’s gloomy face. “Is something wrong?”

  “Men,” Ali answered.

  “There’s a whole lot of that going around about now,” Cami replied with a grin. “If you think it’s bad where you’re sitting, you should see what it’s like out in the lab. It’s been a morning-long roller-coaster ride. First Stu was worried sick about driving the Bronco, but he came back from that so psyched that he was almost walking on air. He immediately called the DMV to check on his driver’s test. Because there’d been a cancellation, he managed to snag an appointment for late this morning. Then, the mail shows up and he goes racing out of the lab like his hair is on fire, only to come back grumbling about how much he hates using secondhand computers. Why would he need used computers? Don’t we have a whole batch of brand-new CPUs on order?”

  “Those are currently on back order,” Ali replied. “The delayed delivery wasn’t that big a deal, but it turns out that now we need some additional computing capacity immediately if not sooner. That’s why I asked Stu to look into leasing some short-term equipment.”

  Cami nodded. “Which explains it, then,” she said.

  “Explains what?”

  “Why Stu was in such a snit,” Cami answered. “As far as he’s concerned, ‘leased’ and ‘used’ are both dirty words. But still, what’s the hurry? I thought the plan was to have the new equipment up and running in time for Lance’s graduation and before he’s ready to come here full-time.”