Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “There were five of them plus Cami and me,” Stu answered, “so seven in all.”

  “We’ll have to make do with fewer people than that,” B. said. “And we’ll need to do this under the cover of darkness when nosy neighbors aren’t up and about. Call when you get as close as Cordes Junction, Stu. I don’t know how long it’ll be before I hit the jet lag wall, but I’m hoping that by the time you get to the village, we’ll have the porch light on and the doors open. With any kind of luck, we’ll also have the Internet connection up and running.”

  Ali gave a resigned but heartfelt sigh. “It’s a long drive, you two. If you need to stop and rest, do it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Stu told her. “That’s the whole idea—arrive alive and with all of those blades still intact.”

  27

  “What kind of backdoor operation?” Cami asked when the phone call ended. Because they worked in such close proximity she, more than anyone else at High Noon, knew about Stu’s informal posse of nerdy guys who networked together from time to time, getting things done by bending a few rules and regulations along the way.

  “Give me some space and let me work on this for a minute. I want to send a photo to Jeff.”

  He went back to the surveillance videos and sent copies of all of them to both B. and Ali, then he went looking for an image that gave the clearest view of the faux building inspector. That one, a full-on shot of the man standing at the front counter and signing the visitor’s log, was the one Stu selected and then enhanced. Once he had an image with what he regarded as acceptable resolution, he e-mailed it to a friend of his, Jeff Swanson, with the caption: Anyone you know?

  “Who’s Jeff?” Cami asked.

  “Jeff Swanson,” Stu replied. “He works for the Arizona Department of Transportation.”

  “And?” Cami prompted.

  “In an effort to cut down on identity theft, ADOT added a facial recognition component into their driver’s license procedures. Like yesterday. When I passed the test, they took my photo, but the license they gave me is only temporary. I won’t get a permanent one until after my photo goes through the state’s facial rec program. If any duplicates show up, the permanent license isn’t issued. Jeff’s in charge of the program,” Stu added, “and he owes me one.”

  “That’ll only work if the bad guy is licensed in the state of Arizona,” Cami objected.

  “True,” Stu agreed, “but it’s a place to start.”

  With no reply from Jeff instantly forthcoming, Stu leaned over against the passenger door. Soon, despite his earlier bravado with Ali about making the trip home, his lack of sleep from the night before caught up with him. He dozed off—more than dozed—and when he woke up, the 101 had become the 210 and they were driving through Pasadena.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean to drop off like that.”

  “That was more than a drop-off,” Cami replied. “That was more like a drop dead. You’ve been out cold for an hour and a half, and while you’ve been sawing logs, I’ve been thinking.”

  “About?”

  “About leaving those bugs in place. Presumably, even though the bad guy knows that we’re aware of the intrusion, he’s probably still monitoring whatever’s happening on our end. What would happen if we used the bugs to launch a misinformation campaign?”

  “What kind of misinformation?”

  “There’s an article that showed up in Shooting Illustrated a couple of months ago.”

  Stu rolled his eyes. Fortunately for him Cami was too preoccupied with driving to zero in on the gesture.

  Shortly after Cami had come to work for High Noon, she’d been caught up in an unfortunate situation where she’d been hijacked off a highway and held prisoner in a Phoenix area house. She’d used her Krav Maga martial arts training to good effect in getting out of that mess. Since then, however, she’d become even more serious about self-defense. She had obtained a Ruger LCR, manufactured in neighboring Prescott, as well as a lifetime membership in the NRA. Shooting Illustrated came to her every month as part of her membership.

  Stuart had never been comfortable around guns. The only weapon he had ever owned had been the Swiss Army knife he’d inherited from his grandfather. Stu had made more than one snide comment about Cami leaving on the dot of five o’clock every afternoon, either rushing to the gym for Krav Maga or else racing off to the shooting range. At the moment, however, even someone with Stuart’s limited social skills knew better than to veer into making a snide comment.

  “What kind of article?”

  “They called it the ‘Bad Guy’s Blueprint’ or maybe the ‘Bad Guy’s Playbook’—something like that.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That when bad guys go looking for victims, there are five steps. Predators go looking for victims. They stalk their victims, often choosing ones who are distracted in some way and not paying attention to their surroundings. Once they select their victim and decide whether or not they’re worth the trouble, they have to close in to a strike position so they can execute the attack.”

  “What does any of this have to do with the price of peanuts?”

  “That phony building inspector who got into High Noon under false pretenses is not a good guy. Whether he’s working on his own behalf or on someone else’s, he came there looking for someone or something, presumably you and Frigg.”

  “So he’s currently at the stalking stage?”

  “Right,” Cami replied, “but in order to launch an actual attack, the predator will have to get close, so let’s set a trap that will bring him to us in a controlled environment where we’re expecting him and he’s expecting us to be . . . well . . . distracted; not paying attention.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “By going into the office, walking into the lab, and making a big deal about what’s going to happen next.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you’re going to sell Frigg, of course,” Cami said with a triumphant grin. “If Frigg is the prize here, learning that you intend to auction her off to the highest bidder should be enough to bring the bad guys crawling out from under their rocks. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what will.”

  28

  Once off the phone, B. immediately logged on to his laptop, rerunning his own set of scans to verify that there were no signs of intrusions on any of the office computers. When the files containing the surveillance videos arrived, he scrolled through them, inside the building and out. B. and Ali finally sat down to their long-delayed homecoming dinner, but by then Alonso’s perfect meatloaf was dead cold, and the mood was decidedly different from what either of them had expected. B. was still livid that High Noon’s office complex had been targeted, but he deferred to Cami and Stu’s idea of leaving the planted listening devices in place.

  “I’d like to get a look at one of them, though.”

  “Why?” Ali asked.

  “If we can locate a serial number, we might be able to track the end user through the manufacturer. For right now, though, our first priority has to be getting the AI up and running.”

  When B. and Ali had joined forces, they had chosen Ali’s house in Sedona proper over B.’s place in the Village of Oak Creek. At the time there had been a serious downturn in the real estate market. Rather than sell at a loss, they had opted to keep the home and rent it out until things improved. When the most recent tenants had moved out just prior to B.’s departure on this latest trip, they had put off making a final decision about selling or not until after his return. Right now delaying that decision had turned out to be a good thing.

  “The house is totally empty at the moment,” Ali said. “If we’re going to expect people to work there for the next little while, we’ll need tables and chairs at least, and probably some tools, too. The furniture for the new lab was delivered last week. Since you were out of town, it’s all crammed into your office at the moment. Why don’t I drive over to Cottonwood and bring some of it back to this s
ide?”

  “If you’re going, I’m going,” B. insisted. “I’ll know which tools to bring along, and you won’t. If Alonso is up to it, maybe we can ask him to drive over as well. That way there will be three of us to load the furniture, and it’ll fit better in the back of the F-150 than it will in the back of your Cayenne.”

  All of that was pretty much inarguable. “I’ll ask,” she said. Ali’s text found Alonso in his quarters, the Airstream trailer that had once belonged to Leland Brooks.

  Alonso was happy to help out, and so, for the second time that day, Ali traveled from Sedona to Cottonwood, this time with her driving and B. in the passenger seat, while Alonso followed in the pickup. During the thirty-minute trip, B. managed to log on and work his way through the steps necessary to re-up the Internet connection at the house in the village, switching it over from a residential application to a business one. Ali was just turning in to the business park when he finally finished the long-winded call.

  “Whew!” he said. “We should be up and running. Fortunately for us, the tenants who just left had upgraded to the latest router only a few months ago, so we don’t have to go looking around for one of those.”

  Once at the business park, they hurried up to High Noon’s entrance where Ali keyed in the codes that opened the shutters and turned off the security alarm.

  “Okay,” she said, propping the door open. “Once we’re inside, we don’t say a word. If the bug has a video component, the bad guys will see what we’re doing, but as long as we’re not talking, they won’t know why. I can tell you from long experience that the Stuart Ramey army travels on its stomach. If we don’t have plenty of coffee, sodas, and snacks available, we’ll end up with an insurrection on our hands.”

  She was on her third trip back and forth from the Cayenne to the break room when her eye fell on the intercom buzzer next to the door—the one the faux building inspector had used to summon Shirley in order to gain access to the building. Ali had seen the outdoor surveillance video of him standing there, pressing the button. It hadn’t looked to her as though he was wearing gloves.

  Moments later, she was inside, rummaging through one of Shirley’s file drawers, the one labeled MAILING SUPPLIES. Armed with a strip of clear packing tape, she went back outside and pressed the sticky side against the button. She was removing the tape as B. came out the door, lugging a toolbox.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Collecting a fingerprint,” she said, “but now I need a way to carry it without messing it up.”

  In the end, using a second piece of packing tape, she fastened the tape, sticky side up, to the outside of an empty soda can before placing the can in the Cayenne’s cup holder.

  “Do you think you’ll to be able to talk Dave Holman into running that print?” B. asked.

  “I’m pretty sure I can,” Ali told him. “After all, he and I go back a long way.”

  “Are you trying to make me jealous?” B. asked.

  “Nope,” Ali said. “Just trying to figure out a way to catch Bad Boy Barris.”

  On the trip back to Sedona, jet lag finally caught up with B. in a big way. He dozed and snored in the passenger seat, while Ali—behind the wheel—drove and worried. Between reactivating a renegade AI and dealing with whoever had planted the bugs, it seemed as though High Noon Enterprises was every bit as much at risk as it had been when Owen Hansen had been alive and on the loose.

  We managed to dodge a bullet that time around, Ali told herself grimly. Let’s hope we can do it this time, too.

  29

  When Cami pulled in to a gas station in Beaumont, California, it was nine thirty at night. Two major traffic tie-ups along the way, one on the 210 and another at the 210/I-10 interchange, had turned what should have been a four-hour trip into a five-hour ordeal. By the time they finished filling the tank, the GPS was estimating their arrival time in the Village of Oak Creek as 4:22 a.m.

  “I’m bushed,” Cami announced. “That ETA doesn’t take stopping by the airport to pick up my car into consideration, so either we pack it in here and find hotel rooms for the night, or you take over driving for a while.”

  “Me?” Stu asked, sounding alarmed. “But I thought Ali said . . .”

  “I know what Ali said, but she isn’t here,” Cami told him. “We are, and the situation on the ground has changed. The state of Arizona says you can drive, and so do I. How soon do you want to be home and putting the Frigg jigsaw puzzle back together?”

  “As soon as possible,” he said.

  “Right,” Cami said, handing him the keys. “In that case, you drive for a while and I’ll sleep.”

  Filled with misgivings, Stuart climbed into the cab and fastened the seat belt. He had always believed that driving a car was forever beyond the scope of his limited capabilities, yet here he was behind the wheel of an actual truck. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine rumbled to life.

  “Don’t forget to release the emergency brake,” Cami reminded him.

  It took a long moment for him to locate the release, then he put the truck in gear and eased forward. Driving with all the recklessness of a little old lady on her way to church, Stuart crept out into traffic, but what he felt was absolute elation. He only wished that Grace Ramey, his grandmother and the woman who had raised and nurtured him, could have been there to see him do it.

  An hour later, past the last casino outpost of Indio and with Cami asleep in the passenger seat, Stu continued motoring eastward, with the U-Haul tucked in among a never-ending stream of eighteen-wheelers. He was not a man given to introspection, but being on I-10 and watching the miles go by, he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was traveling the same lonely stretch of highway where his parents had perished thirty-eight years earlier.

  As a child Stu had not been a good traveler. When one of his mother’s uncles passed away, his parents had decided to make a quick three-day drive over to L.A. for the funeral. The plan had been for them to go over on day one, attend the funeral on day two, and return on day three. Taking a cranky three-year-old along on that grueling trip had been out of the question, especially since Stu’s grandparents had been willing to look after him. His parents had been on their way back home when, somewhere on the Arizona segment of I-10, a drunk, driving westbound in the eastbound lanes of the freeway, had crashed into them head-on. Three people had died instantly as a result of the collision—the wrong-way driver and both of Stu’s parents.

  Stu had been far too young to remember any of this. What he knew about it had come to him in bits and pieces from things his grandmother mentioned to him over the years. No one else had been willing or able to step up and take on the task of raising the boy. As a consequence, what should have been a temporary three-day babysitting gig had turned into a permanent custody arrangement. Stu’s grandmother and his grandfather, Robert, Sr.—a disabled Korean War veteran—had scratched out a meager living, surviving on his grandfather’s minute disability checks and later Social Security while paying the rent on their shabby double-wide mobile home by serving as resident managers of a South Phoenix trailer park.

  While Stu was growing up, there had been no such thing as a “family car.” His grandfather, a double amputee, would have needed a specially modified vehicle in order to drive, but the cost factor of that had been beyond their limited means. As for his grandmother? Grace had never gotten a license. Never once had anyone suggested that Stu make a pilgrimage out to the lonely spot in the desert where his parents had lost their lives. Here and there along the highway, the truck’s headlights lit up small white crosses positioned along the shoulder of the road. Presumably each cross indicated a spot where some motorist had died.

  Seeing them made him wonder. Were there any crosses placed at the spot where his parents had died and, if not, should there be? And if he could somehow locate the exact site now, was it too late to install crosses even though Stu himself had no memory of either his parents or of their fatal accident? When
was being late with something like that too little too late?

  Cami stirred in her seat. “How are you doing?” she asked, straightening up.

  The question startled Stu out of his reverie, and he answered without really meaning to. “My parents died here,” he said.

  Cami sat up straighter and looked around. “Right here?” she demanded.

  Stu realized then that in all the time he and Cami had worked together, he had never mentioned a word to her about his grandparents or his parents. She knew about Stu’s long-ago friendship with Roger McGeary because High Noon had been involved in the investigation into Roger’s death, but Stu had kept the rest of his history—especially the parts about his dead parents and his caring grandparents—locked away in a tightly closed box.

  “Not right right here,” he corrected quickly. “Somewhere out here in the desert on I-10. I never knew exactly where it happened.”

  He told her the story then, spilling it out in a way the old Stuart Ramey never could have. He told her about growing up in a grim mobile home park with elderly and impoverished but loving grandparents as his caretakers and guardians. He told her about the years of being bullied in school, and how Roger’s arrival on the scene had offered him a lifeline. And finally, he told about the darkness and despair that had descended on him after Roger moved away, followed shortly thereafter by Grace’s death.

  “I was homeless for a long time after my grandmother died,” he admitted. “I was living in a shelter when B. found me and gave me my first job. I’ve been with him ever since.”

  “I never knew any of that,” Cami said quietly. “Thank you for telling me. A lot of things that didn’t make sense before do now. What were your parents’ names?”

  “Penelope and Robert S. Ramey, Jr.,” Stu answered. “His middle name was Stuart. I was named after him and my grandfather.”

  Stu had a lot of acquaintances out in the geek world, people with whom he connected by text and phone, but always with a device of some kind as an intermediary. He considered B. to be a friend, and Ali, too, he supposed. But in the silence that suddenly filled the truck, he realized with a shock that Cami, too, was now his friend.