Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  “How tall can they grow?”

  “Two hundred feet, easy.”

  “Two hundred feet?”

  “More,” he assured me. “It just depends on how long they’ve been standing.”

  “And they could hold a lot of weight? Like, if a real heavy metal coil was wrapped around the branches, from the bottom up.”

  “That wouldn’t be so much weight. But it wouldn’t matter, anyway. A tree like that, it could hold a few hundred pounds like it was nothing.”

  “That’s perfect, Franklin. I knew you’d be the one to ask.”

  “Mr. Spyros—”

  “You already gave me everything I needed,” I assured him.

  —

  Driving back, I remembered Franklin’s saying Marylou would be at home.

  Maybe that was just what he called his rented cottage, but I didn’t think so. Not anymore. When I finished designing my invasion plan, I’d need the both of them, anyway.

  —

  No matter how many ways I drew the diagram, it ended up the same—one chance was all I was going to get.

  Still, not all that difficult…if I’d had the time to scout the terrain, check on in-and-outs, watch for patrols. But the time just wasn’t there. I could do the math: Something was in this for Rhonda Jayne Johnson. Something more than a regular client, even a rich one.

  Okay, so what? I could get her to tell me, but I couldn’t just walk away with whatever she said, even if I believed every word. And if I made her dead, there’d be no more leaks to Benton, so he’d know something had gone wrong.

  That was the last thing I wanted. I didn’t want Benton worried; I wanted him relaxed. The more sure of himself he was, the less danger he’d be to Dolly.

  It all came down to the man in the log house. He’d founded Undercurrents a long time ago, built it from a little blog to the most trusted news source in the whole area. What would make him risk losing all his work had built?

  That last e-mail from Dolly to Undercurrents had been enough for him to call the whore, so he had to know she was interested in anything that came in on whatever Benton was planning. But maybe he didn’t know she was a whore. Had she told him a fairy tale about a potential scoop? One she wanted to do, all by herself? Her own investigation—maybe even big enough for a Pulitzer?

  No matter how anyone had sized her up, ambitious would be somewhere in their assessment.

  What could banish any journalistic doubts about Undercurrents better than achieving such recognition from an organization that had been so highly respected decades before the Internet ever existed?

  He couldn’t know she was leaking info to Benton—that would make her a traitor to his cause, and the stuff I got from the ghost showed that the CIF—I guess he’d see himself as “Editor-in-Chief”—wouldn’t hesitate to purge members of his collective.

  But I didn’t want him to do that. A compromised organization always has cracks where seeds can be planted. If I could just convince the boss that there really was a story about Benton, a big one, maybe he’d be willing to help me with the planting…provided he got to harvest the crop.

  —

  If I wanted Franklin to come along on this, I’d have to get past MaryLou.

  I wasn’t worried about that. She’d have her own reasons to want to be in on it, too—lots of them. I knew one of those was to make sure I didn’t get Franklin locked up, but that didn’t bother me—my invasion plan would put him miles away when I moved in.

  First, I had to modify some tools I had, and fabricate some others I didn’t. I already had a night-work outfit, right down to the pull-off soles on the boots I’d be wearing. They were two sizes bigger than my feet—the weights I’d pressure-woven into the exposed outer rim would make the tracks look uniform.

  Franklin would be walking behind me, so I added a thick backbone of fluorescent orange tape to my outfit. It wouldn’t actually fluoresce until it was exposed to a mid-spectrum blue light—all Franklin had to do was tap the button on the flashlight I gave him to follow me. MaryLou would be on the perimeter. As soon as Franklin started back, she’d use a mini-strobe to guide him. In squid-ink darkness, a man can see a candle point of light at a thousand yards.

  All that was probably overkill. It would be night, but not mineshaft-dark, and Franklin had a forester’s sense of direction—he could probably have retraced our steps with his eyes closed.

  The other tools were a necessity. I modified a woodsman’s ax to give it a much wider cutting edge on one side, honed it sharp, then welded some extra iron to the other side. Kind of like a giant version of my tomahawk. I wrapped the long handle with the same plastic sheathing that covers wires—the metal head of the ax might conduct some electricity, but it wouldn’t travel far.

  In Franklin’s hands, one swing would chop through anything covering the coaxial cable I knew had to be there…if I was right that the satellite receptor was as high off the ground as possible.

  No point thinking that way—I had to be right.

  The metal detector I built would guide us. Not the kind the treasure hunters used on beaches, or what the military used to detect land mines. This one used competing pulse waves to locate aboveground metal.

  I knew any cable had to enter the house somehow, and that cable would be underground. But if we used a regular detector, we’d have a long line to trace, and we’d get a lot of false positives. An invasion has to move from where you start to where you finish without hesitation.

  The pulse detector had its own disadvantages. A wrought-iron fence would confuse it. Even chain link would. But the back of that log house wasn’t fenced. If there was any metal sitting waist-high in those tall trees, finding it wouldn’t take more than a minute.

  I already had the camouflage netting we’d need to pull over the truck. And we knew there was room to stash it less than a kilometer from the house. For Franklin and MaryLou, covering that distance was nothing, even if they had to move pretty fast.

  The other tools I’d need, they didn’t need to know about.

  —

  “One more time,” I said.

  “We got it the last five times you went over it,” MaryLou snapped, showing her nerves a little.

  “That’s just Mr.…That’s just Dell’s way,” Franklin said, as calm as if all I needed him for was taking out an opposing lineman. Or two. “He always goes over everything. Over and over. I’ve seen him do it even with Dolly.”

  I could feel MaryLou stiffen, then relax back into the same athlete’s calm as Franklin’s.

  “Fire away,” she said, softly enough so I’d not miss her message. She didn’t much care what I was going to do. And she knew what I was capable of doing.

  “You know the drop spot. You pull the truck in, we off-load the bike and pull the camo netting over. You wait there. When Franklin comes back, you pull off the netting and go. If I’m not where you’ll be waiting inside two hours, just drive home.”

  “We could wait—”

  “Any more than two hours means the thing went sour,” I told them. “Dolly’s going to be spending the night at Mack and Bridgette’s, so she’s alibied solid.”

  What I didn’t tell them was the last message I’d left for the ghost:

  |>If nothing from me in next 48, destroy any connection. Then please send the message I stored to my wife @ address you already have. Wherever you go, my gratitude goes with you.<|

  The address he had was one Dolly had set up years ago. She didn’t like doing it, but she went along when I told her that it would be the last time she’d hear from me. It had never been used; it only existed for that one purpose.

  I can’t remember exactly what the message said. Not without feeling the sadness I knew would hit her the second she saw any e-mail flash at that address. But I know I told her that if I hadn’t shown how much I loved her in life, I’d find a way to do it from wherever I ended up.

  Dolly would erase the message, do a death-wipe on her hard drive before she pulled it free. T
hen she’d go down to my basement and grab the machine I used to communicate with the ghost. Both halves would go into the same canvas sack as the hard drive. Then the little sledgehammer would take care of the rest. The worthless tiny pieces would be dumped in the ocean. Not from shore—Dolly had a good pal whose husband was a fisherman, and she’d been out with them enough times so it wouldn’t be unusual for her to go again. Those boats cover a lot of ocean. The little plastic pieces would be scattered over fifty miles, coming and going.

  Everything else could just stay as it was. There’d be no reason for Dolly to report me missing—nothing unusual for me to be gone for months at a time, and there’d be no dead body to kick off an investigation.

  The law would need a warrant to search our house—Dolly’s house, they’d see when they checked the deed—and Swift’s threat to sue the cops for millions would probably be enough to make them forget the idea.

  I didn’t carry any life insurance. Every dime of aboveground money was in Dolly’s name. No motive.

  And Dolly had a lot of friends who wouldn’t like any intrusions into her life. Anyone who came around asking questions, they’d have a better chance of getting Rascal to talk.

  —

  “Ready?” I asked Franklin.

  “We’re both ready,” MaryLou answered. Not speaking for Franklin, but making sure I understood she was just as much a part of whatever was coming as her man was.

  Without saying another word, I jumped down from the truck and started moving. I could feel Franklin close behind—he wasn’t making much more noise than I was, and I wasn’t making any at all.

  Nothing clumsy about the big man’s movements. I didn’t know his IQ, but his kinetic intelligence was probably off the charts.

  You’ve got nothing to be grateful for, I remember thinking. Everybody used you, one way or another. But if La Légion ever found one such as you…We circled behind the house. No alarms went off that I could hear, and I knew that all those “home security” systems did was dial 911 when they were tripped, anyway. I couldn’t see the local cops—if they even had any—going to “silent approach” mode…not in those night-black woods.

  When we got to the highest trees, their tips were visible against the full moonlight, but none stood out—I couldn’t see the cable I needed to be there, even with the night-vision goggles.

  But the metal detector instantly scored a hit. I followed it until I was close enough to see the cable, standing stark against a tree trunk. Heavy-coiled stainless steel, it looked like.

  I motioned Franklin forward, risked a quick flash to show him what I’d found, then stepped out of his way.

  The big man came on fast. Even the rubber boots I’d told him to wear didn’t seem to slow him down. He hadn’t acted surprised when I’d said he’d need a pair of heavy rubber gloves, too.

  He stepped back, flexed his torso to make sure of his purchase, and swung the ax. The solid thunk! of the blade sinking into wood was all I needed—anything between that blade and the tree was severed beyond repair.

  I ripped the glow tape off the spine of my work outfit, and motioned for Franklin to return to the truck. He wouldn’t have the tape to guide him, but I wasn’t worried.

  Or maybe I just put it out of my mind—I’d need to concentrate all I had on the next task.

  —

  One full circle to be sure.

  The garage had room for three cars, but only one was there—an upscale sport-utility vehicle, maybe a Range Rover, in a dark shade of green. One light on in a side window, nothing else.

  Knocking on the door would wake the whole house, and I didn’t know who was in there.

  I could blitz the window—this far from the road, no one would hear a scream. But you only do that when you want to paralyze the target—when your task is death, the target’s panic would be your friend.

  Not my job, not that night. So I probed for vulnerability, confident that the latex would keep my fingerprints off anything I touched. The first two windows moved so easily that I figured they were never locked. But maybe never lubricated, either. Still, a slow, careful lift would be better than broken glass.

  More out of respect for my training than any real expectation, I gently turned the knob on the front door.

  It wasn’t locked.

  That paused me for a second, but it kind of fit with everything else I’d seen, so I pushed in. Very gently. All the goggles picked out of the darkness was furniture. Some kind of parlor, not a living room. I made my way in the direction of an electric light’s glow, following the maze down a side corridor.

  At the end of the corridor, a partially open door threw a slice of light into the hall. I could hear a keyboard clicking. Whoever was in there wasn’t watching TV—the clicking was almost frantic, as if they thought they could restore the cable connection if they tried hard enough.

  I put the goggles into a side pocket with a silent Velcro closure, ran my gloved fingers over my balaclava to make sure it was in place, breathed in through my nose, let it out. The crossed-mesh plate would alter any sound I made. Okay.

  I didn’t much like using such a heavy-caliber pistol, especially a semi-auto, but I couldn’t know what I’d be facing, and the Glock .40 with black-tip ammo would punch through pretty much anything at close range.

  My left shoulder opened the door. I stepped inside with the movement, pistol up. A woman with a severe haircut was seated, facing a computer screen bigger than most TVs, her back to me. She didn’t turn around—a combination of my silence and her concentration.

  “Don’t make any noise,” I said softly.

  She spasmed in her chair. Moved her hands to its arms and kept them there, as if to reassure me.

  “Please turn around,” I told her. “I just want to ask you a couple of questions, and then I’ll be gone. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  That last part isn’t what I’d usually say—there’s something about those words that terrifies most people. But I could sense the woman would take them at face value.

  She turned, not moving her hands from the chair’s arms. Her rust-colored hair was cut just as severely in front—bangs almost to her eyebrows making as sharp a line as her just-past-collar-length had from behind.

  “What do you want?” she asked, not raising her voice, projecting the calm people try for in high-stress situations. Not relaxed, just trying to use her body language and voice to tell me she wasn’t a threat.

  “Who else is here?”

  “Here?” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “Nobody else is here. This is my…home.”

  “Please be sure,” I said, raising the pistol just a couple of inches. “If I get surprised, you get dead.”

  “I am sure,” she said, just this side of indignant. “This is my house. Just mine. Nobody lives here except me.”

  “All right,” I said, keeping my voice level, telling her I accepted her answer. I believed she’d understood what I’d told her about surprises. She reminded me of someone who’d read a lot about what to do in certain situations, trying hard to follow a script she’d never really internalized.

  “Rhonda Jayne Johnson” is all I said.

  “What? You think I’m…?”

  “No. I know who she is. I know a lot more about her than her name. I don’t know your name, and I don’t want to know it. But I know something about Rhonda Jayne Johnson that you don’t. Something you need to know.”

  “What?” She wasn’t challenging me; whatever it was I had to say, she truly wanted to hear it.

  “She’s a traitor.”

  “A…traitor? Are you…? Are you some kind of government agent or…? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Undercurrents, that’s you, yes?”

  “That’s right,” she said, ready to defend her work against any opponent, but the pride in her voice was the tell. “You thought I’d be a man, is that it?”

  “I didn’t even have a guess,” I lied. “But whoever put that operation together wa
sn’t just skilled, they spent years and years investing in it. Not only money—although it had to have taken plenty of that—investing in its credibility. You’re the most reliable news source for the whole coast, the one people trust.”

  No response. So I poured a little more oil over the water I’d disturbed.

  “It’s not just that you don’t take advertising—and I bet you get offers all the time. It’s that you’re all actually reporters, not shills who print press releases. You investigate, you check out who’s doing what, and you could prove anything you put up online if anyone ever challenged it.”

  She didn’t move her hands, but her eyes sought mine, as if to examine my soul. Good luck with that. All she’d see would be the greenish contact lenses with black iris centers. Empty ones.

  “Rhonda Jayne Johnson works for you,” I went on. “Or with you, I guess you’d probably say, since your paper is supposedly run by a collective.

  “For all I know, that might even be true. Different people come and go, but not you, never you. You started this a long time ago.

  “I know two things about you: you’re a journalist that stepped in to fill a vacuum, and you knew that gaining the people’s trust would be a long, hard road to walk even before you started.

  “That’s a life investment, all that. So I figured if you knew a member of your collective was leaking info to outsiders—info like the identity of folks who use your system to tip you off—you wouldn’t let it slide. That would be against everything you stand for.

  “Every time a tip comes in, you check it out. Double-source and fact-check. All the old-school stuff. You’ve built so much, why would you risk your credibility by trusting anyone blind?

  “If people ever stop trusting that their tips will be kept confidential—off the record, or however you say it—you’re done. The way you have it set up now, everyone for miles around is working for Undercurrents, right? They feel safe. Secure. That’s what I came to tell you: everything you worked for, it’s all in danger now.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I know that Rhonda Jayne Johnson has a relationship with a hedge-fund guy. I don’t know what his game is, but it’s got to be about money. Making a monster score.”