by David Dun
Sam used his camera to scan the four-thousand-square-foot poolhouse annex, then swept up the hillside until he saw the boulders and palms on the far left. Monotonously he repeated the sweep, stopping every minute or so to look with his naked eye. It wasn’t enough to see the intruder; Sam had to capture his presence on film. That way the local police, who were at this point thoroughly buffaloed, could be convinced that they were looking for something more than one of Suzanne’s publicity stunts. Sam believed her. But even he was finding it taxing.
Normally he would farm out this sort of chase-’em-down job to someone like Shohei, or with a little more training from Shohei, perhaps his son, Bud. Usually his contracts were far more sophisticated than catching a clever stalker. But this fellow had so successfully eluded authorities and private detectives that Suzanne had finally persuaded Sam to solve her problem, paying his rather extraordinary fees.
More than anything else this stalker was patient, willing to wait weeks to get a single good photo. Last time, the final straw, he had photographed Suzanne painting her toenails in the bedroom. Carefully reviewing all the photos and the dates when they were apparently taken, Sam concluded that the man had a penchant for sneaking around the day before a full-moon night. Everything about this case was utterly bizarre. Sam knew they were dealing with a badly twisted mind, and it worried him.
He studied the buildings, the grounds, the pool, squinted, and did it again. Nothing.
The stalker seemed to have an uncanny way of knowing when to arrive. Suzanne, wanting to end it, thought the swim in the scanty suit, the day before a full moon, would make marvelous bait if the stalker had any means of observing it.
Sam had placed banks of infrared motion detectors and video cameras. Suzanne kept a dog, Grendel, making it seemingly impossible for a stranger to enter the grounds without triggering either a red blinking light on Sam’s control panel or a yapping dog alert.
But there was something Sam hadn’t figured out and he knew it. This guy had an edge that nobody understood.
Sam picked up the radio. “Bud, come back.” While he waited he made another sweep with the video.
Sam had hoped Bud would be drawn to a slightly more intellectual calling, but it was not to be. Bud liked the most literal side of fighting bad guys and there was no dissuading him. Close all their lives, Bud and Sam were inseparable. They both loved the daredevil stuff in their spare time and more often than not did it together.
Because he’d had longer to work at it, Sam was by most measures stronger than Bud, but at forty he was no longer faster. “Come back, Bud,” he spoke again into the microphone, slightly concerned. Nothing. Bud was normally back to him in three seconds. Maybe bad radio. Just then, Grendel the Doberman began an ugly bark in the dense garden behind the poolhouse.
“Bud, you out there? I need a comeback.”
A light turned red on Sam’s panel. Abruptly the dog went silent. Someone was in the garden. And the light indicated that someone was in the house. But that was impossible.
Suzanne swam, oblivious.
“Bud, you there?”
Damn.
Sam moved toward the door; time to get Suzanne out of the pool. Still nothing more from the dog. Before walking out the veranda door, he glanced back—no more lights were blinking on the control panel, so it was unlikely that whatever triggered the sensor was still in the house.
He slipped out the veranda door, holding the mike to the PA system.
“Suzanne,” he said.
She stopped swimming.
As if by magic, a man appeared, sitting on the roof of the poolhouse. He held a camera mounted on a crossbow. Sam swung the camcorder onto the pool-house roof and punched the police call button on the alarm pad. That done, he sprinted onto the veranda and down the six feet of steps.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” an amplified voice said.
Sam froze. The intruder was talking through the stereo system piped around the pool. If the gunman’s finger moved a fraction, Suzanne’s perfect body would be sliced with a four-bladed hunting bolt.
“Get out of the water, Suzanne,” the man said.
The intruder wore a mask, but at least two video cameras with separate feeds were capturing his image. They were also recording the voice unless he had somehow managed to disable the microphones.
Suzanne stopped at the edge of the pool, broadside to the intruder.
“Out now,” the man barked.
Suzanne didn’t move.
“Ten seconds and you’re a dead goddess. I suggest you move.”
Suzanne looked at Sam. He nodded. He needed time. Where was Bud?
“Take off the suit,” the man said. No doubt he was clicking pictures as he spoke. Suzanne didn’t move. “I said take it off.”
She looked at Sam. He nodded again, his eyes trying to pick out Bud. Suzanne’s shaking hands reached behind her to untie her top. As she moved her hands and turned to the side, Bud came flying over the peak of the poolhouse roof and sent his body like a missile at the back of the intruder. The man’s neck snapped with such a pop that Sam heard it from several yards away. The man rolled down the roof, hit the concrete, and moved in ugly spasms. Suzanne screamed and ran, trying for the short way around the pool to the house, thereby actually moving toward the poolhouse and the quivering body.
Sam drew his .357 magnum and walked forward, his eyes never leaving the man on the ground. Suzanne began yelling crazy, hysterical screams all over again; a second man stood in the poolhouse door, just ten feet from her, with a pistol leveled at her chest.
“Nobody move,” the man said, “except you.” He spoke to Suzanne. “Come over here to Papa.” like the first man, he had a dark plastic mask hiding his face.
Suzanne just shook.
Grabbing her around the neck, the man dragged Suzanne back toward the poolhouse where Bud still stood on the roof, at least twenty feet away.
“Put down your guns and come down here or I blow her brains out.”
Sam’s mind was whirling. What stalker would risk this? And how could there be two men? Something was dead wrong. Whatever the case, if the guy was a sexual psychopath, Suzanne was likely dead if he got her alone—anywhere. If he was only pretending to be a sex nut, anything was possible.
Sam started walking, trying to will Bud to ignore the gunman and retreat over the roof to strike again.
Instead, Bud dropped from the poolhouse roof to the patio.
That was wrong, son.
“Stop there,” the stalker said to Bud.
Thirty feet from Sam the intruder had a chokehold on Suzanne and his gun to her head. He began walking Suzanne the last few feet to the poolhouse. Sam couldn’t let that happen. Bud was closer but could do nothing. For a second the intruder released Suzanne to open the poolhouse door. Suzanne started to bolt, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. Bud vaulted a patio table toward the pair, and the gunman fired, hitting Bud square in the chest. A second shot fired from the hip caught Bud in the head.
Before Sam’s eyes his son thrashed and shook. Somehow the gunman’s first shot at Sam missed.
Sam leaped to the side behind a garden boulder. Bullets spat against the stone.
The sounds of Bud’s shaky breath all but paralyzed him. A sorrow so deep that it took power from his legs displaced his rage; he couldn’t turn the emotional corner. Sam stared at the ground, knowing that the maniac was dragging Suzanne to some insane torture. He forced himself to move, to peek around the boulder at his convulsing son.
The door to the poolhouse was now closed. Sam sprinted recklessly to his boy. There was a thumb-sized bloody hole above his right eye. He propped Bud’s head in his hand and devoured the bloody face with his eyes. For Sam there was no face like this in all the world and never would be again. For the briefest moment there was a flicker of recognition in Bud’s eyes; then he was gone.
With nothing more than grief and duty in his heart, Sam marched to the poolhouse door. The large workout area
was empty and undisturbed. Out the back door Sam saw nothing. All he could think was that his initial suspicion had been correct: These guys knew something he didn’t. They must have had a way into the compound. If they didn’t glide on a parasail, maybe there was an underground passage. Suzanne had not mentioned tunnels when asked directly about them, but this property had been in use for years. Just yesterday he had learned that somewhere in the immediate area of the estate, there had been a silver mine.
The poolhouse had a large mechanical room. Once it had stored coal for a 1930s-style furnace. He would start there.
Sam ran down the hall past the showers and into the large game room. To the right he remembered one door. He found two. The first opened into a large storage closet. Nothing inside. The second led to the mechanical room, whose ancient concrete floor, uneven and tilted in some areas, held a cast-iron cover Sam didn’t recall seeing.
Careless.
He pointed the .357 at the cover and lifted it clear. Nothing but a four-foot-deep hole. Jumping down, he looked around at a big earthen pit blackened with coal remnants.
The chamber was bounded on four corners with old concrete stub walls. Disgusted, he climbed out, thinking he’d better search the whole building fast. As he made for the door a swatch of black fiber caught his eye. Clothing. It had been trapped under a concrete chunk that was part of the fractured floor. The cement block wouldn’t budge when he used his fingers. He went to the room’s workbench, pulled down a pry bar, and tried again.
It came up. Beneath the wooden frame on which the jagged piece of concrete had rested was a black hole, a tunnel. Returning to the workbench, Sam found a light, shined it down inside.
Jesus.
He estimated a ten-foot drop; a ladder hung in place. These guys had done a lot of work.
First Sam hung into the shaft upside down with light and pistol. It had the smell of dead air, fetid with the cycle of living and dying. On the floor of the shaft lay fresh loose earth from their recent excavation under the poolhouse. Although the shaft went in two directions, all the footprints came and went away from the direction of the swimming pool and toward the nearest property boundary. His eye followed the footprints to a bend in the shaft some forty feet from the hole.
He turned and climbed down the ladder in the conventional manner. Obviously he was descending into one of the old silver mine tunnels. There wasn’t time to be cautious. Once on the floor of the tunnel, he ran with the tracks.
Sam had almost reached the bend when he heard the sounds of a struggle. He turned off his light and slowed.
“Don’t make me ruin your face.”
Suzanne’s assailant was standing at the base of another ladder. She was on her knees naked in front of him.
“Go to hell.”
Sam rounded the corner and walked silently toward the gunman.
“I’m not going to kill the best piece of ass in North America. Not yet.”
Sam aimed at the gunman’s head, but it was indistinct and would be hard to hit in the semidarkness. He dropped his aim to the center of the man’s shoulder.
He whistled loudly.
Startled, the man whirled reflexively. It was the only excuse Sam needed. Lead poured out of Sam’s pistol, hitting the man’s torso as if little patches of the gunmen’s hide were exploding. Sam felt only a sting in his arm before the return fire caught him square in the chest and sent him flying. Tough son of a bitch, Sam recalled thinking before he passed out. ...
Twenty-eight
“When I woke up in the hospital the world was a different place,” Sam told Anna. “Losing my son was everything, and it felt as though nothing of me remained. I just wasn’t there anymore without him. I gave my staff a large severance except the people feeding and maintaining Big Brain. Suzanne insisted that I go with her to France where she was making a movie. It wasn’t then that we talked about it—about us. She came to the hospital, told me, and said she’d be back. I managed to tell Typhony, my on-again off-again girlfriend at the time.
“They wheeled me to Bud’s funeral with two nurses and two IVs. When I got back to the hospital Suzanne had returned with a whole squad.
“She rented this place in the French countryside, the Loire River Valley, the heart and soul of France, she called it. I was completely depressed. She brought doctors and fed me happy pills.
“Suzanne came and went and physically I got better. I noticed the nurses got cuter.
“I couldn’t go out with Suzanne without news coverage, but we saw each other each night when she came back from location, and gradually we got to know each other.
“Things started tending toward the physical and we both got nervous. I wanted my quiet anonymous life, still thinking I might somehow go back to work, I guess. She didn’t want a boyfriend who couldn’t take her to an opening. I thought maybe I loved her at the time, but I had always told myself never to get involved with a celebrity. I don’t know if it was that or the depression and the guilt that initially kept us apart.
“We took a breather, so to speak, and for a few days I went for long walks around the green lawns, through the rose gardens, into the vineyards, past the fish ponds, and along the Loire River. There didn’t seem to be a solution.
“She called me and said we had to find a way to be together and she was coming to talk about it. They had been in Spain to shoot some scenes. I never talked with her again.”
“The jet crash,” Anna whispered.
“Yeah.”
“First Bud, then Suzanne.” Anna shook her head. “Did you love her?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t know what we could have done. I went back to work.”
“The way you explain it, you see yourself as a victim of your profession, which demands you not take up with a celebrity. Tidy little package. Circumstances may change, but your whole life will always be a set of clever tricks you use to make sure that intimacy never happens. Passion, yes. But not the rest.”
“I take up with a celebrity and the media will soon know when a person’s in trouble. Right now they don’t notice that I’ve shown up because I don’t exist. That’s important.”
The phone rang.
“Answer it,” Anna said.
“I have two big pieces of news,” Paul said. “Hal called. A G-Four landed at Campbell River and took off for Fiji. They even learned that the people getting on the plane in Canada came in on two Beavers from the Alert Bay area.”
“Fiji. I’ll be damned. Which island?”
“The airport at Nadi. After Nadi the G-Four went to Lebanon, but a number of passengers got off in Fiji and took a limo to another part of the airport If they boarded another plane, Hal says it’s only a matter of time until he knows whose plane and where it goes. Apparently it’s hard to keep secrets in Nadi. But if they stayed a few days and then flew out, it could be harder than hell to find them.”
“Lebanon tells me it’s Samir Aziz,” Sam said. “Trouble in paradise—partners at each other’s throats.”
“Right. We’re exploring that. But Big Brain has a new entry in the diagram.” Paul went on at some length to explain the strange correlations in the data.
“And you must have something on Wes King,” Sam said.
“He died of a heart attack a couple months after the break-in. You were in France.”
“Well, we missed it and now all we can do is play catch-up.”
“What?” Anna took his arm as he hung up. “You look sick.”
Sam was still sifting the facts in his mind. “It’ll take a few minutes to explain. You ready?”
Anna checked the oven. “This stuff burns easily because of the honey.” She pulled out the granola, served it, and got them glasses of orange juice.
“Okay,” Sam said, and sat at the table. “Suzanne King had a kind heart. Suzanne allowed her ex-husband, Wes King, to hang around her house. Of all these divorced celebrities who allegedly remain ‘good friends,’ this was that rare couple that actually did remain on good term
s.”
“It’s not a bad idea to maintain the friendship.”
“Uh-huh. Well, there wasn’t any spin with them. And Wes stayed at the house mostly when he visited town on business. The study remained his and I guess, according to the maid, the deal was that he could keep using it until Suzanne found a serious boyfriend. Wes had a wall safe—which of course we didn’t know at the time of the stalker case—where he kept the source code to a valuable software program his company had developed. It was called Auditor, and it had made him a fortune. All you need to know is that it was a very sophisticated accounting program that integrated other manufacturing and production functions and was unique at the time. But to set it up and to make it run with other programs you needed the source code. It’s very long and complex and virtually can’t be figured out.”
Sam started nibbling the granola as it cooled and nodded his approval to Anna.
“Somebody wanted it for use in places like China, where its sale was forbidden by federal law. Supposedly because of its potential military applications. The whole thing with the stalking and photos of Suzanne was a diversion to distract attention from the real motive for invading the property. The people who were after the software’s source code found themselves a couple of real live perverts with a record of stalking and assault.”
“But why go to all that trouble?” Anna asked. “If you’ve got the tunnel into the estate, why not sneak in when nobody is home?”
“Because they couldn’t do it with only one entry into the house. You blow up the safe and everybody can guess what you’re doing. The software theft only works if people don’t suspect that it has happened. That’s the big difference between this and a theft of cash or jewelry. Suzanne believed that stalkers were invading her house—she was distracted. I doubt she even knew the contents of the safe. None of us, not me, not the police, and evidently not Wes, were thinking about theft or planning for it. We were all thinking about people on a weird power trip posting nude photos on the Web. That’s how we interpreted all the break-ins, the entire experience.”