The first e-mail? The phrase intensified my controlled panic into full-blown terror. I was a fish newly hooked, my journey only beginning. But I barely had time to shudder when the voice said, “Now walk outside. Alone.”
Forcing my feet toward the door, I gestured for Ariana to stay put. She shook her head and trailed me, chewing at the side of a thumbnail. I stepped out onto the walk, Ariana waiting behind, shouldering against the jamb and tugging the door tight to her side so only the front sliver of her was exposed.
“End of the walk. You see the sewer grate? Just past the curb-painted house numbers?”
“Hang on.” I stopped ten feet shy of the grate. “Okay,” I lied, “I’m standing right on top of it.”
“Lean over and look at the gap.”
So they weren’t watching all the time. The trick was to know when.
“Patrick. Patrick!”
With dread, I turned to see Don making his way over from his driveway, toting a box of office files. I muttered, “Wait a second,” into the mouthpiece through clenched teeth. And then: “This really isn’t the best time, Don.”
“Oh, didn’t see you were on the phone.”
“Yes. I am.” Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed movement at the front door, Ariana easing back and shutting it to barely a crack.
“Don’t stall us.”
Don was stammering at me, “Listen, I just . . . felt I should apologize for my role in . . . everything, and—”
“You don’t need to. It’s not between me and you.” My face burned. “Listen, I’m on a critical call. I can’t get into this right now.”
“Get rid of him. Now.”
“I’m trying,” I muttered into the phone.
“Well, when, Patrick?” Don asked. “I mean, it’s been six weeks. For better or worse, we are neighbors, and I’ve tried a number of times—”
“Don, I don’t need to discuss this with you. I don’t owe you anything. Now, get out of my face and let me finish this call.”
He glared at me and took a few backward steps before turning for home.
“Okay,” I said, “the curb drain . . .”
“Once you’ve removed the devices from the house, put them in your black duffel bag on the top shelf of your closet and drop them down there. All lenses, cables, even the nonlinear junction detector. At midnight tomorrow. Not a minute before. Not a minute after. Say it back to me.”
“Midnight tomorrow, sharp. Everything down the grate. Sunday at four P.M., I get an e-mail.”
Until then, live with dread about what that e-mail might hold.
“This is the last time you will hear my voice. Now set the phone on the ground, smash it with your foot, and kick it down the sewer grate. Oh—and, Patrick?”
“What?”
“This is nothing like what you imagine.”
“What do I imagine?”
But I was talking to a dead line.
CHAPTER 20
After disposing of the phone, I returned inside. The front door swung open to greet me, and I grabbed Ariana by the wrist and pulled her into me. Our cheeks pressed together. Sweat. The smell of her conditioner. Her chest was heaving. I cupped a hand around her ear and whispered, as faintly as possible, “Let’s get ourselves to the greenhouse.”
The only place on the property with clear walls.
She nodded. We pulled apart. “I’m scared, Patrick,” she said loudly.
“It’s okay. I know what they want now. At least what they want me to do next.” I gave her the broad strokes of the phone conversation.
“And what about after this, Patrick? These people are terrorizing us. We have to call the cops.”
“We can’t call the cops. They’ll know. They know everything.”
She stormed toward the family room, with me at her heels. “So keep giving in and giving in?”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“There are always choices.”
“And you’re an expert on sound decision making?”
She wheeled on me. “I’m not the one who sold out my life to get fired off a shitty movie.”
I blinked, stunned. Holding her hand low by her stomach, she beckoned with her fingers: Come on.
I caught my breath again. “Right. You’re much more grounded. It took what? One crank call to get you to step out on our marriage?”
“It took a lot more than that.”
“Because I was supposed to read your mind to know about all the resentment you were silently storing up?”
“No. You were supposed to be present in this marriage. It takes two people to be able to communicate.”
“Nine days!” I shouted, so loud I caught us both off guard. Ariana started, took a half step away. Bitterness rode the back of my tongue. I couldn’t stop myself. “I was gone nine days. That’s less than two weeks. You couldn’t wait nine fucking days to talk to me?”
“Nine days?” The color had returned to her face. “You’d been gone a year. You disappeared the minute an agent returned your phone call.”
Her eyes welled. She turned and banged through the rear door. I shoved the heel of my hand across my cheek. I lowered my head, exhaled, counted silently backward from ten.
Then I followed.
When I pushed through the rasping door into the heat of the greenhouse, we grabbed for each other. She hugged me around my neck, squeezing hard enough to hurt, her forehead mashed to my jaw, my face bent toward hers, mossy humidity coating our lungs. We let go of each other a bit awkwardly, and then Ariana rotated a finger around the small enclosure. Lifting pots, crawling under shelves, running hands along posts, we searched. The translucent siding made the job easier. We finished and faced each other across the narrow aluminum staging table.
Our exchange inside, for the cameras and in spite of them, our clumsy embrace, the intruder’s even stare, the feeling of horror when I’d discovered the first hidden device, the casually marked floor plans showing dozens more—the pressure from it all exploded in this first moment of relative privacy. I hammered a fist into the staging table, denting the aluminum, splitting the scabs on my knuckles. Two terra-cotta pots toppled off and shattered. “These assholes moved in to our house. Our bedroom. I’ve been sleeping on top of equipment they planted. What the fuck do they want from us?” I stared at the shards, waiting for the rage to recede. Nice work, Patrick. Sound strategy, responding to a grand master with a temper tantrum.
“They heard everything,” Ariana was saying. “All the arguments. The petty stuff. What I told you Tuesday night over the dining table. Everything. Jesus, Patrick. Jesus. There’s not an inch of our lives that’s been just ours.”
I drew in a deep breath. “We need to figure a way to get out of this.”
Her lips were trembling. “What is ‘this’?”
“It’s got nothing to do with an affair. Or a student. Or a pissed-off movie star. Whoever these guys are, they’re experts.”
“In what?”
“This.”
Silence, broken by the gentle whir of the shutter fan. I wiped the back of my hand across my shirt, leaving a streak of crimson. Ariana looked at the lifted scabs and said, “Oh. Oh. That’s how you . . .” She took a deep breath, nodded. “What else do I need to be clued in on here?”
I told her about everything from Jerry to Keith, Sally Richards and the boot print, and how I’d lied and told the caller I was standing on top of the sewer grate and he hadn’t known the difference.
“So they’re not watching everything all the time,” she said.
“Right. We just don’t know where the dead spots are. But they seem to be backing off the surveillance. Why else would they give us the location of the bugs in the house?”
“To set up something else.” She took a deep breath, shook her hands as if drying them. “What the hell’s gonna be in that e-mail, Patrick?”
My stomach roiled. My lips felt dry, cracked. “I don’t have a clue.”
“What can we do? There’s gotta
be something we can do.” She looked helplessly through the green siding at our house. Here we were, huddled, displaced. “If they know specifics about your trip to the police station, they probably have someone inside. Is Richards involved with this?” She’d dropped her voice instinctively to a whisper.
“It’s not her,” I said. Ariana regarded me skeptically, so I added, “I just know. Plus, why would she have told me about the boot print, which implicates the cops?”
“Okay. But even if it’s not her, we can’t go to her again or they’ll find out.”
“I doubt she can help us anyway. Whatever this is, it’s well above the pay grade of a divisional detective.”
“Fine. So let’s go above her pay grade. How about the higher LAPD divisions?”
“No good. The make of boot could’ve been SWAT issue, so we can’t trust downtown either.”
“Then we need to get help from the FBI or whoever.”
“These guys’ll find out.”
“Do we care if they do find out?” Ari asked. “I mean, what are they threatening us with?”
“I guess that would be another surprise,” I said. “When it comes.”
She shivered. “Should we risk it? To get help?”
“I think we should see what these guys want first. Or else it’ll just be another futile conversation with cops or agents or whoever. We’ve already seen how that goes.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go along with their directions just because you’re scared of how they’ll retaliate if you don’t?” she asked.
“Of course I’m scared,” I said. “I’m willing to believe they can do anything.”
“That’s the point,” she said angrily. “That’s what they’ve been trying to teach us. We don’t know people big enough to help us. So what do we do?”
“First let’s get the bugs out of the walls. At least the ones they’re admitting are there. And let’s do it quickly.”
“Why quickly?”
“Because at midnight tomorrow, all the evidence goes down the sewer grate.”
My arms cramped from holding the wand. Slowly, laboriously, I swept the circular head over the south wall of the living room. Though we’d checked every square inch of every surface, and though false positives abounded, the marked-up floor plan hadn’t left out any bugs. At least any I could detect using the instrument they’d provided. Despite the endlessly swirling dust, we’d closed all the curtains and blinds, making the rooms as claustrophobic as the tiny greenhouse.
On the armchair in the corner sat our laundry basket, filled to the brim with a jumble of cables, mini-lenses, transmitters, mounting plates, assorted sleeves, and a catch box for various optical fibers we’d dug out from behind our air-conditioning fan outside. Upstairs looked like a crack house—furniture slashed and upended, walls torn apart, paintings, mirrors, and books strewn on the floor. Pots and pans littered the kitchen, the cabinets stood ajar in the family room, and the contents of the drawers and medicine cabinet had been emptied into the powder-room sink. For hours we’d worked in dread-filled silence.
Dust and bits of plaster flecked the sweat on my arms. When I scanned down the inner doorframe, the green light glowed right on cue. Pulling the printout from my pocket, I checked the location against the final red circle, stepped down from the chair, and tapped the spot. Wearily, Ariana trudged forward and punched a hammer through the drywall.
I stepped over a nail-studded length of molding, set the wand down on a flap of turned-back carpet, and stretched my aching arms. Beside the torn carpet, I’d rested the photographs I’d found inside cabinets and drawers, the remaining pictures Ariana had printed up and playfully hidden six months back. Together they formed a visual CliffsNotes of our relationship. Smoking together outside a Bruins basketball game. Our first meal in the house, some moving boxes shoved together to form a makeshift table for take-out Vietnamese. Me grinning, holding up a check from Summit Pictures, the first dime I’d made as a writer. In the background the lopsided cake Ariana had baked for the occasion. The maudlin, tender things we did to celebrate ourselves, back before we discovered we could look foolish in front of each other. I stared at that cake, the candles still smoking. Whatever wish I’d made had been the wrong one. It was hard to believe, in light of the calamity of the past few days, that we’d actually thought we had problems before all this.
A length of runner cable wrapped around her fist, Ariana stepped back, fighting it from the hole like a fishing line. The embedded wire came lurchingly, carving a trench across the wall, past our framed wedding picture, which slipped from its nail to the floor, a crack forking the glass through our grinning faces. The crumbling channel zigged north through the ceiling, the cable eventually tearing free from the fan. She staggered a bit when the wire gave, standing stooped and openhanded for a breathless moment. Then she lowered her face into an upturned palm and finally broke the dour silence with a sob.
CHAPTER 21
“No one I like would call me at this hour.”
“Jerry, listen, it’s Patrick.”
“As I said . . .”
I hunched against the pay phone outside Bel Air Foods, casting a glance over my shoulder at the empty street. The tinge of morning light stole some of the glow from the streetlamps. “This thing’s taken a turn, Jerry. Our whole house was bugged.”
“Ever think about adjusting your meds?”
“Can you—please, please—give us some guidance here?”
“Why the fuck are you calling me? You fishing for a restraining order, Davis? I told you the studio has zero interest in—”
“This has got nothing to do with the studio.”
That stopped him. “Why not?”
“I’m telling you, come look at this stuff. You won’t believe what we pulled out of the walls—lenses and shit that I didn’t know existed. There was not a trace of the insertion. They must’ve run the wires behind the drywall arthroscopically or something. They hid a pinhole camera inside the speaker grille of my alarm clock, another one in the vent of a smoke detector.”
He whistled, and then I heard him breathing. “Pinhole cameras?”
“That’s the least of it. Listen, the house is supposedly clean now. But I don’t trust it. I want it checked. They called, said I can’t contact the cops.”
“You must be in dire straits if you’re calling me.”
“I really am, Jerry.” I could almost hear him thinking about that one. I prodded a little: “You’ve done surveillance, right?”
“Of course—you think Summit hired me for my temperament? I was an intercept analyst in the Corps. That’s all anyone does anymore in Hollywood. Wiretapping. They barely even make movies these days.”
“Look, I gather this is really advanced stuff. Do you have any contacts who can do it? Someone more current?”
“Fuck you ‘more current,’ you reverse-psychology prick. I’ll admit—you’ve piqued my interest. I mean, if this stuff is what you described, I should take a look. Never hurts to see what new gadgets are in play.”
“So you’ll come?”
“If”—a pause—“you promise you’ll never try to come near the lot again.”
I blew out a deep breath of relief, leaned my forehead against the wall. “I promise. But listen, they might be watching the house.”
“You tore your place apart, yeah? So how ’bout an early-morning visit from your contractor?”
An hour later the doorbell rang. I glanced past Jerry, dressed convincingly in jeans and a ripped long-sleeved T-shirt, to the white van at the curb. Magnetic signs on the door and side proclaimed SENDLENSKI BROS. CONTRACTORS. He hefted one of two giant toolboxes at me and barreled by, introducing himself brusquely to Ariana. Unsnapping the catches, he pulled out a remote, aimed it through the closed door, and clicked a button.
“Wideband high-power jammer in the van. Your cell phones, wireless Internet, any surveillance devices—they’re all squelched.”
I said, “Sendlenski Brothers
?”
“Who couldn’t believe a name like that?” He tugged out a directional antenna and hooked it to what looked like a laptop with a shoe box–thick base. An electronic waterfall traversed the screen, a red stripe running down the center. “First things first. Let’s see if there are any other devices still operating. You’ll need to go about your business and stay out of my way. Now, listen, I have to turn off the jammer to pick up any signals. It’s a good idea anyways, because that thing takes out a four-block radius, so your neighbors are already dialing tech support.” He fished an iPod nano, which he wore on a lanyard, from beneath his collar. A small contraption—a mini-speaker?—plugged the headphone jack. “Most high-end devices will only operate if there’s noise to record. That’s how they save juice. So guys started playing Van Halen when they swept rooms. Then the devices were upgraded to only transmit speaking tones. So . . .” Raising a finger to his lips, he aimed and clicked the remote again, turning off the jammer, then thumbed the iPod dial. A voice issued forth: “Philosophy in the Boudoir, by the Marquis de Sade.”
Ariana caught my eye and mouthed, Marquis de Sade? Really?
While Jerry busied himself in the foyer, I settled on the couch and flipped through Entertainment Weekly but found myself rereading the same paragraph. In the kitchen Ariana emptied all the mugs out of the cabinet and then replaced them in what looked like the same order. She tore the lid from a box of mac & cheese and let the noodles patter on the countertop. No device hidden inside like a Cracker Jack prize. She lined up slices of bread by the sink. Crimp-searched the dry cleaning. Plucked a barrette from her hair and studied it. Her anxiety was infectious; I found myself eyeing our banal household clutter over the top of the magazine, wondering at each item’s Trojan-horse potential. A ninja blowgun hidden in the potted philodendron?
Jerry made his way meticulously from room to room, the silence broken only by the drone of the audiobook from his iPod. De Sade’s characters had plied an exhausting variety of orifices by the time Jerry whistled us over to the living-room coat closet, where he sat before a different, but equally bulky, laptop. My Nikes were set on the floor near the turned-back flap of carpet, Ariana’s favorite raincoat spread out beside them.
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