Alexander Death (The Paranormals, Book 3) (20 page)

“I don't know how secure my cell phone is.”

“I suppose we could provide you one of our encrypted phones for our conversations, if you'd like,” Breisgau said.

“I'd appreciate it.”

“It's your bill.” Breisgau shrugged. “We'll start looking for her right away. If she can be found, our associates will find her. We'll contact you the moment we determine her location and whether she's in danger. Until then, you'll receive a weekly report, either in writing or by telephone—”

“Use the encrypted phone,” Seth said. “Wait, weekly reports? How long do you think this will take?”

“We don't know, Seth. We don't have much information yet. With any luck, we'll find her happy and content in Seattle. Speaking of which, get us a copy of that postcard and a large sample of her handwriting. We can determine whether she actually wrote that message to her father.”

“Okay, that sounds good. But even if she wrote it, maybe somebody forced her to do it—”

“Always a possibility. I'll have Misty check out a secure satellite phone for you, and she'll set up the wire transfer for our retainer.”

Seth nodded. While Breisgau gave his assistant instructions over the phone, Seth clenched the arms of his chair, worried about his decision to hire this platinum-grade private intelligence company. If Jenny really had struck out on her own, then she needed to lay low, because the feds were after her. Hale's investigation might draw the government's attention to her, especially considering the sort of people who worked here, lots of former spies and spooks.

Seth didn't believe Jenny was safe, though. Ashleigh Goodling had been back, somehow possessing Darcy's body and getting close to Jenny. Whatever had happened in Charleston, it had almost certainly been the result of one of Ashleigh's plots. And Seth was never going to find her on his own.

“While we wait,” Breisgau said, “I happened to notice that Barrett Capital has a lot of interests in the technology sector, over in Asia, India.”

“That's my dad's venture-capital obsession.”

“I just want to tell you that Hale Group Asia has a number of offices in the region, and a lot of friends. Corporate intelligence, risk assessment, security design. Sometimes you have to pay a little extra fee to local officials to keep things smooth. Sometimes you can hire state police at bargain prices. We can negotiate all of this.”

“Oh, yeah? I'd have to talk to my dad about that.”

“I would enjoy talking to him myself.” Breisgau slid a business card across the table. “We can offer a package of security and data-gathering services customized to your company's needs.”

“Right. Gotcha.” Seth pocketed the card, which felt like silk in his fingers. “But right now, I want to focus on Jenny.”

“I'll put a team on it today,” Breisgau said. “We would certainly like to see this as the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial relationship between Barrett Capital and Hale Security Group.”

“We'll see,” Seth said.

Ashleigh stood at the window of the room at the Four Seasons Hotel, looking down through the curtains at Rodeo Drive, and the smog-heavy city stretching away to the horizon. She was naked except for a beaded necklace, with a matching bracelet and anklet. Each strand of beads included a few ovals of ivory, cut and polished from the pieces of her old skeleton—as long as the bone beads touched Esmeralda's skin, Ashleigh could continue inhabiting Esmeralda's body.

Esmeralda herself slumbered deep at the back of Ashleigh's mind, completely ensnared in the thick golden web of Ashleigh's love.

“Come back to bed,” the congressman said. He lay on the bed behind her, also naked. “We only have a few more minutes.”

“I think you need a bigger strategy,” Ashleigh said.

He laughed. “Now you want to be my strategist? I don't think Greenburg will like that.”

Ashleigh flipped her hair as she looked back at him over her shoulder. “Have I ever steered you wrong, Senator?”

“It's still Representative,” Brazer said. “Let's not get cocky.”

“Let's do.” Ashleigh walked back and sat on the corner of his bed. “Let's get really cocky. I don't think Greenburg's ads are making the biggest impact.” She gave him a sad smile and stroked his leg, pouring love into him.

Six days after she'd begun volunteering for the Brazer campaign, Eddie Brazer himself came by to chat with the volunteers. Ashleigh had shaken his hand. Three hours later, they'd been in bed together at the Four Seasons. Over the past three weeks, they had spent four lunch breaks together.

“You don't like the new ads?” Brazer asked. “'I believe in the Three E's: Education, Employment, and the Environment.' What's wrong with it?”

“It depends. Are you
trying
to put everyone to sleep?”

“You don't want to panic people,” Brazer said. “They want to hear that things will keep ticking like always, only better. Remember, it's mostly the elderly who vote.” He traced his fingers across her stomach, up to her breasts. “Now, enough about work...”

“I'm not kidding,” Ashleigh said. She'd insinuated herself into his life, even helping revise his speechwriter's drafts. Ashleigh had helped him make simple, emotional appeals for the issues that would appeal to his base: the need to protect the environment, the continuing importance of labor unions, the right of a woman to choose what to do with her own body.

“Fine, what's your big idea?” Brazer asked.

“Are you making fun of me?” Ashleigh teased. She lay her hand on his chest.

“Never. I love it when volunteer kids tell me to remake my entire campaign, four months from the election.”

“Hey, I'm on the payroll now,” Ashleigh said. “If you can't trust your Social Media Coordinator, who can you trust?”

“So you really think I should ax the ads.”

“It's not about the ads,” Ashleigh said. “You need to do something bigger, to generate tons and tons of media. Something that will make you a household name.”

“Like putting naked pictures of myself on Twitter?”

“Right, that would be a brilliant move.” Ashleigh had to force herself not to glance at the slightly parted closet doors. On the top shelf, between stacks of spare pillows and blankets, she'd stashed a video camera to record the two of them together. If you were going to hook up with a congressman, you might as well get full mileage out of it. “But seriously. People need to see you as a leader. A crusader.”

“Not the Muslim community.”

“I mean, you need a hot issue. Something you can use to attack the President and his whole party.”

“The economy. The endless wars.”

“Nobody understands the economy,” Ashleigh said. “And nobody cares about the wars. You need outrage. You need to make them feel threatened, and make them understand it's the President's fault.”

“You are diabolical.” He drew her down alongside him and kissed her. Brazer was in his mid-forties, married, reasonably good-looking, not that great in bed. “But if I'm going to be Jack the giant-killer, I'll need a pretty big ax.”

“I have a couple of ideas.”

“I knew you would.”

“Have you heard about this thing in South Carolina? A bunch of people disappeared in some little town. Homeland Security was all over it for a minute and then went away.”

“I don't think I've heard of that one.”

“People are saying that a bunch of people died, hundreds of people died. There was some kind of extreme toxin. Maybe even a bioweapon kind of thing.”

“What people are saying that?”

“On the Internet. A bunch of people.”

“Esmeralda, you can't trust everything you read on the Internet.”

“And don't talk to me like I'm some little old lady who just discovered the computer lab at her nursing home. I think there's something to this. I think somebody screwed up, and a lot of people died, and the White House used the Department of Homeland Security to cover it up.”

“You don't want to go poking around national security issues,” Brazer said. “That can explode in your face.”

“It's not so much national security. It's incompetence, death and a cover-up to hide their mistakes. I'm telling you, there's something to this story.”

“You're really attached to it.”

“I've just been looking for something you could use,” Ashleigh said. “This looks like a possibility to me. Lots of sloppiness and loose ends, on their part.”

“It sounds risky.”

“You just have someone look into it,” Ashleigh said. “If it looks like a good way to take a shot at the President, accuse him of corruption and lying to the public and all that, you can take it back to the Homeland Security oversight committee with you. Launch some hearings. You get to position yourself as a reformer uncovering abuse of power.” She kissed him, spiking him with more love. “If nothing else, you might scare somebody up there, and maybe they'll shovel you some money and political support in exchange for you shutting up about it.”

“You think this could work?” His eyes were glazed over as he looked at Ashleigh. He was like soft clay in her fingers.

“It really could,” Ashleigh said. She knew Brazer was on the House Homeland Security Committee, and his party controlled the House, though not the Senate or the White House. She was determined to use his position to help her figure out what had happened in Fallen Oak and in Charleston, and why Jenny kept getting away with her horrific crimes. She suspected it was just as she'd told Brazer—some very powerful people did not want the administration to look weak on security, not while the President only had a 35% approval rating and was in danger of losing the Senate in November.

“And who would I appoint to go investigate this for me?” Brazer asked. “It would have to be someone I can trust. The early part of the investigation needs to be low-key, well under the radar. If we hit trouble, we need to be able to close it down fast, run away, and forget all about it.”

“That's why I love you, Congressman,” Ashleigh said. “You're so smart.”

“Who are you really?” Jenny asked Alexander. It was nearly midnight, under a luminous full moon and a clear sky glowing with constellations. They sat on the beach below his house, a blanket insulating them from the wet volcanic sand. Jenny was puffing on a sizable spliff he'd rolled for them, to help settle her raw nerves.

“You know who I am better than anyone.” He leaned back on his elbows and looked out at the slow, deep waves of the Pacific.

“I mean in this life. You know. How did you end up down here, doing this? Where did you start out?”

“Where was I born?”

“Yeah. Stuff like that.”

“It's nothing special,” he said. “It's why it's not worth talking about. My dad's an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Total douchebag. So is my stepmom. My real mom lives in New York, or she did the last time I heard from her.” Alexander took the joint from Jenny's fingers.

“What else?” Jenny asked. “What were you like in high school?”

He laughed. “Kind of a troublemaker. I already knew just about everything they had to teach, from my past life memories. Got into a lot of arguments with my history teachers. I was just bored.”

“Me, too. Well, the bored part, not the arguing part. I was really quiet.”

“That's so unlike you,” Alexander said.

“So your life sucked in high school, too,” Jenny said. “Then what?”

“A year at Stanford. The summer after my freshman year, I decided to go backpacking through Mexico. Nobody would come with me, because they were so scared of the drug war and the kidnappings and just the unknown. That's one problem with people these days—no courage. They just want to plug their brains into a TV or video game and escape. Nobody had the balls to take a risk.”

His words actually made her think of Seth, and how he always ended up under his parents' thumb.

“So,” Alexander said, “One morning, I staggered out of a bar with a brain full of tequila. Tiny little town in the Baja. I'd told some local guys I could make the dead walk, and ended up taking bets from all of them. They thought I was just some stupid drunk gringo, and they were pretty much right. There was a funeral in town that day, this poor old woman who'd been killed by a rattlesnake. And we went to that funeral, me and the four or five guys I'd been drinking with. And...well, like I said, I was just a drunken asshole.”

“What did you do?”

“I shouldn't have. I wouldn't have if I'd been sober. But I walk into this lady's funeral, and I touch her hand. And then I make her corpse jump right out of the casket and dance around in front of her family and the whole village.”

“That's terrible!”

“I told you it was terrible.” He shook his head. “I still feel bad about that one. Everyone was horrified, screaming, praying, and I was just full of tequila and laughing. I'm not even sure if I collected on my bets. It was practically a riot.”

“That was pretty mean.”

“Yeah, well, that's why you shouldn't drink tequila, kids. But that's how the Calderon people heard about me. Papa Calderon collects astrologers, psychics, shamans. He's got a dozen or more on the payroll. I think they're mostly frauds, but I'm one of them, so what do I know? And it turns out I fit right into his plans to grow coca in the Sierra Madre.”