Dark Rivers of the Heart (25 page)

In two years, making a long series of small profits that no one noticed, she had amassed more than five million dollars. Her only large score had been a million in cash, which had been intended as a payoff from the Chicago mob to a United States Senator on a fact-finding junket to Vegas. After covering her tracks by destroying the laser disc on which a conversation about the bribe had been recorded, Eve intercepted the two couriers in a hotel elevator on their way from a penthouse suite to the lobby. They were carrying the money in a canvas book bag that was decorated with the face of Mickey Mouse. Big guys. Hard faces. Cold eyes. Brightly patterned Italian silk shirts under black linen sport coats. Eve was rummaging in her big straw purse even as she entered the elevator, but the two thugs could see only her boobs stretching the low neckline of her sweater. Because they might have been quicker than they looked, she didn’t risk taking the Korth .38 out of the handbag, just shot them through the straw, two rounds each. They hit the floor so hard that the elevator shook, and then the money was hers.

The only thing she regretted about the operation was the third man. He was a little guy with thinning hair and bags under his eyes, squeezing into the corner of the cab as if trying to make himself too small to be noticed. According to the tag pinned to his shirt, he was with a convention of dentists and his name was Thurmon Stookey. The poor bastard was a witness. After stopping the elevator between the twelfth and eleventh floors, Eve shot him in the head, but she didn’t like doing it.

After she reloaded the Korth and stuffed the ruined straw purse into the canvas book bag with the money, she descended to the ninth floor. She was prepared to kill anyone who might be waiting in the elevator alcove—but, thank God, no one was there. Minutes later she was out of the hotel, heading home, with one million bucks and a handy Mickey Mouse tote bag.

She felt terrible about Thurmon Stookey. He shouldn’t have been in that elevator. The wrong place, the wrong time. Blind fate. Life sure was full of surprises. In her entire thirty-three years, Eve Jammer had killed only five people, and Thurmon Stookey had been the sole innocent bystander among them. Nevertheless, for a while, she kept seeing the little guy’s face in her mind’s eye, as he had looked before she’d wasted him, and it had taken her the better part of a day to stop feeling bad about what had happened to him.

Within a year, she would not need to kill anyone again. She would be able to order people to carry out executions for her.

Soon, though unknown to the general populace, Eve Jammer would be the most feared person in the country, and safely beyond the reach of all enemies. The money she socked away was growing geometrically, but it was not money that would make her untouchable. Her
real
power would come from the trove of incriminating evidence on politicians, businessmen, and celebrities that she had transmitted at high speed, in the form of supercompressed digitized data, from the discs in her bunker to an automated recording device of her own, on a dedicated telephone line, in a bungalow in Boulder City that she had leased through an elaborate series of corporate blinds and false identities.

This was, after all, the Information Age, which had followed the Service Age, which itself had replaced the Industrial Age. She’d read all about it in
Fortune
and
Forbes
and
Business Week.
The future was now, and information was wealth.

Information was power.

Eve had finished examining the eighty active recorders and had begun to select new material for transmission to Boulder City when an electronic tone alerted her to a significant development on one of the taps.

If she had been out of the office, at home or elsewhere, the computer would have alerted her by beeper, whereupon she would have returned to the office immediately. She didn’t mind being on call twenty-four hours a day. That was preferable to having assistants manning the room on two other shifts, because she simply didn’t
trust
anyone else with the sensitive information on the discs.

A blinking red light drew her to the correct machine. She pushed a button to turn off the alarm.

On the front of the recorder, a label provided information about the wiretap. The first line was a case-file number. The next two lines were the address at which the tap was located. On the fourth line was the name of the subject being monitored:
THEDA DAVIDOWITZ.

The surveillance of Mrs. Davidowitz was not the standard fishing expedition in which every word of every conversation was preserved on disc. After all, she was only an elderly widow, an ordinary prole whose general activities were no threat to the system—and therefore were of no interest to the agency. By merest chance, Davidowitz had established a short-lived friendship with the woman who was, at the moment, the most urgently sought fugitive in the nation, and the agency was interested in the widow only in the unlikely event that she received a telephone call or was paid a visit by her special friend. Monitoring the old woman’s dreary chats with other friends and neighbors would have been a waste of time.

Instead, the bunker’s autonomous computer, which controlled all the recording machines, was programmed to monitor the Davidowitz wiretap continuously and to activate the laser disc only upon the recognition of a key word that was related to the fugitive. That recognition had occurred moments ago. Now the key word appeared on a small display screen on the recorder:
HANNAH.

Eve pressed a button marked
MONITOR
and heard Theda Davidowitz talking to someone in her living room on the other side of the city.

In the handset of each telephone in the widow’s apartment, the standard microphone had been replaced with one that could pick up not only what was said in a phone conversation but what was said in any of her rooms, even when none of the phones were in use, and pass it down the line to a monitoring station on a continuous basis. This was a variation on a device known in the intelligence trade as an infinity transmitter.

The agency used infinity transmitters that were considerably improved over the models available on the open market. This one could operate twenty-four hours a day without compromising the function of the telephone in which it was concealed; therefore, Mrs. Davidowitz always heard a dial tone when she picked up a receiver, and callers trying to reach her were never frustrated by a busy signal related to the infinity transmitter’s operation.

Eve Jammer listened patiently as the old woman rambled on about Hannah Rainey. Davidowitz was obviously talking
about
rather than
to
her friend the fugitive.

When the widow paused, a young-sounding man in the room with her asked a question about Hannah. Before Davidowitz answered, she called her visitor “my pretty-eyed snookie-wookums” and asked him to “give me a kissie, come on, give me a little lick, show Theda you love her, you little sweetums, sweet little sweetums, yeah, that’s right, shake that tail and give Theda a little lick, a little kissie.”

“Good God,” Eve said, grimacing with disgust. Davidowitz was going on eighty. From the sound of him, the man with her was forty or fifty years her junior. Sick. Sick and perverted. What was the world coming to?

“A cockroach,” Theda said as she gently rubbed Rocky’s tummy. “Big. About four or five feet long, not counting the antennae.”

After the Drug Enforcement Administration raided Hannah Rainey’s place with a force of eight agents and discovered that she’d already fled, they grilled Theda and other neighbors for hours, asking the dumbest questions, all those grown men insisting Hannah was a dangerous criminal, when anyone who had ever met the precious girl for five minutes knew she was
incapable
of dealing drugs and murdering police officers. What absolute, total, stupid, silly nonsense. Then, unable to learn anything from neighbors, the agents had spent still more hours in Hannah’s apartment, searching for God-knew-what.

Later that same evening, long after the Keystone Kops had departed—such a loud, rude group of nitwits—Theda went to 2-D with the spare key that Hannah had given her. Instead of breaking down the door to get into the apartment, the DEA had smashed the big window in the dining area that overlooked the balcony and courtyard. The landlord already had boarded over the window with sheets of plywood, until the glazier could fix it. But the front door was intact, and the lock hadn’t been changed, so Theda let herself in. The apartment—unlike Theda’s own—was rented furnished. Hannah had always kept it spotless, treated the furniture as though it were her own, a fastidious and
thoughtful
girl, so Theda wanted to see what damage the nitwits had done and be sure that the landlord didn’t try to blame it on Hannah. In case Hannah turned up, Theda would testify about her immaculate housekeeping and her respect for the landlord’s property. By God, she wouldn’t let them make the dear girl pay for the damage
plus
stand trial for murdering police officers whom she obviously never murdered. And, of course, the apartment was a mess, the agents were pigs: They had ground out cigarettes on the kitchen floor, spilled cups of take-out coffee from the diner down the block, and even left the toilet unflushed, if you could believe such a thing, since they were grown men and must have had mothers who taught them
something.
But the strangest thing was the cockroach, which they’d drawn on a bedroom wall, with one of those wide-point felt-tip markers.

“Not well drawn, you understand, more or less just the outline of a cockroach, but you could see what it was meant to be,” Theda said. “Just a sort of line drawing but ugly all the same. What on earth were those nitwits trying to prove, scrawling on the walls?”

Spencer was pretty sure that Hannah-Valerie herself had drawn the cockroach—just as she had nailed the textbook photograph of a roach to the wall of the bungalow in Santa Monica. He sensed it was meant to taunt and aggravate the men who had come looking for her, though he had no idea what it signified or why she knew that it would anger her pursuers.

Sitting at her desk in her windowless jurisdiction, Eve Jammer telephoned the operations office, upstairs, on the ground floor of the Las Vegas quarters of Carver, Gunmann, Garrote & Hemlock. The morning duty officer was John Cottcole, and Eve alerted him to the situation at Theda Davidowitz’s apartment.

Cottcole was electrified by the news and unable to conceal his excitement. He was shouting orders to people in his office even while he was still on the line with Eve.

“Ms. Jammer,” Cottcole said, “I’ll want a copy of that disc, every word on that disc, you understand?”

“Sure,” she said, but he hung up even as she was replying.

They thought that Eve didn’t know who Hannah Rainey had been before becoming Hannah Rainey, but she knew the whole story. She also knew that there was an enormous opportunity for her in that case, a chance to hasten the growth of her fortune and power, but she hadn’t quite yet decided how to exploit it.

A fat spider scurried across her desk.

She slammed one hand down, crushing the bug against her palm.