Internecine (30 page)

“Oh. Zetts will be thrilled, then.” Three deep breaths, and his refuel seemed to take effect. He rubbed his temples, hard. “So . . . what was in your supersecret
NORCO
file? Anything good?”

“I’d like to see yours,” I said.

“No way. That system has never heard of me, and I make sure to keep it that way.”

And off we went, hitting the road again. We ride together . . . we die together.

“Where are we going?”

Dandine chewed. “God, Connie, sometimes you can be so dense. Isn’t it obvious?”

It was, painfully. All I needed to have done was check the next name on the Sisters’ shopping list, still in my pocket.

The zombie had come to life about the time Zetts began to toke his first postchase doob. It activated to standby, then began transmitting when the motor was engaged, its trip preset for a certain range of vibration. It hadn’t switched on until I had started the engine again. That was how my pursuers had bagged the Sisters, but not Zetts’s house. As Zetts told us later, he fished the device right out of the reservoir for his window washer, where it was floating, sealed in a ball of latex insulation, like (per Zetts) “a turd that won’t flush, wrapped in a rubber.”

The “rubber” turned out to be heavily impregnated with aluminum dust, to further fox scanners. It was colored to match the washer fluid and thus escape detection by the hurried eyeball. But the hide was the brilliant part. Surveillance paranoiacs the world over will tell you complex stories about first bug, wheel well; second bug, tire well, third bug. Target vehicles are over-bugged so as to provide the knowledgeable victim with bugs to find, and bugs to overlook. Both Zetts and Dandine noted that they’d never seen a bug stashed in the washer jug, and that it was so simple it was scary-smart.

Nobody thinks about these things.

Nobody thinks about the real statistics in examples like airline crashes, or AIDS infiltration, or our supposed national epidemic of crack babies. News media slant such hot topics at a fever pitch in order to instill a particular variant of panic that results in people buying more of certain kinds of products. Airline insurance, sexual armor, home security systems. Fear sells. I know that one by heart. Know how many people, total, have died in airplane mishaps since the dawn of aviation? Thirteen thousand. Ask a citizen on the street, and chances are he or she will guess that many
per year
. It’s all evidence of what they’re
not
being told.

Make the customer sell himself.

At leaving out specifics, Dandine was a master manipulator. I had to
keep reminding myself of this, every time I automatically accepted his assessments as gospel. But every time I tried to prefigure a move to reassert my own identity, Dandine was ahead of me.
You were supposed to “escape”; it was all in the plan; it was a test.
I was mucking around with chess strategy, and he was playing Go.

We were headed up Beverly Glen, past the Beverly Hills Hotel. Two turns past Cielo Drive.

“We’re going to force an audience with Mr. Theodore Ripkin,” said Dandine. “You will inform him you are in the possession of certain tapes provided by Alicia Brandenberg in order to secure his cooperation. What Ripkin does or says should tell us pretty quickly whether he’s a
NORCO
tool . . . or his opponent is.”

Calle Viuda was one of those streets that was more a glorified driveway with a sign; it was not on the official register of street names in LA County and only led to a single tract of property, a graded mesa of semi-hilltop overloaded with the kind of fauna either storebought, or imported to these climes by rich people. Dogwood trees, lizard’s breath, magnolia, and thick carpets of preternaturally green lawn that must have cost a thousand dollars a month to water. No matter what anybody says, Los Angeles is still in the desert.

The compound was classically boring Spanish Mission style, but the security surrounding it was state-of-the-art for, say, 1999. When we arrived, the electric gate was still open halfway, and I saw Dandine’s eyes go flat and silver. He muttered
dammit,
sotto voce.

“What’s happening?”

“It’s already happened,” he said, reaching into the rear seat for the black Halliburton Zetts had delivered. Another case packed with cash, firearms, and fake ID. Dandine selected a leatherette jacket containing documentation that he was with the National Security Agency. He checked the magazine on his pistol and then handed me another gun. “Thumb safety on the left side of the slide,” he said. “You’ll have to stick it in your pants; I don’t have another holster.” Then he kicked the car into gear and accelerated through the open gate.

“Whoa, wait, wait just a minute! What the hell am I walking into, here?”

“Not now.” He didn’t look at me, not once, during the serpentine drive uphill. His eyes were scanning the greenery in search of some enemy. “I need you to be Mr. Lamb again, just like before, if what I think is right.”

He didn’t
think
it, he
knew
it. Sensed it, on some superhuman level of attuned perception. Whatever “it” was, my latest task was to play along, follow his lead. Perhaps he smelled a mishap, borne on the very air we breathed.

I tried to record impressions the way I thought he was: Big lawn, seven-car garage (all doors down), at least sixteen rooms in the house. A Bronco and a limited-edition Mercedes in the cul-de-sac, next to a Ford Focus, which had to be an employee car. The maid. Pool house out back. Cabana. Gigantic front door in carved mahogany, iron knocker, still ajar. Smear of blood on the threshold. A foot sticking out of the door.

Red-tailed hawks circled in the updraft above the house, which had a canyon view all to itself.

“How about we just leave, instead?”

“Listen.” Sirens were approaching in a manic Code Three, dopplering up the canyon. “Too late. We’d never make the end of the driveway before the cops got here. Let ’em come and we’ll tough it out.”

I almost protested before I realized he did not mean a shootout with the extremely well-armed minions of the Beverly Hills PD. He should have winked at me or something, but that would have been a beat too far for melodrama.

We could see the convoy threading through the Calle Viuda switchbacks—one van and at least four other units, most unmarked cruisers, speed-drifting on the turns with the surety of aggressive-driving graduates. The sirens were off now. They knew where they were going and we didn’t have a back door.

The dead guy sprawled in the entryway was jumpstitched by bullet holes in a jagged row from his left hip to his right shoulder. He had that bodyguard look, and had died with his teeth clenched and fists balled. Dandine gave him a glance—just one—and stepped over him, leading the way with his pistol, muzzle anticipating and covering the unknown space inside the house.

From the grim look of the scenario,
NORCO
was already aware of Alicia Brandenberg’s demise and had begun a general purge. I remembered what Dandine had said about deducing things from the size and pattern of a hit. This was big-time, scorched earth stuff. It looked like Theodore Ripkin had pulled the short straw in the big
NORCO
choose-up.

The foyer opened to a grand stairway that spiraled lazily up the curve of one of the house’s three turrets. Each step was wide enough to park a car lengthwise, and on one of them there was a woman facedown, her arm extended through the wrought iron risers, coagulated blood forming candle-wax stalactites on her fingertips. Simple black blouse and trousers, probably the maid with the Focus. She had been blown completely out of her shoes. Bullet gouges had vandalized the wall, sniffing to take her down, and some nobleman in a huge painting had suffered a hit right in his stern expression. The hole made his face look like a cartoon caricature of surprise, the face Wile E. Coyote makes when he realizes he has fucked up yet again.

The cars kept barreling up Calle Viuda. When I turned back, Dandine had slipped away to continue his investigation. I checked out the kitchen, through swinging double doors. Another domestic and another enforcer-looking guy, both deader than the meat in the fridge. One of them had been two bites into a Monte Cristo when he started catching slugs and stopped breathing. There was spilt coffee on the floor tiles, drying already, similar to the maid’s blood on the stairs. When I came out, Dandine was walking down the stairs with that odd grace of his, like a dancer, despite his arm sling.

“Two more,” he said. “Nobody that looks like Ripkin. They either took him, or he got out.”

“Or he wasn’t home,” I said, off-balance with the weight of the firearm in my waistband. I was still holding onto the dim hope that this might be an unrelated event at the hands of . . . I didn’t know, revolutionaries, terrorists, angry house wives,
something
else. Pointlessly, I said, “Unless
who
took him?”

“Who do you think? Look at the patterns. They came through the door spraying. Probing by fire, with automatic weapons. You see any shell casings on the floor?”

“No.”

“They had their hardware boxed and baffled.”

“English, please?”

“They used silencers and cartridge-snaggers, like I used back at the hotel. I doubt if anybody upstairs heard anybody downstairs getting bagged. This ain’t happening; it’s over.” He stowed his piece as the first incoming cruiser rutted the gravel outside in a speed-stop. “Put on your sunglasses,” he said.

“Like at Varga’s?” I said.

“Just like at Varga’s.”

There was almost enough overcast daylight left to get away with it, too; I could always claim my shades were prescription, but if we got into chitchat on
that
depth . . .

I hung back while Dandine strolled right into the muzzle view of several riot guns and more than a few drawn police .357s. He had never intended to pull a gun. He was going to pull rank instead. You had to admire the sheer balls on the guy.

“Thompson, NSA,” he announced, flashing his perfect credentials. I heard somebody shout
stand down.
The same voice, the shouter, said, “Captain Ramses.”

By the time I got to the door, they were already shaking hands. Captain Ramses had brought a small army for his armed response, plus a point man in full-bore SWAT Kevlar, and a K9 shepherd. Ramses made a hand sign and the cops stashed their hardware, relieved at not taking fire, irritated at not getting to discharge. An LAPD chopper had settled into a hover pattern overhead, thrumming the air.

“That’s Lamb,” he said, jerking a thumb toward me. I did my tough-guy single nod and my glasses slid down my nose. Slick. One of the uniformed cops called in a Code 4 from the location; he said “location” instead of “scene,” as though he was talking about a movie shoot.

“Whatever your call was,” said Dandine, “This was no burglary. Captain, I’m going to have to ask for your discretion on this, and possibly your judgment. Because I believe we’ve really got a terrorist incident on our hands, right here in the middle of where we’re not supposed to
worry
about stuff like that.”

“Copy that,” said the captain, playing hardcase, all squint and burly set of jaw. He’d seen worse. He eyed Dandine’s sling. “What happened to you?”

“Torn rotator cuff,” Dandine said.

“What can you tell me?”

“Run a jacket on every one of those dead bodies in there and you’ll find Middle Eastern passports for the lot. You can get an evidence van up here double-quick, but that won’t change the prognosis. We may be looking at a Yellow Alert for Beverly Hills, and I’m not talking about missing toddlers, if you catch my meaning.”

Captain Ramses knew the ramifications.
“Shit,”
he whispered, indicating what his workday had become.

“Every one of your men will have to be debriefed,” Dandine said. “Whoever shot up this place wasn’t making a pit stop after the Beverly Hills Gun Club, am I right?”

“Oh, thank god, thank god! Oh, god! Oh, no
—”

We heard some antique porcelain tchotchke in the house crash into powder as it was blundered from a pedestal.

“Oh . . .
god,
Esteban, god, god, they’re all
dead!
”

“Somebody religious?” said Dandine.

Half the response team realigned their weapons on the front door as a disheveled man plummeted out at a dead stumble. His shirt was untucked, there was an unseemly rip in the shoulder of his tailored suit, his face was bright red, and he walked clop-footed, as though he had forgotten how. His clothing was smudged with dust and dirt, and he only seemed partially aware of us, his rheumy blue eyes saccading across us too many times. His hands were jittering with shock, which was deadly, because one of them held a nickel-plated revolver, a whore’s gun that had probably spent most of its life in a drawer.

This, then, was the estimable Theodore Ripkin.

“Stand down!” Ramses shouted toward his men. The presence of the helicopter pretty much necessitated that everyone shout. “Sir—I’m going to ask you to stop right where you’re standing, and place that weapon on the deck. I do mean right now.”

Ripkin skidded to a halt as though he’d smacked into an invisible
barrier. “Oh! Oh! Yes!
Of course!
I—oh, thank god you men are here, thank god—”

“He’s back on the God thing again,” Dandine said to me in aside, already disgusted with the specimen before us.