Night Talk (11 page)

The apartment was as confused and cluttered as Rohan's mind—Chinese take-out boxes, dried-out pizza, beer cans and an almost empty bottle of vodka. The room had a chemical, sweet smell. A small burner on the coffee table had whitish chunks next to it.

Rohan looked as if he had spent the night fighting an attack from flesh-eating zombies. Maybe he had. Real ones or those created by inhaling crack cocaine.

“You have to leave,” Rohan said. “I got a call. The police are coming; they want to talk to me about you and Ethan. I don't want them to catch you here, they'll try and pin something on me. They're after me, they—”

“How'd you get a call? Your phone's been disconnected.”

“My phone's been disconnected?” Rohan stared around, puzzled. “My phone's been disconnected. You're right. How'd I get a call?”

To accommodate the police, the phone company could turn a phone line off so calls couldn't come in and then turn the line back on to allow a call through, but Greg didn't share the observation.

“I need to talk to you about Ethan,” Greg said.

“Ethan's dead.”

“I know, I saw him commit suicide.”

“Suicide—hell no, they killed him.” He stared at Greg, wild-eyed. “If you saw them kill him, you must be one of them.”

“Rohan—”

Rohan backed off. “Keep away from me!”

“Listen,” Greg said softly, “I came because you called me. Ethan called me last night then jumped out of a window of the building across the street. I saw him fall, so did—”

“He was pushed, they killed him.”

“Who killed him?”

“They did, the ones that Murad works for, the ones that control everything we do.”

He was excited, manic, moving around as if he expected threats to suddenly materialize in the room.

“Were you using Ethan to hack into the university to get evidence of your abduction?”

“That bastard Murad is hiding the names of people he fed to aliens in that sleep program he uses to supply them. The judge wouldn't let me subpoena the list—he's one of them. They've got the cops and the judges in their pocket.”

“What did you mean when you said Ethan got too close to them? What's the secret file that Ethan was after?”

Rohan was too wired to stand still. He paced a few steps one way and then back. “They're going to get us, we don't stand a chance. We have to go undercover, figure out—”

“Stop. No one's going to do anything to us if we keep our senses and fight back. We can go to the news media—”

“All controlled by them.”

“Who are ‘them'? We need—”

“You know who they are,” Rohan shouted, “the controllers, the ones in charge, the ones that Murad works for.”

“Calm down and listen to me, Rohan, you're talking in circles. We need facts we can back up, not unsupported accusations. Ethan got into a secret file and he or someone else did a money transfer from my bank that I didn't authorize and the feds think I did. How did he—”

The doorbell rang. It sounded like a shot in the room. The two men froze and both looked to the front door.

Rohan said, “The police. They said they were coming.”

“Did someone say I was coming? You know of a fed named Mond? Something called the Interagency?”

“You have to get out of here. If they find us both here they'll think we're in it together.”

“In what?”

“The back, out the back.”

“Tell me what's going on, what you and Ethan were doing.”

The doorbell rang again.

Rohan pushed him. “Out the back, the back.”

Greg went slowly, trying to get Rohan to focus. “Did Ethan give you a file? Do you know how he got the money from my account?”

“They can't find us together.”

It was useless. The man was wasted—mindless and panicked.

Greg followed Rohan through the kitchen to the back door but he hesitated at the door as Rohan fumbled with the deadbolt. His instincts told him not to run but face whatever was coming at him from the police, but Rohan was vibrating and ready to unravel, so he stepped out.

Rohan slammed the door behind him and hurried to the front door as the doorbell rang for a third time. His mind was swirling. It hadn't been on track since he started on alcohol and cocaine to get it into whack.

He jerked the door open to a man in a utility worker's uniform.

 

23

Greg wavered on the landing, trying to decide whether to go down the steps and leave or barge back into the apartment. Getting caught sneaking out the back as if he had something to hide would not just be humiliating but be interpreted by Mond and the police that he was involved in whatever Rohan and Ethan had going.

It was now a given that Rohan had some hacking deal going with Ethan but he hadn't pinned Rohan down about the secret file that Ethan was supposed to have passed to Greg. He was sure Rohan was involved in the scheme.

He heard something—an exclamation from Rohan? He reached for the door handle and gripped it but froze without turning it, not sure what he was hearing. Rohan was so high he could be shouting at the cops or even being cuffed so he wouldn't interfere as they ripped apart the apartment as they had done his.

Greg struggled with whether to leave and fight another day or confront Mond with Rohan there in the hopes of getting Rohan to blurt out the truth. He decided the hell with it—if the police ask Rohan questions about him and Ethan, he wanted to hear the answers.

He opened the door and paused to listen. No sound was coming from the living room. He moved through the kitchen to find the living room empty, the front door closed. Had they arrested him? In and out that fast? Without a wrecking crew searching the place? Not likely. He called Rohan's name and checked the bedroom and bathroom.

Excited voices came through the doors to the balcony that Rohan had left open. The voices came from the street two stories below. It didn't sound like cops but a crowd.

Greg ran out onto the balcony and looked down. Rohan was lying on the sidewalk, with people gathered around. It looked like neighbors, not police. He was facedown, his head at an unnatural angle to his body, as if his neck had snapped. He wasn't moving; blood was on the concrete next to his head.

A woman kneeling beside him stood up. “There's no pulse.”

A teenage boy with his foot on a skateboard pointed up at Greg. “That's him—I saw him throw the man over.”

Greg shouted down, “No, you didn't! Not me.”

“I saw it!”

“You didn't see me!”

“Call the police,” someone yelled and someone else said they'd been called.

Greg backed away from the edge of the balcony and went back inside, half stumbling. Mindlessly, in shock over seeing Rohan's lifeless body and the kid's crazy accusation, he went through the kitchen, out the back door and down the stairs to the parking lot in the rear of the building.

He made his way past the side of another apartment building and to the street beyond. His car was on the street that had the crowd and he wasn't ready to face accusations again.

He wasn't going anywhere, just walking, trying to get his head on right, trying to comprehend what had happened. The kid was right about one thing—Rohan had been thrown off the balcony. The kid was a typical eyewitness who didn't get a good look at the person he saw push Rohan, but now had an image of Greg burned into his head because he'd connected up the two in his mind. An image he would convey to the police as an impartial eyewitness.

Rohan had expected the police to arrive and ask questions about Greg, had opened the door to someone, and now he was dead. Like Ethan. High on drugs and dead from what appeared to be suicide but wasn't, because the skateboarder had seen someone put Rohan over the edge.

Greg realized that besides the kid's testimony, his own fingerprints were in the apartment; his car was nearby on the street. Someone in the crowd might have recognized him or would when there came an explosion of publicity about him: two deaths and stolen secrets.

He was going to be arrested. That was now a certainty. Going from being the host of a nationally broadcasted radio show to being arrested for murder. In a matter of hours. It made no sense. He was being framed but by who? Why? Why was the sky suddenly falling? The sands were shifting under his feet so fast he was being kept off balance. Had a strange encounter over twenty years ago come alive to haunt him?
Were they back?

Crazy crazy crazy.
He was up to his neck with murder and treason and who the hell knew what else. He felt as if his feet were in quicksand and he was being sucked in—not slowly but in big gulps.

Ethan. Rohan. What did they get into? What the hell did they unleash? Why did they get him involved with a money transfer? Questions pounded in his head. None of it made sense. Not the lack of publicity about Ethan's death. Not the clamp-down on what should have been sensational reports about a bizarre death in one of the biggest cities in the country; not Ethan's being turned into a nonperson by wiping him off the Internet.

He dialed Liz Tucker and got her voicemail. She was either dodging the call or was at her son's wedding with her phone turned off.

“Liz—things are getting worse. Something else has happened. I need to contact that lawyer you mentioned.” He hung up, his mind swirling. She told him that the lawyer was at a bar meeting. What was the lawyer going to do? Tell him to turn himself in? Arrange for him to surrender? Try to get bail? Do they even give bail in murder cases? Rohan claimed Ethan was murdered. Was he going to face two murder charges? Murder for hire, in Ethan's case?

Forget proof. Liz already told him there was enough to hang him. Forget bail for sure if he faced two murder charges. He would rot in jail for the years it took a sensational case to get to trial. Helpless while he lost everything he worked for. Everything. His reputation. His freedom.

He had walked two blocks from the apartment building when he heard sirens. A police car with flashing lights was coming toward him and he stiffened and stopped walking, not daring to invite a bullet in his back by turning and running.

The cop car made a left turn and disappeared from sight in a direction that could take it to Rohan's apartment building.

The next siren he heard would be one coming for him.

A car pulled up beside him. A red Mini Cooper convertible with the top down and a woman behind the wheel.

She said, “The first thing you have to do is get rid of your cell phone. They let you keep it because there's a leash attached to it.”

The woman who had been in the doorway when Ethan's body was on the sidewalk.

The woman passing cryptic messages to him.

 

24

She was about thirty, slender, and had short chestnut hair with caramel and gold highlights. Green-framed sunglasses and a pink cap with a peace icon on it complemented her smooth rosy complexion and seemed to even go with the snazzy little red convertible.

She wore a white lacy pullover and black linen pants. Her clothes were snappy casual, not what one would wear to a formal office atmosphere like that of a lawyer or doctor or even to lunch at a Melrose restaurant, but wrinkled casual, just a little dressier than those of the Silicon Valley young Turks who ruled the computer world while dressed in T-shirts and jeans.

She struck him as a professional but in a nonconventional business, maybe even a teacher, a no-nonsense one, businesslike with confidence but reserved—even a bit on the grave side.

Her long slender fingers had no nail polish and were neatly trimmed to make sure they didn't get in the way of working with a computer keyboard. And because Ethan was a computer guy, he took her to be part of the computer world, too.

There was an edge to her, tension, as though she was holding back from hitting the gas and leaving him in her car's dust, but that may have been because more sirens were blaring. The sirens were electrifying. He had to fight the urge to run.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“A friend of Ethan's. He got me into trouble, too.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Your kind. What you've been battered with since Ethan's death. The fallout from cracking a secret program.”

A helicopter was in the distance, closing in on the area.

She said, “That's probably a police chopper. I saw people crowding around a person on the sidewalk. Unconscious, I think. Maybe it's a medevac.”

“Rohan. He's dead.”

“Rohan?”

“The guy on the street. He got thrown off of his balcony.”

“Someone killed him?”

“A kid on the street saw me come onto the balcony and thinks I did it.”

She gave him a look.

“I didn't. Rohan pushed me out the back door when he thought the police had arrived to question him. I came back in when I heard something and stupidly walked out onto the balcony.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don't know, the place was empty when I came back in. I stepped out on the balcony and a kid on the street started yelling. He thought I was the one who threw Rohan off. Right now I'm puzzled as to why you don't know Rohan but you have been driving around his place.”

“I'm following you.”

“Why are you following me?”

“I told you, Ethan got me into trouble. He hacked into something that has started a firestorm.”

More sirens.

She said, “I'm leaving. Get in or stick around and talk to the police. It's your call.”

He climbed in.

 

25

He looked her over after they pulled away from the curb and he checked the traffic to the rear. No police cars. She had a serious cast to her features. Maybe it was a permanent demeanor. She struck him as a person who didn't laugh very often, but then again there hadn't been anything to laugh about lately.