Night Talk (37 page)

He needed to hole up somewhere so he could think. If Ali hadn't taken the damn car keys he could have parked somewhere and rested until his eyes and mind were working right again.

He kept walking, on the sidewalk, away from the motel. Where he was going, he didn't know, or how to get anywhere farther than his feet could carry him, but he knew he had to get out of the area because it would soon be swarming with police.

Keep moving keep moving keep moving,
he told his feet.

He heard sirens and they sounded like the same ones he had heard when he walked away from Rohan's apartment after looking down and seeing a body sprawled on the street.

Greg hadn't gone more than a block when he saw a white van parked along the curb.

He stumbled as his feet lost coordination because his mind took up all his energy. It couldn't be a coincidence. It had to be the same van. He should have gone down to where the killer was lying and rifled through the man's pockets to find the van keys.

He stopped beside the van and peered through the closed passenger-side window. It was dark and his sight was still too blurred to see the interior except to notice there was no one in the van.

He tried the passenger door and it opened. He leaned in and there it was—a key in the ignition. That was all, just a plain key, not even with a ring or a remote door opener. But it was the most beautiful key he had ever seen.

He slipped onto the passenger seat and shut the door behind him. It would have been easier to have walked around to the other side of the car and gotten onto the driver's seat the usual way, but he was driven almost by paranoia that if he didn't climb in and take possession he would lose the van.

His ribs screamed in pain as he worked his way laboriously over the seat and got settled on the driver's side, now more exhausted than ever. He tried the key and the engine started and he muttered a little thanks.

He pulled away from the curb. With his watery eyes it looked like Christmas as he slowly headed down the boulevard, the white, red, yellow and green lights glowing like bright bulbs.

He still didn't know where he was going. He just drove straight. After he'd driven a few minutes he pulled over in a business section, a light industrial area filled with small shops and warehouses that were closed for the night, and parked the van.

A red glow to the rear reminded him to take his foot off the brake.

He scooted lower in the seat and closed his eyes. Images of a body free-falling and spinning like a top popped into his head.

 

75

For the moment he was safe. But surviving the killer hadn't increased his life expectancy by much. He wondered if the van was rigged with a tracking device so whoever sent the killer would know his location. He didn't see anything obvious but it was dark in the van and a tracking device could be anywhere, even underneath or in the engine compartment. A camera the size of a pinhead could be recording him. But what were the chances there was another killer waiting to go into action?

Fumbling around the interior, he found a bottle of water and poured it on his face and onto his eyes. Wedged in between the center divider and the passenger seat was a slender computer tablet. He weighed it in his hands for a moment, wondering if he dared use it to access Ethan's hidden file. No, that would be stupid not only because it would make it easier to track him, but it would also let them know where the file was so it could be destroyed.

He rolled down the passenger window and threw the tablet out. As far as he was concerned, anything electronic could be used to track him.

In the center divider he found eleven twenties—$220. Not much but enough for an untraceable stay in another cheap motel, although that trick wouldn't fool anyone. It hadn't even worked the first time.

Finding the money made him feel better. Having no money or plastic in a big city felt like being lost in a forest without food or shelter.

He shut his eyes again, leaned back and concentrated.
What's the plan, man?
Get on the freeway and drive as far as $220's worth of gas would take him? Then what? Broke and stranded, lie down on the freeway and become roadkill? Go downtown and camp on the door of a newspaper or TV station in the hopes of running into someone who could help?

Getting the media involved seemed to be the only way to survive the morass that was swallowing him. He wouldn't have had a killer after him if Ethan hadn't penetrated something super-big, evidence that would expose a conspiracy he and so many others felt was strangling government of and for the people. From what Ethan had told others, that had to be what the God Project entailed. Getting the evidence publicized would make the secret forces back off, even if it was written off by the authorities as a hoax.

But he didn't give himself a respectable chance of surviving alone until morning—not camped where he was or downtown. Not much chance of hiding out in the van without being discovered in short order, period. He had to get out of the van. Going to a motel would only delay the inevitable—the door would come crashing in sometime in the night and he would be finished.

“Finished.” The word stuck with him. Ethan had started something big. He'd broken into a secret government program and discovered something that launched a black operation to find and destroy the evidence and kill anyone who knew about it.

Ethan had started it and passed it on to him to finish.

Greg shook his head to clear his thoughts. Ethan hadn't passed the file to him to find someone else to expose the truth—he sent it to him because he was a media personality known to millions.

He didn't need to camp downtown and beg someone to listen before he was dragged out of the van and murdered during the night. He'd publicize the dirty secrets himself. What he needed was a way to access the file and then broadcast the information to the world.

That boiled down to getting on the Internet to get to the file and find a way to spread the information out to the world once he had it. Dropping in at his broadcasting studio and going on the air nationally wasn't in the cards. Besides never getting past the front door at the studio, he was certain he would be cut off even if he managed to get on the air.

He thought about how clever Ethan had been to fool everyone by getting the information to him in a way no one would have suspected. Every aspect of his own life must be under a microscope—phones, Internet, e-mails, tweets, texting, blogs, Facebook and every other social media and electronic communication. And there was no way for him to send out a message to thousands by snail mail.

They had him electronically hog-tied, but what if he worked through someone else?

If he got on another person's computer, he could get on the Internet and access the file. He'd only be able to send it out to whatever social networking was on that computer because anything with greater access, like his radio program's database of his fans, would be intercepted. He might end up being able to access only a couple dozen people. And he wasn't about to endanger family or friends by using their computers even if Mond didn't have them blocked.

Even more on point, when they had put him under the microscope he was certain they would've included everyone in his personal circle of friends and family because they would be the ones whom he was most likely to contact.

While shielding himself and anyone he contacted, he still needed to get the information out to tens of thousands, millions of people, if possible, and the only database available to him with that kind of access was the one his radio show maintained.

A door suddenly opened in his mind and he realized how he could pull it off. It was an audacious path that he hoped, like Ethan's snail mail, the authorities or black ops would never have thought of and intercept.

Once he got on the Internet, he knew how to get the information out to the world.

 

76

Using a stranger's computer seemed like a reasonable plan. Whoever was trying to keep the information secret couldn't be tracking every computer in the world, and where Ethan hid the file didn't sound like a location that the NRO would be monitoring. It also wouldn't put a stranger in danger because there would be no connection to Greg, other than his briefly borrowing the computer.

The most likely place to find a computer was at a coffeehouse, coffee bar or whatever the “in” name was now for places where people sat around and drank lattes while they played with their phones and computers.

He drove back toward the hills, to Ventura Boulevard, to a coffeehouse he had been to before. The place was half a block off the boulevard, down an alley too narrow for a vehicle.

He thought about parking the van a couple of blocks away but decided that if they were tracking the van, by now they would know where it was. He had to get in and get the job done before he got dragged out of the coffeehouse or ended up getting killed “resisting arrest.”

He left the van half a block from the alley, at the first available space he saw, and headed for the coffeehouse.

Greg took a look at himself in the reflection of a store window before he reached the alley. His eyes had been stung and he'd been kicked and beaten up and fought a killer to the death. He appeared to have lost the fight and some of life's other battles along the way.

There was a streetlight at the corner where the alley and boulevard met, but none down the alley itself to the coffee place. It felt good on his eyes to walk in the darkness.

Before stepping into the coffee bar he straightened his clothes and blinked his eyes several times, wiping tears away.

He paused just inside and got some stares he ignored. He needed a computer with a webcam and went for the first person he saw who had one. He took the eleven twenties out of his pocket and stuffed one back in so he had money for a cup of coffee.

The guy with the computer webcam looked up as Greg approached. Slender, in his late twenties, with glasses and a goatee, he had
IT
written all over him. Just the kind of guy who would be comfortable accessing data. But he didn't look receptive to being interrupted. His body language said he was a person who was only barely comfortable being alone and yet couldn't handle anyone intruding on his space. The kind of guy no one would like at the office but who was efficient, knew it and let everyone else know it. A twerp.

Greg stopped in front of him, feeling a little breathless. “Hi, this is crazy, but I need to make a quick webcast. I'll give you two hundred dollars if I can use your—”

“Fuck off.”

“I know it's weird—”

“Beat it or I'll call the cops.”

Greg scoffed at that one. “Sorry, private joke.” He looked around the room and said out loud, “Anyone, I need to make an urgent webcast. I've got two hundred dollars for a few minutes on a computer.”

“I'm calling 911,” the twerp said.

A barista approached Greg. “Excuse me, sir, but you can't come in here and disturb—”

“Hey!” The interruption came from a young woman with a wheat-colored ponytail three tables away. “You're Greg Nowell.”

“Who's Greg Nowell?” the twerp asked.

“You've been in here before,” the barista said. “You're the radio guy.”

“Why do you need to do a webcast?” ponytail asked. “My computer will do it and you don't have to pay me.”

Greg sat down beside her. “You don't want to know. I'm serious.”

“Really? Hey, I listen to your show. ‘Night Talk with the Nighthawk.' This have anything to do with conspiracies and aliens and Bigfoot stuff?”

“All of them.”

“Epic!”

“I need to first access a file and then send it by linking it to a database that has about a million e-mail addresses on it. Take this anyway.” He set the ten twenties on the seat beside her.

“Whose database is it?”

“It's a charity I'm one of the founders of. I make periodic webcasts to raise money for them. This time I'm using it to send out important information.”

“Why don't you just go to your station and—”

“I know I look like crap but I got hit with some crazy laser thing. They're trying to kill me. I need to get out the webcast before they manage it.”

“Who tried to kill you?” the twerp asked.

A crowd had gathered. “It's a publicity stunt,” someone said.

“It's prank time!” the twerp yelled.

Greg said to ponytail, “Look at my face. Do I look like I have makeup on?”

She nodded. “You look like someone didn't like your face and decided to use it as a punching bag. Your eyes have that look Dracula gets when he's thirsty.”

He waved off questions from the group. “Let's get this done,” he told the young woman. “We need to start by opening a file.” He unfolded the Chinese take-out menu and set it on the table, pointing out the scribbled link. “This is the Web site we first need to access.”

She shook her head as she read Ethan's scribbles. “Department of Agriculture? Mad cow division? On a Chinese menu. Hey, dude, this really is a joke.”

Greg stood up and pulled up his shirt, exposing a raw, black and bloody wound. He took her hand and put it against the hot, raw bruise on his face. “Is this a joke? Look at my eyes again. I got hit by a laser that almost blinded me and then a guy tried to finish me off.” He tapped the flier. “To get that information.”

She looked around the room for support or for someone to tell her to walk away from it. The wounds had shut up the crowd.

The girl with the ponytail took a big breath. “Okay, okay, it's crazy, I'm nuts, but I'm with you. Let's do it.”

 

77

“I'll read off the Web site to you,” Greg told the young woman.

Getting into the Department of Agriculture and the mad cow site was easy. Nothing stopped them. The woman entered the path as Greg read aloud Ethan's scribbled information. A file called “For Greg” popped up.