Paranoia (14 page)

“Got the rear spoiler and everything,” he went on. “Dual exhaust tips, right?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“With the rolled edges and everything?”

“Absolutely.”

He shook his head again. “Man. You restore it yourself?”

“Nah, I wish I had the time.”

He laughed again, a low, rumbling laugh. “I know what you mean.”

“Got it from a guy who’d been keeping it in his barn.”

“Three-twenty horsepower on that pony?”

“Right,” I said, like I knew.

“Look at the turn-signal hood on that baby. I once had a ’68 hardtop but I had to get rid of it. My wife made me, after we had the first kid. I’ve been lusting after it ever since. But I won’t even look at that new GT Bullitt Mustang, no sir.”

I shook my head. “No way.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Was everyone in this company obsessed with cars?

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like you got GR-seventy–size tires on fifteen-by-seven American Torque Thrust rims, that right?”

Jesus, could we move off this topic? “Truth is, Luther, I don’t know shit about Mustangs. I don’t even deserve to own one. My wife just got it for me for my birthday. ’Course, it’s going to be
me
paying off the loan for the next seventy-five years.”

He chuckled a little more. “I hear you. I’ve been there.” I noticed him looking down at the desk, and then I realized what he was looking at.

It was a big manila envelope with Nora’s name on it in big, bold capital letters in red Sharpie marker.
NORA SOMMERS
. I looked around the desk for something to slide over it, to cover it up, just in case he hadn’t yet read the name, but Nora kept her desk immaculate. Trying to act casual, I yanked at a page of the legal pad and ripped it out quietly, let it drop to the surface of the desk and slid it over the envelope with my left hand. Real cool, Adam. The yellow paper had a few notes on it in my handwriting, but nothing that would make any sense to anyone.

“Who’s
Nora
Sommers?” he said.

“Ah, that’s my wife.”

“Nick and Nora, huh?” he chortled.

“Yeah, we get that all the time.” I smiled broadly. “It’s why I married her. Well, I’d better get back to the files, or I’m going to be here all night. Nice to meet you, Luther.”

“Same here, Nick.”

By the time the security guy left I was so nervous I couldn’t do much more than finish copying the e-mails, then turn off the light and relock Nora’s office door. As I turned to return the key ring to Lisa McAuliffe’s cubicle, I noticed someone walking not too far away. Luther again, I figured. What did the guy want, more Mustang talk? All I wanted was to drop off the keys unseen, and I was out of here.

But it wasn’t Luther; it was a paunchy guy with horn-rim glasses and a ponytail.

The last person I expected to see in the office at ten o’clock at night, but then again, engineers worked strange hours.

Noah Mordden.

Had he seen me locking up Nora’s office, or maybe even
in
it? Or was his eyesight not that good? Maybe he wasn’t even paying attention; maybe he was in his own world—but what was he
doing
here?

He didn’t say anything, didn’t acknowledge me. I wasn’t even sure he noticed me at all. But I was the only other person in the vicinity, and he wasn’t blind.

He turned into the next aisle down and left a folder in someone’s cubicle. Fake-casually, I strolled past Lisa’s cubicle and deposited the key ring in the plant, right in the soil where I’d found it, one swift movement, then I kept moving.

I was halfway to the elevators when I heard, “Cassidy.”

I turned back.

“And I thought only engineers were nocturnal creatures.”

“Just trying to get caught up,” I said lamely.

“
I
see,” he said. The way he said it sent a chill up my spine. Then he asked, “In what?”

“Sorry?”

“What are you caught up in?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said, my heart pounding.

“Try to remember that.”

“Come again?”

But Mordden was already on his way to the elevator, and he didn’t answer.

PART THREE
P
LUMBING

Plumbing:
Tradecraft jargon for various support assets such as safehouses, dead drops, et al. of a clandestine intelligence agency.

—The International Dictionary of Espionage

23

By the time I got home, I was a wreck, even worse than before. I wasn’t cut out for this line of work. I wanted to go out and get smashed again, but I had to get to bed, get some sleep.

My apartment seemed even smaller and more squalid than ever. I was making a six-figure salary, so I should have been able to afford one of those apartments in the new tall buildings on the wharf. There was no reason for me to stay in this hellhole except that it was
my
hellhole, my reminder of the low-life underachieving bum I really was, not the well-dressed, slick poseur I’d become. Plus I didn’t have the time to look for a new place.

I hit the light switch by the door and the room stayed dark. Damn. That meant the bulb in the big ugly lamp by the sofa, the main light source in the room, had burned out. I always kept the lamp switched on so I could turn it on and off at the door. Now I had to stumble through the dark apartment to the little closet where I kept the spare bulbs and stuff. Fortunately I knew every inch of the tiny apartment, literally with my eyes closed. I felt around in the corrugated cardboard box for a new bulb, hoping it was a hundred-watt and not a twenty-five or something, and then navigated through the room to the sofa table, unscrewed the thing that keeps the shade on, unscrewed the bulb, put in the new one. Still no light came on. Shit: a fitting end to a lousy day. I found the little switch on the lamp’s base and turned it, and the room lit up.

I was halfway to the bathroom when the thought hit me: How’d the lamp get switched off? I never turned it off there—never. Was I losing my mind?

Had someone been in the apartment?

It was a creepy feeling, some flicker of paranoia. Someone
had
been here. How else could the lamp have been switched off at its base?

I had no roommates, no girlfriend, and no one else had the key. The sleazy management company that ran the building for the sleazy absentee slumlord never accessed the units. Not even if you begged them to send someone over to fix the radiators. No one was
ever
in here but me.

Looking over at the phone directly beneath the lamp, this old black Panasonic telephone/answering-machine combo whose answering machine part I never used anymore, now that I had voice mail through the phone company, I saw something else was off. The black phone cord lay across the phone’s keypad, on top of it, instead of coiled to one side of the phone the way it always was. Granted, these were dumb little details, but you do notice these things when you live alone. I tried to remember when I’d last made a phone call, where I’d been, what I’d been doing. Was I so distracted that I hung up the phone wrong? But I was sure the phone hadn’t been like this when I left this morning.

Someone had
definitely
been in here.

I looked back at the phone/answering-machine thing and realized something else was wrong, and this wasn’t even subtle. The answering machine that I never used had one of those dual-tape systems, one microcassette for the outgoing message, another to record incoming messages.

But the cassette that recorded incoming messages was gone.
Someone had removed it
.

Someone, presumably, who wanted a copy of my phone messages.

Or—the idea suddenly hit me—who wanted to make sure I hadn’t used the answering machine to
record
any phone calls I’d received. That had to be it. I got up, started searching for the only other tape recorder I had, a small microcassette thing I’d bought in college for some reason I no longer remembered. I vaguely remembered seeing it in my bottom desk drawer some weeks ago when I’d been searching for a cigarette lighter. Pulling open the desk drawer, I rummaged through it, but it wasn’t there. Nor was it in any of the other desk drawers. The more I looked, the more certain I was that I’d seen the tape recorder in the bottom drawer. When I looked again, I found the AC power adapter that went with it, confirming my suspicion. That recorder was gone too.

Now I was certain: whoever had searched my apartment had been looking for any tape recordings I might have made. The question was, who had searched my apartment? If it was Wyatt and Meacham’s people, that was totally infuriating, outrageous.

But what if it wasn’t them? What if it was
Trion?
That was so scary I didn’t even want to think about it. I remembered Mordden’s blank-faced question:
What are you caught up in?

24

Nick Wyatt’s house was in the poshest suburb, a place everyone’s heard of, so rich that they make jokes about it. It was easily the biggest, fanciest, most outrageously high-end place in a town known for big, fancy, and outrageously high-end estates. No doubt it was important to Wyatt to live in the house that everyone talked about, that
Architectural Digest
put on its cover, that the local journalists were always trying to find excuses to get into and write about. They loved doing awestruck, jaw-dropping takes on this Silicon San Simeon. They loved the Japanese thing—the fake Zen serenity and spareness and simplicity clashing so grotesquely with Wyatt’s fleet of Bentley convertibles and his totally un-Zen stridency.

In Wyatt Telecommunications’s PR department one guy’s entire job was handling Nick Wyatt’s personal publicity, planting items in
People
and
USA Today
or wherever. From time to time he put out stories about the Wyatt estate, which was how I knew it had cost fifty million dollars, that it was way bigger and fancier than Bill Gates’s lake house near Seattle, that it was a replica of a fourteenth-century Japanese palace that Wyatt had had built in Osaka and shipped in pieces to the U.S. It was surrounded by forty acres of Japanese gardens full of rare species of flowers, rock gardens, a man-made waterfall, a man-made pond, antique wooden bridges flown in from Japan. Even the irregularly cut stones paving the driveway had been shipped from Japan.

Of course I didn’t see any of this as I drove up the endless stone driveway. I saw a stone guardhouse and a tall iron gate that swung open automatically, seemingly miles of bamboo, a carport with six different-colored Bentley convertibles like a roll of Lifesavers (no American muscle cars for this guy), and a huge low-slung wooden house surrounded by a tall stone wall.

I’d gotten the order to report for this meeting from Meacham by secure e-mail—a message to my Hushmail account from “Arthur,” sent through the Finnish anonymizer, the remailer that made it untraceable. There was a whole vocabulary of code language that made it look like a confirmation of an order I’d placed with some online merchant, but actually told me when and where and so on.

Meacham had given me precise instructions on where and how to drive. I had to drive to a Denny’s parking lot and wait for a dark blue Lincoln, which I then followed to Wyatt’s house. I guess the point was to make sure
I
wasn’t being followed there. They were being a little paranoid about it, I thought, but who was I to argue? After all, I was the guy on the hot seat.

As soon as I got out of the car, the Lincoln pulled away. A Filipino man answered the door, told me to take off my shoes. He led me into a waiting room furnished with shoji screens, tatami mats, a low black lacquered table, a low futon-looking squarish white couch. Not very comfortable. I thumbed through the magazines arrayed artistically on the black coffee table—
The Robb Report, Architectural Digest
(including, naturally, the issue with Wyatt’s house on the cover), a catalog from Sotheby’s.

Finally, the houseman or whatever you call him reappeared and nodded at me. I followed him down a long hallway and walked toward another almost-empty room where I could see Wyatt seated at the head of a long, low black dining table.

As we approached the entrance to the dining room I suddenly heard a high-pitched alarm go off, incredibly loud. I looked around in bewilderment but before I could figure out what was going on I was grabbed by the Filipino man and another guy who appeared out of nowhere, and the two of them wrestled me to the ground. I said, “What the fuck?” and struggled a little, but these guys were as powerful as sumo wrestlers. The second guy then held me while the Filipino patted me down. What were they looking for, weapons? The Filipino guy found my iPod MP3 music player, yanked it out of my workbag. He looked at it, said something in whatever they speak in the Philippines, handed it to the other guy, who looked at it, turned it over, said something gruff and indecipherable.

I sat up. “This how you welcome all Mr. Wyatt’s guests?” I said. The houseman took the iPod and, entering the dining room, handed it to Wyatt, who was watching the action. Wyatt handed it right back to the Filipino without even looking at it.

I got to my feet. “Your guys never seen one of those before? Or is outside music not allowed in here?”

“They’re just being thorough,” Wyatt said. He was wearing a tight black long-sleeved shirt that looked like it was made of linen, and probably cost more than I made in a month, even now at Trion. He seemed to be more tanned than normal. He must sleep in a tanning bed, I thought.

“Afraid I might be packing?” I said.

“I’m not ‘afraid’ of anything, Cassidy. I like everyone to play by the rules. If you’re smart and don’t try to get tricky, everything will go fine. Don’t even think about trying to take out an ‘insurance policy,’ because we’re way ahead of you.” Funny, the idea had never occurred to me until he mentioned it.