Redheads (36 page)

But that was a worry several minutes in the future.

What he needed to do now was sabotage the steering gear so it would fail if someone tried to turn the ship around. The tools for repairing the gear would be kept in this room, and what could be used to fix that equipment could rig its failure. He found a supply cabinet next to a workbench and opened its drawers one at a time until he found what he was looking for. He gave himself five minutes to do what needed to be done, measuring the time by counting to three hundred as he drilled holes in the main hydraulic lines and weakly patched them with hose clamps and cardboard which would burst at the first rise in pressure from a major movement of the rudder. He didn’t want to simply drain the fluid from the system because the loss of hydraulic pressure would set off an alarm in the bridge. That alarm couldn’t come until later. In the last sixty seconds of his countdown, he went to the wall-mounted fifty-five gallon drum of spare hydraulic fluid, and punched through its bottom with a hammer and a screwdriver. The viscous yellow liquid began to spread across the floor of the steering room. If they had a good engineer aboard, they would get the rudder working again—but it would take hours.

He was done in here and looked for the exit, finding a ladder welded to the transom that led into the darkness. This would reach the deck, right at the stern rail. He mounted the first rung and began to climb, one handed. He kept the pipe wrench locked under his right armpit. The thing could be flying headfirst down the ladder towards him in the darkness, its mouthful of infected teeth coming at him with the gathering speed of a falling stone. He looked up the rungs and could see nothing. After a while he put thoughts of the thing out of his mind and focused on climbing.

When he got to the hatch, he balanced himself by locking his right elbow around a steel rung while he leaned backwards with his weight on the rusty wheel. When it finally gave way, he spun it counterclockwise and then pushed the hatch up with the back of his neck as he climbed through.

After the darkness and dim artificial light inside the ship, the daylight struck him blind. For a moment, he shrank back into the hatch. He’d expected night. But the sun was either rising or setting, and the sky on the horizon was lit a pinkish gray. If he lived long enough, he’d find out whether this was dusk or dawn. When he adjusted to the idea there would be no cover of darkness, he came entirely out of the hatch and stood on the stern deck. He was in between two canyon-like stacks of cargo containers that rose ten high and five deep between the stern and the superstructure that held the bridge. Then he looked up and saw he’d come to the deck directly beneath the thing he’d been praying the ship would possess: a free-fall lifeboat.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chris methodically worked through the straight and flat streets of the Inner Sunset, and then, while Julissa slept next to him, he started on the curving, steep streets that led up to and around Grand View Park on the southern edge of the neighborhood. In the amber light of the streetlights he could see waves of fog blowing through the stand of cypress trees on the dark hilltop to his left. To his right, down the slope, there was a row of fine houses. The computer was on Julissa’s lap and her head was leaning against the window. Light from the streetlights made a halo from the small circle of vapor where she had breathed against the glass in her sleep.

The alarm went off thirty seconds after he turned onto Fifteenth Avenue. The alarm was just a slowly repeating beep, not very loud. He drove another five seconds before he realized what it was. Then he gently applied the brakes and parked against the curb. It was three o’clock in the morning. The cars parked on the street were covered in a glittering layer of dew. A light rain had been falling, but had stopped for now. He let the windshield wipers go through one more sweep, then turned them off. Some of the houses had lights over the doorsteps or above their garage doors, or low ground lights set amongst the bushes of their steeply sloped and small front yards. But there were no windows lit. He put the transmission into park, set the brake, and dowsed the headlights.

Julissa woke and looked at the computer.

“It’s him,” she said.

Chris nodded and watched as she leaned into the backseat, reached into the box containing her device, and came back holding the main receiving antenna on a long cable. Then she opened a programming window on her laptop and began to dial down the antenna’s sensitivity. Chris watched silently, taking his eyes off her face only to scan the street and the rear-view mirror. Julissa switched off the alarm and the car was hushed except for her fingers tapping on the keyboard and the quiet purr of the engine idling. Julissa covered one side of the circular antenna with a sheet of lead foil and then rotated it slowly. The uncovered side of the antenna was facing backwards when the alarm began to ping again.

“Back up about a hundred feet.”

“Yeah.”

Chris put the car into neutral and released the parking brake. They coasted silently backwards down the hill with the headlights off. When they’d gone past two houses, Chris turned to the curb and parked again.

The third time the alarm began its ping, Julissa’s antenna was facing the house directly to their right. It was a two-story house made of unpainted redwood planks. Its garage came nearly to the edge of the street and there was a deck built on top of the garage accessed from sliding doors giving passage to what may have been the master bedroom. Though curtains were drawn across the glass doors, Chris could see a faint blue-white glow. Otherwise, the house was dark.

“Is this the one, or is it possible there’s a house behind this?”

“I don’t think we could get reception beyond fifty or sixty feet. This is the place.”

They looked at the house, at the cold illumination seeping through the bedroom curtains.

“Now what?” Julissa asked.

“Stay here,” Chris said. “I’m just going to check it out.”

He saw she was scared and he leaned across the seat and put one hand on the back of her neck. Beneath the spill of her red hair, her neck was still warm from sleep and he wished he could simply take her back to the hotel and make love to her and then sleep next to her until well into the morning. He wished he could let go of revenge and just take Julissa to a safe place where they could live quietly and love one another. But even though she was terrified, he knew her heart was locked into this just the same as his. So he pulled her gently to him and kissed her, and felt both longing and ferocity in the way she kissed him back.

“I’ll be right back. I’m not going inside. I just want to see what kind of alarm he’s got.”

“Okay.”

He reached into the glove compartment and took out a black shaving kit full of things he’d picked up in Chinatown. Then he stepped from the car and pulled the hood of his black sweatshirt against the light rain. He crossed the street and walked into the narrow side yard between the hacker’s house and the one next door. No motion light came on and no dog barked. He opened the shaving kit, found the pair of black spandex gloves, and slipped them on. Then he took out one of the throwing knives and a penlight. He unsheathed the knife and held it in his right hand, keeping the penlight in his left hand. He did not turn on the light yet, but walked quietly between the low juniper bushes, the legs of his jeans soaking through from the rain in the branches. He came to the kitchen window, which was about three feet square. Its outer sill was above the level of his head, but there was a plastic trash can against the house just under the window. Now he turned on his light and saw several things at once. There was a pair of wet boot prints on the lid of the trash can, and there was a six-inch diameter circle of glass on the ground in the bushes. He shone the light carefully up the window. Someone had used a diamond-bladed glass cutter to cut a circle from the pane’s upper edge. The window was closed. He turned off the light and held it in his teeth while he climbed up onto the trash can. When he stood, the circular hole in the glass was right at his face. Without even using the light he could see it would be possible to reach through the hole and unlatch the window. As for an alarm, the window was wired with a sensor. When the sliding pane of glass was opened, a magnet on the moving pane would lose contact with the stationary sensor on the casement, triggering the house alarm. But when he flicked on the penlight, he saw this sensor had been overcome in the same way he would have done it. A small piece of black magnetic tape was stuck over the sensor, so that no matter what position the window was in, the alarm system would believe it was closed because the sensor would never lose contact with a magnetic pull. There were no vibration sensors on the window, probably because the hilltop was too windy.

He heard a rustle of clothing against branches behind him and he dropped to a crouch on the lid of the trash can, bringing up the knife. Julissa was standing five feet away, hidden in the shadows except for her face.

He lowered the knife and slipped down from the trash can.

She stepped up to him and leaned to whisper in his ear.

“What’d you find?”

“Someone’s broken into this house,” he whispered back. “Probably tonight.”

He used the flashlight to illuminate the boot prints on the trash can and the circle of glass on the ground.

“The prints haven’t washed off yet, and it’s been raining on and off for an hour.”

“Who’d have gotten here before us?” Julissa whispered.

“I believe in coincidences, but not this time.”

“You think it sent someone.”

Chris nodded. He led them farther into the shadow between the two houses. There was a low redwood fence partitioning the backyard from the narrow side yard. At least in the darkness he didn’t feel so exposed, though he realized if people expected them to come, he and Julissa may have been watched from the moment they rolled up. He needed to think fast. If they made a run for the car, they might get shot crossing the driveway. A man with a rifle could be standing behind the curtains in the bedroom, or hiding in the shadows on the hill where they’d never stand a chance of seeing him. But if there were gunmen in either place, why didn’t they get shot the second they stepped out of the car? The killer and his hired men obviously knew what they looked like.

They came to a second window that lit the living room. Chris risked raising his head to the level of the sill so he could look inside. The room was in perfect order. A few small spotlights over the bookshelves showed the space. There were leather couches facing a gigantic flat-screen television, dark wood-and-glass display cases housing vases and jade carvings. The walls were adorned with framed paintings showing scenes from Guilin—steeply peaked mountains rising above the mist, rivers flowing between stands of bamboo. A potted orchid sat alone on the coffee table. Nothing was tipped over, there were no books strewn on the floor, there were no bullet holes in the furniture or blood splatters on the walls.

“What now?” Julissa said. She was whispering so quietly he heard her words more by the brush of her breath against his ear than by the sound of her voice.

Maybe the only safe thing was to hop the fence into the backyard of the house next door, move into the yard of the house past that, and then run on foot in the shadows until they could catch a cab or hop a bus. If the killer sent his men to break into his own hacker’s house, then it was likely the hacker was dead and whatever evidence he’d possessed had been destroyed. Perhaps the hacker knew too much, or his usefulness had ended and his only remaining purpose was to hang as bait. If that were the case, then the best thing they could hope to get from this situation was to stay alive. Chris thought about it a second longer, and saw by the look on Julissa’s face that she was reaching the same conclusions.

“Is there anything in the car that could trace us to the hotel?” Chris whispered.

“Not on my computer. Did you rent the car under the same name that you used to check into the hotel?”

“Shit.”

If the killer’s men got the car and traced it, they would find the name he was traveling under, which was also the name connected to his source of nearly endless funds. It had been unbelievably stupid to park out front and walk up to the house. Part of his mind wanted to ask how he could have known. But the facts were simple: he’d been stupid and may have killed them both. He and Julissa just looked at each other, crouching in the shadows with their hands on each other’s shoulders so that they could whisper into each other’s ears.

“Then let’s go in,” Julissa said. “I mean, if we’re fucked either way, we might as well do the one thing that has a chance of getting us somewhere.”

Chris nodded and they went back to the kitchen window. He climbed onto the trash can, checked that the magnetic tape was still in place over the sensor, and then slid the window open. To climb inside he’d have to step into the kitchen sink and then down to the floor. Before he did, he handed Julissa a second pair of gloves from the shaving kit in his sweatshirt pocket. As she put them on, he ducked through the window and into the kitchen. He still had the throwing knife in his right hand. When Julissa stepped into the sink, he held her left hand to help her silently down to the floor. The kitchen had a recently cleaned citrus smell. Chris went to a small throw rug in front of the stove and wiped the soles of his shoes so they wouldn’t squeak on the hardwood floors. Julissa did the same.

As they reached the living room, they heard a thud directly above them. This sound was followed by the scratch and drag of a man clawing his way across a hardwood floor. Then the house was still. Julissa had taken a big Chinese-style cleaver from the magnetic rack in the kitchen. She was looking across the living room to the staircase that rose up into darkness. She nodded at it with her chin, and Chris raised his own knife and led the way.