They're Watching (2010) (46 page)

"Not unless you had the signature of that particular signal."

"Like its characteristics?"

"Yes, radio frequency, period, bandwidth, amplitude, type of modulation--all the usual suspects."

"An acquaintance of mine swept our house for us, and he found the thing using a signal analyzer. Would that have recorded the signature?"

"Any signal analyzer worth a damn would have saved the signature in its library. Can you get the analyzer?"

"I have an idea how I might. But I . . . uh, I might need you to offer the guy a job."

"He get fired?"

"Not yet."

Kazakov nodded. "I see."

"I need to make a call. If I turn on my cell phone, can Ridgeline source where I am?"

"This isn't 24. It takes a good amount of time to track a signal. If they're looking. Keep it to a few minutes and you'll be fine." He gestured to the balcony, but his eyes had already moved back to his copied cell-phone bill, the one I'd used to track him down. As I stood, I noticed that his stare had caught on some of the underlined numbers.

"Whose numbers are those?" I asked.

"Advocates," he said, not elaborating. "May I copy this as well?"

"You can have it."

"You've done me an enormous service. Now I need to do a bit of damage control." He gestured to the sliding glass door again, and I left him to his vodka and satellite phone.

"Help you?" The weak cell-phone connection did nothing to stifle Jerry's indignation. "Jesus, don't you learn?"

"Not quickly."

"I'm hanging by a thread over here after Mickelson found out I swept your house. I told you this shit better not come back on me with the studio, and here I am--an ass hair from fired."

"You said you wanted to get back to real security anyway. I have a job lined up for you with North Vector."

"Everyone's looking for you, Patrick. Cops, press, not to mention whoever you're tangled up in. Forget fired. How 'bout aiding and abetting?"

"You haven't watched the news today," I told him. "You don't know I'm on the run."

Beyond the closed sliding glass door, Kazakov sat in his plush white bathrobe, satellite phone tucked between ear and shoulder, gesturing with aggressive precision. I set my hand on the balcony rail, looked out into a tangle of branches. I closed my eyes, breathed in rain and mud, waited for Jerry to decide my wife's fate.

"No," he said slowly. "I guess I haven't. What kind of job?"

"You can sit down with the CEO and pick one."

"The CEO?" He was breathing hard. "This better not be a ruse."

"They have my wife," I said. "They have Ariana."

He was silent. I checked my watch, eager to turn the phone back off.

"Tell me what you're asking for."

We talked through the details, made arrangements, and signed off.

Immediately after I hung up, an Asian chime sounded. With dread, I clicked to open the cell-phone message.

BY NOON TOMORROW, YOU WILL LEAVE THE CD WITH THE VALET AT STARBRIGHT PLAZA.

The screen opened to a live shot of Ariana, bound to a chair. The background was blurry, but it looked like a small room. Her hair was loose and wild, one eye was black, and blood trickled from the edge of her lips. There was no sound, but I could tell she was screaming my name.

The feed vanished, replaced by block letters: TWELVE HOURS.

Then darkness.

I turned off the phone. My mouth was dirt dry, and I had to clutch the balcony rail until I could feel my legs back under me.

A memory came, vivid and unbidden--that first time I'd met Ariana at the freshman-orientation party at UCLA. Her lively, clever eyes. How I'd approached on nervous legs, gripping that cup of keg beer. My lame line--"You look bored." And how she'd asked if I was making a proposition, an offer to unbore her.

I'd said, "Seems like that could be the challenge of a lifetime."

"Are you up to it?" she'd asked.

Yes.

Out on the balcony, the midnight cold had found its way through my clothes. I was shivering violently. Inside the hotel room, Kazakov set down his satellite phone and beckoned me.

I pried my hands off the balcony rail and started in.

Twelve hours.

Chapter
56

The lobby was spotless and gleaming. Even the marble ashtrays, standing obediently at the elevator doors containing nary a butt, looked as though they'd been polished with a silk handkerchief. It could have been a hotel or a country club or the waiting room of a Beverly Hills dentist. But it wasn't.

It was the Long Beach office of Festman Gruber.

The elevator hummed pleasantly up fifteen levels. A floor-to-ceiling wall of thick glass--probably ballistic--rimmed the lobby, funneling visitors to the bank-teller window of the reception console. The security guard behind the window had a sidearm and an impressive scowl for 8:00 A.M. Behind him was a beehive of offices and conference rooms, also composed of glass walls, with assistants and workers scurrying to and fro. Aside from the dollhouse view, it looked just like any other business, depressing in its sterility. The front barrier muted everything beyond to a perfect silence. All that classified work, taking place right in the soundproofed open.

It didn't seem that the guard recognized me, but the bruising on my face said that I was out of place here among the Aeron chairs and plush carpet. My palms were damp, my shoulders tense.

Four hours until Ridgeline would kill my wife.

"Patrick Davis," I said. "I'd like to speak to the head of Legal."

He pushed a button, and his voice issued through a speaker. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No. Just give my name, and I'm sure he or she will want to see me."

The guard didn't say anything, but his face showed he thought that to be improbable. I prayed that the cops wouldn't be summoned before I had a chance to talk to someone.

Of course I'd yet to sleep. I'd picked up Jerry's signal analyzer from a drop point in the wee hours, and some of Kazakov's unnamed associates were rigging it to plug in to a standard GPS unit so I could zero in on Ariana's--or at least her raincoat's--location. After that I was on my own. I'd have to source that tracking signal and catch up to the Ridgeline crew wherever they were hunkered down before they headed out to our meet point at high noon. Right now I needed something to drive that wedge deep and hard between Festman Gruber and Ridgeline, something to arm myself with to take in to the men holding my wife. There were more variables than I could wrap my sleep-deprived mind around, and if any one of them tilted in the wrong direction, I'd be making funeral arrangements, standing trial, or filling out a casket.

As I waited for entry or arrest, treated to a little piped-in Josh Groban, I watched an assistant walk down a glass-walled hall and enter a glass-walled conference room. Men in suits rimmed a granite table the length of a sailboat. One man, identical to the others, rose from the head abruptly when she whispered in his ear. He glanced through the walls at me, Ariana's life hanging in the balance of his decision. Then he walked briskly into an office next door. Waiting breathlessly for his verdict, I was struck that all the glass wasn't some pretense of feel-good corporate transparency; it was an embodiment of the ultimate paranoia. At any time everyone could keep an eye on everyone else.

To my great relief, the assistant, an Asian woman with a severe bob cut, fetched me and led me back. I passed through a metal detector, dropping Don's car keys to the side in a silver tray that passed them through a scan of their own. But I kept my sealed manila envelope in hand.

Now came the real challenge.

The man waited for me in the middle of his office, arms at his sides. "Bob Reimer," he said, not offering his hand.

We stood centered on the slate rug, regarding each other like boxers. He seemed to fit with the total ordinariness of the setting, a mover and shaker who left nary an imprint on the retinas, as bland as a watercooler in a bomb factory. He was older--fifty, maybe--of a generation that still wore tie clips, carried through on their side parts, said "porno" instead of "porn." I couldn't help but think of those replicating G-men from The Matrix--Midwest white, neat suit, not a hair out of place. He was Everyman. He was nobody. Blink and he'd been replaced by an alien, simulating human form. A crushing disappointment, after all the fear and loss and menace, to be confronted with such banality in an air-conditioned office.

He crossed behind me and tapped the glass wall with his fingertips, and it clouded instantly, blocking us from the rest of the floor. Magic.

He went to his desk and removed a handheld wand, which I supposed, in light of my continuing spy education, to be a spectrum analyzer. "Given circumstances, I assume you won't object," he said.

I held my arms wide, and he ran the wand up and down my sides, across my chest, my face, the manila envelope. I resisted an impulse to drive the point of my elbow down through his nose.

Content that I wasn't emitting any RF signals, he slid the wand away in a well-oiled drawer. A framed photograph of an attractive wife and two smiling young boys was on proud display. Beside it sat a coffee mug picturing a cartoon fisherman that said WORLD'S BEST DAD! I realized, with revulsion, that he probably was a good father, that he likely carved his life into neat little compartments and managed them with a despot's efficiency. This compartment had all the trappings and symbols of an ordinary family man, but I had the sensation of being in a well-appointed viper's nest, designed to imitate human surroundings.

"You're a fugitive from justice," he said, not unpleasantly.

"I've come to deal." My voice sounded level enough.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Right," I said. "Clean hands up here on the fifteenth floor."

"Why did you come here?"

"I wanted to look you in the face," I said. Though fury had edged into my voice, his expression remained amiable. I took a half step closer. "I can connect you to Ridgeline."

If there was shock at hearing the name, he concealed it beautifully. "Of course you can. Ridgeline is a security company. They handle our international executive protection."

"We both know they've been handling a lot more than that."

"I'm uncertain what you're referring to." But his eyes stayed on the envelope.

The phone on his desk bleated. He crossed and punched a button. "Not now."

The Asian assistant: "There's an investigative reporter team here from CNBC. They say they want a statement on a breaking story."

He crossed his office in four steps, knocked the milky glass with a knuckle, and it grew clear again. More magic.

Across in the lobby stood two men in windbreakers, one toting a massive video camera with CNBC TV emblazoned on the side next to the familiar peacock rainbow flare. "Get rid of--" Reimer's jaw flexed out at the corners, and his gaze swiveled to mine.

"I haven't leaked this yet," I said. "Obviously, or I wouldn't be here. But I can't speak for what Ridgeline's doing."

"Why would you think Ridgeline's making a move against us?"

I didn't answer.

The assistant again, through the phone: "Would you like me to have them wait out here?"

"No." He shot his watch from the cuff of his jacket. "I don't think we should keep investigative reporters in the lobby to hobnob with the Jordanian contingent due here ten minutes ago." His sarcasm was understated, and all the more biting for it. "Put them in Conference Four, where I can keep an eye on them. Offer them coffee, Danish, whatever. I'll be in with Chris to see them shortly."

His mouth pulled to the side in a straight line, no curl--his version of a smile. "Perhaps we could speed this along? What's this about, exactly?"

"As I said. Ridgeline."

"I don't know what stories you think you've caught wind of, but you should know that companies like Ridgeline are a dime a dozen. They're given an assignment, and off they go. They don't even know why they're doing what they do half the time, so it's easy for them to misinterpret instructions, overstep their bounds. They're composed of former Spec Ops guys, and let's just say that type has been known to get a little . . . overzealous on occasion."

The breezy tone, nary a stutter--to him this was all just business as usual. And being here behind the scenes where levers were thrown and accounts brutally balanced, I felt naive and sickened. I watched his pink lips moving and had to check my disgust to focus on his words.

He continued, "That's why Festman Gruber is very careful to limit its dealings with companies like Ridgeline to specific contracted services, such as executive protection. You need a junkyard dog sometimes, but you also have to make sure that you're holding the leash."

"It would be unfortunate if that junkyard dog maintained records of all its transactions with Festman Gruber." I held up the manila envelope.

I looked at him; he looked at it. He took the envelope a bit more hastily than suited his demeanor, breaking the seal and sliding the sheaf of papers into his hand. A complete set of those documents I'd pulled off the Ridgeline copier's hard drive--payments, accounts, and phone calls tracing the connection from Ridgeline back to Festman Gruber.