Once splayed out and stabilized, he struggled to find his feet again, but it was too late. The man was on him. The collar of Graham’s T-shirt went tight as the guy pulled on it, and then he felt another hand on his arm as he was lifted to his feet.
Graham struggled against the man’s strength, wriggling like a grounded fish to break his hold. He got his arm free, and used the momentum to spin and try to back out of his shirt. He heard the fabric tear, and he felt the constriction release a little, but then the man punched him. Graham didn’t see it, but it felt like a closed fist and it landed hard on the exact spot where the center hump had nailed him when they screeched to a stop.
The blow triggered a cough and Graham tasted blood. His knees sagged.
“I am sorry, Graham,” the man said. “I do not mean to hurt you. You leave me no choice. I hope I hurt not too bad.”
“Leave me alone!” Graham yelled, but it was a weak sound. He took a step to run again, but knew it would be a wasted effort. Whatever the guy had hit had ruined the wiring of his chest. It didn’t hurt so much as it didn’t work anymore. He couldn’t take a full breath.
“The pain will pass soon,” the man said. “I am sorry. You must come with me now.”
Through his gasps for air, Graham managed to ask, “Who are you?” Looking up at the man, he saw no features. Perhaps it was the darkness of the night, but perhaps he was wearing a mask. Graham thought that to be more likely the case.
“If you promise to walk with me, I will promise not to hurt you anymore. Do we have a deal?”
Graham nodded. “Yes,” he said. Even as the words left his lips, he knew that it was a deal that he wouldn’t hesitate to break.
“Good,” the man said. “Let us walk back to the cars.”
As they made the walk back, Graham saw for the first time what the Markhams had seen before they slammed on the brakes. Two pickup trucks had blocked the entire road. If they had continued to speed, as Graham had wanted them to do, God only knows what might have happened. They’d probably all be dead. There was absolutely zero room for them to have sneaked by.
“Who are you?” Graham asked again.
“That doesn’t really matter,” the man said. There was a dismissiveness — a finality — to his tone that told Graham that it would be useless to ask that question again.
He’d run farther than he’d thought, probably a hundred yards. It took a long time to negotiate the walk back, and the trip was made longer still by the fact that somewhere in the encounter, Graham had run out of one of the replacement flip-flops they’d issued to him at the police station. It was annoying enough walking on one that he paused in the stroll back to pull the other one off and walk barefoot.
“I have him,” his escort said to the crowd that had gathered around the Markhams’ car. Peter and Anita had been pulled out, and were standing on the passenger side — the side closest to Graham — with their hands on their heads. They both looked terrified.
“What is going on?” Peter demanded. “Why are you doing this? We’ve done nothing wrong.”
Graham thought he might have been hearing his own words from a few hours ago being recited back to him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Anita as he passed within speaking distance. “I tried to warn you.”
He felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him to a stop. “What did you tell them?” The malevolence in the man’s tone told him that he’d accidentally crossed some kind of line.
“Nothing,” Graham said, but he knew that the word had come out too quickly. “Nothing that they probably didn’t already know.” He tried to make eye contact with the man he was speaking to and saw that he was in fact wearing a mask — the kind you would wear in the middle of winter to prevent frostbite on your nose, but made of a lighter material.
“I see,” the man said. He looked over at Anita, who stood maybe ten feet away, and at Peter, who stood three feet farther.
From somewhere under his shirt, the masked man produced a pistol. He pointed it at Anita and fired a single bullet through her forehead. She dropped straight down, as if her body had been unplugged.
Graham didn’t know if the voice he heard yelling was his own or if it was Peter’s. Two seconds later, he knew it was Peter’s voice because it fell silent as the gunman’s second bullet caught the man in the mouth and killed him instantly.
“There,” the gunman said. “Now it doesn’t matter what you told them.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Venice pressed the transmit button. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”
“Go ahead.”
“PC Two was just picked up at the jail by a team claiming to be federal agents. I don’t have access to their names, but the car they’re driving is registered to Emin Zakaev of Detroit, Michigan. That happens to be the same person who lives at the address called from the Hummingbird Motel just minutes before the shoot-out in the parking lot.”
In the pause that followed, Venice imagined Jonathan and Boxers discussing the importance of the disclosure. After fifteen seconds, Scorpion’s voice came back, “What do we know about the owner?”
“Really, not very much. Not yet, anyway.” As she spoke, she continued to plow through whatever data she could pull up. Sometimes, it was difficult to decide which was the better move when delivering news to her boss. Should she deliver the headline by itself, or should she wait until she had the whole story? In this case she went with the headline simply because of the speed with which everything was changing.
“Roger,” Jonathan said. “Get back to me when you know something.”
Venice owed an answer, and she was going to find it. Every person on the planet had some kind of past, and for every past, a record existed somewhere in cyberspace. Maybe it was an application to a zoning board to put an addition on their house, or maybe it was as simple as a driver’s license. Each of those documents — and thousands of variations of tens of thousands of different possibilities — opened a door to other information, and if one were talented enough in the business of wrangling ones and zeroes, most of those doors could be opened. She often thought of herself as a digital burglar. Armed with a unique set of lock picks, she could enter spaces where she was not welcome and peek into the most private parts of people’s lives.
She assumed that Emin Zakaev was a pseudonym of some sort. In the short term, that meant that she wouldn’t be able to dig up much about his past that would be relevant to her right now. Tracing aliases was not especially difficult, but it was outrageously time consuming, and time was the commodity of which she had the least.
She decided to treat the name as if it were real, thus ignoring his past and concentrating on the present. If he used the same pseudonym to register his car and pay his phone bills, there were likely a lot of other things he did with the same name. People rarely thought about the width and depth of the footprints they left every day simply by going through the motions of life. The e-mail address you use to read the New York Times is the same one you use to order toys off the Internet. The credit card you use for cable television is the same one you use to eat at restaurants. Once Venice was able to break into one usage of a credit card, and was able to learn the password, a person’s entire life lay right there, spread out for her to explore.
As was often the case, the phone company records proved easiest to breach. Armed with Emin Zakaev’s MasterCard and his password, she was able to gain access to every expense he had charged over the past three years. Most of it was useless to her — at this stage, she didn’t care what food he preferred or what books he read, though that could prove important later.