"— ello, Max? Max, It's Kirsten. Call me on my mobile soon as you can.''
"Max, this is Kirsten again. Still waiting to hear from you.''
"Hello, Max? Same message as before."
"Max, where are you? It's been four days and I'm getting really concerned. My sister and her husband are telling me to call the police, and maybe they 're right. This is all so confusing for me. So please, if you hear this, get in touch.''
"Max, I've decided to do what Anna wants and contact the authorities—"
Nimec clicked off the answering machine and looked at Nori in silence.
Though it was still not yet full morning in Johor, and both were running on empty, they were in Blackburn's spare, single-room living quarters at the ground station, having decided to check it out for clues to his whereabouts before heading off to bed. There had been nothing to help them on that score, but Kirsten Chu's frequent and increasingly worried messages — the most recent of which had been left two days earlier according to the machine's time/date stamp — at least revealed that she had not completely vanished from the face of the earth as well. And while the messages also seemed to confirm Nimec's feeling that Max had gotten into some kind of serious fix, they ultimately engendered more questions than they answered.
"Sounds like she's staying with her sister," Nori said after a while.
"Hiding out's more like it," Nimec said. "You catch the sister's name or do I have to run through the tape again?"
"Anna," Nori said. "No second name, though. And Kirsten mentioned there being a husband, so it'd be a different surname from her own. Makes it harder to track her down."
"A lot of married women keep their family names these days."
Nori shook her head.
"You're thinking like an American," she said. "Asian societies aren't quite so liberated."
Nimec sighed.
"Why the hell would she ask Max to call on her cell phone?" he said. "Wouldn't it have been simpler to just leave Anna's number for him?"
Nori thought about that a moment.
"Simpler for us, absolutely, but her situation's another matter," she said. "Put yourself in Kirsten's shoes. Whatever she's been into with Blackburn, it's something her family's probably better off not being enlightened about."
"For their own safety, you mean."
"Right," Nori said. "The less they know the better. Also, it sounds to me like Max would have been against Kirsten calling the authorities to report whatever happened—"
"Or at least she feels that way," Nimec said. "We can figure out why later, but go on, I didn't mean to interrupt."
"My point is that she seemed to be under pressure from her family to make the call, and would've been torn in two different directions about actually doing it. Could be the sister and her husband had misgivings about Blackburn… why wouldn't they, when you consider the whole situation? If you're Kirsten, you're going to feel uncomfortable about having him get in touch with you on their home phone, maybe kicking off a round of difficult questions from Sis. The other way's a lot more private."
"Except, as you've already indicated, it stinks as far as we're concerned," Nimec said. "Joyce has numbers for Kirsten's home and business phones, but not the cellular."
"No address?"
"Besides her office at Monolith, no."
"What about Max's notes on his investigation? The ones he gave to Joyce?"
"I didn't even know they existed until yesterday, when I called to tell her I'd be coming to Johor. They're encoded on his PIM, and it'll take some time to decrypt and go through them."
She nodded, thinking. "I assume we want to steer clear of the badges."
"For the time being, yes. Not that we even can be sure she's phoned them. Or, if she has, that she's told them where she's staying."
"It's even an open question which police force she'd call," Nori added. "Her sister could live on either side of the causeway. Or elsewhere. National borders are close in this neck of the woods."
"True enough, but we do we know Kirsten lives in Singapore. If we're lucky, she'll be listed in the public telephone directory. And that might give us the info we need."
"Maybe, maybe not," Nori said. "Most young, single women leave their addresses out of the listings. It's standard protection against sickos."
"Now you're the one thinking like an American… and a New Yorker at that," Nimec said with a wan smile. "Singapore isn't the kind of place where there's going to be a problem with obscene phone callers. If she's in the book, we'll likely find out where she lives…"
"And the next step would be to get in there and look around for something with Sis's address written on it," Nori said, completing his thought.
Nimec nodded agreement.
"I hate to risk breaking and entering," he said. "But if we have no better alternative…"
Nori wobbled her hand in the air to interrupt him, then gestured to the key he was holding, a spare they had obtained from Station Security to gain access to Blackburn's room.
"Leave that part to me," she said.
It was a little past four in the afternoon when the two men in the Olds Cutlass drove up to the entry gate of the UpLink Cryptographies facility in Sacramento, slowing to a halt as they reached the guard station.
"Detective Steve Lombardi," the driver told the guard through his open window. He tilted his head toward the man in the passenger seat. "My partner here's Detective Craig Sanford."
The guard regarded them through his mirrored sunglasses.
"How can I help you?" he said.
"We need to speak to the supervisor in charge," Lombardi said. "We've got a subpoena for crypto keys, you know the deal."
The guard nodded. It was SOP for law enforcement to deliver court orders whenever there was an investigation or legal action involving the release of data-recovery keys used by UpLink software. With everybody from banks to supermarkets to Mafia hoods using crypto in their daily business operations nowadays, and thousands of keys stored in the data-recovery vaults, and all kinds of civil and criminal cases in which computerized files were requested as evidence, it wasn't unusual to get as many as four or five visits a week from police officers delivering subpoenas.
"Just need to see your ID and papers," he said.
The driver took the requested items out of his sport jacket and gave them to the guard. A moment later the passenger reached over and passed the leather case holding his own badge and identification through the window.
The guard angled his mirrored lenses down at what he'd been handed, glancing over the police tins, unfolding the court papers.
"Everything kosher?" the driver asked.
The guard studied the ID and paperwork another second, then nodded and returned them through the window of his booth.
"Go right on ahead, fellas," he said.
The doorman at the luxury condo near Holland Road, on the eastern part of Singapore Island, had scarcely arrived for his morning shift when he saw the pale blue taxi pull up near the entrance and discharge its passenger, a slight, nicely dressed young woman carrying a couple of overstuffed travel bags. The luggage aside, she looked as though she'd been traveling, her hair slightly messed, a somewhat frayed expression on her face.
As she struggled toward the building with the bags, he set down his tea and rose from his desk to get the door.
"Can help?" he asked in typical Singlish fashion, blending English words with Chinese sentence structure.
She set the bags down on the carpeted floor of the vestibule and fussed her hair into place.
"Yes. Or I hope so, anyway," she said. "I'm here for Kirsten Chu."
The doorman regarded her a moment. Her American accent explained why he had not recognized her as an occupant of the high-rise. But he was familiar with the woman whose name she'd mentioned.
"Apartment Fifteen, I can call up, lah." He reached for the intercom's handpiece. "Your name, please?"