“Don’t screw with me,” he says. “It’s only gonna make it worse. No one knows where you are right now. Your partner is off somewhere up by Mission Bay. We can go watch him on television if you like. Your secretary believes you’re going to be back by three, but you didn’t tell her where you were going. Not according to the transcript I saw. And even if you did tell her it wouldn’t matter, because you never arrived here. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
“You bugged our office?”
“Seven ways from Sunday,” he says.
“We had it swept.”
“They have these little devices now with switches so you can turn ’em off when the man with the R.F. detector comes around. Turn them back on again when he leaves. You can do it remotely. They don’t find a thing. You gotta get with the times if you’re going to do this shit. If I were you, I’d ask for my money back from the company that swept the place.”
“Why don’t I go do that?” I shift my eyes and shoot a quick glance at the door.
“I’d feel more comfortable if you sat down,” he says. “Put the cardholder on the desk, along with the file folder.”
I do it.
“Now you can turn that chair around to face me.”
I do what he says.
“Take your coat off and drop it on the floor.”
“I don’t have any weapons.”
“Do it!”
I take the coat off and drop it on the floor next to the chair.
Then he motions me into the chair with the muzzle of the pistol.
I sit.
“Eyes down,” he says.
I look at the floor. A few seconds later I feel a hot burning sensation in the center of my chest as if a snake has sunk its fangs into me. When I look up I can trace two wires running from my upper torso to a bright yellow pistol-like device in his hand. Ten feet of hot conductor wire connect from the darts in my chest to the Taser gun in his hand. The darts are held in place by sharp jagged barbs.
“We’re gonna be here just a few minutes while you answer some questions. How painful it gets is up to you,” he says. “So why don’t we just make it quick and easy?”
FIFTY-SIX
Three days earlier, just after five in the morning, Ana had been roused from a deep sleep by a signal from her cell phone. One of the lawyers, Hinds, was on the move. It woke her and caught her attention because it was so early.
She waited for him to break the geo fence surrounding the law office, but this didn’t happen. Instead he crossed the other fence, the one surrounding Madriani’s house. The two of them were meeting. They were headed somewhere.
Ana threw on her clothes and ran for the car. In less than seven minutes she was parked down the street from Madriani’s house. She was just in time to watch as an official-looking dark blue sedan pulled into the lawyer’s driveway.
Through the field glasses she tried to read what was printed on the driver’s door. All she could read, in small white letters, was GOVERNMENT VEHICLE, OFFICIAL USE ONLY.
The two lawyers gave each other a quick hug. Madriani got in the backseat of the car and a second later it backed out of the driveway and drove in the other direction. Ana waited for Hinds to turn and walk toward the house before she pulled from the curb and followed the car.
Forty minutes later she watched as it disappeared down the same rabbit hole used by the Dumpster diver and his driver a month earlier-the guardhouse at the entrance to the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar.
She couldn’t follow him, but it set off alarm bells. The instant she got back to her hotel she set another geo fence around the Miramar Air Station. It wouldn’t do any good in terms of tracking Madriani because he was in another car. But it would give her a signal if either of the lawyers went out there again in their own vehicles.
It made Ana wonder what was going on at Miramar. Maybe the lawyer was into this thing deeper than she thought. Was it possible? Could the lawyers be in collusion with the people who had the French auto-nav system? It didn’t seem to make sense, since their own client was involved in the accident. But then who knows. Maybe they were on the take.
The next day and a half Ana spent scoping out the location of her new client’s contracted hit, the job she had been delaying. She had been watching the place on and off over the last several days. She wanted to be able to move the instant she recovered the equipment. That is, if she could find it. She was prepared to wait two days, no more. If by then she didn’t have it, she would grab one of the lawyers, probably Madriani, and subject him to enough pain that he would tell her everything he knew.
If after that she still couldn’t find it, Ana would have no other choice. She would have to perform the new contract and disappear back to Europe and home.
She could pray that no one would find the navigational computer, trace it back to its French designers and from them to her. But Ana didn’t like to leave such matters to fate. If they did find it and made the connection, everything in her life would unravel. Authorities would start linking passport pictures and fingerprints, aliases, and travel records to jobs she had performed on two continents over nearly a decade.
Interpol, the FBI, and every state intelligence service in the Western world would descend on the picturesque villa in southern France. They would find her grandmother and her aunt and destroy their refuge from the world.
This morning she was back, tracking after the lawyers. She was getting ready to snag one of them. At the moment it looked like it might be the older one, Hinds.
He was driving north on I-5 when he took the interchange at I-8. He went a few miles and got off on Mission Bay Drive. Ana was just about to take the off-ramp when the signal on her cell phone told her that Madriani was now also on the move. His car had broken the geo fence around the law office.
Ana let Hinds go. She shot past the off-ramp and drove west toward the ocean. She turned off on Nimitz Boulevard and pulled into a parking lot in front of a motel to check her phone.
The tracker on the little Spark Nano under the fender of Madriani’s Jeep was set to report its location at intervals of five minutes. It took three intervals, a full fifteen minutes, before she could confirm that he was headed north on I-5 and had passed the interchange at I-8. He was driving fast, approaching the 805, running north, out of the area.
Ana tossed her cell phone on the passenger seat, started the engine, and took up the chase. Every few minutes she glanced over at the phone to see if the GPS had updated his position. She was afraid he might turn off the highway at some point and she would fly past him.
When she looked over to check the phone, she realized it had timed itself out and gone dark.
“Damn.” She kept her eyes on the road, reached over, and picked up the phone. It took a few seconds looking back and forth between the highway and the phone to key in the four-digit code to unlock it.
Seconds later the GPS showed Madriani moving west toward the ocean on what appeared to be a major thoroughfare off the highway. From the small map on the cell Ana couldn’t identify the turnoff. She wanted to look more closely in order to study the phone, but she didn’t dare. Traffic was moving too fast. If she took her eyes off the road to look at the small screen, she could end up like the charred occupants of the car at the gas station.
Ahead she saw a sign, a broad overpass with a long straight exit on her side of the divided freeway. There was a large curving cloverleaf on the other side. Whatever road it was it ran east and west, a major thoroughfare. She decided to take it.
At the top of the overpass Ana stopped at the signal and checked the phone once more. Distance was hard to calibrate on the small map.
She saw the flashing marker on the map noting Madriani’s last position. He’d obviously moved on since then. She wouldn’t get another GPS reading on him until the next timed interval.