than fox squirrels.
DeCorso fell first, causing a moment of disarray among his men. The watchers’ guns were fitted with silencers, so the bullets didn’t pop, but thwacked into wood, furniture, and flesh. In contrast, Will’s gun boomed every time he pulled the trigger, and Frazier winced at each one, eighteen blasts, till the room fell silent.
By then, it was filled with caustic blue fumes and the tart smell of gunpowder. Will could hear a tinny voice yelling hysterically into a headset that was lying on the floor, separated from its man.
Everywhere, the primary color of blood was clashing with the suite’s pastel hues. Four intruders were on the floor, two moaning, two silent. Will rose to his knees, then haltingly stood on rubbery legs. He didn’t feel any pain but had heard that adrenaline could temporarily mask even a serious wound. He checked himself for blood, but he was clean. Then he saw Mark’s feet behind the sofa and scrambled to help him up.
Christ, he thought when he saw him. Christ. There was a hole in his head the size of a wine cork, bubbling with blood and brain matter, and he was gurgling and oozing secretions from his mouth.
He was BTH?
Will shuddered at the thought of this poor son of a bitch living like this for at least another eighteen years, then grabbed Mark’s briefcase and bolted out the door.
AUGUST 1, 2009
W ill tried to be invisible. People were rushing past him, heading toward the bungalow. Two sprinting hotel security guards in blue blazers elbowed him off the path. He kept walking slowly, impassively, in the opposite direction through the hotel gardens, a man with a briefcase shaking inside his suit.
As the doors to the main building closed behind him, he heard muffled shouts from the bungalow area. All hell was about to break loose. Sirens were approaching; response times are fast in ritzy zips, he thought. He needed to make a snap decision. He could try to make it to his car or stay put and hide in plain sight. The tactic had worked at the beauty salon so he decided to try it again, and besides, he was too unsteady to do much more.
The front desk was in turmoil. Guests were reporting gunshots, security protocols were being enacted. He briskly strode past overwrought employees and angled toward the elevators, where he hopped on a waiting car and randomly pressed the third-floor button.
The corridor was empty except for a service cart in front of a room halfway down the hall. He peeked into the partially open door of Room 315 and saw a housekeeper vacuuming.
“Hello!” he called out as blithely as he could.
The maid smiled at him, “Hello, sir. I’ll be finishing soon.” There were bags, a man’s clothes in the closet.
“I’m back early from a meeting,” Will said. “I’ve got to make a call.”
“No problem, sir. Just call housekeeping when you like and I can come back.”
He was alone.
Looking out the garden-facing window, he saw police and paramedics. He slumped on the side chair and closed his eyes. He didn’t know how much time he had-he needed to think.
Will was back on the fishing boat with his father, Phillip Weston Piper, who was silently baiting a line. He’d always thought it a grand-sounding name for a man with rough hands and sun-beaten skin who made his living arresting drunks and ticketing speeders. His grandfather had been a social studies teacher in a Pensacola junior high school with high hopes for his newborn son and thought a posh name would give him a leg up in the world. It was a nonfactor. His father grew up to be a fun-hunting carouser and booze hound who drank his way through life and was a miserable bully of a husband who subjected his mother to a constant fusillade of abuse.
But he was a halfway decent father, taciturn to the extreme, though Will always sensed that he was making the effort to do the right thing for his son. Maybe their relationship would have been better if he’d known in advance that his father was going to die during his senior year at college. Maybe then he would have made the first move and engaged the man in a conversation to find out what he thought of his life, his family, his son. But that conversation was buried with Phillip Weston Piper, and now he had to go through life without it.
Will never thought much about religion or philosophy. His business was, in effect, the death business, and his approach to the investigation of murders was fact-based. Some people lived, others died-wrong place, wrong time. There was a terrible randomness to it.
His mother had been a church woman, and when he visited, he dutifully accompanied her to the First Baptist Church in Panama City. She was mourned there when cancer took her. He had heard his fill of will-of-God talk and divine plans. He’d read about Calvinism and predestination in school. All this was hokum, he always thought. Chaos and randomness ruled the world. There was no master plan.
Apparently, he’d been wrong.
He opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. The entire Beverly Hills police force was down in the garden. More EMTs and paramedics were arriving. He reached for the laptop and opened it. It was in sleep mode. When it resumed, the log-on window to Shackleton’s database demanded a password. Will misspelled Pythagoras three times before getting it right. So much for his Harvard education.
There was a search screen: enter name, enter DOB, enter DOD, enter city, enter zip code, enter street address. It was all very user-friendly. He typed his own name and his DOB, and the computer told him: BTH. Fine, he thought, confirmed. Hopefully not BTH the way Mark Shackleton was BTH, but he had at least eighteen years in him, a lifetime.
The next entries wouldn’t be so easy. He hesitated, considered shutting the computer down, but there were more sirens, more shouts from the garden. He inhaled sharply then typed, Laura Jean Piper, 7-8-1984, then hit the Enter key.
BTH
He exhaled, and silently mouthed, Thank God.
Then he inhaled again and typed, Nancy Lipinski, White Plains, NY, and hit Enter.
BTH
One more to solidify his plan: Jim Zeckendorf, Weston, Massachusetts.
BTH
That’s all I want to know, that’s all I need to know, he thought. He was trembling.
As he sat there, the logic seemed inescapable. He, his daughter, and Nancy were going to survive despite the operatives who were tasked to kill in order to keep Area 51 secret. That meant he was going to take an action that prevented their deaths.
It was madness! Take free will and throw it out the window, he thought. He was being carried downstream by the River of Destiny. He was not the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.
He was crying now, for the first time since the day his father died.
While trauma teams were transporting the wounded from the bungalow to waiting ambulances, Will was at the desk in Room 315, composing a letter on hotel stationery. He finished and reread it. There was a blank he needed to fill in before dropping it in a mailbox.
The beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills was marred by the noise and diesel stench of dozens of emergency service vehicles and news vans spewing fumes up and down Sunset Boulevard. He walked past them, head down, and hailed a taxi.
“Hell’s going on here?” the driver asked him.
“Damned if I know,” Will answered.
“Where to?”
“Take me to any kind of computer store, the L.A. public library, and a post office. In that order. This is extra.” He reached over the seat and dropped a hundred dollars in the driver’s lap.
“You want it, mister, you got it,” the cabbie said enthusiastically.
At a Radio Shack, Will bought a memory stick. Back in the taxi, he quickly copied Mark’s database onto the device and tucked it into his breast pocket.
