finish this call.'
He glared at me and took a few backward steps before turning for home.
'Okay,' I said, 'the curb drain . . .'
'Once you've removed the devices from the house, put them in your black duffel bag on the top shelf of your closet and drop them down there. All lenses, cables, even the nonlinear junction detector. At midnight tomorrow. Not a minute before. Not a minute after. Say it back to me.'
'Midnight tomorrow, sharp. Everything down the grate. Sunday at four P.M., I get an e-mail.'
Until then, live with dread about what that e-mail might hold.
'This is the last time you will hear my voice. Now set the phone on the ground, smash it with your foot, and kick it down the sewer grate. Oh--and, Patrick?'
'What?'
'This is nothing like what you imagine.'
'What do I imagine?'
But I was talking to a dead line.
Chapter 20
After disposing of the phone, I returned inside. The front door swung open to greet me, and I grabbed Ariana by the wrist and pulled her into me. Our cheeks pressed together. Sweat. The smell of her conditioner. Her chest was heaving. I cupped a hand around her ear and whispered, as faintly as possible, 'Let's get ourselves to the greenhouse.'
The only place on the property with clear walls.
She nodded. We pulled apart. 'I'm scared, Patrick,' she said loudly.
'It's okay. I know what they want now. At least what they want me to do next.' I gave her the broad strokes of the phone conversation.
'And what about after this, Patrick? These people are terrorizing us. We have to call the cops.'
'We can't call the cops. They'll know. They know everything.'
She stormed toward the family room, with me at her heels. 'So keep giving in and giving in?'
'We don't have a choice.'
'There are always choices.'
'And you're an expert on sound decision making?'
She wheeled on me. 'I'm not the one who sold out my life to get fired off a shitty movie.'
I blinked, stunned. Holding her hand low by her stomach, she beckoned with her fingers: Come on.
I caught my breath again. 'Right. You're much more grounded. It took what? One crank call to get you to step out on our marriage?'
'It took a lot more than that.'
'Because I was supposed to read your mind to know about all the resentment you were silently storing up?'
'No. You were supposed to be present in this marriage. It takes two people to be able to communicate.'
'Nine days!' I shouted, so loud I caught us both off guard. Ariana started, took a half step away. Bitterness rode the back of my tongue. I couldn't stop myself. 'I was gone nine days. That's less than two weeks. You couldn't wait nine fucking days to talk to me?'
'Nine days?' The color had returned to her face. 'You'd been gone a year. You disappeared the minute an agent returned your phone call.'
Her eyes welled. She turned and banged through the rear door. I shoved the heel of my hand across my cheek. I lowered my head, exhaled, counted silently backward from ten.
Then I followed.
When I pushed through the rasping door into the heat of the greenhouse, we grabbed for each other. She hugged me around my neck, squeezing hard enough to hurt, her forehead mashed to my jaw, my face bent toward hers, mossy humidity coating our lungs. We let go of each other a bit awkwardly, and then Ariana rotated a finger around the small enclosure. Lifting pots, crawling under shelves, running hands along posts, we searched. The translucent siding made the job easier. We finished and faced each other across the narrow aluminum staging table.
Our exchange inside, for the cameras and in spite of them, our clumsy embrace, the intruder's even stare, the feeling of horror when I'd discovered the first hidden device, the casually marked floor plans showing dozens more--the pressure from it all exploded in this first moment of relative privacy. I hammered a fist into the staging table, denting the aluminum, splitting the scabs on my knuckles. Two terra-cotta pots toppled off and shattered. 'These assholes moved in to our house. Our bedroom. I've been sleeping on top of equipment they planted. What the fuck do they want from us?' I stared at the shards, waiting for the rage to recede. Nice work, Patrick. Sound strategy, responding to a grand master with a temper tantrum.
'They heard everything,' Ariana was saying. 'All the arguments. The petty stuff. What I told you Tuesday night over the dining table. Everything. Jesus, Patrick. Jesus. There's not an inch of our lives that's been just ours.'
I drew in a deep breath. 'We need to figure a way to get out of this.'
Her lips were trembling. 'What is 'this'?'
'It's got nothing to do with an affair. Or a student. Or a pissed-off movie star. Whoever these guys are, they're experts.'
'In what?'
'This.'
Silence, broken by the gentle whir of the shutter fan. I wiped the back of my hand across my shirt, leaving a streak of crimson. Ariana looked at the lifted scabs and said, 'Oh. Oh. That's how you . . .' She took a deep breath, nodded. 'What else do I need to be clued in on here?'
I told her about everything from Jerry to Keith, Sally Richards and the boot print, and how I'd lied and told the caller I was standing on top of the sewer grate and he hadn't known the difference.
'So they're not watching everything all the time,' she said.
'Right. We just don't know where the dead spots are. But they seem to be backing off the surveillance. Why else would they give us the location of the bugs in the house?'
'To set up something else.' She took a deep breath, shook her hands as if drying them. 'What the hell's gonna be in that e-mail, Patrick?'
My stomach roiled. My lips felt dry, cracked. 'I don't have a clue.'
'What can we do? There's gotta be something we can do.' She looked helplessly through the green siding at our house. Here we were, huddled, displaced. 'If they know specifics about your trip to the police station, they probably have someone inside. Is Richards involved with this?' She'd dropped her voice instinctively to a whisper.
'It's not her,' I said. Ariana regarded me skeptically, so I added, 'I just know. Plus, why would she have told me about the boot print, which implicates the cops?'
'Okay. But even if it's not her, we can't go to her again or they'll find out.'
'I doubt she can help us anyway. Whatever this is, it's well above the pay grade of a divisional detective.'
'Fine. So let's go above her pay grade. How about the higher LAPD divisions?'
'No good. The make of boot could've been SWAT issue, so we can't trust downtown either.'
'Then we need to get help from the FBI or whoever.'
'These guys'll find out.'
'Do we care if they do find out?' Ari asked. 'I mean, what are they threatening us with?'
'I guess that would be another surprise,' I said. 'When it comes.'
She shivered. 'Should we risk it? To get help?'
'I think we should see what these guys want first. Or else it'll just be another futile conversation with cops or agents or whoever. We've already seen how that goes.'
'Are you sure you don't want to go along with their directions just because you're scared of how they'll
