'You're amazing.'
In the rearview I could see her standing in the bright light of the sandbox, phone to her ear, a hand shielding her eyes. I turned the corner, and she was gone, except for the voice in my ear.
'Take care of yourself,' it said. 'You're heading into uncharted waters.'
Chapter 50
'I'm sorry, sir, you can't do that.'
I was crouched in front of the copier, having swung open the panel and removed the hard drive. Even with my back turned, there was no way to insert the Ridgeline hard drive into the vacant slot without his noticing. I shoved the Kinko's hard drive down the front of my jeans before turning around, holding the other in clear view. 'Oh, sorry. It just jammed up. I was checking--'
'The hard drive?' The Kinko's cashier, a high-school kid with a thatch of curly blond hair and gauged earrings, chewed listlessly on what smelled like Black Jack gum. 'You can't do that. Give it to me.' He swiped the Ridgeline hard drive from my hand. I almost grabbed for it, but then he leaned over and plugged it in to the copier. 'Listen, if you mess with the equipment--' He did a double take, and his expression changed.
Sally and Valentine had been in here checking the computer-rental logs and probably flashing my picture. Or maybe he recognized me from the news. My bad bruises probably compounded his unease. I raised a hand awkwardly to my cheek.
He backed to the counter. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Take your time.' He pretended to bury himself in his reading, a dog-eared trade paperback of Y: The Last Man, but his eyes flicked at me over the tops of the pages.
I quickly key-tapped my way into the copier's memory and clicked the button to print out everything on it. My fingers drummed the counter as the machine spit out one piece of warm paper after another. Looking over my shoulder to make sure the kid wasn't calling the cops, I was too distracted to read anything. It came to about thirty pages. I paid with a spill of crumpled bills and rushed out to the car.
A cold sweat hit when I thought of Ariana at home, unprotected. I made it only a few blocks before I had to pull over and call her on the prepaid cell phone. My heart pounded until she picked up.
'You still alive?' I asked.
'No,' she said. 'Oh, wait. Yeah, sorry. I am.'
'Paparazzi still surrounding the house?'
'Our inadvertent guardian angels? Yes, they're here. Noses to the glass.'
'You call me if they leave.'
'They leave, we're throwing a party.'
I hung up and took a deep breath, the stack of copies heavy in my lap. Rain clouds threatened above, giving dusk a head start, and I had to click on the dome light to see the top sheet clearly.
A surveillance photo of me standing at our front window looking out at the street, the pane blurring my face. The voyeuristic view and my smudged features gave the copied photo an otherworldly feel, which sent a chill burrowing beneath my scalp.
Keith as well was tracked in a number of pictures, the time stamps indicating they were taken in the days before his death. A handwritten log, presumably derived from a wiretap, listed various numbers he'd called from home and cell phone. The next few surveillance photos followed an older gentleman in a suit, stepping out of a limo beneath a glass-and-steel building with a slick logo in the lobby window--the letter N on a tilt within a circle. He wore a silver goatee, and his bearing suggested justified confidence. Beneath was a copy of a cell-phone bill under the name Gordon Kazakov, with various numbers underlined. Another enemy of the board? Other grainy photos followed, featuring various men and women. Someone at a base camp in the snow--the environmental activist who'd 'fallen' off a cliff? There were answers here to questions I hadn't even known to ask.
I kept flipping through. Airline tickets, hotel bills, more phone records, a bank ledger with transactions circled. Check stubs and wire confirmations. Matched to certain payments were names: Mikey Peralta, Deborah Vance, Keith Conner. And, sure enough, Patrick Davis. It read like a menu of prices--the cost to stalk, to frame, to kill.
The next page held copies of four money orders for $9,990--each just below the $10,000 bank-reporting threshold. Scrawled at the top of each one was #1117.
What the hell was that? Some kind of internal code? An account number? And why were these payments set apart and given prominence?
With growing astonishment I turned to the last page. A photo showed Keith sprawled dead on the floor of that hotel room. The forehead divot, the pool of ink in the eye socket, the perverted angle of the neck--it brought back the horrid epiphany of that moment with a force that made me forget to breathe. I examined the photo more closely. The wink of the flash was visible in the glass of a framed watercolor on the wall, and the time stamp showed 1:53.
Five minutes before I'd been spotted by the room-service waiter on the ground floor.
Not only could I not have been in the room at that time, but I couldn't have shot the photograph; I'd had no camera, and certainly no film when I'd been taken into custody.
My hands shook with excitement.
My name--cleared. The dots--connected.
Before DeWitt and Verrone had emptied out the office in preparation for my captivity, they'd copied these key incriminating documents, probably so all the members of Ridgeline's team could keep a packet to inoculate themselves against future threats. They'd documented their transactions with Festman Gruber all the way to the bank-account numbers on either end of each wire. If they went down, they could take Festman down, too. Mutually assured destruction. But I wasn't part of that equation. I was out of the circle, and now I had my thumb on the detonator.
I reached Sally Richards on her cell phone. There were voices in the background, what sounded like a get- together, so I said, 'Give me ten seconds to talk.'
She said, 'Go.'
'I have definitive proof clearing me of Keith's murder. I have hard evidence of the conspiracy. Like you said-- justice, truth, and all that crap. Here's our shot. I can serve it to you and Valentine on a silver platter. Meet me for five minutes.'
I held my breath, listened to that background noise--a radio playing, someone's joke going over big, the jangle of a dog collar. The last crescent of sun dipped behind a bank of clouds, and the sky downshifted three shades of gray. She hadn't hung up, but she hadn't replied either.
'Come on,' I said. 'Show me that motivating curiosity.'
Silence. My hopes were dissipating along with the daylight.
Finally she exhaled across the receiver. 'I've got a place.'
Mulholland Drive rides the ridge of the Santa Monicas, overlooking the world. To the north the Valley stretches out like a sequined tarp, flat and unforgiving, a hothouse of trapped air and bad associations--porn, meth, movie studios. The Los Angeles Basin, cooler in all regards and eager to point that out, dips south, pushing west until ever-pricier real estate terminates in a throw of sand and the polluted Pacific. A glamorous road befitting a glamorous city, temptation and danger at every turn. It lures you to take in the view but never stops twisting. You fix on the pretty lights until you plummet to your death--L.A. in a nutshell.
Finally I turned off on a compacted dirt road, a cloud of red-brown dust rising to escort my car to the secured yellow gate. NO PARKING AFTER DUSK. Outside the gate I slotted the Beemer next to the familiar Crown Vic, grabbed the sheaf of copies, and hoofed it up to the old Nike missile control facility. A quarter mile up the dirt trail, the place waited, a Cold War relic as cracked and desiccated as Kissinger's accent.
The scattered buildings, trimmed in fallen barbed wire, had the feel of abandoned playground equipment. Rusted, forlorn, municipal. They didn't look like much, perhaps because the power of the place was never here. It was buried in missile silos in the tranquil surrounding hills.
My shoes crunched rock. The air was heavy and smelled of rain. A path wound around to the hexagonal observation tower. Following, I entered the overhang. Steep metal steps zigged and zagged with cold military precision. Educational signage sealed the structure's fate--it was now a musty museum, a gutted time capsule, a temple to an obsolete paranoia.
Khrushchev's prediction shouted from a plaque bolted to the base of the tower: WE WILL BURY YOU. Breathing in metal and dirt, I could picture the clean-shaven soldiers who had manned this facility around the clock, smoking their Lucky Strikes, eyes on the horizon, waiting for a shift change or the world to end.
