Chapter 54
Parked in an alley behind a gas station, I looked at the items I'd carried out of the fray, aligned neatly on the passenger seat. Don's laptop. A sheaf of twice-folded documents, wrinkled from my pocket and moist from rainfall. And the real-life MacGuffin, a white-silver disc.
The golf hat from Don's backseat was tugged down over my scraped-up face, the pistol hidden in the back of my jeans. I'd switched out the Range Rover's license plates with those from a pea green Buick reposing in an apartment carport. I needed to buy time before the theft was noticed, and the Buick's plate frame--ZACHARY AND S AGE'S G RANDMA!--hinted that the owner probably wouldn't be heading out to trip the light fantastic at 9:30 P.M. Boosting cars wasn't bad enough; I'd been reduced to stealing from a granny.
With nervous anticipation I booted up Don's Toshiba and started to insert the CD. But I hesitated with it halfway in. Did I want to know what it contained? Once I did, could they let me live? Curiosity tormented me, but I fought it off, withdrawing the CD and placing it back on the leather, where it glared up at me. Whatever was on it would surely open up another world of trouble, and I couldn't afford to have any more distractions between me and Ariana.
The longer I delayed, the greater the likelihood that the cops would catch up to me. Or that Ariana's kidnappers would lose patience with her or find her inconvenient. The smartest move would be to call Verrone now and tell him I had the CD. He'd know I'd lied about the safe-deposit box, but as long as I had what he wanted, I couldn't see why he'd care.
The throwaway cell phone had run out of juice, so I turned on my trusty Sanyo. Jerry had said that calls a few minutes long were tough to track, so I'd keep it short. Rehearsing what I was about to say, I punched in Ariana's number. My thumb hovered over 'send.' But something wouldn't let me put the call through.
Maybe it was the image of Mikey Peralta laid out in that hospital bed, fist-sized dent in his forehead. Or the crimson halo spreading on the floor beneath Deborah Vance's hair. I wanted desperately to believe that as long as I didn't set eyes on whatever that CD contained, Ariana and I would be safe. I wanted to believe that if I gave the Ridgeline crew what they wanted, we could shake hands and walk away. But the truth I didn't want to acknowledge was what was freezing my thumb over that 'send' button. And that reality made itself known now, like a punch to the gut: My wife and I had already crossed the point of no return.
With two dead cops, a pair of kidnappings, and RHD and SWAT gunning for me, everything had spun out of control for Ridgeline, as it had for me. There was no way they could still entertain the notion that they could rein this back into a simple frame-up and leave me holding the bag.
Before the plan had derailed, they had needed me alive to insulate Festman Gruber, their employer, from suspicion in Keith's murder. But now Verrone, DeWitt, and whoever else constituted Ridgeline seemed to have switched to full-blown damage-control mode. Their objective now was self-preservation. Which meant acquiring leverage. Covering their asses. And eliminating witnesses. Mikey Peralta's 'car accident' and Deborah Vance's 'revenge shooting' were pretty good indications of what they planned to do to me and Ariana once our usefulness was exhausted. We knew too much now. We'd seen too much. They'd keep Ari on the hook just long enough to lure me in.
Aside from those copied documents, the CD staring up at me was my only ammunition.
If I delivered it to Ridgeline, they'd kill me and my wife.
I looked down at the phone, those ten digits glowing on the screen. Then at the CD on the passenger seat. The phone. The CD. Phone. CD.
It was time to change the plan. To go on the offensive.
The only way to beat them was to outplay them at their own game.
With a renewed sense of purpose, I turned off the phone, fired up the computer, and slotted in the CD. A single PDF file popped up, which I double-clicked. Fifteen pages, charted by the right scroll bar. Tables and graphs. A CONFIDENTIAL stamp, conspicuous yet translucent, halved each page at a diagonal. The cover sheet stated, F ESTMAN G RUBER--INTERNAL DOCUMENT ONLY--DO NOT REPRODUCE, followed by a few paragraphs of dense legal threats.
I clicked from page to page, scanning numbers and columns, waiting for the data to take shape. A graph on the tenth page, labeled 'Internal Study,' spelled it out plainly enough even for my geometry skills, atrophied since sophomore year of high school.
Three lines charted sonar decibels across various months. The blue one, a steady horizontal, showed the existing legal limits. Another, flying high above the law, indicated the decibels reached by Festman Gruber's sonar system. They peaked north of three hundred decibels, well above even the figure Keith had thrown at me through a puff of clove smoke from his deck chair.
In other words, illegal activity.
A green line across the bottom of the page, far beneath the legal limits, puzzled me. The key labeled it simply NV.
The letters tugged at a memory, tripping an image I'd seen in the documents I'd pulled off the Ridgeline copy machine's hard drive. Grabbing the papers, I shuffled past the creepy picture of me, past Keith Conner's phone records, past those money order slips positioned like dominos, finally finding the surveillance shot of the older man with a silver goatee exiting a limousine. The next picture of him included the image I was looking for, a logo painted on the lobby window of the high-rise in the background. The logo was an elegant one: Encompassed by a ring, an N quarter-turned like a dial so the letter's diagonal and second upright suggested a V.
NV, all tied up in a neat little circle.
So it was a corporation.
I studied the gleam off the limo's wax job, the formidable building, the man's confident bearing. It all seemed to suggest that he was someone high up at NV. The fact that he'd been placed under Ridgeline surveillance, in turn, suggested that his company was a rival to Festman Gruber.
I needed a name.
Beneath the photo was a copy of a cell-phone bill that belonged to a Gordon Kazakov. Several of the phone numbers were underlined, but they meant nothing to me.
I drove off, searching for a Starbucks. In Brentwood that took four blocks. I tucked the Range Rover into the curb in front, close enough to pirate their wireless Internet signal, then neurotically slotted a few quarters in the meter, though it was well past the hours of operation. My eyes swept the window and caught on a wall clock over the espresso machine--10:05.
Less than sixteen hours until Ridgeline would kill my wife.
The light banter and scent of java from inside struck at my nerves, reminding me how far I'd skidded off the tracks. With the hat brim pulled low over my bruised face, I turned from all that light and warmth and scurried back to the vehicle. Door locked, laptop open, and voila--a Linksys Internet connection.
Google Images spit out a number of pictures for Gordon Kazakov, the man in the surveillance shot. A few clicks showed him to be the CEO of North Vector, NV of the nifty logo, a Fortune 1000 powerhouse specializing in-- surprise--global defense and technology. In addition, he owned two football teams in Eastern Europe, a low-fare airline with a hub in Minneapolis, and a historic mansion in Georgetown. But the most interesting bit of news was hidden in a recent Wall Street Journal profile. Though North Vector had made no official announcements, the article suggested that it had a revolutionary sonar system nearing viability.
A competing system that--according to the smuggled document--functioned using not just legal but markedly reduced decibel levels. The comparison, judging by the graph, didn't look flattering for Festman.
The muscles at the base of my neck had tightened into knots so unyielding that they felt inanimate when I reached back to knead them. Closing my eyes, I ran through what I knew, searching out the hairline crack where I could drive in a wedge.
Ridgeline had been hired by Festman Gruber to do their dirty bidding--to make sure that nothing interfered with Festman's defense contracts until that Senate vote went through. But Ridgeline seemed to be growing increasingly distrustful of their employers. They'd started keeping backup records of the illegal activity they conducted on behalf of Festman. They'd even gone so far as to acquire a confidential internal study showing Festman's sonar system to be operating outside legal parameters, a document that, if leaked properly, could probably do more damage to Festman's pocketbook than a Keith Conner documentary.
I massaged my temples, considered the angles. I thought about something Ariana had told me the night we'd received that first menacing phone call and discovered the cameras in the walls. We were huddled out in the
