'No,' said Jane. 'He's the regional head of a big security company. His phone will have sweepers and bug detectors that even the police can't buy yet. Besides, he won't say anything that will put him away unless he sees you.'
On the third day at four in the afternoon Jane White-field went to a pay telephone in Barstow and made the call. 'I want to speak with Mr. Barraclough,' she said. 'Tell him it's Colleen Mahoney from the courthouse. I have something he wants to talk about.'
'Can you hold?' said the secretary.
'No,' said Jane. 'I'll call back in two minutes. Tell him if he's not the one who answers, he's lost it.' She waited four minutes, then dialed the number again.
This time a man's voice answered. It was deep, as though it came from a big body, but it was smooth, clear, and untroubled. 'Yes?' he said.
'Is this Mr. Barraclough?'
'Yes, it is.' He held the last word so it was almost singsong.
'This is - '
'I know who it is, Jane,' he said. 'I heard that's what you like to be called. What can I do for you?'
Her mind stumbled, then raced to catch up. He was far ahead of the place where she had thought he would be. 'I have Mary Perkins,' she said.
'Who's Mary Perkins?'
'I'm not recording this,' she said. 'Your phone isn't tapped.'
'I know it isn't.'
'Then do you want her?'
'If you have her, why do you need me? You like me all of a sudden?'
'If you weren't tracing this call, why would you ask so many stupid questions?' Jane asked. 'I'll call this number at five a.m. tomorrow. If you meet me alone and unarmed, you'll get a peek.' She hung up, picked up Mary, and drove to Los Angeles, where they rented two identical white cars, then left the gray Toyota at the Burbank Airport. They spent the night in a motel in Woodland Hills.
At four a.m. Jane parked her rented car on the street she had chosen below the freeway, climbed the fence to turn on her camera, microphone, and recorders. Then she drove west to the big coffee shop in Agoura and at exactly five a.m. used the pay telephone outside the door.
'Yes?' said Barraclough.
'It's me,' she said. 'In twenty minutes I'll be at the lot on the corner of Woodley Avenue and Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. If you're not there I'll keep going.'
'Wait,' he said. 'I didn't get those streets.'
'Then rewind the tape and play it back,' she said, and hung up.
Twenty minutes was an enormous stretch of time for a man like Barraclough. Jane thought about all of the preparations he would have made already. He would have all of the trainees on the special payroll of Enterprise Development already awake and standing by. He would have some pretext for using Intercontinental Security's facilities and equipment too. Now he would be frantically ordering all of them into positions around the Sepulveda Recreation Area. No, not frantically: coldly, methodically.
She had selected the meeting place carefully. It was the sort of spot a person might choose who had some fear of ambush but no understanding of how such things happened. It was free of people in the hours before dawn, a flat open lawn that had been built as a flood basin with a vast empty sod farm on one side, a golf course on the other, and nothing much but picnic tables and a baseball diamond in between. The place gave the illusion of safety because she could see a second car coming from half a mile off. So could he, but all he had to do was block two spots on Burbank Boulevard and one end of Woodley and she was trapped.
Jane left the Ventura Freeway and continued eastward on Burbank Boulevard. It would still be another hour before the sun came up. At exactly 5:20 she was driving beside the golf course, and as she came around the long curve, she saw his car. It was a new, dark gray Chevrolet parked beside the road on the small gravel plateau above the empty reservoir. She could see the little stream of exhaust from the tailpipe that showed her the car was running. She took her foot off the gas pedal as she approached, and coasted to a speed of under ten miles an hour. She made a left turn onto the lot, then pulled up ten feet away from his car and stared into the side window.
It was difficult to tell how tall he was when he was seated in the car, but he gave her the impression of being big. His hands on the wheel were thick and square-knuckled, and his shoulders were much wider than the steering wheel. The white pinstriped shirt he had on seemed a little tight on his upper arms, the way cops wore theirs. He was obviously wearing it without a coat to make her believe he had actually come unarmed.
She looked directly into his face. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a wry half smile. She reminded herself that she had known he would try to rattle her with some intimidating expression, maybe the poker player's look when he raised his bet: my money's on the table, so let's see yours. But his face set off a little burst of heat in her chest that rose up her throat into her jaw muscles. She could not turn away from the eyes. They were light, almost gray, squinting a little because of the false smile, and watching her with a disconcerting intensity. They took in her fear and discomfort, added his savoring of it, and reflected it back to her. His mind was focused utterly on her, on what she was feeling and thinking. His eyes revealed that he felt nothing except some vicarious glow from the anxiety he could inspire in her.
It was time to lose whoever he had brought with him. Jane stamped her foot on the gas pedal and the car's back wheels spun, kicking up gravel. It fishtailed a little as one wheel caught before the other and then it squealed out of the lot onto Burbank Boulevard. She drove to the east, took the ramp onto the San Diego Freeway at forty, and sailed into the right lane at sixty-five. She checked her rearview mirror to be sure he was coming, and saw the gray Chevrolet skid around the curve and shoot off the ramp toward her. She kept adding increments of speed while she held the car steady in the center lane.
She watched the mirror so she could spot his helpers coming up to join him, but no other car on the freeway was traveling as fast as theirs were. She checked the cars ahead, but none of them did anything out of the ordinary either. She waited until the last second to cut back across the right lane to the feeder for the Ventura Freeway, then stayed in the eastbound lane until it was almost too late before she cut across the painted lines to the westbound ramp. She looked into the mirror again, not to confirm that he was still chasing her but to be sure that no other car could have followed him.
She drove westward until she saw the telephone with the blue '177' painted above it, then turned on her emergency flashers and coasted along until she made it to the shoulder and stopped twenty feet past the call box. She got out of her car and walked to the spot where she had aimed her directional microphone and camera. She saw his headlights after five seconds, then the turn signal, and in a moment he was rolling up along the shoulder of the road to stop behind her.
He swung his door open on the traffic side, got out as though he were invulnerable to getting clipped, and walked up to her. His arms were out from his sides, but he was carrying something in his hand. She stepped backward to the door of her car. He saw her move and seemed to understand that she was preparing to bolt. He set the object on the ground and stepped back.
Jane kept her eyes on him as she stepped forward and picked it up. It was a small box with a metal hoop and a thumb switch. She recognized that it was a hand-held metal detector like the ones they used in airports when somebody set off the walk-through model. She ran it over herself from head to foot, then tossed it to him and he did the same, turning around so she could see there was nothing stuck in his belt. The little box didn't beep.
Barraclough's eyes scanned the area around him in every direction, returning to her face abruptly now and then to see if she reacted. He said, 'Mind if I look in your car?'
'Go ahead,' she said. 'Mind if I look in yours?'
The mysterious smile returned. 'No.' He watched her as he took a step toward her rented car. She never moved. He said, 'You driving or am I?'
She said, 'I'm not getting into a car with you.'
He looked around him again, as though this meant he needed to do a better job of searching the middle distance for witnesses. He said, 'What made you panic back there?'
'That's not what I want to talk about. I say it was a trap, you say it wasn't, I say you're a liar.'
His smile seemed to grow a little. 'What do you want to talk about?'
'You've been chasing Mary Perkins, I've been hiding her. Now I'm ready to sell her.'