an aspect of the hunter-killer instinct, how felines in the wild tossed fish out of a stream prior to making them a dinner course.
The lesson in this for Lathrop was that whenever you played, you had to know you were playing for keeps… which, on second thought, had
Ah, the glory days of a hot-shit deep-cover op.
Now Lathrop slowed to a halt at the edge of the path. He had a good view of the carousel from where he stood and didn’t need to get any closer. It was old-fashioned, dating back maybe a century, with a band organ, several rows of antique carved animals, and gondolas on the outside of the platform. Though this was a weekday, the warm, sunny weather had brought visitors to the park in droves, and the ride was filled.
Lathrop bent as if to tie his shoelaces and gazed covertly at the spinning platform through the lightweight, black-framed eyeglasses he’d donned in his car. An instant later, he pushed a tiny knob at the hinge of their left stem with his fingertip, and a rectangular augmented reality panel appeared on that side. Seeming to hover about two feet in front of him, the AR display was in fact being projected onto the upper half of the plain plastic lens by the microelectromechanical, or MEMS, optical systems embedded in the frame of the glasses.
A twist of the control knob focused the image reflector /magnifiers in the lens and smoothed the display’s borders.
“Profiler,” Lathrop whispered into the pickup mike clipped to his collar.
On his vocal command, an audio link through a slender cable running down under his windbreaker to his hidden wearable computer — the same device he’d had on his belt the night of the tunnel ambush — launched a bootleg version of the UpLink International face-finding application sold to him by Enrique Quiros. Talk about an intriguing turn of the wheel.
Lathrop waited as the software loaded. To conserve memory, he’d installed a minimized version that contained a search index of ten thousand terrorists, criminals, and their known associates and would show the twenty closest matches in the AR panel. The program’s full-option setup on his desktop computer would have let him scan many times that number, and Lathrop knew he could have accessed its database resources over his wireless network connection. But that was a time-consuming distraction in the field, and the pinhole digicam in the bridge of his glasses would capture an image of his subject that he could review at his convenience.
He continued to watch the carousel’s jumpers slide up and down on their poles as it went around to the cycling pipe music. Most of the younger kids were belted onto the menagerie animals that made up the inner rows: spotted pigs, smiling fairy tale frogs, and brightly colored birds with long, arched necks that might have been fanciful cranes or ostriches. On the tall king’s horses behind the gondolas were their older brothers and sisters, some with their parents standing alongside the saddles to steady them. A group of whooping, overly giddy teens that Lathrop nailed as stoned on pot occupied the remaining painted ponies.
None of them was his concern.
Estimating he had about a minute to fiddle with his sneakers without attracting attention, Lathrop concentrated on the twosome sitting like sweethearts in a gondola at the perimeter. Except, he thought, this was no such snuggly interlude.
The man was Enrique Quiros. Lathrop didn’t recognize the blonde looker riding with him, but he’d been on enough tails in his day to read their body language and was positive that whatever was going on here was strictly business.
This afternoon was proving to be much more interesting than he could have anticipated.
After leaving Quiros’s Golden Triangle front in La Jolla, Lathrop had pulled his Volvo out of the hourly garage around the corner, swung back toward the office building, and double-parked about halfway down the street, where he’d gotten a good view of its front entrance. That was the only way in or out besides the loading and emergency doors, and Enrique wouldn’t have seen any reason to leave through them.
Five minutes later, Quiros emerged alone onto the busy sidewalk, turned in the opposite direction from Lathrop, and walked a block to yet another of the neighborhood’s ubiquitous indoor garages.
Lathrop followed, stopped near the garage, and watched some more. It wasn’t long before Quiros came driving out in a custom Porsche Carrera 911, the vehicle of choice for ostentatious, drug-dealing slime crawlers. Probably he’d called ahead for the attendant to have it ready.
Lathrop allowed Quiros to get about two car lengths ahead of him and then angled his Volvo into the flow of traffic. The 911 made a left onto A Street and headed north on Twelfth Avenue, following the road to where it became Park Boulevard, moving along toward Balboa Park at a moderate speed. At the intersection beyond the overpass, Quiros waited at a red light, took a left on the green, drove a short distance, and then turned right into the macadam parking lot back of the Spanish Village Art Center.
There were plenty of available spaces, and Lathrop swung in five or six slots down the aisle from Quiros, between a Ford Excursion that could have carted around the entire Osmond clan and an only slightly less house-y minivan. As he’d watched Quiros step out of the 911 and walk north, away from the art center toward the carousel and zoo entrance, he got his jogging clothes out of the gym bag on the passenger seat and changed into them, stuffing the sport jacket, dress slacks, and cordovans he’d shed into the bag.
The concealment offered by his tinted windows and the large, unoccupied vehicles on either side convinced Lathrop nobody would be able to peek in on him, but he doubted it would have raised an eyebrow even if that were the case. Guys did stranger things in their cars. And all he’d have looked like to some busybody who might notice was a working stiff who’d sneaked away from his desk to play hooky in the springlike weather.
Keeping Quiros in sight, Lathrop brushed back his hair and put on the Nike baseball cap resting on his dash. His first law of disguise, a baseball cap was the perfect standby, as long you didn’t wear one with a team logo that might stick in anyone’s memory. Costume beards, wigs, facial prosthetics, and other materials of that sort were great tricks of the trade, but preparation was needed to use them effectively, and Lathrop had been working on the hoof.
He added the AR glasses last, plugging them into the hidden microcomputer belted around his waist.
Within minutes after Quiros left his car, Lathrop made his own exit and trailed behind him to the carousel, where the slinky blonde had been waiting for Enrique near the ticket line.
Now he watched them circle around and around, talking rapidly, as if trying to cram in whatever had to be said before the five-minute ride came to a finish. Lathrop was hoping he’d be able to piece together their conversation on playback using the speech-reading component of his desktop software, which employed context- sensitive logic to fill in sequential blank spots when their faces spun away from his digicam lens or the carousel’s movement blurred the video input, also compensating to some extent for the cross talk that occurred during ordinary verbal exchanges.
As the carousel whirled on, the Profiler floated a dozen possible hits, overlaying the bottom of the mug shots with their known or assumed names, ages, nationalities, and a requisite listing of offenses.
Lathrop was mildly disappointed. He’d have liked to ID the blonde on-site, but it was clear she wasn’t any of the criminal candidates that had popped into his display. Still, he was charmed to have stumbled onto this little tryst and had plenty of recorded conversation to study later.
He straightened, figuring he’d bent over his shoelace long enough. Also, the ride was grinding to a halt, and he was concerned Enrique would start in his direction after getting off. The guy might not suspect he was being shadowed, but neither was he an oblivious fool.
Lathrop was about to move on down the path when he noticed something that caused him to risk staying put another few seconds. As the gondola spun past on one of its final slow revolutions, Blondie abruptly opened her purse, brought out a smallish object, and gave it to Enrique. A box, dark and shiny, the kind Lathrop imagined they’d carry in those exclusive Rodeo Drive jewelry stores.
He watched with sharp curiosity. The quick handoff squelched any second thoughts that might have occurred to him about this being a lovers’ outing. It didn’t even seem especially amicable. There were no smiles. No meeting of the lips, chaste pecks on the cheeks, or air kisses. Moreover, Enrique looked reluctant to accept the box, almost nervous, stuffing it into the pocket of his sport jacket like it was red hot to the touch.
Lathrop’s chin tilted upward. His lips parted and curled. He drew in a breath. That transaction was it. Right there. The reason for the meet. And he’d captured the cherished moment on his wearable’s flash memory card.
