leaving him drained from overwork and nerves, the normally starch crispness of his officer’s uniform gone as limp as he felt, Commander Bertrand Kilana slouched before a computer screen behind his locked office door.
The air in the room was stale with sweat, ground out cigarette butts, and paper cups of cold, half-drunk coffee. One of the cups on his desk had begun leaking from its bottom, but Kilana had not noticed the spreading brown ring of wetness around it. Nor would he until tomorrow morning, when he returned to the office after too few hours’ sleep. By then the coffee would have partly soaked through a stack of his important case documents and the pages of a favorite investigative reference book, then dribbled down to the floor to leave a dark, permanent stain on his rug. Kilana would find the paper cup empty and curse himself for having neglected to dump it.
On Kilana’s monitor now, a live-streaming Internet surveillance video from the Rio de Gabao Hotel showed two of the Americans under observation exit an elevator that had risen to its luxury suite level and return to their separate rooms.
The commander identified them, tentatively, from his matched listing of UpLink personnel and their suite numbers. This information was stored in his computer’s encrypted database, but for the sake of convenience he’d kept a hardcopy on hand beside his keyboard. According to this printout, the men were Peter Nimec — suite 9—and Vincent Scull — suite 12.
He did not know, or wish to know, where they had been tonight — only that they had left shortly before ten, and stayed out for some three odd hours. He did not know their positions with UpLink, though that information could be easily obtained from departmental sources. He did not even know with absolute certainty why he had been instructed to maintain a constant watch over them.
Kilana kept his eyes on his role in the plot and let its other players worry about theirs. It was what he’d been told to do. It was also what was very much safest for him.
Kilana palmed his mouse, moved the cursor to the toolbar of his Internet Service Provider’s browser and clicked FILE ? ARCHIVE ? SAVE. When the dialogue box opened to request a file name, Kilana typed in the word
Now Kilana clicked again, and the hidden camera’s real-time images of the men were stored as a high- resolution, compressed audio/video DivX file on his database. He then took a rewritable DVD from the rack on his desk, slipped it into the computer’s burner drive, and returned to the toolbar.
Several mouse clicks later, he had merged the night’s dozen
With the files copied, Kilana removed the disk from the drive tray, put it into a jewel case, and turned off his computer. Then he rose, made a perfunctory attempt at smoothing down his rumpled, sagging uniform, abandoned all hope of it, and left the office, snapping out the lights as he went through the door.
In the parking lot, a courier waited in the shadows near Kilana’s automobile. The police commander knew this man’s face but not his identity. More willing ignorance; it was well within Kilana’s power to learn everything about him, from his grandmother’s maiden name to his favorite pissing hole.
Passing the jewel case to the courier without a word, Commander Kilana watched him leave the parking area on foot and then disappear into the night.
After a few moments, he got into his car and drove home, ousting from his mind an intrusive guess about the DVD’s eventual destination.
Yes, the less he knew the better.
Except, perhaps, when it came to the beautiful occupant of luxury suite 5 at the Rio de Gabao Hotel.
SIX
It was eighteenth-century Franciscan padres at the San Carlos Barromeo Mission, outside what would become the city of Carmel, that gave the vast, cragged stretch of the central California coastline its original name:
The rental cabin Kuhl’s sleeper agents had acquired for him in Big Sur perched on the edge of a precipitous gorge three thousand feet above sea level, its western windows offering a wide view of the Pacific Ocean beyond the canyon, its isolation guarded by a thirty-foot-tall iron entry gate a full mile down the ridge’s eastward slope. Built in 1940 as a secret getaway by one of the state’s early millionaire lumber barons — and currently assigned by family heirs to the management of a real-estate company specializing in wilderness properties — the furnished cabin was a large two-story structure of stone and Douglas fir logs with open interior spaces, a central spiral staircase, French doors, and upper and lower balconies that extended past the sheer western cliff to overhang the long, empty plunge of the canyon. Access from the limestone gateposts was confined to an unmarked strip of winding dirt road circumscribed by thirty private acres of oak and redwood forest, vertical shale outcrops, rolling fields, and scattered swift-moving streams that ceaselessly chattered, splashed, and tumbled down deep, steep cuts in the wooded mountain slopes.
Behind a high west window on the second floor, Kuhl sat in a supple leather chair watching the commercial van’s arrival through his binoculars. It pushed uphill between the trees at an engine-grinding crawl, its wheels occasionally sinking into loose, crumbly ditches in the access road. The road’s narrowness would not have allowed even two small vehicles to pass in opposite directions, and it had recently become rutted and washed out after a spate of heavy late summer rainfall. The Realtor’s offer to fill and regrade its surface had been declined by Kuhl’s representatives. Their employer sought a period of complete escape from distraction, they emphasized. The noisy repair work would have impinged on the first week of his stay at the very minimum, and he was adamant about requiring uninterrupted solitude.
A ten-thousand-dollar deposit left on his lease had ensured that complete deference was given to his wishes.
Now the van came jolting and bumping over the final few yards of the path. Kuhl wondered whether its rough trip up had agitated the occupants he assumed were riding in its cargo section. This was no bit of idle musing. He must have absolute confidence in their reliability. If they showed any sign of unrest he would notice it, apologize for the driver’s trouble, and send him back on his way.
After several moments, Kuhl lowered his binoculars to the windowsill. The van had reached the cabin and pulled to a stop on the unmanicured grass beside his own Ford Explorer. The words ANAGKAZO BREEDING AND TRAINING painted on its flank were easily legible to his naked eye.
As the driver got out, Kuhl rose and turned to the man who had been standing behind him near the window.
“Stay out of sight, Ciras,” he said. “I’m going down.”
Ciras nodded. He was slender, almost delicate looking, with shiny black mongoose eyes, dark curling hair, and olive skin. There was about him a keyed, alert stillness that was all contained energy. He rarely seemed to move unless necessary. When he did, it was in darting bursts. On a crowded Munich street once, Kuhl saw him turn on a Verfasungsschutz intelligence agent who had been trailing them, and slice open his belly with a sweep of the knife so quick its blade was never glimpsed in his hand.
At the foot of the spiral stairs now, Kuhl heard the bell chime and crossed the main room to open the door.
“Mr. Estes, hello,” his visitor said. Tall, bearded, and stocky, he wore a short-sleeved chambray shirt, denim
