Ice Cap (24 page)

I buzzed him through the outside door and waited for him at the top of the stairs. Eddie got there first, alternating between saying hello and sniffing all over the floor. Sam clomped up the stairs and handed me a bagful of coffee and sugary, puffy things from the real Italian place in the village.

“The least I could do,” he said.

“You're right. You could do a lot more.”

I let them into the foyer that used to be the reception area when the apartment was an office full of surveyors, and then into the kitchen, which had a table where I made him sit until I'd extracted the coffee and dumped the pastries onto a plate. From there we went into the living room, where there were opposing chairs, which only took a few minutes to clear of junk so we could sit down. Eddie occupied himself sniffing at the boxes and stacks of printed matter littering the floor.

“Do you realize how little space you actually live in?” he asked, looking around.

“Don't start in, not at this time of the morning.”

“Do you realize how much more life you'd have if you got up earlier?”

“Is this why you came over here and woke me up? So you could be an asshole?” I asked him.

“Nah, I could do that anytime. I got a note from Ivor. Hand-delivered to my mailbox. He wants a sit-down.”

I took a sip of the cream-and-sugar-infused coffee, which remarkably was still quite hot.

“Interesting. Any other details?”

“That's all it said. A personal note from the man himself. Evil little gnome that he is.”

“So how does that happen?” I asked.

“We sit down with him.”

“Out in the open with lots of witnesses. A sharpshooter with his sights trained on Ivor the whole time.”

“Don't know any sharpshooters.”

“We'll just tell him there's one,” I said. “Good enough.”

“I have a much cooler idea,” he said.

“One that couldn't wait until after eight o'clock?”

“No. The sit-down is scheduled for nine. You'll want to be better dressed. Though we can do it from here.”

I almost choked on my latte. “What are you talking about?”

“Skype. The perfect solution. Voice and video, a face-to-face with no danger of anyone shooting anyone else. Twenty-first century, baby. You do have the application?”

I drew the collar of my shirt to my throat as if the camera was already on me.

“How do you know about Skype? You don't even own a computer. What happened to Sam the Luddite?”

“I don't need a computer. I've got a grown daughter. I Skype her once a week from a soundproof booth in the Southampton library. A little jerky, but clear enough. Very cool shit. Ivor was all over it. He doesn't want to get shot any more than we do.”

I pointed the mouth of my latte at him.

“You've been cooking this up for a while,” I said. “Thanks for the warning.”

He squinted, the closest thing he ever got to a sign of regret.

“I probably should have told you, but you'd only just fret over it the whole time. This is better. No time for fretting. But you ought to take a shower and fix yourself up. You don't want Ivor thinking you're a slob,” he said, looking around the room again.

I huffed loudly but did as he asked, keeping my hair dry under a shower cap but otherwise giving myself the full treatment. I emerged not only clean, but professionally suited up.

“That's what I'm talking about,” said Sam. “We'll keep the camera at about waist up, so you can lose the pumps if you want.”

We went across the hall to the office and my computer. With a little rearranging of the stuff on my desk, we were both able to sit in front of the screen and be inside the camera frame. Eddie did some more sniffing, then curled up on one of the few naked patches of carpet.

“This is too weird,” I said. “Sit-downs are supposed to be in a private room in the back of an Italian restaurant.”

A few minutes later a little box popped up telling us we had a Skype call coming in from General Resource Recovery. I accepted the call, expanded the window, and suddenly had a dark-faced, balding little guy in an open-collared silk shirt and wraparound sunglasses, with a Doberman pinscher sitting next to him, filling the screen.

“Hello, Ivor. Hi, Cleo,” said Sam. “
Como estas?
Ivor's the one in the sunglasses,” he added to me. I was glad Eddie was asleep on the floor, though who knows if dogs can see other dogs on a computer screen.

“Mr. Acquillo. I wish I could say it's a pleasure to see you again.”

His speech had a Spanish inflection. I remembered from my research years ago that he was born in the Philippines, a mix of Dutch and Asian.

“Same here,” said Sam. “It's only because we seem to have a situation.”

“And you are Miss Swaitkowski?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm part of the situation.”

“I think this can be easily resolved,” said Ivor, putting his arm around Cleo, who continued staring into the screen. My appreciation of the Skype idea soared. “It seems to be on account of faulty information.”

“Really,” said Sam.

“I accept the responsibility,” he said. “I sent my associates to call on Miss Swaitkowski, mistakenly thinking she was still in the real-estate business. I want to expand my home in Southampton, which will require a hearing with the appeals board. You came highly recommended, but now I hear you're into a different thing.”

“I am,” I said, temporarily losing all doubt over the career change.

“I'd like this to end here,” said Ivor. “You'll have no further contact from us, and we'll forget about the manhandling of my security personnel.”

All of us but Ike, I thought.

“Fine with me,” said Sam. “We're not looking for trouble.”

“We're not,” I said.

“That's good. Then we're agreed. Let's make this the last time we need to have a conversation,” he said, and with that, we saw him lean over his keyboard, and with a single tap, he was gone. I quit out of the application just to make sure.

“So that was easy,” I said. “What do you think?”

“It was too easy. He's lying.”

“That's too bad.”

“No, it's not. It means something.”

“To the Buczek case?” I asked.

“I don't know. But it's where I'd look.”

“Sullivan told me to stay away from Fleming.”

“It's not up to him,” he said. “You've got your own job to do.”

“That's the theory.”

*   *   *

We talked some more while finishing off the fattening breakfast. Then Sam and Eddie left me to my own devices, which started with a quick change out of the nice clothes and into the ones that made me so thankful I worked in a one-woman office.

I kept the lipstick and mascara on, though. Why not.

Then I stared out at the windmill across the street and tried to read my own thoughts, conscious and otherwise. It wasn't a long deliberation, because the first impulse that seemed to have some sense attached to it found me at my computer keyboard writing to Randall Dodge.

“How's the Zina check going?” I asked him.

A half hour later, he wrote back.

“There is no Zina. No matches fitting the description. Interpol came up with zilch. I suggest we extend the search beyond Poland.”

“Sure,” I wrote. “You can do that?”

“As long as my friend remains my friend,” he replied.

“So stay friendly,” I wrote.

I hadn't allowed myself to react when UB first reported Zina's nonidentity. UB was likely a clever cyber-warrior, but still an amateur. Interpol was different. Way different. You don't hide from those guys.

That was why I had to ask Randall. To hear that news. I knew it was coming, and though I didn't know where it would lead, from then on all things would have to be different.

*   *   *

“What do you know about Ivor Fleming?” I asked Roger Angstrom when he answered the phone.

“What do I know or what do I know that I can print?”

“What do you know.”

“He has a very successful, legitimate scrap-metal business, collecting product from all over the East Coast, separating it by type of metal, more or less, and shipping it all around the world. His biggest customers have traditionally been sheet-metal fabricators serving the auto and appliance industries. Originally in Japan and Western Europe, now most of it goes to China, Brazil, and Korea.”

“That's all printable. Tell me what's not.”

“In return for what?” he asked.

A short list of options leapt to mind. “I'll give you an exclusive on the Buczek case. Once it's concluded.”

“In your favor or not?” he asked.

“Either way is in my favor. All I'm striving for is the truth.”

“I can't talk about this over the phone,” he said. “We'll have to meet. Tonight?”

“You know where I am. Mr. Sato will ring when you get here.”

*   *   *

Among the infinite number of things one can do with the computer is not only check the weather report, but actually see the weather bearing down on you in lush, representational colors. You only need to go to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web site and look. These are the people who tell everyone else in the country what's going to happen, maybe, in the coming days. Unless something changes. That morning it was telling us on the East End that all the ferocious winter weather we'd been experiencing was just a prelude, a warm-up if you will, to what was coming later that week.

Of course, it also might miss us. Or it might hit us square between the eyes. No one knew for certain, breathless warnings from the attractive local newscasters notwithstanding.

Yeah, yeah, was all us jaded and irritable Long Islanders could think. Heard it all, seen it all before, and we're all still here. Wake us up when Armageddon is really coming to town and maybe we'll give it a little attention.

For my part, I had the outfit, finally. Everything warm, rugged, and resistant to overuse. My car drove like a snowmobile and there was limitless sashimi and green tea one flight down. We'd never lost power in the building, and even if that happened, there was always Burton's place, which was set up to live off the grid through anything short of thermonuclear war.

But I studied the giant Doppler radar map anyway and began to be impressed with all the green. Green, incongruously, meant heavy snowfall. At that moment, a lot of green was dumping on the western reaches of the South. As usual, the wind currents were projected to bring that monster over West Virginia, Maryland, and South Jersey, across a little scrap of the Atlantic Ocean, and then broadside into Long Island.

As far as I could tell from their projections, Southampton was predicted to be smack in the middle of the storm.

Oh, goody.

I noticed a little gadget on the site that let me zoom in on the projected center of the storm to see how it would be distributed across all the area villages and hamlets. It was driven by a version of Google Earth, so you could see all the real roads, buildings, and bodies of water.

It was at that moment I was seized by a revelation that had been lying dormant in my brain for days. The shock of it actually felt like a blow to the chest.

“Idiot!” I yelled into the empty office, and immediately called Randall Dodge, who by this time would likely devoutly wish he'd never met me.

“Yes, Jackie,” he said, answering the phone.

“Dude, can I borrow your satellite application? The one we played around with the other day?”

“I can't give you log-in rights. The millisecond the system sees your IP address, it'll lock you out and cut me off. Forever. The deal is, you can trade, but you don't share.”

“Okay, can I come over there and pretend I'm you?”

It took a while for him to answer, but not because he was considering the proposition. It always took him longer than most to respond to questions. I took it as a Shinnecock thing. Rapid responses were undignified.

“Sure. When?”

“Tomorrow in the
A.M.
,” I said.

“Bring ham and cheese.”

*   *   *

A mighty storm might have been roaring toward us, and I might have been totally unprepared for the consequences, and it was surely gray and cold and wretched outside, but for all that, my heart was warm with eager anticipation. I had a plan for the next day, one I could see unfolding in my mind's eye. I had a theory, and a track to run on until that theory was proven right or wrong, and that was all I needed to be a whole person—a cheerful, anxious, unrelenting person.

 

18

I brought five different types of croissant and enough coffee to float a battleship. Randall was ready with a relatively clear and well-lit workspace waiting for me, the satellite program booted up and hovering over Southampton Village.

“Does this thing work at night?” I asked, sitting down in front of the monitor.

“It's just a weather satellite,” he said. “No night vision. That's NSA stuff. I wouldn't be sneaking into their servers. That's instant black helicopters overhead, commandos at the door. And then I disappear.”

“We don't disappear people.”

“We don't? Excellent news.”

He gave me a quick tutorial on how to move laterally and zoom in and out by using a little joystick. It wasn't much different from Google Earth, just in real time. In a few moments I was up in Seven Ponds, and a few moments after that, I had Tad Buczek's place filling the screen.

It was disorienting, the proportions far different from how I'd calculated them on the ground. I reset my perceptions by starting at the head of the driveway, following it down the hill to the sharp turn, past the pergola, which was more sprawling than I realized, and then on to the main house. From there, I followed the drive to the staff house, which was farther away than I thought, and tucked up next to a stand of trees. Next to the staff house was a barn twice its size. At least I thought it was the staff house. There were other buildings nearby, rectangular boxes probably made of corrugated steel, and things I wasn't sure about but assumed were part of the Metal Madness collection.