Overfall (29 page)

Sam had almost reached the bend when he heard the sounds of a struggle. He turned off his light and slowed.

“Don’t make me ruin your face.”

Suzanne’s assailant was standing at the base of another ladder. She was on her knees naked in front of him.

“Go to hell.”

Sam rounded the corner and walked silently toward the gunman.

“I’m not going to kill the best piece of ass in North America. Not yet.”

Sam aimed at the gunman’s head, but it was indistinct and would be hard to hit in the semidarkness. He dropped his aim to the center of the man’s shoulder.

He whistled loudly.

Startled, the man whirled reflexively. It was the only excuse Sam needed. Lead poured out of Sam’s pistol, hitting the man’s torso as if little patches of the gunmen’s hide were exploding. Sam felt only a sting in his arm before the return fire caught him square in the chest and sent him flying.
Tough son of a bitch,
Sam recalled thinking before he passed out. ...

“When I woke up in the hospital the world was a different place,” Sam told Anna. “Losing my son was everything, and it felt as though nothing of me remained. I just wasn’t there anymore without him. I gave my staff a large severance except the people feeding and maintaining Big Brain. Suzanne insisted that I go with her to France where she was making a movie. It wasn’t then that we talked about it—about us. She came to the hospital, told me, and said she’d be back. I managed to tell Typhony, my on-again off-again girlfriend at the time.

“They wheeled me to Bud’s funeral with two nurses and two IVs. When I got back to the hospital Suzanne had returned with a whole squad.

“She rented this place in the French countryside, the Loire River Valley, the heart and soul of France, she called it. I was completely depressed. She brought doctors and fed me happy pills.

“Suzanne came and went and physically I got better. I noticed the nurses got cuter.

“I couldn’t go out with Suzanne without news coverage, but we saw each other each night when she came back from location, and gradually we got to know each other.

“Things started tending toward the physical and we both got nervous. I wanted my quiet anonymous life, still thinking I might somehow go back to work, I guess. She didn’t want a boyfriend who couldn’t take her to an opening. I thought maybe I loved her at the time, but I had always told myself never to get involved with a celebrity. I don’t know if it was that or the depression and the guilt that initially kept us apart.

“We took a breather, so to speak, and for a few days I went for long walks around the green lawns, through the rose gardens, into the vineyards, past the fish ponds, and along the Loire River. There didn’t seem to be a solution.

“She called me and said we had to find a way to be together and she was coming to talk about it. They had been in Spain to shoot some scenes. I never talked with her again.”

“The jet crash,” Anna whispered.

“Yeah.”

“First Bud, then Suzanne.” Anna shook her head. “Did you love her?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t know what we could have done. I went back to work.”

“The way you explain it, you see yourself as a victim of your profession, which demands you not take up with a celebrity. Tidy little package. Circumstances may change, but your whole life will always be a set of clever tricks you use to make sure that intimacy never happens. Passion, yes. But not the rest.”

“I take up with a celebrity and the media will soon know when a person’s in trouble. Right now they don’t notice that I’ve shown up because I don’t exist. That’s important.”

The phone rang.

“Answer it,” Anna said.

“I have two big pieces of news,” Paul said. “Hal called. A G-Four landed at Campbell River and took off for Fiji. They even learned that the people getting on the plane in Canada came in on two Beavers from the Alert Bay area.”

“Fiji. I’ll be damned. Which island?”

“The airport at Nadi. After Nadi the G-Four went to Lebanon, but a number of passengers got off in Fiji and took a limo to another part of the airport If they boarded another plane, Hal says it’s only a matter of time until he knows whose plane and where it goes. Apparently it’s hard to keep secrets in Nadi. But if they stayed a few days and then flew out, it could be harder than hell to find them.”

“Lebanon tells me it’s Samir Aziz,” Sam said. “Trouble in paradise—partners at each other’s throats.”

“Right. We’re exploring that. But Big Brain has a new entry in the diagram.” Paul went on at some length to explain the strange correlations in the data.

“And you must have something on Wes King,” Sam said.

“He died of a heart attack a couple months after the break-in. You were in France.”

“Well, we missed it and now all we can do is play catch-up.”

“What?” Anna took his arm as he hung up. “You look sick.”

Sam was still sifting the facts in his mind. “It’ll take a few minutes to explain. You ready?”

Anna checked the oven. “This stuff burns easily because of the honey.” She pulled out the granola, served it, and got them glasses of orange juice.

“Okay,” Sam said, and sat at the table. “Suzanne King had a kind heart. Suzanne allowed her ex-husband, Wes King, to hang around her house. Of all these divorced celebrities who allegedly remain ‘good friends,’ this was that rare couple that actually did remain on good terms.”

“It’s not a bad idea to maintain the friendship.”

“Uh-huh. Well, there wasn’t any spin with them. And Wes stayed at the house mostly when he visited town on business. The study remained his and I guess, according to the maid, the deal was that he could keep using it until Suzanne found a serious boyfriend. Wes had a wall safe—which of course we didn’t know at the time of the stalker case—where he kept the source code to a valuable software program his company had developed. It was called Auditor, and it had made him a fortune. All you need to know is that it was a very sophisticated accounting program that integrated other manufacturing and production functions and was unique at the time. But to set it up and to make it run with other programs you needed the source code. It’s very long and complex and virtually can’t be figured out.”

Sam started nibbling the granola as it cooled and nodded his approval to Anna.

“Somebody wanted it for use in places like China, where its sale was forbidden by federal law. Supposedly because of its potential military applications. The whole thing with the stalking and photos of Suzanne was a diversion to distract attention from the real motive for invading the property. The people who were after the software’s source code found themselves a couple of real live perverts with a record of stalking and assault.”

“But why go to all that trouble?” Anna asked. “If you’ve got the tunnel into the estate, why not sneak in when nobody is home?”

“Because they couldn’t do it with only one entry into the house. You blow up the safe and everybody can guess what you’re doing. The software theft only works if people don’t suspect that it has happened. That’s the big difference between this and a theft of cash or jewelry. Suzanne believed that stalkers were invading her house—she was distracted. I doubt she even knew the contents of the safe. None of us, not me, not the police, and evidently not Wes, were thinking about theft or planning for it. We were all thinking about people on a weird power trip posting nude photos on the Web. That’s how we interpreted all the break-ins, the entire experience.”

“Okay, so what information connected King’s software and my brother’s case?”

“Big Brain. I told you the feeding of Big Brain never really stops. The tech staff was feeding Big Brain even when I was off sailing. What we had thought of as a solved crime—namely Suzanne King’s stalkers—suddenly became an unsolved crime when the news about the safe and the source code became public. The techies fed in the information as the police released it. And the FBI guys that know me and know Big Brain paved the way to feed data for their own purposes. That created a hot spot or high-priority area in the database on anything related to the King case. If there is any genius in Big Brain’s software it is taking these seemingly unrelated facts and finding connections. Sometimes it just seems like trivial information but you’d be amazed at what comes of it.

“In the car used by the stalkers there was a shaving kit, and in that kit was a paper cocktail coaster that had a phone number on it. The number belonged to an executive for Systemtechnik, a German company. We never made anything of that because the stalker was a cousin of the executive’s wife. That explained why he had the number. But before we figured that out we tapped into a computer contact list for Systemtechnik and downloaded the entire contents. And of course we never throw anything away. Big Brain has nearly infinite memory space. One address in those thousands of company contacts was a Cayman Islands address that will become important. Big Brain drew a correlation and the executive with the stalker’s phone number was the same executive who entered the Cayman address in his company’s computer.

“More recently Big Brain highlighted the name of an exporter of gift cheeses in France because it appeared on an invoice retrieved from the garbage of a Grace Technologies employee named Benoit Moreau. The cheese package bore a shipping address—a post office box in the Cayman Islands, the
same
post office box in the Cayman Islands that had popped up in the Systemtechnik records. That meant a connection to the Suzanne King case.

“To thicken the plot some, a French software company called Belle du Jour had received construction drawings from that same Systemtechnik executive. Belle du Jour also received money and sent billings to Grace, so Big Brain noticed that Belle du Jour had dealings with both Systemtechnik and Grace, and in the case of Grace the ROCs—”

“Wait, what’s a ROC?”

“ROC, record of communication. ... The ROCs were to one Benoit Moreau.”

Anna looked confused, but she motioned for Sam to continue.

“Next comes the exotic twist. A little while back, for a completely different project, we managed to download one of the databases from a very large overnight delivery company. We’re talking major data volume here, but handling it is something that Big Brain does better than any computer in the known universe. Big Brain found a package sent by Benoit Moreau—a shipment from a sex gadget company. Now Moreau is close to Chellis in the corporate structure, so she creates red flags any time Big Brain notices her. She sent the sex toy to Belle du Jour, but the contact phone didn’t match any of the numbers we had for Belle du Jour. The number turned out to match a satellite phone, and it also appeared on the phone logs of a cell phone used by one of the stalkers. It was also dialed by the Systemtechnik executive and a phone at Grace headquarters in Paris.”

“So that tells us a criminal, the Systemtechnik fellow, and this Benoit gal all called the same sat phone number.” Anna’s eyes widened, as if she could see the possible significance.

“Uh-huh. They did. Next step is to find the address associated with that sat phone number; turns out it’s registered to a company, the Freight Stop, in the Caymans. You could search for that company for years and find nothing on it ... but ... Big Brain had noted that someone at Belle du Jour had sent a document to the Freight Stop. And at one time the billing address for Belle du Jour was a Cayman Island address that had all mail forwarded to a certain Polynesian island address.

“Because of this, Big Brain assigned priority to the Polynesian address.

“That led Big Brain to do some handwriting-recognition analysis. Remember the cheese? In Benoit Moreau’s garbage was a card that she had sent to the Cayman address, which forwarded it to the Polynesian address. A joke was scribbled on the card by the recipient, who sent it back to Moreau—return address: Polynesia. The joke was in French and it said: ‘Keep the G spot warm.’ And it was signed
G.
Now do you recall the guy checking for spores in the Carter Building?”

“Yeah?”

“He signed in with the receptionist as G. Gousteaux. Big Brain matched the G on the sign-in form with the G on Benoit’s card. And when he was printing his name on the sign-in sheet it matched the print of the joke on the gift card. That makes the man at the Polynesian address the man of Belle du Jour, who is associated with the Freight Stop, which does business with Grace Technologies and Systemtechnik. This fellow is almost surely the lover of Benoit Moreau and is definitely the spore man who killed Weissman and who in all likelihood masterminded the assault on the Carter Building.”

Anna whistled, shaking her head.

“What really tortures me is that he also probably controlled the two perverts who harassed Suzanne, one of whom killed my son. The good news is that we’ve put this all together. The bad news is that this guy is very clever and very deadly and now opposes us. One more thing. When we gave all this to Interpol, they thought it might be a man who sometimes calls himself Devan Gaudet.”

“That’s incredible.”

“About like the granola,” Sam said, taking the last bite.

“So now that makes this personal for you.”

“I’m afraid it does.”

Devan Gaudet strode lazily down the sidewalk, an air of calm certainty masking what he was about to undertake. On a leash he led a fine-looking bulldog as harmless as May daisies. It amused him that the good guys were so predictable. At times like this he was practically ready to believe in God, for only the miraculous could account for his good fortune.

Naturally Grady
had
to tell Guy that she was going to go to school. (It was entirely predictable that the Sam man would try to ruin a perfectly good stripper by giving her a job and sending her to college.) With her background she would start either in a small state university or a junior college. Using about a dozen skip tracers he and Trotsky identified the school in three days.

That would have been impossible to accomplish in the short time frame if she hadn’t also reassured Guy that she wasn’t moving far. She had called from a phone booth on the street right after registering at school and according to her story walking some distance through the neighborhood before stopping to use a pay phone. Although she didn’t say how far she walked, they assumed no more than thirty minutes. On the tape of the call there was the sound of a harbor whistler buoy in the background. There was one junior college in the greater LA area that would be within earshot of a whistler buoy. Benoit had sent the voice recording as an e-mail attachment so that Gaudet and his men had it almost immediately.

Using an old ruse, a seasoned private eye had gotten Grady’s mailing address out of the school. Of course it was a PO box. Since the post office needed a physical address or phone number, a complex bit of bribery completed the work. Immediately he put three of his best men on the house. At least that was Trotsky’s assessment of this trio. When they saw Grady leave in a rusty-looking car driven by another young woman they called him. The bodyguard types around the house had vanished, so he concluded that she would be gone for a while. No suitcase had been in her hand, so she wasn’t on a trip. Now he was only gambling on her swift return.

There was something unusual about this job—something in his state of mind. For some time he had allowed himself to fantasize about watching this particular young woman die. He knew that she must be beautiful if she was anything like her reputation. The vision growing in his mind was becoming a compulsion, and although he knew it, he found himself drawn to the point that his will was riding on a tide of strange emotions. Nothing about the situation seemed to be blunting his analytical skills; he was not unaware of the risk involved in a face-to-face, hands-on killing. As he thought about it he concluded that his will was very much intact, that there was no element of irrationality. It was simply that the reward inherent in what he was planning merited the risk. It was nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure, the way some men risk their lives for a shot at the summit of Everest.

The house had an alarm equipped with motion detectors. The best way in was under the house through a duct that had been opened with heavy shears, but before going into the house he had some chores. He crossed the street at the end of the block, careful not to jaywalk. Wandering a little, letting the dog piss and sniff as he went, looking here and there, he made sure to give the appearance of a man out for a stroll.

When he arrived at the front gate he tied the dog and it sat. Then he walked through the gate and into the shadows, where he pulled on plastic surgeon gloves, put rubber slip-ons over his shoes, and pulled a key from under his raincoat. Next, staying in the shadows, he went to the side of the house, unlocked a padlock that fastened a three-foot-high door allowing access under the house. Chellis’s men had exchanged locks after they had cut off the original with bolt cutters. It took seconds to find the splice between the heavy lengths of duct tape; he disconnected them at the elbow. Another two minutes to find the depression in the ground that had been covered with cardboard, burlap, and dirt. It was carefully constructed so as to be invisible to the naked eye. He left it open so that he could crawl in quickly, but hoped he wouldn’t need it. Next, he moved up under the grate and slowly pushed it aside. The motion detector did not trigger the alarm.

He pulled a plastic bag from the large pocket of the overcoat. Without hesitating, he stood up with his torso above the floor and triggered the alarm. He went straight to the cupboards, found a bowl, and filled it with the contents of his bag and placed it on a table with a note. The alarm was raucous. Moving fast, he found the trapdoor to the attic in the bedroom closet. There were foot pegs up the wall for access. He tilted the overhead trapdoor on its hinges and put his head up into the attic, illuminating the musty space with a flashlight. It was a sizable storage area and had a plywood floor supporting a large number of boxes. The woman was a pack rat. When he left, he did not replace the trapdoor, but instead left it open for easy access. He then jumped back under the house, replaced the heater grate, and fit the duct back in place, applying tape. The alarm had been sounding for three minutes. Crawling out from under the house, he walked to the front, took the dog, and immediately encountered the neighbor, clearly the neighborhood busybody, just as his men had predicted. An older man with a pipe and a paper under his arm looked eager to talk.

“I am from France, as you can tell by the accent, and I saw this place and thought sure it was my friend’s, and now I see that I am turned around and in the wrong neighborhood. I feel so bad. Somehow when I knocked loudly on the window I must have set off the noise sensor.”

“Only a girl and her friend live here.”

“Yes. Well, I wish the police would come so I could explain.”

“I don’t know what it is like in France, but here it can take twenty minutes for the police to arrive. I’ll tell them. Last time it was a spider crawling over the which-’ em-a-call-it. I turn the alarm off and reset it when she isn’t here, but I have to wait for the police to check everything out.”

“You’re sure? I’m very sorry for the racket.” As if he hadn’t a care in the world, Gaudet walked down the block, turned to the left, and disappeared from the neighbor’s sight. Turning the dog loose to wander off down the street, he doubled back behind the house, jumped a neighbor’s fence into the backyard of Jill’s house, and went immediately to the grate. After about seven minutes from its initial sounding, the audible alarm automatically turned off and became a steady beeping inside the house. It was another ten minutes before the neighbor who had the code was in the house with the police. Footfalls made it obvious that they were walking through the house, checking superficially.

“Hey,” one of them whispered. There was silence for a time.

“Hell, there’s nothing up there. They just left the trapdoor open.”

“You gotta check, though.”

Then they were back at the front door and he could hear the neighbor resetting the alarm. He would have sixty seconds.

“You know it’s fifty dollars for false alarms,” the officer said.

“Guess I should have collected from the guy with the dog,” the neighbor said as they closed the door.

Rushing up through the grate, he replaced it, and was up in the attic before the alarm once again became effective.

Gaudet sat in the attic and waited, amused that it had gone so easily. Had they been more watchful, it would have been necessary to wait in the hole in the ground under the house. This way it was so much more comfortable. Taking out his light and a small book, he began reading the published journal of a bondage slave.

There were a couple of lamps radiating a soft glow, one in between a small sitting area and the breakfast nook, and the other in the living room. Then there were night-lights in the wall outlets along with various things that emitted pleasant scents; and these electrical deodorizers were in addition to hand-tied bags of aromatic herbs; and there were special sounds like the heat pump fans, the rather loud refrigerator freezer, the hot-water pump, and sometimes the Jacuzzi tub. To Grady, Jill’s house felt as if it nurtured life, even had a life, as opposed to just containing people, and in that respect it reminded her of a large jetliner flying over oceans in the dead of night.

The place seemed more feminine than one would expect, given an owner who favored rock climbing and fast cars. All the furnishings in Grady’s room were done in an amber-colored oak except the Early American amoire, which appeared to be pine. Two paintings featured flower gardens created by making myriad dots in oil. She didn’t know the correct name for that type of painting, but had made a mental note to find out.

Grady had arrived home late, having seen the dentist, the doctor, and run a number of household errands with her bodyguards. Lately she found herself looking over her shoulder. As Grady understood it, they had her father and there was nothing more for them to get but her.

After she changed into her sweats, she pulled on a robe and found Jack outside the back door, sitting on the porch.

“Hey,” she said. “Wanna talk?”

“It’s the middle of the night” He turned and smiled. “Sure I’ll talk, but we need you sleeping. You’re still freaked about the alarm, aren’t you?”

“Well, it’s my third night and it happened today.”

“We walked through this place. Looked in all the closets. We went over with the alarm company that it was the motion detector in the kitchen. But it’s impossible to get to the kitchen without triggering other motion sensors. We can’t find a point of entry. Probably the guy with the dog knocked on the window and some time near that moment a bug crawled across the detector or a mouse ran across the floor and it went off. The guy thought he did it. That’s all.”

“I know.”

“We called Jill and she said it was probably nothing because the alarm has a hair trigger.”

“You really think it was nothing?”

“Would you be here if we thought there was any danger? Really, the odds that some French company is going to get together a killing squad in a week is a little far-fetched. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t be careful. So if you think of anything, you tell me. We’ll all be right here. Soon I’ll be in the living room. If need be I’ll sit in the bedroom and watch you sleep.”

“No. No. I’ll go back to bed or read or something. Do you want some soup? Jill left a big bowl on the table.”

“No. No, thanks. You have it. Maybe it will help you sleep.” Talking to herself about how safe she was, she went back and got in bed.

All this fuss over her father was a further irritation. She had never allowed herself to be impressed that he was a famous physicist. Although she had not previously wasted more than a few minutes thinking about him, she now was becoming curious. More accurately, she was beginning to worry. Maybe he was the best guy ever. Perhaps, in some strange way, he had cared for her but never let it be known. Now she might never know.

Hot and still adrenaline-alert, she tossed off the blankets and glanced at the phone. It was 11:30 P.M. and Guy would be leaving the club. She wanted to talk with him one more time, and that would be the end of it for a few days. Jill wasn’t home and the security people seemed to be staying outside. She picked up the phone and made a collect call.

“It’s so good to hear from you.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I haven’t called very much. I’m starting to realize that you probably cared about me.”

“I
do
care
about you. How’s school?”

“Well, I’m just auditing a class. It’s the middle of the term so I don’t really start for grades until next semester. But I also have a job. A new job. I’m done with stripping, done with drugs, done with clubs. I’m moving on.”

“That’s so great. I am too. New job starting next week. I’m managing a bar. A bar where people leave their clothes on. So what’s your job?”

“I can’t talk about it. It’s research.”

“Sounds fascinating. Whatever you can tell me I would love to hear.”

She hesitated. She knew she could trust him. “I’m researching things—interesting things. Like today I was learning things about Fiji. Taveuni Island.”

“Fiji?”

“Yeah.”

“What about Fiji?”

“You know, I shouldn’t get into it. Not even with someone I trust. There are rules here.”

“I understand. Will you be going to Fiji?”

“No. But others will.”

After more small talk she hung up, feeling intrigued, more so than she could remember. He was a nice man. She grabbed her robe and headed for the refrigerator. There were men about the place, so she had been told to wear something.

As she walked down the hall past the living room and into the kitchen, she saw the bowl of soup again on the table and the note from Jill.

She tossed the note and sat down with the soup after she had crushed some saltines and sprinkled them on top. A quick blast from the microwave and inside of four minutes she had the soup down.

It was savory, surprisingly so, heavy with spices and the flavor of barbecue sauce.

She decided to call Jill at the office.

“You can’t sleep?” Jill said.

“My body seems to be on full alert.”

“Still thinking about the alarm?”

“Uh-huh. You know, I have hated my father for as long as I can remember and I don’t even know him,” Grady said.

“At least you feel something and you have a name for what you feel. What is your first memory of your father?”