The Disposable Man (31 page)

“You did a pretty convincing job,” Judy said flatly.

“That was the point. If we hadn’t, he couldn’t’ve gotten in tight with the gang we’re after.”

Judy, like me, seemed to be trying to recall which television show this came from. “I hadn’t heard about any gangs,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have,” I spoke up. “We’re not talking about street thugs wearing colors. This is bigger, and more dangerous.” I jerked a thumb at Anatoly. “I don’t want to go into too many details, but since we’re asking for a favor, it’s the Russian Mafia. Anatoly brought it to our attention. Vermont isn’t great pickings for them, but it is a perfect place to lie low. And that’s something we want to stop.”

Judy still looked totally unconvinced. Her sister was smiling ear-to-ear. “This is great. What do you want from us?”

Sammie leaned forward in her chair. “Remember that GPS thing you showed me a while back—the satellite transmitter? We were hoping to use a few of those to track this gang’s cars.”

Judy surprised me by bursting out laughing. “This must be legit. Only the Brattleboro cops would think of bugging a car with a caribou collar. How in God’s name were you going to attach the thing? Wrap it around the bumper?”

Sammie was taken aback, but I took hope from Judy’s first show of interest. “Couldn’t we hide it in the trunk, or somehow attach it underneath?”

“You could, but it wouldn’t work. Those transmitters are line-of-sight devices. Their antennas have to be visible to the satellite for their signal to be picked up. They’d only work if you glued them to the roof.” She paused and added, “Which might actually work if they’re driving eighteen-wheelers, or some other tall truck.”

There was a disappointed silence in the room until I asked, “You said, ‘those’ transmitters. Did that imply there’re others?”

Abby smiled broadly, and before her sister could stop her, she blurted out, “Sure there are. We’ve got eight of them right here—”

Judy held up her hand. “Hold it. Hold it. How do we know what’s going on here? We can’t just give you a bunch of stuff and wave you out the door. Abby’s talking about cutting-edge equipment—the hardware equivalent of Beta copies—samples. Companies lend them to us so we can work out the kinks. If they get into the wrong hands, we’re in serious trouble.”

“By ‘wrong hands,’ you mean competitors, right?” I asked. “That wouldn’t be a problem here. These are crooks, not patent thieves.”

“And,” Sammie added, “we’ll draw up a document right here and now, assuming total liability.” I resisted knocking her on the head for that one, nodding in agreement instead.

Abby got to her feet. “Come on, Judy. Lighten up. You know darn well we’re expected to beat the shit out of those units—and lose ’em, too, if it comes to that. That’s why we got ’em in the first place, and we signed a waiver.”

She crossed the room to one of the cabinets, unlocked the top drawer, and returned with a plastic box. She opened it, extracted what looked like three small wafers, and laid one in each of our hands. “Latest technology. Designed to track birds in flight.”

I cradled it in my palm, barely feeling its weight. “This talks to a satellite?”

Abby looked pleased at my incredulity. “Yup. And—what’s better—it’s more powerful than the collar we showed Sammie. I can’t say we’ve ever put it in a car trunk, but the makers say it should work. We’ve only had ’em for a week or so.”

I held it up to the light and examined it more closely. I then fixed Judy Coven eye-to-eye. “They would be perfect.”

Judy bit her upper lip thoughtfully. “Abby’s right,” she finally admitted. “We’re not at risk as much as I said. I would like that document, though, in case things do go sour. Companies like ours are plowed under all the time by one lawsuit or another, and I don’t feel like joining them, especially over some deal you won’t tell us anything about.”

Sammie rolled her chair over to one of the desks and grabbed a sheet of paper. “Done.”

I turned the wafer over to Abby Coven. “How do they work, exactly?”

She dropped it back into the plastic box. “The tradeoff is the power supply. The larger units can emit pretty much a continuous signal, so the satellite can track it around the clock. Depending on the size and configuration of the battery, the unit will work from a few days to several months. These little guys can’t do that. They talk to the satellite periodically. The less they talk, the more the power source lasts. We heard they’ve used units kind of like these on monarch butterflies. ’Course, those emitted only once every few days, so they’d last for weeks. In any case, the rate of frequency can be programmed in.”

“And how are they picked up by you?”

This time, it was Judy who rolled her chair across the floor, stopping before one of the computers, which she switched on. “The technology is called GIS, for Geographical Information System. Just as an example, here’s a grid of downtown Brattleboro.” She tapped on the keyboard a few times, and brought up a colorful, slightly fuzzy version of a topo map, with the elevations marked in earth-colored hues, complete with a shadowing effect that made the screen look three-dimensional. I instantly recognized the confluence of the West and Connecticut Rivers, with the looming mass of Mount Wantastiquet hovering on the New Hampshire border.

“What we receive from the sending unit—via the satellite—,” Judy continued, “are the coordinates for latitude and longitude. Those are logged into the computer and appear on the screen as a single white blinking dot.”

A dot like what she’d just described magically presented itself. “I’m cheating here,” she said. “The units aren’t activated, so I just entered in some data. The fastest those wafers can work is once every ten minutes, so every ten minutes you’d get a new dot on the screen, assuming the unit was moved.”

“How long will the battery last at that rate?” I asked.

Judy looked up at me. “I don’t remember. We haven’t really fooled with these much.”

“A week,” said Abby from behind us. “That long enough?”

It wasn’t a question that bore much thought. “Should be,” I said.

I tapped the screen with my fingernail. “You can call up all of Vermont, just like you did Brattleboro?”

“Yup.”

I pointed to several small boxes containing numbers. “These are the coordinates?”

Judy hesitated. “That’s where they’d show up. This is fake, though—I mean, I wrote them in. Real data looks different. It fluctuates a lot. The Department of Defense corrupts all satellite-linked GPS readings somewhat—some kind of paranoid antimissile hangover from the Cold War. They call it ‘selective availability.’ Part of the program here corrects for that, though, so it’s nothing much to worry about.”

Anatoly spoke for the first time, slowly and carefully. “This is legal, outside the military?”

I laughed, thinking of how improbable that would seem to a lifelong resident of the old Soviet Union. “Yeah—pretty neat, huh?”

I turned back to both Coven sisters, suddenly concerned, and pointed at the oversize computer. “The problem is, though, that all this only works if you’ve got one of those and know how to work it. Isn’t that right?”

Judy’s hands fell from the keyboard and she looked at the screen in a new light. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

“Where’re you going to be operating from?” Abby asked.

Sammie and I glanced at each other and then at Anatoly, who gave a barely perceptible shrug. “We don’t know yet. It might be dangerous, though. You couldn’t be there, if that’s what you were thinking.”

Abby smiled. “I like a good time, but I’m not
that
interested. Maybe we could manage it all from here and send you the results.”

That piqued Sammie’s interest. “How?”

“Simplest way would be over the Net—as e-mail. It would be slow, but unless you have the right equipment and a trained operator, I don’t see how else it would work. This way, all you’d need was a laptop with a modem and access to a phone line.”

“And you two at the other end,” I added. “I don’t know how that part would work. If things got hairy, you could be spending a lot of time in that chair.”

The Covens exchanged looks.

Anatoly pulled at my sleeve and whispered, “This is not good.”

I got up and walked with him to another part of the room, keeping my voice low. “Maybe not, but it’s all we got. You can stay here with them, babysit us, or tell your boss you canceled the whole idea on your own.”

He didn’t answer, his choice already clear.

“Could be good publicity,” Sammie was coaxing the two sisters.

I was amazed at her callousness. In point of fact, these women could also end up with their reputations and business ruined. But I added, almost instantaneously, “And maybe some compensation. I know better than to speak for the chief on financial matters, but we’ve found money before for emergencies like this.”

After a telling silence, Judy finally nodded. “Okay, what the hell. I’m assuming you don’t have a laptop?”

We all shook our heads.

“We’ll set you up with everything, then. Just make sure a full inventory is added to that document you drew up.”

Sammie laughed at the pure absurdity of the suggestion. “You got it.”

GEORGI PADZHEV OPENED THE DOOR OF THE
motel room himself, his eagerness transparent. “Did you get what we need?”

Sammie, entering behind me, hefted the canvas bag she had looped over her shoulder.

Rarig and Corbin-Teich were sitting at a table in the corner, their hands free. Willy, I noticed with no surprise, had only graduated from coat hangers to his own handcuffs, his muscular right wrist still attached to his chair.

“Where’s Gail?” I asked.

Padzhev gave me a distracted look, reaching for Sammie’s bag. “She’s fine.”

I stepped in front of him and slapped his arms down. Anatoly immediately grabbed me from behind and shoved a gun in my ear. I kept looking at Padzhev. “Where is she?”

The muscles in his face quivered briefly as he fought for self-control. He then muttered something fast and harsh to Anatoly, who steered me outside, down the walkway, and into the abutting room. Gail was sitting up on one of the beds, no longer bound or gagged, but looking like hell. A guard was lounging in a seat by the window.

Anatoly said, “You have two minutes,” and shoved me toward the bed, taking up a station by the door.

I sat next to her and took one of her hands in mine. “How’re you holding up?”

She smiled wanly. “If I knew you’d be this much trouble when we met, I don’t think I would’ve made the effort.”

That cut deeper than she’d intended. I looked at the floor, thinking how right she was.

She touched my cheek. “Joke, kiddo—I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I wish the hell I could.”

“What’s going on, anyway?”

“It’s boiling down to an old-fashioned shoot-out between two rival Russian gangs. I’m just hoping we all get out of it alive.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“You, me, Willy, and Sam, plus some guy from Middlebury and John Rarig. They might have more hostages than they got soldiers by now.”

She watched my face for a long moment, and then asked, “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

“It could be. I’ve been told so many lies by now I’m the last one to know what’s what. But I think the top guy here—Georgi Padzhev—is fighting to stay alive, pure and simple. He’s far from his base, cut off and outnumbered, and so desperate for help he’s got us working for him.”

Her face registered surprise. “How?”

“He’s holding you over my head. Sammie and I just got him a fancy bugging system he’s hoping will tell him when the opposition’s too close. I don’t know what the hell good it’ll do.”

Anatoly pushed himself away from the doorframe and tapped his wristwatch.

I kissed Gail and stood up. “I love you. I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded and smiled encouragingly. “I know.”

Back in the first room, Padzhev had spread his new toys on one of the beds. Rarig and Corbin-Teich were standing at its foot, looking like two spectators at a game of solitaire.

“This is quite excellent, Lieutenant,” he said as I entered.

“Sammie fill you in?”

“Yes, she did. I hope we can rely on your two operatives in Brattleboro.”

“You can send somebody down there to shoot one of them as insurance, if you want.”

He looked away from the computer and the small pile of wafer-thin transmitters and fixed me with a stare. “I will if you think it necessary, just as I will shoot your girlfriend in the head if you step out of line.”

I stared back, feeling my face flush. It was time for me to do everything possible to avoid such confrontations—to be amenable, affable, and helpful. To fade into the woodwork until I saw an opportunity to act.

“I appreciate that,” I finally said and jutted my chin toward the electronic pile on the bed. “How do you plan to use this stuff?”

His study of me lasted a few seconds longer, before he stepped away and resumed his nervous pacing. “From what I understand, the best advantage it gives us is if we occupy a stationary position.”

“That’s true,” Sammie agreed. “If we were getting the information in real time, it might not be, but since it’s going to be e-mailed to us, that’ll slow everything down. Our staying put means that much less data to be crunched down and forwarded.”

Padzhev paused by the bed and picked up one of the transmitters again, turning it over in his hand. “So we are the fort and they are the attacking army—a fort before which they will abandon their vehicles and render all this utterly useless.” He tossed it back, barely hiding his disgust.

“That was plan A,” I suggested, “when we thought we were dealing with much clunkier transmitters. What we need is to find a way to plant the bugs on the people, not their cars.”

He gave me a sour look. “If we could do that, Lieutenant, we could also kill them, which happens to be the whole point of this exercise.”

“We have to figure out a way they’ll pick up the bugs themselves,” Sammie said, stimulated, I thought, by Padzhev’s worsening mood, which was beginning to concern me, too. “Like the Trojan horse.”