They're Watching (2010) (47 page)

His tie, set neatly to his Adam's apple in a broad half Windsor, appeared suddenly too tight. His face colored, accenting the stubble pinpoints beneath that close shave, but he needed only a moment to process the surprise and regain his composure. When he looked back up, he was completely in control again. "Whatever Ridgeline elected to do on their own time, they will answer for."

I just looked out across the floor, giving him rope. There was plenty to behold, a whole world contained in the glass walls--all that respectable industry in constant, efficient motion. The reporters had been ushered into the conference room across the hall. They sat slurping coffee, the large camera with the CNBC logo resting on the table between them.

"We do a lot of business in the international community, Mr. Davis," he said. "We have dealings with over two hundred thousand individuals, last I checked. Many of them in the aggressive professions. We can't account for the temperament of each one."

"But these individuals answer to you," I said. "Or they did. You're the top dog, at least when it comes to this little scheme. It stops with you, so everyone above remains nicely insulated from the truth."

He didn't refute the point, which felt an awful lot like confirming it.

"You can reach Ridgeline," I said. "You can make them stop."

His bottom lip bowed in just barely, as if he'd tasted something repulsive. "It's safe to say that contact--and loyalties--between our companies has frayed."

"You're not in touch at all?" I asked.

From what Kazakov had told me about the workings of such arrangements, I'd assumed as much. And given the aggressive moves Ridgeline had taken against their omniscient employer, they'd need to stay off the grid as much as I did. But I wanted to confirm the communication breakdown, and I needed to draw Reimer out.

"Regular communication can be a detriment when it comes to matters where both sides require"--a pause as he selected the right word--"prudence. All the more when dealings achieve a heightened level of complication. And now this." He sighed, disappointed. "These documents make clear that Ridgeline isn't interested in upholding their agreements. But that cuts both ways. We are no longer obligated to offer them the customary protections."

I nodded at the papers in his hand. "Looks like they read that one coming."

"This"--he raised the sheaf--"this can be explained away in a few phone calls."

"If your bosses are willing to make them for you. Ridgeline is expendable. My guess is you might be, too. You know what they say: Never be the senior man with a secret."

A cough of disbelief. "Documents can be altered. Put into context. The news waits for us." He gave an almost unconscious nod to the reporters sitting patiently across the hall. "You think a few pieces of paper are enough to make my bosses want to hang me out?"

"Combined with the story I can tell."

"You?" He smiled. "We can erase you. Not kill you. Erase you. From all consideration. It's not just us, it's whose shoulders we're standing on, which databases we plug in to, which institutions are reliant on our continued success."

"Is this the 'I am the government' speech? Because I've heard that one already."

His lip curled, almost imperceptibly. "Ridgeline, like everyone else"--he waved a hand around--"they're just fish in our aquarium. We tap a little food into the tank, and they come swimming." A faint grin. "But I'm sure a grounded college instructor like yourself can't relate to that."

The words cut deep. My mind moved to Deborah Vance in her apartment, the vintage travel posters and antique furniture and spot-on style, all selected with painstaking desperation to transport her to another age. Roman LaRusso, agent to the washed up and disabled, hunkered down in his stacks of dusty paperwork, his view of a brick wall offering barely a craned-neck glimpse of billboard and blue sky. All those faded dreams hung framed on his office walls, head shots with signatures and stale advice from would-bes and also-rans no more qualified to proffer it than I: Live Every Moment, Don't Stop Believing, and yeah, Follow Your Dreams. I thought of who I'd let myself become by the time this had all started twelve endless days ago--a has-been almost-screenwriter with a marriage on the rocks. Impatient, gullible, desperate for attention, eager to be exploited, to be noticed, to hasten whatever was coming my way. I'd been out of the spotlight, off the stage, consigned to the real world, where I was unwilling to deserve what I already had.

Reimer was watching me expectantly, his words still lingering: I'm sure a grounded college instructor like yourself can't relate to that.

"Not anymore," I said.

"No?"

"I don't care about movies or writing or whales or sonar," I said. "I care about my wife."

"They have her?"

"They do."

"Looks like they read you coming, too," he said with a measure of satisfaction. "They're trying to clean up their mess. They will do what they have to do, and they will invent stories and defenses later. I'm afraid that doesn't bode well for you and your wife."

"So you and I are in the same boat."

"The difference is, we can scrape a company like Ridgeline off the bottom of our shoe, and we can use a nuclear warhead to do it. It's all about allies, who's on the other end of the phone. Ridgeline thinks they've built an insurance file in this"--he shook the papers, the first little show of emotion--"but they've done nothing more than arrange for their funerals. You--and they--know next to nothing about something that never happened. They've compiled proof of our dealings, but proof is relevant only if there's a legal inquiry, an arrest, a jury. We will make calls. We will rewrite this. That's what all you fish--circling in your glass bowls, captivated by your own reflections--never grasp. Companies like Festman Gruber, we decide which stories get told. Festman Gruber doesn't answer to a bunch of copied documents or a crusading murderer with a bone to pick. Everything will be hung on you. And the fallout will land on Ridgeline."

"Unless," I said, "you've been good enough to give me what I came for."

His eyes darted back and forth, scanning my face. "As in this is being recorded?" He barked a one-note laugh. His grin looked stuck to his teeth. "Bullshit. You went through a metal detector."

"There are cutting-edge devices," I said, "that function using tiny amounts of metal."

"I scanned you myself for RF."

"It wasn't transmitting then. In fact, you turned it on yourself."

He looked down at his arms, his hands, finally focusing on the envelope he still grasped. With dread, he lifted the loose flap. A razor-thin clear square, the size of a postage stamp, remained inside on the gummy strip. Its transparent contact, which had been pulled open to activate the device when he'd raised the flap, was stuck to the envelope. "There's no"--he paused for a breath--"power source."

"It vacuums RF out of the air and converts it to power to run itself."

His gaze moved through the walls, all those cell phones strapped to belts, assistants tapping on iPhones, routers blinking from bookshelves, all that free RF floating around, waiting to get grabbed out of the air he breathed all day up here on the fifteenth floor. A single bead of sweat emerged from his sideburn and arced down his cheek.

"A . . . a transmitter that small, it would need its receiving equipment close by"--he tried on a shrug--"or . . . or there's no way this tiny signal could transmit beyond our front barrier." He pointed to the wall of ballistic glass that framed out the lobby and the outside world.

I knocked on the wall, the glass clouding. My second knock brought it clear again. Across the hall, in Conference Four, the CNBC reporters sat cocked back in their chairs, feet on the table, eating crullers. The guy at the head of the table nodded at me, sucked glaze from his fingers, and made a ta-da gesture at the massive camera.

"Hidden in the camera," Reimer said hoarsely. "That's the receiving equipment." His voice was flat, but I thought it was a question.

"Receiving," I said, "and relay. To a safe off-site location."

"I don't believe it. Besides us, there's maybe a handful of places in the world with that kind of teeth in the surveillance arena. You . . . Where would you get technology like that?"

"Where do you think?"

His face shifted, and I believe he understood what fear was for the first time in a very long time.

In Conference Four the fake reporter leaned forward and peeled the magnetic CNBC peacock sign off the side of the camera, revealing the North Vector logo beneath.

Reimer made a noise--something between clearing his throat and grunting.

I said, "There's an internal study on relative sonar levels I managed to get into the hands of North Vector as well."

He blanched.

"That junkyard dog you hired seems to have slipped the leash," I said. "Some of those important calls you were talking about? They're being made right now. I understand that the contract at stake is worth twenty billion dollars, give or take a few billion. I'm guessing a figure like that might go a certain distance toward eroding your bosses' devotion to you."

"Okay," he said. "Okay, let's talk about this. We can still rein this in, get everyone what they need. Listen--" He put a hand on my shoulder, leaving a sweat stain. "You'll need us to mediate this situation with your wife. We're the only ones who have an angle in to Ridgeline. We can hurt them."

"You already told me. You don't know how to contact them."

"But when they emerge." His words were adamant, compacted into hard little syllables. "You need us in the mix. We can undo all this. You need me. Even if you could convince the cops to jump off your trail and onto theirs, you don't want law enforcement crashing into a hostage house. Not with operators of this caliber dug in. There'll be nothing left of your wife but a bloodstain."

Through the clear walls, I could see the clock in the neighboring office--8:44 A.M.

Three hours and sixteen minutes until--

"No cops," I said. "No force."

A puff of disbelief parted his lips. "Then how?"

"I'll worry about that. You'd better worry about what to tell your higher-ups in Alexandria. And you'd better pick your words carefully--I've found Festman Gruber's corporate culture to be a bit unforgiving."

I left him standing on the rug, a droop in that square posture. When I reached the door, his voice came over my shoulder. It sounded less vengeful than weary, resigned to the carnage to come. "You are way out of your depth," he said. "You can't begin to imagine what kind of men these are. If you take them on alone, you might as well put the bullet in your wife's head yourself."

My hand resting on the door lever, I closed my eyes, reliving that grainy feed that Ridgeline had sent to my cell phone at midnight. Ariana roughed up, screaming my name soundlessly. The thin line of blood at the edge of her mouth. What else had they done to her? What else were they doing to her right now? He was right, at least in part: I was way out of my depth. Was he also right about where this would all end?

I pushed out into the hall. The North Vector operators stood waiting. As we threaded through the glass labyrinth, workers rose from various workstations and watched us leave. At the elevators I looked back, but Reimer had turned the glass walls of his office opaque, a dark knot at the core, a symbol of my own quickening dread.

Chapter
57

I parked Don's Range Rover in a driveway at the end of a perfectly normal residential street in North Hollywood. I called 911 from my cell, told Dispatch I was ready to give myself up and seek their help for Ariana's recovery. I couldn't see any other choice, I said. Not with my wife held captive, due to be executed in fifty-three minutes.

Sitting, sweating, I watched the SWAT van roll up, then the black-and-whites, then Gable's sedan.

Leading with their submachine guns, the SWAT officers came fast and hard, closing on those tinted windows from all sides. A gloved hand yanked open the driver's door, and then MP5 barrels crammed the interior. But I wasn't there.

I was a mile and a half away, parked on a dirt overlook, watching through a military scope that seemed like something out of science fiction, with magnification suited to a NASA telescope. Can see the whites of birds' eyes, Kazakov had bragged.

I could even make out the address on the Post-it I'd adhered to the steering wheel. The address of the single-story clapboard two blocks up the slope from me.

I hustled back toward the boosted Dodge Neon that an anonymous friend of North Vector had helped arrange for me--Kazakov's final favor. North Vector wouldn't accompany me from here on out. Providing tech support to help take down a rival company was one thing. Saving my wife was another. Bullets, exposure, and liability--the risk of coming out on the wrong side of this one was too high.

But I had no choice.

I dialed my cell phone again, and my favorite paparazzo, fresh out of hiding, picked up.

"You in position?" I asked.

"Yup." Joe Vente was wired, smacking his gum.

I'd called him last night, and in return for an after-the-fact exclusive if I lived to give it, he'd agreed to put out the word to his grapevine of colleagues. They'd get to the block just before I did and remain hidden until I arrived. I'd made clear to Joe: The timing had to be just right. I'd go to the house first, before the photographers made themselves known and before the cops arrived. I'd lay out the situation to DeWitt and Verrone, mention that the house was surrounded with recording equipment of every type and law enforcement of every stripe, then pray that would be enough of a deterrent to negotiate Ariana's and my way out of there.