He wasn't here to watch her face turn putrid.
"Pervert," she said. "I was strung out yesterday when I tried to kiss you. I'm not that desperate." Then she started moving back and forth like a pendulum, her eyes on my mouth. "Oh-mygosh. Take that thing out again."
"Mmm-mmm."
She was totally staring. "No, take it out! Your teeth! You're not going to believe this."
I still had five minutes to go but went slowly to the bathroom, rinsed fifteen times, came back and shined my teeth in the mirror. They were totally white. Like, shining, searing white.
"They don't even look like teeth!" I said in horror.
"They look great! Ohmygosh. You'll have the bestest smile at my birthday. Why didn't we think to do this before People came?"
Like I needed even more of those crazy cavegirl get-well cards. I started to say to her, "Stand back, and don't get any dumb ideas." Not that she would.
I never said it. Some weird sound made me think a bell was ringing. Then I realized it was Cora, somewhere far off like the basement, screaming her fool head off.
THIRTY-NINE
SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
10:40 A.M.
GRIFFITH'S LANDING
I DROVE TO GRIFFITH'S LANDING WITH ALAN, wondering if my great feeling came from Cora pitching backwards when I first let go of her in the basement or from the notion that I was actually going to work. If yesterday was awful, today was fantastic. Life was like that. I'd enjoy today while it was today.
I lay my head on the headrest and put my energy in preservation mode. My throat was still bothering me, and I knew pacing myself would be a necessity. Alan drove to a supermarket parking lot, which was more blacktop than cars as the summer hadn't started yet, and parked near the street. We were dressed in jeans and polo shirts, and he put on a baseball cap and shades. I was already wearing my shades.
"Keep your head down, Mr. Famous, just in case," he said, "and follow me."
We headed across the parking lot to where a black van was parked, with a sign that read SUITOR'S PLUMBING on the door. It looked pretty banged up. When we ducked inside, the sight just about gave me whiplash. There were eight monitors on one wall—some on, some bleeping sand—and a thousand wires.
A guy who looked only about a few years older than me had been in the driver's seat reading the newspaper. Alan introduced him only as Nigel, a new agent from Washington.
"Sorry, no seat belts," Alan said, and he pulled a chair off a stack of four chairs in the far back corner and handed it to me. It was hard to get all four legs on the floor without hitting any cables, but as soon as we were sitting, Nigel took off.
Alan laid the pile of old pictures—suspected members of ShadowStrike—in my lap and said, "Start looking through these. Agents on the street already have them memorized. We'll be listening for our guys to make any idents and watching them tail anyone suspicious ... and don't expect miracles."
The only new photo was Cora's, the close-up of one startled guy. Under it was written with a Sharpie pen in black, Log-in: Pasco. Name: Unknown. Alias: Abdul Khadisha. I was amazed at how typically American he looked—the biggest problem being there was no typical American look. But he could have been any little kid's granddad. I tried to memorize his features—circular face, curly hair, balding on top, graying on the sides, hazel eyes, thick bottom lip, thin top lip. While I did the same with the other eight photos, all of which had names and even some aliases scrawled beneath them, Alan began playing with the monitors and talking to agents he was hearing on headsets.
I glanced up once to see the Ferris wheel from the Icon Pier three or four blocks to our left. This was a primitive operation in enough ways to startle me. Alan had a roll of masking tape and a stack of index cards in his lap. He would say things into his headset like, "Mike, do a three-sixty ... again ... again," and he'd pick up the monitor that showed three complete circles from the view of someone walking on the street. He'd mark MIKE on the index card and say, "Mike, your number today is four." He'd tape the index card in front of the monitor marked 4 with "Mike" and "#4" scrawled onto it.
He did this with eight agents, some on the street, some on the boardwalk, one in front of the Superfresh where we'd just come from, and one in front of the CVS. Nigel had a laptop and clicked a few lines every time Alan would ident an agent. Gauging from the height shown in the monitors, I gathered these guys had the cameras hidden in their collars or in some button on their shirts. I didn't ask questions. But people strolled by them occasionally, and we were looking into their shoulders.
I began watching the monitors with Alan after every picture was stuck in my head and ignored a feeling of seasickness as their constant movement got behind my eyes. Alan would call them "Four" or "Six" and chatter with them, giving me the impression the agents were bored but used to it. Alan would laugh and send back what sounded like a punch line, though I couldn't hear the jokes. This went on for an hour and ten minutes. A preschool passed by Agent Six, two teachers bringing small children in a double line up to the boardwalk. A lot more women passed than men, and since none of the pictures I'd been shown were women, I let my eyes fall to those monitors where men passed. None of them had the facial features I'd memorized while trying to ignore hair, which could easily be changed.
"Seven, I'm alive, I'm alive," Alan finally said, and I watched the corresponding monitor as Agent Seven started to follow what I thought was a teenager at first. It was a little skinny guy in an oversize sweatshirt and baggy jeans. I could only see the back of his head at first. I watched him move farther down the street, until Agent Seven began following. The skinny guy stopped at a trash can and peeled a banana into it, finally glancing straight at the monitor. That's when I recognized his features as similar to one of my photos, a young suspect named Ibrahim Kansi. The agent passed him by and uttered something that made Alan say into the headset, "Six, pick up suspect Kansi on Ocean and Belmont."
Agent Seven kept going, and I watched Six's monitor as the agent turned a corner and caught the guy peeling the banana from the other side. He was far off. I wondered if the agents were sure it was the same guy as the one in the photos. Alan got his face within a foot of the monitor, slowly shaking his head back and forth, like he was doubtful.
I was, too. Just from the headshot, I would have put Ibrahim Kansi at about five-foot-nine, and this man was more like five-foot-two, and it made me respectful of the challenges intelligence had in making accurate idents.
As Agent Six strolled closer, Alan glanced at me. "What do you think?"
But the agent was on the far side of the street, and the suspect stood by the trash can down in the left corner of the monitor. As soon as I could focus in on the man's face, the agent bent down to tie his shoe, and I was faced with sidewalk and a sneaker toe. It almost made me pitch forward in the chair.
"All I could see is he's got the same nose," I said, and Alan, now standing, laid a hand on my shoulder.
"We'll see if he's meeting someone. That always helps. Seven, circle back around and get the banana peel. Can we fingerprint a banana peel?" Seven must have said something funny about DNA, because Alan laughed and replied, "If you find any bite marks, you get a bonus."
The suspect walked on down the street again, chewing and licking his fingers, a plethora of DNA and fingerprints and information that we couldn't touch. It was frustrating. Eventually the agent followed, and the guy turned into an apartment building, where he knocked instead of pulling out a key. It was impossible to see who let him in.
"Note address: seventeen fifty-one Belmont, bottom floor," Alan said, and Nigel's keypad clattered. We watched Agent Six sit somewhere, and a newspaper kept flying up into the bottom of the screen.
Another twenty minutes passed. I was starting to understand the level of patience these guys needed. The agents up on the boardwalk were getting no hits, and one look-alive at the CVS turned out not to be a match.
Agent Five had switched with Agent Six,
I understood from Alan's chatter, and finally the door to the apartment opened on monitor five. The suspect came out with another man, whom I recognized immediately.
"That's Pasco," I said.
"Five, you might have another bingo," Alan said more calmly than I would have expected, and I watched as the two headed west on Belmont Avenue for a couple of blocks, talking away.
My desire to see them knocked to the concrete was eating me alive. "Are you going to arrest them today?"
"I hope we won't have to make any arrests until we're up to our necks in evidence. We may just be getting started. Our next step is to tap their phones, wire their premises. It'll be a couple of weeks, unless we see them folding up the op. We need evidence. Lots of it."
The shorter guy put his hands in his pockets at one point, which pulled up the back of his sweatshirt, and I noticed some sort of short club in his back pocket with something shiny on top.
I leaned into the monitor. "What is that?" I touched the image of the club with the Sharpie.
"Five, get closer," Alan said, which gave me some flinch-worthy sense of power, as I had only been curious. The agent sped up until he was maybe twenty feet behind. The shiny thing was a chain that ran from the top of this little billy club to a matching club that was down deeper in the guy's pocket.
"Looks like nunchucks," Alan said. "It's a martial arts weapon. A properly trained guy can flip those around and hit someone before they even know they're being attacked. Five, is that a set of nunchucks?"
The agent turned while the suspects crossed the street to the Superfresh, but Alan repeated for me, "Affirmative. Note that Ibrahim Kansi might have martial arts capabilities."
Nigel now sat sideways with the laptop on his legs. He clattered a note.
"Three, pick them up and follow them into the Superfresh," Alan said, and the scene on monitor three moved through an alley, then the parking lot, and picked up the two men. They passed by Alan's car and suddenly banged into each other.
Alan sighed. "Hmm. My car was just made."
I watched, intrigued, as the two stared at the license plate, took a step back almost simultaneously, and then headed into the store, looking over both shoulders just once.
"Isn't that bad?" I asked.
"Some of the chatter from the Kid implied that they were wise to us already. It doesn't mean they'll go into retreat. They'll just be extra careful. So will we. Three, go into the store ahead of them."
I guess it's normal to think of your own house as the center of the universe in a case like this, but I couldn't help thinking of how Alan's car had been parked outside the Kellerton House so often. Obviously, there were many ways to get an initial ident on his car, but I thought of him telling Rain that he was a target. I thought of dead animals turning up here, turning up six feet from our property.
I could feel my ire rise and start to smolder out my ears, though I kept telling myself I could be way off. And I watched the monitor as the agent passed these guys in the frozen-food aisle, loading something like a giant box of burritos into a pushcart. The agent picked out some frozen meatballs and passed the two again an aisle or two later while they dropped a tube of Colgate into their cart.
Alan had been speaking into the headset pretty steadily, and I realized suddenly that there were three agents in the Superfresh, and two outside. I looked at the different monitors to find the suspects on this one and then that one. It was like a poorly choreographed square dance, a do-si-do to make you dizzy if you let it. I walked in Cora's skin for a moment. There is just something over-the-top about seeing what terrorists eat and what they use to brush their teeth with. It's some shit you'd rather not see that makes them all too human.
Alan didn't seem awed by anything. He just choreographed the agents until another showed up outside, making the total at the Superfresh six.
His cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and looked confused for a moment. "The alarm to the basement is going off at the Kellerton House. Let me make sure it's just a computer glitch."
He handed his headset over to Nigel, who switched places with him and watched the screens but said very little. Concerned about Cora being down there alone, I watched tensely as Alan speed-dialed the house. He got the voice mail and redialed three times before I flinched at a rap on the side of the van. It turned out to be Mike Tiger waving a cell phone in the passenger window.
Alan hit the UNLOCK button, and Mike jumped into the seat.
"I got Marg. Stop calling her now," he said to us, then, into the cell phone, "What's going on?" Mike listened for a long time. "Did you relock the door?...Already? Thanks."
He hung up. "Cora Holman had some sort of episode down in the basement. Hallucination, Marg said. She screamed and froze so nobody could get to her. She's got a boyfriend or something?"
"A ... friend, Henry," I stammered. "Did she faint? Did she fall?"
"I don't know."
"So ... what?" I asked, too loudly. "She's on enough blood thinner to make an elephant hemorrhage. She can't be falling—"
"Relax. That friend of hers had come over, and he heard her. Since the door was locked, he kicked it in and ran down to help. And Hodji, who had finally gone to sleep, heard the alarm and found a USIC security-code box by a kicked-in door. And when he discovered a stranger down there, he tackled the guy and got him in a body lock. It was a mess, but Marg said she's—"
I grabbed Mike's cell out of his hand and called Marg back.
"Did she fall?" I asked.
"No. She's confused and upset," Marg said, "but both men say she was standing straight up."
I heaved a sigh and glanced at my watch. I had to get back myself, but the idea of jumping to Alan's car when the suspects who saw it were about to walk out of the store gave me pause.
"She hallucinated?" I asked, trying to clear my head.
"Yes. Her mother and some pond creature. Her mother was telling her to come in the water even though she couldn't swim. She's shaken up."
It's normal to think your hallucinations are real, but that one sounded over-the-top. Most people hallucinate a chair moving a foot by itself or changing colors from red to blue. "Should we call the medication switch off?"
I still hadn't apologized for my outburst on Saturday. I put it on the top of my list of things to do as her levelheaded answer got me breathing slightly normally again. "I'd be more worried about white-cell counts and Q3 levels rebuilding than a withdrawal effect. Obviously, it's one we wish she didn't have, but it's not compromising her health."
Not unless she hallucinates me or Marg telling her to follow us out the window and fly.
Alan handed me the keys to his car. We'd already made arrangements for me to take his car back alone if I had to leave before him.
"You want me to go jump in your car after those guys just made it?" I said.
"They haven't even gotten to the checkout line yet. Just move quickly. The parking lot is crawling with agents. You're perfectly safe."
I looked at the monitors one more time, and it was like playing God, being able to know where your threat is every second. They were buying shredded wheat. My shades had been on the top of my head, and I lowered them. I still had Marg as I stepped out. Mike walked along beside me as I talked to her.
"Who's with her until I get there?"
"Henry," she said. "He and Hodji formed an instant friendship after their run-in. They're both accomplished chess players. Cora wants to learn to keep her mind occupied the next few days."
Games of the intelligentsia. I felt my problems deepening.
Mike had his fingers in my back, which meant to pick up speed; they were probably in the checkout line.
"Shit," I said, unable to think. "Just stay with her until I get there. Don't leave her alone. Not even with that guy."
"I've got a nineteen- and a twenty-year-old and both dislike me thoroughly, but that's because I was a good mother. I'll be ten feet away in the corridor, folding wash, darling."
"Hey, Mar
g?" I decided I shouldn't wait. "I'm really, really sorry about Saturday."
"You have nothing to apologize for. You deserve a medal. No harm done."
"If you say so." I snapped the phone shut and handed it to Mike with a grin. In spite of it all, Marg likes me better than Henry. Considering Henry was educated, talented, well-spoken, thoughtful, and now, as we could see, gallant, I couldn't guess why she felt that way. But it put a bounce in my step that I needed anyway.
I got to the parking lot, and between faces in cars reading newspapers, a female agent putting groceries in a trunk, a guy on a bicycle, and a guy holding the door of Alan's USIC car open and beckoning to me, I realized the place was indeed crawling. I got in and he slammed the door. I took off quickly without saying anything.
FORTY
CORA HOLMAN
MONDAY, MAY 6, 2002
12:55 P.M.
HER BEDROOM
I LAY IN BED, staring into the noon sunrays streaming in my window, trying to put the memory of the darkened basement behind me. Rain and Owen spent a few minutes making a fuss over me, asking all sorts of questions, and I just didn't have the answers to even the simplest ones. For example, Rain asked if I "felt okay." I felt outside of myself, airy, like I'd drifted up to the ceiling and was watching all of this. I didn't know how to make that sound plausible.
I felt so many things—confusion, embarrassment, exhaustion, dizziness from god knows what—but mostly embarrassment. I kept hearing Henry's yell of shock as he himself had been attacked from behind. And after one look at Mr. Montu's black and blue face in the red lighting of the darkroom, I had thought it was chapter two of my hallucination.