“What a scam!” the guy said as he pulled out his wallet and produced a credit card. He glanced over at George. “Get ready to be raped, my man.”
The man behind the counter fished the card out of the window slot and slid it through his processor. His eyes flicked over to George, probably wondering if he was going to have a repeat performance when it was his turn.
George offered him a tight smile. Whatever hopes he had of getting access to Sal’s car had diminished in the last two minutes, watching the attendant handle the couple. For one, George probably didn’t have near enough cash on him.
The tow guy grabbed a walkie-talkie. “Joey. We got someone coming back for the black Escalade you just brought in.” He pointed to the guy, then a door in the corner. “Sir, through here, please. Miss, you can wait out front. The gates will open when the vehicle pulls out.”
She spun on her heels, heading out. “Asshole.”
The attendant looked up at George. “How can I help you, sir?”
• • •
He escorted George across the yard to the back corner of the lot. Two large German shepherds growled at George as they passed.
“Fucking shame,” the attendant said when they reached Sal’s car. “It was a nice ride. I knew when I first saw it that the operator didn’t live through the crash.”
“Unfortunately no airbags in the classics,” George replied, agreeably. He wanted the tow guy to feel like they were buddies.
George had gone for broke back in the office. He had opened his wallet in front of the attendant and took out all the cash in it—$317.00—and slapped it next to the window slot. He told the attendant this was everything he had and it was all for him—if he would let him take a look inside the totaled car of his dead friend. He described the vehicle, saying that the police station said it had been brought here. He even went so far as to tell the tow guy he was looking for a microchip. He thought that if the attendant believed he was looking for something of street value, like some kind of jewelry, then he might want to take a look for himself instead of accepting George’s cash. But the guy had looked at the cash and simply said, “Sure.”
The Oldsmobile looked as dead as Sal. Its front end was folded up on itself to less than a third of its previous length. The convertible top was down, which was how Sal had it ninety percent of the time. The engine block was pushed back into the front seat. George groaned. This was going to be harder than he envisioned. He approached the vehicle, looking for a place to start as the attendant’s walkie-talkie crackled to life. “Danno? You got someone at the front gate.”
“Copy that. I’m on my way.” Danno turned to George. “I gotta go back to the office.” He motioned to the car. “Knock yourself out, but be careful. And no walking around the lot. You stay right here.”
“Okay. Got it,” George said, offering a thumbs-up.
“You hurt yourself, I’m gonna throw you over the fence and pretend I never saw you. Understand?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Good. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, so hurry up. You finish before that, come knock on the back door to the office.”
“What about the dogs?”
“Like I said, stay in the middle of this open lane. Do not veer off.”
“Got it again,” George said.
Danno nodded and rushed off. George turned back to the Oldsmobile. He peered down into the wrecked convertible. The entire interior was littered with broken glass. The engine block took up most of what was the passenger’s front seat. There was a little more room on the driver’s side. George pulled out his cell phone, turned on its flashlight, and focused the beam under the engine and under the front seats for a quick look. Broken glass was piled up under there, too. He realized this was going to be a near impossible task—a microchip would be just slightly larger than a postage stamp and a couple of millimeters thick at best. That’s if the reservoir microchip was in the vehicle at all. George took a deep breath. It was better to quit thinking and just get on with it. He bent over the driver’s door and started sorting through the shards of glass with a broken windshield wiper blade.
• • •
A half hour had passed and George hadn’t found a thing. He was covered in dirt, grease, and soaked in sweat. Frustration was giving way to anger. This little field trip had seemed like it was going to be a lot easier in the abstract. At least the attendant hadn’t come back yet. He debated stopping.
George was in the vehicle’s backseat now, lying on his stomach, shining light up under the front seat. At this point he was picking up each piece of glass and after examining it, throwing it out of the car. A sweep of the flashlight revealed that there were a lot more pieces left to go. He shifted his weight to get a better reach under the seat—
“Hey, buddy? Time’s up.” Danno had returned.
“Okay!” George replied cheerfully, without getting up. “Almost done.” Now that he was being forced to quit, he didn’t want to. He kept at it, moving faster, but stopped throwing the discarded pieces of debris out of the car. He was now merely pushing them aside. In the rush, he was cutting his fingers on the fragments.
The attendant shuffled around the dusty ground with his feet, waiting. He was obviously ready for George to leave pronto. “Now means now! Don’t make me go get one of the dogs.”
“Okay,” floated up from under the seat. George sorted faster, becoming frantic. All this for nothing!
Danno’s patience was at an end. “I’m about to reach over and grab you by the belt and haul you out of there.”
“I’m coming.” But he wasn’t.
“Okay . . . On three. One . . .”
George kept sifting, sweat burning his eyes.
“Two . . .”
“Okay!”
“Three!”
George felt a hand grab his belt. His arms flailed as he was propelled backward out of the car and began staggering around, trying to regain his balance, when Danno let go of his belt. The man might have been overweight, but he was powerful.
“I gave you way more time than we agreed to. It’s time to go.”
“Damn it!” George screamed at the guy. “I know what I came for is in there! You have to let me keep looking!”
“I don’t have to do anything. You want to keep looking? Come back in a couple of months when the LAPD releases the vehicle. You pay the tow and storage fees, and she’s yours. We’ll even tow it to your house. Although that’ll be extra.”
“Just five more minutes,” George pleaded.
“No!” The tow guy trained a hard gaze on George, then glanced down as the sunlight had caught a reflection on the front of George’s dirty shirt. In addition to a few glass fragments, there was a thin, flat, gold-colored rectangular object. Danno plucked it off of George’s shirt.
“Is that what you were looking for?”
George had his mouth open to argue some more but stopped and looked down at what the guy was holding in his hand. It was a microchip.
“I’ll be damned,” George murmured.
• • •
George sat in his car in the corner of the salvage yard’s parking lot with the engine on and the air conditioner cranked up. He was overheated, but he was also elated. This just might be the Rosetta Stone to break the code. He had a magnifying glass app on his phone open that operated through its camera lens, which was focused on the small gold object in his hand. He could see a series of haphazard linear gouges on the surface, probably from the utility knife that had been found at the crash site. Apparently Sal had actually managed to cut the damn thing out himself! The poor guy must have intuited what was happening. That was George’s current theory. And it made more sense than anything else he could think of. Way more sense than suicide.
George gave up trying to examine the chip with the magnifying app on his phone. He needed something more powerful to tr
y to view the individual chambers that held the medication. To do that, he needed to go back to the medical center. He couldn’t believe that he had actually gotten his hands on the damn thing!
Rap, rap, rap! George’s head shot up and spun around to the noise. The attendant was knocking on the window with a short billy club.
“You can’t stay here in the lot,” he yelled through the glass, giving an unmistakable signal that George was seriously trying his patience. “Move it.”
George waved okay and put the car in gear.
• • •
George scanned the rows of individual reservoirs on the chip. Each was the size of a pinprick, and there were thousands of them. George had researched the way the chip worked. Each individual reservoir had been assigned its own radio frequency, which, when received, signaled a thin layer of gold nanoparticles encapsulating a drug dosage to dissolve. The freed medication was then transported across the biological membranes, where it entered the bloodstream and spread throughout the entire body.
George was back at the medical center in the pathology lab, where he had commandeered a dissecting microscope to study the microchip. With the powerful magnification he could see that its myriad small containers were in fact empty! All of them. There was no way that could be considered normal for a two-month-old reservoir that had been intended to last at least two years. The chip also noted the type of drug it held: Humalog. George recognized the name as a brand of fast-acting insulin.
For George, it was now a question of whether or not the reservoir emptied pre-mortem or postmortem. Pre-mortem, meaning that the dosages were dumped en masse while Sal was alive. The implication of that was murder, whether by hacking or deliberate intent on behalf of the application’s designers. Postmortem meant that after Sal had died and the reservoir had gone through the trauma of being gouged out of Sal’s body, it had somehow released its contents. Then there was always the issue of it sitting for a few days under the broiling L.A. heat wave sun in a wrecked car. Maybe that, too, could have done it.
Of all the possibilities, George thought pre-mortem was the most realistic option, but he needed more proof, and he had an idea of how to get it. It was possible that Sal’s broken smartphone combined with the microchip might be all he needed, provided he could get someone to help him. The first person that came to mind was Zee.
George switched off the light of the dissecting microscope and left the pathology lab after thanking the technician who had helped him. He was pleased with what he had accomplished, but recognized something important: He needed to be careful. Lots of people, including Clayton and possibly the men searching Sal’s apartment and surely Amalgamated, would be wanting Sal’s microchip. It was, if he was right, a smoking gun.
• • •
George drove home, his mind going a mile a minute. He knew that he had stumbled onto something serious. The first person he should call was Paula. She had to know that her “baby” had been hijacked. He just hoped that she wouldn’t blame the messenger, because he knew she would be both horrified and devastated. He wondered if he should call her while she was still in Hawaii, and then wondered why he was wondering. Of course he should call her as soon as he was certain. This wasn’t something that could wait. People were literally dying.
37
GEORGE’S APARTMENT
WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2014, 3:52 P.M.
Ablack SUV and a black van, both with dark tinted windows, pulled up and parked behind George’s apartment complex. A bank of electronic listening equipment lined the interior of the van. Four men dressed in SoCal Edison uniforms alighted from the vehicles, leaving two men in suits behind in the SUV and two technicians in coveralls sitting in the back of the van.
The four men in uniform strapped on an array of impressive electrical tool belts. One went to a nearby pole and climbed up to tap the phone line. The other three went to the building’s electrical panel and opened it, as if they were reading the meter. They then split up: two men went through the complex and the other man walked around the side of the building.
All three quickly closed in on George’s apartment, one in back and two in the front. There was no conversation or hesitation. They were professionals. It was all planned. Nothing was left to chance.
The two inside the complex rang George’s doorbell. There was no answer, which they fully expected. Earlier, having checked his cell phone with GPS, they knew that George was in the San Fernando Valley. Yet they wanted to be sure his apartment was empty. One of the men quickly and effortlessly picked George’s cheap lock.
Without so much as one word, the taller of the two disappeared inside the apartment while the other stood guard just inside the entrance. He peered out of a window. The pool area of the complex was empty. No one was about; it being the Fourth of July, most people with a car were at either the beach or a barbecue.
The other man in George’s apartment worked quickly, hiding several small listening devices and cameras, linking them up wirelessly with a battery-powered amplifier hidden by his colleague on the back side of the apartment behind a downspout. The amplifier would catch the wireless signals from the devices inside the apartment and then relay them to the recording equipment in the van. All told, the whole operation took less than seven minutes.
Once safely back inside the vehicles, the four technicians waited to be picked up by a third vehicle. The car appeared moments later, stopping just long enough for the four men to scurry aboard. The men in coveralls were left behind in the van and the two suits were settled into the SUV, removing their sidearms and generally making themselves more comfortable. They knew it would most likely be a long night. But they were accustomed to it. Their jobs required long hours of boredom punctuated by sudden violence.
The man sitting behind the wheel dialed a number on his mobile phone and left a simple message: “We’re good.”
38
GEORGE’S APARTMENT COMPLEX
WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2014, 6:05 P.M.
George turned into the street behind his apartment. He was exhausted and had a near accident while driving back from the valley. It seemed like rush hour even though it was a holiday. Pulling into his slot, he didn’t notice the black SUV at the curb in the street. Or the black van that was parked half a block farther down the road. Such vehicles were more common than palm trees in the neighborhood, especially black SUVs.
George parked and grabbed his gear, carefully making sure the tiny drug reservoir was safely in his pocket, and raced to his apartment. He put everything except the microchip on the dining room table, and then located Sal’s broken smartphone as well as Kasey’s. With these in his other pocket, he ran outside and up the stairs to pound on Zee’s door.
“Jesus! Hang on. I’m coming!” Zee yelled. A second later he yanked the door open and took in George’s expression and appearance. “What the fuck, dude?” he said. “We have a fire in the building or what?”
“I need your help. Right now.”
“Slow down, dude. I’m here,” Zee said, trying to calm his clearly distraught neighbor.
George took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, realizing that he had to get himself under control. He knew that what he was asking Zee to do was going to take a long time, if he could do it at all. And that was assuming Zee was even willing. That was another big if, given that what George wanted Zee to do was very much against the law.
“I need you to do a job,” George said, trying to maintain an even tone. “I’ll pay you. A lot. I have almost ten thousand dollars in cash and credit.”
“Whoa, dude! Cool it! You gotta start at the beginning.”
“It’s just . . . I know you haven’t been working and money is an issue—”
“Money is an issue for me even when I am working. But let’s hear what you got.”
“I need you to do a little hacking for me.”
Zee’s antennae went up. “No hack job is little. Some are easy, some aren’t. But none are little. Not to the hackee. Just explain exactly what it is you’d like me to do. And relax. You want a beer?”
George took a seat on the couch and said, “Yeah. A beer would be great.”
Zee got the beers and George launched into giving Zee enough background on Amalgamated and iDoc to intrigue him. Luckily Zee found the idea of smartphones taking the place of primary-care doctors mind-blowing. He wanted to sign up for iDoc himself, explaining if he got the clap, he could get treatment without having to explain everything to a real person, case closed. “You know,” Zee continued, “sometimes going to the doctor can be a little embarrassing. But you know something? I know a way for this iDoc to be even better.”
“Zee, I’d like to keep this conversation on point,” George interrupted.
“No! Hear me out,” Zee responded. “When you go to the pharmacy to fill a prescription, you shouldn’t have to deal with the pharmacist! That can be as bad as talking to the doctor. You know what I’m saying? All you should have to do is flash your phone or press your fingerprints onto a touch pad, and, bingo, you get your prescription immediately.”
“That’s a great idea, Zee, but we’re getting off track.”
“Sorry. Continue!” Zee said, holding his beer up to George in a mock toast.
“The iDoc concept is fantastic and it is the future of medicine. But I think there is a problem. Either by design or by accident it’s gone beyond its mandate. I think it’s been acting as a kind of death panel.”
Zee just stared at George with a blank expression. Finally, he said, “Explain!”