"I don't disagree."
They pulled up in the driveway of the Palmer Inn. Although Maria had not planned to stay the night, she had long since missed her flight and had now decided to attend an early-morning telephone conference with Patty McCafferty and Jeb Otran-a discussion she wanted to hear.
"Look," Dan said, "why don't you come to my house? You have no luggage. You don't even have a toothbrush. I have a guest bedroom. Pepacita, my housekeeper, is there. You wouldn't be the lone female."
"Hey, that's a leap across a giant gulf. In the morning you'd wake up and realize this is Maria the enviro under your roof-the enemy. Isn't that what you guys call us?"
"We call you worse than that. But this is an emergency."
He watched her brow furrow.
"You're going to feel strange walking into the lobby like that. What will you do in the morning?"
"Oh, and you've got a whole size-eight wardrobe?"
"I do."
"You-you didn't get rid of your wife's clothes?"
"No. Not all of them. Not yet. She was a generous and good person. She would have given you the clothes if she were alive, so why not when she's gone?"
"You've got clothes I could wear to a seven a.m. meeting?"
"Absolutely. Size eight. Tess weighed one hundred twenty-five pounds. She was five foot eight inches tall. Pepacita is a great cook. There'll be dinner whenever we get there."
"What if we get the clothes and I come back here."
"You can decide when you get to my place."
"I am famished."
"Good. We'll at least get you dinner and a wardrobe."
''You know, any day now we could be in court on opposite sides of a timber-harvest plan, clawing at each other until our fingernails are hanging from bloody stumps."
''What happened to the old saying: 'Let us strive mightily but eat and drink as friends.' "
"This is real life. This counts. If you cut down a grove of redwoods a thousand years old-well, they're gone forever."
He straightened his hat and looked at her as if he had an answer.
"You wanna say something dumb, like they'll grow back."
He laughed. "Let's go to my house before we start an all-night fight."
Hans Groiter liked dried pumpkin seeds. He liked the little ritual of cracking the salted shells between his teeth and sucking out the meat. The trick was that after removing the heart he ate the shell as well.
As he drilled through the sub-floor of Dan Young's house, he ground a shell to a pulp between his teeth. Peering around the edge of the Venetian blind, he had watched a heavy Mexican woman puttering in the family room. Figuring carefully the location of the large couch, he had entered the crawl space under the house and used a hand drill to create a 1/8-inch pilot hole. Although his spike mike had wood-boring threads, he wanted to make it easy and silent.
He worked by the light of a battery-powered lantern, keeping it turned away from the entrance to the crawl space and hoping that some stray beam of light would not penetrate the darkness outside the residence and give him away. With the predrilled hole he easily screwed the mike through the floor with his right hand while his left arm mindlessly brushed aside cobwebs. Around him the pillar and post foundation supported a crawl space that varied between twenty-four and thirty-six inches over uneven ground. Protruding through the plywood floor were the nails that held the sub-floor to the plywood. If he wasn't careful, they would bloody his knuckles.
By the time the mike was screwed through the plywood, the medium-density fiber (MDF) sub-flooring, and the carpet, he had a strong feeling that he better get the hell out before he was caught. He worked with a fierce sense of urgency. If they did come, his men would trigger a quiet beep on his walkie-talkie and alert him to listen. So far, the silence had been reassuring. Once the mike was in place, he inserted a tri-pronged plug to a wireless transmitter.
As quickly and as quietly as possible, he retreated to the small, hinged door in the side of the house, exited the crawl space, and walked the one block to a waiting van.
In the forest behind the house, buried in an azalea, stood a large, sensitive microphone aimed at the family-room window. Sound waves from inside that hit the window could be picked up by Groiter' s hidden paraphernalia and broadcast to the van. Any kitchen or family-room conversation that could not be detected by the spike mike under the couch could probably be heard through this giant ear. Also, Groiter's best surveillance man, a guy too expensive to be anything but an independent contractor, had done a phone tap at the pole, also using a transmitter with a feed to the van.
All they needed now was for Dan Young to come home and talk to someone.
In the van, Groiter pulled out a Clive Cussler novel and poured a pile of pumpkin seeds onto a paper towel. "Now we wait," he told the surveillance man.
In retirement Groiter imagined that he would sit on a South Seas beach with a mound of pumpkin seeds, a stack of thrillers, and some dark glasses that would make it easier to watch the girls go by. A bachelor, he had never felt the need to become attached to anyone or anything with the possible exception of his retirement account that he nursed with a mother's love and a father's devotion.
Over the years he had managed to develop a marvelous detachment where people were concerned. He did not laugh when they laughed, cry when they cried, nor did he ever mentally put himself in the place of another. For that reason he could, if required, strangle toddlers. But he maintained a scientific point of view. If there was no remorse, there was also no joy in wet work, and he employed as little violence as he deemed possible in order to ensure a satisfactory retirement.
He had served Kenji well, managing largely through creativity to avoid killing people even in the most difficult circumstances. His value lay in his availability to do whatever was needed, like a bizarre kind of insurance policy. And since he had absolutely no one to tell, his exploits went utterly unheralded.
Most of his killing had been done in liberated Iron Curtain countries where the Mafia got in the way of some business arrangements of the Petchenkoffs, an old-money European family. He had at least achieved a stalemate after knocking off four highly placed figures in organized crime. To get to the bosses, he had to kill at least a dozen underlings, two with a ten-inch awl, one with a knife, all up close and personal. The Petchenkoffs were allowed a graceful exit at a reasonable price, neither side wanting anything more to do with the other.
He met Kenji while working for the Petchenkoffs. Actually, the Asakas were more or less sideline participants, and Kenji had an inkling of Groiter's exploits. When Kenji hired him and imported him to the United States, things became much more refined. He hadn't killed a soul working for Kenji, although he'd helped Kenji clean up the mess with Catherine Swanson and the photographer.
Perhaps Hans's greatest asset was figuring people, their fear, their greed, their envy, and their lust. If somebody had a mind for mischief, Hans had a mind that could find a way between that miscreant and whatever thing of Kenji's they wanted.
At the moment he was having a bit of a struggle understanding exactly what Maria Fischer and Dan Young might want. The morons at the lab had handled the lawyers' intrusion in typically ridiculous fashion by bringing them inside the compound and locking them in a room without so much as a guard. Amazing that a brilliant scientist could be so mindless when it came to security and so fragile when it came to enforcing it.
Yoshinari Asaka III maintained a five-story, traditional Japanese castle on the outskirts of Kanazawa in the province of Hokuriku near the Sea of Japan. It was his preferred residence, though he had several. On this day he sat in his covered garden, by the koi pond, next to a burbling stream running beneath a small footbridge. Growing near the water at his feet was a calla lily bearing a deep purple, trumpet-shaped bloom. It was a gift from his daughter Micha in America, and he treasured it. He also treasured her: the texture of her voice, her scent, her smile, and her determined squint. These things gave him great pleasure.