“Jesus.”
“We’d take his help if he offered. You must have some ideas. You got anything for us?”
Michaels thought about it. Toni would tell the director anyway, it was her job now, so it didn’t matter if Dixon knew. He said, “Morrison had some kind of valuable data and he used it against the Chinese. We think maybe they were after him. Maybe they caught up with him.”
“What kind of data?”
“Sorry, that’s need-to-know only.”
Dixon shook his head. “Doesn’t seem right. The dead guys were all sitting down when the shooting started. And according to the interviews with the screenwriters, everything was quiet until somebody yelled ‘Gun!’ At which point, all hell busted loose. It sounds more like a negotiation than a face-off.”
“It must have been an ugly scene in here.”
“Yeah. Though a couple of the screenwriters were more pissed because they didn’t get to see the movie than they were upset about all the corpses. Welcome to L.A.”
Michaels considered what Dixon had said. A negotiation. Yes, it did, didn’t it? Why would the Chinese be negotiating with a man who had wiped out a couple of their villages?
Maybe they wanted him to tell them how. Maybe they were willing to pay for it?
Well, if Wu was the guy negotiating, he hadn’t done too good a job of it, had he? And Morrison wasn’t going to be pedaling anything, either.
Jay sat slouched in a wicker chair at the Cafe Emile, looking out on the Champs Elyseés, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. He sipped black, bitter espresso from a tiny china cup, and smiled at the couples who strolled past. The war was over nearly two years, the Nazi occupation history. Postwar Paris in the spring was a much nicer place than a military surplus store in any season.
Henri, the waiter, approached. He had in his hand a small paper tablet. He gave Jay a nod that was both servile and arrogant and offered him the tablet. “ ’Ere iz ze list you wanted, Monsieur Greedlee.”
“Merci.” Jay took the tablet and waved Henri away. He looked at the list, scanned down the row of names — no… no… no… wait!
Jay sat upright, bumped the table, and sloshed espresso from the cup. Yes! There it was!
He snapped his fingers loudly, caught Henri’s attention. “Garçon! Voulez-vous bien m’indiquer ou se trouve le téléphone? Je desire appelez faire!”
Henri rewarded Jay with a sneer. “Bettair you should work on ze pronunciation and ze grammar first, monsieur!”
The arrogant prick knew he wanted to make a call, but he had to correct his French first.
“Montrez du doigt, asshole!”
Henri shrugged off the insult and did as Jay requested — he pointed toward the café.
Jay stood and hurried to find the phone.
Michaels had supper at the hotel, and when room service brought him the chicken sandwich, it had bean sprouts on it. Well, of course. This was L.A.
He ate the sandwich mechanically, not really tasting it. He was screwed, there was nowhere to go from here. Toni had been right, he wasn’t a field agent. He couldn’t just hop on a plane, fly to a crime scene, and expect to spot some crucial clue that the local police and FBI forensics team had somehow missed. He knew better. But he had needed to see the place for himself, hoping it would somehow jog something in him.
Well, it hadn’t. And here he was in a hotel in La-La Land, eating a chicken sandwich with bean sprouts, without a clue as to what he should do next.
On the bedside table, his virgil lit, telling him it was bad to the bone. That was probably Toni, calling to tell him what an idiot he was. At the moment, he was inclined to agree with her.
The tiny screen on the multipurpose toy didn’t show Toni’s face, however. It was Jay Gridley.
“What’s up, Jay?”
“I think I got him, Boss.”
Michaels stared at the virgil. “What? How? Where?”
“I crunched all the commercial airline flights leaving SoCal in the last twelve hours. Burbank, LAX, John Wayne, in Orange County.”
“And you found Ventura?”
“No. But I did find a Mr. B. W. Corona.”
“I don’t see—”
“It’s another freeway name, Boss.”
“Kind of a reach, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not. Guy booked a ticket two days ago, a round-trip to Seattle. He was originally scheduled for this evening, but he called and changed it to an earlier flight. Return is open-ended.”
“I don’t see how that makes it any more certain.”
“Okay, look. He planned to leave tonight, but there was some kind of a problem, a shoot-out, so he had to take off early.”
“But he’s planning to come back, your Mr. Corona.”
“If you’re on the run, you don’t buy a one-way ticket, that’s a red flag, first thing cops look for.”
“But why would he use a name we might know?”
“Because he doesn’t know the freeway names have been compromised. He doesn’t know we picked up his pal at the surplus store in Washington, so why would he throw away perfectly good ID?”
“Still sounds like a stretch.”
Jay did an imitation of a late-night infomerciaclass="underline" “But wait, but wait, don’t order yet, listen to this!”
The virgil’s screen was tiny, but it had good resolution, and Michaels could see Jay’s grin easily enough.
“I checked the car rental places at SeaTac. A Mr. B. W. Corona walked into Avis, no reservation, and rented a midsize Dodge ten minutes after the flight from L.A. landed late this afternoon. You got a computer terminal there in your room, Boss?”
“Yes.”
“Plug your virgil into it, I want to show you something.”
Michaels opened the terminal, lit the screen, and tapped the infrared send-and-receive code into his virgil. Jay’s face appeared on the hotel’s computer screen. “I’ve got your visual on the hotel’s computer,” Michaels said.
“Stand by.”
The image of Jay was replaced by a digital line-by-line image. It was a close-up of a California driver’s license.
“This came from the counter scanner at Avis. They log all licenses.”
The man in the hologram had short hair, but a full beard. Could that be Ventura?
Michaels couldn’t tell. “I don’t see the guy in our sketch.”
“No law against growing a beard, having your picture taken, then shaving. But forget the picture.”
Michaels was already scanning the information on the license. He got no farther than the name. “Son of a bitch! Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”
“C’mon, Boss, you always save the best part of a story for last. You want me to call the Washington state police and have him picked up?”
“I suppose you know where he is, too, huh?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, really?”
Jay laughed. “You are really gonna love this part. Avis has theft-recovery devices installed in their fleet. Somebody decides to keep a car instead of turning it in? They can dial a number and turn on a little broadcast unit wired into the car’s battery. The unit sends a GPS signal to the nice folks at Brink’s, and they can tell you exactly where the vehicle is.” He shifted back into the infomercial announcer’s voice: “Now how much would you pay?”
“Son of a bitch.” Michaels looked at the computer’s flatscreen. The name on the license was the final selling point: The “B.W.” stood for “Bruce Wayne.” And everybody who read comics, watched television cartoons, or went to action adventure movies knew that Bruce Wayne was the secret identity of Batman, mentor and elder partner of Robin the Boy Wonder, aka Dick Grayson.