Jackie clicked away and then returned to the small rectangular box on the Lantern dashboard, inserting her cursor on a command line. She typed: 18:00, and then hit enter.
17:59:59 it read. Seventeen hours and fifty-nine minutes.
17:59:58
One day and counting. Lots of work to do. She clicked on the Mount Wilson radio tower in Los Angeles. The easier stuff she’d save until later, using the back door she’d created into the major telecom providers, like Verizon and Comcast, China Telecom, Vodafone, Nippon Telegraph, and on. New modems and routers for everyone or most people around the globe. All with the power to hit the human pause button.
17:59:56
17:59:55
17:59:54
Forty-Two
With Jerry behind the wheel of the Miata, Eleanor in the passenger seat, and Lyle squeezed painfully into what passed for a backseat, the threesome stared at a greenish-brown-colored flat located near the western edge of San Francisco, not far from the beach. Salty wet air clung to these attached flats, the colors so worn they took on the dull flavor of the fog itself.
“You think she’s in there?” Eleanor asked.
Lyle didn’t answer. His eyes settled on a shaggy-looking mat lying before the front door. Something elevated the mat slightly, a box or package hidden beneath. Lyle pushed his way out of the Miata.
Jerry reached around and felt for his gun. Watching Lyle wander off without warning reminded Jerry of something, a memory he couldn’t quite grasp. “I don’t trust this guy for a second, Eleanor.”
She exhaled loudly, a tacit agreement, but not a direct confirmation. She didn’t want to give Jerry permission to do anything stupid. They watched Lyle knock on the door. Wait, knock again. Lean down and look and move the mat aside with his toe and stare at what looked to be a package. Lyle seemed satisfied and loped back to the car.
“Package postmarked a week ago,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is around.”
“Who’s the package addressed to?”
“Jackie Badger,” Lyle said.
They’d found the address in minutes with the help of a friend of Jerry’s in the police department. They also discovered Jackie worked on Google’s campus in Mountain View, at least that’s what it said on a CV they found online. But they figured they’d never get in there and Lyle’s plan had been to try to visit her place while she was gone.
Now, standing here, he thought aloud, “We could call the police, or wait until night to see if she comes back. Or…” He paused. “We could see about the back. There’s a small yard, accessible by an alley. Looks pretty desolate back there, so if there’s a back door…” He let it hang there, stared at the house. “In any case, it’s, what, four fifteen, so we don’t have long before—”
His sentence was interrupted by Jerry opening his door. He stood and straightened his dark blue windbreaker.
“I got this,” he said. “You two relax.”
He walked purposefully to the street corner. Lyle felt a tug of conscience and turned to see it was being beamed at him by Eleanor. She stared at Lyle and he shook his head, knowing exactly what he’d done. It wasn’t quite condemnation, though.
“Let’s use the powers of the gun for good,” he said.
“Watch out or it will turn on you.”
A few minutes later, the front door opened. Jerry beckoned them inside. Lyle looked around the street and didn’t see so much as a mail truck. It was still shy of quitting time. He and Eleanor stepped out of the fog. Jerry closed the door behind them.
“What did you do?” Eleanor asked.
“Piece of cake. Some stuff I learned doing a hotshot-firefighting weekend training. I’ll spare you the gory details.” Lyle thought it condescending but mostly was focused on the musty smell in this classic midcentury San Francisco flat. A narrow hallway led to a bathroom and two bedrooms in the back. Halfway down the hallway, a doorway led to the kitchen and to the right of the front door, a living room and dining room with creaky wooden floors. The place looked little lived in. Lyle closed his eyes and inhaled. He took in humidity that had seeped into these walls, the low-level mold. He winced; virus could take root here. That wasn’t today’s business. They searched the house, first with great care, and then with more urgency when nothing of relevance, or even mild interest, revealed itself. Other than that the outdated and Spartan decor—an old futon couch in the front room, a garage-sale dining-room table, a beanbag chair, a refrigerator with a pizza magnet holding a sloppily written shopping list and little inside—reminded him very much of his own surroundings and habits. It told him that Jackie Badger focused on things inside her head, not the external. Know your virus, he thought, as he descended wooden stairs from the back of the kitchen to, presumably, the garage. Halfway down, he heard: “Dr. Martin… Lyle.”
It was Eleanor, calling from the bedroom. Lyle found the airline captain looking at a photograph. Of Lyle. He was standing at the café near his house, holding his bicycle, about to mount it. It looked like the photo had been taken by a long lens.
“It was tucked in behind that picture,” Eleanor said. She gestured to a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, now hung askew after Eleanor had delved behind it. She looked at the picture. “I wonder why she’s collecting photos of people who look bewildered,” she teased lightly.
Jerry stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. “You’ve never been here?” he asked Lyle pointedly.
“Who even prints pictures anymore?”
Lyle took Eleanor’s meaning: everyone keeps their photos online.
“Someone who wants you to find it,” he muttered. “Everyone’s phone is off, right?” he said just a touch less absently.
Lyle looked up to find Jerry staring at him. “Now why would she leave us the photo, huh? You’ve got a lot of strange answers, pal. Maybe you’re trying to throw us off the scent.”
“Jerry…”
The sound of their back-and-forth reminded Lyle, somehow, of Steamboat. “There’s going to be more,” Lyle said obliquely. He walked out of the room and into the second bedroom next door. It served as an office. Now, all tenderness or care was gone from Lyle’s search. He swept things around on the desk, pulled out books from the shelf. He pawed through pockets in the two jackets hung in the closet and shuffled through plastic cartons holding files and folders. On the desk, he stared at a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was from four days earlier. The headline on the lead story referred to the upcoming march on Washington. It was tomorrow, Lyle realized.
He stood to find Eleanor and Jerry looking at him. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. He thought about the note on his fridge, about how this person said she’d met her match. He brushed past them, through the linoleum and bad tile kitchen, down the stairs to a dark, damp garage. At the bottom, he found a string hanging from the low ceiling and pulled it to click on a lightbulb. It provided dim light but enough to make out a garage converted into storage space, no car, boxes, junk, a bicycle and a treadmill. Then he saw the flies. Bingo.