Junie Flynn stepped onto the elevator, pushed the button for the parking garage, and was tugging her cell phone out of her pocket to make a call when someone yelled for her to hold the car. A hand shot between the doors and the rubber buffers bounced back from the wrist of Harcourt Bolton.
“You’re fast,” she said as he stepped inside.
“Old but not dead yet,” he said, grinning and puffing a little from having run down the hall.
“Parking lot?” she asked.
“Yes. Been a long day and we old duffers need to take naps or we fall asleep in meetings.”
“It’s only a little after one.”
“I was up all night,” he said, and reinforced it with a yawn that made his jaws creak. “God, excuse me.”
They got off in the parking garage, but Bolton touched her arm before they went their separate ways. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Junie. You’re quite an impressive woman. You’ve overcome so much. You’ve dealt with hardships and obstacles that would have crippled most people, and yet here you stand. A radiant woman of intellect and power. Compassion, too. FreeTech is a testament to good intentions.”
Junie was surprised. “You know about FreeTech?”
“Mr. Church tells me that your company is repurposing many of the technologies Joe took away from Howard Shelton’s Majestic group.”
“I’m surprised he told you.”
Bolton’s smile was rueful. “The Deacon and I go way back. I won’t lie and say we’ve always been friends, more like friendly rivals, but we play for the same team. We both want to save the world from itself.”
“I suppose that’s how we all feel.”
“Not all of us,” he said, his smile dimming. “I heard that your offices were robbed. Such a frightening invasion. Thieves these days wouldn’t bat an eye about hurting someone. There are so many bad people in the world. So many people who have darkness in their hearts. So many people who want to turn out the lights on everyone else.”
“Yes,” she said. “And it hurts me to see how often they win.”
“You think they’re winning?”
“Don’t you?” she asked, surprised. “With what ISIS or ISIL or whatever they’re calling it now is doing? With what those people down at Gateway tried to do?” She shook her head. “It shows how sick the world is.”
“Sickness can be cured,” said Bolton. “And bad people can be redeemed.”
“Sometimes, I suppose.”
“Look at your own company. As I understand it you are taking technologies that could do unimaginable harm and are using them to save lives. And, if you want to talk about redemption, I hear that Alexander Chismer — or should I call him Toys? — is one of your employees. Or is he more than that? He has unusually high DMS-approved security clearance for a person who, by all accounts, should be serving multiple life sentences for murder, terrorism, and a laundry list of other crimes. If you have been able to reform someone like him, then perhaps there is hope for us all.”
“How do you know so much about Toys?”
“You ask how and not what I know?” Bolton chuckled. “Come now, Junie, don’t forget who I am. I’m a spy, don’t forget.”
Junie took a small step back from him. “I don’t think I want to talk about Toys or FreeTech,” she said. “I have to go.”
He began to reach for her and caught himself. “God, I didn’t mean to spook you, Junie. Truly I did not. I’m trying to tell you how much I admire what you’re doing.”
“I really have to go,” she said. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
She backed a couple of steps away and then turned and hurried over to her car. When she got in and locked the doors, Junie turned to see him still standing there. Watching her as she started the car and drove away.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
He lived like a monk in paradise.
The resort was gorgeous, with sculptured gardens in which stands of green bamboo framed ponds of brightly colored koi. Parrots in lovely ornate cages chattered to one another, and ducks waddled in and out of a series of lazy streams that were also home to turtles and bullfrogs. Totem poles hand-carved in Bali seemed to encourage meditation in the gardens. And guests could wander beneath the cool canopy of leaves formed by over a hundred species of palm trees, with a thousand species of flowers and plants filling the air with a subtle olio of fragrances.
The Polynesian-themed hotel had over three hundred guest rooms and suites, each with a private balcony or patio. One wall of them looked out over the blue perfection of Mission Bay. From the top floors on the other side the guests could see the deeper blue of the vast Pacific.
The sad young man sat on a beach chair outside one of the ground-floor garden apartments. His was the least ostentatious of the rooms and it had the least enchanting view. That was fine with him. It was remote and it was quiet. The fact that he owned the hotel was something no one at the Catamaran knew. The staff knew that he was a permanent resident — the only such person at the place — and they mutually assumed that he was a relative of the owners.
He wasn’t. He had no relatives anywhere. They were all dead. So were most of his friends.
He wished he was, too, and though suicide was always easy enough to engineer, it was never an option for him. Some of the residents of purgatory took their penance seriously. He certainly did.
Living at the resort offered him solitude when he wanted it. Tourists were notoriously clannish in places like this. There were very few of the raucous party types there, and the rest of the guests seemed to sense that they would not find a companion for idle chatter in the unsmiling young man. They were correct in that. He was never rude, but he seldom gave more than one-word answers. The only conversation he ever sought was with the resort’s five parrots, Bianchi, Chadwick, Cornell, Mercer, and Scooter. They never asked complicated questions and he found them to be agreeable company even in his darkest moods.
He also had a cat.
Or, perhaps it was more true to say that the cat had adopted him.
On a chilly April night the gray-and-black tabby had come in through his open French window, jumped up on his bed, and gone to sleep without comment. The young man allowed it. After all, who was he to tell a cat where he could or could not sleep?
After a week of sharing his room, his bed, and his meals with the cat it was clear it had no intention of leaving. It was also clear that it had once been a well-cared-for housecat but had now fallen on very hard times. It was scruffy, underfed, and badly scarred from claw and tooth. No collar or tag. Only after the man received a couple of fleabites did he scoop him up and take him to an animal hospital. The cat was given a thorough examination, received all the proper shots, had a chip inserted under its skin, was washed and groomed. When the woman at the desk asked him what the cat’s name was, the young man considered for a moment, and finally said, “Job.”
And Job he was.
Job and the young man kept company with one another. The cat liked being petted, so the man petted him. The cat liked grilled fish instead of cat food, and so the man requested that from the kitchen. The cat didn’t like to use the cat box inside the apartment, so the man put one on his deck. It was the cat’s life, after all, and the man had no desire to impose his will on it. Every once in a while, in the darkest hours of the night, the cat would allow the young man to wrap his arms around the small furry body. If it minded the salty tears that fell on its head, it did not complain.