Let them have dropped the watch,
he prayed. A 24 x 7 watch on a person of interest was a costly affair: It took at least five agents working forty hours a week to minimally cover a target, and if they were expecting it and taking evasive measures—jumping next door's backyard fence, for example—you could double or triple that watch before you had a hope of keeping the cordon intact. Add management and headquarters staff and vacation and sick leave and you could easily use up twenty personnel—call it a cool million and a half per year in payroll alone. And Miriam hadn't been back, that much he was fairly sure of. Another sixty seconds passed. Mike made an executive decision:
There's no watch. Party time!
The houses adjacent to the Beckstein residence were all vacant. Mike turned and walked back to the next one over, then rang the doorbell again. When there was no response, he shrugged; then instead of going back to the sidewalk he walked around the building, slowly, looking up at the eaves. (Cover story number three: Would you like to buy some weatherproof gutter lining?)
The fence between their yard and the next was head-high, but they weren't tidy gardeners and there was no dog; once he was out of sight of the street it took Mike thirty seconds to shove an empty rainwater barrel against the wooden wall and climb over it, taking care to lower himself down on his good leg. The grass in Miriam's yard was thigh-high, utterly unkempt and flopping over under its own weight. Mike picked himself up and looked around. There was a wooden shed, and a glass sliding door into the living room—locked.
Think like a cop. Where would she leave it?
Mike turned to the shed immediately. It had seen better days: The concrete plinth was cracked, and the window hung loose. He carefully reached through the window opening, slowly feeling around the frame until his questing fingers touched a nail and something else. He stifled a grin as he inspected the keyring. This was almost
too
easy.
What am I missing?
he wondered. A momentary premonition tickled the edge of his consciousness.
Miriam has enemies in the Clan, folks like Matthias. Oh.
Matthias had an extra-special calling card. Mike looked at the sliding door, then shook his head. So it wasn't going to be easy. Was it?
The key turned in the lock. Mike opened his case and removed a can of WD40, and sprayed it into the track at the bottom of the door. Then he took out another can, and a long screwdriver. First, he edged the door open a quarter of an inch. Then he slowly ran the screwdriver's tip into the gap, and painstakingly lifted it from floor to ceiling. It met no resistance.
Good.
It was a warm day, and the cold sweat was clammy across his neck and shoulders and in the small of his back as he widened the entrance. Still nothing.
Am I jumping at shadows?
When the opening was eighteen inches wide, Mike gave the second spray can a brisk shake, then pointed it into the room, towards the ceiling, and held the nozzle down.
Silly String—quick-setting plastic foam—squirted out and drifted towards the floor in loops and tangles. About six inches inside the doorway, at calf level to a careless boot, it hung in midair, draped over a fine wire. Mike crouched down and studied it, then looked inside. The tripwire—now he knew what to look for—ran to a hook in the opposite side of the doorframe, and then to a green box screwed to the wall.
Mike stepped over the wire. Then he breathed out, and looked around.
The lounge-cum-office was a mess. Some person or persons unknown had searched it, thoroughly, not taking pains to tidy up afterwards; then someone else had installed the booby box and tripwire. It was dusty inside, and dark.
Power's probably out,
he realized. A turf'n'trap sting gone to seed, long neglected by its intended victim:
Better check for more wires.
Before touching anything, he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. A poke at a desk lamp confirmed that the power was out—no surprises there. Hunting around in the sea of papers that hands unseen had dumped on the office floor was going to take some time, but seemed unavoidable: Empty sockets in a main extension block under the desk, and an abandoned palmtop docking station, suggested the absence of a computer and other electronic devices. Mike checked the rest of the house briefly, squirting Silly String before going through each doorway: There was another wire just inside the front door, beyond a toppled-over bookcase, but there were no other traps as far as he could see.
Getting down to work on the office, he wondered who'd turfed the scene. The missing computer was suggestive; going by the empty shelves and the boxes on the floor, it didn't take long to notice that all the computer media—Zip disks, CD-ROMs, even dusty old floppy disks—were missing. "Huh," he said quietly. "So they were looking for files?" Miriam was a journalist. It was carelessly done, as if they'd been looking for something specific—and the searchers weren't cops or spooks. Cops searching a journalist's office wouldn't leave a scrap of paper behind, and spooks wouldn't want the subject to know they were under surveillance. "Fucking amateurs." Mike took heart: It made his job that bit easier, to know that the perps had been looking for something specific, not trying to deny information to someone coming after.
Fumbling through the pile of papers, sorting them into separate blocks, Mike ran across a telephone cable. It was still plugged in, and tracing it back to the desk he discovered the handset, which had fallen down beside the wall. It was a fancy one, with a built-in answerphone and a cassette tape. Mike pocketed the tape, then went back to work on the papers. Lots of cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lots of scribbled notes about articles she'd been working on, a grocery bill, invoices from the gas and electric—nothing obviously significant. The books: There was a pile of software manuals, business books, some dog-eared crime thrillers and Harlequin romances, a Filofax—
Mike flipped it open. "Bingo!" It was full of handwritten names, numbers, and addresses, scribbled out and overwritten and annotated. Evidently Miriam didn't trust computers for everything; either that, or he'd latched on to a years-out-of-date organizer. But a quick look in the front revealed a year planner that went as far forward as the current year. Why
the hell didn't they take it?
he wondered, looking around. "Huh." Assuming the searchers were from the Clan . . . would they even know what a Filofax
was?
It looked like a book, from a distance; perhaps someone had told the brute squad to grab computers, disks, and any loose files on her desk.
They don't think like cops
or
spooks.
He looked round, at the green box on the wall above the door, and shuddered.
Time to blow.
Outside, with the glass door shut and the key back on its nail in the shed, he glanced at the fence. His leg twinged, reminding him that he wasn't ready for climbing or running. There was a gap between the fence and the side of the house, shadowy; he slipped into it, his fat planner (now pregnant with Miriam's Filofax) clutched before him.
There was a wooden gate at the end of the alley, latched shut but not padlocked. He paused behind it to peer between the vertical slats. A police car cruised slowly along the street, two officers inside. Two? Mike swore under his breath and crouched down. The car seemed to take forever to drive out of sight. Heart pounding, Mike checked his watch. It was half past noon, near enough exactly. He straightened up slowly, then unlatched the gate and limped past the front of the house as fast as he could, then back onto the sidewalk outside. He fumbled the key to his rental car at first, sweat and tension and butterflies in his stomach making him uncharacteristically clumsy, but on the second try, the door swung open and he slumped down behind the steering wheel and pulled it to just as another police car—or perhaps the same one, returning—swung into the street.