She seemed to notice the workers around her for the first time. “Well?” she said sharply in her native tongue. “What are you waiting for? Back to work!”
As they scurried into motion, Evan nodded at a poster of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man pinned on the neighboring table. “How about that one?”
“This guy?” She grinned, showing perfect rows of pearl-white teeth. “He’s good-looking, right? Been damaged and restored a few times, like most good men.” She freed a corner of the poster, showed off the back side. “Got all these collector stamps to establish provenance. But.”
She barked another order across the room, and a moment later the lights in the building went out with a series of clanks. A black-light wand clicked on in her hand, the greens and whites of the poster suddenly luminescent. “Fake, see? The glow gives it away. They made an ink-jet printout, glued it onto vintage backing, and intentionally distressed it.” The lights came back on, and she whisked the poster off the table, Frankenstein disappearing into the wide drawer of a flat file cabinet. She smirked. “I know a good forgery when I see one.”
Slipping her arm through Evan’s, she led him down a back hall that smelled pleasantly of petroleum. “The poster trade, Evan, is the Wild West.”
“Seems to be.”
They entered a dark-walled photography room, its windows blacked out to prevent reflections during shooting. A fine excuse to have an impenetrable back room in which to conduct business of a certain type.
“It’s been what — six months?” she said. “You came because you miss me?”
“Of course. But not just that.”
“You need another license? Social Security card? Travel visa?”
“Haven’t had a chance to burn the ones I’ve got.”
Her lips made a sly shift to one side. “You brought me a lead on a German Metropolis three-sheet?”
Melinda’s — and every poster trader’s — holy grail, the poster went for upwards of a million dollars. There were three in the world that anyone knew about.
“Alas, no.” Evan withdrew Katrin’s passport from his pocket and held it out.
Melinda regarded it a moment, then took it and thumbed to Katrin’s photo. A playful tilt of her head. “Should I be jealous?”
Setting the passport down on the workbench, she opened and closed several letterblock drawers housing customs stamps. “Do you want her to have been to India?” She removed one of the larger stamps. “Or how about the Galápagos? This is the elaborate one they give you at Baltra.” She thwacked the stamp onto a piece of scrap paper, took a moment to admire her handiwork.
“No. I don’t need it embellished. I need to know if it’s real.”
Her thin eyebrows lifted, but even then not a wrinkle appeared in her flawless skin. She crossed to an AmScope binocular microscope hooked into a computer for image capture. All business now, she flipped her long hair over one shoulder and bent to the wide eyepiece mounted on a boom arm. She studied the passport cover, its seams, and multiple pages under different specialized lights.
Then she took her time on the computer, sorting through the captured images. Back to the passport itself, now with a loupe, examining the photo page square inch by square inch.
“It’s real,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She straightened up, deleting the images from the computer, then clearing the cache. “It is very hard to fake a passport, Evan. The paper is impossible to replicate.”
“Even from etched and engraved metal plates?”
She shook her head. “No way.”
“How about if it was silk-screened from a high-detail Photoshop print?”
“Even I couldn’t achieve this clarity in the pixelation.”
That answered that, then.
Melinda blew out a breath. “Look, maybe someone could re-create the embossment tool for the security images, but these holograms? No way. This is a flawless specimen.” She held his gaze a moment longer, perhaps sensing that he needed more convincing. “Not a fake. Not a good fake. Not a great fake.” She offered the passport back with an artful flick of her wrist. “It’s her.”
26
Unnerved
Sitting at his personal command central in the humid semidark of the Vault, Evan sipped two fingers of U’Luvka over ice and watched the surveillance feeds of the loft. Katrin slept fitfully, stirring in the throes of an unpleasant dream. She had plenty of reason to be unnerved.
He was unnerved himself, and this was not a sensation he was accustomed to experiencing.
He was used to missing puzzle pieces, equations that didn’t add up in full, but something was more significantly off kilter here. He didn’t know how he and Katrin had been tracked — not once but twice. He didn’t know who wanted to kill them. He didn’t know that he could trust his client.
He rewound the footage to confirm that Katrin hadn’t strayed from the loft. She hadn’t even left the futon. Next he called up the readings from the microchips in her system to test if he could grab the GPS signal, but none showed. Likely she was too far from her last meal, the digestive juices not stimulated sufficiently to charge the sensor particles in her tract.
His rules required that he zero in on the people who were pursuing them. And, from there, zero in on the Vegas outfit who had hired them.
Aside from the phone number of Sam’s killer, as untraceable as his own, his only concrete information was the nickname he’d heard spoken during the motel raid: We got two down, Slatch.
The monitor to Evan’s left loaded results from NCIC, the National Crime Information Center computerized index, the pride of the FBI. The powerful data-mining engines of the Alias File had been churning for a while now, ever since he’d typed “Slatch” into the search field, putting to work all those tax dollars he didn’t pay.
Three results popped up now. The first, Julio “Slatch-Catcher” Marquez, a Mexican-mafia gangbanger currently serving a dime in Lompoc for armed robbery. Beneath that, Evelyn Slatch-Donovan, a Hollywood madam with ties to organized crime. Dismissing them both, Evan clicked on the third. Only a single picture of Danny Slatcher existed on federal record, a surveillance shot of him stepping off a speedboat onto a dock, a panama hat and sunglasses obscuring his features. But his form — that vast, bottom-heavy build — was undeniably that of the man Evan had spotted in the motel parking lot.
A pulse started up in Evan’s neck, his heartbeat quickening with the thrill of a lead putting out.
In Slatcher’s right hand was an elongated Pelican case, the very size Evan himself used to transport sniper rifles. It seemed extremely likely that Slatcher was the man behind the scope in Chinatown who had fired the shots at Katrin. For now Evan would operate on that assumption.
Two names were listed under Slatcher’s known associates. The first, marked “deceased,” had been a dirty banker out of Turks and Caicos, the man’s file showing about what one would expect for a deceased money launderer. Ball bearings within ball bearings.
The next brought up a few fuzzy photos of a woman with a thick mane of hair — probably a wig — riding helmetless on a green-and-white Kawasaki. “Candy McClure.” Maybe she was the woman from the Scion, but it was hard to tell. There was no other information listed for her, just the few blurry photos and a name.