“Your… terms?” Yeager was looking at him differently. Was it a newfound respect?
“An authorized payment. In writing. A million dollars in cash.”
Yeager burst out laughing, a strange, hollow sound that rumbled from deep in his chest.
“I’m willing to accept payment in four installments,” Danny said. “The first two hundred fifty thousand dollars is due no later than ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” He paused to let it sink in. Yeager didn’t reply. Stunned silence, perhaps. “Now, why don’t we discuss what you want from me.”
Yeager shook his head slowly. He gave a thin smile. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “You’re not in a position to negotiate. You’re out there all by yourself at the end of a limb, and you’re sawing away at it. Not smart, Danny. Not smart at all.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“Well,” Danny said, “you and your partner have a decision to make. You know how to reach me.” He turned around and yanked open the van’s rear doors and hopped out.
Leaving his iPhone behind.
Not by accident.
67
Danny sat in a groovy café on Newbury Street called Graffiti. The walls were lined with paintings for sale, done by students at the Museum of Fine Arts school. The ceiling was pressed tin, the floor was tiny white hex tiles, and the coffee was “single-source.” And expensive. A cappuccino cost six bucks. The baristas were clean-cut, with neatly trimmed beards, wearing white button-down shirts.
No one at a table seemed dislodgeable, so Danny ordered a six-dollar cappuccino and sat at a banquette, placing his laptop on one of the shellacked tree stumps they provided for the tableless to set down their cups and plates.
He signed into their Wi-Fi. No password required. He had to assume the phony DEA agents had found a way to tap into his Internet at home.
He went to iCloud.com, Apple’s cloud storage and computing service, and entered his Apple ID. There he found a green radar-screen-looking icon for an application called Find My iPhone. It showed his iPhone. Up came a big Google map of Boston, centered on the Back Bay, where he was. Then the map swooped toward the western suburbs, and a tiny green pinhead appeared on an orange road marked I-90, the Massachusetts Turnpike.
The green pinhead was slowly moving westward along the turnpike.
He was tracking his own iPhone, and with it, the bogus DEA guys, Yeager and Slocum. The idea had come to him while he was standing inside the van. His iPhone was more useful to him as a tracking device than a tape recorder.
Maybe Yeager would realize Danny had left his iPhone behind. In fact, he probably would. But he’d assume Danny had forgotten it in the heat of the moment.
Would he and Slocum toss it? Not likely. They’d want to mine whatever intelligence from it they could-call logs, text messages, phone numbers. Not that they’d find much of use; Danny had deleted quite a bit.
Or maybe they wouldn’t even notice he’d left it. He’d turned off the ringer and the vibrate mode.
Now the green glowing pinhead had turned off 90 and was headed north on Route 128.
A couple of sips of bitter cappuccino later, the pinhead had turned off onto Third Avenue in the town of Waltham, heading south.
Where they were going, and why, he hadn’t a clue.
A few minutes later, the green glowing pinhead had stopped moving.
He clicked the + button on the map to move in closer. Now he was in Google’s Street View. The green dot was in a parking lot behind a building that was marked AMBASSADOR SUITES.
He Googled “Ambassador Suites” and “Waltham” and found a website for an extended-stay hotel for businessmen.
Residentially inspired suites. One-week minimum occupancy. Fully furnished mini-kitchen, light housekeeping.
The temporary home for two ex-DEA agents.
Time to pay them an unannounced visit.
68
Half an hour later, Danny pulled into the parking lot of a generic-looking redbrick three-story motel-like structure.
The Ambassador Suites Extended Stay Hotel of Waltham.
No white van in sight.
He parked and switched off the engine. In front of the hotel was a portcullis over a concrete T that led to the main entrance. The grand entrance. It was a dismal, antiseptic-looking place. It pulsed with loneliness and desperation and transience. Most of the guests here, he figured, were midlevel business executives from places like Oracle or Raytheon or Biogen Idec who’d just “relocated” to the Boston area and were searching for housing. Or maybe visiting “teams” from Google or Microsoft or Genzyme here on some short-term project for a couple of lonely weeks. Skilled construction engineers working on a job, here for a month or two, away from home.
But what about a couple of ex-DEA agents running some sort of scam? Were they here?
A gray Mini Cooper came around the side of the hotel and pulled out into the street. And he realized there was more parking behind the hotel. He started up the car again and moved around to the back. Two rows of parked cars, broken in the middle by the rear entrance to the hotel and a lane perpendicular to the cars that led to a street. Directly across the street from the hotel was a big concrete and steel parking garage, almost a block long.
In the back row of cars on the left, nestled among the rented-looking economy sedans, was a white panel van with INTERSTATE FOOD & BEVERAGE on the side.
They were staying here, at this hotel, and they were probably in their room. This wasn’t an area where anyone walked anywhere. There were no sidewalks, and the distances were too great. If they’d gone out, they’d have taken the car.
They were here.
He parked, slung his laptop bag over one shoulder, and walked under the portico into the main entrance. The lobby was small and dimly lit and smelled of burnt coffee and fast food. The reception desk was small, with a marble-topped counter. Fluorescent light flickered. No one seemed to be behind the counter.
There was a bell, the kind you hit to make it go ding. No one, not even Pavlov’s dogs, likes being summoned by a bell. He called out, “Hello?”
A bulky young man, midtwenties, trundled out. His name badge said MATT.
“Can I get a room just for the night, Matt?” Danny asked. Maybe the one-week-minimum policy was flexible. He shifted the bag on his shoulder. It bulged on one side with the mass of Galvin’s pistol, but the shape wasn’t obvious. Still, he couldn’t help feeling self-conscious.
“Sure,” the clerk said. Simple as that. Plenty of vacancies and the policy goes out the window.
“Got anything at the back of the hotel?” Where the white van was parked, he thought.
The clerk hunched over a keyboard that was a little too low for comfort. Tappa tappa tap tap tappa.
Danny’s chest felt tight. He was on the verge of doing something pretty damned dangerous. But it was better not to dwell on the odds.
It was like a Wile E. Coyote moment where you fall if you look down: the cartoon laws of physics.
So don’t look down.
“That’ll be one hundred four ninety-nine.”
Danny handed him a credit card, held his breath. After a moment, he saw the charge had gone through okay. This one he’d paid down. There was room on the credit line. He exhaled.
The clerk took a sheet of paper from the printer and slid it across the counter. Danny signed it.
“Help you with your bags, sir?”
“I’ll bring them up later.”
His room was on the second floor. It was entirely possible that he’d bump into Slocum or Yeager or both, and he had no explanation prepared.
If they saw him, he was pretty well screwed.
The room was small and efficient. A queen-size bed, a desk, and a chair. A kitchen area with a dishwasher, refrigerator, coffeemaker, two electric burners. Everything a relocating executive could need to make his lonely little home for a few weeks.