“Know most of your customers, do you?”
“Part of the job.”
Boldt said, “Including the guy who used this phone about an hour ago?”
The bartender offered a smug look. Boldt flashed his shield, and the man’s composure wavered. He pulled out a twenty, and then another, and laid them both on the bar.
“Put it away,” the man said, somewhat apologetically. “I came on thirty minutes ago. I have no idea who used the phone an hour ago.”
“Someone we can check with?” Boldt inquired.
“Listen, it’s so damn busy in here between five and seven, there’s no way anyone’s going to be able to help you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Okay, listen… ” The bartender stood within inches of the bar and leaned toward Boldt. “Truth is, officer, the hall phone is kinda wired into the house line. It don’t ring there; it rings here. But customers dial out on the hall phone.”
“And the house pockets the money from the pay phone.”
“Something like that. Hey, I’m not the owner.”
“So unless you were in the hall, you wouldn’t know who used the phone.”
“That’s about it.”
The phone rang. The bartender reached for the receiver, but Boldt held him off. “This is for me.” Boldt yanked up the receiver. “Boldt.”
That same synthetic voice said, “Your wife has nice hands. You hang up again, she’s wearing gloves for the next six months, and her little pussy dance is on the evening news.”
“I don’t talk to robots,” Boldt said. Inside, he decided he’d gone too far. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to hang up the first time, to feign a lack of cooperation, except that it went so against his nature. This was, he decided, the call Liz had been expecting, except that the first step was apparently to collect the coveted software. Boldt had read two department e-mails on the analysis of the LaRossa disk. The first expressed optimism that the password cryptography on the disk could be “cracked.” The second explained in some detail the sophistication of the security protecting the software contained on the disk, and how it was never going to be compromised.
The bartender overheard Boldt’s comment, twisted his face, and walked away to service a customer.
“Forty-five minutes. Your cell number.”
Boldt repeated his cell number into the phone.
“You do this alone, or it all comes back on you and yours. Tomorrow, next week, next month-listen, you’d better keep looking over your shoulder if you bring others in on it, or do anything but what I say.”
“You don’t know me very well,” Boldt said, again wondering why his mouth got ahead of his brain.
The line went dead. Boldt hung up the receiver. The guy was smart, and that worried him.
He called Pahwan Riz, the Special Operations commander, before he even reached the Crown Vic. Hell if he was doing this alone. He could smell a trap a mile away.
Discovering himself the target of a surveillance operation left Boldt with mixed feelings. He couldn’t remember ever having been on the receiving end of such attentions, and he found it off-putting. The arrangements were made hastily, primarily because of the time restrictions imposed by his anonymous caller, but the brilliance of some of these guys never ceased to amaze him, and by the time he bumped the Crown Vic into the restricted parking garage attached to the Public Safety Building, the operation was already well under way.
Suspecting, but not quite willing to believe, that whoever had called him might have civilians paid off within the department-spies-he obeyed Pahwan Riz’s choreography to the letter. The Crown Vic was already equipped with GPS transmission equipment because, like patrol cruisers, it carried a Mobile Data Terminal on the dash-the equivalent of a built-in laptop computer that allowed text to be sent to and from the car. Limousine services and some taxis, parcel delivery and express delivery vans, all carried similar equipment-and all contained the satellite tracking device allowing dispatchers to locate any vehicle at a moment’s notice.
The trick was to get some of this same equipment-a small GPS and a voice-recording device-onto Boldt without him being descended upon by technicians. Riz’s solution was to leave the equipment in a men’s room stall, and to direct Boldt to visit the rest room upon his arrival at SPD, which he did. From the bathroom, now wearing the two devices, he proceeded directly to Property and signed out for the bright red disk that had been in the possession of Tony LaRossa as he’d collapsed from his heart attack. He took the man’s bank ID access card as well, already foreseeing its future use. With Boldt being lieutenant in charge of Crimes Against Persons, there wasn’t anything the Property sergeant was going to deny him. He signed the requisite forms, accepted the plastic bags bearing the chain of possession, all carefully detailed in indelible marker, and returned to the Crown Vic at a slow jog, moving a few uniformed officers out of his way while checking his watch on the fly. Ten minutes in which to reach the exit of I-5 north.
Whoever had planned this for him had timed it to within seconds. He knew immediately that the drop was to be just as perfectly timed, that he would be pushed right to the limit to accommodate the demands.
As it was, he hit the street with the pedal down, built-in grill and window lights pulsing the blinding blue light, clearing traffic.
Eight minutes to go. It would be a miracle, but he just might make it.
Several miles above him, in the cold black void of space, satellites tracked his every turn, and Pahwan Riz-in the steam-cleaning van, with a team of four unmarked vehicles-followed at a distance, never letting Boldt out of his sight.
SIXTEEN
THE KNOCK ON THE BACK door sounded like a gunshot as it banged off the walls of the kitchen and ran through Liz like a jolt of electricity.
“It’s okay,” said Bobbie Gaynes, a wire in her ear leading from a walkie-talkie. “It’s Officer Foreman, BCI. I’ll get the door. You sit tight.”
Liz had made them both some Red Zinger tea, and she noticed the steam in the light of a lamp as it swirled and tried to follow Gaynes, dissipating a few inches from the cup. She felt this way too-her energy fading the longer Lou stayed away. First the kids, then Lou. She felt as if all the love in this home had lost its way. She blew on her own tea and took a sip and returned the mug to the coaster, noticing that it shook slightly in her grip and wondering how much more of this she could endure.
She heard Danny Foreman’s sonorous voice interspersed with the female chimes of Gaynes’s and, a moment later, the back door thump shut. Foreman entered the living room asking if she had a minute. He carried what looked like a silver Palm Pilot in hand, and kept it in his lap as he sat down. He looked tired and worn. He glanced over at Gaynes’s mug of tea, grabbed hold, and drank from it, savoring the taste. She found his brazenness disturbing and thought it some kind of sign, a signal that she should have interpreted more clearly.
“Where to start?” he asked, peering over the mug as he took a second noisy sip.
“Lou’s not here,” she said.
“I’m up to speed on that.”
“I’m not. Not exactly.”
“He’s busy.”
“Well, that certainly clarifies things.”
“It’s to our benefit he’s occupied.”
“Is it?”
“What I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential. I can only assume that a banker knows all about confidentiality, and I can only hope that despite what I presume to be your loyalty and devotion to your husband, you keep this confidential.”
“Message received.” She made no agreement, extremely careful of her word selection. Lou had warned her to expect such a meeting; how he anticipated such things was beyond her, but she was glad for it now.
“It affects us all, Liz, and is not to be taken lightly.”