The vote went much more smoothly this time around.
16
THE STORK BOBBED in the driver’s seat of the overheated Chevy rental van, peering across at the KCOM building at Roxbury and Wilshire. He’d toned down his shirt for the low-profile drive-by, but Tim still wasn’t pleased about having his distinctive mug pointed out the window. The Stork fidgeted continuously, shifting in the seat, polishing his watch face, one knuckle or another endlessly assisting his glasses on their Sisyphean climb up the barely existent bridge of his nose. He was an incessant mouth-breather, and he smelled like stale potato chips. Tim contemplated how he’d come to be here with this bald, lisping man prone to peeling sunburns and too-bright shirts.
They stared at the fifteen-story building, rising up in planes of concrete and glass to shade a bustling stretch of Beverly Hills. A window washer hung suspended from cables about a hundred feet off the ground, swaying and wiping, his silhouette standing out from the late-morning sun’s brilliant reflection off the panes. An enormous front window on the ground floor housed a panoply of plasma-screen televisions broadcasting KCOM’s current offering, a talk show exhibiting couches, ferns, and women of various ethnic backgrounds sharing a common unpleasantly vigorous demeanor. Since the TVs ran on closed circuit, showing the sets even during commercial breaks, they drew a small crowd of voyeurs and Rodeo Drive tourists hungering for table scraps of behind-the-scenes showbiz.
“If the new metal detectors at the entrance are any indication,” the Stork said, “they’re gearing up to turn this place into a high-tech fun-land by the Wednesday interview. Entry control points, IR sensors, metal-detector wands. The whole ten yards.”
“Nine yards.”
“Yes, well.” He shifted his weight deliberately from one side to the other, as if breaking wind. “Heck of a lotta security.”
“News orgs are all about confidentiality and scoop. They’re notoriously difficult to penetrate. CNN used to come in with stories ahead of Army intel.”
“What’s CNN?” the Stork asked.
Tim studied him to see if he was joking. “A news station.”
“I see. I can help you more if you tell me what you’re planning here.”
“I appreciate that, but I don’t need more help. I just need you all to do your respective jobs.”
“Okeydokey.”
As they pulled past the building, Tim armed some sweat off his forehead. “Listen…Stork-”
“No origin.”
“Excuse me?”
“My name has no origin. At least none that’s exciting. Everyone asks, everyone wants a story, but there isn’t one. One day, third or fourth grade, a kid on the playground remarked that I looked like a stork. Perhaps he intended it to be hurtful, but I don’t believe I look like a stork-I mean, truly resemble a stork-so I took it as neutral. The name stuck. That’s it.”
“That’s not what I was going to ask.”
“Oh.” The Stork strummed the padded wheel with the heels of his hands. “Fine, then. That. Okay, not that it’s any of your business, but it’s called Stickler’s syndrome.” His voice slipped into a drone as he launched into a rehearsed speech. “A connective-tissue disorder that affects the tissue surrounding the bones, heart, eyes, and ears. Among other things it can cause nearsightedness, astigmatism, cataracts, glaucoma, hearing loss, deafness, vertebrae abnormality, hunchback, flattening of the nasal bridge, palate abnormalities, valve prolapse, and vicious arthritis. As you can see, I have a relatively mild case. I can’t type, I can’t shuffle cards, and I’m nearsighted to twenty over four hundred, but I could be curled in a wheelchair deaf and blind, so I try not to bitch. Does that satiate your curiosity, Mr. Rackley?”
“Actually,” Tim said, “I was just going to ask if you could turn down the heat.”
The Stork made a soft popping sound with his mouth. He reached over and rotated the dial. “Righto.”
They finished their turn around the block and came up on the building again. Tim tracked a bike courier at the crosswalk, heading for the shipping and receiving dock at the northeast corner of the ground floor. She had a KCOM decal on her helmet and a Cheesecake Factory bag in the bike’s front basket.
“Slow down,” Tim said.
The courier biked up the ramp and flashed an ID card at an obese security guard with a clipboard, who lazily wanded her down with a metal detector, then tugged open the roll-up gate. Heading back into the dock interior, she slotted her front wheel into a bike rack by the service elevator, yanked the bike seat free of the frame, and tucked it protectively under an arm. Just before the guard slid the rolling gate down, Tim saw the courier punch a code into a numeric keypad beside the elevator. An extended metal frame shielded the pad from view; her hand disappeared to the wrist by the time her fingers reached the keys.
The Stork eased the van over to the curb in front of a pharmacy and medical-supplies store that displayed a wheelchair and a bevy of aluminum walkers in the front window. They sat watching the closed, corrugated dock gate and the security officer rolling something he’d dug out from his nose between his thumb and index finger.
“Do you think the bike-courier cards are strictly ID, or do they double-function as access-control cards for movement within the interior?”
“They’d be strictly ID, I’d bet,” the Stork said. “Access-control cards are usually only issued to high-clearance people, not mailroom gofers. Corporations are very strict about them. If they’re reported missing, they’re immediately deactivated.”
“Fine,” Tim said. “Forget the access-control cards. If I gave you a prototype of a regular ID, could you manufacture a fake one?”
The Stork snorted and flopped his hand in a dismissive wave. “I engineered a microphone that could fit in a pen cap and pick up a whisper at a hundred yards. I think I can deal with duplicating an overglorified library card.”
Tim indicated the dock gate with a slight tilt of his head. “The bike rack’s just past the checkpoint, near the service elevator.”
“Probably a Beverly Hills zoning law-they don’t want the sidewalks cluttered up.” The Stork popped a pill into his mouth and swallowed it effortlessly without water. “If you want to get a pistol through, smuggle in a dismantled Glock. They’re mostly plastic. Only the barrel has enough ping to set off a detector-make a key chain out of it and stuff the rest down your shorts. The firing pin doesn’t have enough metal to get picked up.” He studied Tim curiously, awaiting confirmation.
Instead Tim said, “We need to get a better angle on that keypad.”
The Stork pointed at the narrow street running parallel to the north edge of the building. “A window on that side would look directly in on it.”
“Give a drive by.”
The Stork pulled out and eased down the street. There was indeed a window, but it was largely blocked by a decrepit truck.
Tim barely turned his head. “Keep moving, keep moving.”
The Stork drove down the block and pulled over again.
“The truck’s in the way, and it’s a narrow sidewalk. The only way we could see in would be to press up against the glass, which would be more than conspicuous.”
The Stork said, “Then we wait for the truck to move.”
“It’s a parking-permit street-no meters in need of refreshing-and the truck has a permit dangling from the rearview. There are reservoirs of leaves collected around the front wheels from the last rain four nights ago. I’d bet that’s the resting place for someone’s old rig.”
“I’ll get it moved.”
“How?”
The Stork grinned. “I just will.”
“Even if you get that truck moved and we get binocs on the window, there’s no clear sight line to the keypad. It’ll be blocked by the courier’s body when he’s punching in the code.”