76
Fifteen minutes of contortions on unforgiving blacktop to fish the keys out from under the Malibu with his feet. The duration of the discomfort expanded because he needed to field questions from a ten-year-old boy.
“What’chu doing, mister? That’s funny.”
“Got an itch on my back.”
“You do not.”
After freeing his wrists, it took another five minutes to find the Glock and Colt. He was particularly irritated that Rodent had dropped them in a trash can containing the remnants of a Slurpee. Shaw would have to strip both weapons and apply heavy dosages of Hoppe’s cleaner to remove the cherry-flavored syrup.
Back in the camper, he prescribed a Sapporo beer to dull the pain from the pulled thigh and neck muscles. Then he transferred his contacts, photos and videos from his iPhone to his computer, checked them for viruses and placed the mobile in a plastic bag and took a hammer to it. He texted the new number to his mother at the Compound, his sister and Teddy and Velma.
He then dialed Mack’s number in D.C.
“Hello?” the woman’s sultry voice said.
“I’ll be on burners till I get a new iPhone.”
“’K.”
Charlotte McKenzie was six feet tall, with a pale complexion and long brown hair, her brows elegantly sculpted. During the day she wore a stylish but dull-colored suit, cut to conceal her weapon if she was wearing her weapon, and flats, though not because of her height; her job occasionally required her to run and when it did she had to run fast. Shaw had no clue what she’d be wearing now, presumably in bed. Maybe boxers and a T. Maybe a designer silk negligee.
Shaw loved the way she made lobbyists cry, the way she sheltered whistle-blowers, the way she found facts and figures that, to anyone else, were as invisible as cool spring air.
Those who knew both of them wondered, Shaw had heard, why they’d never gotten together. Shaw occasionally did too, though he knew that, like his heart, Mack’s was accessed only by negotiating an exceedingly complex and difficult ascent, rather like Dawn Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite.
“Need some things,” he said.
“Ready.”
“There’s a picture on its way. I need facial recognition. Probably a California connection but not certain.” From his computer he sent her an email containing an attachment of a screenshot of Rodent from the video he’d taken during the Molotov cocktail incident.
A moment later: “Got it. On its way.” Mack would be sending it to a quarter million dollars’ worth of facial recognition software running on a supercomputer.
“Be a minute or two.”
A pause, during which clicks intervened. Mack made and received her phone calls with headset and stalk mic so she could knit. She quilted too. In anyone else these would jar with her other hobbies — of wreck scuba diving and extreme downhill skiing. With Mack, they were elegantly compatible.
“Something else. I’ll need everything you have on a Braxton. Probably last name. Female, forties to sixties. She might’ve been behind my father’s death.”
The only response was “B-R-A-X-T-O-N?”
In the years he’d worked with her Mack had registered not a single breath of surprise at anything he asked her to do.
“That’s it.” He thought back to the note that Eugene Young had written to his father:
Braxton is alive!
“May have been an attempted hit on her fifteen years ago.”
This introduced the unsettling thought that his father was a member of a murderous conspiracy too.
“Anything else?”
He thought about asking for the address of one Maddie Poole, a grinder girl who lived somewhere in or around Los Angeles.
“No. That’ll do it.”
Click, click, click. Then silence and a different tap — that of a computer keyboard.
“Got him on facial recognition.”
“Go ahead.”
“Ebbitt Droon.” She spelled it for him.
Shaw said, “That’s a name, for you.”
“I’m sending you a picture.”
Shaw reviewed the image on his screen. A twenty-something version of Rodent.
“That’s him.”
Droon?
“His story?”
Mack said, “Virtually no internet presence but enough fragments that tell me he — or, more likely, some IT security pro — scrubs his identity off the ’net regularly. He missed a pic I found in an old magazine article about vets. It was a JPEG of the page, not digitized, so a bot would miss it. Boyhood in upper Midwest, military — Army Rangers — then discharged. Honorable. Vanished from public records. I sent the one-twenty to someone. They’ll keep looking.”
An enhanced facial recognition search — based on one hundred and twenty facial points, double the usual. That “someone” would probably mean a security agency of some sort.
Mack said, “Now. Second question. Braxton, female. Nothing. That wasn’t much to go on. I can keep searching. I’ll need people.”
“Do it. Take what you need from the business account.”
“’K.”
They disconnected.
Colter Shaw stretched back on the banquette. Another sip of Sapporo.
What’s this all about?
From a stack of old bills — in which he kept his important documents — he extracted the note Professor Eugene Young had sent his father. He’d hidden it in a resealed power company envelope.
Ash:
I’m afraid I have to tell you Braxton is alive! Maybe headed north. Be CAREFUL. I’ve explained to everybody that inside the envelope is the key to where you’ve hidden everything.
I put it in 22-R, 3rd Floor.
We’ll make this work, Ash. God bless.
The two Cal professors, his father and Eugene Young, were involved in something obviously dangerous, along with “everybody,” whoever they might be. Rodent’s side wanted Ashton alive; Braxton’s people wanted him — presumably the others too — dead. But only after finding the envelope.
The stack of pages was the key to something that his father had hidden somewhere. He went back to his notebook and skimmed through the pages he’d jotted at the Salvadoran café. Precious little. He found only a notation of the pages whose corners had been turned down.
37, 63, 118 and 255.
He hadn’t bothered at that time to jot their contents. He tried to recalclass="underline" an article from the Times, one of his father’s incoherent essays... Wasn’t one a map?
Staring at the numbers, trying to recall.
Then it struck him. There was something familiar about the numbers. What was it?
Colter Shaw sat upright. Was it possible?
37, 63, 118 and 255...
He rose and found his map of the Compound, the one LaDonna Standish had been looking over, on which he’d pointed out the climb he had planned when he visited his mother.
Spreading the unfolded chart in front of him, he ran his finger down the left side, then along the top. Longitude and latitude.
The coordinates, 37.63N and 118.255W, were smack on the middle of the Compound.
In fact they delineated a portion of the caves and forest on Echo Ridge.
The man of few smiles smiled now.