Evan could understand why René had chosen to hide here. Several prominent businessmen and ministers lived in the complex, which was riddled with security cameras.
Logging on to the Internet, Evan accessed an untraceable account at Hashkiller and set its 131-billion-password dictionary to work. Within minutes he was on the luxury condo building’s network. He found the security camera system next, matching the name to the decals on the building’s main fence. Hashkiller made short work of that, and then a hundred-plus internal and external camera feeds appeared.
He picked the lenses along the route he was planning to take and then opened up the camera-control links. First he slewed the pan-tilt zoom lens above the front gate to face the sun. The image turned a uniform white. The neighboring ones he aimed directly at streetlights to the same effect.
The cameras in the interior east stairwell didn’t have the same operability, so he turned off their auto-irising and then directed them to stop down. The pictures went black.
In case René had hacked into the security cameras on his own floor, a likely precaution, Evan took a single frame of valid video from each one, duplicated it 50 million times, and injected the gapless IP feed back into the video storage server. This created a spoof of each camera’s normal scene, showing forever-empty corridors. Snapping the laptop shut, he stood, stretched out his shoulder, and headed for the door.
It was time.
71
Vaporized
Candy cracked her window to get a little fresh air and leaned away, not wanting to get sucked into the black hole of Jaggers’s charisma void. He sat motionless in the passenger seat, his hands on the GPS unit as if about to embark on a game of Super Mario.
She monitored the residents and visitors entering the condo building’s front gate.
Old woman with a purse dog. Hipster with sleeve tattoos and a slouch beanie cap. Ladies who lunched in pink pantsuits and glittering pearls.
“Halya Bardakçi,” she murmured.
Though she stared straight ahead, she sensed Orphan M’s head dart over. “What?”
“That was her name. The girl you killed in the alley outside Sevastopol.”
He picked up the laptop and reviewed footage. “How do you know?”
Candy kept her eyes on the luxury complex.
Elderly couple. Teenage girl with bad eye shadow. A diplomat’s wife who resembled a drag queen.
“I read the news story,” Candy said. “She was just a down-on-her-luck kid.”
Bushy-mustached businessman. Swarthy janitor. Strapping college girl.
“Why does that matter?” Jaggers asked.
“Because, you dickless fuck,” Candy said, “she could’ve been us.”
Jaggers jolted in his seat, and for an instant she thought he might strike her. But his eyes remained glued to the laptop. He’d screen-captured the image of the hipster who’d entered the building earlier and zoomed in on the face, barely visible beneath the beanie cap.
“Fuck,” Candy said.
“Make sure that he’s inside René’s condo,” Jaggers said. “And ascertain which room. I’ll ready the coordinates. The last thing we need is him getting away singed.”
Candy grabbed her phone and hopped out of the car.
Jaggers called after her, “And V?”
She leaned back in.
“If you worried more about surveillance and less about a dead Crimean whore, we could’ve sizzled him at the front gate.”
She slammed the door harder than necessary and jogged for the building.
The Need raged and gnashed inside him. Without his infusions of young blood, René could already chart his deterioration. Achy joints, flagging energy, and that chalky residue always in his mouth. The taste of aging.
As soon as they coaxed the Nowhere Man out of hiding, Dex would put an end to him and they could set about rebuilding a new medical lab and acquiring new product.
Rising from his midday nap, René shuffled from the king-size bed toward the makeup counter of the bathroom suite. The windows were Lexan, of course, but to deter surveillance he kept the curtains drawn and the lights off. Just across the tile floor of the interior hall, the connecting door to Dex’s condo was in clear view. It was closed for privacy, though given all the cameras they’d installed throughout the rooms, privacy was hardly an issue. When Dex wasn’t at René’s side, he kept watch on every inch of René’s quarters from a collection of monitors next door, ready to alert their Greek freelancers at the first sign of anything out of the ordinary. It would take the tap of an iPad, no more, and hired knives would close in on Despi and carve her to pieces.
Dex had plans for Evan after that. He’d made multiple contingencies for how to eliminate him once he appeared. Disguised gunports in the common walls. Autolocking double-cylinder dead bolts on the solid-core front door to block egress. Vents wired up for gas just as in the chalet.
René braced himself for a look in the mirror. Despite the low light conditions, he winced at the sight. It was getting harder and harder to produce his confected self. Thinning hair swirled up from his pate. The bags under his eyes had grown bags beneath them, a landslide of bruise-colored flesh. His jowls held the weight of the world.
He began the process of putting himself together.
Cover-up filling in the crow’s-feet. Concealer and color corrector. Fish oil and zinc, calcium and vitamin E. No need for Cialis, not holed up here, but he’d upped his Lexapro in an attempt to filter out some of the gray from the Zagreb pollution. He was just reaching for his Rogaine when his hand brushed across a heap of silken fabric on the dim counter.
A scarf?
He lifted it. Two slender pieces that came apart. Each was a skin-colored tube of fabric covered with elaborate patterns.
Fake sleeve tattoos.
He let them slip to the shag carpeting. His eyes lifted to the mirror.
Barely visible in the dimness at the back of the room was the outline of a face.
A man sitting on the upholstered settee, swallowed by the shadows.
René forced a smile. “Evan,” he said, loud enough for the surveillance equipment to pick up. “I knew you’d find me.”
René let his eyes tick over to that connecting door across the tile, checking to see if any movement interrupted the seam of light across the bottom. He pictured Dex readying the halogenated ether. The Greek henchmen moving on Despi. The door opening and Dex filling the frame. Given that Dex was down to one hand, it would take him so much longer to do to Evan what needed to be done.
The outline of the face stared back at him, a featureless mask. René stayed upright in his chair, staring at the reflection in the mirror.
“The thing is,” René said, listening for the hiss to come through the vents, “this situation is more complicated than you’ve accounted for.”
Something crashed into the mirror, leaving a red streak, and landed with a slap on the counter. Pill bottles skittered across the surface, bouncing on the floor.
René shrieked.
He stared down at the enormous hand resting on top of the jumble of knocked-over beauty products.
Tattooed across it, an eerie, too-wide smile.
His rolling eyes found the connecting door. For a moment he felt an irrational stab of hope — there were Dex’s size-eighteen boots shadowing the gap beneath. Then the darkness spread and spread, seeping beneath the door, creeping across the tile.
He felt his insides wither, his heart drop down the bottomless pit of his stomach.
Still, it seemed, the Nowhere Man had not moved.
René’s throat seized up, too dry to speak. He croaked out the words. “You can have your money back.”